“The circus we do today”: possibilities, trajectories and limits in the resignification of circus art in Argentina

Abstract

Various historical changes have taken place since that circus, currently classified as a “traditional” circus, which was reproduced from generation to generation and characterized by its itinerancy. In these transformation processes, legitimate ways of doing circus are disputed, which, in Argentina, as well as in other territories, are characterized by a dynamic tension between tradition and innovation, between the past, the present and the future. In addition, these processes involve debates about the classifications of the artistic genre style – fundamentally between the so-called traditional circus, the new circus, the contemporary circus –, as well as in relation to the place occupied by technique, body, artistic message and creativity, generating tensions around the possibilities and limits in the processes of artistic resignification. Therefore, the objective of this article is to analyse the debates around the possibilities of resignification of the circus that have been developing in at least the last three decades in Argentina. Historical sources will be used together with data from different ethnographic researches that I have been developing together with circus artists in the last decades.