‘Take Me With You’: Circus Arts from the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Performance

In this talk, performance artist and historian Adin Walker will guide audiences through a history of circus performance and practice, beginning with Walker's archival research on nineteenth-century aerial arts and its relations to photography, early cinema, and spectacles of gender multiplicity. The talk will also include discussion of Walker's community-engaged work with contemporary circus and social circus practitioners in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as Walker's ongoing collaborations with playwright and circus artist L M Feldman. In particular, Walker will discuss a recent production of Feldman's new play titled Limber, a Love Story that Walker directed and choreographed with Emerson Stage in Boston, MA. The play follows an ensemble of artists training to become professional circus practitioners and the coaches who guide them. Moving from nineteenth-century aerial arts to contemporary circus to movement-driven theater that finds inspiration in circus histories and philosophies, Walker's talk ultimately follows how circus is an artform that teaches us what it takes to hold and carry each other.