Phare Ponleu Selpak

Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS), meaning “the brightness of art”, originated in 1986 in Site 2 Refugee Camp on the Thai border. The idea of a creative association, which would use art and expression to help young refugees overcome the trauma of war, emerged from drawing workshops held for children in the camps. This original idea continued after the refugees returned to their homeland, and PPS was formally founded in 1994 by a group of former Site 2 children.

Phare Ponleu Selpak is a Cambodian non governmental organisation. It aims to support community development through providing social, educative and cultural services to children and their families. Phare Ponleu Selpak implements a global approach aiming to answer children’s individual needs to ensure each child’s is able access their rights.

Phare Ponleu Selpak’s action is centered around artistic practice. Arts are used not only as a tool to foster expression, but also as a complete set of tools aimed at answering children’s psycho-social needs. This includes education, life skills, social skills and personal development. Following the years of war and the destructive Khmer Rouge Regime, Cambodian culture was seriously damaged. Artistic practice is then a means to allow the population to rediscover and reclaim their cultural practices and knowledge, allowing them to rebuild their identity.

Pps’s social action involves 30 children who are hosted within the compound in the Child Care Center and 46 more supported while staying with their families in their communities. These children face some deep social issues; they are victims of child trafficking, domestic violence, abandonment, disease, extreme poverty, and street begging. All the children benefit from a nutrition program (three meals a day), medical support (medical primary care, medical referral, medical charges), education support (schooling support, school material, school follow-up, non formal education), as well as from cultural and artistic activities (three art schools and a leisure centre). Furthermore, 150 children daily are welcomed in the leisure center to enjoy educative, cultural, artistic and leisure activities. 75 children a day also have free access to books and games in the library.

The three artistic schools form the core of PPS’ work in the community. These three schools, open to all and free of charge, are used by 450 children either for leisure activities or as vocational training. These three schools are: Visual art school, Music School and Performing Arts school divided into a Theatre program and a Circus Arts section

For the past 11 years, the circus school has welcomed street kids and teenagers to train all day long in several circus disciplines: acrobatics, juggling, balancing, contortion, trapeze and clowning. Twenty of those kids are now young adults who have become outstanding professional artists performing in Cambodia and all around the world.

An entertaining but also constructive discipline, the practice of circus requires a personal commitment, individual and collective application, thus creating a healthy relation to authority through a disciplinary structure. It’s a productive way for kids to confront ‘risk’, in the secure frame of the school, rather than confronting danger on the street. Therefore Det strongly believes that circus can help youths with difficult social backgrounds to get out of vulnerable situations and violent cycles.

(In French only)

More than 120 pupils attend the circus school everyday, from 8am to 11am in the morning and 2pm to 5pm in the afternoon. They are divided into six groups according to their age and level, and are trained by eight different specialized teachers. The school offers technical sessions, physical training, collective games and time for stretching/warming down

After few years the most talented students formed a company and set up a show called ‘Bong Touch Bong Thom’, which had great success immediately. Some of these artists, urged by the need of transmitting what they had enjoyed, naturally started teaching in the school. Others decided to go further with their artistic career and joined new productions to be performed around the world.

Social Circus

Social Circus refers to the growing movement toward the use of circus as an agent of social change, as a tool of personal and social development of young people and for an intercultural dialogue. It uses alternative pedagogical tools to work with marginalized people, mainly with youth with personal or social difficulties.

While a career in the circus is one possible future to the youth who participate in the social circus, it is not the purpose. Rather, the objective it to increase self-awareness, individuality and collective unity, self-discipline and many other values through a pedagogical alternative in order to transform the vision and capabilities of youth. The main goals of the trainings are to teach autonomy, solidarity, self-esteem, perseverance, physical-fitness, communication, and adaptability.

In social circus, circus arts are also used as a motor for intercultural dialogue. As an art of the body it transcends linguistic barriers. Circus is then used as a special tool for encountering the other, regardless of ethnic or social origin, and to promote social and cultural diversity for the artists as well as for the audience.

On the right side of this blog, I put some links on social circus program in the world. The most famous between all of them is the project Cirque du Monde, a branch of the Cirque du Soleil that works to expand and support social circus programs in eighteen different countries, and over forty worldwide communities. The Circus du Monde also offers intensive programs and training networks, aimed at enhancing the teaching skills of the circus instructors who wish to practice their art in a social-intervention context.

To know more about the project of "Cirque du Monde", click here.

And to know about the partners of the project, click here.

Handstand

FEDEC

Created in 1998, the European Federation of Professional Circus Schools (FEDEC) is a network that comprises 38 professional circus schools located in 20 different countries (Albania, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Tunisia and United Kingdom). FEDEC’s main vocation is to support the development, evolution of pedagogy and creation in the field of circus arts education. To accomplish this, FEDEC published in 2008 a directory including a compilation of circus schools across the world, and a survey about the sort of training that they provide.

In this document you’ll find the FEDEC database of school contacts, informations on their level of training, details of the skills that they teach at that level ; and at least a translations of circus skills techniques in English, Spanish, Deutch and French.

Les 7 doigts de la main/ The 7 fingers

"Les 7 doigts de la main translates literally as "the 7 fingers of the hand". It is a twist on a French idiom ("the five fingers of the hand") used to describe distinct, individual parts united tightly, moving in coordination towards one common goal. Here it refers to the 7 directors/ founding members of the company who, by combining their very distinct personalities, talents and experiences, work towards their common artistic goals, functioning with all the dexterity and beautifully awkward coordination of an unconventional and unlikely 7-fingered hand.

The 7 Fingers was founded in Montreal in 2002 by seven seasoned circus performers. Friends who had worked together in such prestigious companies as the Cirque du Soleil, the Cirque Eloize, Wintergarten Variety, Teatro Zinzanni, the Pickle Family Circus and Cirque Knie, or trained together at Montreal’s National Circus School, they decided it was time to offer something new to the circus arts scene, to create a circus of an entirely different flavor".

More about it? click here