My name is Jeni Barnard and I am a co-founding member, along with Barney White, of Acrojou. A two-person, shoestring operation, still in its early stages in many ways, we formed in 2007 following a commission for the Trafalgar Square Festival. As a performance company we generally sit in the ‘circus- theatre’ bracket. As graduates of London’s Circus Arts BA ‘The Circus Space’, where we met and both specialised in acrobatic wheel, our training is predominantly in circus, peppered with physical theatre, choreography, dance and clowning.
My attraction to circus came as a natural progression from a steady focus on theatre and visual art forms (drawing, photography, tinkering, making stuff). I loved theatre for its immediacy, the way in which it exists only in the moment it happens, along with its power to deeply affect those who experience it (when it is good, and the moment is right). The visual art I explored was quieter, stiller, but I was always drawn to it due to a fascination with images.
Jumping through hoops. Photo: Bertil Nilsson
People often seem to favour one sense, and for me it is sight. In taste and sound I definitely lack a sensitive palate, but images, for me, affect on such an intrinsic level (whether incidental, or created to that end as ‘art’) as to be one of the most essential elements in how I process the world, and how I communicate within it.
Somewhere around the end of my teens, circus entered my periphery when, by chance, I heard of Circomedia, a circus arts and physical theatre course in my hometown of Bristol. At the time, intending to continue training in theatre and hoping to head towards working as a director, I initially auditioned with the thought that it would be good to gain a basic understanding of circus, to allow me to create work with its artists in the future. Through the course of that year, what had begun as a plan to learn a little, became a long-term commitment to circus. Realising the huge visual scope and physical toolbox circus could offer to theatre, I began training to the technical level that I could create work from ‘within’, using circus with devised theatre to create the kind of work which was beginning to form as a possibility somewhere on the edge of my mind.
Many years of training later, and five years into Acrojou, we have recently completed Wake, our first full-length, venue-based production. Previously, we created The Wheel House, a short outdoor show. Completely different in both style and content, what the two have in common is a use of physical skills, combined with theatre and visual design, to enable us to tell stories with our bodies and images, rather than with language.
