Between Spotlight and Darkness: A Morning with the Circus

I thought circus meant glitter, loud music and children with cotton candy.
Bascula – an independent center for contemporary circus and performing arts – taught me something very different.

One weekday morning I walked into their big, dark hall with my camera. No audience, no clowns, no popcorn. Just a few pools of light on the floor and quiet music from a speaker in the corner. The rest was shadows.

The artists were already there, stretching, wrapping wrists, rubbing chalk into their hands. Aerial silks hung from the ceiling like sleeping creatures. A trapeze creaked softly. No one was performing for anyone; they were simply working. Repeating the same move again and again until the body remembered it better than the mind.

For a photographer, it was both heaven and hell.
Heaven, because the light was gorgeous – sharp beams cutting through the darkness, carving out muscles, catching chalk dust in the air. Hell, because there was so little of it. I cranked up the ISO, missed more shots than I care to admit, and slowly learned to anticipate the exact moment an acrobat would let go, twist, fly.

What I loved most was the concentration.
The woman hanging upside down from the rope, eyes closed, trusting her grip. The aerialist wrapped in red silk like a flame floating in the black. Two acrobats balancing on canes, bodies forming a perfect X in mid-air. No makeup, no drama – just people in dialogue with gravity.

At some point I realised I’d stopped thinking about “taking photos” and started breathing with them: inhale when they climb, hold my breath when they drop, exhale with the click of the shutter when they land safely.

When the session ended, the lights came back on and the magic dissolved into water bottles, sweatpants and tired smiles. But on my memory cards the morning was preserved exactly as I felt it: a series of tiny, bright islands of courage floating in a sea of darkness.

Since then, whenever I think of circus, I don’t imagine the big top.
I think of Bascula on a quiet morning: no applause, no audience – only artists who fall, get up, and fly again, and a photographer hiding in the shadows, trying to keep up.