Documents 

The Cambridge Companion to the Circus provides a complete guide for students, scholars, teachers, researchers, and practitioners who are seeking perspectives on the foundations and evolution of the modern circus, the contemporary extent of circus studies, and the specialised literature available to support further enquiries. The volume brings together an international group of established and emerging scholars working across the multi-disciplinary domain of circus studies to present a clear overview of the specialised histories, aesthetics and distinctive performances of the modern circus. In sixteen commissioned essays, it covers the origins in commercial equestrian performance during the late-eighteenth century to contemporary inflections of circus arts in major international festivals, educational environments, and social justice settings.

This book documents and discusses the meaning(s) of the creative process at play in the crafting and staging of circus acts. It highlights the experience of circus artists as their skills develop and mature into public performances that create aesthetic and emotional values in the modern economy of live spectacles. It scrutinizes the meaning that circus acts produce for the spectators and for the artists themselves who live this process from the inside. This is a book for those studying semiotics and wanting to see it applied to a real life milieu in accessible and passionate prose.

The Meaning of the Circus is grounded on the personal experience of Professor Paul Bouissac as both a circus entrepreneur and a researcher with decades of primary material on the significance of past and contemporary circus acts. It is based on substantial accounts provided by many men and women who have agreed to share the challenges, joys, and anxieties of their life as artists. Personal and rigorous, it contributes to the hermeneutics of the circus arts by adding existential depth to the production and reception of their performances.

Thinking Through Circus gathers ten dialogues with and between circus artists. Each entry bears witness to how a specific circus practice is (also) a practice of critical thinking, revealing how feminism, queerness, dramaturgy, love, disobedience, posthumanism and the aesthetico-political imaginary are rethought in and through contemporary circus practice.

With this book, The Circus Dialogues wants to tend to the embodied relationships between contemporary circus and today’s world, defending circus as a field in which experimental thinking is already happening and can continue to happen. Doing so, we hope to contribute to a more sustainable circus, expanding both accountability and agency within our field.

The Circus Dialogues is a two-year artistic research project at KASK School of Arts Ghent (BE) led by Bauke Lievens (BE), Quintijn Ketels (BE), Sebastian Kann (US/DE) and accompanied by Vincent Focquet (BE). Our work delves into and makes space for encounters between theory and artistic circus practice. The Circus Dialogues aims to shine a light on the circus as a field in which experimental thinking is already happening, and we work to ensure the ongoingness of such thinking in an artistic and institutional ecology that’s long-term sustainable. We do this first and foremost through our diverse artistic practices. In parallel, we organize reading groups and collaborative gatherings for circus artists. We have also published several Open Letters to the Circus. Our activities are conceived with the intention of helping to imagine the circus field as both important and political. Most importantly, we defend circus as an open and undefinable form. [editor summary]

In this volume, twenty-four creators come together with three scholars to discuss Contemporary Circus, bridging the divide between practice and theory.

Lavers, Leroux, and Burtt offer conversations across four key themes: Apparatus, Politics, Performers, and New Work. Extensively illustrated with fifty photos of Contemporary Circus productions, and extensively annotated, Contemporary Circus thematically groups and contextualises extracts of conversations to provide a sophisticated and wide-ranging study supported by critical theory.

Of interest to both practitioners and scholars, Contemporary Circus uses the lens of ‘contestation,’ or calling things into question, to provide a portal into ways of seeing today’s circus performance.

Conversations with: Lachlan Binns and Jascha Boyce (Gravity and Other Myths), Tilde Björfors (Cirkus Cirkör), Kim ‘Busty Beatz’ Bowers (Hot Brown Honey), Shana Carroll (The 7 Fingers), David Clarkson (Stalker), Philippe Decouflé (Compagnie DCA), Fez Faanana (Briefs), Mike Finch (Circus Oz), Daniele Finzi Pasca (Compagnia Finzi Pasca), Sean Gandini (Gandini Juggling), Firenza Guidi (ElanFrantoio, NoFit State Circus), Jo Lancaster and Simon Yates (Acrobat), Johann Le Guillerm (Cirque Ici), Yaron Lifschitz (Circa), Chelsea McGuffin (Company 2), Phia Ménard (Compagnie Non Nova), Jennifer Miller (Circus Amok), Adrien Mondot (Compagnie Adrien M and Claire B), Charlotte Mooney and Tina Koch (Ockham’s Razor), Philippe Petit (high wire artist), and Elizabeth Streb (STREB EXTREME ACTION). [editor summary]

The Routledge Circus Studies Reader offers an absorbing critical introduction to this diverse and emerging field. It brings together the work of over 30 scholars in this discipline, including Janet Davis, Helen Stoddart and Peta Tait, to highlight and address the field’s key historical, critical and theoretical issues. It is organised into three accessible sections, Perspectives, Precedents and Presents, which approach historical aspects, current issues, and the future of circus performance.

