Book

The book offers a psychoanalytic account of the practice of contemporary circus. It evolves its narrative through three voices: dramatic address (love poems from a disaffected, retired artist to the public), memoir in verse (a genealogy of becoming a circus artist) and psychoanalytic theory written through the lens of personal experience as a circus artist, pedagogue, director and psychoanalytic scholar.

It offers the benefit of a subject/artist embedded in the theory, showing how the artist comes to theory from their own contexts – social, gendered, sexualized and racialized – and how theory helps the artist contextualize themselves in the field. The theoretical perspectives draw from Freud via Lacan but touches upon Winnicot, Klein and Kristeva.

Sex, death, seduction, trauma and an intimate yet distanced relationship to an amorous other: circus and psychoanalysis have much in common. This book looks to the story circus tells when it is on the couch; a love story of impossible desires, improbable fantasies deeply indebted to masochism and utopian longing. However, trapped as it is in its conservative and narcissistic aesthetics of infatuation – stunning, erotic and impressive – its queer core of anti-normative and anarchic desire has been co-opted as the poster-child for neoliberal success. This work looks to its fundamental and disavowed romance with failure to show how progressive its thinking could be.