“In order to invent new futures, we must know our pasts”.
Dr Dea Birkett
So begins an event that is the first of its kind, a symposium looking into the lives of the circus women that came before. The symposium introduced a slew of female historical figures, like Patty Astley, first lady of circus, and Koringa, exotic handler of animals. Some speakers interrogated these histories, with stories of 18th and 19th century artists, families, and child prodigies. Others highlighted modern women that had paved the (muddy, dusty, unpredictable) road for independent entrepreneurship, such as 80s and 90s all-girl aerialist troupe Skinning the Cat, and its founder Rebecca Truman, whose exquisite costume designs and visionary sculptures are on display in a public exhibition at the University in Western Bank Library.
This was, by all accounts, first and foremost an event that valued the lived experience of the female circus artist alongside celebrating the women that came before, and whose shoulders upon which circus foundation has been built.
As a professional practitioner and PhD candidate, I decided that in order to attend and document this event, I would draw as a mode of inquiry. The historical lives of female circus artists can often be stereotyped, or left unrecognised as ambiguous figures. Like a sketch, the contours of these women are shaded by different interpretations, or else reflected in accounts that tend to frame them as spectacles. In art, we might recognise this as a caricature. Yet these women were not fixed figures, assured within history. While they may be remembered as circus artists, what else were they? Mothers. Labourers. Suffragettes. Indigenous women. Entrepreneurs. Their virtuosity has often eclipsed the ordinary textures of their lives. To attend the symposium with pencil and paper felt truer to the diffracted lives of these layered, fleshy complexities. Women that not only occupy a chimeric like identity comprised of many characteristics, but seemingly refuse a fixed categorisation.
Guest speakers included academics who had extensive personal experience in circus scholarship as well as practitioners of aerial arts and circus culture. For example, the National Fairground and Circus Archive’s Senior Archivist and co-curator of Rope Women, Arantza Barrutia, and long term practitioner of aerial arts Emily Rose Greenwood. In honour of the eclectic company of circus practitioners, academics and the curious, we created a Wonder Wall for the Wondrous Women of Circus, in which a series of prompts invited participants to wonder about the elements of the symposium and the future of women in circus.
Certainly, the culture surrounding circus has involved gritty determination, creativity and entrepreneurship, but it is important that in this entanglement, we understand that women’s labour has extended far beyond performance. They have rigged, directed, booked tours, managed companies, built communities and imagined entirely new forms of circus practice. Women have brought resilience and innovative facets to circus arts across time.
Rebecca Truman described touring in the 1980s (and later) as an exercise in continual invention. Costumes were handmade. Rigs were built from necessity rather than abundance. Marketing consisted largely of shouting your wares upon arrival. Off-season, Skinning the Cat was booked via corporate events, funding the next venture the following season. Such vision in costuming and constructing elaborate, interesting rigs to suspend aerial equipment from acted as inspiration for the next generation of circus artists.
Speaker Dr Marisa Carnesky has experienced first-hand supporting early-career performers through her teaching in Contemporary and Popular Performance at Rose Bruford College, London. As a circus artist, she draws from family histories, showmen stories, and archival inspirations. In 2004, Carnesky decided that she wanted to make a ghost train; a great structure that could carry a political message as well as draw focus on the plight of female refugees; “I wanted to make a ghost train about disappeared people. From East to West … across borders”.
Another pertinent theme to be raised was ageing out of circus. Practitioner and scholar Emily Rose Greenwood brought up the subject of age and performance: “I never talk about age because I want to keep performing”, suggesting that women in circus are believed to age out of their virtuosity. Interestingly, circus continues to inherit traditions that rarely accommodate ageing, maternity, sickness or retirement. Whilst the circus is a tented world of wonder, it also functions like any other economical beast; it generally utilises its workers until there is no further need for that product.
The circus is a worldwide wonder, and women are part of its infrastructure, but questions of women’s contribution and value not having an age limit remain. In a society that does not always fund its arts, what safety net and security can reasonably be expected of the women that perform, labour and risk their lives within the Big Top?
Perhaps most interestingly then, was the question towards the end of the event: what is the vision for women in circus? Aptly, the circus scholars in that room, that had come before and laid a path, gave their answers:
“There’s a huge interest in clowning amongst young people”. Dr Marisa Carnesky.
“I’d like to see places that teach circus skills work with a closer relation to circus industries i.e. teaching caravan/tour life”. Rebecca Truman.
“Collaborate, share and create a community of scholarship”. Professor Vanessa Toulmin.
“Funding that is practical and fosters a supportive ecology for women in circus”. Dr Dea Birkett.
Rebecca Plume is a PhD candidate at Buckinghamshire New University. Her research is interested in the entanglement of female circus artists with their apparatus, and what chimeric identity may emerge from such an encounter. She can also be found performing at Circus of Dreams at Chessington this Halloween 2026. Follow her work on Instagram: @circus_belle
Are you researching women in circus? Join the conversation on Padlet, on the Women in Circus Wonder Wall.
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