The chapters, grouped together into 13 theme-based sub-sections, provide a clear entry point into the field and emphasise the diversity of approaches available to students and scholars of circus studies. Classic accounts of performance, including pieces by Philippe Petit and Friedrich Nietzsche, are included alongside more recent scholarship in the field.

Edited by two scholars whose work is strongly connected to the dynamic world of performance, The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is an essential teaching and study resource for the emerging discipline of circus studies. It also provides a stimulating introduction to the field for lovers of circus. [editor summary]

Depuis sa naissance, sous forme de théâtre équestre à la fin du XVIIIème siècle, le cirque a conçu ses propres rapports au corps, à la parole, à l'objet, à l'espace, sans cesser d'entretenir des relations de séduction avec les autres disciplines. Issues de nouvelles écoles, les compagnies d'aujourd'hui bousculent les catégories et les hiérarchies établies. Elle conçoivent des oeuvres à part entières, émancipées de la logique du numéro, où la prouesse n'occupe plus forcément le premier plan. Contestant la notion de genre mineur, les "circassiens" pratiquent l'hybridation des techniques et la transgression des codes. Forgeant leurs propres écritures comme ils inventent leurs agrès, ils n'en aspirent pas moins à la considération dont jouissent les arts savants. Cette nouvelle édition, comprenant une introduction actualisée et une bibliographie étendue, propose une réflexion critique sur le cirque, de la piste traditionnelle à la scène contemporaine. [résumé de l'éditeur]

Bouissac is one of the world's leading authorities on circus ethnography and semiotics present in this volume a theory of the circus as a secular ritual and introduces a method to analyze its performances as multimodal discourse. He cover the range of circus specialties (magic, animal training, acrobatics, clowning) and provide examples to show how cultural meaning is produced, extended and amplified by circus performances and a reflection on the potentially subversive power of this discourse and its contemporary use. [editor summary]

Presenting a number of contemporary works of art, the exhibition The Circus as a Parallel Universe offers an introduction into the universe of the circus and highlights a wondrous place full of knowledge of the world, surprises and sensations, a place of poetry, but also of excitement, confusion, and unease.
The circus as a parallel world has become a projection surface in film and literature, but also in the fine arts. fascinated with the circus, its forms, and its practice. Besides animals and acrobats, it is primarily the figure of the clown whose complexity oscillating between good and bad, funny and sad has always inspired the arts. Reaching far beyond the actual fringes of the circus’s ring, the exhibition assembles international artistic positions that thematize the world of the circus outside the big top and draw on its figures, forms, and metaphors. [editor summary]

Un incontournable ouvrage de référence qui apporte une riche reflexion sur le développement du rôle et des influences de la Femme dans les arts du cirque à travers le temps et envers la communauté au sens large. Publié suite à une conférence multidisciplinaire « Zene & Cirkus » qui s’est tenue à Zagreb (Croatie) en novembre 2009, cet ouvrage regroupe les textes des conférences des historiens, spécialistes de théâtre, anthropologues, artistes et journalistes qui ont proposé leur point de vue sur la contribution de la Femme au cirque traditionnel et actuel. De plus, cet ouvrage présente plus de 191 superbes photos issues d’archives publiques et privées.

Il y a 25 ans, le Centre national des arts du cirque de Châlons-en-Champagne (CNAC) accueillait ses premiers étudiants.
Inventeur d'une nouvelle pédagogie qui place l'élève au coeur d'enseignements pluridisciplinaires (danse, chant, théâtre...), promoteur d'un cirque de création et d'écritures individuelles, le CNAC a formé une nouvelle génération d'artistes qui ont oeuvré au renouvellement des esthétiques circassiennes. Il est d'ailleurs fascinant de voir combien de nombreux artistes qui façonnent et composent aujourd'hui la scène contemporaine sont passés par cette prestigieuse école.

L'ouvrage, richement illustré, fait le point sur la pratique et l'enseignement circassiens. Avec des textes d'Emmanuel Wallon, de Jean-Michel Guy, de Yann Ciret et de Philippe Noisette consacrés à la pédagogie, aux agrès (conception, construction, évolution, exploitation), à la question du corps en jeu, des écritures et mises en piste circassiennes, à l'histoire de troupes. [Note de l'éditeur]

This pioneering study is one of the major publications in the increasingly popular and largely undocumented area of circus studies. Through photographs and illustrations, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the socially changing ideas of muscular action in relation to our understanding of gender and sexuality. She questions how spectators see and enjoy aerial actions, and what cultural identities are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement. [editor summary]

Cet ouvrage évoque tout d'abord des notions de base de la psychologie sociale et des sciences de l'information et de la communication puis les réinvestit dans la sphère de la culture pour montrer comment les médias et les pouvoirs publics ont construit une représentation sociale pour un cirque dit "nouveau". L'observation du cirque classique permet ensuite de comprendre comment les animaux, les clowns, les acrobates sollicitent l'imagination du spectateur qui participe ainsi à la co-construction d'un imaginaire à la fois propre à chacun et commun aux quelque 12 millions de français qui constituent le public du cirque classique. [4e de couv.]