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In “Toward a Queer Circus: Lessons of and from the Theatre with Jean Cocteau, Barbette, Phia Ménard, and Les Précieuses des nuits de Montréal,” Batson seeks what we might explicitly call queer circus, even as he admits to experiencing the queer in much of circus through viewings nourished by Sedgwick-like reparative readings. Intertwining his explorations with texts by Malouin, Richmond, and Zajdlik, he examines mutually informing notions of queerness, in-between-ness, danger, and risk in circus practices and theories. Through analyses of how queer writer and artist Jean Cocteau, queer circus performer Barbette, queer theorist Mark Franko, and transgender artist Phia Ménard can help us understand these intersecting notions, he ultimately turns to the 2014 circus cabaret Les Précieuses des nuits de Montréal to look a bit more deeply at what it might mean for us all to move toward a queer circus.

In “Queer Hatchings: Carnival Time and the Grotesque in Circus Amok,” Hayley Malouin deliberates on the grotesque as a site for the commingling of notions of the freak and queer through the practices of Circus Amok, New York City’s queer free-to-the-public circus collective. Malouin works through preliminary considerations of the efficacy of the grotesque as a politically oriented element of contemporary circus performance, arguing that Circus Amok’s distinct style of performance—a light-heartedly sardonic mishmash of circus acts, public education, and political activism—produces a grotesque/d space, in which Bakhtin’s “carnivalesque . . . style of expression” (1968, 10) is both evoked and critiqued by Amok’s resoundingly queer and queering brand of circassian freakishness. This consideration works toward a queer reading of Bakhtin’s grotesque that politicizes this grotesque in the contemporary and problematizes its latent preoccupation with and support of a state order. Circus of the Amok variety—political, grassroots, and roughly hewn—offers fruitful ground for such a queer/ed grotesque to emerge.

In “Monsters in the Cabinet: The Queer Burlesquing of Circa’s Wunderkammer,” Kelly Richmond proposes that from within the elegant athletics of circus acts, the glittering silhouettes and teasing tassels of burlesque arise and arouse. While such aesthetic signalling of the sexy is nothing new, the deployment of burlesque harkens back to the nineteenth-century emergence of erotic theatricality utilized as an explicitly political critique of sexual norms. Undressing the practices and potentials of what can be called burlesquing, Richmond looks to how the burlesquing circus lays bare the form’s sexual codes. Through a close reading of Circa’s 2011 show Wunderkammer, Richmond demonstrates how burlesque tantalizes the spectator through a slow and sudden reveal of the performer’s pain, creating a queer and kinky exchange of circus secrets. Burlesque, using a continually eroticized display of camp and irony, denaturalizes the illusion of ease fundamental to circus theatricality, reconfiguring a normative sexual dynamic between performer and spectator into an excessive and exceptional bodily arousal that conjures the queer and freak into empowering play.

In “Queering Circus Sessions” Taylor Zajdlik looks back on his responses to performances at the 2016 Circus Sessions held in Toronto, in particular assessing how his constructs of gender and corporeal bodies in motion were disturbed as he witnessed a provocative act performed by Yury Ruzhyev and Roy Gomez Cruz. The performance consisted of an intimate dance in drag, followed by a daring aerial hoop routine that, through the delicate actions of the two performers, called into question—for Zajdlik—a rigidity of heteronormative gender dispositions. He evaluates his affective response using some of the theoretical frameworks on affect as articulated by Erin Hurley to see the potential for circus as a productive site of both the exploration of gender performativity and the unbinding of rigid gendered constructs. The result, for Zajdlik, is an acceptance of new potentialities generated by this queered space.

Together, in a section with its own blurred distinctions of form and voice, Batson, Malouin, Richmond, and Zadjlik point to rich possibilities of queer/ing within circus practices and aesthetics. [editor summary]

During the broadcast of the 2010 Grammy Awards, the vocal artist Pink offered an aerial performance that immediately was labeled "Cirque du Soleil-esque" in the popular media and elicited a remark that her work pointed to "la Québécisation de l'industrie." This article explores this celebration of a Québécois influence on, evens signs of Québec itself in, the performance industry in the United States. Through an analysis of genealogies of both the art and the artists in conjunction with the development of the nouveau cirque in Québec, this article notes real traces of Québécois cultural productions appearing in American performance spaces while also proposing a way to understand how these performances help create and maintain a Québécois identity for their viewers. [editor summary]

Lors de l'émission des Grammy Awards de 2010, la chanteuse Pink a offert un numéro aérien que les médias populaires ont immédiatement baptisé "Cirque du Soleil-esque" et qui a provoqué une référence à son travail comme signe de "la Québécisation de l'industrie." Cet article examine cette célébration d'une influence québécoise sur, et les marques du Québec lui-m?me dans, l'industrie de la musique aux Etats-Unis. A travers nos analyses de certaines généalogies de l'art et des artistes ainsi que celle du développement du nouveau cirque au Québec, nous voyons de véritables traces de créations culturelles québécoises dans les salles de concert et de production américaines. Nous proposons également une façon de comprendre les manières dans lesquelles ces performances aident leurs spectateurs à créer et à maintenir une identité québécoise. [résumé de l'éditeur]

The artistic direction of the First Chicago Contemporary Circus Festival (January 2014) was unabashedly contemporary with a clear nod to Québec's circus practices. Charles Batson (Union College), Zita Nyarady (York University), CarlosAlexis Cruz (UNC-Charlotte), and Roy Gómez-Cruz (Northwestern University) offer their responses to the three Québec productions programmed in the festival, and to Ricochet, an American company which seemed to share some of the codes and artistic sensibility of young Québec companies while charting its own course. [editor summary]

La programmation de la première édition du festival du cirque contemporain de Chicago (janvier 2014) était sans réserves contemporaine et elle faisait une large place aux pratiques circassiennes québécoises. Charles Batson (Union College), Zita Nyarady (York University), CarlosAlexis Cruz (UNC-Charlotte) et Roy Gómez-Cruz (Northwestern University) se sont livrés à l'exercice de la critique des trois spectacles québécois à l'affiche, ainsi que Ricochet, jeune compagnie américaine, qui semble avoir en commun les codes et la sensibilité artistique de ses contemporains québécois, tout en affirmant sa singularité. [résumé de l'éditeur]

The 2010 première of Cirque du Soleil's Totem immediately sparked comments about the human animal at the heart of the show. With his mise-en-scène tracking an evolutionary journey from the beginnings of life to human development of flight, Robert Lepage expressly calls attention to the animal in the human. This article traces particular moments of the spectacle that underscore a reading in which limits are disturbed and where the ordinary and the extraordinary, the human and the animal, mark and inform each other. Such an analysis occasions an interrogation of meanings assigned to performing bodies in the circus, where the “freak” has never been far from normal. As we revisit reactions to this exceptional performing body, including Cocteau's embrace of le cirque's category-destroying aesthetics, we uncover discourses that still carry meaning a decade into the twenty-first century. Totem and other Montreal performances of a cirque nouveau are shown to draw on a richly layered past as they stage ambiguous bodies of the human animal. [author summary]