Interview – Cie Dissociée, Lauréat 2026
Marcelo Nunes’ Ghetto: swinging across the chasm of class
Around About Circus · By Valentina Barone
Marcelo Nunes is a Brazilian circus artist who uses clowning, fakirism and trapeze to deliver story-driven performances that explore human nature. He began practising circus arts as a child, attended the Escola Nacional de Circo do Rio de Janeiro, studied trapeze in Argentina and then in Europe at Ésacto’ Lido’ in Toulouse, where he also began practising fakirism. His solo show, GHETTO, stems from a personal artistic need to explore and transform loneliness and social marginalisation into tools for understanding, accepting and liberating one’s own existential condition. The show prompts the audience to question who and what we normally fail to see on the fringes of a society that is unable to empathise with others’ pain or addiction. On stage, the perspective is reversed: it is the marginalised individual and their distress that are the protagonists of a journey that takes us out of our comfort zone. Just as the circus has, over time, reinvented itself and challenged established social codes, Marcelo Nunes’ art speaks out against the homogenising aesthetics of a normative world that prioritises class privilege. Decolonising contemporary circus is possible, and a minority practice such as fakirism becomes an expression of mastery and fulfilment. For the circusnext interview series, I spoke to the artist via video link from Rio de Janeiro.
At what point in your life did you discover circus arts, and how did you become a professional?
Macelo Nunes: From the age of five, through social services supporting vulnerable children in São Paulo, I participated in various cultural activities that I wouldn’t normally have had access to. It was in this context that I discovered circus, around eight years old. I like to think of myself as the second generation of artists in my family, as my first teacher was my great-aunt, my grandfather’s sister. A dancer and model, she was certainly an artist, but found herself in a difficult environment in which to fulfil her potential as such.
I’ve always done juggling and acrobatics too, but clowning was my main discipline until I was eighteen. Then I got a bit fed up with making people laugh and wanted to be seen more, so at the Escola Nacional de Circo in Rio de Janeiro, I specialised in acrobatic base. After finishing my studies in Brazil, I was the coordinator of an organisation that runs activities for vulnerable children. It was a wonderful experience that allowed me to return to my roots in a way that held deep meaning.
And yet, I felt that my desire to be an artist was always there, a voice asking to be heard. Following an injury, I decided to take up the trapeze. I continued my training as a trapeze artist in Argentina and then applied to Ésacto’ Lido’ in Toulouse, where I graduated with my personal project, Pacemaker, from which GHETTO originated.
GHETTO is the artistic expression of your anthropological and social research into the theme of social marginalisation. Where does your focus on the excluded come from?
Macelo Nunes: I come from the ghetto, so this show draws on a social reality I know intimately. This perspective is part of who I am, and when I talk about people living on the margins, I do so from a very personal standpoint because I come from a family with a history of drug abuse and detention.
To society, my mother was of no social significance; her addiction was never seen as a sign of hardship. Yet my mother was unable to receive an education; she had five children and found herself alone, abandoned by a society that failed to help her in a difficult situation.
For me today, speaking four languages is normal, even though I come from a marginalised background. Yet I was only able to talk about my family situation after fifteen years. It was through reflecting on the society in which I lived that I freed myself. To do so, I had to place myself in a position of understanding towards my social condition, integrate myself and learn to talk about it.
Where did the idea for the show come from, and how did GHETTO take shape?
Macelo Nunes: For me, marginality and fragility go hand in hand. It is the sociological aspect of art that interests me: contextualising the individual and exploring why they cannot adapt. It is also for this reason that I eventually began experimenting with the absence of a margin between artist and audience.
In the first year at Ésacto’ Lido, we used to experiment once a month by presenting personal research. At the time, I felt a sense of responsibility for having grown up in a difficult situation. I wanted to stage the experience of being punished by society and its taboos. Fakirism emerged in that context. It arose from the need to explore, as part of a collective process, the theme of exposing shame in front of an audience.
After finishing Le Lido, Silence Festival invited my personal project, Pacemaker, for a residency, and during that time, I developed a short outdoor piece called Hertz. The concept was to start with a provocation to take the audience out of their comfort zone. You see a character who provokes rather than speaks, and in that sense, it’s more a physical, rational piece than GHETTO, more of a performance than a show. In front of the audience, it is my inner clown who takes to the stage, smashes bottles and dances on them. It is a projection of injustice, driven by a desire to engage with society and say: ‘Listen, I’m here’.
