Aerialist
creating works on chains, hammock, and the ground
offering coaching, choreography, and speaking


What are queer stories?
Queer as a disruption
Disrupting, rupturing the notions of gender, of body, of sexuality, of reality and our relationships with these things.
Intersecting queer stories with aerial art
Get to know my work







Seen.
I was looked at,
but I wasn't
Albert Camus, The Misunderstanding (1943)

Alec Stoddard (he/they) is a performance artist who uses circus as his primary medium to reflect on queer lived experience and construction of identity. Approaching circus as a physical thinking exercise, they engage with aerial apparatuses in ways that hover between including and excluding the expectations of the viewer to create dialogue that disrupts cisheteronormative understandings of gender-diverse bodies. His work has been described as "wonderfully painful to watch," and "breathtakingly, hauntingly beautiful." With a focus on the lesser-known apparatus of aerial chains, Alec is able to relate his own trans body’s experience of outside assumptions and subsequent systems of oppression to the presuppositions that the chains carry. Together, this partnership of object and performer creates an excellent vehicle to examine queer relationships to the corporeal form and the social forms projected onto it.
