53 Gravity matters: Circus as a device. Paloma Leyton Times of crisis are also a chance for reformulation. While the Covid-19 pan- demic is still relentlessly hitting the professional scene of the arts, we art workers have had to start exploring resilience tactics that, in many cases, have led us to rely on our institutions for solutions. As a result of one of these strategies, a month ago I found myself sitting in the meeting room of the third floor of the Spanish Ministry of Culture. There, at the headquarters of the National Institute for Scenic Arts and Music (INAEM), I was selected for an education grant in cultural management. As I was sitting there alone, for a moment, I was drawn to the glass walls that separate the rooms of INAEM. These walls are decorated with the written words teatro, danza, lírica, música, circo (Spanish for theatre, dance, lyrical theatre, music and circus), which are the disciplines for which the institution provides funding, circuits and prizes. I imagined that if I had been in the same room thirty years earlier, the word ‘circus’ would be missing from the list. In fact, the Ministry of Culture’s first regulations for Circus grants and a national prize ap- peared in 1990, while the first general development plan for Circus at a national level was not put into practice until 2011. This case is just the Spanish example of the late inclusion of circus arts in national institutions of culture, which partially explains why it is often seen as an underrated branch of the arts in academia. Paloma Leyton Université du Québec à Montréal Gravity Matters: Circus as a Device. An Approach on Staging the Relationship between Human Beings and Gravity Panoptikum 2021, 25:53-67 https://doi.org/10.26881/pan.2021.25.03