Introduction: between hope and despair

“I do not understand human existence without hope and dreams” (Freire 24)¹.

This text has two origins. On the one hand, it arises from my doctoral research in which I approached, from an ethnographic perspective, the training processes of circus acrobats, focusing on the bodily work involved. In the conclusions of that dissertation, I proposed the idea that hope, understood as bodily projection and a collective expectation of future fulfillment, occupies a prominent place in training spaces (Sáez 304). That initial idea was later taken up in research carried out with my colleagues Julieta Infantino and Clarisa Schwindt Scioli in order to extend it beyond the body and explore the ways in which hope is projected toward the broader social sphere in the search for, and construction of, other possible worlds (273).

Over time, that hopeful outlook acquired new nuances and grew more complex. During this same timeframe, the Argentine social and political context (as in other regions) began to darken with the advancement of what has been called the “new right” (Semán 43). A key element in this growing complexity was the recognition of certain aspects shared between acrobatic circus practices and other realms of bodily, aesthetic and political discourses that form part of contemporary neoliberal modes of subjectification.

This brings us to the other origin of this text: my need to find some glimmer of hope, without naivety, in the face of the increasingly bleak context of global political, social, economic and environmental crises (Fraser 23). A context in which, as Mark Fisher has famously stated, it seems easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (21).

Between these two origins, one more hopeful than the other, this text emerges. An initial version of this work was shared at the Circus and its Others IV conference, held in Bogotá in February and March 2024. There, these intuitions and concerns found an echo in presentations by other conference participants. Those resonances nourished these pages, adding to the dialogue already underway with other experiences and research in the circus field as well as with theoretical contributions from the social sciences—particularly anthropology, my discipline of origin.

Who needs hope? Some theoretical and methodological considerations

In their presentation of the dossier on hope in the journal Open Anthropology, Han and Antrosio highlight the interest that social theorists have had in this topic starting in the 2000s, and they revisit the question posed by Nauja Kleist and Stef Jansen: “Is the renewed interest in hope a reflection of a world more hopeful or more hopeless than before?” (qtd. in Han and Antrosio 2). As Kleist and Jansen point out, recent publications on the subject seem to lean toward the latter option. The presence of hope in academic debates is linked at the same time to “a widespread sense of crisis and a heightened sense of lack of political and ideological direction” (ibid).

We could say then that a focus on hope arises in a context of hopelessness. Following Freire, hopelessness can be understood as a state that “immobilizes us and makes us succumb to fatalism, making it impossible to muster the strength we absolutely need for a fierce struggle that will re-create the world” (24). The interest in hope thus emerges from the need to once again reach for the strength needed for that struggle. Nevertheless, beyond this general diagnosis, the meanings articulated and mobilized around the concept of hope are heterogeneous and diverse. They are shaped by particular historical and cultural contexts.

Paraphrasing Stuart Hall, the question of who needs hope seeks to contextualize and problematize the meanings attached to this concept. Similar to the concept of identity, the concept of hope has undergone a kind of discursive explosion, within which heterogeneous and even contradictory positions coexist. The question of the need for hope thus functions as a starting point for a critical approach to this concept, which leads us to highlight its socially constructed condition within specific historical and social contexts.

To return to the origin of this text mentioned in the opening paragraphs, the question also serves to make explicit my own position as the one who speaks: I myself need hope.

So, what do I mean here by the concept of hope?

Following Vincent Crapanzano’s proposal, I am interested in approaching this concept in a two-pronged way, understanding it both as a category of experience and as an analytical category. As a category of experience, hope presents a particular relationship with time. It is situated in a “mediate future” (Crapanzano 9), positively valued, a future that opens before us in the form of a promise. At the same time, hope reconstitutes the present, and even the past, insofar as it is configured as a process of creating a possibility or of positioning oneself toward possibility (Crapanzano, interviewed by Kirksey).

Building on the contributions of Susana Narotzky and Niko Besnier, I sense that hope focuses on the tension between personal expectations, the ability to design projects aimed at fulfilling those expectations and the actual possibilities of these things happening in specific circumstances (25). While this experience is located in the individual, it cannot be separated from that individual’s participation in a specific social context. In this sense, the analytical approach to hope involves accounting for how it is constructed, transmitted and plays out in specific contexts. Thus, considering it as an object of analysis requires attempting to understand the specific conditions that craft its particular historical and cultural forms, operation and effects. As such, although the concept of hope does not always appear to be effectively employed, it is worth investigating the specific ways in which this temporal and evaluative blending—this open, promising and positive “mediate future”—that combines the individual and the collective, is present in circus practice.

