‘The Juggler’ - Universiteit van Amsterdam
Transcript of ‘The Juggler’ - Universiteit van Amsterdam
‘The Juggler’ How children from the Stellenbosch area in South Africa
embody, become aware of and challenge the walls in the landscape through the
practice of social circus
Thesis (addition to the ethnographic film)
Sophie Kalker, 10546626, [email protected]
MA Cultural and Social Anthropology 2018-2019
Visual Anthropology pilot
Supervisors: Mattijs van de Port and Anja Hiddinga
Second readers: Kristine Krause and Lianne Cremers
11-01-2019
10.295 (without abstract, table of contents, references and appendix)
Link film: https://vimeo.com/306370355
Password: sisonke
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Abstract
Link trailer: https://vimeo.com/306398288
This thesis functions as a background paper on my ethnographic film ‘The Juggler’.
The Sisonke social circus wants to stimulate integration by making children move together in circus
practice. They use of different exercises to build trust across community lines. With the film, I try to
show how children from Isi!Xosa, English and Afrikaans communities in the Stellenbosch area
experience the practice of social circus; how social circus tries to help the children to challenge the
barriers and walls that are part of the South African landscape, and therefore of the children. The
film is divided in three parts to illustrate how the children showed their shared experiences with me:
imagining, moving and reflecting.
In this written thesis, I try to elaborate on my theoretical framework, methods and reflection. I focus
mostly on landscape, the body, and the benefits of social circus. I use landscape as a term to try to
show the entanglements of history, political context, culture, nature, body and mind. It encompasses
the way people are being-in-the-world; how they form, and are formed by it, in an unstoppable
movement.
With the film and thesis I try to show how walls are a manifestation of this shared landscape; how
the children embody, become aware of and challenge the walls by moving together.
Keywords: embodiment, landscape, social circus, visual anthropology, walls
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction 5
2. Theory & Methods 7
2.1 Theoretical framework 7
2.1.1 Landscape 7
2.1.2 The Body 12
2.1.3 Benefits of Social Circus 15
2.2 Methodological approach 19
3. Reflection 20
3.1 Development of relationships 20
3.2 Ways of filming 22
3.3 Editing process 23
3.4 Checklist 25
3.5 Ethics 27
4. Self-assessment 28
4.1 Achievements 28
4.2 Lessons for future projects 28
Bibliography 29
Appendix 32
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Deeply
I am a juggler
Deeply
I breathe out into the universe
I have breathed in
Into the universe
Where suns
Juggle planets;
Where galaxies
Juggle
Suns and their systems
Where the masked juggler
Juggles
These ten-to-the-ten of the
Starry ten-to-the-ten
Constantly
Immaculately
Eternally
I, atomic child
Charmed child
Of the universe
Juggle
And, am, juggled
- A poem by Michael Gelp and Tony Buzan, from their book The Art of Juggling,
cited by Lionel Chanarin in his thesis on juggling.
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1. Introduction
We grow into the world, as the world grows in us. (Ingold 2013: 746)
All over the world, children are moving for social change. Cirque du Soleil, one of the most famous
global circuses, started a program, Cirque du Monde, to facilitate circus practice for youth all over
the world: social circus. In their vision, social circus can function as an empowering practice that
crosses boundaries. For my research, I focused on how children from different social, economical
and cultural backgrounds from the Stellenbosch area in South Africa experience moving together in
social circus.
The social circus I’d like to introduce is Sisonke circus. Sisonke is an Isi!Xhosa word 1
meaning “we are together”, which also presents the vision of the circus. In 2011, the circus was
founded by Lionel Chanarin, who studied circus at the social circus Zip Zap in Cape Town himself.
He is a professional trapeze artist, acrobat, juggler and clown, who dedicates most of his time to the
social circus. On their webpage, they state that:
Through circus skills such as acrobatics, dance, juggling, trapeze, drama and much more, the children learn life skills such as communication skills, problem solving, health and safety, life skills as well as many other personal
qualities such as trust, respect for others and equipment, accountability, responsibility, teamwork, leadership, self-confidence, risk management, empathy as well as physical health, strength, agility, flexibility, dexterity and vitality. 2
They call Sisonke a family, where diverse communities come together through the medium of
circus, dance, music and skills. The program is free, no matter the background of the children.
They have a core group of 40 participants, consisting children from the age of 7 to 18 from diverse
ethnic, socio-economic and cultural communities in the Stellenbosch Valley in the Western
Cape. As they argue, the impact goes beyond the core group only:
See short promotion video (not made by me): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC6FjJQbV9w1
http://sisonkesocialcircus.org2
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Performances are taken into communities where the diverse audiences share
in the joy which the integrated youth of our rainbow nation brings, inspiring hope, enthusiasm, co-operation and love for one another through our youth.
They want to stimulate integration, connection and the formation of relationships from a young age.
If you can’t stimulate children to focus on the same-ness, to form a community that is not based on
‘ethnicity’ or exclusion, how are the adults - of the present and the future - going to do this? This
seems to be a challenge. Why not start from the beginning: let’s start with the children.
In my film and written thesis, I hope to show how social circus tries to bridge the existing
gaps between different communities through movement. Michael Jackson explains that:
Our relationships with the world of others and the world around are relations of inter-est, that is, they are modes of inter-existence, informed by a struggle
for the wherewithal for life. We are, therefore, not stable or set pieces, with established and im-mutable essences, destinies, or identities; we are constantly changing, formed and reformed, in the course of our relationships with others and our struggle for whatever helps us sustain and find fulfillment in life.
(Jackson 2013: 5)
‘Inter-est’; one can only be(come), when we live and develop together; as constant movement
amongst people. Social circus offers them this. It gives them ‘the chance to express themselves and
be listened to, to realize their own potential and to make their own contribution as citizens of the
world’ (La Fortune 2011: 14 in MacCaffery 2011: 33). In this way, the focus is not on
empowerment by focusing on ethnicity, but empowerment by focusing on crossing societal
boundaries by working together and moving.
For Lionel, the two most important aspects in social circus practice are imagination and
trust. If we can imagine what it might be like for someone somewhere, we can move forward. With
circus, Lionel wants to give the children the opportunity to try to understand how one feels and
thinks, using movement and trust. Imagination, contact and trust fosters friendships and a teaching
that reaches beyond the social circus practice. This is something that normally doesn’t take place
between children from different backgrounds and communities, because they don’t get the
opportunities to do so. Maybe social circus can be a way to move the children ‘to participate in a
world beyond our accustomed roles and to recognize ourselves as members of a community, a
common body’ (Jackson 2013: 67), to start an inclusive movement to challenge current exclusive
distinctions.
