#CircusSoWhite, 2/2
This text was originally published in the 9th issue of The Handstand Press Magazine in December 2024.
Introduction
In the first part of this essay, I proposed a reflection on how the European circus sector is doing with regards to access and inclusion of BIPOC people, particularly when it comes to those who are European-born. Through drawing parallels with the domains of soccer and ballet, I was revisiting the past and put forward a vision of a future for European circus with equalized opportunities and educational infrastructure.
In this second part of the essay, I want to zoom in from the structural to the interpersonal, which is such a big part of our sector, focussing on some of the challenges that global majority people face in the circus field today.
This text was inspired by my own experiences and observations, but also by the conversations I had between September 2023, and October 2024 with the circus and cultural workers Vicki Dela Amedume, Maira de Oliveira Aggio, Marco Motta, Mounâ Nemri, Sofie Anny Nicea V., and John-Paul Zaccarini, as well as casual exchanges with other professionals.
I am aware that this kind of topic can cause discomfort and shame, particularly when the tendency is to fall back on good vs evil binaries and essentializations. While these logics offer the comfort and reassurance of simplicity, it is important to acknowledge that binaries do not accurately reflect the complexity of our identities, our systems and our world.
“BIPOC” isn’t a monolith. The racialized aspects of our experiences are indissociable from our individualities, as well as other aspects of our identities, like citizenship, migration journeys, gender, class, religion, ability, education, queerness, parenthood, neurodivergence, geography, trauma, etc. All these aspects shape our lives, work, choices, stances and careers. While the BIPOC label can be useful in a sociological sense, it’s important to keep in mind that it is an umbrella term for distinct groups and communities, who also have their own relationships among themselves.
I write this as a mestizo Latin American, having experienced first hand many of the issues I write about, while belonging to an ethnic community that has yet to fully let go of the values and racial hierarchies of colonization.
As my friend yamna atlassi, a consultant, facilitator, and public speaker in diversity and inclusion in the cultural sector says so eloquently: the question is not whether one is racist or not, because we all are - even BIPOC people ourselves. Rather, the question is how we come to identify, counter, and dismantle the racism in us, as we oppose it on a systemic level.
Dear reader, I hope you will approach this as an invitation to look within and around. I hope that this piece can also encourage aspiring and incoming young global majority professionals to persevere and feel less alone in their journeys.
A tale of blindspots and biases
In the beginning of my first year of circus school, my fellow non-EU classmates and I, who were all Latin American, got called to the office. The year prior, two students (one European and one non-European) had been caught shoplifting items worth an amount significant enough to get them in major trouble. The European student got a fine. For the non-European, the incident compromised their visa application process, and ultimately got them deported. This was related back to us as a cautionary tale, and we were told not to steal. The school’s administration might have been concerned with our ability to attend class rather than the morality of shoplifting, but their action was painfully aligned with pre-existing racial and ethnic biases in Europe.
Looking back, I am appalled at the school team shortsight, but it was a perfect example of a series of dynamics that are common in the circus field as much as outside of it. As a young immigrant, the memory stuck with me, and together with many other experiences of the sort, it contributed to creating a feeling that I needed to prove myself deserving, and counterbalance a negative perception of “people like me”.
When we think about racism and discrimination, we often think about the most virulent, explicit forms of bigotry. The more subtle ones often go unnoticed, as does their cumulative effect on the psyche and lives of those who experience them. How do teams and institutions that vow to promote values of equality account for these?
In 2020, online platform CircusTalk organized its first Wake Up Call for Inclusion digital panel, on the topics of institutional barriers and individual biases in the Performing Arts. During this panel, Filipino-American circus artist and director Joseph Pinzon recalled conversations with a major international circus company in the early 2000s. He was told that even though they loved his work and he was “on top of their list”, there were no roles for him, nor did they think there would be. Despite being one of the best in the market, he was not main character material.
If you close your eyes and imagine a successful acrobat, a main character, a brilliant producer, or an important festival director, who do you picture?
And now, who do you picture when you imagine a shoplifter?
Representation
In the first part of this essay, I mentioned the importance of representation from the point of view of the audience, but what about the other side of the coin? What is it like to be one in a handful, or the only one?
