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Honorary Ringmaster Isabella Rossellini at the Big Apple Circus in 1978.
Courtesy BAM Hamm Archives. |
by Chris Tyler
The circus is many things: an experience, a practice, a lifestyle, an education, a culture. But, above all else, it is an inclusive art form. “There’s no exclusion,” remarked Duncan Wall, co-founder and former national director of Circus Now, during a 2013 talk on contemporary circus. “Audiences of any class, race, or culture can enjoy the form and participate in it.” For denizens of a visual society, there’s something uniquely accessible about the circus and its focus on the physical body. People are not shut out from understanding the experience.
Yet, “because circus enters our lives so early in our lives as children...we become fixed in our thinking” about the form, as noted by Executive Producer Joseph V. Melillo in the
Beyond Physical Theater podcast (embedded below). The term itself summons images of elephants, clown cars, and bombastic ringleaders alongside the requisite smells of popcorn and cotton candy. But the circus itself is not codified—it is a non-verbal bodily practice. It’s a vehicle for expression, a delicate marriage of risk and virtuosity. It’s theater, dance, music, sport, and visual art—
and the sky is (quite literally) its limit. Circus is an inclusive art in this sense then, too, in that it readily incorporates multiple forms while simultaneously blurring genre boundaries.
