In March 2020, with the rapid spread of COVID-19, bringing the initially localized virus to pandemic proportions, most performing arts ceased their activities around the world. We are interested specifically at what impact this has had on the contemporary circus scene worldwide through an interactive open-source participatory mapping model. Circus practitioners, producers, and scholars are all welcome to identify significant sites and venues, tour itineraries and recollections. Users will be able to write short narratives that are attached to locations.
Concordia University Professors Louis Patrick Leroux (English and Études francaises) and Sébastien Caquard (Geography, Planning and Environment) working with their students Anna Vigeland, Alison Bowie and José Alavez have developed an OpenSource form-based map. The team is responsible for the design and maintenance of the map and its moderating and ongoing functionality.
The project is run out of Concordia University with the support of The Montreal Working Group on Circus Research and the Geomedia lab, where the map is housed.
Moderators from the team and the community will vet messages in French, English, and Spanish to begin. We will later add Portuguese (Brazilian), Simplified Chinese and Russian as additional options once we have the support and the resources.
Click here to access to the moderators guidelines
To offer an accessible and moderated online space for the circus community to identify, tag and to share stories and informed observations on specific circus sites
To create a world map of circus sites of significance to the circus and circus research communities
To harness much oral and unwritten history through the online portal.
To identify sites of interest, both historically and in contemporary practice.
To map passages, trajectories of tours of important shows for historical reference.
To build a lively, ongoing resource for artists, teachers and circus studies researchers.
To identify sites of multiple significance.
Community-building through sharing, mapping and storytelling.
A rich source of evolving and community-corrected information that will be of use as referential data to the circus community and to researchers.
From the data set, researchers will be able to identify and understand the full and nuanced interconnectedness of the global circus community, its natural clusters, its cross-pollination.
Close reading of the storytelling narratives will be useful to social historians and anyone interested in creative discourse analysis.
Comparative circus and touring activity (historical, current and post-pandemic). We will be able to chart the recovery as it occurs.