Circus, Science and Technology: Dramatising Innovation [1st ed.] 9783030432973, 9783030432980

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN PERFORMANCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Circus, Science and Technology Dramatising Innovation Edited by Anna-Sophie Jürgens

Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology

Series Editors Susan Broadhurst School of Arts Brunel University Uxbridge, UK Josephine Machon Middlesex University London, UK

This exciting and timely new series features cutting-edge books which centre on global and embodied approaches to performance and technology. As well as focussing on digital performance and art, the series includes the theoretical and historical context relevant to these practices. Not only does the series offer fresh artistic and theoretical perspectives on this exciting and growing area of contemporary performance practice, but it also aims to include contributors from a wide range of international locations working within this varied discipline. The series includes edited collections and monographs on issues including (but not limited to): identity and live art; intimacy and engagement with technology; biotechnology and artistic practices; technology, architecture and performance; performance, gender and technology; and space and performance. Editorial Advisory Board Philip Auslander Carol Brown Sita Popat Tracey Warr We welcome all ideas for new books and have provided guidelines for submitting proposals in the Authors section of our website. To discuss project ideas and proposals for this series please contact the series editors: Susan Broadhurst: [email protected] Josephine Machon: [email protected]

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14604

Anna-Sophie Jürgens Editor

Circus, Science and Technology Dramatising Innovation

Editor Anna-Sophie Jürgens Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology ISBN 978-3-030-43297-3 ISBN 978-3-030-43298-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Circus Flic Flac, Hannover 2015. Photo by Jürgen Bürgin This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

As the editor of this volume of various and intriguing essays points out, the collection owes its existence to a conference entitled ‘Imagineers in Circus and Science’ held at the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at the Australian National University in 2018. The HRC is the oldest centre for humanities research in Australia, and I offer these prefatory remarks as its Director. Established in 1972 as a national and international centre for scholarly excellence and a catalyst for innovative and interdisciplinary research within the ANU and beyond, the HRC has hosted many of the world’s leading humanities scholars over the forty-odd years of its existence. One of its central functions has been to bring to the ANU scholars of international standing who will provoke fresh ideas within and beyond the academic community—like the scholars represented in this volume and like Anna-Sophie Jürgens herself, who for two years was resident in the HRC as a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellow, courtesy of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. As well as offering and administering a Visiting Fellows programme organised around an annual theme, the HRC funds and organises conferences and colloquia, like Anna-Sophie’s ‘Imagineers in Circus and Science’, and tries to bridge the gap between the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences, including engineering. With links to the ANU’s Centre for the Public Awareness of Science, the HRC considers the natural or ‘hard’ sciences, not as one of two cultures, but as an integral part of the one culture we all share as inquiring, thinking, feeling and acting human beings. With this in mind, v

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the HRC offers a platform for questions about how science and technology are interpreted, valued, communicated and applied. And so does the circus, it turns out, which is hardly surprising because it is precisely surprise and wonder that predominate in our experience of both science and the circus. ‘Imagineers in Circus and Science’ took place in April 2018 with delegates from around the world and the collaboration of a broad number of experts from disciplines as diverse as computer science, engineering, theatre, literary and cultural studies, and circus performance—all of them represented in this volume of essays, which offers the reader the opportunity to savour the ideas and values shared by the delegates amongst themselves over the three engrossing days of the conference. (As part of this conference, Anna-Sophie launched the University’s first cross-campus competition for creative conference recording, with inspired results.) I commend Anna-Sophie’s energy and enthusiasm in gathering so many and such diverse scholars together, first as speakers and then as contributors, but most importantly let me commend to the reader the essays themselves and their thought-provoking explorations of the Circus, Science and Technology. Enjoy. William Christie Australian National University Canberra, ACT, Australia

Acknowledgments

Alexander von Humboldt was not a circus artist. He was not an engineer either. And yet the editor feels she needs to thank him first. After Humboldt’s death in 1859, friends of the polymath, naturalist, explorer and philosopher created a foundation with the aim to continue his generous support of young academics. 160 years later, it is a Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation that has made this book a reality. It gave its editor the opportunity, for which she is thoroughly grateful, to conduct research in Australia. Equally important in the genesis of the volume is the generous support from the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) at the Australian National University and its director, Will Christie. The chapters in this edited collection owe their existence to a conference titled ‘Imagineers in Circus and Science’ held at the HRC in 2018. The conference turned out to be an extremely inspiring, thought-provoking and momentous event, a vehicle for cooperation and publications, not in the least thanks to an array of most supportive partners. The editor/conference organiser takes this opportunity to thank them all: the National Science and Technology Centre (Questacon), the National Film and Sound Archive, Inspiring the ACT, the Warehouse Circus (Canberra’s youth circus), as well as Mark Eliott (Glassblowing Performance) and Karl Fischer (Magic Show). In addition, the editor is indebted to her colleague Rebecca Hendershott for her intellectual contribution to this book; to Will Christie,

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jochen Brocks, Kylie Message and Konrad Lenz for stimulating conversations at various stages in the process; to the University House at the Australian National University (aka Peter Kanowski and team) for awarding her a fellowship that contributed to the preparation of the book; and to Bert Peeters for clarifying key elements in the editor’s writing. Anonymous reviewers approached by the publisher provided brilliant advice in the early stages of the book, and an international cohort of eminent scholars—including but probably not limited to Mark Cosdon, Richard Weihe, Matthias Christen, Stefan Buchenberger and Jessica Milner Davis—have been instrumental in their enthusiastic endorsement of the editor’s (ongoing) intellectual exploration of the intriguing cultural intricacies and connections between popular performance and technology, particularly the delicious art of clowning and engineering. The editor expresses her heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of them. Amongst the contributors, Katie Lavers would like to acknowledge the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts at Edith Cowan University for their ongoing support of her research, and for a grant awarded for transcription purposes. Likewise, Jon Burtt is indebted to the Department of Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University for ongoing support of his research. Erin Ball is very appreciative of the love and support of everyone who has been a part of her journey. Last but not least, the editor thanks all the contributors to Circus, Science and Technology. Collectively, they have challenged Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Their cooperation in preparing their chapters on technology and circus in culture was definitely magic, too. Canberra May 2019

Praise for Circus, Science and Technology

“Circus, Science and Technology: Dramatising Innovation brings together a remarkable collection of essays demonstrating the sheer ingenuity, daring, engineering and wonder of the circus and its allied arts. Documenting and theorising at the intersections of science and human imagination, these leading authors remind us of circus’s past, present and possible future as a crucial site of spectacle, imagination and awe.” —Mark Cosdon, Professor of Theatre and Performance Studies, Allegheny College, USA. Author of The Hanlon Brothers: From Daredevil Acrobatics to Spectacle Pantomime, 1833–1931 ∗ ∗ ∗ “In addition to its interventionist, interdisciplinary and transhistorical approach, shedding new light on the relationship between the circus and science (both broadly conceived), Circus, Science and Technology brilliantly rethinks the faculty of technology as an innovative source for popular entertainments, also considering its essential role in the dissemination of circus innovation as human achievement across cultures, time and the ‘mutual shaping’ of performance spaces. Jürgens has meticulously curated a selection of essays from leading scholars, resulting in a radiant

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book electric with unique voices and diverse perspectives that should spark critical explorations across a variety of scholarly fields.” —Sean F. Edgecomb, author of Charles Ludlam Lives!, Associate Professor of Theatre and Performance, The Graduate Center & CSI, City University of New York ∗ ∗ ∗ “Circus people and technology people are equally enthralled by wonder. But they rarely converse even though they have so much to show and say to each other. This exciting, field-expanding book gets everyone talking, discovering and enjoying the trans-disciplinary adventure.” —Ross Gibson, Centenary Professor in Creative and Cultural Research, University of Canberra, Australia ∗ ∗ ∗ “This remarkable book gives us a compelling picture of circus as a powerful and rich arena for innovation in science and technology. Featuring brilliant analysis, evocative writing and impeccable scholarship, its fascinating essays underscore the central role circus plays in cultural life—and especially how technology and engineering is a vital part of this overlooked story of Western modernity. Riveting to read, the volume opens up new ways to understand science and technology, and their intimate and mutually productive relations with culture and social systems.” —Gerard Goggin, Wee Kim Wee Professor of Communication Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore ∗ ∗ ∗ “Circus, Science and Technology offers a wide-ranging collection of essential, thought-provoking essays on topics ranging from historical mechanical contrivances to postmodern imagineering through media. It is an essential book for anyone interested in the material history and behindthe-scenes workings of circus.” —Professor Louis Patrick Leroux, Concordia University, Montreal. Co-author of Contemporary Circus (with K. Lavers and J. Burtt) and co-editor of Cirque Global: Quebec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries (with C. Batson)

PRAISE FOR CIRCUS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

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∗ ∗ ∗ “This is a book to savour and enjoy, successfully interweaving a range of academic disciplines. Each chapter offers original thinking and scholarship on the intersection of science and drama, giving deeper insight into a little studied field.” —Jessica Milner Davis, University of Sydney, author of Farce (Transaction, 2003), and Judges, Judging and Humour (with Sharyn Roach Anleu, Springer, 2019) ∗ ∗ ∗ “Recent scholarship is making it increasingly clear just how unstuffy the stuffy Victorians really were. In this marvellous volume Anna-Sophie Jürgens and her co-authors explore the intersections of science and spectacle since the nineteenth century. These wide-ranging and entertaining essays offer further evidence of just how important spectacle was for the Victorians, and how central a role spectacular entertainment played in putting science and technology at the heart of culture.” —Professor Iwan Rhys Morus, Aberystwyth University. Most recent book: Nikola Tesla and the Electrical Future (Icon Books, 2019) ∗ ∗ ∗ “This fascinating book takes the popular circus as a key site of intersection between the arts and sciences. Taking case studies from the long and rich cultural history of the circus, this book is an important reminder that scientific and technological innovation takes place in popular spaces as well as scientific laboratories. Essential reading for those interested in the circus arts and the popular history of science.” —Elizabeth Stephens, Associate Professor and ARC Future Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, Australia

