Interview – Taigi Cirkas, Lauréates 2024

Valentina Barone: How long ago did you start collaborating and when did you decide to call the company Taigi Cirkas?

Izabelė Kuzelytė: I met Konstantin Kosovec – Elena’s husband and the co-founder of the company in the only aerial space in Vilnius. Later, he invited me to join him and Elena in a theatre space to start training together, and the friendship between the three of us just kicked off from there.

Elena Kosovec: In 2015, I dropped out of medical school after five years, deciding that it was just not for me, and I had a gap year. I was feeling quite lost at that time, but in the end, I just happened to meet Konstantin and Izabelė. It felt like we had known each other forever. We skipped the small talk and immediately went to the weirdest conversations, and that’s why it worked so well. We were completely self-taught, and reckless, training in a gym without adequate equipment or the right mats, but with a huge desire to learn. Izabelė had a couple of years of experience and began to teach me the cool stuff. Together, we binge-watched circus performances and made big dreams.

Formally, Taigi Cirkas is a company founded in 2016. It was when I directed Konstantin in a short sketch involving him and a music composer for a small festival in Vilnius that we decided to collaborate. As naming a company is always difficult, we went for “Taigi Cirkas”, which in Lithuanian means “simply circus”. 

VB: Saucisson takes a far from classical approach, and its absurdity reverses the spectacularity of circus. How did you come by this intention in your creative process? 

Izabelė Kuzelytė: From the beginning of our friendship to 2025, many things have happened. We took part in different experiences, but we always came back together. Nowadays, Taigi Cirkas includes different members for each show. Saucisson is a unique experience. It did not start with the intention of becoming a project; we did not have in mind to go for residencies to create a production. One day, thinking together, we had the intuition of doing something out of the ordinary. The concept originated from the absurdity of dedicating years of training suspended on a cotton sausage, and it stayed with us. I would say we had the words shocking, absurd and disgusting in mind.  

Elena Kosovec: There was already a lot of grossness involved, driven by the desire to mock our disciplines. I felt fed up personally with the serious approach to a prop and the gentle approach to the rope like it is your loved one. I just felt like I wanted to do something that was the opposite, and talking with Izabele, we caught up this wave. We started getting involved and thinking about it together. It has been a fast escalation of ideas. We thought let’s do this, then do that, then let’s hang a sausage and let’s put mayo on it… We removed the mayo part after. (She laughs). 

VB: How did you decide to apply to circusnext with this audacious proposal?

Elena Kosovec: What is worth mentioning is that in this project, we allowed ourselves to involve all of our creative facets without limiting ourselves to just being circus artists. We rented a camera and just decided to see what would happen. We used a text we created together and the video editing skills we wanted to have. We allowed ourselves to try different things without limiting our creative medium to aerial. It worked because of the freedom we felt experimenting without planning to go anywhere. We just went with it, and then, seeing the first video, we were like: hey, it is pretty cool and might fit for the circusnext selection.

We wanted to be unapologetic and put ourselves out there. It was clear there was an impalpable sense of sensuality and femininity involved. We continued to follow the immediate creativity, picking up and implementing the imaginary ideas spontaneously appearing in our heads. That’s how we created these absurd kebab sign language elements associated with sounds, giving the spectators a sense of displacement. 

Izabelė Kuzelytė: We filmed the first video in February 2023, a very abstract montage cut full of random ideas. With applying to the circusnext selection, we faced our first challenge as we had to make a new video to send that was 10 or 15 minutes of uncut footage, which helped us to understand that the project was doable. I think there were some things we managed to say without putting them into words. The main one, probably, was desacralising the circus body and the object. 

VB: What have been the effects of participating in the circusnext laboratories during your creation process? 

Elena Kosovec: Before the laboratories, it was just the two of us seeing our universe and only from the inside. After showing the work in progress to the laboratories’ colleagues, we invited others and opened the view to the outside. Receiving feedback worked as a reality check. We knew what we were interested in searching for, but we opened up to the opportunity for people to exchange what they saw in what we were doing.  

Izabelė Kuzelytė: When we discussed the video, people told us to see different things in what we were doing. The circusnext labs helped us find our direction by clarifying the intentions that we were not interested in following. There were a lot of discussions to narrow down what we really don’t want to say, what we want to say and what is Ok if people see it or not. 