To do so, I will draw on the ethnographic fieldwork I have been conducting since 2012 in the circus ecosystem of La Plata, Argentina². Over the course of this research, I analyzed training processes, focusing on the construction of specific corporealities within the framework of acrobatic practices. Along the way, shifts between participant observation and observant participation led me to increase my involvement with the practice; I eventually became an “apprentice acrobat,” which also required the development of what I have named elsewhere as embodied reflexivity and estrangement (Sáez 31). It was during this stage of fieldwork that I observed the role of hope in training processes and in other instances of circus practice. Based on this research process, I will propose, in a programmatic manner, a series of analytical dimensions through which we can organize this investigation around hope within the framework of circus arts.

Hope in the body

What happens in the body is the desire to want to do it and the intention to overcome those obstacles (…). There are going to be things that don’t work out, and you have to understand that, understand what your present is and that you can’t know in advance how it will go, what will work and what won’t, and how (…). And that is the work, it is experienced through trial and error, through the effort of searching, hammering away. (…) I have to see the progress, what I am achieving, what I am doing. I am very stubborn, and I know that at some point I am going to get it. I hammer away, hammer away, hammer away, until I manage to get it somehow. (…) I believe one always has to go in with a lot of confidence and trust that if you go through those stages, you will get there, maybe not in the way you think, but you will get there (M³.).

Considering the bodily dimension of hope in circus practice means understanding the ways in which a specific corporeality is constructed, one that is linked not only to the development of skills and abilities but also to a particular mode of relating to oneself and to one’s own body. Circus can be defined as “the art of the difficult,” “the language of feats,” “the lyricism of human bodily skill” (Hochman 320–321), as an art that engages with vulnerability, “that human condition of being simultaneously at risk and safe” (Guzzo 63) or as an art of limits: “The circus artist, after having trained hard and for a long time, transforms the ceiling of their ‘technical level’ into an imaginary limit” (Guy 131). While these definitions may prove insufficient to fully capture the character of the circus as an artform⁴, they help to highlight certain constitutive aspects of circus corporeality and its processes of construction: hard, long-term training as a necessary stage for the development of bodily abilities that involve difficulty and skill, risk and safety.

Working with this combination of difficulty and skill, risk and safety, requires cultivating patience, dealing with frustration and uncertainty, becoming accustomed to certain pains, overcoming fear and fatigue, “hammering away,” persisting in the attempt and preserving the hope that by insisting on practice, the body will expand its possibilities, succeed in reaching the proposed goals and even go farther. And for this, training is necessary. Training promotes the acquisition and development of specific bodily capital (Wacquant 66). It makes it possible to construct a body capable of being put at risk. Certain thresholds are progressively reached: a threshold of strength and endurance for the incorporation of technique and a technical threshold for the development of an expressive language (Sáez 259).

Here we understand training as a mode of forming (in both senses: educating and shaping or constituting) the body, which creates a logic specific to the practice and entails a particular preparation for specific action. It is a systematic process in which repetition, trial and error and exploration are a fundamental part of the learning process, involving habituation to new positions and movements and the acquisition of new bodily skills and capacities that the incorporation of circus techniques entails. Thus, training is the foundation upon which the construction of acrobatic knowledge and the acquisition of the required bodily competencies become possible, allowing the practitioner to reach their own limits and to keep pushing themselves further. Training is therefore the mediating instance of that hope, that promising expectation of fulfillment that allows one to project into the near future, toward that state of the body and its possibilities which does not yet exist or has not yet happened but may come to be in the future.

But as we can observe in the interview excerpted at the beginning of this section, repetition and “trial and error” are not merely learning strategies; they constitute an ethic of relating to oneself and to one’s own body: a way of inhabiting its limits and of recognizing, in the progressive transformation of the body and in the acquisition of technical mastery, the necessity and effects of hope, that “confidence” in a near future in which limits, difficulties, errors and fears will be overcome or displaced. “At some point I’ll manage to do it too, I have hope,” said a training companion as she watched another perform a trick that she herself had not managed to do and was preparing to try again (Sáez, field notes, 7 July 2019).

Along this path, fear, pain and distrust in one’s own body are frequent sensations. Another training companion expressed it like this: “You never know what your body will be able to do each time. (…) Every time I go to try it, I don’t know if it will work, and I’m afraid of falling.” (Sáez, field notes, 5 August 2015).

According to Crapanzano, hope articulates trust and uncertainty because it is related to an external agency, an otherness over which one does not have absolute control (6). In the case we are analyzing, we might think of the body as that otherness over which control or mastery, though progressive, is never total. As Pereira points out, effectiveness in the performance of circus skills is never one hundred percent which means there is always room for distrust and fear of error (58). Reducing that margin, though it can never be completely eliminated, or shifting it toward new challenges is the objective of training. Yet uncertainty persists and with it, hope. If there were no uncertainty, there would be no need for hope. Indeed, hope appears: it is that “what happens in the body” when, even without the certainty that something will turn out well, one insists, works, “hammers away” and trusts that at some point it will be achieved (M.).

