Introduction: A Circus of Dominance
Six giant elephants enter a ring. They are holding each other’s tails by their trunks. For each animal, there are a couple of handlers. What ensues is a choreography of raised front legs, somersaults, twists, and turns. Welcome to the world of traditional circus. Here, man is the most powerful force in nature, and beauty lies in his ability to be the master of his body, animals, things, physics, and his whole environment.
Traditional circus has become a metaphor for humanity’s desire to conquer and control. But this dynamic extends far beyond the circus ring. Our collective obsession with control and division echoes through the political landscape. With the recent re-election of Donald Trump, the rise of far-right parties across Europe, ongoing oppressions in the Middle East, and a full-blown war in Ukraine, the drive for dominance and separation remains pervasive.
From Dominance to Horizontality: An Ecological Model of Circus Creativity
Contemporary circus offers a profound case study for a radically different ethos: one of collaboration, humility, and connection. It reimagines the relationship between humans, objects, and the environment—not as a hierarchy, but as a horizontal, interconnected and interdependent ecological system.
What do I mean when I speak of contemporary circus as an ecological practice? While it includes a responsibility that we, as creators and audiences, carry for the well-being of the planet, I am more interested in why such responsibility exists in the first place. At its core, contemporary circus invites us to reconsider how we interact with the world—both within the tent and outside of it. The circus itself becomes a space where humans acknowledge their place not as rulers, but as collaborators with all that surrounds them: things, tools, objects, materials, animals, laws of nature and one another.
This is why I believe introducing the concept of ecological cognition to a broader audience is so valuable. By exploring how contemporary circus artists create through an embrace of horizontality in their relationship with the environment, we can begin to imagine a world where humans recognize horizontality in all aspects of life.
What is ecological cognition?
The ecological model of cognition was developed by James J. Gibson in the 1960s. Gibson’s ecological model can be understood as an effort to rejoin the mind and body, the internal and the external, action and perception, organism and environment. According to Gibson, we make sense of the world by actively engaging with it. Living, means finding meaningful actions in the world— drinking a cup of coffee in the morning, taking a walk in a quiet park, taking the afternoon bus to the city, falling in love. We find meaning in what the environment affords us.
The concept of affordances is central to Gibson’s theory of cognition. In his most quoted definition of the term, Gibson writes:
„The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.”1
To give some examples—a chair affords sitting, a door handle affords grasping, a table affords placing another object, etc. But also, a loved one affords quality time, a good show affords the feelings of inspiration and so on.
Traditional Views of Creativity
Just as the traditional circus presented mastery over a disembodied material world, many classic views of cognition treat the mind, either as something separate from the body or as an internal quasi-computer processing an external reality. This can appear in studies on creativity as well, where the human mind is seen as the only source of ideas, while the outside world stays passive— just raw material to be shaped. Even though some of these views aren’t strictly dualistic (they often reduce everything to physical processes in the brain), they still leave the environment looking lifeless. The ecological approach moves beyond both the old mind-world, mind-body split and this one-sided focus on the brain, showing that creativity emerges from an ongoing, active relationship with the world around us.
However, as most artists know, this is rarely how creation unfolds. More often, the materials we work with—our tools, scenographies, and objects of research—seem to have a mind of their own. Creation happens in collaboration with these materials, through a process of discovery rather than projection. This is precisely how and where the artistic element of contemporary circus makes itself present: not as a performance of human mastery, but as a profound dialogue between artist, object, and environment. We, as circus artists, are often engaged in what Malafouris calls “creative thinging.”2
Whereas traditional models of creativity implied a relationship of mastery—of human intentionality over the material environment—the ecological approach and its central concept of affordances invite us to view creativity as a process that unfolds through the active interaction of a maker with her sociomaterial environment.
Affordances and the Artist: Body
Since affordances point to the relation between the organism and the environment, it is crucial to ask which features of the organism get coupled with environmental affordances, and how that influences the kind of creativity I am speaking of.
The affordances that the animal is able to engage with depend on the kind of body the animal possesses—its height, size, shape, etc. A fruit hanging from a tree affords being grasped and picked up by an animal with hands suited for grasping, such as a human.
In this sense, the kind of Cyr wheel one uses depends on one’s bodily specifics – a taller person will have a bigger cyr wheel, a smaller one – a smaller. Of course, this also means that one can play with such expectations of relative size.