Elena Kosovec: We were surprised by the feedback since we did not even imagine the work speaking on the topics they mentioned. It has been nourishing and interesting opening up to this exchange opportunity and inviting people to say what they saw and felt. One of my favourite comments was that we were worshipping the phallic cult. Someone noticed that our onstage relationship was rude, while we were always very gentle with the sausage. I was surprised since we thought we were doing the opposite by destroying it. 

VB: What is the relationship between the two females on stage and the apparatus that you want to underline?

Izabelė Kuzelytė: In the video introducing the show, there was a joke about two women interacting with sausages to demolish the patriarchy. It was just a scribble out of nowhere, but I liked it later. I don’t think this will be the show’s primary theme. We more or less had the idea of talking about a human ready-made product, broader than female objectification. We do not know yet exactly where we will go from now.

Elena Kosovec: When you create something following an irrational stream of ideas, it is not easy to go only one way. There are just different streams following each other. As authors, Izabele and I have been close friends for a long time and shared experiences like posing nude together for painters. We know how to spend time in intimacy with our bodies. We are close mentally and physically but without the sexual or romantic undertone. This quality allows us to trust each other and be very weird on stage. I know, we are a little bit delusional in that sense! (She laughs). Our writing comes from a great body and mind freedom, and this relational quality creates an illusion around us that we can play with.

Izabelė Kuzelytė: Speaking about formats, Saucisson originally was thought to be an installation, so it has already changed a lot. The piece contains material we generated years ago from random creative impulses and, at the same time, is a recent portrait of who we are as authors. We asked ourselves what to challenge: if we wanted to talk about sexuality and women on stage and how. I have been interested in the female portrayal of aerial acts and the consequent sexualisation of the woman hanging in the air. Our focus on desacralising the circus body came from the perspective of being a woman doing the splits on silks during a private event.

Elena Kosovec: Yes, when you are in front of an audience eating roast beef and you get this weird feeling because everyone is having a nice banquet, while you are there just doing the splits, and then, you think: why am I spreading my legs in front of people eating? It is so normalised in the circus world, and we are Ok with this, but then, while writing Saucisson, this aspect acted as a creative impulse in reverse. What else can we do with the same elements? Can we show I am uncomfortable? Then maybe let’s play even more uncomfortably. 

There is also a reference to the market and the consumer-product relationship underlined by the meat presence, as you can consume circus as entertainment. It is liberating to de-spectacularise circus and play with attitudes and images from other arts. The blue dress, for example, is a reference from David Lynch and fits tremendously on stage as a shining colour. Anyway, all the elements in progress we find intuitively need to pass a vibe check.

VB: What point are you at in the process of creating the show? 

Elena Kosovec: We are planning some residencies in the spring and will have the première in the Autumn of 2025, or even a little earlier. The circusnext final presentation is a delicate moment since you have to finalise 15 minutes of a show, but later, you have to rework the material for a longer format. We are discussing and deciding which part to expand or where to add extra elements. What is necessary now is preserving the freedom to experiment and not feel stuck in a format. For this show, overthinking would mean getting out of the frame of our creative flow, so we want to end it relatively quickly but respect how we made things happen. 

We asked Roberto Magro as an external consultant to help us navigate the creative process and understand, for example, if we required an external eye or not, which, in our case, we understood was not needed. He supported us in being ourselves no matter what, and Saucisson’s process without killing our inner voices, advising us on how we can do rather than telling us what to do. Konstantin is the technician and creator of the frying sausages’ props. We are collaborating with two different composers, an opera singer Egle Radaviciute, who got the vibe of what we are doing, and we found the lighting designer, so the team is complete now. 

VB: As one of the few Lithuanian contemporary circus companies, how does it feel to be a circusnext laureate? 

Elena Kosovec: In a light-hearted way, you know you’re always more famous and successful outside your own yard. It is a little weird when you come back from Paris and feel like you’re back to the same old thing but internally, the process has changed you. Now we are comfortable and know we are on the quality level of international circus productions. It has changed our way of communicating with ourselves, not necessarily because we are recognised artists in Lithuania. 

Izabelė Kuzelytė: I would say that the circusnext laureate status can remove a little of the self-doubt. Lithuania is very small, as is the whole Baltic Region. There is also an interesting joke that says Estonia has a youth school, Latvia has a circus place, and Lithuania has people, so we generally cooperate and support the sector growth in the Region. 

Elena Kosovec: Yes, it is true. We form a good circus unit, all three of us!