Exploring Popular Art and the Avant-Gardes: New Perspectives

The connections between circus and the avant-gardes in both research and aesthetic practice have already been explored in w/k. However, as this article shows, the circus-avant-garde theme has the potential to inspire and enrich three interdisciplinary areas of research with new insights: Embodied Research, pantomime as cultural protest and Postcolonial Studies. Discussing this potential, this article draws on, and adds to, some of the intersections between popular art in the form of circus and the avant-gardes, hinted at in a recently published edited collection. The aim is to stimulate lively future academic and artistic explorations into the interstices, and at the intersections, between circus and avant-garde research and art.