Circus and its Others V: Call for participation
Circus and its Others (CaiO) is an international, cross-disciplinary research initiative that explores how contemporary circus artists and companies relate to the concept of difference in their practice. Since its launch with a study day in 2014, the initiative has hosted four international conferences (Montréal, 2016; Prague, 2018; Davis, 2021; Bogotá, 2024) and published multiple peer-reviewed articles, including special issues of Performance Matters, Corpo-Grafías, and Circus: Arts, Life, and Sciences.
This ever-blossoming inquiry along the way has felt like a movement, in that the scholars and artist-researchers involved are united by more than the same research interests. Circus and its Others share the desire to continue to establish circus studies as a field while at the same time engaging in an ongoing reflexive inquiry that allows itself to query its own inclusions and exclusions. The team is thrilled to announce that Circus and its Others will go to Kerala, India, in early 2027 for its fifth iteration! As the scientific and festival committees finalise logistical details, we launch this call for participation and invite you to join us as we pursue themes of challenging genealogies in circus practice and circus studies, and of global cultural flows as articulated by Arjun Appadurai (1990), as we move from South America to South Asia.
CaiO V: Embracing flows and challenging genealogies: Ruptures, remains, and resurrections in circus studies and practice is an opportunity to explore and challenge the disciplinary, historical, creative, and intellectual genealogies that shape our understanding and practice of circus. We intend, through this conference, to contribute to and contextualise historical and contemporary modes of circus practice by evaluating, through practice-based and academic explorations, the thematic and performative grounds of circus in its entanglements with global, local, and indigenous cultural practices and physical cultures. We further intend to investigate the relationship of circus to related disciplines, including theatre, dance, martial arts, and the screen arts.
Read the full call, HERE!
We invite short, 200-250-word proposals/expressions of interest for 15-minute presentations or themed curated/invited panels, to be submitted by March 25, 2026, via Google Forms at this link.
Please articulate clearly in your proposal if you plan to make a formal paper presentation or if, as a practitioner/creator/researcher, you wish to engage in a hybrid practice/talk/research/creation exploration. Multiple submissions are welcome; please make one submission per Form. In each submission, please also include a short biographical statement of 150 words.
CAiO welcome inquiries via circusanditsothers@gmail.com
By April, the CaiO team will communicate early results of our deliberations and may inquire about further information related to your proposal. Once they have the final dates determined, which we predict to be in June / July 2026, we will reach out with yet more details, including further information on lodging and other local costs, which will include, we predict, many low-expense options. We predict that we will wish to hear your final confirmation of intent to join us in Thrissur in late August / early September 2026.
CAiO looks forward to continuing our work and inquiries together!