Circus and its Others V

CaiO has continually challenged the prevailing definitions of what is recognized, expressed and received as circus on a global scale while also providing scholars with an inclusive space to explore and expand what is meant by “others.” As part of these ongoing efforts, and following on from CaiO IV in Bogotá, the project is advancing towards another crucial region in the Global South for its next conference in 2027: Kerala, India.

The emphasis for this gathering will be on our understanding of circus as a continuously expanding network. We will explore whether circus can be understood through established concepts of traditional, contemporary, avant-garde or social frameworks and we will investigate the evolution of performance forms, asking whether circus practices follow a chronological, linear trajectory or embody a multitemporal, polychronic existence. In this we take inspiration from the work of South Africa based Indian scholar Dilip M. Menon, whose work celebrates multiple traditions of thought and the fact that pluriversality, dialogism and strategic engagement have long shaped intellection and debate in the Global South. As we gather in Kerala, yet more fully embracing non-Eurocentric perspectives and engaging with various flows and multifocal viewpoints, we hope to pave the way for a transformation in how we perceive cultural practices, particularly in the realm of popular entertainment.

Kerala, a coastal state in the southern part of India, has historically been a focal point for trans-oceanic trade and economic exchanges which continue to the present day. The Malabar region served as a significant centre for the spice trade where British, Portuguese, Dutch, Jewish, Chinese and Arab merchants interacted with one another and the local populace. Flows of people, cultural practices, traditions, trade and migration moved through the port town of Thalassery, transforming it into a vibrant cosmopolitan centre. This was the ideal fertile ground for the first circus training school in India—the All-India Circus Training Hall (or kalari), founded by Keeleri Kunhikannan in 1888—and was instrumental in shaping the 150-year legacy of circus practice in India.

In Kunhikannan’s kalari, international and indigenous physical cultures blended. Some of the largest and most enduring circuses in India such as Gemini Circus, Great Rayman Circus and the Great Bombay Circus have their origins in Kerala. Crucially, the region was also instrumental in fostering an audience for circus in India. Numerous circus performers who showcased their talents in these circuses have since retired and continue to reside in Thalaserry, often referred to as the circus town of Kerala. Presently, Kerala thrives with its international cultural festivals alongside traditional and indigenous practices.

The circus evolved in India into a widely accessible form of entertainment that attracts large audiences. This form has relied exclusively on box office revenues, in contrast to other cultural expressions that benefit from state protection and support. Recently, after two decades of decline, Indian circus is experiencing a revival in a new format; the traditional circus community is increasingly being supplanted by corporate events in keeping with the neoliberal cultural marketplace. This transformation involves shedding the old model of a traveling tent show and gradually adopting a new identity that features performances in urban auditoriums.

In light of these evolutions, a new path has emerged in the directorial works of artist/educator Abhilash Pillai in which circus performers and theatre artists collaborate to create hybrid circus performances that emphasize their collective labour. These productions illuminate how the subaltern performing body simultaneously engages in creation and the performance of labour, along with its associated politics, in a postcolonial context.

Circus and its Others is partnering with Pillai for the Kerala conference: we are collaborating on the curation of a circus festival that will invite both local and international scholars, artists and the general public to engage with circus in its various forms with a particular emphasis on India and the Indian Ocean region. The combined CaiO conference and festival aim to establish dialogues among circus artists and drama schools; between circus practitioners, governmental bodies, cultural organizations and other stakeholders; and among traveling circus artists, international performers, and urban artists who utilize circus skills and circus proprietors.

Practices of inclusion, struggle and decolonization

To turn to this issue’s content, we found amongst the articles a shared seam of interest in the push-pull between inclusion and exclusion, the ways in which circus artists and scholars approach and understand their work and the ways in which circus practices and studies contend with histories of colonization and continued hemispheric negotiations of power.

In “Treading the Circus Networks across Global South and North: Mobile Transnational Artists from India and Africa”—one of two articles in this issue’s Arts section—Aastha Gandhi traces the transnational trajectories of circus performers from India and Africa, exploring how their artistry has been shaped by migration, race and postcolonial power across both colonial and contemporary contexts. Through two case studies—an Indian acrobat-turned-animal trainer in Latin America during the colonial period and African acrobats navigating modern performance circuits in India and Europe—Gandhi examines how performers adapt their repertoires in response to shifting socio-political conditions. The circus body emerges as a charged site of resistance, transformation and commodification, particularly within Eurocentric frameworks that continue to render Global South performers as spectacle.

