¶ Book of Hours · dawn
…expanding what we’re capable of.
A Phoenix Valley nonprofit for the folk who make live culture
Somebody makes something, somebody encounters it, and something inside us moves. That’s why we join the circus.
…to experience more.
…to become capable of more.
…to make something of your own.
…to do it among others.
And to keep being able to.
Different tents. Same trick, everywhere, for as long as anyone can trace.
Being an account of the same trick, performed everywhere
Someone throws. Someone catches.
SOMEONE WATCHES
Someone learns.
Someone says, teach me.
Someone says, use my room.
Someone says, your shoulder looks wrecked, go talk to her.
Someone says, here's twenty bucks, keep doing this.
Someone says, that was terrible.
Someone goes home
and makes something better.
Circus.
punk show. A Renaissance faire. A drum circle. A puppet theater. A busker on a sidewalk. An aerial company. A basement band. A clown. A dance floor. A circle pit… which is literally a ring. A.k.a. a circus.
A circle pit is a ring of people who make a ring out of nothing but bodies and sound. Circus is Latin for ring. That is the oldest circus there is, and you have already been in one.
The tent isn't the circus. The stage isn't. The ukulele isn't. The costume isn't. Even the performance isn't, quite. The circus is what happens when people gather around something alive.
Every one of us was somebody in a crowd who couldn’t stop thinking about it on the drive home. Who found out how bad they were, and kept going anyway. Until one day somebody in the crowd couldn’t stop thinking about them.
Sometimes dramatic. Sometimes subtle. An expansion of experiential capacity. Wonder. And yeah, a bit of horror. Abyss and thrills. Some laughs. Something new, something novel, something fresh.
That's what the circus has always been about.
Everybody in here is reaching for something. A few of them don't know what yet.
You can be 19 or 59. Punk or rennie.
Professional or beginner.
Everyone arrives for a different reason.
Nobody knows yet what they'll leave able to do.
The witness tries, the beginner practices, the maker performs, and the teacher becomes a student again. Usually in that order. Usually more than once.
Everybody was terrible once. Some of us still are, on purpose.
Come be terrible in front of people. It's where everybody starts.
They come for the skill, and find another relationship to their own body. They come for the show, and encounter something they didn't expect to feel. They come for the people, and find another kind of belonging.
They come because they got hurt, and find people who understand the thing they don't want to give up.
Which of those did you recognize?
Maybe you have something to put into the world. Maybe you want to find out what you can do. Maybe you simply want to keep doing the thing you already love.
I have something to put into the world.
Make the thing. Risk being seen. Give somebody something they could not have encountered if you had not made it.
A song can exist because somebody wanted to make the song. A puppet is worthwhile because it's delightful. A stunt is worth learning because it produces wonder. None of that needs a reason first. Make something nobody has seenI want to find out what I can do.
Nobody arrives good at it. Practice gives your body, attention, voice, timing, and imagination new differences to notice and new choices to make.
Throw higher. Breathe lower. Hear this interval. Shift this weight. Hold this silence. Respond sooner. Miss differently. Again.The index is full of people who teach this. Circus Sundays is a room to come do it in, every week, with guest instructors turning up.
Collect differences · skill is the doorwayHere’s who is already doing it →I want to keep being able to participate.
Bodies wear. Ears take sound. People get injured. Touring exhausts. Crew works brutal hours. Pits hurt. Life happens.
A linebacker gets a trainer on the sideline and a recovery room on Monday. The aerialist gets a spotter. The drummer on tour gets gas-station coffee.
There are therapists and bodyworkers and people who understand the unique demands of certain cultures, certain identities, certain performing arts, certain vocations. We're pulling together who helps with what.
The first room is already open. Circus Sundays · every Sunday, twelve thousand square feet in North Scottsdale, with what a pro team's recovery room has in it. This time it's for the drummer. Sliding scale, nobody turned away.
More play before the play runs out. Keep people in the game · Fight Early DeathPractice changes what can be performed. Performance reveals what needs practice. Both reveal what requires care. Care restores enough room for further practice and performance.
Encounter distinction. Develop distinction. Protect the capacity for continued distinction. And around again.
One philosophy under all three
Honor the constraints that define the game.
Train the constraints that can expand.
Remove the constraints that needlessly exclude.
Then play the available field.
You thought health meant beige wellness people. Fight Early Death hands you earplugs at a hardcore show. Healthcare can happen next to a pit without turning the pit into a clinic.
We keep the tent up so the next weird kid
has somewhere to walk into.
Think of something you can notice now that you once could not. A beat. A balance point. A breath. A timing window. A look from an audience. That difference matters.
Before you juggle, three objects are three objects.
Then there are trajectories, apexes, timing windows, peripheral information, throw quality, hand position, recovery possibilities.Before you perform, being watched may simply be threatening.
