Flow Circus presents: A STUDY OF LOSSES

A magical contemporary circus show set to music by American indie artist Beirut!

Kompani Giraff is a Stockholm-based contemporary circus group known for their visually dazzling, dramaturgically structured and technically advanced circus performances. They combine contemporary circus, magic and object manipulation to create an extraordinary world like no other.

Empires fall, buildings lie in ruins, cultural artefacts are destroyed, animals die out. Most losses go unacknowledged precisely because they have disappeared. We look at what we think is history, but in fact it is a series of temporary survivals in a vast sea of loss.

Using circus, modernity and object manipulation, Kompani Giraff create their own universe in A Study of Losses. Playful in mood, the piece is a choreographic study of the allure of the lost.

Four circus performers and a collection of forgotten everyday objects awaken in an atmospheric landscape where even objects contain memories, dreams and ghostly pain.

The music, composed in close collaboration between Kompani Giraff and US band Beirut, plays a key role in the storytelling. Beirut composer Zach Condon has written 18 pieces for the performance.

A Study of Losses is a free interpretation of the novel Verzeichnis einiger Verluste (eng. An Inventory of Losses) by the award-winning German author Judith Schalansky. It is a book that uses magical realism to describe life and history as a series of losses and disappearances. The essential concept of the book is the ruin, a utopian place where the past and the future meet. The ruin is also a kind of literary metaphor, a space where the dead speak and the boundaries of time are overturned.

“A Study of Losses is carried by playfulness in a thoughtful, sometimes humorous approach and close interaction.”
– Svenska Dagbladet