Documents 

This qualitative study explores perspectives of curriculum through the lens of graduates from a collegial level circus arts program in Canada. Data were collected through participant interviewswith students who had graduated within the past ten years. The overarching research question that guided this study was: How do graduates of a post-secondary circus school program perceive the design, content and delivery of the curriculum? Analysis of the data was conducted through the use of the constant comparison approach. It was through this process that multiple themes emerged from the data, which identified the characteristics of undertaking a career in circus arts. These themes included Pushing Borders, Living in a State of Disequilibrium and Constructing Families. Together, these three themes resulted in the fourth and overarching theme, Embracing Circus Life. The findings from this study suggest that applying constructivist teaching practices, fostering a community of learners, supporting the emotional development of students, having strong relationships with coaches and ensuring that the students perceive the courses as useful are essential in optimizing the students’ perception of the program. This study is unique as it is one of the only studies that explore circus and academics. Whereas much of the teaching of circus arts lies in the historical trend of passing down knowledge, this study explores the present day context of circus whereby students can choose to pursue a degree in circus arts. [author summary]

This film is a story of insides and outsides, and of impossible plans. It was inspired by the memory of our childhoods in the American suburbs, in Connecticut and Orange County. Going into shoot, we had defined a couple of “characters” that seemed meaningful to us as kids. We chose these “characters” also because they had definite imagistic identities as well as social ones, and we wanted to explore character from the outside in: first as an idealized image, then as an idealized image in time and space, and only lastly as the vehicle of an inscrutable subjectivity.

We used improvisation out of practical necessity, and to get closer to the unpredictability that we feel is a part of the social reality, but also because making a huge mess and then whittling it down into a little polished object ready for consumption seemed like the right process for a piece about growing up in America surrounded by lots of beautiful pictures.

The improvisations we did were meticulously organized, but not much of that comes across in the film. Instead, the continuity you see is mostly a post-produced construction. The text that you hear recited over the images was written almost a half a year after the shoot, but before we actually saw any footage—it’s a description of what we think the characters we were representing would have felt in the situations we remembered being in.

We hope that by making this film, more so that had we made a live piece, we have begun to stake our claim within the economy of the image, so that in some small way we can assert ourselves as willing subjects, no longer content to be simply the objects of influence and manipulation.

Created in the framework of the Go! Emerging Artist Commissioning Program (STREB@SLAM).
A special thanks to the Lab:time program at the National Centre for Circus Arts. [authors summary]

Accident d’avion et histoire d’amour qui tournent à la catastrophe. La Vie est tristesse, démence, douleur et dépravation ; mais pourtant drôle, plein de joie et follement sexy ! Dans ce purgatoire imaginaire, les âmes pécheresses sautent, chutent, jonglent, s’élèvent, volent, et chantent pour tenter d’échapper à une inexorable descente aux enfers. Mais personne n’est à l’abri quand vient le moment de ce jugement dernier hors norme, et le public lui-même sera jugé lorsque qu’entrera sur scène le diabolique Maître de Cérémonie. [Présentation de la compagnie]