Contents

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Circus Matters: Engineering, Imagineering and Popular Stages of Technology—Introduction Anna-Sophie Jürgens

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Part I Engineered to Promote Awe: Circus (and) Bodies 2

Engineers of Curiosity: The Barnum Era Jane Goodall

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Unreal Limbs: Erin Ball and the Extended Body in Contemporary Circus Katie Lavers, Jon Burtt, and with Erin Ball

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Part II Technological Invention: Engineering (on) the Circus Stage 4

Circus as Laboratory: Imagineering Legitimacy Mark St Leon

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Circus and Electricity: Staging Connexions Between Science and Popular Entertainments Gillian Arrighi Technologies of Risk, Fear and Fun: Human and Nonhuman Circus Performance Peta Tait

Part III

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Techno-Imaginaries: Imagineering Circus in Other Media

The Circus and the Magic Lantern: A Portfolio of Hand-Painted Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy

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The Circus and Technologies of Animation Ruth Richards

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Engineering Circus Enchantment: Automagic Technology and Electrifying Performances in Fiction Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Robert C. Williamson

Index

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Notes on Contributors

Gillian Arrighi is Senior Lecturer in the School of Creative Industries, University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published over twenty-five refereed journal articles and book chapters and is editor of the scholarly journal Popular Entertainment Studies. Her books include The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: Spectacle, Identity and Nationhood at the Australian Circus (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015), Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and A World of Popular Entertainments (Cambridge Scholars, 2011). She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to the Circus (ms due 2020) and writing a monograph about child actors 1880–1910 (ms due 2020). Erin Ball is an independent circus artist, co-founder of LEGacy Circus and owner of Kingston Circus Arts. Her researches into new movement and performance possibilities inform her work as a circus artist, teacher and disability advocate. She created Flying Footless, a course for coaches wanting to create more accessibility in their classes, and she runs an Amputee Circus Camp annually for people with adaptive bodies to train in circus aerials. Erin Ball runs her own accessible circus space and circus school in Kingston, Ontario. She performs widely in solo work and in duo performance work with Vanessa Furlong in their company LEGacy Circus, most recently in her autobiographical show which has toured North America.

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Jon Burtt is a Lecturer in Dance and Performance Studies in the Department of Media, Music, Communication, and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is the co-author of Contemporary Circus published by Routledge (2019), was associate editor for The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016), and has published on circus in numerous academic journals. He has received numerous awards including two ArtsWA (Western Australia) Creative Fellowships, many Australia Council for the Arts Awards, the Macquarie University Faculty of Arts Learning and Teaching Award, and the Macquarie University ViceChancellor’s Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning. Elisa deCourcy is an art historian, specialising in early photography and associated visual technologies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is the Research Fellow on ‘Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World’ Australian Research Council Project run out of the Australian National University. She has been published in leading international Humanities and Visual Culture journals and was awarded a 2018 summer fellowship to the Harry Ransom Centre, Texas. Her first (co-authored) book, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The Global Career of Showman Daguerreotypist J. W. Newland will be published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Jane Goodall has written extensively on arts in the modern era, with a special interest in the historical relationship between the arts and sciences. Her books include Artaud and the Gnostic Drama, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin (winner of the Australasian Drama Studies Association’s Robert Jordan Prize), Stage Presence and, with Christa Knellwolf, the collection Frankenstein’s Science (Ashgate, 2008), which contextualises Mary Shelley’s work in contemporary scientific and literary debates. Martyn Jolly is an artist and writer and Honorary Associate Professor at the Australian National University School of Art and Design. In 2006, the British Library published his book Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography. His work is in major Australian photography collections. In 2014, he received an Australian Research Council Discovery grant to co-research the impact of new technology on the curating of Australian art photography. In 2015, he received an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to lead the international project ‘Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World’.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Anna-Sophie Jürgens is an Assistant Professor at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science of the Australian National University. She works in the fields of Popular Entertainment Studies and Science in Fiction Studies. She has published on circus fiction, the history of (violent) clowns, and comic performance and science/technology in culture, in numerous academic journals. Her recent books include Manegenkünste: Zirkus als ästhetisches Modell (co-edited; transcript, 2020) and Poetik des Zirkus (Winter, 2016). Anna-Sophie is guest editor of two special themed journal issues published in 2020 with the Journal of Science & Popular Culture and Comedy Studies. Katie Lavers is an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) at Edith Cowan University. Her book Contemporary Circus was published by Routledge (2019), and she is co-editor with Peta Tait of The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016). She has published writings on circus in numerous academic journals and is a circus, physical theatre, and dance reviewer for ArtsHub, Australia. Her awards include an ArtsWA (Western Australia) Creative Fellowship (2010), numerous Australia Council for the Arts Awards, an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellowship (2016), and a Varuna Residential Writing Fellowship (2018). Ruth Richards recently completed her Ph.D. in Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her thesis was situated at the intersection of animation studies and feminist theory, exploring the nature of the animated body through feminist materialist frameworks. Her research interests include women in animation, histories of early animation and cinema, and feminist film and television studies. She has previously published on the clown in animation at the intersection of horror and humour. Mark St Leon is a freelance university lecturer in the areas of management, economics and accounting. He is the author of Circus: The Australian Story (Melbourne Books, 2011) and has written numerous monographs and articles on the subject. In 1991, while serving with the Australia Council, the Federal Government’s arts funding and policy advisory body, he organised Australia’s first national conference of circus people, the Circus Summit, which was convened at the Arts Centre, Melbourne. He also launched the Sydney Arts Management Advisory Group, now in its 28th year of continuous, non-profit operation.

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Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre at La Trobe University and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Recent books include: the co-edited Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene (2018), Fighting Nature: Travelling Menageries, Animal Acts and War Shows (2016), the co-edited The Routledge Circus Studies Reader (2016), the edited Great European Stage Directors: Antoine, Stanislavski and St Denis, vol. one (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Emotion (Bloomsbury, in press). Robert C. Williamson is a Professor in the Research School of Computer Science at the Australian National University. Until recently, he was the chief scientist of DATA61. His research is focussed on machine learning. He is the lead author of the ACOLA report Technology and Australia’s Future. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Queensland in 1990. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.6

Erin Ball (Photo by Michael East) Erin Ball (Photo by Michelle Peek) ‘Two acrobats jumping’, three states of an animated, hand-painted, double-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight ‘Clown with jumping dog on a stage’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight ‘Disassembled Harlequin’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight ‘Juggler’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, lever-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, W. C. Hughes, Optician, London, c1870s. Collection: National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra ‘Two acrobats jumping’, three superimposed states of an animated, hand-painted, double-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight ‘Clown losing head’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Bill Douglas Centre, Exeter University

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Fig. 7.7

Fig. 7.8

Fig. 7.9

Fig. 7.10

Fig. 9.1

‘An acrobat jumping between ladders’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight ‘Clown and cauldron’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight ‘Clown with whip and jumping dog’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight ‘Clown with animated eyes’, four states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight Zirkus des Horrors (Circus of Horror), Berlin 2016 (Photo by Jürgen Bürgin)

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CHAPTER 1

Circus Matters: Engineering, Imagineering and Popular Stages of Technology—Introduction Anna-Sophie Jürgens

Popular entertainment has always been intertwined with the cutting edge of technology and (thus) engineering, given that technologies by definition embody some level of engineering. This also applies to the many facets of the circus, which, surprisingly, have hardly been explored. For example, when powered aviation was a new concept at the beginning of the twentieth century, barnstormers carried out exhibition flights and gravity-defying aerial stunts at fairgrounds and country shows throughout America. These pilots were commonly known as ‘air circus performers’, a title that became ‘official’ in 1920 when the census classified them as circus performers (see Ganson 2014, 38–45; Batteau 2010, 31). A little earlier, in 1884 Berlin, at a time when light bulbs were new to the world, German Circus Renz presented an ‘electric lady’ in the opulent pantomime ‘Harlequin à la Edison, or everything electric’—a show featuring 2000 differently coloured light bulbs and a sword fight with electric

A.-S. Jürgens (B) Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_1

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weapons (see Günther and Winkler 1986, 66). And in turn-of-the-century France, a reviewer for the Revue bleue depicted the circus of the New World—Barnum & Bailey—as ‘a vast machination, an American, gargantuan, indigestible distraction’ that, appropriately, played in the ‘Galerie des Machines’, a leftover from the 1889 world fair (Rearick 1985, 149). This era, when popular culture combined (mass) entertainment with an advanced technological matrix, is the one Michael Carroll defines as ‘popular modernity’ (2000, xii). Carroll does not mention, however, that circus was a crucial ingredient of popular modernity. Around 1900 it was one of the—if not the—major cultural institution travelling the world with monumental productions, huge menageries and myriads of human and animal performers. Before novel technologies gave rise to the cinema industry, internationally touring circuses did not merely use and showcase brand-new transport technologies (trains, automobiles, etc.), but also offered exciting new opportunities for experiencing reality through visual turmoil and displays of mobility and speed. The speed—and ‘mobility mania’ (Hård and Jamison 2005, 183)—of that time was embodied and reflected by the circus. In the early 1890s, it had even been parodied in the French Cirque Molier, the circus of Paris’s elites, in which luminaries such as the Comte de Sainte-Aldegonde clowned in a pantomime and the Comte Hubert de La Rochefoucauld performed on the trapeze. In the parody-pantomime ‘Barnum Express’, which was part of the programme, Barnum (the American impresario who became the archetype of the modern ringmaster) is stranded in Paris for a couple of hours and goes to Molier to get a quick idea of the attractions of the French circus. What he witnesses there is a frenetic performance at comically high speed (see Rearick 1985, 149). Given all these and many more connections, and given the circus’s pervasive cultural presence, it is startling that the interplay and relationship between technological inventions, engineering endeavours and circus arts have scarcely been investigated within the context of popular modernity—and beyond. This edited collection aims to do just that: it breaks new ground by asking questions such as the following: What kind of cultural and aesthetic effects does engineering in circus contexts achieve? How do technological inventions and innovations impact on the circus, both at the apogee of its popularity around 1900 and today? How does the link between circus and technology manifest in representations and interpretations – imaginaries – of the circus in other media?