We can often talk about a racial and ethnic equivalent to the “Smurfette principle”, which describes the presence of one woman in an otherwise all-man ensemble. The inclusion in a team of a single ethnic minority person is thought to be both enough to diffuse any presence of racism, and fill in for the representation quota of all individuals of that group, or even all ethnic minorities.
The weight of such a symbolic position, of knowing that one’s words, work and actions come to reflect upon thousands (or millions) of other individuals while also potentially becoming a trailblazer for future generations is something many racialized artists are acutely aware of. At best, it can convey a sense of meaning that reinforces determination. At worst, it becomes a paralyzing force, making someone lose the freedom of being an individual rather than an ambassador.
This freedom is one that Belgium-born Brazilian Afro-European performer and textile artist Sofie Anny Nicea V. mentions to have found only when, after beginning Circus in Portugal, she continued her training in Brazil, where over half the population identifies as having African and/or Indigenous ancestry. Had she not had that experience, she says, she might have dropped circus completely. How to recreate that freedom for others like her?
Tokenization and typecasting
Just as women are assumed to lack universalism because of their gender, and expected to talk about “women’s issues”, global majority performers and cultural workers are often considered non-neutral, and expected to stick to their area of expertise. Namely, their racial and ethnic identities.
Self-commodification becomes hard to avoid, and it often boils down to two flavors; the entertaining, spicy ‘other’, or the ‘trauma clown’, a term that was coined by the Canadian multidisciplinary artist Vivek Shraya to allude to the link between a marginalized artist’s portrayal of suffering in their work, and institutional support and interest.
Artists like Marco Motta, who gained notoriety with his award-winning Strange Fruit aerial straps solo, face the challenges of a hunger and demand for representations of Black pain. While venues increasingly program performances that explore trauma and experiences of oppression, there is generally little put in place in terms of structural care and systems of support for artists and teams through these emotionally and psychologically taxing performances. In Assum Preto, his newest project, Marco has resorted to collective care practices from Afro-Brazilian, and more largely Afro-descendant diasporas, to fill in for the still absent institutional ones.
While quotas are often the only way to diversify a group due to bias, systemic obstacles and homophily (the tendency to seek out or gravitate towards those who are similar to oneself), the process of tokenization erases the individual in favor of a performative political statement. Many of us have been hired, only to discover that our employers knew little about who we were and what our work was about. ”We” hadn’t been hired. A token had.
Those who manage to stick to the field develop different strategies to cope and counterbalance this objectification. With their projects MACACADA and Mektoub, Maïra de Oliveira Aggio and Mounâ Nemri (La Nour company) aim to directly subvert the expectations and stereotypes they are confronted with by directly playing with them, reclaiming their narratives in their own terms.
Artistic director and founder of the UK company Upswing, Vicki Dela Amedume, states the importance of care in the creative process and staging. In Showdown (created in co-production with the Chamäleon Theater in Berlin), the production deliberately takes on an entertaining, playful tone and a game show format while tackling the topic of systems of oppression and exploitation. The goal of this strategy is both to invite the audience to question their participation in such systems, and to protect their global majority cast from re-traumatization.
Conditional inclusion
While there is a growing demand for BIPOC professionals, this demand is often accompanied by specific expectations in terms of the kind of work we are to produce, as well as an (often unspoken) expectation of docility and submission. Career advancement often follows an assimilation and reproduction logic.
Walking on thin ice and its corresponding psychological load is a constantly draining experience. The distrust isn’t unwarranted, particularly for not-yet-established professionals whose employment is uncertain, precarious and temporary at best. Just as men-dominated fields can be hostile and taxing to women, even without ill-intent and more so when the gender imbalance is pronounced, the same dynamics see themselves reproduced here.
Securing resources to create and perform one’s work and provide for oneself in a saturated market is hard enough. Many artists and workers from underrepresented ethnicities and cultural backgrounds mention the stress of being policed in a field where experiences and voices like theirs are rare, white supremacist values are embedded in the foundations of the field itself, and people in the majority are often unaware of their own positions and biases.
While disruption and challenges to the status quo are natural effects of a more diversified field, an industry that on paper is all for the latter still tends to meet the former with pushback, annoyance or even anger. Professionals that point out structural problems invisible to others often come to be considered difficult and oversensitive.
The underlying belief seems to be that whatever our contributions, we remain guests in an industry we take part in creating.