The centrality of training, insistence and trial and error, shows that what is at stake here is a hope that is not passive, inactive or resigned but, on the contrary, one that is anchored in concrete practice and one that the practice itself helps to construct. A hope that is trained, exercised and practiced alongside other aspects of corporeality. A hope closely tied to self-discipline and overcoming one’s own limitations. One of the circus teachers I interviewed put it this way:

Self-discipline is very much part of being an acrobat, that’s for sure, doing one exercise after another until it works out and … yes, self-discipline. There is no such thing as an acrobat without self-discipline; if not, they’re not an acrobat, they’re a slacker (laughs). Yes, the acrobat, at its core, is self-discipling; that’s how it is, they do it over and over again (…). It’s a race against oneself all the time (…). Getting this exercise to work, then making something else work. And the constant physical training, as something necessary (L.).

Self-discipline and self-improvement (which in turn include various attitudinal postures such as determination, patience, perseverance, confidence, willpower, insistence and persistence) are key in the training process of circus arts. However, although the prefix “self” might lead us to believe that this all involves only individual aptitudes or wills of demand and overcoming, the collective dimension proves to be of great importance in the processes of teaching, learning and creation in circus arts as well as in the incorporation of this practice and its inherent logics.

“At the beginning it’s hard, but you’ll start gaining strength and it will work. [Have] Patience and determination, it will come. Try it again. Let’s go one more time, I’m holding the fabric for you,” E. tells me, as she comes closer after seeing me try unsuccessfully to climb up, placing her hand under my foot to offer me a point of support. (Sáez, field notes, May 2014).

D. tries it once more.

V: There, that’s better! But you can still push more with your arms.

D. does it again.

V: Yes, that’s it. And remember to look at the little red chairs and move forward with your hips.

D. does it once more.

V: Good, that’s it. You just need to keep your legs farther apart and move forward with your hips. Do you want to do one more?

D. does it again.

V: Much better!

(Sáez, field notes, 25 February 2016)

M. and F. climb up and begin to do the new sequence. From below, C., who has already done it, guides them with words.

“Stop, you got tangled!” C. says to F. as she pulls out the fabric that had gotten caught between her legs (…).

“Am I at the right height?” M. asks.

“You’re a bit low, climb up a little more,” C. tells her.

(Sáez, field notes, September 2016).

Training spaces usually have a workshop-like dynamic in which collective experience and teamwork (Hochman 331), as well as peer learning and its tendency toward horizontality (Pergolesi Fuentes 68), are key—even when specific roles and hierarchies exist and operate. As can be seen in the previous field notes, training partners—friends, relatives, colleagues—are like the instructors: they guide through words or physical contact, make suggestions and corrections, show other possibilities, indicate whether it is safe or not to attempt a particular move and provide support when performing risky acrobatics. The presence of others during training provides motivation, confidence and encouragement and involves practices of care, consent, support and collective holding (Zisman 124). This eminently collective dimension of the practice and its transmission processes allow us to situate the processes of building hope as a bodily-affective capacity required to navigate them.

Hope as an affective atmosphere

“With all this we’re talking about regarding training, technique, and discipline, what, then, is the difference between circus acrobatics and artistic gymnastics?” asked a well-known circus master.

The first responses from the panelists who were presenting the book, revolved around history, the processes of distinction between the two disciplines, the greater codification of gymnastics and its evaluation systems …

“I also think there’s something about the atmosphere, or the ‘affective atmosphere,’ to use Ben Anderson’s concept,” I added. “It’s not the same to train in a cultural center where jugglers or clowns are rehearsing at the same time, [preparing to go] to a variety show or a circus performance … There’s something about all of that, something contagious in the air, beyond the technical aspects … ”

At the end of the talk, the master came over to greet us.

“I kept thinking about what you said about the atmosphere. I have a friend who went to India ‘to breathe the same air as Gandhi,’ and something happens to you there with that. There’s something in the air, something you breathe …” (Sáez, field notes, May 2024)

Considering the collective nature of hope and its formation processes gives rise to a second dimension: approaching hope as a shared affective atmosphere. Focusing on this dimension makes it possible to account for the collective aspects of circus practice linked to the circulation of perceptions, moods and feelings, within which it becomes possible to construct these specific modes of corporality and sensitivity. In this sense, hope is something that circulates between bodies, emerging from particular relational configurations while simultaneously expressing them: something that is in the air and is breathed.

According to Ben Anderson, a body is always embedded in a set of relationships that transcend and constitute it (although they never completely determine it), so its capacities are always formed collectively. Following this, in addition to being a bodily capacity, as we described in the previous section, hope can be understood as an affective atmosphere that emerges from bodies while simultaneously imbuing them with a sense of possibility (Anderson 4). For Anderson, atmospheres are generated by bodies—of multiple types—that assemble and affect each other while producing a form of envelopment and an emanation of affective qualities linked to the circulation of perceptions, moods or feelings. Although atmospheres come from and are created by bodies, they are not reduced to them: they exceed them. The affective atmosphere passes and circulates between bodies, linking the individual and the collective, the interior and the exterior, the material and the immaterial, the objective and the subjective.