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Circus, Science and Technology answers these questions by combining the voices of leading performance and circus scholars, art and cultural historians, media and literature researchers and an engineer. Its aim is to produce a better sense of the narratives and cultural work that emerge from the interplay of circus and technology, and of its transhistorical presence and interdisciplinary expansiveness. In so doing the volume contributes new insights to the circus as a versatile frame for interpreting our relationship with technology. It also offers new insights in the popular history of technology, the cultural history of engineering and the history of popular performance; as well as in the material, practical nature of popular entertainment, and its imaginaries in other media. The volume clarifies to what extent circus contributes to shape cultural ideas of technologyrelated desires, fears and uncertainties by mapping the cross-fertilisation between engineering and imagineering in various historical and contemporary circus contexts.

Engineering and Imagineering P. T. Barnum is the founder of The Greatest Show on Earth, that ‘vast machination’ mentioned above that was to become the largest circus in history. Itself an amalgam of museum, menagerie, sideshow, human zoo and circus, Barnum’s superlative, kaleidoscopic travelling show-empire presented automatons, wax figures, mummies, (fake) fossils and an ‘Ethnological Congress of Savage Tribes’ including ‘Bestial Australian Cannibals’ and ‘Mysterious Aztecs’. Barnum is remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes. In fact, during his lifetime and ever since, deception, hoaxing and humbugging have become words commonly associated with his name. As the inventor of many ‘wonderful specimen[s] of creation’ (Barnum in Kunhardt et al. 1995, 41), he fits the definition of an engineer as discussed by performance technologist Thomas Gilbert: set on ‘remaking the world’ for entertainment purposes Barnum ‘approaches nature with a swagger, determined to change it into something it never has been and never would be if left to itself’ (1978, 3). An engineer is not only a designer or builder of engines and machines, but also someone who does not explore the world as it is (as a scientist would). Rather, engineers carry ‘through an enterprise by skillful or artful contrivance’ (Merriam Webster online). Against this background, this volume does not merely probe the many intricate ways in which technology gets interwoven into the texture of modern circus, but it also

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revolves around the notion of the engineer as a contrivancer, one whose most extreme incarnation is the ‘imagineer’: a person who devises and implements ‘a highly imaginative concept or technology’ (Oxford Dictionary online). Thus, this volume’s approach to engineering is based on its wider definition as an art and practice that relates to the development, acquisition and application of technical and scientific knowledge ‘about the understanding, design, development, invention, innovation and use of materials, machines, structures, systems and processes for specific purposes’ (UNESCO 2010, 24). In addition, it remains mindful of the Latin root of ‘engine’ in ingenium: ingenuity or cleverness and invention (ibid.). This is in contrast to approaches that either consider engineering as ‘applied science’, a field or profession, or that foreground tools and techniques as a means of solving practical objectives. In other words, this book focuses on the power of engineering to arrange elements in a way that may (or may not) appeal to human senses or emotions. Thus, although the authors discuss representations and displays of technology in circus contexts, practical and material detail will not take priority over cultural meaning. Ultimately, this volume is concerned with technology as the enactment of human imagination and creativity in the world, in line with Robert Romanyshyn’s (1989, 10) definition according to which: ‘In building a technological world we create ourselves, and through the events which comprise this world we enact and live out our experiences of awe and wonder, our fantasies of service and of control, our images of exploration and destruction, our dreams of hope and nightmares of despair’ (ibid.). This book explores technology as culture—with technological endeavour as practice and product, and circus at the culture-technology interface. The volume pulls together scholars from a variety of disciplines, which is why there are different approaches: some authors take the circus as their starting point and ask how it relates and represents issues to do with science and technology; others do the exact opposite and ask how science and technology are represented in circus spheres. The chapters feature a potent mix of new perspectives, while at the same time presenting thematic coherence and mutual illumination. Barnum’s legacy, interconnected forms of circus showmanship (theatrical, illusionary, technological, electrical, Frankensteinian) and animation (as a spatial, imaginary, physical, technological force) are some of the recurrent thematic threads that weave the chapters together and lure the reader into a world of aestheticised technological entertainment. Together, the authors of Circus,

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Science and Technology make it clear that circus has been capturing audiences’ imagination in American, Australian and Western European contexts not only because of its aesthetic, cultural and political power and potentialities, but also because of its varied technology.

Exploring Popular Spectacle: Circus, Science and Technology Since its creation by Philip Astley and his contemporaries in 1768, the modern circus has been striving to translate the public desire for wonder into acclamation for extraordinary skills and unprecedented displays of wondrous phenomena. The circus and related cultural phenomena— such as so-called freakshows, carnivals and nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ museums—are among the most productive breeding grounds for the staging, invention and amalgamation of creative imagination and scientific-technological knowledge. These sensational, kaleidoscopic institutions presented a manifold combination of scientific discoveries and marvellous exhibits, including living automatons, magical lanterns, wax figures, extra-terrestrials and mummies. Popular entertainments of this ilk, including Barnum’s establishments, provide(d) definitional challenges. Barnum’s biographer, James Cook, observes that his exhibits and ‘living curiosities’ represented ‘a form of realism understood as thoroughly flexible, provisional, and uncertain – a realism whose specific outlines emerged only through relentless public speculation and equivocation’ (2001, 121). By merging contemporary notions of realism with illusionism in his popular exhibits—and thus shaking up and challenging both aesthetic categories—Barnum transformed artful deception and the pleasure of doubt into (show) business. Against this background, the first part of this volume—‘Engineered to Promote Awe: Circus (and) Bodies’—explores how engineering serves the playful reconfiguration of normative corporeality on the historical popular stage and in contemporary performance. It clarifies the ways in which ‘curious’ performing bodies and curiosity conflate with spectacle, as a reflection of the raise and upheavals of industrialisation. Jane Goodall discusses both how curiosity became an impulse for scientific inquiry and technological creations (leading to and associated with the Frankenstein story), and how astonishment at, and curiosity for, man-made marvels was the result of scientific and technological advances in broadly defined circus

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contexts. Multifaceted performing curiosities of end-of-the-century popular entertainments are not an isolated instance of the modern fascination with the imagineered and the Frankenstein myth or with the innovative in Barnum’s entertainment institutions. Instead, they inform modern sensibilities, and predate contemporary ones, by participating in a transhistorical discursive cultural continuum echoed by and challenged through the contemporary ‘extended’ body. Re-imagineered through innovative prosthetic technology, the extended body transports the circus’s exploration of the extraordinary and the interrelationship between the corporeal and the non-corporeal into the world of the surreal and the performance of the future, as Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt uncover in their discussion with circus artist Erin Ball, who imagineers and performs her own prosthetic limbs. Circus is not only a medium for experiment, innovation and (re)negotiation of bodies, however. The second part of this volume— ‘Technological Invention: Engineering (on) the Circus Stage’—produces a better sense of the contours of the mutual contingency of ‘technology’ and ‘culture’ reciprocally transforming one another and conferring meaning on each other, thus informing the patterns of future entertainments. Its chapters explore modes of creation, representation and dissemination of technological innovations in circus and performance contexts around the year 1900, when novel engineering feats provoked profound surprise and moulded the omnipresent trope of ‘modern wonders’ in public accounts and popular culture. They investigate the pragmatic convergence of cultural history and the history of technology and science—‘since the last cannot but be a history of the physical, as much as the social or intellectual, products of engineering endeavour’ (Marsden and Smith 2005, 4). By calling attention to the offspring of the marriage of science and technology in the Australian circus context around the turn of the century and its relation to the external world, Mark St Leon reveals how circus entrepreneurs facing social, economic, geographic and legal challenges ‘imagineered’ their legitimacy through technology. Circus of that time, as the author shows, acted as a testing ground for questions about what forms of engineering were permissible, desirable and applicable, and what applications were to be hoped for or feared. The ways, in which society shaped technology and was shaped by the technology it was building and imagining, were reflected under the big top. Circus turned novelty into cultural value and entertainment style. It rewired popular entertainment and changed visual habits, particularly in

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combination with the techno-totem of the fin-de-siècle: electricity. In the industrialised world, electricity became the pulse of everyday life. Not only was it being used by Frankensteinian science-showmen to reanimate dead matter on stage, it also impacted life in the form of electric motors (which roared life into streetcars, subways, elevators and thus the modern city) and electric lighting empowered by high-capacity generators (which illuminated public spaces and, starting in the 1880s, also private residences). Gillian Arrighi sheds new light on the nuanced relationship between the emerging science of electrical engineering and the circus by exploring the strategies they developed to stage spectacular innovations at the end of the nineteenth century. Since that time, by continuously reinventing and improving circus technology (i.e. props and performance equipment), technical contrivancers, stage engineers and performers have contributed to negotiations about the future of their art via technological innovations that, ideally, not only help progress from contingency to control but also enhance theatricality. The world-renowned Hanlon-Lees troupe is an excellent example thereof. Equally celebrated in America and Australia, the Hanlon-Lees patented several inventions deployed in performances (e.g. a ‘Beheading Block and Ax’, a ‘Dismembering Apparatus’ and the aerial safety net) and thus greatly influenced modern popular entertainment. They not only built ingenious stage mechanics and machinery, but also created technologically memorable comic scenes on stage (including, for example, the explosion of a train, and an engine appearing to plunge into the audience, Cosdon 2009, 60). Performing in Paris in the Cirque Napoléon and at the Folies-Bergère while on a European tour in the 1870s, they were lionised by the most distinguished literary luminaries of the time, including J.-K. Huysmans, T. Gautier, E. Goncourt, E. Zola, T. Banville and J. Verne. The safety net invented by the Hanlon-Lees had far-reaching consequences, as Peta Tait carves out: it did not only inspire the twentieth-century invention of the trampoline by George Nissen, but deeply influenced the nature of aerial performances, the cultural ideas of risk and fear qua theatrical emotions, and wider social practice, leisure activities and sport. She shows technological invention to be a potent vehicle for circus arts to advance aesthetic innovation, which illustrates the cultural role of engineering as a driver for (new) performance styles. All chapters in Parts I and II of this volume examine, refer to, or otherwise deal with the interplay of circus and engineering at a point in time when circus arts were at the peak of their popularity. This was the time