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2. Theory & Methods
2.1 Theoretical framework
Before I introduce my research question and theoretical framework, I’d like to write a few words on
research on children in anthropology. Since children can offer interesting perspectives on their
experience of the society they live in, Hardman argues that children have to be heard, even though
they have been muted for a long time. She gives examples of studies by Mead, Goodman, Levi-
Strauss, Spencer, Taylor and Leach, that all miss the point she wants to address. All these authors
see children as ‘passive objects’, subject to the world of adults. Hardman wants to see the children
‘as people to be studied in their own right’ (2001: 504). Even though there have been attempts to
include children in studies, none of the approaches she mentioned in her article ‘revealed the
beginnings of an anthropology of children, concerned with beliefs, values, or interpretation of their
viewpoint, their meaning of the world’ (ibid.: 503). The beginnings of an anthropology of children
should be extended by paying attention to the bio-physical environment, and by developing
analytical notions about the thinking of a child (ibid.: 516). After 2001, there has been an increase in
studies that attempt to do that (Johnson et al. 2012), but still, I couldn’t find much. I wanted to
research children in their own right, as ‘meaning producing beings’ (Johnson et al. 2012), to see
how they experience their world. I hope that I approached the children in this way, to let them
explain how they experience the practice of social circus.
Therefore, my main research question was: How do children experience social circus in
relation to their embodied lifeworld, and it’s challenges, expectations, values, and obstacles? In this
section, I’d like to elaborate on the theoretical framework that guided me throughout the research. I
divided it into three parts: Landscape, The Body and Social Circus.
2.1.1 Landscape
There are many ways to sketch the historical, sociological and cultural context of South Africa. One
is to use terms that refer to the South African landscape.
They kept telling me about the beauty of the South African landscape. Impatiently, I was waiting, when they were going to start about the
social circus. What I didn’t realize, was that they were talking about it all along.
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With this sentence I open the film. The mountains, rivers, waterfalls, fields and oceans of South
Africa are breathtaking. I was mesmerized by the beauty, but this beauty has a shadow as well; the
inequalities between the people that are part of the landscape. The storyline of my film is implicitly
based around the concept of landscape. Landscape encompasses a sense of place, as well as our
past, our present, time, nature, culture and everything that we regard as our world (Ingold 2000,
Jackson 2013, Basso 1996). It is living, breathing and constantly transforming; we and everything
that it consists of form the landscape. Landscape is not just land or place, nor does it mean
environment or nature. Landscape is something that entangles nature and culture, the people and
their surroundings, all the living and non-living things on earth:
Neither is the landscape identical to nature, nor is it on the side of humanity against nature. As the familiar domain of our dwelling, it is with us, not against us, just as we are a part of it. (…) In landscape,
each component enfolds within its essence the totality of its relations with each and every other. (Ingold 2000: 191)
We are the landscape; it is the totality of the relations we have. We are just as much part of it as
anything else around us is. Ingold argues that we cannot separate our (body-)selves, nature, place,
environment and land from the landscape (2000: 193). Landscape is the collection of this formation,
of this whole. It invokes time and place, past and present, nature and culture, in a continues process
and tension (Bender 2006: 304). We can’t isolate landscape into one subject; it is interconnected
with everything of our existence, with a shared history and present.
The anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff, Sindre Bangstad and Thomas Eriksen had a
conversation about the shared history and present of the South African landscape. Bangstad says:
Looking at South Africa in its present phase from the point of view of an external observer, it is fair to say that there has been a process of gradual disbursement of the great illusions many of us had in the transition from
apartheid to democracy in the mid-1990s. Now, if you look at socio-economic indicators, inequalities seem to be rising, if anything. Poverty is still overwhelmingly black, whilst economic power remains overwhelmingly white.
(2012: 128)
The distinctions made on the basis of ‘ethnicity’ are still very present in daily South African life.
Separation based on skin color linked to economical class is reality. Lots of (black) children grow
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up in poverty in the townships that border the rich neighborhoods. The criminality rates are high,
and the perspective on ‘real’ equality low. As Jean Comaroff argues in the same conversation,
[N]otwithstanding the new freedoms and the new constitution, the gap
between rich and poor is greater than before, and it is still strongly correlated with differences of race. (2012: 122)
In the early 1990s, Archbishop Tutu stated that ethnicity wasn’t something that fit in the new
democracy, but by the late 1990s, ‘ethnicity’ was used as a dividing identity marker, a factor that
shapes the experience of everyday life (ibid.: 122). This grew out to be an even bigger problem over
time, separating people on the basis ‘ethnicity’; not so different from the time of Apartheid.
Identity formation on the basis of ethnicity, by excluding others from your ethnic group, is
still very much part of the daily lived reality of many South Africans. John Comaroff concludes the
conversation by arguing that:
The rise of identity politics empowers a proportion of the population that had been previously disempowered, but it excludes many more than those that it includes. This is the ambiguity, the ambivalence inherent in
the phenomenon. Can one make a politics out of that ambivalence? No, one cannot. One has to make a politics that resolves it, that turns its face against forms of empowerment that depend on perpetrating exclusion and
disposability. About this we are not ambivalent. South Africa, like everywhere else, has got to fashion an answer to the problems of rising inequality and inequity, wherever it takes root, in identity politics, or anything else. (ibid: 133)
Comaroff and Comaroff argue in their book Ethnicity, Inc., which they are discussing in this
conversation, that people should be empowered from within the community, across communities;
not by focussing on exclusion, but on inclusion. Not by fighting the socially constructed differences
by identifying on the basis of ethnicity, but by encouraging the same-ness, the being-together, part
of one society. Jess, the co-director of Sisonke, told me a story on the rough youth she had and the
crimes she had to endure; how the people that mugged her were black, how the people that killed
her father were black (she is white). Because of her experiences, she identified the problem as a
class problem. She wants to make people aware that it is a class problem, and that it has nothing to
do with the color of one’s skin. By doing social circus, she wants to focus on this being-together as
part of one society, that we need to build and improve together. !9
Amidst this complex landscape The Shed, the home of Sisonke, is based. The Shed is a
rebuild big farm-hall, on the Spier wine farm; a 200 hectares piece of land, where many different
people work, live and dwell. Lionel and Jess also work, train and teach on the farm. The farm feels
like a small rainbow-haven. Every morning I wake up, and watch over the vast land that I am
temporarily part of. The mountains watch the sunrise while I’m silently observing the sky. A sky
where walls aren’t present, a sky that is ever-moving. The clouds take many shapes, reflect upon
