Knitting Peace

Cirkus Cirkör (Sweden)

Co-presented with The Cultch

The phrase “hanging by a thread” comes to life in Cirkus Cirkör’s colossal work Knitting Peace.

Under the auspices of director Tilde Björfors, the world-renowned Swedish circus company uses the ancient language of spectacle to address contemporary issues. Five performers take to a stage densely strung with the tangled stuff of existence. Ropes, yarn, webbed expanses of knitted material act as metaphors for human struggle.

Accompanied by musician Samuel “Looptok” Andersson’s live score, the aerialists, acrobats and performers navigate the fine line between safety and peril with exquisite precision and mutual support. The usual tropes of circus — trapeze, hoops, ladders — are replaced by seemingly gossamer threads. The allusions are multiple and shifting, moving from spider web to ship’s rigging to giant balls of yarn like those for an enormous cat. Out of this materiality emerges something radically transformative.

Since the work’s first major tour, an international movement of knitters for peace has emerged, seeking to bring together an increasingly fractured and divisive world through craft and creativity. The loose yarn and dropped threads of self-created obstacles and social impediments are unraveled and remade, binding us together in a new kind of liberation.

In fashioning communities that are defined by connection and repair, Knitting for Peace offers nothing less than another way of being — hand-made, humble and infinitely human.

Top image: Cirkus Cirkör, Knitting Peace © Joana-Magalhaes.