After the collective experience with La Barque Acide, I felt the need to focus again on my own artistic approach, with the idea of working on a new solo piece, and I decided to submit the project to circusnext. In GHETTO, rather than the provocation of wanting to be seen, human vulnerability is brought into the spotlight; the clown connects with the audience to feel together. He embodies society’s problem. The jester, on the other hand, tells society that you are the problem. The show features both tendencies: pointing out the margins and empathising with those who live on the fringes.
No longer in an outdoor space, but in the darkness of a stage theatre, in GHETTO, the set design defines the character. Addiction takes shape within the space as an expression of marginalisation. The carpet of glass prompts you to wonder how many bottles there might be on it, how much one would have to drink to create such a vast carpet of shattered glass, and how long this person has been in this state.
The trapeze and fakirism are the two primary techniques that support the character in dialogue with himself. The phrases I repeat are from a poem by Fernando Pessoa, Poema do Menino Jesus, a hymn to the inner child. Its function is not narrative but rather linked to his oscillation between reality and delusion.
The practice of fakirism is painful, but it triggers a catharsis – in both the performer and the audience – centred on the acceptance of pain. What does practising this technique mean to you?
Macelo Nunes: Initially, the technical work was mainly aimed at training the ability to relate to pain and to move with lightness on the broken glass surface. I don’t feel pain on stage, even though the audience senses the danger I’m facing. There is an irrational, instinctive reaction to broken glass because you know it is dangerous.
What strikes me – and what I sense in the audience – is the contradictory revulsion and attraction when watching a fakir, the inability to avert the gaze, but also the ability to normalise what is happening on stage, because pain is present, yet so are delicacy and vulnerability, and this is why the audience eventually relaxes.
What is clear is that the audience is facing an unusual situation, what you might call transcending reality: the ability to empathise with the sight of suffering, to forget the pain and focus on the artist on stage.
In GHETTO, stage and sound design are key elements. How and with whom did you work on these aspects, and who else did you involve in the project?
Macelo Nunes: Everyone involved in this project is essential. I’m on stage alone, but GHETTO is the result of a team effort. I really enjoy working in a group, sharing and discussing ideas.
GHETTO deals with social exclusion, so the study on scenography was crucial to understanding where the character is situated. I wanted to create a surface made of broken glass, and this was made possible by the expertise of Lluc Castell, set designer for Baro d’evel. In the circusnext presentation, we didn’t use the full stage design yet, consisting of walls – concrete boundaries with which the protagonist interacts and which he cannot climb over.
The sound design by Joan Lavandeira – who is also responsible for the light design with Maria Papadopoulos – echoes this sense of emptiness and conveys the character’s disorientation. Initially, I had planned to propagate the sound throughout the venue from different points and distort it. Now it is amplified by a lone speaker on stage, a single, distant point, to reinforce the idea of isolation. Just as the scenography and sound design speak of solitude, the lighting also amplifies the sense of emptiness within the darkness.
GHETTO has involved various artistic collaborators to refine specific aspects of the research, including Rodrigo Portella for dramaturgy, Caroline Obin for the clown work, and Christophe Le Goff for the choreography.
Ezra Groenen, my teacher at Ésacto’ Lido, has accompanied me in my trapeze research. For me, there is no better person with whom to develop research on the apparatus in relation to emptiness; with her, you truly go beyond technique: you feel free, and anything is possible.
Someone extremely important to me and to the project is Löic Santiago, a teacher I met at Ésacto’ Lido and from whom I learnt the Russian martial art known as Systema, which focuses on stress points and the release of tension in the body. In this technique, the body receives and absorbs the impact of an external impulse, rather than reacting to it. We worked mostly on the suspended body on the trapeze, but applying the same concepts to the study of fakirism has allowed me to infuse dynamism into a technique that is traditionally more static.
How did the circusnext process influence GHETTO’s artistic creation?
Macelo Nunes: Being among the selected projects allowed me to be recognised as a circus creator and led me to found Cie Dissociée. Before taking part in the process, it was clear to me that I wanted to create spaces for reflection within culture through my art, but the selection pushed me to take a stand, to become a project lead and to define my needs and requirements as an artist.