many moods. When I reread my field notes, I noticed that those shapes and moods shaped me as
well. On a misty morning, I woke up and felt pretty sad. My thoughts felt cloudy. I couldn’t do
much, but I did manage to write the following passage:
This excerpt from my field notes touches upon the main topics I address in my film: landscape,
movement and reflection. I experienced and observed how the landscape forms and is formed by the
people that dwell in it, with me as a part of it. The landscape is ever-moving and changing. When I
watched the mountains on those lousy mornings, I observed the unstoppable movement of the
weather. This made me think about the weather as an ever-moving and unrestricted phenomenon,
that influences all beings that are subject to it, like me. The landscape and the weather formed my
mood. It hid the mountains for me. It shaped the way I interpreted the place and the interactions I
had. It might be my naive, white European view, but what I’ve learned from the encounter with the
children from the social circus, is that walls are a big actor in the shaping of (them in) their mental
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21-07-2018 9.00u. Zonder te weten waarom precies, ben ik ontzettend gedemotiveerd sinds gisteravond. Ik ruim niet meer op. Doe de afwas niet meer. Ik ben
alleen maar mijn boek aan het lezen over de relatie tussen een (opgroeiende) man en de bergen. Alle jaren uit mijn jeugd waarin ik heb gestruind door de bergen stromen door mijn gedachten. Uiteindelijk lijken alle bergen op elkaar, zegt de auteur, maar zijn er slechts een aantal betekenisvol. Deze bergen koesteren je herinneringen. Daar heb je van mensen gehouden. De manier waarop de auteur het gevoel beschrijft wat de bergen je
kunnen geven als je er bent, wandelt, slaapt, eet, lief hebt, of wat dan ook, is precies zoals ik het voel. Het maakt me een beetje heimwee-achtig naar mijn bergen. En daarmee naar mijn geliefden. Dan zit ik hier weemoedig op de bank, terwijl het leven aan mij voorbij lijkt te gaan. Ten minste, zo voelt dat nu even. Het is niet heel vervelend, want ik weet dat het wel weer over gaat. Het is alleen zo stil hier. Zo
ontzettend stil. Het enige wat ik hoor in The Shed als ik daar ‘s avonds alleen ben is het krimpen van het dak als de kou intrekt, wat vreemde knallen die me laten schrikken, de wind, en soms wat vliegtuigen die over trekken. In het huisje hoor ik dezelfde geluiden. Plus af en toe het geschuifel van Lionel in de ochtend wanneer hij eerder opstaat dan ik, zijn sloffen aantrekt, en de waterkoker vult voor zijn koffie. Ik hoor de
voordeur open gaan. Dan rookt hij zijn sigaretje met zijn kopje koffie terwijl hij naar de zonsopgang kijkt. Stiekem deel ik dat moment met hem, zonder hem daarin te storen. Ik denk dat dat het moment is dat hij zichzelf even oplaadt, zich klaar maakt voor de dag. Dan wil hij niemand naast zich hebben. Op een of andere manier laadt zijn ritueel mij ook een beetje op. Het koestert een soort tevredenheid, een waardering voor het moment
en de plek. Niet veel later hoor ik het gieren van zijn motor. Dan sta ik op. Soms als hij er nog net is, soms als ik het geluid van zijn motor langzaam hoor afsterven. Dan heb ik het huisje, de ochtend en de bergen voor mij alleen. Dit is zo een moment. Het is ochtend en ik ben alleen in het huisje. Vandaag heb ik alleen geen zin. Het is mistig. Het heeft de bergen
voor mij verstopt, en dan vind ik het op een of andere manier moeilijker. De bergen geven me toch een soort rust, een uitzicht in hoe groot en divers dit land is, en dat ik hier op de boerderij dat allemaal van een veilige afstand mag aanschouwen. Met het vertroebelen van de bergen, vertroebelen ook mijn gedachten. Maar gelukkig weet ik dat op een dag, ook deze bergen mijn herinneringen zullen koesteren.
and physical landscape. In my film, I’ve used walls as a metaphor for the manifestation of the
barriers between people that are still present in the South African society.
In the beginning, I didn’t notice these walls. I was just driving through the landscape in the
little red car that belongs to Lionel. I’d go from within the one gate to the other, and would only get
out of the car when the gate behind me was closed. In many encounters I had, people told me to
only get out of the car if necessary, not to drive on specific roads and definitely not drive into the
townships. If I wanted to observe the ‘lifeworld’, as Jackson calls it, of the children, I had to go
home with them. This is also something that Lionel and Jess encouraged, who actually have many
experiences in the townships. Unlike the others, who advised me based on the fear that leads them.
To fight the still walls that create the separation, we have to keep moving. We, as part of the
landscape that is constantly moving and changing as well. It made me reflect upon my position as a
naive, white European visual anthropologist-in-the-making, the relationship that I’ve built with the
children and the landscape, and how the movements in social circus make the children aware of the
walls that restrain them from moving and interacting.
The inequalities in the current South African landscape is the memory and the result of a
shared history. In this way, the landscape remembers. It speaks to our senses, to the way we embody
our world and make our place in it. Landscape remembers in the way that the past and the present
are presented simultaneously, like our bodies are shaped and formed through time too. ‘Wisdom sits
in places,’ the Western Apache tell us through the words of Basso (1996: 67). The memory of a
shared history is embedded in the landscape, and therefore in the people. I see that the children want
to move, but that they are restricted by walls that represent the (historical) barriers between people
that the children have to challenge. Ingold argues that:
[T]o move, to know, and to describe are not separate operations that follow one another in series, but rather parallel facets of the same process - that of life itself. It is by moving that we know, and it is by moving, too, that we describe. (…) A
being that moves, knows and describes must be observant. Being observant means being alive to the world. (2011: xii)
By moving, we know and describe. By moving, the children share their lifeworld, their being-in-
the-world. They share their different positions in their shared history with each other. By moving,
they become aware of, and able to challenge, the walls that exist in the landscape, which transcends,
in my opinion, the body and mind separation. The walls exist on the in- and outside, in the in- and
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external world, encompassed in the landscape. And even though these walls try to stop this
movement, ‘the creeping entanglements of life will always inevitably triumph over our attempts to
box them in’ (Ingold 2008: 1809). But this isn’t easy. In order to do so, we need to imagine, move
and reflect; the subjects I address in the three different chapters of my film.
Landscape is constituted by numerous memories – either publicly remembered or
deliberately forgotten - and lives that have been part of it. It shows that all our senses, our mind and
our body, the social relations we engage in, the community we are part of, our sense of place, space
and our environment are all interconnected. They shape us as we go, and by doing so we shape the
way. We are like rivers; carving our way through the high mountains, slowly making our pathway.
The path will smoothen over time, it will be clearer, bigger and more prominent along the way we
grow. It asks for a slow and constant pressure, movement, expansion, for others to learn from it
afterwards. We are the landscape: we form it together in one big constant transformation. ‘We’, as
in everything that is the landscape; the rivers, the mountains, the plants, the animals, the people: all
in unity as one big moving picture with a shared memory. If I vanish, the landscape still exists; my
vanishing is part of that existence. We, as fragments, will turn into other parts, as the landscape
keeps transforming, but the memories remain. The landscape remembers. And these memories will
be part of the children of the next generation.
