Which other artists have been involved in this project?

Jef Everaert: Francesco Sgrò, who also composed the music, was one of the first people we brought on board as an artistic collaborator in the broadest sense. The decision to work with him felt natural because he already knew us well and understood how to deal with our different approaches, personalities and needs.

Marica Marinoni: We also brought in Juan Ignatio Tula, primarily to work on the physical material, and involved Alexander Vantournhout for the overall dramaturgy, who helped us confirm the order of the scenes to achieve a conceptual and sensitive result.

Jef Everaert: When you learn a basic move and perform it repeatedly, the magic of doing it fades, yet the surprise remains for those watching. Some things seemed ordinary to us, but they aren’t to the audience. Sometimes you need someone outside your circus know-how to see you perform and help you understand what you’re trying to express in a narrative sense.

Marica Marinoni: Where a simple rotation might seem superfluous to us, it is at that very moment that the audience breathes a sigh of relief and the energy rises. From a dramaturg’s perspective, the attempt to balance on the wheel together highlights our desire to connect with one another and our failure to do so. A simple movement is important because it also represents the first step in a variation; it is the first element of a technical language that you will see evolve. This is why it seemed right to us to involve people from outside the circus world, such as Marie Ballet and Guillaume Servely, to make our language accessible even to those unfamiliar with the circus and the Cyr wheel as such.

How did the circusnext workshop support your creative process?

Jef Everaert: We participated in the workshop in Serbia run by Cirkobalkana, and the experience gave us the chance to work in a way that was less technical but more focused on understanding what we wanted to express on stage. Working together during that workshop gave us a new sense of depth.

Marica Marinoni: It made us aware of what we have in common, as well as our differences. This is extremely valuable because when you want to address diversity, you have to look at it from every angle, including its opposite: togetherness.

Since the beginning, the technical side was already there, we’d got the hang of it, and everything was going well, but the bond between us came later. At the start, there was a sense of osmosis, which then expanded thanks to a slow process that allowed us to focus on one another. It was as if we were technically too close to be able to see our differences. The creative process taught us that getting to know one another is not a given, nor is discovering how and in what we are different.

Your stage presence is like a statement of personality without a specific character. Yet the natural contrast in character comes across powerfully through your stage movements. What challenges have you faced in developing your artistic partnership, and what have you learnt about yourselves, both as performers and as people?

Jef Everaert: On stage, it’s just the two of us as circus performers. We don’t play characters: it’s as if we were just ourselves, only a bit more exaggerated.

Marica Marinoni: I laugh because my sister, for example, gets annoyed when she sees me on stage, because to her I’m very much like my real-life self on stage; she says I’m predictable, that she recognises me as a person.

Jef Everaert: Before I got started on this project, I used to work with people who had a similar creative approach, whereas Marica and I work differently.

Marica Marinoni: For me, there’s always a creative quality in facing something unfamiliar. For Jef, conflict is a shock, and he avoids it at all costs. Yet the theme of difference originated with him and has enriched the project enormously. We had an idea for the show, and we relaxed rather than trying to dominate the other or impose our egos. Let’s say we worked towards a collapse of the ego for the greater good. From Jef, I learnt humanity. I realised that sometimes, by remaining kind to people, things evolve and often resolve themselves. And then I saw that every conflict made us grow; there was always a marked improvement; confrontation became our strength.

Jef Everaert: Everyone who knows us individually is now surprised when they see us on stage and tells us that we look more alike. I am now more like Marica in the way I perform, and Marica is more like me. For me, this means being more in touch with the pure movement and the world of abstract choreography; for her, it means being more in contact and exploring the potential for humour and theatrical play. For both of us, the project represents the freedom to explore many styles and experience a human connection. From Marica, I’ve learnt that if you want something, you have to go and get it, and that sometimes you can be more persistent, stand up for yourself a bit more, not accept things you don’t want to accept, stay in the process, take care of things, and be more active and practical about the things that need to be done. We’ve both learned how to be project leaders together.

What plans do you have in the making for the future?

Marica Marinoni: We are a duo collaborating on an artistic project, but we have maintained our individual identities whilst working together, without setting up a company. We want to take the project on tour as much as possible. In Difference is currently our priority. From my experience, I know it is entirely feasible to make room for other individual projects as well, which will undoubtedly enrich our stage presence.

Jef Everaert: Given that the performance draws on a very broad artistic vocabulary, we can extract specific sequences, which allows us to be flexible and experiment. We want to work with a live musician and create an outdoor, site-specific version of the project. It will be interesting to develop a format suited to a site that is different each time, an aspect that will undoubtedly enable us to expand our artistic language even further.