Not Just a Storm in a Tea Cup: Reframing ‘Home’ Through Socially Engaged Circus Work With Survivors of Domestic Violence

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Lazaroo, Natalie
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Mackey, Sally

Ong, Adelina

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2025
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This chapter discusses the work of Vulcana Circus, a feminist community circus in Brisbane, Australia. Drawing primarily on interviews, I reflect on Vulcana’s most recent community project, Circus in a Tea Cup (2021), which brought together women from the Vulcana community and survivors of gender-based and domestic violence to create stories of survival through circus and physical storytelling. In doing so, I engage with the concept of ‘home’ as a contested category in the context of domestic violence, especially within the field of feminist geographies. For instance, home is seen as a site of dominance and resistance, where hegemonic ideologies of home need to be challenged through alternative interpretations. I thus consider how the circus work reframed the images of home by creating an undomesticated ground upon which the female body could resist and trouble the notion of the docile body produced through domestic violence. By focusing on the experiences of the women involved, I also propose how home can be re-imagined through the landscapes of relationality that are developed as part of creating performance work together.

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Performing Homescapes

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1st

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Lazaroo, N, Not Just a Storm in a Tea Cup: Reframing ‘Home’ Through Socially Engaged Circus Work With Survivors of Domestic Violence, Performing Homescapes, 2025, 1st, pp. 143-168

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