Circus and its Others V

Embracing flows and challenging genealogies: Ruptures, remains, and resurrections in circus studies and practice

Call For Participation
Thrissur, Kerala, India: January/February 2027

Proposals due March 15, 2026

Circus and its Others (CaiO) is an international, cross-disciplinary research initiative that explores the ways in which 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 generated four international conferences (Montréal, 2016; Prague, 2018; Davis, 2021; Bogotá 2024) and multiple peer-reviewed publications, 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 participants 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.

Our 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 finalize logistical details (see below for more), 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. 

Our theme takes up the work of South Africa-based Indian scholar Dilip M. Menon in interrogating the bases of knowledge so as not to defer to Western paradigms as central and originary. In 2022 Menon (following Partha Chatterjee) asserted that decolonial theory had moved through phases of departure and maneuver to one of arrival, “with theorizations that start with the ideal of intellection from the Global South as their premise” (4). New thought from Africa, Asia, South America, and the Arab world is “question[ing] the Eurocentricity of postcolonial theory” (4) and engaging with indigenous ways of thinking and knowing. Such thought challenges narratives that identify the Enlightenment as the dawn of modernity, celebrating multiple traditions of thought and the fact that pluriversality, dialogism, and strategic engagement have long shaped intellection and debate in the Global South (5). 

Circus and its Others’ 2024 conference in Bogotá brought Latin American knowledge, practice, and inheritances to the forefront of our inquiry, offering space for us to continue challenging a circus studies that centres certain histories and epistemologies from the Global North. With this conference in India, we intend to further expand our field, from which South Asian and African histories and traditions are frequently occluded (see PR 2020, 6; Gandhi 2026), asking how the ongoing intersection of local traditions with colonialism, regionalism, and neoliberal capitalism have shaped circus on the subcontinent and beyond. We are particularly interested in exploring the flows of circus traditions, bodies, and capital, including those of the Indo-Pacific region, which continue to contribute to the complex, multicultural field of circus in India and globally. 

More broadly, we propose CaiO V as an occasion to explore and challenge the disciplinary, historical, creative, and intellectual genealogies that shape our understanding and practice of circus. We intend with this conference to contribute to and contextualize 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. 

Kerala, our host region for CaiO V, is a site marked by multiple flows. A coastal state in the south-west of India, it has a long history of trans-oceanic migrations and imperial state formation. Malabar, bordering the region where we will convene, gets its name from the confluence of Dravidian and Persian traditions, and its major cities include ports that were part of global trade routes. Kerala is known in South Asia as the cradle of Indian circus, and as Gandhi (2023) has explored, circus there demonstrates the ongoing and complex interplay of local, regional, and global forces that continue to shape the field. Thrissur, our host city, is a particularly vibrant site of festivals, academies, and cultural institutions, with strong ritual and performance traditions.

Kerala also presents itself as a compelling locus of ecological complexities and its associated modalities of knowledge creation in South Asia. Its geographical location and biodiversity spread across mountainous regions of North Malabar, the coastal lands on the western parts of the Western Ghats, the backwaters in the South, and its dense tropical forests mark its diverse cultural practices tied to these different layers of ecological experiences. To echo Appadurai on agrarian knowledge structures in India, “...knowledge of water, animals, soil, persons, deities, crops, markets, and manure form part of an interactive whole” (1989, 174). CaiO V also invites us to explore, through circus and its association with local physical cultures, this multilayered ecology of performance within circus studies and new methodological, artistic, and creative engagements that it might present. 

As CaiO V will be an opportunity to experience and delve into Keralan, Indian, and Indo-Pacific circus histories and realities, we also invite ourselves and potential participants from around the globe to look yet more deeply into the practices, pedagogies, and discourses related to the circus that we ourselves engage in and create. Where does our own work and knowledge sit in the flows of remains, ruptures, and resurrections (Gandhi 2026)? Can we furthermore, by gathering in Thrissur, make an intervention into some of these flows by drawing on and/or crafting and recrafting networks, across South and East Asia, Europe, the Pacific, the Americas?

