The doctoral artistic research project, Circus as Practices of Hope: A Philosophy of Circus, responds to the growing complexities emerging from the convergence of the fourth industrial revolution, the sixth mass extinction, and the eco-socio-political turmoil of our time. What does it mean to be human today? What does it mean to be a circus artist today? How is circus relevant in today's context?
 
Core to this inquiry is the assertion that although circus arts hold the potential to foster significant knowledge, they simultaneously perpetuate outdated worldviews that restrict their transgressive potential. With this research, Marie-Andrée Robitaille investigates alternatives to regressive models of thoughts and modes of composition, aiming to identify and articulate circus' inherent epistemic, ontological, and ethical specificities and their relevance for navigating and steering the current planetary paradigm shift.

The research has been conducted through the researcher's embodied practices as a circus artist, as a pedagogue, and from the perspective of a human on Earth. Robitaille's inquiry occurred through Multiverse, an iterative series of compositional performative experiments and discursive activities, engaging critical posthumanism and neo-materialist philosophies to challenge and evolve her relation to risk, mastery, and virtuosity.

The project conceptualizes circus arts as nomadic and fabulatory practices, culminating in a series of artistic, choreographic, and conceptual tools and methods that articulate circus arts within and beyond their disciplinary boundaries. The project advances a philosophy of circus that highlights circus-specific kinetic, aesthetic, and embodied relevancies in today's context, situating circus arts as hopeful practices for the future.
 

Read the Exegesis
The exegesis is a critical textual articulation of the research project. The text exposes and discusses the research's questions, methods, and findings. The text accounts for why and how I conducted the artistic research project. It elaborates on and discusses the concepts and processes that were activated through and emerged from the project.Link to the written exegesis 

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Visit the digital exhibition

Visit the digital exhibition​ located on the Research Catalogue, an international database for artistic research, provides a spherical exposition of the doctoral artistic research processes through a repository of images, texts, and diagrams. The exposition intends to honor the aesthetics of the research by employing the concepts and principles that emerged from and steered the process. With a diffractive structural mode of composition, the exposition offers transversal and anarchic ways of moving within the project's various mediality. By adopting a cosmological approach to documentation, I wished to explore the potential of non-linear accesses, multiple partial views, and the built-in ambivalence that comes with these. The digital exhibition has been fed and transformed throughout the research project through evolving and unstable indexicalities, manifesting the fugitive and kinetic aspects of knowledge formation. 


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Consult the Thesis

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