Stunning images and thoughtful essays map out parts of the artist’s own transition during the process of bringing a small piece of queer circus history back to life in LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE, an aerial straps homage to the enigmatic Barbette – a gender-bending aerialist who graced the stages of European cabarets and music halls 100 years ago.

Blending queer history with contemporary reflections on gender, performance, and transition, this work asks us to consider the relationships between risk and spectacle in relation to a body in transition. LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE –and its documentation through this book– is an exultant reminder that queer and trans people have always been here; that these ways of being in the world that have always existed and have value; and that strange beauty can be found in everything, if we are only willing to expand our ways of seeing the world.

This hardcover edition will not receive a second print run. Once they’re gone, they’re gone!

About the SLOW CIRCUS series:
The written word offers a level of depth and complexity into the inner workings of a circus artist’s embodied, often ephemeral work. Much writing about circus arts comes either from either external observers who love the art form, or from Circus Studies scholars; it is harder to find documentation of such work in the voice of the artists themselves. The SLOW CIRCUS series creates circus artifacts that can be held, revisited, appreciated, studied, and examined long after the show has ended and the lights have faded to black. SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE (2024) is the second instalment in the series. SLOW CIRCUS: VACUUM (2021) is the first.