This text was originally published in the 8th issue of The Handstand Press Magazine in September 2024
Whiteness as an ideological and political project for the most part formally began in the 17th century, in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and the enslavement and eradication of indigenous peoples by the Spanish Empire. Definitions have varied and changed through time and across regions, and people who nowadays are thought of as White (like the Irish or Swedish) weren’t always so. Similarly, North American associations with fair skin alone don’t apply to the indigenous Sámi people in the European northern region of Sápmi. In this piece, I will define “White” as culturally and politically hegemonic light-skinned people of Christian European ancestry.
In January of 2015, activist and writer April Reign coined the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to highlight how, among 20 actors nominated that year, none was a person of color. It wasn’t unlike when actress Natalie Portman, introducing the nominees for the Golden Globes Best Director category, made attendees gasp by saying “and here are the all-male nominees”. As Circus joins the ranks of formal, recognised art forms, and as it becomes increasingly accessible to those not born into it, it might be a good time to reflect on how we are doing.
In the US, Canada and the UK, it is commonplace in institutions, the healthcare system, and the national census to ask people’s race and ethnicity, but most European countries don’t. In many cases, it’s illegal.
Thus, while the aforementioned countries can then compile statistics drawing on robust data regarding their ethnic and racial makeup, the EU cannot, despite a 2021 UN report on racial injustice urging us to do so.
There’s reluctance to it because of our history with Nazism, fascism, and secret police, who gathered and used such information for purposes of persecution and eradication. But without data, it’s very hard to keep track of segregation and discrimination, to shape policies, and to hold institutions accountable.
For the sake of the argument I’m making, I hope we can agree that ethnic, cultural, religious, and racial heterogeneity in Europe exists, and that global majorities are part of European societies, even if we don’t know their exact proportions.
“I gave a talk in parliament about representation in general, because you know sometimes people use the word 'diversity' - I hate that word, you know? It feels like you've got the main thing going on here, you've got, like, a burger. And diversity's the thing on the side - it's the chips. I prefer to use the word 'representation', because what we expect from our culture, from our stories, from our politics, is to be represented. I don't want to hear any talk about diversity. It's about representation and it's about how we're represented out there.” - Riz Ahmed - Channel4 Diversity Speech, 2017
While in Circus we like to think that we are not like the other girls, on a deeper look we might notice that we are far behind in matters of representation compared to our sibling art forms. If some aspects, like relatively narrow performer age brackets and body-types can be, to a point, explained by the nature of many circus disciplines, the physics of high level athleticism and the corresponding wear and tear, we have no choice but to note that in the European Circus scene, particularly in the biggest and publicly-funded schools, festivals, and institutions, there is a fair amount of homogeneity and hegemonic over-representation. While in this piece I dive into the racial aspect of this uniformity, much remains to be said about other sides of it, in particular when it comes to socioeconomic class and cultural capital.
I will use the term “global majority” (alternating with ethnic minority and Non-White depending on the context) because, while people of African, Asian, Indigenous or Latin ancestry are a minority in Europe, the term highlights the fact that approximately 85 percent of the global population belongs to these groups. It also opens the door to the much needed conversations about the history of European colonialism and how it is central to understanding the places we occupy in Europe today.
When it comes to European circus, the first major problem is the shortage of global majority Circus professionals of European birth and upbringing, particularly in the indoors, publicly-funded part of the sector, with the exception of the UK. Things don’t look much better when broadened to include Circus dramaturgs, directors, educators, or staff at festivals and institutions. Such shortage is often hidden by the presence of mestizo, often middle class Latin American graduates of the major schools (the reasons for this being equally important to address but beyond the scope of this piece), and Asian and African-born and based performers hired for specific productions, which are typically “ethnic”-themed shows, or commercial resorts and dinner shows (often for lower wages than those offered to their European-born cast members).
Since Circus as both a recognised, mainstream art form and career path is fairly recent, I propose three detours to paint a fuller picture and learn from the experiences of others. We will go from ballet, to our past, to the world of elite sports.
