Cirque du Soleil - and Beyond: Québec's Expanding Circus Worlds

Professor Charles R. Batson (Union College, Schenectady) - With its billion-dollar annual revenue stream, its international touring shows and its striking cultural presence in such destination-cities as Las Vegas, Cirque du Soleil has greatly contributed to the image of Québec as a world-renowned capital of the circus arts. Tonight’s talk offers an exploration of this brightly shining figure by anchoring it in historical and cultural specificities that helped shape the development of Québec’s highly influential cirque nouveau. The presentation then examines ways in which we can see that this Cirque is not just Cirque du Soleil, as Québec’s circus worlds find significant expansion beyond any one enterprise, beyond any one particular aesthetics, and beyond provincial and national borders.

Charles R. Batson is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Union College, Schenectady, NY, where he also won the Stillman Award for Excellence in Teaching. He is the author of Dance, Desire, and Anxiety in Early Twentieth-Century French Theatre (Ashgate, 2005), co-editor of a 2012 special double issue of Contemporary French Studies, and co-editor of 2 recent issues of Québec Studies devoted to a Queer Québec. A member of Montreal’s Working Group on Circus Research, he has published work on French and Francophone cultural production and performance in such journals as SITES, Québec Studies, Gradiva, Dance Chronicle, Nottingham French Studies, Contemporary French Studies, and French Politics, Culture, and Society. He co-edited with Louis Patrick Leroux a compendium of essays on Québec’s contemporary circus called Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries (McGill-Queens University Press, 2016), and he is co-leading, with Karen Fricker and Patrick Leroux, a series of research encounters in the new field of inquiry they are calling Circus and Its Others.