Issue link: http://floodesign.uberflip.com/i/1163853
the person subjected to them? The language of that struggle itself describes those limitations, just as acrobatics has something to say about gravity and about the movement characteristics of objects subjected to it. As a viewer I learn most from those who practice the kind of self-effacement required to achieve virtuosity, and whose performance language is complicated by their attempts to get it right. Recently I've found myself learning from Cori Olinghouse, who is looking at clowning as despair-navigation, through an alternately exquisite, posed and decayed eccentric dance; Wally Cardona, who explores the personal relevance of a foreign movement language for a perspective on the sympathy and alienation inherent in learning it; Jennifer Monson, who is mining physical empathy in order to renew fast-closing channels of human connection; and Angie Pittman, who examines the nobility of privacy in a presentational context. I learn from these contemporary artists, and others, just as I learn from the evolving traditions of dance, mask and circus, which are central to my work. I've tried to extend my understanding of circus dramaturgy by considering the relationship between clown and acrobatics, and reframing this relationship in actorly terms using performance personas and the movement styles within historical theatrical forms, including melodrama, commedia and tragedy. Can the circus framework, with its virtuosic handling of "gravity" and boundary-denial of "clowning," be pivoted away from circus itself and made to frame instead the way people seek to know their own virtuosity, gravity, clowning and sense of history — circus as one's private historicity? 13 | PEAKPERFS.ORG CHARACTER STUDY "STRONG SMELL" CIRCA 1770-1781 BY FRANZ XAVER MESSERSCHMIDT. THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, LONDON IS LICENSED UNDER CC BY 4.0 WHEN I THINK OF FATAL CHARADES, I THINK OF CLOWNS. FOR ME THERE'S NOT ENOUGH CLOWNING IN THE CIRCUS. THE CLOWNS TELL THE VIEWER THAT THE ACROB ATS ARE WRONG TO THINK OF LIMITATIONS AS INFLEXIBLE — THEY'RE POROUS — EVEN WHILE THE ACROB ATICS AND ITS RISKS ARE REAL.