2.1.2 The Body
If I want to think about the embodied socio-cultural history, and about the influence movement in
circus practice can have on that, I have to become familiar with the discourse around the body in
anthropology. I divided this part into three parts: phenomenology, sensory anthropology and
embodiment.
An important approach to start with if we think about the body is phenomenology. A
phenomenological approach helps me to think about how people experience their lifeworld through
the body and senses. Desjarlais and Throop argue that phenomenology ‘helped anthropologists to
reconfigure what it means to be human, to have a body, to suffer and to heal, and to live amongst
others’ (2011: 88). In phenomenology, the line between subjectivity and objectivity is blurred. All
the cultural and historical conditions form the attitude of a social actor towards the world, and all
our thoughts, sensations, perceptions, objects, bodies, etc. influence our objective/subjective
experience of the world. Therefore, the body is seen as ‘a living entity by which, and through
which, we actively experience the world’ (ibid.: 89). For anthropologists, this meant studying
subjectivity, self-experience and personhood from a historical, cultural, variable and relative point !12
of view (ibid.: 92). This called for a more sensory approach in anthropology, an approach focused
on the body and our senses.
Even until now, vision has been ‘seen’ as the most important sense to discuss. Belova tries to
explain the interrelations of the senses from a phenomenological point of view, using Merleau-
Ponty’s perspective: ‘[I]n his understanding, it is the body, not the eye or the mind, that
looks’ (2006: 94). All objects in the world, including humans, intertwine in movement with the
agent in its own center of perception. She argues that:
The body moves in order to interrogate the things and beings around it,
‘its motility is a response to the questions the world raises’ (Dillon, 1997: 146).
Thus the kinesthetic ability expands the receptive, responsive character of body’s involvement with the world and its search to understand others. (ibid.: 102)
So, meaning comes not from ‘isolated perceptions’ (ibid.: 104), but from the interrelatedness of the
senses and the connections one makes in the world, which makes the act of seeing a lived
experience (ibid.: 102). This lived experience is the result of all the movements the perceiver,
object, human, living entity - call it what you want, makes in connection with its surroundings. In
social circus, these connections are transferred as embodied knowledge by the children through
movements and touch. The different lifeworlds of the children give meaning to the movements, and
therefore the movements give meaning to the lifeworlds again. In this way, the focus is not on the
vision, but on touch and what knowledge can be transferred through it.
In anthropology, the place of touch is problematic, even though touch is undeniably part of
our everyday embodied experience (Paterson 2009: 129). Aristotle explains that vision, for
example, is a well discussed and understood sense because it can be connected to the organ that it is
mediated through: the eye. The eye is the organ for vision, the ear for hearing, but the flesh is the
medium for touch, rather than an organ, which makes understanding it difficult. Our sensory
experience of touch, and therefore of the other senses as well, is always mediated (ibid.: 130). ‘For
if touch is by its very nature mediated, it becomes unappealing and irrelevant to try to understand
what touch “is”’ (ibid: 131): communication through the skin (Marinetti in Paterson 2009: 132).
Both authors remind us that the senses are actually not separable, and part of the same embodied
sensory experience. If that is the case, touch is a mediated form of communication to share sensory
embodied experiences. This is also what Classen argues: ‘Touch is not just a private act. It is a
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fundamental medium for the expression, experience and contestation of social values and
hierarchies. The culture of touch involves all of culture’ (2005: 1). Cranny-Francis adds to this that: We know ourselves and the world through the sense of touch, crucially including our ability to touch ourselves and to make sense/meaning of
that touch. At the point of touch, of contact (com- “together” + tangere “to touch”), we know both the self and the other, including the other that is also the self; that can reflect on and position the self. This is a point of connection, at which we perceive connection only through the perception
of difference. (2011: 468)
Though this perception of difference, we can learn from each other. Through touching the other, the
children in the social circus learn to be aware of the fact that they are different; a different body-
self. And in this, they become aware of their position in society, their privileges and disadvantages,
their fears and certainties, the way they differ and are similar. Through touch they learn how it
might be for someone else that grows up in different circumstances, which makes them reflect upon
their own background. They learn to become aware of the embodied walls that prevent them from
touching each other in daily life, and what that means for them.
The sensorial experience of the world in phenomenology inspired anthropologists to develop
a sensory anthropology. Classen argues that sensory perception is cultural, as well as physical. All
our senses are linked with different associations, particular to the person’s lifeworld. Every domain
of society is composed by different sensory meanings and practices particular to culture (1997:
401). She continues: ‘Sensory perception (…) is not simply one aspect of bodily experience, but the
basis for bodily experience. We experience our bodies - and the world - through our senses’ (ibid.:
402). Culhane also argues that we should learn about ‘the interrelationships among embodiment,
affect, imagination, and sensory experience, shot through by the power of history’ to understand the
embodied being (2017: 46). According to her and others, the importance of studying sensory
experience is that we can think of our minds and bodies not as oppositions, but as interacting with
each other and the world (ibid.: 52). The interrelationships among embodiment, affect, imagination,
and sensory experience, shot through the power of history, are exactly the subjects the social circus
has to deal with. Lionel told me that these children all have their own separated experience in a
shared history. The children from the social circus come from such different backgrounds, that it is
hard to imagine that they are part of the same society. They share little but geographical place and
the fact of being human. Language, food, economic situation, education, future prospects, family
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life, holidays, religion, ancestors; everything is different. In circus practice, the children learn to
acknowledge these differences and embrace them, in stead of fear them. They have to embody a
new understanding of the relationships they have with children from different communities through
imaginative thinking and sensory experiences.
This leads me to the anthropological paradigm of embodiment. By moving and interacting
with other body-selves, the children embody new ways of trusting and thinking about each other.
With their Three Bodies (individual, social and body politic), Scheper-Hughes and Lock opt to write
against the Cartesian dualism that the body and mind are separable, which has led to the
anthropological notion that we embody our lifeworld: it becomes part of us through our body.
Therefore, individual, social and political boundaries become blurred (ibid.: 24). Csordas starts to
explain the paradigm with Merleau-Ponty, who situates embodiment in the problematic of
perception, and Bourdieu, who focuses mostly on the practice of it (1990: 7). Until the 1990s,
anthropologists (1) have considered perception strictly as a function for cognition, (2) isolated the
senses, and (3) didn’t link the study of perception to that of social practice (ibid.: 35). That is why,
Csordas argues, it is very important for the paradigm of embodiment to connect the subject and
object, the mind and body, the self and other, cognition and emotion, and objectivity and
subjectivity. If we start from perception, it becomes relevant to see how bodies are formed and
objectified through reflection (ibid.: 36). Embodiment is situated on the level of lived experience;
about our being-in-the-world. In this way, we can see the body-self as formed by a variety of
contexts and relationships (Van Wolputte 2004: 261-262). Both Lionel and Lolona (one of the circus
students) told me a story about how they stood on the shoulders of one of their fellow students one
day in practice. In both of their cases, the base threw the person standing onto the ground, because
his shoulder was hurting. This caused the ones that got thrown off even more pain, which led to a
big discussion in both cases: the children have to learn that they have to take a little pain for
someone else sometimes, in order to be trusted and to protect each other. In this way, social circus
teaches children to break through the established embodiment, by communicating through
movement and touch.