Take, for instance, the work of Argentinian artist Juan Ignacio Tula. In his latest show, titled L’Instant T, he uses an oversized Cyr wheel, as if accentuating how change in size changes the affordances of this tool. The affordances of such an object are radically different from what we expect from a Cyr wheel, and this foregrounding of the device becomes central in equalizing the relationship of the artist and the object.
As the artist trains to become better in a certain discipline, their body changes as well, as if creating a continuous system with the device. The famous aphorism of Marshall McLuhan—“media as extension of man”—takes on a radical significance. The medium expands artistic capabilities, but also transforms the actual shape of the body and even the artists brain.
Affordances and the Artist: Skills
The kinds of affordances that the animal can engage with depend on the skills and abilities of the animal. According to Chemero, affordances could thus be described as “relations between the abilities of an animal and some feature of a situation.”3 We develop such abilities by allowing ourselves to be moved by objects and by exploring their affordances for movement.
In the circus, the development of new skills and an experimental application of already developed skills expands creative possibilities in a couple of ways. First of all, it is by developing the knowledge of a certain tool that the repertoire of acts is expanded. This is why training for many years in a specific circus discipline affords more creative actions and a better perception of affordances for creative movement.
Secondly, as Rietveld and Kiverstein put it, “applying skills in unconventional ways can be sufficient to allow one to discover new affordances offered by already familiar aspects of our environment.”4 Seeking novel materials for already developed skills can allow for a higher degree of creativity.
In Alice Tibery Rende’s performance Fora, we are presented with a rectangular box made of plexiglass and suspended in the air. Trained as a contortionist, Alice was seeking new material environments for the exploration of her discipline. This box, with its four walls, affords a limited space for movement and the possibility of attaching oneself to the box by putting pressure on it from inside. Alice’s skills as a contortionist and acrobat become the lens through which she is able to explore this unique material landscape.
Similarly, Belgian circus director and performer Alexander Vanternhout is famous for bringing various objects, often found outside of circus, into the circus space—bowling balls, ice shoes, and hammers. In his recent show VanThorhout, he creates a collaborative choreography with a hammer, long handle, and small head. After 20 minutes of spinning and manipulation, as the audience, we are led to question: where does Alexander end and the hammer begin? And who is influencing whom— the artist or the object?
By way of conclusion
Contemporary circus artists have become explorers of affordances. We don’t simply use objects; we form relationships that shape both the work and ourselves. Alice’s plexiglass highlights ideas of inside and outside, confinement and freedom. Alexander’s VanThorhout questions masculinity and our relationship with tools—control versus being controlled. My own show, Play(ces), examines spaces that belong to us or do not, reflecting on childhood, growth, and playfulness. Rather than seeking a “correct” use of an object, we embrace its multiple potentials.
Working closely with Marija Baranauskaite Liberman, who creates shows for non-human audiences —for objects—taught me that objects are not passive materials. They shape the creative process itself. The Sofa Project centers on the sofa public, engaging themes of coziness, heaviness, and fluffiness. Our “Duck Show Performance” poses questions about looking and being looked at, mirroring a duck’s reality.
Contemporary circus, unlike traditional circus, is a form of embodied research that encourages us to reconsider our relationship with the material world. It makes us aware of our patterns of perception and habitual engagement, reminding us that creativity involves conversing, not controlling.
I hope this article has offered new ways of thinking, so that next time you attend a circus show, you notice how the artist’s relationship with their tools shapes meaning. May it remind you that the world is full of unnoticed possibilities—truly a playground for our embodied minds.
Perhaps even our politicians could learn something about horizontality from contemporary circus artists.
The author of the article invites readers to explore these ideas further by reading his full thesis titled “Playgrounds of the Embodied Mind: An Ecological Approach to Contemporary Circus”. You can find it online.
Bibliography:
Chemero, Anthony. “An Outline of a Theory of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology vol. 15, no. 2 (June 2010): 181-195. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15326969ECO1502_5
Gibson, James J. Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, New York: Psychology Press, 2014. First
published 1979 by Houghton Mifflin.
Malafouris, Lambros. “Thinking as “Thinging”: Psychology with Things,” Current Directions in Psychological Science vol. 29, no. 1 (2020): 3-8. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419873349
Rietveld, Erik and Julian Kivertstein. “A Rich Landscape of Affordances,” Ecological Psychology vol.
26, no. 4 (October 2014): 325-352. https://doi.org/10.1080/10407413.2014.958035
This article was made possible thanks to a subsidy from the EU under Poland’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