Decolonizing one’s practice
Historical and geopolitical European dominance has led to cultural industries shaped worldwide by Christian, white-supremacist, euro-centric standards criteria and principles, and the circus field is no exception.
It’s a balancing act to negotiate one’s inclusion and career advancement with the resulting burnout of constructing oneself according to systems that erase and devalue those like you. And yet, many global majority workers, in circus and other arts, constantly have to engage in this. The cognitive dissonance needed to operate within a system, which by participating in it, forcefully legitimizes and uplifts systems that are simultaneously trying to bring you down, is no small feat. The need to build parallel value systems that de-center European hegemonic ones appears as, at the very least, a survival tool, and often, a long term ambition of building into larger decolonial narratives and movements.
These are questions central to John-Paul Zaccarini’s FutureBrownSpace, which aims at creating safer spaces for global majority practitioners to enrich their practice, reflect, rest free from the white gaze, while holding conversations with white majority institutions about racialized dynamics within them.
Many circus professionals are also cultural hybrids by birth, upbringing and education. The same white European adjacency and cultural capital that has allowed us to ‘succeed’ in the field can in turn become an obstacle towards building new narratives about ourselves. Many of us are deep in the long, difficult and painful process of self-decolonization, of loosening the grip of Empire on our minds, imaginaries, and bodies. In the context of a high-risk, competitive professional field with little to no worker protections, the negotiation between liberation and material survival is a challenging one.
Resilience, community and support networks
The importance of having a support network to fall back on, as well as mentors and “elders” to look up to for advice is something that keeps coming up in exchanges and conversations. Oftentimes, these mentors and elders come in the form of literature from around the world, and the Global South and its diaspora in particular.
Having a sense of community, inside and outside of circus, to help cushion the exhaustion ensuing from potentially alienating, violent and hostile work environments becomes a form of self-care. Reaching out to other people in similar positions, whether in this or comparable industries, can offer the validation of lived experiences, tools to overcome violence, and help individuals develop resilience and build robust coping mechanisms.
Above all, the practice of community builds directly into decoloniality and is in itself an act of resistance. It’s important to understand that the path towards a more representative circus field is a long one, where the obstacles and challenges can easily crush isolated individuals, but cannot crush supportive and nourishing communities.
Final Thoughts
“White privilege is an exceedingly comfortable perch to occupy, at least from what I can gather. To give it up will be as materially inconvenient and difficult for white people as that privilege currently is for Black people. Either white people don’t yet understand that, or they know it but are not willing to do so - and so we are left with actions like ‘amplifying Black voices’, or ‘advocating for the Black community’, which although helpful are not fundamentally redistributive or disruptive to the status quo. How to tell white people that going on marches, patronising Black-owned businesses, reading Black writers, and amplifying our voices - that all of that is not enough? That if they take allyship seriously, they stand to lose the privileges that are as integral to their lives as breathing. That losing those privileges is necessary. That allyship will cost them the shape of their lives as they know it. And that I do not think they are willing to pay that price.” - Otegha Uwagba, WHITES, on race and other falsehoods.
Stages are powerful places. They give opportunities to tell a story, to share a vision of the world, of yourself, of us, of the future, in your own terms. For the duration of a performance, you have the attention of dozens, hundreds, thousands. Even-maybe, particularly- in mass entertainment, these stories matter . You can ask the little Black girls who saw themselves represented for the first time in the trailer for The Little Mermaid.
Election after election, across the continent, we are seeing public discourse increasingly normalizing and embracing xenophobia and uninhibited racism. Every day, Europe is telling its global majority people that we don’t truly belong, and that we don’t really matter.
How can, and should, our paradigms of creation and of professional education change in order to side with justice, liberation, and dignity for all?
If the goal is clear, and I suspect most of us agree, to get there we must embrace discomfort and disruption. We must let the old world order fall. There is no soft, easy way to a field that builds a different kind of legacy without redistribution, and without the objective loss of power, space and opportunity for those of us who have ‘succeeded’ in the field under the current system.
Will we relinquish power and resources for the sake of justice, finally living up to the proclaimed values of circus as a subversive, brave, free art form… or will we remain a homogenous, privileged playground for those of us deep into, and adjacent, to white hegemony?
Beta readers: Adebissi Adeye, Aurélie Disasi, misha verdonck, Meret Meier (The Handstand Press), Léah Wolff.