Every show engenders a new scenography, necessarily heavy and expensive. Take forty five horses by plane in Hong-Kong or in Los Angeles; Build up our big top in Manhattan at the feet of the Twin Towers now disappeared; settle down, on the tracks of Andreï Roublev in the park Kolomenskaya in Moscow; play in Tokyo in a theater of two thousand places in the earthquake-resistant standards built to welcome us, and unsettled later…
It is considerable financial risks which make us say that: No, Zingaro is not undoubtedly a reasonable adventure. I would say more heroic than in our early stages, when I see today the fitters raising the brown cloth of our gigantic big top in four masts battling against the wind and the rain as sailors in the storm.
We try not to think of it every day but there is the real audacity, today still, to build such an adventure on something so fragile as the interest of the public for our work. The tastes, the fashions, the relationship to live performance can change. The financial risks which we take in every show are sometimes alarming, they rely on a single thing: confidence in the curiosity of tens and tens of thousands of spectators who come and come back each time to see us.
“If the constraints of my job force me to meet the outside world, it remains that my internal rhythm is the one of the track. There. The time does not shell, it turns, in the infinity, dial of a watch which says nothing of the months and years, returning ceaselessly during every new creation to its starting point without apparently nothing and no one ages.
From then on, in this circle, neither the artists nor the horses of Zingaro are of age old. At least, I do not know it. All are often there for a long time. Here is the word: for a long time. It is sufficient to live and qualify our company.
To Zingaro, neither the men nor the horses are committed for given duration. Here and now, they live their common history as much as they wish it. As much as they can. The time, here, is never a chopper, it is a simple case to create.”
Bartabas, extracted from the Almanach Zingaro