In times of climate catastrophe, refugee crises and Covid-19, the question of the responsibility that artists and scholars have is becoming increasingly urgent. What is the role of circus within society? How far does this form of art and entertainment correlate with historical and contemporary social interests? How does circus research position itself as a relevant field of research within academia in the 21st century? Those questions will be explored within the series Adventures in Circus Research–Facing a New Decade, curated by academic Dr. Franziska Trapp. By featuring circus researchers, we give them the space to explain the nature and significance of their research directly to the circus community and to highlight the practical impact of their research on the circus world and its relevance for society.

In this second article of the series, the four researchers Bauke Lievens, Quintijn Ketels, Sebastian Kann and Vincent Focquet, who collaborated on the research project The Circus Dialogues,  share with us fragments from the editor’s note of their new book Thinking Through Circus: If we understand circus as an embodied thinking practice, what does it think? And how can circus as embodied thinking open up space to act? Thinking starts from what they call a certain charme, a spark that lights up between people, turning them into friends. This friendship is not based on sharing the same ideas, but instead inheres in and a...