How to connect with the wind? This was the question Phia Ménard asked herself after connecting with ice. The French performer started off as a juggler, which also comes into play for her relationship to air. But as a circus technique, she ended up mastering it and exploring its full possibilities and she needed more. And this coincided with her change of sex, a vital transition that falls short with the mere word ‘change’. In her own words: In contemporary juggling routines, even failure is dramatised and seen as part of the show. Deep down for me, juggling was just a spectacular feat. I juggled while I was “in the show” while it was a representation of myself. My appearance, my skin and my gender were not mine. The day I finally confirmed my difference and claimed a sex that biology had not given me at birth, suddenly juggling no longer made sense.’

Like ice, wind is an unstable element. Further, people’s relationship to wind is much more present – for better or for worse – than with ice, making it easy to understand the entire conceptualisation that the artist puts into play. Wind can cause us to feel both pleasure and fear. What have Ménard and her colleagues from Non Nova done to put all of this on the stage? Well, they created a small tornado, a windy vortex by using fans arranged in a circle. A little hurricane in a little windy circus ring. Then the wind needed to be objectified, which is when plastic appeared.

A plastic bag is no longer an innocent object unfortunately. Using plastic as an element with which to play with the wind also lets Ménard approach what we all already know about our home in the universe: ‘Plastic evokes trash bins, petrol, oil, consumerism, contamination, all things that end up spoiling our daily lives. But plastic is so present in our lives that it hardly seems artificial.’ Wind and plastic have been the ingredients in several pieces by this French creator, which she presents as performance-art installations, because she believes wind is a living element. It will always be an infertile effort to categorise a practice as open to the imagination as to politics, to play and to a critical attitude, to desire and to violence. Eros and Thanatos. Disgust and beauty.