We invite proposals for research talks and/or panels that address these themes of circus inheritances and genealogies in the context of local, regional, and global flows. These inheritances might include but are not limited to intellectual, creative, and epistemological histories; pedagogical and training regimes; relationships to other creative disciplines; and relationship to indigenous and folk traditions. We particularly welcome proposals about circus in India and the Indo-Pacific region, and further invite proposals that explore the relationships between Global South and Global North paradigms. We also make explicit invitations for presentations in a diverse range of formats, from artists and practitioners who address such questions in their work, practice, and/or research-creation. 

Some of the themes of discussion may include, but are not restricted to:

1. Aesthetics, Performance and Artistic Practices

  • Examinations of circus-proximate arts, including puppetry, dance, physical theatre, street theatre, cinema

  • Examination of circus through intellectual paradigms including night studies, ethical studies, and aesthetic analyses

  • Cross- and inter-disciplinary practices

  • Human / post-human / nonhuman explorations in circus

  • Circus and the changing notion of public sphere

  • Roles of the public / audience

2. Flows, Circulation, and Mobility

  • Flow as networks / networks as flow

  • Histories of circus mobility

  • The circulation of circus artists and their knowledge – labour conditions and regulations, transnational empirical knowledge, routes, and tacit agreements

  • Physical, geographic, and social ecologies

3. Labour, Economy and Modes of Organization

  • Social and economic modes of organization in circus

  • Labour conditions and realities in the flows

  • Family, personal, and professional interconnections and roles

  • Hierarchies, including in- and out-groups

4. Politics, Activism 

  • Circus, activism, social mobilizations and protest

  • Exploring decoloniality in circus performances, practices, and bodies

  • Circus and the changing notion of public sphere 

5. Gender, Race, Class and Power

  • Performances of / across gender, class, race

  • Hierarchies, including in- and out-groups 

6. Education, Pedagogy and Knowledge Transmission

  • Practices of education and pedagogy

  • The circulation of circus artists and their knowledge 

7. Histories, Memories and Genealogies

  • Circus history / herstory / transtory / ourstory

  • Histories of circus mobility 

8. Epistemologies, Methodologies and Research/Creation

  • Interrogation of our very terms of inquiry (what is research? What is creation? What is performance?)

  • Examination of circus through intellectual paradigms 

We furthermore welcome discussions on yet other themes and ideas! 

We share this exciting news, along with its context, now, to elicit an expression of interest! We are currently in conversation with institutional partners and know that CaiO V will take place in the context of one of two long-standing festivals in Kerala: the International Theatre Festival of Kerala or the International Festival of Theatre Schools, both of which take place in Thrissur in late January / early February 2027. We have a strong partner in India in Dr. Abhilash Pillai, who is directing ITFOK 2026, and who is director of the School of Drama and Fine Arts, University of Calicut, which organizes IFTS on an annual basis. A number of variables, including state elections in Kerala in mid-2026, bear on the decision of which of these festivals will be our host.   

We invite short, 200-250 word proposals / expressions of interest for 15-minute presentations or themed curated/invited panels, to be submitted by March 15, 2026 via Google Forms at this link: https://forms.gle/HgPfD7nTdEMBSgb67. 

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. We welcome inquiries via circusanditsothers@gmail.com.  

By mid-April, the CaiO team will communicate early results of our deliberations and may inquire for further information related to your proposal. Once we 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 (The organizers are applying for financial support for the conference, but we regret that we cannot promise bursaries or travel grants at this time.) We predict that we will wish to hear your final confirmation of intent to join us in Thrissur in late August / early September 2026.

We look forward to continuing our work and inquiries together!

Download this Call For Papers as a PDF here.

Circus and Its Others V Academic and Scientific Committee

Charles R. Batson, Union College, USA
Prodosh Bhattacharya, University of Warwick, UK
Marco Antonio Coelho Bortoleto, University of Campinas, Brazil
Aastha Gandhi, Ambedkar University Delhi, India
Julieta Infantino, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina  

In addition to institutions named above, we are delighted to celebrate the inclusion of the open-access, peer-reviewed scholarly journal Circus: Arts, Life, & Sciences as conference partner.