Then you begin distinguishing attention from judgment, silence from rejection, tension from failure, mistake from catastrophe, audience energy from your own internal state.You do not merely understand balance. You balance.
You do not merely discuss courage. You step out. You do not merely conceptualize embarrassment. You drop the ball. In front of everyone.Then you discover you are still there. Pick it up. Try again. Now something has changed.
What have you learned to notice that you once couldn't see?
So here is the name for it
A distinction is an ability to perceive or enact
a difference that previously wasn't available.
Human freedom is partly a function
of available distinction.
That's the trade. More differences, more moves.
One way we hold the mystery
Perception is King.
Love is Queen.
Reality is the realm. The body is the kingdom's terrain. Play is the freedom still available inside its laws. The Jester keeps asking whether the borders are really where everyone says they are.
What play actually needs
Enough constraint that something can happen.
Enough freedom that something unexpected can happen.
Start mild and grow wild.
Not because the fool is exempt from gravity. Because he's willing to test the edge and sometimes finds there was another ring just beyond the one everybody could see.
The check is on the way out :: what can you do now that you couldn't on the way in?
One person's door. Yours will look different.
I was running from my body. That's where the pain was. Why would I want to be there?
The jester gave me a way to say things I could not yet say plainly. A way to wear what I was not yet comfortable wearing. The thing I ran from became the instrument I participate with.
Make the ugly beautiful. Make pain ridiculous. Make fear theatrical. Approach horror voluntarily and then step back out. Turn uncertainty from an abyss into material.
Some rooms get the suit and tie, and it's one hell of a suit and tie. But that doesn't have to come first, before the ukulele-wielding jester wielding horror and warmth in the same breath. Love and light exist hand in hand with the dark in me.
The question
What can this thing do?
There's nothing wrong with the whiteboard. But some things can only be learned by doing them. Experience something. Observe. Model it. Return to experience. Let reality insult the model. Revise it. Try again.
Student. Connector. Creator. Student again.
A stumble followed by panic communicates failure. A stumble incorporated into the dance communicates play. The audience doesn't merely perceive what happened. They perceive your relationship to what happened.
Look again. The jester does not need to own the throne. The jester can change the angle.
Court jesters lost their heads too, while they enjoyed special privileges. That's the tightrope walk.
I found a form that let me back into my own life. A jester. A ukulele. Horror and warmth in the same breath. It took me most of forty years and a lot of wrong turns, and a spiral is not a loop :: a spiral means distance from the last coordinate.
What did you run from? What would let you walk back toward it? What would you have to put on to come through that door?
I want to find out what the world has left to teach me. Start with you.
So here is the only instruction
Create, my friends,
something of your own.
If you don't like what I make, go make something different. Go make something you enjoy making, and tell me how much you hate it, or how much you love it. But give me the gift of having something to respond to.
Here's mine. Show me yours.
Come as a beginner. Come as a witness. Come as someone new. You still belong.
You may become more useful to people once usefulness is no longer the admission price you charge yourself for being among them.
A lot of us learned to be useful so we'd get let in somewhere. You can put that down here. You're in the circus because you came.
Not customers. Not followers. Family.
Everybody keeping somebody else
in the game.
Family is everybody participating in somebody else's continued possibility.
The performer gives an experience. The audience gives attention. The venue gives room. The crew makes the impossible practical. And the weird beginner gives everyone the privilege of witnessing a first attempt.
Everybody has something. Everybody needs something. Nobody has to be everything.
Somebody teaches, somebody hosts, somebody funds, somebody tapes an ankle, somebody fits earplugs, somebody drives the van, somebody films the old rigger's hands while he can still show it.
The circus reproduces itself through participation. That is what we are actually here to protect.
Some of this only passes hand to hand, and some of the hands are ninety. Who should we talk to before we can't?
What counts as carrying the tent
Learning badly. Trying something. Carrying something.
Watching. Playing. Helping. Making. Recovering.
Cheering. Being weird.
The circus keeps making circus folk.
You do not need a finished identity, a polished act, or a five-year plan.
What might you become
by participating?
We don't know either. Come find out with us.
That last door is real
Nobody finds out from the parking lot.
Get in and let it answer.
Tell us you exist.
Tick whatever's true. This is how the family finds each other.
Everybody has something.
A craft. A room. Gear, hands, hours, or money. Nobody has to be everything.
More play before the play runs out.
We're pulling together who helps with what. Tell us what you need and we will point you at somebody who understands what you do.
Come encounter something
you don't already know how to be.
More ways in. More folk to do it with. More road left.
play@circusfolk.com::(480) 788-6463
Circus Folk is being organized as an Arizona nonprofit corporation for charitable and educational purposes. We are not yet recognized as tax-exempt and are not currently making tax-deductibility claims. The organizational and governance page lives at circusfolk.org.