By contrasting colonial and contemporary experiences, the article insightfully reveals how logics of coloniality persist under globalization. It invites deeper reflection on how historical hierarchies are reconfigured, rather than erased, in today’s global performance economy. Ultimately, the article challenges the marginalization of Southern circus traditions in critical discourse and affirms the symbolic and material significance of performers whose histories of movement, negotiation and creativity remain at the cultural periphery despite their centrality to transnational circuits.

The second Arts article, Mariana Sáez’s “Training Hope: Reflections on Circus Practice and Acrobatic Training as Practices of the Future,” (translated by Adam Cowan) offers a compelling analysis of how hope is articulated within the circus world, specifically in the context of acrobatic training. Beginning with her own need for hope in an increasingly bleak global landscape marked by political, social, economic and environmental crises, the author approaches hope “as a constitutive dimension of circus practices, examining its role in the construction of corporealities, the circulation of affective atmospheres and the modalities of collective organization.” She proposes a twofold approach to hope, understanding it simultaneously as a category of experience and as an analytical category. In doing so, she brings a series of theoretical developments on hope (by, among others, Freire, Crapanzano, Anderson, Berlant and Narotzky, and Besnier) into dialogue with the experiences, practices and discourses that emerged from her ethnographic fieldwork in the city of La Plata (Argentina). The excerpts from interviews and field observations open a window onto the complex ways in which hope is expressed in the lives of these circus artists.

From the outset, Sáez suggests that articulations of hope within circus spaces may point toward—or even nurture—forms of political hope that have been weakened in the context of neoliberalism and the rise of right-wing movements. Yet, even as she acknowledges her own need for hope, she also recognizes the contradictions that emerge, including within her own argument. In this sense, her formulation of a “vulnerable, fragile, fearful, reflective and critical hope” resonates with concepts such as bell hooks’s “militant hope” or Paulo Freire’s “tragic hope,” achieving an affective and political argument that combines ethics, theory and personal experience without slipping into sentimentality or triumphalist discourse. It is a subtle yet powerful invitation to continue imagining and sustaining other possible worlds through practices that are fragile yet collective.

In the Life section, two contributions engage with the concepts of practice as research and research-creation from differing positionalities and through different methods; reading them together offers a fascinating vantage onto the ways in which contemporary circus artists are both embracing and contesting with practices that combine academic research with creative activity. “black light, white noise: becoming asymmetrical difference, doing trapeze without trapeze” is a provocative and original offering from the scholar-artist Dana Dugan that embraces the Life section’s intermedial nature. It comprises a twenty-one-minute video of Dugan performing the titular experimental piece (which she performed live at the Achura Karpa festival in Bogotá) and an accompanying essay that blends theory, background and context about Dugan’s life and the performance with passages of verse. In the performance, Dugan is naked and moves slowly through space and on the ground, her body partially illuminated by a hanging blacklight; passages from the accompanying text appear as overlays on the video recording.

The elements of Dugan’s CALS work benefit from being read and experienced against and through each other, relaying back and forth as embodied/mediated research and creative/critical text. Strands of narrative emerge: Dugan navigating cancer during the COVID-19 pandemic, unable to work on the trapeze and finding an echo of that experience in a sense of alienation from her white racial identity: “White estrangement describes a process of disrupting, disidentifying or alienating oneself from the constructs and privileges of Whiteness by making Whiteness perceptible, accountable and unsettled.” With this research-creation, Dugan offers up “the feltness of complexity … evolved thinking that cannot be reduced to language or conceptual determinations or representations or identity,” a refusal of capture that resonates with many other aspects of the Circus and its Others project.

The Decá collective—Nathalia Azevedo (Nat Menosum) and Paolla Wurlitzer Castillo (Paô Ollitsak)—focus their Life contribution (translated by Mariel Azoubel) on practice as research (PaR) from their particular perspective as circus artists recently graduated from the professional program at the Luiz Olimecha National Circus School (ENCLO) in Rio de Janeiro. They approach the PaR concept carefully, acknowledging its roots in traditional oral cultures and its presence in Brazilian academia since the 1990s, while also noting that the specific terminology (in Brazil, prática como pesquisa) is new and inherited from Western academia. With this in mind, they revisit their circus school experiences, identifying the ways in which they engaged with PaR even if they had not named it as such at the time.

