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The Cyborg Circus Project

The Cyborg Circus Project is an emerging disability-led dance and circus company practicing out of the Small Arms Inspection Building co-founded by Shay Erlich and Jenna Roy. Our mandate is to address and remove barriers that disabled movement artists experience when entering professional practice through a combination of a professional company, community classes, and professionalization opportunities. The Cyborg Circus Project operates from a disability justice standpoint. This involves centering the voices of marginalized disabled people including the voices of BIPOC, Queer, and Trans disabled people, along with others who are often erased from mainstream disability discourses.


We are wheelchair liberated. Wheels represent possibility and plurality: the space between motion and stillness, the balance point between safety and risk, and how imagination creates opportunities for new motions to emerge. The reciprocal relationship between mobility device users and device cannot be denied. Animating the inanimate device, the user is in turn animated. Mobility devices often overshadow the user and reduce them down to their device, rather than the totality of their being. Coming together in community and communal exchange with other disabled people to challenge these attitudes builds strength and healing.  Wheeled motion is a sensory delight, inciting and overwhelming the senses. Wheelchairs make sounds in motion, provide sensation of the wheeling surface, and provoke smells and tastes, thus creating a sensory profile entirely unique to navigating the world in this fashion. We encourage patrons to identify relationships and examine the sensations provoked in their own sensory experience.

Cyborg Circus photo by SCHOLTZ(10).jpg
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