Title Pending 5002

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.Circus artists embrace the desire to achieve the impossible though the exploration of the possibilities of the body. And in the Australian milieu, contemporary circus performers put their bodies, their creativity and often their political agendas on the line. Contemporary circus relies upon creative and ideological risk just as much as the physical risk encountered in the execution of tricks. Nevertheless, it is the body that is central to the risk explored within the artform. In this paper I will position my theory of "A rhythm of bodies", exploring how notions of embodiment and creative and physical risk, play out in the work of award winning and internationally renowned Adelaide Company Gravity and Other Myths. Of how impossibility is made plausible through risk and authenticity on stage.Looking to Deleuze and Guattari's "Body without Organs" and Jondi Keane's "Embodied Cognition", I will argue that in circus, bodily "impossibilities" or the usual limitations of the body are effectively disregarded. Drawing their own, greatly extended, limitations and boundaries around their bodies, circus performers do not, indeed cannot, subscribe to the limitations that most people accept as normal. I discuss how the circus artists use their bodies to explore not only the extremities of "what a body can do" but also of what a body can say.