Introduction

Movement is an inextricable aspect of changing social configurations. As mind-body, nature-nurture binaries are increasingly challenged, not only by shifting intellectual frameworks, but by the very ways in which social and cultural programmes and initiatives are designed, the role of kinaesthetic dynamics and the kinds of social and cultural modes of engagement they encourage or make possible, is increasingly being taken into consideration within community development theory and practice (Breivik and Sudmann, 2018; Morton et al, 2019). Corporeal habits and modes of engaging the world shape both individuals’ subjective experiences and, potentially, collective modes of co-creation, altering how worlds are materially shaped. Moreover, while the movement of bodies occurs at the local and ‘micro’ level – foregrounding questions of touch, physical balance and affectivity – the conditions of movement are shaped by wider institutional structures and policies. This chapter focuses on global practices of ‘social circus’, highlighting some of the ways in which circus arts are currently being used as a community development modality to transform human social experiences and relations through the creation of conditions for experimentation with bodily movement and bodily relations. It further explores the ways in which questions of the personal, the interpersonal, the community and the institutional interrelate within the context of programmes using circus arts in the service of social and community development goals.

Antonio Gramsci (1971: 138) famously argued that each individual ‘participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it’. The work of ‘development’ within community-based arts practices is not then merely a matter of conceiving the world, but also living and navigating it from within. More recently, Meade and Shaw (2007: 419) argue that ‘community arts constitute important sites of counter-hegemonic struggle against limited and limiting accounts of human experience’. Artistic practices can provide sites for resisting received ways of encountering the world and altering a sense of one's role within such a world. Each practice, project and programme offers unique aesthetic and disciplinary tools that may shed light on the ideological and discursive formations that shape subjectivity through, for example, the creation and discussion of images, as well as the creation of alternate images and development of alternate practices.