The goal of this recall and reframing of their training experiences is “to theorize and bring structure to [their] creative process” and to ground that theorization and practice in their lived experience and creative, intellectual and cultural/social backgrounds. Such grounding, they argue, is central to their commitment to decoloniality which for them means “denaturaliz[ing] Eurocentric categories of thought, opening space for and legitimizing other forms of knowledge and existence, rooted in the experiences and wisdom of peoples historically subjugated by colonial logic.” The terminology of territory is also central for Decá:

By engaging with our social, political and cultural contexts, we create works that break with universalizing and homogeneous aesthetics, proposing a situated circus language that reinvents itself based on new narratives, bodies and ways of existing. With this, circus ceases to be merely a spectacle but also becomes political action.

The film gives voice to Pescayre’s artists, many of them Mixtec. Their articulations about taking on and giving life in the present to characters and cosmogonies from a richly layered past, Fragoso’s moving images and Pescayre’s written declarations, all end up, experienced together, calling us to give attention to particular local and personal specificities of creation which also point to yet other re-creations and newly imagined beginnings. Pescayre, with Fragoso, leaves us with the notion that it is not just the “sacred clown” of historical oral and written narrations that is given life in these reimaginings and transpositions of ritual and other performance vocabularies: we all find ourselves quickened with spirit-giving breath.

Dancer and circus artist Yann Szuter, in “Decolonization, a Poetic Approach,” offers for the Life section an engagement, through images, movement and text, with CaiO IV keynote speaker Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández’s notion that moving towards decolonization means accepting “the challenge and the opportunity to actively rethink modes for human interaction.” For Szuter, this work is necessarily poetic as it is also necessarily danced. He situates his world in these words, not without a certain “cheekiness” that he says we must all use in our decolonial work:

I belong to this generation that discovered the World—this World—at the same time as we learned about its upcoming collapse and felt it shift beneath our feet. Jump, rebound, slide, change direction, switch side, adapt—move, then think: [this is] the natural order.

In the Sciences section, Izzi Kessner and Melanie Stuckey’s “A holistic risk assessment of chest binding practices for transgender circus artists” offers a thoughtful and well-researched overview of relevant literature and experiences about the potential benefits and risks of transmasculine performers binding their chests during circus training and performance. Given a lack of existing literature on chest binding and circus, they refer to studies about the physical and psychological effects of chest binding more broadly, supplementing this with Kessner’s own experiences and community sources such as Reddit threads. A holistic risk assessment methodology, combined with a harm reduction perspective, allows the authors to advocate for “evidence-informed decision-making aligned with personal values, experiences and goals” rather than offering an argument for or against chest-binding practices in circus. As they persuasively argue, a holistic risk assessment approach is well-suited to our field given that risk “is one of the defining characteristics of circus.”

We welcome this research and article for many reasons: Circus and its Others has thus far primarily involved arts, humanities and social science researchers so bringing a scientific approach to questions of embodied gender and inclusion broadens our overall inquiry and adds new dimensions to our exploration of the circus and differences. The article also speaks directly to the theme of this issue in its even-handed advocacy for inclusivity in circus, by offering research in the interest of raising awareness around the relationship of chest binding to circus practices and helping artists and organizations make informed decisions.

Furthermore, we, as guest editors, thrill to this issue’s inclusion of a book review by Tracy Zhang, a member of the Circus and its Others expanded leadership team and author of important pieces that remind us of the sometimes fraught, always rich, interconnections among circus arts, artists and companies in China and the Americas. Here, she evaluates Jeff Raz, Stephanie Greenspan, Qri Quesada and Devin Holt’s 2024 volume, An International Circus Affair: How a Nanjing Acrobat in San Francisco Changed American Circus Forever. As is often the case in our ever-growing field of circus studies, we find it interesting to note that each of the book’s authors are circus artists themselves. In her review, Zhang asks us to consider the scholarship here as an inflection on what relations have been, and can be, built across otherwise formidable boundaries.