Collective Art
Maggie Anderson
www.LittleVillageMag.com
"[The work] doesn’t necessarily strike them as art; it’s just something that is happening in the world.” — Carlos Ferguson
CIRCUS ACT A
Tiny Circus rolled onto Iowa City’s downtown pedestrian mall on a warm July night. Not a mini-version of Barnum and Bailey—this circus had no ringmaster, no lions, no bearded lady or dog boy, no trapeze artists. But there were still sights to be seen, including a custom-built, 12-foot airstream trailer, a 10-foot, white projection screen, and a repertoire of short, sweet stop-motion animation films. While the Friday Night Concert played by the weather dance fountain, the Circus—a collaborative artists’ collective based out of Grinnell, Iowa—set up their demonstration booth on the mall’s north end. Those who were interested could create their own animations. (I wrangled onlooker Eric Villhauer, a Waldorf history and political science student who lives in Coralville, into joining me to make a two-second short we’ll call “The Battle of Swingline Stapler and Little Felt Fellow with Tea-ball Helmet.”) Visitors wandered by, often stopping to marvel at the airstream and ask what, exactly, is a Tiny Circus? 20
August 2009 | Little Village
After the concert concluded and the skies grew dark, circus members unfurled their screen, “dimmed” the lights (“We ‘circused’ the light,” said Tiny Circus artist Grace Lemaitre after she helped cover a street light with a black trash bag), and projected their animations. Stop-motion is a simple way to create a film. The producer photographs a scene multiple times, physically moving the contents slightly before each sequential shot, and then edits the individual photographs together. The finished project produces the illusion that the object are moving independently—it’s a little like a flipbook, in principle. The medium is perhaps best known for its use in The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Claymation series (how could we forget the Claymation Christmas Special!), or maybe the Gumby television program. More recently, director Michel Gondry used stop-motion in his 2006 motion picture, The Science of Sleep, and Tiny Circus’s style reminds me very much of protagonist Stéphane Miroux’s dream world—whimsical, quirky and surreal, yet approachable and delightfully homemade. With the theme “The Other Histories of the
See the Circus More information on Tiny Circus, including online animations for viewing, can be found at www.tinycircus. org. If you want to catch them live, the Tiny Circus will finish out the season with two more shows: • artstop in Des Moines, September 11–12. More info at www.artstopinfo.com. • Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, August 8. More info at www.mnhs.org.
World,” the Tiny Circus shorts imagine creation stories for things like kissing, smiles, repetition, rain, ghosts, clocks and hiccups. In its two-year history, the collective has involved anywhere from 12 to 20 core artists, in addition to hundreds of community collaborators, and created more than 10 films. This year, community performance and workshops have become a core part of the Tiny Circus mission, and the group’s members have towed their airstreams (they have three— one for projection, one is a studio and the third is living space if needed) around the state to county fairs, arts festivals, town celebrations and even an impromptu performance at a farm implement next to a Grinnell ice cream shop,