2.1.3 Benefits of Social Circus
The movements in social circus need some explanation. By doing movements that work on trust,
team building and self-confidence, social circus tries to unconsciously teach them, through play, the
same lessons in other aspects of life. For example, one of the first social circus exercises I’ve
witnessed (and done) was falling off the stage into the arms of the children that catch you. All the !15
children will stand in front of the stage, lined in two rows facing each other with their arms up. One
person will stand on the stage with their back facing the group, who will fall backwards off the
stage into their arms. I was filming them doing it, and lost myself slightly in my camera and image.
Lionel dragged me out of my film-concentration; ‘Now you have to do it!’ I didn’t really think
about the fact that I was also able to do it, so I climbed on the stage and dropped myself. It was a lot
more frightening than I expected. Since you aren’t facing the catching children, you don’t really
know what you’re falling into. You just have to trust the fact that there are people standing on the
ground who will catch you. This is a huge step in developing trust for each other. After the catch, I
immediately felt a better connection with the children, I was on their level: I was learning how to
trust them and be trusted by them.
Some authors outside anthropology have written on the psychological benefits of these
exercises. Twardzicki writes that when arts are used in a social community setting, they can increase
community relationships, and improve wellbeing and health. The arts in health care can improve
communication skills, the establishment of relationships with others forms of expression, and self-
esteem (2008: 69). This is something that social circus strives to establish. Maglio and MacKinstry
write about these psychological effects of social circus. They give a short overview on the program
and results of the ‘Circus in Schools’ program they researched from a therapeutical perspective.
They argue that children can develop their artistic expression and group solidarity through social
circus, which offers them to create new ties with society (2008: 287). They stress the methods and
activities used in social circus to teach life skills, personal and social skills, and interdisciplinary
skills (ibid.: 288). They give the following examples (ibid: 289):
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Warm-up games Opportunities for team work, collaboration, verbal and non-verbal communication, increased challenges, and a mix of attainable and challenging tasks.
Acrobatics Core, upper and lower limb strength and flexibility, body awareness, trust, positive risk-taking, giving and receiving physical support.
Acrobalance Team work, body awareness, problem solving, trust, safe and positive physical interaction, gender stereotypes around
strength challenged, and a mix of achievable and challenging tasks promoting self-efficacy.
Manipulation (juggling, hula hooping) Grading of tasks to increase challenge. Opportunities to improve coordination, gross, and fine motor skills.
Promotion of rapid thinking, reaction, persistence and practice. Opportunities for peer education, creativity, and improvisation of combining skills learned.
Balance-based activities Promotes reduced fear of heights and physical limits. Peer-to-peer support and trust of self and others. Taking responsibility for safety of self and others is integrated.
Awareness of self in relation to others and the physical environment is continually addressed.
Performance Promotes creativity, collaboration, breaking down of
inhibitions, exploration of theatrical themes, giving and receiving social support, experience of taking on different roles, development of different characters, brainstorming, problem-solving, and various forms of communication.
The findings, according to the authors, were that social circus practice:
1. Provides a fun, motivating and intrinsically reinforcing experience 2. Increases positive risk taking both physically and emotionally, in a safe and supported environment
3. Promotes physical health and body awareness through activity 4. Enables participants to acquire a broadened skill base relating to circus as well as more generic ‘life skills’ 5. Increases self-confidence and self-efficacy
6. Improves social connectedness, teamwork, and leadership skills within the group 7. Provides opportunities for calming rhythmic activities, increased sensory
feedback, a focus on balance, and coordination 8. Creates a space in which participants feel a sense of belonging (ibid.: 289)
I’ve seen that these qualities are indeed very present in the social circus training. What I want to add
to this literature, is to observe what it is like to place this into the context of the children, to see
further than just the psychological benefits and to add an anthropological view on the matter, mostly
from the perspective of the child and what happened in the interaction between them and me.
Of all the subjects social circus addresses, I found that Sisonke mostly focuses on
developing trust. Especially in a society where fear and separation are very present, poverty of trust
is a very important issue. Cadwell stresses the importance of this by focusing on how social circus
teaches children how to trust each other and themselves (2018: 20). While describing different
circus ‘hard skills’ (the actual acts of doing circus) and ‘soft skills’ (the social acts related to it), he
argues that social circus is not used to teach specific circus techniques as a goal, but to teach how to
do it, to learn how to trust yourself, your peers and teachers, and how to cope with failure (ibid.:
24). He concludes that:
The pedagogical effectiveness of youth and social circus is not limited to the acquisition of basic circus techniques but rather includes the development of an array of personal and social capabilities. Key among these is the ability
for participants to trust themselves and to trust others. (ibid.: 28)
This is something that I’ve experienced as well. Falling off the stage into the arms of many children
improves your trust in others. This development of trust helps them to cross the societal borders
between communities. Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean that they immediately leave their share in the !18
landscape with the embodied socio-cultural history behind. It actually just starts at learning to trust
each other in circus practice; to eventually become aware of the barriers towards trusting each other
in daily life.
2.2 Methodological approach
I wanted to use film as a medium to come closer to an understanding and portrayal of the
experience of the children, since I don’t think that academic writing can communicate the sensorial
experience of embodiment and movement. By learning movement skills in social circus, the
children move between embodied and disembodied states: the body in action becomes the focus of
awareness (Lewis 1995: 228-229). I wanted to see if I could find an academic language with film
that can mediate between the body and mind, movement and embodiment, and subjectivity and
objectivity. Since in film, the separations don’t need to be as clear.
In my original approach, I wanted to shift from ‘embodiment as praxis’ to ‘metaphors as
praxis’ to look for a way to transcend the body/mind dualism. According to Jackson, metaphors can
unite us into one Being again, because metaphors can function as crucial mediators between the
body and the social and natural environments (1983: 137). What I wanted to do, was to focus on
non-verbal metaphors, or bodily metaphors that communicate this physical experience of the world.
Although I still admire Jackson’s approach, and although bodily metaphors are still used in social
circus practice, I had to let this go as a main focus during the research, because I realized that
thinking about landscape was more useful to understand how the children experience movement (or
bodily metaphors) in social circus practice.
