Alexis Shotwell ends Against Purity (2016), with a discussion of two stories both written by Hiromi Kawakami. Very briefly, the first story, “Kami-sama” (meaning “God Bless You”), describes the ordinary interaction between a bear and the narrator, and ends with the bear asking for a hug, which the narrator consents to give. The second narrative offers a revision: the story arc remains the same, but Kawakami introduces an “unpicturable kami [god] into the frame: the god of uranium” (199). The bear and narrator’s interaction is marked and complicated by a “nuclear imaginary,” where fear of radiation exposure shapes the bear’s request for a consensual hug, but the mundane everydayness of their walk by a river persists. We keep living. In this current moment, when touch is more conscious, more present, less available, how apt these revisions and the subsistence of mundane life and complicated contacts seem.

Circus culture is infused with care, consent practices, and support. We are used to holding each other up. Now without touch, without apparatuses, without our shared space, our understanding of presence, performance, and play is necessarily being remodeled. Live circus performance has shifted and with it elements of care and consent in our performance and training practices have consequently transformed.

A new virtual world. We pulse with possibilities, grounded in grief and loss. We smile and zoom and meet and talk. But we mourn what is out of grasp. Cancelled shows and cancelled income. Cancelled classes, practices, training sessions. In these new online spaces, our training environments shift, mutate, and extend commitments to consent and support in isolation. Circus care expands as we perform virtual spotting: online training, and verbal modifications, check ins, and daily messages, open spaces for crying, for trembling, for helpless laughter and excitable fear. We reach across borders.

We refuse an impulse to put on-hold and opt instead to hold each other from afar, shifting our definitions of productivity and product, alongside precarious timelines and futures. In these collaborative moments of new digital realities, geographies and maps are recalibrated and queer time (Muñoz, 2009) feels more alive, an investment in a future not yet knowable, unnameable sensations of a present not quite here.

Our bus was never meant to move, but our bodies were meant to touch. A new world, if only for a moment, necessitating another deep full breath.

Works Cited:

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYU Press, 2009.

Shotwell, Alexis. Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.