The tent still matters, says the new generation.
For two decades, contemporary circus has been moving indoors — into theatres, art galleries, conservatoires. A small, stubborn cohort of London-based makers is putting the canvas back up. We spoke to four of them about why.
If you trained as a circus performer in the United Kingdom in the past twenty years, you were almost certainly told, at some point, that the future of the form was indoors. There were good reasons for the orthodoxy. Indoor venues are warmer, cheaper to insure, more accessible, and — most importantly — easier to fit into the funding categories that arts councils understand. By the late 2010s, the question of whether the tent had a future at all had quietly stopped being asked.
It has, in the past two years, started being asked again. And it has been asked, almost without exception, by a generation of performers and producers who were not around when the orthodoxy hardened. They are mostly in their late twenties and early thirties. They trained, in many cases, at conservatoires that taught them to think of the tent as a relic. They are, by their own account, surprised to find themselves arguing for its return.
What the tent is, and what it isn't
The first thing I learned, in the course of the conversations that informed this piece, is how specific the word "tent" is in this context. We are not talking about the marquee-and-bunting tradition. We are not talking about the touring tent of the mid-twentieth century, with its three rings and its ringmaster. We are talking, almost universally, about the single-pole big top — a structure typically built for between two hundred and six hundred seats, raised and struck by the company itself, and used as the artistic frame for a single piece of work performed in the round.
This is a different proposition from the indoor circus venue, even when the indoor venue is in the round. The tent is, the makers insist, an instrument. It has acoustics. It has weather. It has a particular relationship to the time of day at which the piece is performed. It cannot be made to behave like a black box, and the work is not made under the assumption that it should.
"The tent is not a substitute for a theatre. It is a different room. The mistake we made for twenty years was treating it as a worse version of the same thing."
Why now
Several of the people I spoke to traced the renewed interest to a single, technical change in how small touring tents are now manufactured. The current generation of European-built single-pole structures is significantly lighter than the equivalent tent of fifteen years ago, can be erected by a small crew in roughly a day, and — crucially — meets contemporary fire-retardancy and structural standards out of the box. The economics of taking a tent on a small UK tour are now, for the first time in a long time, almost reasonable.
The cultural reasons are harder to pin down. One performer I spoke to attributed the shift to a generational fatigue with venues whose programming choices were, increasingly, dictated by funding cycles and commercial pressures. Another described the tent as a refuge from the "audience extraction" model of contemporary arts presentation — a setting in which the audience is, by definition, a guest of the company rather than a customer of the venue.
A third made a more practical argument. The work she wants to make, she said, requires the tent's particular acoustic and visual properties. It cannot be made anywhere else. The fact that this is now financially feasible is the only reason the work is being made at all.
What the work looks like
I have seen four pieces by tent-based companies in the past nine months. They differ enormously in tone, subject, and scale, but they share several characteristics that I would not have predicted.
The first is a relationship with weather and time of day that no indoor venue can match. One company programmed its piece to begin at the moment of sunset; another at the moment of moonrise. The work was timed to the building rather than the building to the work. The audience, in both cases, registered the change in light as part of the performance.
The second is a relationship with the company's own labour. The tent is, by necessity, erected by the company. The performers have spent the day, every day of the run, doing physical work on the structure that will hold their performance. This visible labour is, several of the performers told me, part of what the piece is about. The audience knows, on some level, that the room they are watching the work in is also the room the performers built that morning.
The third is a relationship with the touring schedule. Tent-based work cannot tour at the pace of indoor work. The structure has to be raised, the venue (typically a field, a car park, a piece of common land) has to be negotiated with the local council, the company has to live on-site for the duration of the run. The result is residencies of three or four nights rather than one-night stands.
What it costs
I should be honest about the economics. Tent-based touring is, in 2026, still significantly more expensive per performance than indoor touring. The companies I spoke to are funded by a combination of small grants, ticket revenue, and — in two cases — private patronage that they would prefer not to discuss in detail. None of them, by their own admission, are making a profit.
None of them, either, are willing to revise their plans. The conviction across all four conversations was the same: the work they want to make requires the tent, and they will continue making it for as long as the work justifies the cost. The tent, in this framing, is not a marketing decision. It is an artistic instrument.
What happens next
There are, by my best count, between six and nine companies currently doing significant tent-based work in the UK. Two of them are touring this summer. A third is in residency in a field in Norfolk. A fourth, the most established, has just announced a five-city tour for the autumn.
This is not, by the standards of any other form, a movement. It is closer to a tendency. But it is a tendency that did not exist, in any visible way, five years ago, and the people behind it are not interested in being a temporary phenomenon. They are talking to each other. They are sharing rigging crews and structural advice. They are, in two cases, planning a co-produced piece for 2027.
I do not know whether the tent will return as a significant cultural form. I do know that the people working in it now are working with a seriousness and a clarity of purpose that has been rare in this part of the field for some time. Whatever they make next, I will be in the audience for it.