In March 2023, Guillaume Diop became the first Black dancer to reach the top rank of étoile in Paris Opera Ballet’s 354 year history. Three years prior, along with four other Black dancers of the company, he wrote a letter called “De la question race à l'Opéra de Paris" (Of the race question at the Paris Opera), which led to the company’s first ever diversity report to be commissioned and published.
In a 2021 article with the New York Times, Diop said “When you’re not white, it’s hard to imagine yourself as a dancer in the Paris Opera”. In that same article, Chloé Lopes Gomes, the only Black dancer at the Staatsballett Berlin as of 2020, states “If the audience don’t see people like them onstage, they won’t come. It’s a fact.”
So what about Circus? How does our field, however unwittingly, embody the narrow demographic vision of Europe championed by the likes of Le Pen, Meloni, Van Grieken and Åkesson? How are we, without recognising it, insulating ourselves and gatekeeping who gets to see, do, and above all, create circus?
A (short) walk through history
It’s important to note that global majority bodies, and specifically Black and Brown ones, haven’t always been absent from European and global north Circus stages. While the following section is far from exhaustive, I hope it gives further context on the history and legacy of Circus–a history that should be looked at alongside that of freak shows, sideshows, and human zoos, as these operated closely together in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
In 1885, PT Barnum launched his showman career by exhibiting Joice Heth, an enslaved Black woman in her late 70s or early 80s, who was nearly blind and mostly paralyzed, under the pretense that she was 161 years old and the former nursemaid of George Washington. According to Benjamin Reiss, author of The Showman and The Slave, “[PT Barnum] had these new ways of making racism seem fun and for people to engage in activities that degraded a racially subjected person in ways that were intimate and funny and surprising and novel”. Barnum was hardly alone in this approach.
Another infamous example of this exploitation of Black bodies is the one of Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited as a freak show attraction in 19th-century Europe under the name Hottentot Venus, marketed as "missing link between man and beast". People could pay a fee on top of their entrance one in order to touch her body. She was exhibited until her death in 1815, upon which her brain and genitals were preserved and further exhibited.
Exhibitions like Baartman’s and human zoos as part of circuses were extremely popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as part of the colonial propagandic project of dehumanization of non-European peoples and cultures. These displays were often built to prove the supposed inferiority of the exhibits' culture, in contrast with the implied superiority of "Western society", pushing forward the “savage without civilisation” tropes to justify colonial subjugation. It’s worth noting that human zoos, notably those curated by German merchant Carl Hagenbeck, also included indigenous peoples from the Americas, as well as Sámi people, just as sideshows and freakshows often portrayed disabled people.
Even “success stories” among non-White Circus figures of the past typically entailed exploitation. Clown Rafael Padilla, better known for his stage name Chocolat, was one of the earliest highly successful Black entertainers in Europe, rising to fame at the turn of the 20th century. Born in Cuba to two enslaved people, as a teenager he was bought and taken to Europe by a Spanish businessman. Rafael was spotted by famous clown Tony Grice, who initially hired him as a stuntman and gave him the stage name Chocolat. He went on to achieve great success as a solo performer, and during his twenty years of collaboration with British clown George Foottit. However, it’s important to note that much of this acceptance had to do with Chocolat’s character being shaped according to the dominant imagery and prejudices against Black people (and specifically Black men) of the time. Foottit played the high status clown, and Chocolat the low status one. His character was the silly, childish, friendly and harmless Negro who got regularly “comically” beaten during their sketches.
The history of Western circus is tightly interwoven with that of colonialism, racism, slavery and imperialism. Our legacy of commodifying and exploiting global majority people in cruel, ridiculing, and abusive ways is one that we must be aware of. Put in tandem with the contemporary near absence of global majority performers in our industry, it makes for a truly urgent need to take concrete action to bring our field to a place of reckoning, reparations, and justice, as we continue building the Circus of the 21st century.
How to get there? And what happens if we do?
“Talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn’t. Talent can’t reach opportunity unaided.”- Idris Elba: Speech on diversity in the media and films, 2016
How did France go from a country that failed to qualify for three out of four World Cups and three out of four European Championships between 1960 and 1974, to the country where the most soccer World Cup players are born?
Back in the 70s, the French Football Federation decided to create a national structure for developing talents, establishing one of Europe’s first football academy systems. By the mid 70s, a wide network of academies to recruit and train local youth had been formed.
France won its first (male) European Championship in 1984, and its first (male) World Cup in 1998, with many players being non-White immigrants, or children of immigrants of formerly colonized countries, coming primarily from poor and working class neighborhoods. The tendency has continued, as more and more of France’s best talent comes from socioeconomically disadvantaged post-colonial immigration (even despite the racial quota scandal exposed by news organization Mediapart in 2011 aiming to exclude ‘dual nationals’ from selection to youth training centers).
France is not a place where discrimination has been eradicated; it’s not a paradise of social equity and opportunity. But in the limited realm of soccer, it provides a telling example of what can happen when young talent is given the best opportunities and resources to develop. It blooms.
Moving forward
There’s no quick fix to a lack of representation of global majorities in European Circus. We are talking about a long-term process of structurally changing how Circus as a career can be accessed. Even with great natural talent, years are needed to reach professional-level technical skill and artistry. If we are indeed committed to justice, we need to invest in scouting and educational infrastructure and logistics. Resources have to be directed towards finding youths with talent and passion, and providing the environment and materials needed for them to develop, without wealth being an obstacle.
As we broaden the scope of who gets to become professionally involved in Circus, it’s important that we remain aware and connected to our wider social and political contexts, and that we look deeply inwards to understand our own positions, biases, stereotypes, expectations, and blindspots regarding underrepresented (and over-represented) groups and narratives. It’s important to understand how we see ourselves in our human ecosystems, and to de-center the hegemonic gazes.
Institutions and their teams have to look deep and hard at their own value systems and how these translate into the treatment and opportunity that students and professionals of different backgrounds receive, as well as in how their work is perceived and interpreted.
Multiculturalism and representation are not a game of hosts and guests–of those who are neutral, universal, irreplaceable, objective, and legitimate, and those who are not. Those who are individuals, and those who are interchangeable faces of supposedly monolithic groups. While the worst and most straightforward forms of dehumanization are behind us, we must be wary of not falling into tokenization in a rush to “look diverse”.
Besides, a great deal of Circus training centers, schools, and institutions are already implanted in low-income areas with high global majority percentages. It’s only fair to take concrete steps for these spaces to become more than opportunistic agents of gentrification.
If I shared the anecdote about Natalie Portman’s intervention at the Golden Globes, it’s because I wish to draw an important political parallel: European Circus has seen a strong feminist movement emerge in recent years, questioning gender imbalances, calling not only for equal representation between women and men on stage, in festivals, and in positions of power within the industry, but also for the immediate tackling of patriarchal and misogynistic violence wherever and whenever it occurs in Circus companies, institutions, schools or events. The movement has done a remarkable job analyzing and addressing the mechanisms of implicit and explicit discrimination and bias that constitute the gender glass ceiling within Circus.
We agree that we lose precious insight, experiences, and approaches when women aren’t in the industry in sufficient numbers. We agree that women should be able to tell stories, particularly their own, in their own terms, and shape how things are done. This logic can and should be extended to other underrepresented categories of people, and women should be at the forefront of that movement of political solidarity.
We have to even the playing field.
If we put such a system in place now, we might begin to see a different landscape in ten years. We might have a European Circus scene that reflects today’s Europe.
Acknowledgments: To beta readers for the early versions of this piece: Adebissi Adeye, Xenia Bannuscher, Alex Bastiane, Aurélie Disasi, Jenny Herman, Ris Schortinghuis, Misha Verdonck and Léah Wolff, and to Elise Missall and Mary O'Shea from The Handstand Press Magazine for their suggestions on the final version.