This conceptualization of affective atmosphere leads us to situate acrobatic training within the context in which it takes place, paying attention both to the collective dimension of the practice and the relationships established between those who participate in it, as well as to the other bodies, human and otherwise, that form part of that environment and between which affective circulation occurs.

L., wearing headphones, is practicing his soccer ball juggling routine in front of the bar where, on show nights, drinks and food are sold. Behind him, colorful pennants hang, and on the shelves surrounding the bar—remnants of the warehouse’s former life as a textile factory before its current use as a circus space—are photographs of artists and circuses from diverse times and places, dolls, antique objects, boats, clown noses, posters of shows and political slogans, among many other objects that decorate the place.

L. has been frequenting the place for more than ten years now, ever since he was a child wandering around the neighborhood, occasionally stopping by to take a look, and ultimately being invited to stay. Now, he’s training for next week’s variety show. A few meters behind, under the now erected trapezes, N and A prepare their acrobatic duo for the same variety show, in which they will act as hosts and presenters.

“Good morning, come in,” N. says to a girl who timidly crosses the entrance door, while holding a handstand on A.’s hands. The girl asks something, and N. points in a direction with their left hand, remaining balanced only on their right hand over A.’s. (…)

N. and A. are positioned right in the passageway, both for those arriving to take classes or rehearse in the studios at the back, as well as for those heading to the circus-themed clothing shop—created by one of the acrobats who trains here—located on the side. Their training, therefore, includes greeting passersby and even carrying out brief, hilarious conversations with them from the most unusual positions, adding to their practice this difficulty and improvisational skill, which will also become part of their performance as hosts of the variety show. (…)

A. has known L. since his childhood. A. was one of the people who insisted he come into the cultural center, lent him balls and clubs to “play with,” invited him to stay in classes, or gave him some tasks related to taking care of the space. A few months ago, before another variety show they also shared, A. told me: “And the fact that L. is now one of our artists means we’re on the right track. A kid who was hanging around discovered something he likes to do and that could also be a way of life.” (…) A few meters ahead, past the curtain that marks the beginning of the stage, colorful mats and fabrics cover the space where the aerial silk class is taking place. Music plays in the background. There are about twenty people, mostly women, taking turns climbing up and down the fabrics to practice their routines. (…) Those who have similar knowledge and are practicing the same sequences of movements, share the same fabric or the same area. (…)

“What happened to your hand, did you hurt yourself?” M. shouts up to L. from below the fabric, noticing some red marks.

“Oh, no,” L. laughs, “it’s paint from the stencils we made last night for the protest. I scrubbed it a lot, but it didn’t come off.”

The “protest” she refers to is the “Ni una menos” demonstration, held every June 3 since 2015, following a case of femicide and established as a protest against violence toward women and gender dissidents. L. is an active member of a local feminist political organization, in addition to participating in the actions carried out by the circus collective. (…)

P. is about to try a new sequence.

P: “I’m not sure if it’s going to work, I don’t really remember …”

M: “I’ll guide you if you need anything.”

D: “I also thought I couldn’t, but I managed. You’ll get it too!”

A: “Besides, you almost have it. Have faith in yourself!”

While P. performs the acrobatic sequence, M. supports her with words, indicating what to do at the moments when she seems uncertain. At one point, when P. is about to fall, D. holds her and pushes her hips upward so she can continue. When she finishes, M., A., and D. applaud her.

A: “See, you could do it. You just have to trust yourself!” (…)

From time to time, bursts of laughter, shouts, bumps, and other noises erupt from the adjoining room where a clown workshop is taking place, often provoking laughter among the acrobats, catching them by surprise and overlapping with their movements. (Sáez, field notes, June 2016)

This scene depicts one of the spaces where acrobatic training takes place in La Plata. The various elements that appear in it contribute to the construction of a climate in which the playful, the fantastical, the social and the political intertwine, as do the past, present and future, opening multiple and diverse possibilities. Within this atmosphere, and as part of it, acrobatic training takes place and it is possible to observe the role of relationality and connections with others in shaping hope as a corporeal and affective dimension. Although it is not named as such, in the previous scene as well as in the fragments of field notes shared in the preceding section, we can recognize the parameters through which Crapanzano defined hope: a temporal orientation toward the immediate future coupled with a positive assessment, an open and uncertain yet promising future—“we’re on the right track.” This temporal and evaluative orientation circulates—and is simultaneously apprehended and constructed—within the framework of a particular configuration of relationships between bodies. An invitation to take part, a path of possibilities that opens up, a hand that holds, a word of encouragement, a peer who offers themself as an example or a guide: all these make up that affective atmosphere that circulates between bodies and keeps open the sense of possibility, both for what can actually happen and, above all, for what has not yet happened but remains latent, as an expectation of future fulfillment, as hope. Teachers, artists, training partners, “teach not only physical skills, but tireless persistence and a stubborn refusal to be beaten down” (Zisman 126).