I still wanted to find a language to express what I’ve learned from the encounters I had in
South Africa. Even though the bodily metaphors (like a human pyramid, which obviously has a
greater impact on the child than just standing on top of each other) are still used in the practice of
social circus, I found another metaphor to be a more accurate portrayal of the message I want to
transfer. I shifted away from the bodily metaphors as a main focus, and focused more on metaphors
in, or that are part of, the landscape. To convey my interpretation, I focused on walls as a visual
metaphors for the the big barrier that exists between people from different socio-, cultural,
economical groups in my film.
Visual anthropology provides the methods to show how these children embody and become
aware of these walls. We should recognize cinema as something that beholds many possibilities for
creating and sharing knowledge and exploring other lifeworlds. Suhr and Willerslev understand the
invisible as the meaningful worlds observed by anthropologists - worlds that the anthropological !19
ideal of thick description has always sought to highlight. They say that film can show us bodily
details that offer a rich understanding of someone’s experience, that are impossible to write down
(2012: 291). With montage, we can create layers and metaphors that illustrate this experience that is
impossible to communicate in words.
In my montage, I created a story based on a visual metaphor: walls. This is something that
developed in the editing process, and reflects my experiences in South Africa. The metaphor of a
wall is the layer I wanted to add in the montage, next to showing the development of the children
throughout the time that they are part of the circus. I start with the walls and the introduction in the
circus, I continue with imagination, trust and reflection. These are the stages of awareness the
children go through in the process of doing social circus. Firstly, they learn that other children lead
different lives from them; they learn to imagine what it might be like for someone else. Secondly
they learn to trust and be trusted, to finally become aware of and challenge the walls that exist in the
mental and physical landscape. With these chapters and metaphors, I hope I showed the importance
of social circus in the lives of these children and the effect it has on them and their families. I’ve
also been through these stages; I’ve tried to imagine what it might be like for them, to grow up in
South Africa. I won their trust and learned to trust them as well. Finally I became aware of the
mental and physical walls, something I didn’t realize in the beginning. This is also what Suhr and
Willerslev argue; although we should keep the right balance between realism and constructivism,
simplicity and complexity, resonance and dissonance, ‘montage of ethnographic films provides us
with a complementary and resourceful means of making us imagine other people’s worlds’ (2012:
294, 293). Not by showing ‘how it is’, but how we, as anthropologists, imagine it to be. Then, as a
last remark, could this portrayal of imagination form anthropological theory? Anthropological
theory should not ‘attempt to draw the findings of various studies together into an overarching
explanatory framework. There is no attempt to hunt for causes: the aim is rather to trace effect’ (Mol
2010: 261). This is what I tried to do: to trace effect. The effect of movement in social circus on the
children’s experience of their embodied lifeworld and the effect of visual methods in
anthropological research.
3. Reflection
3.1 Development of relationships
I found the Sisonke social circus by chance. At first, I was going to one in Morocco, which didn’t
happen in the end, because it was summer; practice would not continue during the summer months. !20
This left me empty handed. I looked on the map of Cirque du Monde, and searched for social
circuses in countries where it was winter and I spoke at least one of the languages. I clicked on
Sisonke, did some background research and emailed them. Within ten minutes, I was going to South
Africa. I had to reframe the context of my research and my living situation. Luckily, Lionel offered
me a room in his cottage on the farm. Jess, Theo and him (the circus people) live in these cottages
next to each other, which made it very easy for me to emerge in their world.
Once I arrived at the airport, I spotted the only colorful person, even with a broken leg. I
thought, ‘that must be him’, and it was. He broke his leg because he fell off a ladder while rigging
something. Surprisingly, since he does so many dangerous things in his life where it is more likely
to break a leg. I arrived late in the evening, so I didn’t know where we were going. We got into his
little old red car, which he calls ‘the old lady’, and drove far out of the city, onto a big farm. Only
the next morning, I realized the magnitude and beauty of the land I would be living in and on for the
next three months. From that moment on, our relationship developed quickly. We became dear
friends. Lionel, Jess and Theo took me in as part of their circus family, and showed me everything
they wanted to share. I couldn’t have wished for a more warm welcome into the field. Because I
spent so much time with them and in The Shed (the practice hall), I had all the opportunity to film
whatever I wanted, and even take time to edit along the way.
The building of relationship with the children didn’t go as smooth as with Lionel, Jess and
Theo. Since the circus only practices once a week, it was difficult for me to build in-depth
relationships with the children at the start. In the end, I managed to visit some of their homes, which
was key for my research and film. Originally I wanted to visit the poorest and the richest house, but
neither was possible. The richest house wasn’t available because they were too busy, and the
poorest house I couldn’t visit. After asking him many times, Nande eventually told me:
Nande: ’I’m sorry Sophie, but it really isn’t safe for you to come to my place. I live really deep down in Kayamandi and it is not a
good place to be for you. I hear gunshots in the night.’ Me: ‘But is it safe for you then?’ Nande: ‘Yeah, for me it is safe. Not in the night of course, but then
no one is safe.’
He joined us at Lolona’s house, one of the houses I could visit because it is in a better neighborhood
of Kayamandi. In the end, it didn’t matter I couldn’t visit the houses I had in mind, because it still
gave me the opportunity to really spend some time with some of them and ask them questions. Of
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course, it isn’t comparable with living with people. I’ve noticed how important that is, because I
have the feeling I didn’t really became part of the children’s life outside of Sisonke. Over the
weeks, I noticed that my role as an anthropologist was not clear for the children. Therefore I
decided to teach a photography course to the children I had the best connection with, to function as
a teacher as well (next to Lionel, Jess and Theo), and for them to show me more of their lives
through images. I had never taught before. I realized that I really enjoyed it (as well as the kids).
Their pictures have been very important in my understanding of how important the social circus is
to them. In the end, we organized an exhibition of the photographs they chose which expressed their
circus experience the best. 3
The thing I’d like to think about better next time, is that only later, I realized that none of
them had the feeling the film was ‘about them’, because there were so many children I wanted to
speak with. They, including the instructors, had the feeling the film was about the social circus only.
They distanced themselves from the circus a little, even though they are the circus to me. On the
one hand, this was beneficial because they probably wouldn’t have been as comfortable with me
and my camera if they had the idea that they were in the spotlight, but on the other hand I had the
feeling it made them less engaged with the film.