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when cultures of technology developed in the Western world, when technological inventions were perceived as ‘modern marvels’ (Carroll 2000, 33) and technology was seen as the solution to most problems—a cultural praxis and expression. The third part of this book—‘Techno-Imaginaries: Imagineering Circus in other Media’—revolves around the same period of ‘popular modernity’, albeit from a different angle: it focuses on representations and interpretations of the circus-and-technology interplay in other media such as magic lanterns, animated films and literature. Part III thus illuminates the circus’s participation in a dense web of interactions between fiction and reality in technologically mediated culture and cultural fantasies. The chapter by Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy serves as a transition between the historical and intermedial focus of the volume. It presents some rare technological artifices: magic lantern slides featuring circus protagonists and iconography. As these slides speak for themselves, they are accompanied by only a brief introduction into their Australian historical background. From the early 1800s, the artificially produced images and ghostly phantasmagorias of magic lantern shows mesmerised audiences all over the world with their hypnotic qualities. What is hardly known is that not only were they still popular in the late nineteenth century, but also featured circus scenes and performers on comic mechanical slides: moving pictures in their own right. Magic lanterns and circuses were vital parts of urban entertainment culture. These two modes of entertainment share some essential performative conventions and purposes. Both invoke surprise, wonder, laughter and excitement in their audiences, and both have influenced contemporary media technologies. Fascinating in and of themselves, the exceptional magic lantern slides presented in this volume can be cast as harbingers of a major media revolution that ultimately saw turn-of-the-century circus and other popular entertainments lose much of their appeal: cinema. In Paris, for instance, the success of cinema, at the time a brand-new form of entertainment, was dramatically signalled when, in 1907, the old Cirque d’Hiver on the Boulevard du Temple became a Cinéma Pathé, followed by the Hippodrome in the Rue Caulincourt, which became the Gaumont Palace in 1911, a cinema that three years later surpassed in terms of income the perennial leader of the nonsubsidised entertainments—the Folies-Bergère, the city’s most famous English-style music hall (Rearick 1985, 193). However, as is well known, and as this volume vividly demonstrates from various perspectives, popular performance

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and circus in particular, as powerful agents in the formation of modern culture, do live on, displaying their resilience in new forms of ‘cinematic showmanship’. Ruth Richards examines circus in the context provided by this kind of showmanship (illustrated by early twentieth-century filmic animation techniques) and uncovers how it remains influential to this day. Her chapter reveals how technologies of animation produce the illusion of movement and of ‘life’, and (thus) of encounters between the real and the imagined. Animation technologies enact wonder as a ‘sleight-of-hand’. They invite audiences to suspend their disbelief and, simultaneously, to acknowledge the constructed nature of the medium. Taking this one step further, the final chapter of the volume is dedicated to the affinities and synergies between magic (as a cleverly executed trick, deception and form of virtual reality), technologies and circus—in fiction. Asking what awe-inspiring spectacles or effects of engineering look like in circus fiction, and in what ways (imaginary) technologies affect, or even redefine, what fictional circus is, Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Robert C. Williamson pick up several of the threads in this book and refer to its central themes, which are the reconfiguration of normative corporeality through body engineering, the immersive and illusive power of both circus and technology, the appearance of multidimensional curiosities and the birth of electrical showmanship. The last chapter of the volume thus explores cultural imaginaries of the (re)creation of circus performances through technology, investigating scenarios in which circus physicality evolves into somatic eccentricity, electricity becomes a means of Frankensteinian posthumous performance and the engineer turns into a clown. All of this builds worlds of meaning and frames our technological future.

Circus Matters---The Bottom Line Scholarship on circus and clowning has been flourishing in recent years (i.e. Tait and Lavers 2016; Arrighi 2015; Peacock 2014; Stott 2009). However, while scholars have recognised the importance of technological invention in popular entertainment (Ndalianis 2012; Klein 2014) and its relevance in the cultural history of performing arts and circus with respect to performing bodies and prostheses (e.g. Thomson 1996; Adams 2001, 2012; Shildrick 2002), and while they have discussed the structures of circus settings, props, equipment and logistics (Davis 2002), there is a dearth of research into engineering and imagineering as methods applied and results achieved in the context of circus and engineering

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in culture. Publications touching on Barnum’s entrepreneurial strategies (Cook 2001; Saxon 1989) do not explore his ways of promoting awe and marvel in relation to the broader cultural context revolving around the creation of curious artefacts in the Frankenstein sense. Admittedly, historians of science in the tradition of Morus (e.g. 1988) did do work on the Frankenstein-theme within (science) spectacles, and representations of scientist-engineers have indeed been examined in cultural contexts (Haynes 2017; Shepherd-Barr 2006), but links with the circus world have hardly been explored. The contributions to these themes in the last chapters of this volume—which focus on circus in magic lantern slides, in filmic animation and in fictional engineering—are among the very first of their ilk. The contributors to Circus, Science and Technology refer to the abovementioned research panorama, drawing from studies on circus, culture and performance arts and the history of technology and science. In so doing, they tacitly agree that ‘science’ and ‘technology’ are anything but clear-cut, distinct and well-defined entities. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to technology-in-circus (as part of the study of culture more generally). This volume addresses that significant gap in our understanding through its study of the various shapes engineering takes on the (imaginary) sawdust stage, which is essential in building a globalised modern culture of wonder. According to the 2010 UNESCO report on the state of engineering, we live in ‘engineered economies, societies and technocultures’ as ‘almost every area of human interest, activity and endeavour has a branch of engineering associated with it’ (24). This volume adds new perspectives to this phenomenon and the cultural relevance of engineering, by bringing together different scholarly perspectives on the facets of engineering and technology in circus contexts. It carves out new dimensions of the richness and multidimensionality of the circus’s cultural capital. Discovering narratives that place the circus’s manifold interactions with technology and science into the spotlight, it also provides a richer account of the circus’s past, its endurance and transportability. The volume elucidates how popular performance was and is significant for the present. It canvasses how the realm of engineering has become integrated in our ways of performing and perceiving circus today. As an edited collection, Circus, Science and Technology offers valuable breadth to these themes without losing a sense of overall coherence. The bottom line is, this book clarifies circus matters.

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References Adams, Rachel. 2001. Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Adams, Rachel. 2012. Disability and the Circus. In The American Circus, eds. Susan Weber, Kenneth L. Ames and Matthew Wittmann, 418–435. New York: Yale University Press. Arrighi, Gillian. 2015. The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: Spectacle, Identity, and Nationhood at the Australian Circus. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Batteau, Allen W. 2010. Technology and Culture. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Carroll, Michael Thomas. 2000. Popular Modernity in America: Experience, Technology, Mythohistory. Albany: State University of New York Press. Cook, James W. 2001. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Cosdon, Mark. 2009. The Hanlon Brothers: From Daredevil Acrobatics to Spectacle Pantomime. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Davis, Janet M. 2002. The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ganson, Barbara. 2014. Texas Takes Wing: A Century of Flight in the Lone Star State. Austin: University of Texas Press. Gilbert, Thomas F. 1978. Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. New York: McGraw-Hill. Günther, Ernst, and Dietmar Winkler. 1986. Zirkusgeschichte: Ein Abriss der Geschichte des deutschen Zirkus. Berlin: Henschelverlag. Hård, Mikael, and Andrew Jamison. 2005. Hubris and Hybrids: A Cultural History of Technology and Science. New York: Routledge. Haynes, Roslynn D. 2017. From Madman to Crime Fighter: The Scientist in Western Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Klein, Norman M. 2014. The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects. New York: The New Press. Kunhardt Jr., Philipp B., Philipp B. Kunhardt III, and Peter W. Kunhardt. 1995. P. T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman. New York: Knopf. Marsden, Ben, and Crosbie Smith. 2005. Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. Engineer. https://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/engineer. Accessed 30 July 2018. Morus, Iwan Rhys. 1988. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ndalianis, Angela. 2012. The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses. Jefferson: McFarland & Co.

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Oxford English Dictionary. Imagineer. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ definition/imagineer. Accessed 30 July 2018. Peacock, Louise. 2014. Slapstick and Comic Performance: Comedy and Pain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rearick, Charles. 1985. Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France. New Haven: Yale University Press. Romanyshyn, Robert D. 1989. Technology as Symptom and Dream. London and New York: Routledge. Saxon, Arthur H. 1989. P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man. New York: Columbia University Press. Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. 2006. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Shildrick, Margrit. 2002. Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self. London: Sage. Stott, Andrew McConnell. 2009. The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter, Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian. Edinburgh: Canongate. Tait, Peta, and Katie Lavers (Eds.). 2016. The Routledge Circus Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland (Ed.). 1996. Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body. New York: New York University Press. UNESCO. 2010. Engineering: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities for Development. Paris: UNESCO Publishing.

