The Circus Dialogues

The Circus Dialogues is a two-year artistic research project (2018-2020) funded by KASK School of Arts that investigates experimental encounters and exchanges between circus practice and theory. The project is led by Bauke Lievens, Quintijn Ketels and Sebastian Kann, and accompanied by Vincent Focquet. The Circus Dialogues is committed to defending circus as a field in which experimental thinking is already happening and can continue to happen, along multiple lines and across multiple idioms. With our actions we hope to give space to a plurality of intersecting and contradictory voices. What we hope will emerge from these encounters is a notion of circus as irreducible to one definition or essence. Rather, we imagine circus as a shifting and possibly empowering field of diverse practices, whose borders are and should remain undecidable.

The Circus Dialogues follows on from Bauke Lievens' four-year artistic research project (2014-2018) Between being and imagining: towards a methodology for artistic research in contemporary circus. During this project, Bauke published the First (2015) and Second (2017) Open Letter to the Circus and organised the First (2015, KASK School of Arts, BE) and Second (2016, Cirque-Théâtre d’Elbeuf, FR) Encounter on Artistic Research in Contemporary Circus. Between being and imagining was marked by Bauke’s passage from being a dramaturg to making her own artistic work, with the creation of ANECKXANDER (2015) and Raphaël (2017), both co-creations with Alexander Vantournhout. The artistic research project ended in 2018 with the publication of a book titled Negotiating Distance: 2 letters and 3 conversations on artistic research in contemporary circus.

The Circus Dialogues started out in 2018 with the publication of the Third Open Letter to the Circus, written by Sebastian Kann. In the same year we organised the Third (PAF, Saint-Erme-Outre-et-Ramecourt, FR) and Fourth (Chateau de Monthelon, FR) Encounter on Artistic Research in Contemporary Circus. Currently, we are working on a book titled Thinking Through Circus, a heterogeneous collection of commissioned texts, written by people working in and around circus today. The book will be launched at the three-day symposium Smells like Dialogue: A Circus Symposium at Vooruit (Ghent, BE) in January 2020. At the symposium we invite circus artists, theoreticians and a wider audience to engage in exciting conversations about theory, politics and practice in the contemporary circus field. It is in the week that leads up to the symposium that the Thinking Through Circus research week will happen at KASK School of Arts.

Check out the call for applications for the Thinking Through Circus research week taking place at KASK School of Arts 10-17 January 2020.

The Circus Dialogues is a two-year artistic research project (2018-2020) initiated by Bauke Lievens, who is an affiliated researcher and professor at School of Arts KASK/Conservatorium. Quintijn Ketels and Sebastian Kann are the associated researchers. The Circus Dialogues is financed by the Arts Research Fund of University College Ghent (BE). The book and the symposium are co-funded with the support of the Flemish Government (Department Youth, Culture, Sports and Media). Vooruit, UGent (S:PAM) and Circuscentrum are financially supporting the symposium and research week.