Documents 

What happens when circus artists get in the studio and throw gender, circus practice, history, sexuality, body image, theatre, writing, devising, drag and movement into one big melting pot? This thesis attempts to answer this question. Using Barbette, a genderbending circus artist active in the early-mid 20th century, as catalyst, frame and partner in this research, I set out to develop what I’ve named “the open source play”: an innovative performance-making tool that would enable fellow circus practitioners to become active creators, guiding them to devise an autobiographical show through the lenses of circus history and queer theory. I begin by introducing Barbette: his life, his person and persona, as reflected through both primary and secondary sources, and within the wider historical context of drag performance. I then investigated my own personal relationship to this research, extracting interactions and testing the roads I envision other devising artists might travel when engaging with The Barbette Project. Taking a step back, I examined the history of female bodies and performance in circus to construct a lens for gendered analysis of circus performance, which I then applied to contemporary aerial acts that play with gender. Adding on layer after layer, I constructed The Barbette Project’s open source play and map out the various methods and approaches it takes. Evaluating the two-year period of research, I trace the devising and creation process as it unfolded over four stages of Research & Development conducted with diverse teams in different environments. As for the result of this research,
I choose to borrow from words of poet T.S. Elliott: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”