PART I

Engineered to Promote Awe: Circus (and) Bodies

CHAPTER 2

Engineers of Curiosity: The Barnum Era Jane Goodall

While many major institutions now endeavour to reinvent the museum as an entertainment venue with spectacle, performance and action as central elements of the visitor experience, it is easy to forget that Barnum’s circus, as the leading prototype of this modern entertainment form, was born out of the museum. Live entertainments had been offered to museum visitors for several generations, but as the menageries and variety acts became larger and more physically dynamic, they found their own milieu in the circus tents of the great travelling shows, leaving the museum with its dead and still displays to take a more austere place in the culture of modern amusements. At issue in this radical change of direction was a shift in the culture and meaning of public curiosity. Yet the circus has never left its prehistory behind, and there is much to be learned from revisiting the phase of its divergence. Nowhere is this divergence more starkly manifested than in the enterprises of P. T. Barnum, whose Greatest Show on Earth was seeded in the galleries of his American Museum. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, curiosity was becoming a respectable middle-class quality, associated with the drive to improve

J. Goodall (B) Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_2

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oneself through the acquisition of knowledge of natural history. Women and children were encouraged to make collections of ‘curious’ objects, and visits to the museum were an enterprising family excursion. Professional institutions such as the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, began to link their mission with lay organisations dedicated to ‘the diffusion of useful knowledge’. Branches of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge were active in London, New York and Boston by the late 1820s. They published The Penny Cyclopaedia, an ambitious venture with the aim of providing authoritative information to the general public on a wide range of subjects. With detailed entries on topics in geography, botany, zoology, ethnology, philosophy, linguistics, physiology, astronomy and music, this was no mere popular guide to natural history (see The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 1833–1843). It set out to break down the limits of general knowledge through the encouragement of serious and persistent curiosity. But curiosity at this time had many faces. It might be an earnest form of self-improvement, but its darker side was imprinted on the public imagination through the influence of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, which found wider audiences through a popular stage adaptation with the title Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein in 1823. With a moralistic script by Richard Brinsley Peake and the heroic actor T. P. Cooke as the monster, the production was advertised as a portrayal of ‘the fatal consequences of that presumption which attempts to penetrate, beyond prescribed depths, into the mysteries of nature’ (Playbill, 28 July 1823). Curiosity taken to such impious lengths still threatened to raise demonic forces. The critic for The London Morning Post described the monster as ‘a nondescript – a horror to himself and others’ (Review, 30 July 1823).

Disturbing the Order of Things What is curiosity without thrill? In Wonders and the Order of Nature, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park document the association of the unknown and the uncanny going back to the middle ages. They take a prefatory quotation from Foucault: ‘The word curiosity […] evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities’ (1998, 9). Adelard of Bath associated the feeling of horror with a dark uncertainty ‘that holds you, shrouds and leads into

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error all who are unsure about the order of things’ (quoted in Daston and Park 1998, 109). With the advancement of science, error and uncertainty retreat. Or at least, that is the assumption. As the enduring popularity of Mary Shelley’s novel attests, the encroachments of scientific modernity did not resolve the vexed relationship between the human psyche and the order of nature, but rather discovered new ways of ratcheting up the tension. Victor Frankenstein is caught between old and new frames of knowledge, drawn on the one hand to the arcane researches of the alchemists and on the other to modern rationalist philosophies of science. At the time of its publication, Frankenstein tapped into speculation about the possibilities of reanimation suggested by experiments with electrification of recently deceased bodies. There was clearly a market in the more fearful aspects of curiosity, and the showmen of London saw profit in combining the educative appeal of natural history with a frisson of terror. Venues on the Strand in London specialised in exhibitions of bizarre and exotic creatures. The ‘Bonassus’ exhibited in 1820 was probably a bison, but its promoters developed a narrative to endow it with the powerful and preternatural qualities of Frankenstein’s creature, a phenomenon born of thunder and lightning: Wrapt in clouds, in tempest tost Above the reach of human power Bonassus reigns, himself an host And glitters in the darken’d hour. His eyeballs restless as the flash That darts the living fire And when we see his motions rash We fear but must admire. (Playbill, The Strand, London 1820)

It is the convergence of electrical power and biological life evoked here that taps into the mythos of Frankenstein. The electrical sciences were politically risky (see Goodall 2012), and had been since the early seventeenth century when the idea of moving objects at a distance was seen as strictly a prerogative of divine power. To replicate that power through human intervention was regarded as a form of necromancy. Natural history was at the other end of the spectrum, the bourgeois science par excellence.

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The thrill of breaching the bounds of the known world and tapping into uncanny elemental powers had no place in the kind of useful knowledge gathering encouraged by popular national societies. Curiosity as a form of good behaviour and an improving influence on the upwardly mobile middle-classes was widely satirised for its blandness and triviality. In the 1840s, the inaugural issues of Punch magazine offered ‘Punch’s Information for the People’ and parodic reports from the British Association for the Advancement of Everything in General and Nothing in Particular. Entertainment was the mission of Punch, and the only entertainment value of such parochial ambitions lay in their absurdity, which the magazine continued to exploit (see Goodall 2011). London citizens were caricatured as micro-organisms in the 1850 cartoon ‘Wonders of a London Water Drop’, which showed the various species of Londoner (aldermen, councilmen, deputies, clerks) ‘disporting in the liquid dirt as in their native element’ (Goodall 2002, 114). What is striking about this drawing is its attribution of acrobatic virtuosity to specimens viewed under a microscope. They are dancing, tumbling, leaping and juggling like fairground performers. This was precisely what was missing from the culture of natural history, which was all about collecting fossils, feathers, skeletons and shells, the dead tissue of once-living organisms. Sorted into labelled compartments, they were locked in a cabinet of curiosities that provided the equivalent of a polished coffin for the flora and fauna of the world. Charles Dickens in Hard Times (2001, first published in 1854) portrayed this sterile domestic installation as a blight on the lives of young people, a moribund antithesis to all the wonders of the world on display in thrilling and dynamic action at the circus.

Reanimation at the Museum In America, the ironies of this antithesis were already exercising the imagination of entrepreneurial genius P. T. Barnum. Barnum arrived in New York City in the 1830s as a man on the make, with no fortune behind him and his eyes on the wonderful opportunities of commerce. Shrewd enough to see that if you wanted to sell things, you needed to cater to a need asking to be satisfied, he identified curiosity as one of the strongest drivers of human behaviour. In 1840, he ventured into a bargaining process for Scudder’s American Museum. Under the management of the Scudder family, the business had failed to attract enough visitors, and Barnum knew why. Everything in it, as he said, was as dead as a herring.

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Summing it up as a collection of ‘stuffed monkey and gander skins’ was one of his strategies for getting the price down, and once he had completed the purchase, he set about his own project of reanimation. The stuffed monkey and gander skins, along with a vast collection of feathers, shells, bottled fish and reptiles, remained an essential asset. He continued to expand the natural history displays, making a successful bid for the famed collection of Charles Wilson Peale in 1843 (see Barnum 2018). This was a shrewd strategy for appropriating its scientific and educational credentials. He understood the importance of heritage to the aspirational middle classes who were his target audience. The museum flourished in its early years, becoming one of the most popular venues in New York, but Barnum was in search of wider horizons. Without the spirit of adventure and the determination to push boundaries, curiosity was a tame business. His own career was based on strategies of diversification and reinvention, and one of his most significant talents was an instinct for manipulating regimes of heredity and hierarchy in a rapidly changing cultural milieu. It was, effectively, a new form of social engineering. Those who were not born great could acquire status by association with those who were, if they became famous enough. And celebrity, as a new form of prestige, could be produced and enhanced through skilled management. It was all about performance. There were three gifted performers who played a key role in setting the parameters of the Barnum enterprise. Charles Stratton, from Barnum’s home town of Bridgeport in Connecticut, began his career as an entertainer at the age of five in the persona of Tom Thumb. Stratton had ceased growing in height in early childhood. His diminutive stature made him a ‘prodigy’ in the taxonomist’s sense of the term: he was an individual whose formation was a major departure from type. But he was also an infant prodigy as a stage talent, engaging in cute parodies of the greater human presences by posing as heroic figures in Greek mythology, or impersonating Napoleon. In 1844, he and Barnum received the ultimate endorsement when they were granted an audience with Queen Victoria, an experience upon which Barnum reported at length in his autobiography (see Barnum 1850). If Stratton was a prodigy of nature, Swedish singer Jenny Lind was the perfect ‘type specimen’ of modern femininity. Under Barnum’s management, Lind toured America in 1850, giving sell-out concerts. Modesty rather than grandeur was her style-note. She appeared on stage in simple white dresses, or in the guise of a shepherdess or gypsy girl, spawning a secondary trade in posters, sheet music, dolls and porcelain figurines. ‘The

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Swedish nightingale’ became one of the most prevalent icons of American domesticity. Barnum continued to promote the legend long after the tour was over. He wrote chapters about Lind in his autobiography and included glowing passages about her in all his brochures. She was the presiding spirit of the newly refurbished American Museum, where her songs were played on the pianoforte to delight visitors and her portrait hung at the head of the grand staircase (Barnum 1850, 9). The 1850 brochure for the museum was an earnest disquisition on the values promoted in P. T. Barnum’s establishment: temperance, Christian piety, decorum and the proprieties of family life. Those who knew Barnum from his earlier incarnations, though, might have been wondering how this could accommodate his earlier doctrine of humbug. In the autobiography he published in 1855, he made no secret of his love of practical joking, which included all manner of hoaxes and ‘innocent’ deceptions (see Barnum 1855; Cook 2001). By making a pitch for the American Museum as a moral high ground, he gave himself scope to take humbug to another level, one on which the boundary between scientifically attested realities and the fantasy zones of human curiosity was ingeniously confused. While Lind and Stratton served to establish Barnum and his enterprise at the heart of a new aspirational middle-class culture, it was the third performer who expressed the wider cognitive challenges that threatened to breach the containment lines of this deeply conservative milieu, and take culture of curiosity in the direction of circus. William Henry Johnson, later to become popularly known as Zip, was an African American microcephalic. Although at the time of his introduction to Barnum’s Gallery of Living Curiosities in 1860 he was probably 18 years old, he was diminutive enough to seem childlike. Most important of all, though, he was a talented performer. As his subsequent career in show business proved, he was a skilled mime, a witty manipulator of situations and an inveterate charmer. Though the idea of genetic engineering was beyond the cultural horizons of mid-nineteenth-century America, the Gallery of Living Curiosities at the American Museum was an arena for the genesis of strange and exotic human forms. The strangest amongst them, as his name implies, was the ‘What is it?’. In the Advance Courier of May 1860, the excitement about this being was spilled out in screeds of tiny print. The sheer quantity of detailed and academically sourced information from scientists