At this point, it appears relevant to return to Paulo Freire’s proposal that “one of the tasks of the progressive educator (…) is to unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be” (25). According to this author, “without a minimum of hope, we cannot so much as start the struggle” (ibid.). That is why generating an atmosphere that allows one to believe and feel that it is possible to overcome limitations, fears, risks and difficulties is essential for remaining engaged in practice. In this sense, considering the collective and horizontal nature of the training processes referred to above, it is not only the educators or teachers who contribute to the creation of this atmosphere and to the transmission of hope but also, and to a great extent, the training companions. The presence of hope, and the optimistic mood associated with it, plays an important role in the learning process, particularly in critical or distressing moments when things “don’t work,” “hurt” or “are scary.” Sharing the hope that, through training and practice, one will achieve the bodily and technical mastery required for performing figures and tricks of increasing complexity and risk is crucial for persisting in the attempt. But, as can also be inferred from the scene presented earlier, hope is not limited solely to the realm of classes or training sessions focused on technical and aesthetic know-how: one learns something that can come to be a way or “a means of life,” as A. said in relation to L.

Between 2019 and 2021, along with Julieta Infantino and Clarisa Schwindt Scioli, I worked on a collective publication project: a compilation of texts on circus pedagogies in our country. The book includes diverse texts written by circus artists from equally diverse trajectories. One of the authors is Mario Pérez Ortaney, an artist from a fifth-generation circus family who, after leaving the itinerant life under the circus tent, dedicated himself to passing on circus knowledge to new generations of young people who are drawn to this practice. Mario wrote his text in dialogue with Clarisa, who had been his student and who supported and collaborated on his work. Some time later, with the text finished, Mario sent a message to Clarisa in which he said: “I kept thinking about what I learned, and for me what the circus taught me most is to have hope” (Sáez, personal communication, March 2021).

That which “is in the air” and is breathed in when sharing circus spaces, as the circus master mentioned in the opening words of this section and like the learned hope Mario refers to in his message to Clarisa, comprises elements that cannot be restricted to the technical. They include various aspects linked to the circus as a craft, work and profession: “That’s where you learn how to work, how to organize the circus” (Videla 31). They also include values tied to the circus as a way of life: freedom, itinerancy, independence, autonomy, community life. And hope.

Hope in collective organization

And here is the distinction I make between teaching circus and passing it on across generations. When you teach, you teach technique (…), but when someone passes circus on, they pass on a feeling, a way of seeing. They transmit an enthusiasm in oneself that can only be passed on, not taught (…), you gather it from a multitude of information and experiences (Ortaney 129).

What has been presented so far provides the opportunity to present a final dimension of hope in the circus sphere: its connection to collective organization as part of a life or political project. In addition to being an art form, circus has been a way of life as defined by many artists and many of the families who continue to deploy countless strategies to sustain what we now call “traditional circus” (Infantino 246). In this context, the organization of circus work and its transmission are strictly intertwined and their objective is not the production of a show or artistic work, but rather the production, reproduction and continuity of the circus family (Silva and de Abreu 30). In these traditional circuses, what is taught, or more than taught, what is “passed on,” as Mario Pérez Ortaney notes in the quote that begins this section, is linked to a way of perceiving, understanding and realizing life; to sustaining a family business or a company that functions as a space of belonging, self-management and resistance; defending a way of life historically associated with freedom, itinerancy and transgression (Infantino, Sáez and Schwindt Scioli 255).

However, this idea of the “circus family” is often found in use beyond “traditional” circuses, as observed in the setting where I conducted my ethnographic research in the context of self-managed cultural spaces oriented toward circus teaching and practice. The definition of the circus as a “way of life,” “a way of being” and as a space for personal and collective fulfillment, and the connection of these ideas with the overarching concept of “family,” appear in the discourses of artists who do not come from circus families but who have approached the circus through varied and more or less institutionalized training spaces. Although these artists draw certain connections with the traditional circus—especially in the case of those dedicated to street circus performances—they tend to situate themselves within the framework of contemporary circus. In these definitions, the artists recover, reinterpret and transform elements that could be linked to the traditional circus, at its heart being community and family life, understood as a space for mutual support: “The circus is a family tradition, a collective one, of being together; the circus is the metaphor of the great big family. And that remains, it’s in the circus artists; we all feel it” (C). While not strictly speaking about biological families, “being a family” continues to be a value associated with the circus that allows us to highlight the collective nature of life; it can be linked to the concept of community and understood as a sense of co-belonging that “combines affective and cognitive components, a feeling of solidarity and an understanding of shared identity” (Brow 1). Particularly, those definitions of community that embrace the model of tradition, family ties, personal bonds of intimacy and trust, shared everyday life and relationships of exchange and reciprocity can be linked to a certain romantic longing and anti-capitalist morality (Delgado 3). In this sense, the idea of family and circus community is interwoven with the hope of building alternative worlds.

