ABSTRACT
When a body enters the stage, images, social structures, and ideas are immediately attached to its materiality. Thus, the circus body always carries processes of signification. This chapter explores how the hand-balancing body is traversed by systems of signification. Starting from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s analysis of the possibility of a “body without organs”, this chapter investigates how the three main structures of signification, “the organism,” “signification,” and the “subject,” function in the circus discipline of hand-balancing. It also explores the space the artist navigates throughout this process.
