Circus and its Others ^expired Free

Circus and its Others Davis, 2021
Conference, Festival, Community

Circus and its Others (CaiO) is an international, cross-disciplinary research project that explores the ways in which contemporary circus artists and companies relate to concepts such as difference, otherness, and alterity in their practice. Through its activities, which has included three conferences (2016, Montréal; 2018, Prague; 2021, Davis) and a themed double issue of the peer-reviewed journal Performance Matters, CaiO brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds, artists and arts professionals, and the broader community to engage with circus as a vibrant, complex contemporary art form and field of practice. CaiO’s participants share the desire to continue to establish circus studies as an academic field while at the same time resisting its full institutionalization, engaging in an ongoing reflexive inquiry that allows itself to query its own inclusions and exclusions.

We are thrilled that our third conference will take place in Davis from November 4-7, 2021 (rescheduled from November 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic). With the University of California, Davis we have found a host that shares many of our own values. Circus and its Others promotes cross-campus alliances, bringing the work of graduate scholars and emerging scholars into dialogue with internationally recognized academics and creative industry leaders. Numerous UC Davis departments, programs, and initiatives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities have recognized the value of our event for the academic, artistic, and general community and supported us financially and institutionally. As organizers, we are tremendously grateful for their trust and commitment.

Underlining our engagement with circus as a practice as well as a field of study, our conferences take place in collaboration with circus festivals. In our previous conferences we have collaborated with Montréal Complètement Cirque (2016) and Letní Letná (Prague 2018). We are pleased that we will collaborate with the Mondavi Center, UC Davis’s performing arts presenter, for our Davis conference. With the Mondavi Center as partner, we will be able to showcase and promote current developments and aesthetics in the field of contemporary circus. CaiO, UC Departments, and the Mondavi Center will work to incorporate the conference and festival into different curricular activities on campus. UC students, faculty, and staff will benefit greatly from the convergence of academic pursuit, artistic research, and creative encounters at CaiO Davis 2021. CaiO is in conversation with the UC Davis Disability Center and we are striving to make the conference as accessible as possible.

CaiO has received the Davis Community Arts Grant and is sponsored by Visit Yolo. With their generous support, CaiO will organize a street circus festival on Sunday November 7th, involving and celebrating the wider Davis community. The Street circus festival strives to be diverse, inclusive, and intergenerational and will provide the Davis community with free circus performances and workshops, helping to strengthen the bond between UC Davis, the local community and national and international researchers and artists.

Ours is an ever-blossoming inquiry that, along the way, has started to feel like a movement. Its scholars and artist-researchers are united by a fascination for the cultural work of circus, particularly its capacities to explore and explode received conceptions of difference and otherness, which we believe contribute to more open and expansive experiences of community.

Find more information at:
https://www.circusanditsothers.org