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and pseudo-scientists of the day was an essential component of the presentation. Barnum’s genius for provoking curiosity was sometimes counterintuitive, and here the scale of his print was in inverse proportion to the levels of excitement he sought to generate. The public must be coaxed into fascination before the stakes are raised to levels of intrigue and amazement. Successful trade in humbug entailed caution, and Barnum knew better than to put himself in the position of making definitively false claims. In the closely printed handbills, claims of authenticity were outsourced to those well placed to provide them. The New York Sunday Times is quoted, offering a little account of the theory of evolution, with reference to Addison’s essay in The Spectator and, of course, the recent work of Mr. Darwin. As with all Barnum’s Living Curiosities, this ‘nondescript’ had an origin story, claiming he was found by a party of explorers in darkest Africa (Advertisements 1860). But the use of the word ‘nondescript’ carries associations: it echoes the term used to describe T. P. Cook’s rendition of Frankenstein’s monster. Here, we have an exercise in imagineering that counterpoints Mary Shelley’s creation. One is constructed through illicit scientific process and the other ‘discovered’ as a natural being. One breaches the bounds of the natural world; the other opens them onto wider prospects. One is drawn to the fields of ice in the northern reaches of the planet; the other belongs to the overheated darkness of the African jungle. Frankenstein’s creature is gigantic, hideous and violent. The ‘What is it?’—as Barnum’s patrons were assured—was ‘agile, docile and playful as a kitten’ (Advertisement, The American Museum, 11 April 1860). Racism was deep-seated and vicious in Anglo-American culture of the period and Barnum had no compunctions about presenting this boy as ‘the Missing Link’. Yet even as he was catering to the presumptions his patrons brought to the encounter, he was also testing them. Johnson’s skills as a performer (‘agile’ and ‘playful’ hint at this) soon made him the star of the Museum’s most heavily-promoted attraction: the ‘Happy Family’ of human anomalies. In 1860, his companion exhibits were the famed ‘Aztec Children’—returned from a tour of European royal households— and the Albino family. This novel rendition of the human family, each belonging to a unique and species-defying category of their own, was posed with decorum and a touch of sentimentality typical of the semiformal family portrait of the period. Images of them were disseminated widely on handbills and in Barnum’s publications. ‘What is it?’ was also

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portrayed in a series of delicately etched Currier and Ives lithographs, adopting poses that evoked memories of the pantomime character Jocko the Brazilian Ape, a hugely popular figure on the New York Stage in the 1820s (Goodall 2002, 51–52). As in the pantomime, the idea put forward is not just that this may be a member of the human family, but that he might be a member of your own family. One of the lithographs shows him standing between two couples, one of whom has a child of about his size. With the diversity of human types displayed in the Gallery of Living Curiosities, was Barnum hinting at the possibility of some kind of biological engineering? There was mystery here, and a suggestion to visitors that they had entered the shadow domains of human knowledge. What were the limits of possibility for living forms? There was no Frankenstein’s monster in his collection—the claim that his creatures were found in the natural world was essential to his business model—but it was animation that gave his human curiosities a frisson of the uncanny. The ‘What Is it?’ never spoke but within the boundaries of the exhibition space, he moved, strangely and with suggestive gestures and facial expressions that challenged the interpretative capacities of audiences. With animation, though, came performance. If the natural history museum appealed to curiosity about form and its biological variants, the circus evolved as a pyrotechnic display of human skill in motion, specialising in illusions, transformations and gravity-defying feats.

Triumph and Catastrophe This meant a commitment to engineering in the broadest sense, from the design of new physical tricks to the construction of apparatus to enable them. The ‘peerless prodigies’, as they were called in most of Barnum’s advertising, in the American Museum were ‘freaks of nature’, prodigies of formation and scale. While the freak show remained as a staple element of Barnum’s circus, prodigies of skill and action took over in the next phase of his enterprise. Many of the museum personages seem to have adapted readily to the more overtly performative environment of the circus. William Henry Johnson, in particular, seems to have relished the freedom accorded to him as an entertainer. In the persona of Zip, he played on the enigma of a physiological identity his audiences had been

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taught to interpret in accordance with Darwinian ethnology, while retaining his own forms of control over the image he presented (see Goodall 2002, 56–57). Barnum himself, though, did not deal in smooth transitions. Keen as he may have been to present himself as a figure of brightness and probity, aspects of the Frankenstein prototype manifested themselves as he furthered his boundary-defying ambitions: it was as if the destiny of his creations was strung between triumph and catastrophe. ‘Iranistan’, the Moorish palace he built for himself in Bridgeport in 1848, was a grandiose expression of his new public persona. Based on the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, its extravagant façade and onion domes created an imposing presence in his conservative home town. Its orientalism expressed Barnum’s internationalist ambitions, and a capacity to bring wish-fulfilment to a level never before imagined in provincial America. It stood for less than a decade before being burned to the ground. In 1864, the American Museum came under attack from the Confederate Army of Manhattan, a small group of Southerners who carried out incendiary attacks in New York towards the end of the Civil War. This time, the fire was put out without major damage, but less than a year later, in July 1865, the museum was completely destroyed in a massive conflagration. The live animals inside, including two beluga whales kept in the basement, met a horrible death (see Thompson 2015). Barnum’s response was to rebuild and upgrade the establishment. In 1868, it too was consumed by fire. Out of the ashes of the American Museum, like some display of Promethean ambition triumphing over fate, came a plan for the Great Roman Hippodrome, to be built on the site of the former railway depot between Madison and Fourth Avenues. The original construction caught fire at Christmas in 1872. Barnum was informed by telegram that all the livestock had been destroyed but for two elephants and a camel. The horror of it does not seem to have touched him. Almost immediately, he began cabling his overseas agents for replacement animals. At a benefit concert organised to assist those in his company who had sustained losses in the fire, he announced: ‘I have been burned out so often… I am used to it’ and immediately committed half a million dollars to the reconstruction (Barnum 2018). The rebuilding went apace, and a massive 10,000 seat venue was opened in New York in 1874. Fires were a common hazard in city buildings of this period, but Oscar Wilde’s dictum springs to mind: to lose one establishment by fire may be

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regarded as misfortune. To lose several looks like carelessness—or perhaps something more motivated. Although no evidence has been put forward to implicate Barnum in the disasters, speculation remains. Was he profiting from insurance arrangements, or perhaps just seeking to capitalise on the sensation? Was it cheaper to destroy ageing livestock en masse than to deal with them in various stages of decline? Whether or not intention had a part in it, the repeated pattern suggests that the cultural adventurism at which he excelled was also a ruthless and dangerous game. Barnum’s finances by this time were understandably in chaos, but he seems to have prefigured the Wall Street model of the financial adventurer, treating debts as assets and disasters as opportunities. The neoliberal manifesto ‘never let a good crisis go to waste’ would not have been out of place amongst his mottos. As long as he could come up with something to invest in and something to sell, there would be no shortage of punters. The trick was always to enlarge the prospects. As he expanded his commercial ambitions, he raised the stakes in public curiosity, inviting larger forms of speculation about ever more spectacular manifestations of animal nature and human endeavour. Advertised as ‘Ten Times the Largest Show on Earth’ with an ‘authorised capital’ of one million dollars, the touring show came with a set of guarantees from its celebrated proprietor. A payment of $5000 was vouchsafed to anyone who could legally challenge any one of his claims. These included boasts of the largest tent in the world, of unprecedented numbers of performing horses, dogs, musicians, equestrians, animal trainers, acrobats and ‘the most daring aeronaut that ever lived’. Here curiosity became conflated with spectacle. The cabinets of dead and desiccated specimens were left behind, while the living wonders of the world flooded into the massive arena of the Hippodrome. There were chariot races, an Indian hurdle race, a Chinese procession and a succession of historical pageants billed as the ‘Congress of Nations’. This was Barnum’s way of parading his credentials as an internationalist. Britannia’s carriage entered the arena first. She was followed by Napoleon in imperial pomp, the Pope with a retinue of cardinals, the Russian Czar, a Turkish Sultan and the Chinese Emperor. The equipage for the United States did the culminating lap of honour (Programme 1874). It was a parade of cultures reflecting the hierarchical order promoted through the Darwinian ‘science’ of ethnology.

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How do we get from the ‘stuffed monkey and gander skins’—perhaps the most succinctly memorable denigration of the early nineteenthcentury culture of curiosity—to this? We have entered a new era of popular imagining, one in which a blend of cultural imperialism and glamorous fantasy create vastly expanded horizons for the citizens of the American Empire. The object was to ‘elevate, purify and refine the character of public entertainments’ but to do so with ‘all the pomp and glory of Caesar’s era’ (Barnum Commercial Newspaper, 3 August 1874). Barnum reminds his audience that circus is an ancient art before he conjures it into this new era as a modern one.

Spectacle and Spectators Early illustrations for the American Museum show elegantly dressed visitors standing in the centre of the exhibition rooms, surrounded by cabinets and dioramas containing objects of fascination. They move through the space, ascending and descending the grand staircase, drawn from one display to another by their own tastes and enthusiasms. These images imply that the establishment is all about you, as a spectator: the exhibits are an accessory to the persona of the mobile contemporary citizen in an expanding world. The structure of the Hippodrome reversed the positions of audience and exhibit, confining spectators to the seating rings on the periphery of the action, while those who were the focus of attention commanded the centre of a vast arena. Paradoxically, though, the audience remains in a dominant position, a distinguished collective in whose service all this extravagant display is staged. Spectators at the great Barnum shows were offered a certain vision of themselves: a sense of identity confident of its dominance in the hierarchy of species and its pre-eminence amongst the congress of nations. What marks Barnum out as the leading impresario of the later nineteenth century is his instinct for engaging the psyche of the spectator; although this is not a term, he would have used. The language of the psyche, its drives and structures comes through to the twentieth century via Freud, whose ideas were yet to be disseminated, but the word expresses a recognition of the larger dimensions of the human mind, a recognition that accords with Barnum’s appeal to the public imagination and his participation in the cultural formations of identity. His early experiments with ‘humbug’ show a fascination with psychological lures and triggers. What was really going on in the game of enactment and interpretation?

