Franziska Trapp

“I believe I can fly” “I believe she could fall”.

Contemporary Circus Dramaturgy and the Perception of Risk.

Imagine: An athlete at the Olympic games and an acrobat in a circus perform the same trick. However, the audience perceives their presentations in completely different ways. While we observe the first to discover if the trick has been performed to perfection, we watch the latter to see whether the trick can be performed at all, or even fails. The circus performance is perceived as being more dangerous than the one of high-impact sports. This specific reception is based on the principle of the aesthetic of risk – not to be mistaken for the actual risk.

In traditional circus, risk is staged: The drum rolls announcing a difficult trick, the beat on the drums marking its success, the triple failure and a Babylonian structure separating the elements by degree of difficulty underscore the spectacular nature of each action. Thereby “the spectator perceives the illusions of circus performance rather than the reality of precise movement focused on the safe execution of the action. “(Tait 2016, 529)

In contemporary circus performances, the presentation of spectacular risk is not the focus. However – and this is the main hypothesis of this lecture – the aesthetic of risk is still a fundamental element of meaning constitution. The decisive factor is no longer that the risk is staged, but the belief that circus is risky. The aesthetics of risk underscores the phenomenality of the performance. For this reason, the recipient simultaneously follows the artistic performance, the action surrounding the depicted fictional character and worries about the artist. This dramaturgic structure has a high potential for emotional involvement as a basis for an artform that provokes societal change.

This keynote-lecture approaches the question of safety and risk from the perspective of the spectator. It is based on a four-year long research project, whose findings were published in the book Readings of Contemporary Circus. A Dramaturgy (DE: De Gruyter 2020; EN: Routledge 2023). All explanations are illustrated with concrete examples and enriched with short interactive exercises.

About the speaker

Dr. Franziska Trapp is a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. She is the founder of Circus | Studies and organizer of international conferences, including Semiotics of the Circus (2015), UpSideDown—Circus and Space (2017), Semaine du Cirque (2020), Écrire l’histoire du cirque (2022) and New Circus. New Architectures? (2024) and editor of the recently published anthology 360° Circus. Meaning. Practice. Culture (Routledge 2023). Trapp has worked for various circus productions such as the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain (FR) and Cirque Bouffon (DE) and collaborated as a dramaturge with Tall Tales Company (NL), Sysmo (BE), Julia Berger (DE) among others. She was awarded third place as Germany’s Best Junior Research Talent of 2019 (Academics/Die Zeit) and received the DGS Young Researchers Price 2020 (German Association of Semiotics) for her book entitled Readings of Contemporary Circus. A Dramaturgy (De Gruyter 2020, Routledge 2024 (EN)).