Searching for an Escape: An Autoethnographic Study of Aesthetic Innovation in Professional Circus School
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Western professional circus education, innovation is often cast as a positive, disruptive force. Openness to innovation is lauded by many for enabling young artists to express their unique, authentic selves. This optimistic story, however, fails to consider innovation’s ideological function in post-Fordist capitalism, and in so doing, obscures the ambivalent ways students experience the call to innovate. In this study, I use reflexive journaling to unsettle this narrative by exploring the polyvalent ways innovation features in my life as a student at École nationale de cirque. I explore the competing ways different members of the community, including students, coaches/administrators, and casting agents/companies, understand innovation in order to reveal the pressures students must navigate to find artistic satisfaction and professional viability. The data are interpreted in light of my positionality and contextualized using performance studies research. Overall, innovation is not the straightforward, liberating force it is often made out to be. While many students at École nationale de cirque aspire to innovate, they can also feel pressure to do so to win social capital and professional advantages. The type of innovation they are able to explore, however, is bounded by material constraints, ideological structures, and market incentives, which reward novelty and uniqueness but discourage questioning norms. Coupled with the post-Fordist shift from mass production to hyper-individual competition, this transforms innovation into a tool for self-promotion. In Western contemporary circus education, students can struggle to navigate these conflicting pressures, thus experiencing the call to innovate as a source of anxiety as much as freedom. Dans la formation professionnelle des arts du cirque en Occident, l’innovation est souvent perçue comme une force positive et disruptive. Beaucoup prônent l’ouverture à l’innovation pour permettre aux jeunes artistes d’exprimer leur personnalité unique et authentique. Mais ce discours optimiste oublie de prendre en compte la fonction idéologique de l’innovation dans le capitalisme post-fordiste. Ce faisant, il cache l’ambivalence dans la manière de percevoir cet appel à l’innovation aux yeux des étudiant·e·s. Dans cette étude, j’ai choisi d’écrire sous la forme d’un journal de bord pour venir bousculer ce discours en explorant les multiples façons que prend l’innovation dans ma vie d’étudiante à l’École nationale de cirque. Je me penche sur les différentes manières de comprendre l’innovation parmi les membres de la communauté (étudiant·e·s, coachs/administrateur·rice·s, agents/sociétés de casting) afin de mettre en lumière les pressions qui pèsent sur les étudiant·e·s pour trouver l’épanouissement artistique et professionnel. L’interprétation des données tient compte de ma position et leur contextualisation s’appuie sur des recherches menées sur la performance. D’une manière générale, l’innovation ne constitue pas la force libératrice que l’on voudrait souvent nous renvoyer. Alors que la volonté d’innover se retrouve chez beaucoup d’étudiant·e·s de l’École nationale de cirque, elle s’accompagne d’une réelle pression liée au capital social et aux avantages professionnels à acquérir. Toutefois, leur quête d’innovation est indissociable des contraintes matérielles, des structures idéologiques et de l’influence du marché, qui tend à récompenser la nouveauté et l’originalité, mais qui dissuade tout questionnement des normes. Si l’on combine ce phénomène à l’évolution post-fordiste où l’on passe d’une production en série à une concurrence hyperindividuelle, l’innovation devient alors un outil d’autopromotion. Dans la formation circassienne contemporaine en Occident, les étudiant·e·s peuvent avoir du mal à gérer ces pressions contradictoires et ainsi vivre cette incitation à innover autant comme une source d’anxiété que de liberté.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".