Leaking Circus Projects
A Framework for playful art and artful play.
Leaking Circus Projects is a platform for playful, serious and radical artprojects. We produce art exhibitions and exchange projects and engage in collaborative and experimental research projects.
The Leaking Circus started as a conceptual framework for Helen Edlings own artistic research but soon grew into the shape of a platform for specific projects and for collaboration with others.
Currently based in Roslagen, Stockholm we aim for projects and collaborations both near and far where possibilities and opportunities arise.
Thoughts on playful art, or artful play...
"Play is always a creative act that might take the shape of a physical product or a time-based interaction, lateral thinking and communication.
What we do when creating, when deciding to act out a play is to consciously
or unconsciously decide the framework for it, set the scene. The framework can be the roles that you give the players in a role play or improv theatre exercise, or it can be the materials you decide to use when building something. The crucial part is that you always ‘set the stage’ and on that you move according to your choices and it is only your imagination sets that the limit. You create something- whether it is physical or imaginary. The idea or concept of play and creativity and the difficulty to pin them down is to be compared to a labyrinth or a maze.
Play is always mobile. It knows no boundaries apart from the ones you set up, it can move from an imaginary planet in a made up story to the tree outside the neighbour’s garden to the plate of food on the dinner table and all this within a time span of two seconds or two years. A ongoing non-linearity which could be seen in the light of rhythm; rhythms as interrelations between time and space. When play has begun it can not end, it can stop but it can not end, it will always be there since it has happened, and as with ideas, the carry new ones with them, they multiply and feed off each other.
Another perspective of play [...] is play/playfulness as a way of crossing over boundaries of set structures and to create new possibilities of different kinds of play through setting a whole new frame. Creating your own rules by creating an alternative world, could be said as playing real life.
One of the basic underlying problems with play and the everyday adult world is that it is not seen as something important. Imagination and make believe is something that children can amuse themselves in. It could be said that artists who work in relation to or with play or playfulness and who manages to make a living of their practices are playing for a living.
So, where does play exist in our world, and in what forms, where could/should there be a place for more play? According to Johan Huizinga: “the first main
characteristics of play: is that it is free, it is in fact freedom”.(Huizinga 1950:8)which is further emphasised by Roger Caillois in his book Man Play and Games:“There is also no doubt that play must be defined as a free and voluntary activity, a source of joy and amusement. As an obligation or simply an order, it would loose one of its basic characteristics. ..Finally and above all it is necessary that they be free to leave whenever they please, by saying: ‘I’m not playing anymore’ “(Caillois 1958:6)"
Helen Edling (freely from H.E's MA.Fine Arts Dissertation)