Tsirihaka Harrivel

Physical performance artist, creator and composer Tsirihaka Harrivel develops a language around circus art in all its variety of means, expressions and constraints. Since 2006 he has worked with Vimala Pons to create spectacular forms which explore the possibilities of speech and its meaning in relation to the physical act, leading to GRANDE in 2016. In 2017, during a performance of GRANDE, Harrivel accidentally fell eight metres. He used this experience as the basis for La Dimension d’Après (touring in 2020-2021-2022) and also worked with Vimala Pons on the conception of Périmètre de Denver (2021). Since 2020 Tsirihaka Harrivel has developed Arcade | Sentimental, a series of immersive installations which are part arcade game, part killing game. You, the first piece in the cycle, premiered in 2022.

The origins of the circus in gladiatorial combats and mock battles laid down a certain number of fundamentals, rules and signs which form its classic identity. While the profound nature of this “identity” remains largely contradictory, uncertain and impossible to pin down, these martial origins have sown the seeds for an art played out on the battlefield between life and death.

Tsirihaka Harrivel’s residency at Villa Kujoyama centres on this link between the circus and martial arts, conjuring violence in a radical transformation whose traces persist. He sets out to pinpoint this martial tropism through Japanese ways: on the one hand kyūdō (archery) and, on the other, exploration of contemporary rites, with a particular emphasis on the individual.

This obligation to embrace antagonism in order to fully grasp a subject is foundational to his project in Kyoto.