Along similar lines, and in line with the affective atmosphere described previously, cultural centers, schools and informal spaces linked to circus are often described by those who participate in them as spaces for socialization and belonging, as places of encounter, dreams, creativity, struggle and hope. Students and teachers who participate in one of the cultural spaces where I conducted my fieldwork defined it these ways:

“It’s a factory of dreams, of opportunities.”

“For me, it’s a space for self-managed human and artistic encounters, born out of cultural resistance.”

“It’s a place that allows us to constantly question ourselves and break away from the horrible logic in which we live.”

“Where we can work based on mutual trust, without bosses or hierarchies, and that is part of our economy and our understanding of self-management” (Sáez, field notes, November 2022).

Here, the discourse surrounding self-management as a mode of production, a political horizon and an identity marker becomes relevant. As a broad theoretical category, the concept of “self-management” refers to the control by a group of people over production and decision-making process within a specific space (García Guerreiro). In practical terms, it implies the social and economic participation of workers in the management, control and decision-making of their workplace or company, with the goal of improving their working conditions and income (Albergucci et al.). This anchoring in self-management, which refers both to a mode of production and to an identity positioning (Fernández Álvarez and Rebón), makes it possible to understand the connections that many circus spaces establish with businesses brought back from bankruptcy by their workers—who make part of their facilities available for the establishment of a cultural project, such as the one hosting the scene described in the previous section—or with abandoned properties—in the case of La Plata, mainly state-owned buildings linked to the railway system that have fallen into disuse—that are occupied and converted into cultural spaces. In these cases, self-management is also interwoven with specific social movements such as that of worker-run recovered businesses without bosses or the squatters’ movement.

In the local cultural field, the concept of self-management has also acquired some specific meanings. Self-managed spaces are presented as those that come to occupy and provide a previously nonexistent space with more inclusive characteristics:

We emerged with the idea of being a starting place, a beginning for all the artists who didn’t have a space. Because there are always commercial venues or places that offer spaces for established artists, or those who are already in a certain position with a certain trajectory. Our idea was to create a space for those artists who don’t have any opportunities, because it’s difficult to get started. (B.)

As can be seen in this interview fragment, one of the objectives of self-managed projects is to modify certain conditions of the cultural circuit and open new possibilities of training, production, work and visibility to artists who were not recognized within previously established spheres (Zarauza 84).

Likewise, self-management appears closely linked to independence, which is defined as the absence of belonging to a state structure and the lack of dependence on a single source of funding, and is exercised through the acquisition of a set of experiences and knowledge built through the various strategies developed to sustain the practice and share it with society (Mercado 192). These experiences and forms of knowledge are acquired largely as part of either training processes or space management. In training processes, students often collaborate in preparing the space for different activities, whether by arranging and organizing the equipment used in training, cleaning spaces or materials, setting up showcases and performances, participating on stage or backstage in such performances, and engaging in pre-production or post-show disassembly. Space management may include tasks such as promoting the activities held there, collecting entrance fees, selling raffle tickets or running the food and drink bar to raise funds; or by contributing specific skills that support the project such as graphic or web design, for example. Many activities constitute this type of knowledge which emerges from commitment to a collective project.

In addition, other forms of knowledge are acquired through the very process of carrying out a collective project, such as managing a training or production space in circus arts and sharing experiences and strategies with other similar projects. These processes help artists develop specific knowledge which, as del Mármol points out, include elements related to obtaining and administering public and private funds, administrative procedures for the legal authorization of spaces or the management of permits to use urban public space, establishing legal entities and registering them in the national tax system, among others.

Within this framework, we can think of these different modes of productivity and collective organization of circus activity as a way of “making a living,” in the sense that Narotzky and Besnier give to this term. These authors propose rethinking the ways in which people “make a living”—emphasizing both the “effort” it entails and the goal of “sustaining life”—through an approach that involves not only wage labor but also investments in social relationships, bonds of trust and care and other forms of cooperation and collective articulation that give meaning to a life and allow it to be “worth living” (27). In this framework, past experiences provide a horizon of expectations that shapes hope for the future, aimed at a general improvement of life opportunities—bearing in mind that what is understood as “improvement” is historically and politically conditioned.

Thus, in line with what has been discussed so far, self-management often takes on, from the perspective of social and cultural activists in general and of self-managed organizations in particular, a valued place in the process of building an alternative political project, one with a broader scope than that of the cultural or life project itself. And here, once again, hope appears as a key element.

