Circus as Practices of Hope: A Philosophy of Circus
(2024)
author(s): Marie-Andrée Robitaille
published in: Stockholm University of the Arts (SKH)
This exposition provides a spherical exposition of the research processes through a repository of images, texts, and diagrams, and contains the exegesis—a critical textual articulation of the doctoral artistic research project Circus as Practices of Hope: A philosophy of Circus.
Abstract
My doctoral artistic research project, Circus as Practices of Hope: A Philosophy of Circus, responds to the growing complexities emerging from the convergence of the fourth industrial revolution, the sixth mass extinction, and the eco-socio-political turmoil of our time. What does it mean to be human today? What does it mean to be a circus artist today? How is circus relevant in today’s context?
Core to this inquiry is the assertion that although circus arts hold the potential to foster significant knowledge, they simultaneously perpetuate outdated worldviews that restrict their transgressive potential. With this research, I investigate alternatives to regressive models of thoughts and modes of composition, aiming to identify and articulate circus´ inherent epistemic, ontological, and ethical specificities and their relevance for navigating and steering the current planetary paradigm shift.
I conducted my research through embodied practices as a circus artist, as a pedagogue, and from the perspective of a human on Earth. My inquiry occurred through Multiverse, an iterative series of compositional performative experiments and discursive activities. I engaged critical posthumanism and neo-materialist philosophies to challenge and evolve my relation to risk, mastery, and virtuosity.
The project conceptualizes circus arts as nomadic and fabulatory practices, culminating in a series of artistic, choreographic, and conceptual tools and methods that articulate circus arts within and beyond their disciplinary boundaries. The project advances a philosophy of circus that highlights circus-specific kinetic, aesthetic, and embodied relevancies in today’s context, situating circus arts as hopeful practices for the future.
To quote this work:
Robitaille, M-A. (2024), Circus as Practices of Hope: A Philosophy of Circus, Documented Artistic Research Project (doctoral thesis), Stockholm University of the
Arts.
Publication series X Position no. 33
ISSN 2002-603X ; 33
ISBN 978-91-88407-52-8 (print)
EISBN 978-91-88407-53-5 (e-publ)
The Missing Page: Place as Palimpsest and ‘Foil’
(2020)
author(s): Jeremy Bubb
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
In this exposition, I analyse the making of The Missing Page, a short film I shot in 2016 (and completed much later, in 2018) in response to the disappearance of my mother, Dorothy, from her home for over twelve hours; she was later diagnosed with dementia. This exposition reflects on the key stages of the project: establishes the aims of the film and its inspirations; the nature of the exploratory research, which took place on location at my parent’s home; and the conclusions I drew. I also review my working methods and discuss influences such as slow cinema and defamiliarization, identifying the importance of narrative, ethnographic methods, sound design, the notion of ‘space’, ‘place’, and palimpsest in shaping my thoughts, and the progress of the making of the film.
Not at Home: The Uncanny Experiences of Radio Home Run
(2018)
author(s): Heather Contant
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
In this paper, I attempt to better understand the Japanese media artist Tetsuo Kogawa’s concept of radioart by examining the relationship of this concept to movement. To do this, I focus on the Japanese term ika, which can be used to describe the uncanny feeling that results from aesthetic strategies, such as Viktor Shklovsky’s artistic techniques of defamiliarization or Bertolt Brecht’s alienating tactics of Verfremdungseffekt (V-Effekt). Discussions of ika not only circulated through and around the intellectual and artistic communities that Kogawa participated in during the 1970s and 1980s, they also influenced the practices of the very low-powered FM radio stations, Radio Polybucket and Radio Home Run, established by Kogawa’s students in the early 1980s. By discussing the emphasis of ika and physical movement in Radio Polybucket’s and Radio Home Run’s practices, I begin to trace a central element in Kogawa’s concept of radioart, which I call a kinetic interaction with the material conditions of radio. Through this kinetic interaction, Kogawa makes the material aspects of radio phenomena—its technology, its electromagnetic waves, and its sonic content—perceptible in a new way and thereby reveals previously hidden possibilities.
The sounds of food: Defamiliarization and the blinding of taste
(2017)
author(s): Tara Brabazon
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay – situated within the small but emerging field of sonic food studies and gastronomic auditory cultures – is positioned in the gap between the sounds of food and the meanings derived from the behaviors and practices encircling food. In food studies literature, assumptions abound about multi-sensory engagement. Yet, the sonic components of food remain undertheorized. This sonic research article – consisting of an sonic artifact and exegesis – emphasizes and prioritizes sensory incongruity. Intentionally, the non-eating sounds of the digital and analogue interactions surrounding food are summoned. There is a reason for the focus on these interfaces. Working with Viktor Shklovsky’s theorization of defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение), presented in his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” I am interested in reducing “automatization” and value “disruptions.” I have produced a sonic artifact that textualizes three slices of food sound: shopping for groceries, the delivery of food to a domicile, and cooking. These sounds were not slotted into a convenient narrative of a sonic documentary. They were not staged; they were not sound effects. There is a gap – of experience, expertise, perception, and meaning – between signifier and signified, the sound and its reception. The deferral of meaning creates hesitation, confusion, instability, and unsettles meaning systems.
The cultural politics of pervasive drama: aural narrative, digital media and re-compositions of urban space
(2015)
author(s): Eva Giraud
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This article argues that pervasive drama has the capacity to illuminate the cultural politics of urban space, by highlighting microsociological power relations that shape everyday movement. It suggests that the medium does this in two ways: firstly, through its use of “pervasive sound narratives” that actively defamiliarize urban space and, secondly, through the auditory technologies that disseminate this narrative, which draw attention to everyday engagements with mobile media that are ordinarily beneath our notice. These arguments respond to Anderson’s call for further research into the “productive listening potentials” of aural narrative (Anderson 2012), by exploring specific ways that pervasive drama can foster more meaningful and politically-engaged experiences of place. Drawing on The Memory Dealer as a case-study, narrative extracts and focus group findings from the drama are used to illustrate pervasive drama’s specific, politicised “listening potentials”.