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About the Modern Circus Arts poster

This circus skills organizational system is intended to educate and inspire circus professionals, teachers, and students.

Why is a system like this useful?

Circus professionals, teachers, and students need a way to understand the relationships between modern circus apparatus and skills.

What can we learn from a circus organizational system?

We can learn a lot!  Circus organizational systems:
  • Comprehensively organize the skills, disciplines, and apparatus that the system’s creator believed were important to create “circus.”
  • Serve as a cultural record of how acts are performed in relation to one another.
  • Show the bounds of human creativity at a particular moment in history.
  • Suggest a common language for circus skills and apparatus.
  • Elucidate the steps an artist should take in order to learn a new skill.
  • Help a teacher or school set their curriculum.

How was this organizational system created?

  • Created by Amanda Gatewood, PhD, between 2020-2023
  • Consulted with circus artists at the Madison Circus Space in Wisconsin, USA
  • Incorporated three rounds of feedback from the Circademics Facebook group
  • Reviewed
    • other circus organization systems,
    • YouTube videos of circus searched in multiple languages,
    • live circus performances,
    • publicly available information on the internet, and
    • websites of circus prop vendors such as Flowtoys and Renegade Juggling

Where did the idea for an organizational system for circus come from?

The Gurevich System was the first system created (that we know of) for classifying circus arts.  Unfortunately, it is not up to date.

The Gatewood System is a comprehensive update to the Gurevich System. The Gatewood System has been influenced by other circus organizational systems, too (such as systems proposed by Burgess, Dokucirco, Bortoleto, and more).

Where else has this image been published?

An older version of this graphic was published in the article "Runaway Circus" on August 23, 2023 by the Metro Silicon Valley weekly paper in San Jose, CA, USA.

Circus Talk published a story called "Developing a Circus Organizational System" on November 27, 2023.  It describes how and why this graphic was created.  
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