3.2 Ways of filming
The camera that I brought to the field is a Nikon D610 with a Rode Videomic Go. I chose this
camera because I’ve been photographing with it for a while, so I know it well. While filming, I
controlled all the settings manually to create the atmosphere I wanted to capture. In a way, this gave
me the feeling I ‘made’ the images myself. The disadvantage is that I had to divide my focus
between my subjects and the technicalities. This sometimes distracted me from listening and
responding carefully, although I have the feeling it didn’t influence my camera conversations too
much. What disturbed me more, is that in a lot of footage I changed the settings to produce a better
image, without realizing that my settings wheel makes a horrible sound on the recording. Next to
that, by changing light settings, the whole clip becomes difficult to use because the color grading
changes. At that time, I didn’t know what I was or wasn’t going to use, so I just free-styled in
playing with the settings. Also, the manual focus was very difficult to control. If you want to keep
your subjects in focus all the time, you can’t leave your camera screen. This is something I couldn’t
do. Because of this, a lot of my footage is partly out of focus. I don’t mind it that much, because it
I added the photographs to the appendix.3
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actually reflects the out of focus mindset I had when arriving in the field. Nonetheless, it is a little
distracting for the viewer.
The lens I used is a 50mm/1.4 lens. I also brought a 35-70mm and a 70-300mm lens, but I
didn’t use them. What I like about my 50mm lens is the image-quality it produces, the colors are
beautiful and soft. I didn’t want to have color and light differences in my footage, therefore I stuck
with this lens. Another reason was that with a set focal point (50mm in this case), I really have to
use myself to compose the image. I can’t zoom in or out, so if I want to get closer to someone, I’d
have to approach him or her. Ethically, I think this is a more honest way of capturing closeness,
because you as the researcher really have to get close in a physical sense. This changes the
interaction and the moment of intensity the camera captures. Since I had to move up close, the
subjects had more agency to decide what they want to show so close-by. This makes the camera a
very physical object to me.
Even though I brought a tripod all the way there, I didn’t really use it. Whenever I took it
out, people reacted to the camera differently. The camera and the mic are already very present in the
room and the interaction, so the presence of a tripod seemed too overwhelming sometimes. The
camera is a pretty fluid object, because it moves with my movement. A tripod is more static, which
made the interaction more static as well. Sometimes I regret it, because my footage is more shaky
than I would have liked, although I’m also happy I kept the movements fluid and going, since that
correlates with my research focus.
3.3 Editing process
The process of making the film is a pretty intense one. In regular documentary filmmaking, most
scenes are previously thought of and filmed according to plan. In anthropological filmmaking, this
is not the case. I came back from the field with 90 days of footage. Fortunately I already structured
a lot during fieldwork by editing weekly updates, otherwise I wouldn’t have known where I
should’ve started after those three months. Almost every week, I made a clip of 10 minutes with all
the footage that struck me and that reflected upon the process of thinking at the time. These updates
helped me a lot to structure my thinking and refine my plans for further filming.
Even though these updates shaped the way I filmed, the filming was still pretty much
unstructured. The only thing I knew for sure is that I wanted to get to the children’s homes and film
them during practice. Once I came back from the field, I realized that I didn’t specifically film the
most important metaphor of my film: walls. I plowed through my footage and found walls in all
kinds of shots; scenery under random conversations, filming while driving the car, filming the !23
environment when I had nothing to do, et cetera. I was lucky to find many of them (since they are
quite present in the landscape), but I can imagine that this type of unstructured filmmaking can lead
to a lot of superfluous and/or lacking footage. As anthropologists we go into the field with a semi-
structure in mind, with a specific focus and gaze. I think that in filmmaking, this is not enough.
When we write, we can write about moments in history that we didn’t think would be important at
the time, and use them to make our argument in retrospect. With film, you can’t work with these
memories, because you maybe didn’t film them. This tension between the open mind you need to
start anthropological fieldwork and the structure you need to start filming is something to reflect
upon within visual anthropology.
During the editing process I had some setbacks due to unnecessary updates I did amidst the
editing process. This is something I’ll never do again. It took me more than a week to rewrite my
project-file into a file that worked with my older version, since my computer wasn’t capable of
handling the new version. Even though this was horrible, I learned a lot about computer
specifications, soft- and hardware.
The biggest challenge for me was to create a coherent storyline where all the different
characters I had to introduce were not distracting the viewer from the main argument. To make a
storyline that has a clear argument and story with unspecified footage, is very difficult and differs a
lot from writing (as I’ve mentioned earlier). I’ve filmed all my images in a time that I wasn’t aware
of the things that I know now, which makes it feel like I’m reading back my field notes; as if I’m
editing in and shuffling with history. I can’t change the images anymore into something that suits
my story better. In writing, you use your field notes as an in-depth example to enrich your
argument. In film I found this to be more difficult because the images lead their own lives:
everything is presented at the same time, whereas in writing, you can pick the details you want to
present. The challenge I faced was to stop shuffling “field notes”, and edit them in a way that my
analytical point and my position as a researcher comes across. This is one of the biggest challenges
in editing for visual anthropologists, in my opinion.
Of course, we have to acknowledge and realize that visual anthropology is camera based
research, and not research to make a film. This is also something that is powerful about visual
anthropology, because the films that come out of the camera based research are very honest,
reflective and almost innocent in a way. We can’t hide our flaws or reshoot them; we have to work
with our intuitively shot footage. The analyses mostly happens in montage, more than in a pre-
planned documentary. Visual anthropological research shows a process and what happens in the
interaction between the researcher and the informants. !24
3.4 Checklist
To make an anthropological film, I had to take the following criteria in account. The first one is
‘layerdness’. With the use of visual layers, an anthropological film tries to make a thick description
with edited images and sounds. The montage seeks to create a structure to make the images
meaningful for the argument. In anthropological filmmaking, visual metaphors are used to express
the things you want to show on different sensorial levels. In my film, I wanted to do this by using
fluid (circus) and static (walls) images. I’ve observed that children are fluid beings. They live in the
feeling world, which is a very fluid and dynamic world. They want to connect, move, touch and
explore. To learn through play. The separations and barriers that the children have to face in society
restrain them from this freedom of movement. Circus offers them this freedom of movement in a
fluid way. In the open space on the almost gate-less farm, the children that normally only play with
each other through the fence, can now play freely. Through movements they learn how to trust each
other, and it makes them aware of the barriers that they still have towards each other. I hope to make
this clear by showing layers that mostly consist of gates, walls and fences, contrasting fluid circus
movements, trusted home environments and vast landscapes.
