The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted events around the world, including Circus and its Others’ planned activities: Our third conference, originally planned for November 2020, will now take place in November 2021 at the University of California, Davis. We did not want to wait, however, until late 2021 to continue our work and the movement of scholars and practitioners related to the Circus and its Others project! We are therefore offering a series of smaller, on-line, digital events, spanning from Fall 2020 to the summer of 2021. With these online events involving artists and scholars, we intend to bring yet more attention world-wide to our community and to our questions.
These panels are being organized by the academic and creative committee of the Davis 2021 conference: Charles Batson, Karen Fricker, Olga Lucia Sorzano, Veronika Štefanová, and Ante Ursić; and produced by Russ Martin.
The third in Circus and its Others’ digital panel series focused on Australian circus. In this event, moderated by Karen Fricker (Brock University), three Australia-based circus experts offered 15-minute presentations on their work followed by discussion and Q&A with the audience. Kristy Seymour (Griffith University) will shared her practical and theoretical work about how circus training can enhance the well-being of children diagnosed on the autism spectrum and their families. Gillian Arrighi (University of Newcastle)’s presentation offered a new perspective on circus during the Age of Empire by focusing not on tours of European circuses to South and South-East Asia, but rather on the movement of circuses between colonized territories in the region. The final presenter, Brisbane-based circus artist Celia White discussed the work of GUSH, a culturally and generationally diverse ensemble who use circus to explore how the performing feminine body is read and misread.
The panel was presented as part of the Cirkopolis festival, a contemporary circus festival based in Prague (where Circus and its Others 2 took a place) with elements of contemporary dance, physical, visual theater and contemporary music scene genres. The festival is organized by Palac Akropolis together with CIRQUEON – the center for contemporary circus.
Watch the panel below.
Speakers
Dr. Kristy Seymour is a circus artist and academic researcher with over 20 years’ experience in the Australian circus sector as a performer, trainer, artistic director and administrator. She has worked extensively in the youth circus sector leading a team of inspiring artists as the Head Trainer and Artistic Director of Flipside Circus in Brisbane 2004-2010. Working as a creative producer and choreographer, she has collaborated with leading arts organisations, venues and festivals such as with Strut n Fret Production House, Brisbane Powerhouse, Creative Generations, Woodford Folk Festival, Brisbane Festival and Adelaide Fringe Festival and Festival 2018. In 2012 Kristy moved into academia and has since completed her Masters with Honours on circus and autism (2012) and more recently her doctoral thesis (2018) focusing on Australian Contemporary Circus as a major artform. ). Her research has been published in New Theatre Quarterly and Performance Matters. Connecting her work to the international sector, in 2015 she undertook a residency as researcher in residence at Ecole Nationale De Cirque and Cirque du Soleil Headquarter. Kristy has her own circus school, Circus Stars, solely dedicated to children with autism, which was the topic of her recent TEDx talk (June 2017).
Paper
This paper explores my practical and theoretical work in how circus training can enhance the well-being of children diagnosed on the autistic spectrum and their families. In 2010, as (Head Trainer at Flipside Circus in Brisbane,) I developed a method for using circus as a therapeutic tool for children with autism. In this paper, I will work between experiential and theoretical positions to explore how circus can open up a new world to such children, enabling them to take risks physically and emotionally, and to stretch the capacities of their bodies in an environment that enriches their social development. Concepts such as ‘chaosmosis’ from Deleuze and Guattari, Pope, and others are deployed to argue that, counter-intuitively, children with autism benefit from the environment of creative chaos that attends circus. Through Agamben’s work on being and singularity I will explore how circus values difference and inclusivity, building community in ways also captured by Probyn’s notion of ‘outside belonging’. Further, case studies from the Circus Stars program (2013-present) will be presented to demonstrate the practical application of the method and the relationship of chaos that binds circus and autism together.
Dr. Gillian Arrighi has published numerous articles and chapters on the circus, popular entertainments, child actors, and acting theory. She is a founding editor of Popular Entertainment Studies; co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Circus (CUP, 2021); Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry (Palgrave, 2014); A World of Popular Entertainments (Cambridge Scholars, 2012); editor of a focus issue on circus for Early Popular Visual Culture (2017); and author of the monograph The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: spectacle, identity and nationhood at the Australian circus (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015). Her current book project concerns child actors on trans-national popular stages, 1879-1910.
