Taking back the technical: contemporary circus dramaturgy beyond the logic of mimesis

Abstract

Mimetic approaches to circus dramaturgy displace the formal qualities of circus tricks, privileging the body’s capacity to refer over its capacity to affect. In such a context, specific circus tricks tend to become interchangeable, generalized, and ultimately devalued. What if we were instead to build a dramaturgical discourse which takes circus technique itself as a starting point? This thesis seeks to think and write circus technique as a staged material process—as a joining-together and coming-apart of human bodies, technical discourses, and material objects—which brings its various component parts in and out of mimetic referentiality. Such an approach gestures towards the rich potential of an alliance between circus theory and materialist philosophy.

Inspired by Maaike Bleeker’s dramaturgical practice, in which a heightened awareness of that which is emerging in the studio subsequently serves to ground rigorous reflection about the possible implications of these emergences, I use the vocabulary of materialist theory to direct the dramaturgical gaze towards four affective parameters. These parameters concern the trick’s territorializing force; its revelation of the realm of the virtual; its problematization of agency (as shown in Ilmatila’s Gangewifre); and its apparent cause. In doing so, my intention is to enable artists and dramaturgs to think, speak, and perform circus technique with an eye to its real nuance and fullness.