From Psyche Magazine: The French performance artist Bastien Dausse built the ‘contemporary circus company’ Compagnie Barks around his abiding ‘desire to play with gravity’. This reality-bending video features two performances from Compagnie Barks’s show Moon / Cabinet de curiosités lunaires (2022). In the first, titled la bascule (or the seesaw), Dausse secures the French performance artist Julieta Salz into a weighted device he invented to simulate the gravity of the Moon, which is one-sixth of Earth’s. Dausse, still bound by the pull of our planet, then assists Salz as she moves through a series of transfixing acrobatic movements.
In the second, titled la Table et chaises (or the Table and chairs), Dausse and Salz move across a set of table and two chairs, with each object having only two legs affixed to the ground, all set against a forest background. Each of these performances juxtaposes the rules of our everyday world with elements that seem to challenge them, encouraging viewers reconsider the familiar.