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Curiosity in Barnum’s world takes on psychological dimensions and in this, as in so many other ways, he was a pioneer. In his choice of performers, he was category-driven. From the showman’s point of view, prodigies of form and physiology that challenged the limits of the natural order themselves belonged to a taxonomy. Were the giants, midgets, albinos, conjoined twins, ‘missing links’, dog-faced boys, fat ladies and skeleton men of the freak show examples of misfired natural engineering, beings that were out of the natural order? Or were they indications of larger and stranger dimensions in the order of nature? It was the latter suggestion that offered a more potent challenge to the popular imagination, and in presenting it, Barnum was making a provocative intervention in the order of cognition being established by the scientific authorities of the time. Following the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859, regimes of knowledge were under intense renegotiation, so this was a time in which an outsider to the academic world could play some adventurous games with public curiosity in expanding spheres of speculation. In his advertising for the Hippodrome, he declared a purpose to promote ‘Object Teaching’ through dynamic and ever-expanding forms of exhibition. This was no longer the inert object world that could be enclosed in a drawing room cabinet, but a phantasmagoria of living beings in action, their exploits diversified by moving platforms, vehicles, swings and rotating devices in an engineered environment. If the term ‘imagineer’ is a postmodern coinage, it makes etymological sense as a means of conveying the idea that the human imagination is subject to the ingenuities of engineering. The Latin term ingenium, with connotations of genius and inventiveness, itself suggests a relationship between innate capacities and the technologies by which they may be developed or enhanced (see Lewis 1879). The stretching of human understanding and capability was at the heart of the Barnum enterprise, together with the moral ambiguity of being ‘ingenious’. Those who are ingenious find ways through the maze of providence that others might not consider, getting past obstacles by which others are blocked. By the 1870s, the zeitgeist was becoming oriented towards a future created by the technologies that drove the industrial revolution. In show business, the biggest game of all was being played in the massive theme parks of the World’s Fairs. The challenge now was more than just that of injecting life into a collection of dead things; it was about creating new forms of vital energy and action. As the scale of his operations expanded,

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Barnum began to experiment with titles. In 1871 he hedged his bets, advertising ‘The Great National Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome’ but by the following year, he had relegated the museum and menagerie to a background role and was promoting ‘P. T. Barnum’s Great Travelling Exposition and World’s Fair’. In 1873, it was ‘P. T. Barnum’s Great Travelling World’s Fair’ and ‘The Greatest Show on Earth’. This reflects his awareness of a larger cultural transition. His early opportunities as a showman came from a world in which scientific curiosity was focused on the deep histories of evolution: in geology, in species development and in human ancestry. Now he was in competition with the international displays of arts and industry featured in the new giant adult playgrounds of the World’s Fairs, which catered to a burgeoning public curiosity about technological advancement. Here Barnum, unashamed egotist though he was, seems to have known his own limits and recognised the need for collaborators with complementary abilities, although he preferred to tell the story the other way around; they petitioned him to lend the magic Barnum-touch to their ventures. The Hippodrome project was enabled through a partnership with William C. Coup and Dan Castello. Coup understood the logistics side of the business: the planning of routes and schedules, the acquisition and maintenance of rolling stock for touring, design of large-scale performance tents and the management of a multi-skilled workforce. He organised the lease of a set of thirty-foot railroad cars and put together a team that included a specialist railroad manager, contracting agents, press officers, parade directors, a master of pavilions, a master of properties and a manager of human curiosities. Castello, billed as ‘Manager of the Grand Oriental Circus’, knew the performance side of things (see route book ‘P. T. Barnum’s Great Travelling Exposition and World’s Fair’, 1872). He was involved in the acquisition of new acts and their orchestration into themed forms of spectacle. Their 1872 company was headed by equestrians, who were responsible for most of the spectacle, with interludes of clowning and acrobatics (see ibid.). Barnum found Coup ‘very able but too cautious’. James A. Bailey who he initially characterised as ‘sagacious and practical’ proved to be more of a match for his own commercial audacity (Barnum 2018, 327, 385). In spite of his best efforts to increase the scale of his presentations and acquire spectacular and unique acts, Barnum began to find he was being outdone by Cooper, Bailey and Hutchinson’s Grand International Allied Shows. His response was to enlist Bailey and Hutchinson as partners for

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the 1881 season. Where Coup was highly skilled with the complex logistics of touring, Bailey added some flair and hutzpah. An important aspect of this was a determination to experiment with new technologies. Bailey insisted that the first Barnum and Bailey show would feature electric lighting, and ordered 21 massive chandeliers, proclaiming: ‘Our entire canvas city, interior and exterior, will be as bright as noon-day’ (Bailey cited in Albrecht 2014, 15). Spectacle was Bailey’s driving enthusiasm. There were to be no ‘cheap effects’ (Davis 2002, xi). Orders for new and splendid costumes, and updated equipment and vehicles, were an ongoing investment. Under the new partnership, the circus procession became a magnificent tour de force in itself. The bandwagon that leads the way was replaced by a gilded chariot. It was followed by teams of horses, wild animals in cages, another gold chariot filled with athletes posing as classical heroes, Tom Thumb’s miniature coach and ‘elaborately caparisoned elephants topped with fake South Asian mahouts and howdahs’ (Davis 2002, xi). It was Bailey who decreed the three-ring performance format, and he sought new approaches to the design of collapsible large-scale tents to accommodate it. Engineering innovations were an ongoing focus for the company. New and improved facilities reflecting the latest technologies were an important drawcard in the competitive world of international shows. The big top for 1890 was 460 feet long and accommodated 10,000 spectators. A photograph in the 1904 Barnum and Bailey route book shows the interior of the big top further enhanced, with a deftly engineered frame that combined flexible, lightweight poles with a robust structure for the support of ‘thrill acts’ involving aerial tumbling and diving (Davis 2002, 6). With a company of some 1000 human performers, a range of massive animals including giraffes, elephants, camels and buffalo, and a vast stock of ornate vehicles and stage sets, the logistics of travel acquired another order of difficulty. Specially designed sixty-foot cars were linked end to end, to create a train 3600 in length. The Greatest Show on Earth was a phenomenon that dominated the landscape as it crossed the nation and took over the life of a city with its arrival in the grand parade on Circus Day. As circus scholar Janet M. Davis comments, ‘the turn-of-the-century railroad circus was a powerful cultural icon of a new modern nation state’ (2002, 10).

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Dramatisations of the great national story were a major element of the Barnum and Bailey shows. In 1892 they presented Imre Kiralfy’s Columbus and the Discovery of America, proclaimed as ‘The Grandest and Most Colossal Spectacle of All Time’. This featured a succession of sumptuous tableaux. Columbus receives the blessing for his mission at the court of Queen Isabella, which is then celebrated with a pageant of ‘the ancient glories and pastimes of the moors of Granada’ with ‘bewildering ballets’ and ‘oriental splendours’ (an opportunity for some 300 dancers to disport themselves in exotic costumes, see Barnum material at the Library of Congress). A night scene of the boat on the waves culminates in the siting of land, and disembarkation at dawn on the shores of the New World, where Indians fall back in awe at his presence. In the final tableau, Columbus returns in triumph to the Spanish court, bringing with him submissive representatives of the Indian tribes. Columbus occupied the entire three-ringed complex, drawing the surrounding audience into an immersive experience designed to dazzle and amaze at every turn. They are passive passengers on an imaginative journey through a highly controlled emotional landscape. Through the rest of the circus programme, they may laugh, shout, applaud, gasp or watch in anxious silence, but as participants they remain essentially in thrall to the performance, their gaze directed by the swirling shapes of the action in the vast space. As passive witnesses, though, they are also positioned to conceive of themselves as denizens of a dominant species, a superior race and a pre-eminent nation. If Bailey was the consummate orchestrator of spectacle, Barnum continued to preside as the imagineer-in-chief. Throughout his career, his greatest talent had been a capacity to mythologise himself and his enterprise with a grandiloquence that grew in parallel with the imperial aspirations of late nineteenth-century America. In retrospect, he is a figure who embodies much of the worst of the cultural milieu from which he emerged—the racism arising from delusions of ethnological superiority, the presumption of a right to plunder wildlife and cultural traditions from every region of the earth, the cruelty to animals and the equation of commercial profit with moral achievement. Yet even as he invited his audiences to engage in the inflated public fantasies of the Greatest Show on Earth, perhaps he had not, after all, left the minor games of humbug behind. This pseudo-emperor of a parallel universe, the Sun of the Amusement World, as he proclaimed himself in posters for the 1881 season, was

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drawing the public into an outlandish form of pantomime. In the ‘Human Menagerie’, as he continued to call his magnificent circus, formations and taxonomies were in wild and unpredictable realignment. Flying and tumbling bodies of different nations and ethnicities, humans engaged in daring interaction with wild animals, muscular women and gracefully aerodynamic men confused any settled presumptions about the natural order and the human place in it (see Tait 2005). The ‘savage’ and ‘primitive’ peoples disporting themselves in the ethnological congresses were a spectacle catering to the educated curiosity of those who took for granted their own racial and cultural superiority, yet the spectators were implicated. They too, were members of one species amongst others, and now that the theory of evolution had introduced the prospect of mobility in the great hierarchical order of being, who could tell where all this was heading in the intoxicating environment of cultural modernity? What, after all, is a human being? ‘What is it?’ Zip, the performer who had stayed the course from the American Museum to the Greatest Show on Earth, continued to trade on this question as a wry joke. In 1925, he offered to appear as a witness for the defence in the trail of John Scopes, the high school teacher indicted for teaching about the evolution of man from ape. Curiosity on that score was at white heat. The ‘missing link’ outlived the Emperor of the Entertainment world by thirty-five years and saw the unfolding of another era, in which identities continued to shift and converge—nowhere with more dynamism and fascination than in the circus.

