Aerial, apparatus, assemblage: Pain, pleasure, kink, and the circus body without organs

Abstract

Addressing intersections of performances, practices, and practitioners of circus aerial and BDSM, I investigate how “play” manifests in both activities. Circus aerial and kink both involve forms of play that experiment with what is possible, tenable, and worthwhile for bodies to do under restrictive and painful conditions. Both practices are both pleasurable and serious, seeking transcendent, less “controlled” experiences, while maintaining the level of control necessary in forms of play involving real risk. Aerialists select their performance apparatuses not just aesthetically, but for the planes of intensity that playing on and with them enables them to traverse in experimentation and performance, mirroring the complex factors determining an individual’s preferred forms of kink play. Combining performance analysis, interviews with kink-involved circus aerial performers, and my own experience as an aerialist and a kink practitioner, in conversation with theories of play and of sexuality, I explore how intersections of pain, pleasure, and play in BDSM and aerial practice inform each other on embodied and aesthetic registers. I argue that, as an assemblage of aerialist and apparatus, the performer engages in a Deleuzian act of becoming, evoking a Body without Organs that, in its play of intensities, is more than incidentally masochistic.