Paper
This paper arises from questions about the ways that circuses travelling in the South- and South-East Asia region at the turn of the 20th century intersected with histories of colonialism and imperialism. Academic studies since the 1980s have examined the ways that British popular entertainments advanced ideas about the advantages of the colonial imperative and the allure of empire (McKenzie 1986). More recently the author has brought to light the ways that mainstream Australian circus practices promoted the ‘otherness’ of its performers, whilst also promulgating imperial themes during the Second Boer War of 1899-1902 and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 (Arrighi 2012; 2015). However, within the field of Circus Studies, critical analyses of colonial circuses travelling and performing across the vast South- and South-East Asia region during 1880-1920—the period ascribed by historian Eric Hobsbawm as the ‘Age of Empire’—have yet to be undertaken.
Drives of colonialism and empire are most often understood as moving from centre to periphery. We see this idea mirrored somewhat in the transnational spread of the circus during the late-19th century, when the Anglo-circus was transferred to South Africa by the British showman Frank Fillis (van der Merwe 2007), and the large English circus of Harmston and Son spent years establishing and sustaining a mainstream audience base in the colonial territories of South-East Asia.
What is little understood about the processes of circus transculturation in the South- and South-East Asia region is that circus entrepreneurs and mainstream circus aggregations emanating from other colonial territories also undertook major touring projects, thus enacting aesthetic and transcultural movements between territories on the periphery of empire. In the mid-19th century George B. W. Lewis (1818-1906) toured equestrian shows out of Melbourne along theatrical touring routes that were developing between Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, China, and India. Lewis’s entrepreneurial activities were inflected with the factors of mobility and risk that were vital to the early spread of the circus (Colligan 2013). Forty years later the patriotically Australian FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus undertook major tours throughout South East Asia, travelling as far as India, Burma, and Shanghai (Arrighi 2015).
Celia White is a devisor and director of contemporary circus. She is Artistic Director of Vulcana Circus representing women, trans and non-binary gendered people to create new circus work with emerging, professional and new performers, and working in partnership with community groups and organisations. Most recently she created Rear Vision, a drive-in circus performance reflecting on this interesting and challenging year. As a co-founder of GUSH, she co-created Monsteria, presented at Wonderland Festival and Adelaide Fringe Festival and winner of Best Circus and Physical Theatre weekly award in 2018, Mutating Roots with Mayu Muto, and Under My Eye with Bianca Mackail.
Paper
This is a presentation of the work, Monsteria, by GUSH, a circus ensemble made up of four culturally and generationally diverse women that uses the repertoire of circus to explore the way the performing feminine body is read and misread. This is an issue for performance, generally, but more explicitly for physical performance that depends on the body as the ultimate conveyor of meaning - how it moves, what it can do or not do, how it is covered or not covered, how it relates to other bodies and the performance space. This is an agenda that has become urgent, in our view, as the imperative of “new” circus, to undo traditional gender relationships in circus, has been lessened in a lot of contemporary circus we see or perform alongside. The circus of GUSH is itself subject to scrutiny to see how it might be approached differently to serve the content and the bodies performing it. GUSH emerged from the feminist company, Vulcana Circus, that supports women, trans and non-binary gendered adults, kids and teens of all genders, to learn, and create circus. Vulcana provides circus training, performance making projects, and community engagement programs and is an incubator for new, emerging and professional artists.
Moderator
Dr. Karen Fricker is Associate Professor of Dramatic Arts at Brock University, Ontario, Canada; and a theatre critic at the Toronto Star. Her monograph The Original Stage Productions of Robert Lepage: Making Theatre Global was published in 2020 by Manchester University Press. With Charles R. Batson she is co-founder of the Circus and its Others research project. A dedicated double issue of the peer-reviewed journal Performance Matters (4.1-2) on Circus and its Others, which Karen co-edited with Hayley Malouin, appeared in 2018. She is involved in a number of research projects about the futures of theatre criticism in the digital age.