A Small Show, Under Canvas

Kuroneko Circus is a traveling circus company working out of North Carolina. We raise a tent, play a run of nights, and take it down again. There is no arena, no pit orchestra, and no screen between the act and the audience — the front row is close enough to hear the rigging creak and to feel the draft when an aerialist drops.

The company was formed in 2026 around a fairly narrow conviction: that circus is a live craft, and that most of what makes it worth watching disappears at distance. A strongman lifting a person is a physical fact you can verify with your own eyes from twelve feet away. At two hundred feet it is a rumour. So we work small on purpose, in a tent that seats a crowd rather than a stadium, and we build the season around nights where the audience can see hands, breath, and chalk.

The tented-show tradition in the Carolinas

The travelling tented show is old ground here. For most of the last century the Carolinas were a working circuit for small tented circuses — shows that arrived in a town in the morning, put up canvas on a rented lot or a fairground, played an afternoon and an evening, and were gone before the next day’s heat. They were not spectacles imported from somewhere else. They were a trade, run by people who could rig, drive, sew, and perform, usually all four.

That is the tradition we are consciously part of. Everyone on our crew does more than one job. The people who set the rigging are the people who perform on it. The tent goes up by hand. It is slower and more awkward than hiring a venue, and it is the entire point: a tent is a room you build for one audience and then carry away, and a show built for that room is a different animal from a show built for a stage.

Who we are

The company is a mix of disciplines rather than a single specialty — aerial, ground acrobatics, clowning, juggling, and traditional sideshow. The running order changes through a season as acts join and leave, but this is the bill carrying the current run:

• Kerry Magnus — Strongman and Acrobat
• Solace — Straps
• Typhoon the Clown — Sideshow
• Frederick — Juggling
• Morpheus Walker — Ringmaster
• Raven Rainey — Aerial Loops

Performers work with us as independent contractors, paid per performance, and they keep their own acts and their own bookings. That arrangement is deliberate too. A circus that owns its performers outright stops being a place working artists want to come back to, and a small show lives or dies on the people who come back.

Where to find us

Our current engagement is the Autumn Season, playing every Friday and Saturday night in October 2026 with Haunted Harvest at CATHIS Farm in Lillington, North Carolina. Our tent sits on the grounds; one admission covers the whole event.

If you are a performer, we are casting for every run. If you want the company at your own event, private or public, start on the booking page. Anything else — press, venue partnerships, a question about a ticket — reaches us at [email protected].