Saar is a circus artist who works with Rope Design, she builds installations that she moves with and explores the connection she has with the ropes. Creative Rigging combined with play and improvisation, while listening to the material she is working with are important parts of her practice.

Saar has done circus since a young age at youth circus Elleboog. At the age of 19 she went to the circus school in Tilburg (NL), ACaPA (Fontys Academy for Circus and Performance Art), where she specialized in Triple Cloudswing and Vertical Dance. After graduating in 2012 she traveled around the world for different projects, like a tour with Ellen ten Damme (NL), company Acrobatic Conundrum (US) and the Envision Festival (CR). She taught and performed at Aerial Dance Festivals in Ireland, the UK, France, Texas and Costa Rica and was one of the featured artists in the documentary “Grazing the Sky” directed by Horacio Alcala.

Besides training, performing and teaching in different aerial disciplines, Saar is also very interested in rigging all the material. She likes understanding the different forces at work on the apparatus and your body, how you can work with those or manipulate them if you get to know them. To explore new possibilities and creative solutions. To learn more about this Saar took part in entertainment and stunt rigging courses and shadowed other riggers. She has been working as a circus rigger since 2012, at the moment she is working on the rigging design for Circus Days and Nights, a circus opera by Cirkus Cirkör, Malmö Opera and Philip Glass and she teaches creative rigging at UNIARTS in Stockholm (SE). She also organizes and teaches different circus rigging courses.

From 2018 until 2020 Saar did research at the MA Contemporary Circus Practices at DOCH (Dans och Cirkus Högskolan) in Stockholm (SE), then she continued her research in a advanced course in Narrative Design (2020-2021) at UNIARTS departments for film & media and scenography & costume design. 

Her research is about Rope Design and Rigging Design as artistic practice. Since the age of 5 Saar has been sailing and doing circus, through both she became fascinated by ropes, knots and forces. Rope seems like a very simple material that you maybe don’t notice directly, but many variations of rope and string are essential to our life and it would look drastically different without them. We wouldn’t have clothes without string and thread, no toothbrushes or electricity cables and no string instruments!

Saar mainly works with cotton rope with which she builds different installations, she explores how they affect her movement, thoughts and way of looking at the world. The attraction and connection she feels to them is deepened by the memories, fantasies and metaphors they carry with them. They have the ability to change the perception of time while pulling, and pulling, and pulling to get meter after meter through a knot. Listening to the ropes and other objects to enter into dialogue with them and experimenting with her relationship to them by means of improvisation and play are the main methods she is working with.

For her research moving, thinking and rigging go hand in hand. Without the creative rigging she wouldn’t have the same possibilities in the movement and the cooperation between the ropes and the body creates new ideas for potential rigging and installations. This way of creative rigging is an essential part of her artistic practice, but often not acknowledged with the same importance as performing.