What History of a constantly evolving art form? Circus and its reinvention

Contemporary animal-free, acrobatics-based virtuosic circus in Québec is an export service industry generating over $1 billion a year (Leroux, 2016a), has created a thriving scene for Québec artists engaged with the most important creators worldwide from theatre, dance, circus, multimedia, and music (Jacob, 2016 and David & al, 2020), and is a point of national pride used as a recurrent tool for soft-diplomacy in government (Zhang, 2016). Quebec circus culture reflects national ambitions of exceptional creativity and of economic autonomy, yet it also has a long, complex history, as this research will unveil, that allows us to understand the society from which it emerges.

Circus regularly recalibrates Québec's thriving cultural expression, one that was traditionally based on language but now has shifted its focus to innovative creativity and distinctive technical expertise. Incredibly, there is to date no detailed sociohistorical book-length account of its development, impacts, and potential (current research includes Boudreault, 1999; Beauchamp & Lavoie, 2003; Jacob & Vézina, 2007; Jacob, 2019; Leroux & Batson, 2016; Place au cirque! 2021). The proposed research program, steeped in oral history and community participation, is an ambitious one which involves many student researchers as veritable collaborators, many of which are from the Québec circus community. I will draw from a decade's worth of observation, discussions, teaching and advising circus practitioners, carefully collating facts, and especially, to draw on the trust and collaboration of a community that is finally ready to share its history. Circus in Québec has long been presented as having "reinvented" the form and been conceived "outside" of history (Leroux, 2016b). The project's goal is to produce scholarly articles, public talks, a video exhibition of selected interviews, all leading and contributing to the first scholarly monograph on Québec circus history from 1798 to 2024.

Before Québec became a global beacon for circus production (with Cirque du Soleil as the most visible example), for over 150 years, the province exported hundreds of talented strongmen, strongwomen, acrobats, equestrians, and contortionists to American circuses whose authentic culture disappeared, taking on the required "ethnic" identities that shows required (Leroux, 2016b; Place au cirque! 2020; Leroux, 2022). The research will reveal a history of virtuosity and shifting personas, of the international circulation through constant touring of Québec-born artists in the 19th Century and the later emergence of a "reinvented circus" as it imposed itself internationally, aesthetically and commercially with Cirque du Soleil in the 1980s. A serious study of past and recent performances will also allow us reconsider the reification of recolonizing tropes that have traversed the themes and stock representations of gender, otherness and orientalism as seen in commercial Québec circus. Drawing on recent and current historiographic practices in performing arts, this rich multidisciplinary, transnational and singular history of Québec circus and its place in the world will further advance our understanding of contemporary circus' unexpected and exceptional cultural contribution to Canada and beyond. This relationship to the Other and to international trends and markets is an underexplored element of Québec circus history and practices that will be examined through a careful study of documented artistic impact across continents. Researching and writing the history of Québec circus will carry in its very accomplishment, the act of questioning many of its tenets, notably its self-creation and lack of historical depth. This significant Québec sociocultural art form and industry will finally have its published history.