¶ Book of Hours · dawn
…expanding what we’re capable of.
A PHOENIX-BASED NONPROFIT FOR THE FOLK WHO MAKE LIVE CULTURE, AND THOSE WHO GATHER AROUND IT
…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.
Find the folk. Come inside the ring. These are the pieces that connect the rest.
Books and dispatches from inside the tent.
A new book from Circus Folk · included with membership
To further our mission, we wrote a book all about attention, play, culture, and our capacity to experience.
Start with The ALIVENESS Manifesto, free for everyone. A short field guide to reclaiming attention, making more room for play, and protecting the conditions that let living culture grow.
Circus Folk members get the complete 50,000+ word Members Only First Edition, plus invitations to live tellings and Q&A as the audio edition takes shape.
Different problems. Same question: what helps people keep showing up, making things and being able to enjoy what other people make?
Someone throws. Someone catches.
SOMEONE WATCHES
Someone learns.
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.
A circle pit is a ring made of nothing but bodies and sound. Circus is Latin for ring. You have already been in one.
Different tents. Same trick, everywhere, for as long as anyone can trace. The circus is what happens when people gather around something alive.
There is a device in your pocket that has spent ten years learning what you will look at next. It is very good at it. Good enough that sitting in a room while somebody throws, and staying all the way through the catch, is a thing a body has to relearn.
When did something live last make you gasp? Being moved is a skill. It wears like any other, and it comes back the same way: in a room, on purpose, more than once.
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 it’s obvious. Sometimes you notice it later. Either way, the range of what you can take in and do something with can grow.
Experiential capacity is how much of what is happening you can take in, and do something with. That is the part that grows.
Everybody in here is reaching for something.
You can be 19 or 59. Punk or rennie.
Professional or beginner.
Onstage or in the third row.
Everyone arrives for a different reason.
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?
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.The rooms and the stages are on the index. Pick one, and bring five minutes.
Make something nobody has seenI made something →I want to find out what I can do.
Come be terrible in front of people. Some of us still are, on purpose.
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.Three months of learning to juggle changes the brain in ways a scan can see. That was measured in people in their sixties.
The index is full of people who teach this, and Troupe Care is a room to bring them into.
Collect differences · skill is the doorwayWho’s 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. And eventually, people stop coming out to play.
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 who understand what a scene, an identity, or a craft asks of a body. We're pulling together who helps with what.
The first room is already open. Troupe Care :: four hours in North Scottsdale with what a pro team's recovery room has in it, for up to ten of your people. This time it's for the drummer.
The Hot Mess Line opens when the bench is ready :: trained Spotters, tested routing, clear handoffs, and enough founding support to cover the opening costs.
A day for everybody, on a sliding scale, comes when there are enough of us to staff it.
More play before the play runs out. Keep people in the game · Fight Early DeathSomeone learns something, then risks it in front of people. Performance shows them what still needs work. Sooner or later, the body, the schedule, the money or plain exhaustion enters the picture.
That’s why Practice, Perform and Care share a tent.
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.
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.
Two leaves of this book are bound on their own: what art does to what you can notice, on both sides of the footlights, and one person’s door. Turn to the Jester →
Come as a beginner. Come as a witness. Come as someone new. You still belong.
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.
Family
Everybody keeping somebody else in the game.
The performer gives an experience. The audience gives attention, which is harder to give than it used to be, and easier every time you do. 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 sometimes. 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?
Carry the tent from wherever you are. Membership is open. Thursdays, from anywhere. Five sizes of generosity; one membership.
What counts as carrying the tent
Learning badly. Trying something.
Watching. Playing. Helping. Making. Recovering.
Cheering. Being weird.
The circus keeps making circus folk.
You can show up before you know what your role is. Most people do.
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, and it stays between us.
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::602-935-PLAY
Circus Folk is an Arizona nonprofit corporation organized 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.
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