Among the numerous posters with political slogans that decorate the circus space previously described, many promote self-management, collective organization and resistance rooted in tenderness and joy. One of them declares: “In the midst of this confusion brought about by the imposition of violent power, today self-management rises as a source of hope for self-knowledge in the personal sphere and for its powerful collective dimension (…).”

And, referring to this same space, two artists noted:

It is a place of cultural, artistic, and human resistance … (…) It is a place where one can find refuge in order to build collectively. These are the kinds of spaces that are essential in the hardest, most repressive, and hopeless moments. (…) When everything gets tangled, it is the place where one can find the end of the thread. (Sáez, field notes, November 2022)

We need to have new ways of connecting to each other as a community and we need to truly begin to build a new Argentina, an Argentina of the future, more communally. It’s also about building identity, (…) and making things happen that are transformative for society. (…) There’s a way, not so much from the mind, but rather from action, of carrying out community activity that ends up being useful and endorsing this idea of horizontality on the one hand, that the truth is that we can have a better life (…). We have to prepare ourselves to build. (B.)

These ideas of a collective construction of a new society or a new country, capable of transforming the current state of society and improving conditions from a perspective centered on community, make it possible to draw connections between circus projects and broader social movements such as feminism, agroecology, the popular economy and worker-recovered factories which share the ideals of political and social alternatives. These connections can be seen: in the organization of joint fairs (for example, markets where agroecological products from the city’s horticultural belt are sold alongside various handcrafted natural products ranging from personal hygiene items to decorative objects); in the organization or participation in social and political events serving the feminist agenda such as the Plurinational Encounter of Women, Lesbians, Transvestites, Transgender, Bisexual, Intersex and Non-Binary People; in the staging of themed variety shows; in the holding of workshops or other spaces for debate on gender inequalities and violence in the circus world; in participation in marches or other kinds of political demonstrations accompanied by circus performances; or in the establishment of training or artistic projects in worker-recovered factories or in spaces previously abandoned by the state that were reclaimed, as mentioned earlier.

Ruffianization and recovery of hope

Not long ago I saw a Facebook post that said something like: “Want to improve your figure? Come do aerial silks.” (…) If this is the way we conceive of circus arts, we’re done for (…). No, we’re after something else! (C.)

In the introduction to this article, I mentioned my need to find a form of hope that does not rest on naïve optimism. However, the path traced thus far seems guilty of just that. In these final pages, I will return to what was previously outlined in order to present some critiques that allow us to question such naivety and, I hope, help open up another space of possibility for hope.

Throughout this text, I have approached hope as a constitutive dimension of circus practices, examining its role in the processes of constructing corporealities, circulating affective atmospheres and shaping modes of collective organization. However, far from being reduced to a mobilizing affect of an unequivocally positive nature as might be inferred up to this point, hope can also serve as an entry point for problematizing the ways in which circus practices align with neoliberal forms of subjectivation and the risks this alignment poses, including their potential to be “ruffianized” (Guattari and Rolnik 482); that is, of circus practices operating based on the market and the attainment of capital rather than on the basis of counter-hegemonic or countercultural resistance. It should be noted, however, that these dimensions are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, they coexist and intertwine within everyday practices.

To begin, we can identify a certain ambivalence in the emphasis on maximizing capabilities and accumulating bodily capital—an emphasis that aligns with attitudes of self-discipline and self-improvement described above, as well as with optimistic narratives of personal growth and the continual pushing of one’s limits. While all these aspects enable the construction of bodily and affective powers, they can also reproduce a logic of “self-entrepreneurship” (Foucault 264) according to which each subject must recognize themselves as human capital that must be permanently managed and increased, and as the sole party responsible for their success or failure, rendering invisible inequalities in starting points, trajectories and available capital, among other structural aspects that are intersected by inequalities based on gender, race or class.

The centrality of risk can also be read in this light. In recent decades, the status of risk has changed: from a socialized risk that guaranteed certain safety nets provided by the State, it has shifted to a model of privatized risk in which individuals are left to their own devices. In this sense, the choice and management of risk inherent in circus practice can easily align with discourses that maintain that the paradigmatic individual of neoliberal society is one who takes risks (Fridman 77).

The quote that begins this section shows a possible diminishment of circus practices, particularly aerial acrobatics: they are commonly reduced to promotional narratives that foreground a fun, challenging, and different path to self-improvement—particularly in terms of physical fitness and self-confidence—while undermining a more complex understanding of circus practices. In other words, aerial acrobatics are merely one more option among the many technologies available for the management and transformation of one’s own body and self, according to hegemonic canons, stripped of its own historicity and political nature.

