Madeleine Grant - interview reflection

Madeleine Grant is a Brisbane based printmaker, painter, acrobat, aerialist, clown and cabaret performer currently working with  Vulcana Women’s Circus  and Commonthread. Grants arts practice is driven by a passion for physical performance and expression of personal beliefs. With issues such as arts conservation, financial sustainability and career longevity being ongoing concerns.

Grant currently splits her time performing with Vulcana Women’s Circus and Commonthread (of which she is a founding member). The interview was held at Vulcana Women’s Circus, which is a social circus, that is volunteer based and performs nationally. The respect for diversity and feminist principles is a starting point and centrality to their work and creating opportunities for women, youth and the LGBTNB community to express ideas through physical and creative process. Due to being ill informed prior to the interview, initial research was focused on learning the terms, beliefs and practices. While I considered the implications of being a Christian male in that environment, a personal revelation was that, for me, identity of the individual is internal (the soul). Transcending boundaries such as race, gender and sex.

For Grant and I, our practices revolve around our belief systems. Grant stated that her “radical left” political views of Agrarian Socialism, influences everything she does. Particularly how she views society and the media. She consciously accepts that she lives in a capitalist society, that she is a part of it and she tries to work with in it. While endeavouring to make art that is in-line with her beliefs, and attempting to avoid organisations that hold dichotomous views. Grant acknowledged that there are works that successfully combine circus with politics, but applying these views in her physical performance is difficult.

The nature of performance work for Grant also causes issues regarding conservation. This is also a personal concern as a digital/interactive artist. A lot of value and commercial success is weighted on the ability to conserve art, but as a performance artist much of her work is ephemeral as is my own. She chooses to reinvent her work rather than conserving, which is especially true for clowning. An audiences experience when they are laughing and the timing is good, the high that she gets and the high the audiences gets can not be captured. The performance can be repeated and improve upon, but recording for conservation is difficult.

Developing long term financial sustainability and practice management is an ongoing procedure. Grants financial stability is achieved by splitting her time as a librarian and performer, both of which she considers an integral part of her arts practice. In her early practice, working in a small arts community gave her a narrow focus, now the alternative work aids her in developing ideas and interactivity. She currently spends 70-80% of her practice training and rehearsing, 10% performing and the remaining time spent in administrative and logistical work including stage managing, special effects work and costume stuff and prop production. Additionally Grant is constantly recovering from injury due to the physical nature of performance, it is a field that practitioners adapt to depending on age, prior training and physical capacity.