The second criterium for an anthropological film is ‘media-awareness’. Since we use the
camera as a tool for research, we should not pretend that it does not exist, nor that it doesn’t
influence the situation and relationship with your informants. The camera has been a big presence in
my research. I was even introduced for the first time to the children like this:
‘Hello everyone, we have a few new Sisonke family members. One of
them is Sophie, she came all the way from Amsterdam to be here with us for three months. She likes to look at the world through her camera, so you’d better get used to that.’ - Lionel, during the first practice I attended
My camera was introduced very shortly after me. They didn’t even meet me without it; an integral
part of their experience of me. This gave me access in many ways. Because they were used to me
looking at the world through my camera, it wasn’t weird at all that I just hung around and did
nothing but film most of the time. Without a camera, behavior as such would have probably raised
more questions. I talked with the children and adults about the presence of my camera and what it
meant for them. I edited three of these moments into a short video. 4
Link video: https://vimeo.com/302432955 | Password: sisonke4
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I divided the clip in three parts. Here, I will give a little background information. Part 1: The
pretentious camera. This happened in my first week in South Africa. I was in the car with Lionel,
the circus director. Late at night, we stranded in the middle of the road due to lack of gas. While
waiting for a friend to bring us gas, we had a conversation about the presence of my camera. Part 2:
The awkward camera. This was during training with Bridgette, a social circus student, and Karen, a
circus performer and teacher. Many evenings we spent training together. We were listening to
possible songs for Bridgette to perform her silk act to. I think this clip shows the vulnerable
awkwardness the camera provokes in all three of us. Part 3: The intrusive camera. In this particular
moment, Jess, the co-director of the circus, and me were visiting a venue in Kayamandi, the
township next to Stellenbosch, to discuss the possibility of creating a training space for the children
from Kayamandi that are part of Sisonke. The farm is quite far away, so we had to bring them back
and forth every time they would want to train by themselves (which we couldn’t do). By that time,
all the circus people (and me) were already used to the camera. I didn’t realize that the venue owner
wasn’t, and was just filming like he was. He deals with me in a very direct but friendly way. It made
me realize once again that the camera cannot be silently present.
Even if I wanted to, I think I couldn’t have ignored the fact that it is me looking at the world
through the camera. I have the feeling that all my images portray my experience, the way I related
to the world I encountered. This brings me to the third part of the checklist: ‘intersubjectivity’, or
the reflection upon the encounters I had with the people I met. It is in these encounters that the
magic happens, the merging, meeting and clashing of two worlds of experience and understanding.
They brought me my information. The moment that was most striking for me was the moment
where Maya, one of the circus children, shows me a picture of some children that she was playing
hide and seek with through the fence (in the beginning of the film). If it wasn’t for me, that remark
would have just disappeared in the void of all the spoken words that day. But because I was the one
who was listening, and because it clashed with my experience of playing hide and seek with my
neighbors from another socio-/cultural background when I was young, I filmed it, picked it out, and
made it a central point in my understanding of their world. These encounters form the basis of my
experience, and therefore of my film.
The last criteria is ‘experimentation’. This is the hardest one for me to think about. How am
I challenging the standard ways of making a film? By discussing the last three criteria already, I
hope that my film will come across different from a ‘fiction-non-fiction’-film. I hope that by being
critical towards my own position as a white, female, European researcher, my own theoretically
inspired way of understanding the world I encountered, my feelings, development and relationships, !26
I can challenge the idea that the film is the truth as it presents itself to the viewer. I hope that the
metaphor of walls can function as a way to realize that these mental and physical barriers the
children have to deal with are very complex, and that circus might be a way to make them aware of
the barriers in order to challenge them. Circus won’t ‘solve’ the problem, it rather functions as a
method of (self-)reflection. This is, in my opinion, the first step towards change.
3.5 Ethics
Working with children raises a lot of questions around ethics. During the fieldwork, I had the idea
that the children didn’t mind my camera. The way the camera and me were introduced (as I’ve
explained above), apparently gave them enough information to accept my presence. I functioned
mostly as someone that was part of the circus for a while, rather than a cameraperson. Nonetheless,
the camera had an effect on them. I think it made them aware that they were being viewed, and
therefore aware of what they were telling and showing me.
Lionel said that the camera functioned as a way to reflect on what they are doing and
thinking, which I noticed as well. For example, Nande told me one day in the car how useful our
camera conversation was for him:
Nande: ’Every week, I pick my favorite day of the week. This week, it was
definitely Wednesday, when you visited.’ Me: ‘Really? Why?’ Nande: ‘It is really good to talk about these things, it helps a lot. Normally we don’t get the time to talk about it. Sometimes Mama Aida [a social worker]
comes to Sisonke, and I really enjoy talking to her. It helps me think.’
Nande expressed how he needs to stop and reflect for a moment, but that the rhythm of daily life
doesn’t always allow it. In the beginning, I asked Lionel if I should have made the children and
their parents sign a film agreement form, but he found that to be unnecessary. Before I started
filming, I asked the parents if I could film their children, and if I could maybe come and visit. They
added me to their WhatsApp group to explain my project and my role in the circus.
Even though I got positive responses, I still have to be careful with the representation of
children on camera. While filming, the children have power over what they show and tell, but what
I show through editing is out of their control. Even more than with adults, the possibility that the
children didn’t fully understand what I wanted to achieve with the film at the time, is even bigger.
So, the framing of their words and worlds can come as a surprise. Before I show my film to people
!27
outside my personal and university circles, I asked Lionel to show the last version to the main
children and their parents. Before I finalize the film, I want to hear their feedback. Luckily Lionel
was very positive (which means a lot to me), so I can only hope the children and parents will feel
the same.
4. Self-assessment
4.1 Achievements
Even though I have a lot of remarks on my approach, outcomes, choices, et cetera, I have the
feeling that I have done everything I could to make the most out of this project. Since, I constantly
got confronted with the things I wanted to have done differently, it was an exciting experience to
take a whole year to develop, research and finalize something that is very close to my heart. I see
this film as a learning process, and am happy to have learned the things I have. I’m already looking
forward to start something new with these experiences in mind and body.
4.2 Lessons for future projects
I’ve learned many lessons I want to take into future projects. I want to elaborate on the two main
ones here. Firstly, I want to be more active and confident in choosing and directing my shots. I
would have liked to ask Bridgette if she could turn off the music while we were having a camera
conversation. I would have liked to ask Rune and Lolona if we could have taken some more time to
film their house and surroundings. In general, I would have liked to spend more time with them. I
was afraid to ask these things, because I didn’t want to break the fragile relationship they, I and the
camera were building. In the future, I want to be more confident in asking these things as a
‘filmmaker’, who also happened to be an anthropologist. Also, I would’ve liked to take more time
to really curate my camera-settings precisely, to make my light, sound and focus less messy. If I
would have done these things, which comes down to taking more time, I would have more silent
moments, silent shots of life that can set an atmosphere for the viewer, something that my footage
lacked. Secondly, I wish I made it more clear that the film was about them. Not about the social
circus as a concept, but about them as part of a social circus. I think that they would have
understood my motivations better, and would have given me more time to be silently present in
their lives at home as well.
!28
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Appendix
These were the photographs the children have taken, titled and curated into an exhibition in The
Shed. They were taken during a photography course I gave to come closer to the children and for
them to show me their lifeworld through pictures. With these photos, they try to show their circus
experience through pictures.
‘Field of Dreams’ by Mila
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