At the same time, this perceived diminishment often enables those who teach these classes to make a living. In a context where earning an income from artistic practices is highly complex, given the lack of institutional support and the scarcity of spaces for performance, teaching is one of the activities through which regular income can be generated and, in some cases, this leads to moving away from strictly circus spaces and into other fields related to the care and management of the body, where they become intertwined with other practices and discourses.

On the other hand, the forms of self-managed organization that are positively valued in the city’s circus spaces, although presented as alternatives to the consolidated circuits of cultural production that focus on the community, are not immune to the danger of the deterioration of circus practices. As Lorey points out, alternative living and working conditions, organized around values such as freedom of choice and creativity, autonomy and the development of one’s own capacities, “have increasingly become the most useful in economic terms, since they favor the flexibility demanded by the labor market” (72). From this author’s perspective, “chosen” precarity forms an active part of neoliberal political and economic relations. This is how one of the interviewees expressed this coexistence of (self)exploitation and choice: “And I work twice as hard because we have rehearsals in the morning and afternoon and classes in the evening, plus all the management, and I go crazy (…). I’m on the verge of a stroke, but I love it” (A.).

To these questions about the aspects around which we observe the construction of hope in the circus sphere, we could also add the use of the concept of hope in contexts such as self-help books aimed at achieving financial success (Fridman 75) or the political discourses of the new right (Semán 194). We could then think of hope as a form of cruel optimism (Berlant 35): the suffering brought on by the fantasy of a good life which becomes increasingly illusory yet continues to seduce us. Taking the critique even further, we might even question the epistemological matrix of progress upon which the Western idea of hope has been built and lean toward abandoning it altogether, as Julie Garlen Maudlin proposes. But then, does no place remain for hope?

On the contrary, my own need for hope persists and insists. Not as another form of cruel optimism but as “the only evidence we have left that we have not abandoned the possibility of social change” (Berlant 454). If, as resonates in the artist’s exclamation at the beginning of this section, “we are looking for something else,” the sketched outline of criticism presented here does not seek to be hopeless but, on the contrary, to help identify the tensions in order to “bring forth the force that creates other worlds” (Guattari and Rolnik 490).

It’s not about having hope for hope’s sake but rather about discerning what uses we can make of it and toward what objectives we can orient it to achieve the open future it promises us. We must continue to hover around “that other thing,” that future world we desire, in order to cultivate a hope that is part of its construction. We must work on and with the body, not as a way of making it fit into this world but as a tool for building another, even if we don’t yet know exactly what it will be like.

We recognize that hope resides in a zone of indeterminacy: it can operate as a vector of adaptation and normalization but also, and at the same time, as a collective force of political imagination. So what possible twists, inversions, knots, twists, slippages, escapes or falls can we propose to nurture this latter option?

The path traced thus far allows us to observe the centrality of the circus affective atmosphere in the construction and articulation of specific forms of hope in which bodily potentials are amplified; solidarity building processes are given substance; self-management is embodied as a way of generating livable lives; and politics is practiced as a form of communal attachment.

To conclude, in an attempt to keep seeking answers to the question of how to nurture hope as a collective force of political imagination, without any claim to exhaustiveness, I will mention some possibilities explored by colleagues who, in my view, keep a space open for hope.

With regard to the bodily dimension, revisiting representations and practices of “domination” and “control” can foster new ways of relating to risk and virtuosity, ways that are more attuned to vulnerability, sensitivity, affectivity and communality. The work of Marie-Andrée Robitaille provides a relevant and inspiring contribution, offering both conceptual and artistic tools for situating circus as a hopeful practice oriented toward the future.

Another aspect linked to the control of the body is its stylization and aestheticization. Here, according to Virginia Alonso Sosa’s proposal, the disruptive political potential can be found in the insistence on the grotesque in popular elements of circus, thereby challenging the hegemony of the neat, the beautiful and the refined.

These revisions can lead to interesting reconsiderations of what circus is and what it can be. Jean-Michel Guy’s inquiry into the limits of circus can serve as a starting point to problematize and question definitions while reaffirming the artistic dimension of circus, rooted in the production of meaning rather than virtuosity or feats per se.

Turning now to the collective dimension, Gerardo Hochman highlights the importance of insisting on the collective sense of circus practice even when this means going against institutional frameworks. On a broader scale, we can also examine the connections between circus collectives and social movements. The proposal of Lucas Vilela et al. regarding the role of circus in the decolonization of university curricula, or that of Camila Losada on the connection between circus performances and the feminist movement, are some examples of this type of inquiry.

Finally, I hope that this conversation about hope may serve both to place the concept under critical pressure and to put it into practice: giving rise to a hope that can be utopian yet indeterminate, contingent, weak, restless, fearful, reflective and, most critical of all, vulnerable. A sensitive and fragile yet persistent form of resistance that, in the midst of disenchantment, continues to bet on the possibility of other future worlds.

—Translation from Spanish by Adam Cowan