Who gets to stay on stage?

When I started in circus, I thought the biggest challenges would be physical — strength, technique, and risk-taking. I didn’t understand that one of the biggest questions is much quieter: who actually gets to stay in the room?
Circus, like many performing arts, is built on flexibility. Touring schedules stretch across weeks and countries. Rehearsals happen late into the evenings. Work is intense, physical, and often unpredictable.
And somewhere between all of that, there is very little space for care.
Care for children, care for family, care for anything that exists outside of the work.
For a long time, this isn’t something you notice. You just move forward, project to project, city to city. The structure feels normal because it’s all you know — or at least it feels like something you cannot change. You adapt and accept, otherwise you risk being left out.
But becoming a parent shifted something for me. Not only in my daily life, but in how I see the field I work in. I started noticing who was missing. How many artists quietly disappear at a certain point in their lives. How rarely caregiving bodies are seen on stage. How the system often assumes a performer who is endlessly available and mobile — and how far that is from reality, at least for me.
I don’t think the question is whether artists with families can continue working. We can. But often, we do it by bending ourselves around structures that were never designed to hold us.
Working in this way has made me rethink not only how I work, but why. Sometimes I also find myself struggling to answer that question, doubting myself when I’m away from my child and realizing he is slowly forgetting the language we speak together.
In my recent projects, I find myself drawn to formats that open things up rather than narrow them down. I have also had to set boundaries in my work. I don’t want to be away from my child for more than two weeks at a time — and even two weeks already feels like forever.
Here are a few examples of how this has shaped my practice: mentoring young artists through online meetings, so that the two mother-mentors can stay at home with their children; creating a show for assisted living homes in Berlin, allowing me to work close to home; and developing performances for audiences who cannot access traditional theatre spaces.
I recently performed in a children’s show and was reminded how meaningful it is to perform at 10am while children are at school — and to have my evenings free at home. I am also creating a show together with another mother of two, where even finding time to meet and discuss the project becomes part of the process itself. Working in collective structures allows for shared responsibility instead of carrying everything alone.
These are artistic choices, but they are also practical ones. They are ways of building a practice that can exist alongside life, not in opposition to it.
I don’t have a fixed solution. I am still inside the question.
But this is what I believe right now: if we want a diverse, sustainable, and honest performing arts field, we need to look beyond what happens on stage. We need to ask how the work is made, who it is made for, and who is able to keep making it.
Because representation is not only about who is visible.
It is about who gets to continue.