Speaking of Circus

What is a magazine if not dialogue? What is dialogue if not language? To many, articulation (in spoken or written language) comes as natural as breathing. To others, it’s a political gesture or privilege. In this issue of the magazine, we ponder the idea of articulation and meaning making through language, within the context of a predominantly non-verbal, non-textual artform – contemporary circus.

Philosopher Karen Barad famously wrote that “language has been granted too much power.” And yet, we speak. We might be in the process of designing more wholesome modes of care, empathy, understanding and belonging, ones that can be expressed outside of language. We might be looking at a future free from our anthropocentric grasp, a future where signs, codes, and meanings can exist in more-than-linguistic configurations. Today, however, the future exists (perhaps primarily?) in our language.

For this issue, we invited contributors whose work within contemporary circus touches on aspects of language or meaning making, at the crossroads with embodied forms of expression. Artist Kathrin Wagner shares her thoughts on blending juggling and slam poetry, following the premiere in Denmark of her solo performance ‘I Was Told.’ If Kathrin uses words to communicate to her audience, Jakob Jacobsson and Lisa Chudalla of company Revue Regret use language to give their audience a way to express a universally human emotion – regret. Lithuanian artist Marija Baranauskaitė tells of her project creating and performing for an audience of sofas, teasing out post-anthropocentric capacities of the artform.