References Advertisements for ‘What Is It?’ at the American Museum. 1860. New York Sunday Times and The Spectator, 11 April and 5 March 1860. Harvard Theatre Collection. Advertisement for Barnum’s Great Roman Hippodrome. 1874. Commercial newspaper, 3 August 1874. Image at http://fsu.digital.flvc.org/islandora/ object/fsu%3A846. Accessed 14 April 2019. Albrecht, Ernest. 2014. From Barnum and Bailey to Feld. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Barnum, Phineas Taylor. 1850. The American Museum Illustrated. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2014gen34181?sp=1& st=list. Accessed 14 April 2019. Barnum, Phineas Taylor. 1855. The Life of P. T. Barnum. New York: Redfield.

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Barnum, Phineas Taylor. 2018. The True Life of the World’s Greatest Showman. Chapter XLVII. Barto. Pennsylvania: Creative Texts (Kindle edition). The Barnum and Bailey Greatest Show on Earth, Imre Kiralfy’s Columbus and the Discovery of America, poster and other illustrated material, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98500522/. Accessed 23 April 2019. ‘The Bonassus.’ 1820. Playbill. The Strand. Harvard Theatre Collection. Cook, James W. 2001. The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Daston, Lorraine, and Katherine Park (Eds.). 1998. Wonders and the Order of Nature. New York: Zone Books. Davis, Janet M. 2002. The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Dickens, Charles. 2001. Hard Times. New York: The Modern Library (Originally published in 1854). Goodall, Jane. 2012. Electrical Romanticism. In Frankenstein: Norton Critical Reader, ed. J. Paul Hunter, 490–506. London: Norton. Goodall, Jane. 2011. Reverse Ethnology in Punch. Popular Entertainment Studies 2 (1): 5–21. Goodall, Jane. 2002. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin. London: Routledge. Knight, Charles (Ed.). 1833–1843. The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. London: Charles Knight. https://archive. org/details/ThePennyCyclopaediaOfTheSocietyForTheDiffusionOfUsefulK nowledge/page/n1. Accessed 14 April 2019. Lewis, Charles Short. 1879. Ingenium. In A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus: text:1999.04.0059:entry=ingenium. Accessed 14 April 2019. Presumption! or The Fate of Frankenstein. 1823.Playbill. Theatre Royal, The Strand. London, 28 July 1823. Programme of P. T. Barnum’s Great Roman Hippodrome Bills of Performance. 1874. https://connecticuthistoryillustrated.org/islandora/object/ 110002%3A4502#page/4/mode/2up. Accessed 23 April 2019. ‘P. T. Barnum’s Great Travelling Exposition and World’s Fair, Season of 1872.’ Transcription of Circus Route Book, Circus Historical Society. http://classic. circushistory.org/History/PTB1872.htm. Accessed 14 April 2019. ‘Punch’s Information for the People No. 4.’ and ‘Punch’s Information for the People No. 5.’ Punch, I, 119 and 179. Review of Presumption or The Fate of Frankenstein. 1823. London Morning Post, 30 July 1823.

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Tait, Peta. 2005. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London: Routledge. Thompson, Helen. 2015. ‘150 Years Ago, a Fire in P. T. Barnum’s Museum Boiled Two Whales Alive.’ Smithsonian.com, 20 July 2015. https://www. smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pt-barnums-bizarre-museum-burnedground-1865-180955955/. Accessed 14 April 2019.

CHAPTER 3

Unreal Limbs: Erin Ball and the Extended Body in Contemporary Circus Katie Lavers, Jon Burtt, and with Erin Ball

In March 2014, Erin Ball, the Canadian circus artist, went for a walk in snow-filled woods near her home in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The snow had whited out all the landmarks and after walking for a while she became disoriented. She lost her way and began wandering through the trees trying to find the path. Gradually she lost all feeling in her feet and became unable to walk. She continued to search for the path crawling through the trees on her hands and knees. She was found on a road six days later, still alive but with a body temperature of only 19 degrees Celsius (66.2 degrees Fahrenheit) and suffering from severe frostbite. This incident resulted in an extended stay in hospital of almost a year, and the eventual amputation of both of her legs below the knee. As a professional circus artist, she was not aware of any other double leg amputees performing in circus. She became depressed and suicidal and says that it

K. Lavers Edith Cowan University, Joondalup, WA, Australia J. Burtt (B) Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_3

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took her a year to grieve and accept her situation before she could start to look forward.1 When Erin Ball started to walk again, she began a Facebook page showing her progress.2 Her growing group of Facebook friends became a source of strength and support. They encouraged her to post about her experiences and also to share photos of her successes as well as her setbacks. As a result, she has documented her progress in re-imagineering her body from these early beginnings right up to the present day in detail. This collection of photographs, videos and notes forms a unique research resource that follows Erin Ball from when she was learning to walk again and how to use prostheses, through to the present day—where she is weight-lifting with a personal trainer to build up her strength, and is in the process of regaining her previous physical skills, such as skiing, bike riding and even roller skating. This process of social media documentation has also created a unique record of her lived experience and of the re-learning and re-imagineering of all her circus skills. Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt, both circus academics based in Sydney, Australia, became aware of the rigorous and self-regulated physical training she was undertaking in order to start performing circus again through Facebook. They also became interested in her unusual performance experiments especially with innovative prosthetic limbs. Meanwhile Erin Ball started to work with some of the ideas about prostheses that had come up in discussions with the authors and she developed a short performance entitled The Extended Body, presented at the ‘Circus and Its Others II’ Conference in Prague, in August 2018, as part of her presentation with Cultural Studies scholar Keren Zaiontz, entitled, ‘Against Ableist Logics: The Adaptive Body in Contemporary Circus Arts’. The Canadian prosthetics designer Kristina Walsh also became aware of Erin Ball through her Facebook page. Seeing Erin Ball performing silks in an online video, Kristina contacted her and the two of them have since started to collaborate on developing innovative prostheses for Contemporary Circus3 performance. The research and writing for this chapter have since evolved through FaceTime discussions between Katie Lavers, Jon Burtt and Erin Ball, with additional conversations with Kristina Walsh. The process of returning to Contemporary Circus performance has required Erin Ball to re-imagineer her body to develop the strength and endurance to perform again and to re-think traditional circus skills to accommodate her adaptive body. The term ‘adaptive’ which is used in this writing is Erin Ball’s own choice. She chooses this term to describe

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her body in preference to the term ‘differently abled’ which, as she points out, applies to everybody. She also chooses the term ‘adaptive’ in order to emphasise the potential that the term offers to be able to positively adapt to new situations as they arise (Lavers and Burtt Interview March 2018).

Contesting the Normate in Contemporary Circus In the book Contemporary Circus (Lavers et al. 2019), the idea is proposed that much political work in Contemporary Circus involves the contestation of the predominance of the ‘normate’. This writing proposes that Erin Ball’s work is activist and political in that it engages with and contests the dominance of the ‘normate’ in Contemporary Circus. The idea of the ‘normate’ is of pivotal importance in Contemporary Circus, with much scholarly writing pointing out the predominance of the white, hetero-normative, able-bodied male performer (Fricker and Malouin 2018; Lavers and Burtt 2017). It was the Disability Studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in her book Extraordinary Bodies (1997) who coined the term ‘normate’ which has since become widely adopted. She says that the term has gained traction because it describes in one word something that previously required several phrases to articulate. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes, Normate, then, is the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and the cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them. If one attempts to define the normate position by peeling away all the marked traits within the social order at this historical moment, what emerges is a very narrowly defined profile that describes only a minority of actual people. Erving Goffman […] observes the logical conclusion of this phenomenon […] ‘in America: a young, married, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports.’ (8)

As Garland-Thomson notes, there is no mention of femaleness in this portrait of the normate. There is also no mention of performers with adaptive bodies. In Contemporary Circus , Lavers, Leroux and Burtt note that: This idea of a socially constructed and internalised cultural ‘normate’ that directly relates to external bodily appearance is of intrinsic importance in

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Circus Studies, as in many ways it can be seen as emerging, becoming embodied, and being promulgated through the developments in American circus after 1871 – the year that P.T. Barnum came into circus at the age of 61. (2019, 55)

P. T. Barnum moved into the field of circus just after a fire in which his American Museum in New York had burnt down. As a result, he brought into circus the animals that had been displayed in his museum, along with the ‘freaks’ or ‘human oddities’ who had also been exhibited there. These diverse human performers, which included people with disabilities, hermaphrodites, bearded ladies, fat ladies, thin people referred to as living skeletons, Siamese twins, small people, people covered with an unusual amount of hair, as well as people of colour and Indigenous peoples, were collectively referred to by P. T. Barnum as a ‘“human menagerie” (a term popularized by P. T. Barnum) of racial diversity, gender difference [and] bodily variety’ (Davis 2002, 10). The performers labelled as the ‘human menagerie’ were initially included as part of the main show in the big top, however, Barnum soon moved them from the big top into separate tents outside. This move enabled Barnum to charge additional entrance fees but also, in an architectonic way, reinforced the acceptable parameters of the normate through this process of separation.4 In addition to this architectonic division of the performers by P. T. Barnum, there has also been an erasure of successful disabled artists working with circus and vaudeville. Disability Studies scholar, Tina Carter (2018), has written that her research has revealed that there were a number of successful disabled performers, including hand-balancers and aerialists, who provide an alternative history of nineteenth-century circus and vaudeville. Carter writes that these adaptive performers have been forgotten and their histories occluded (see ‘UNfrIQUE’). It would seem that this selective process of the forgetting of these performers and the exclusion of them from most histories of circus also contributes to the current predominance of the normate in Contemporary Circus.

Re-Imagineering the Adaptive Body for Circus Performance In early 2018 Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt began a series of conversations with Erin Ball about her decision to start performing circus again. Extracts from these conversations are included in this chapter in italics.

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Who are your role models? Erin Ball: People who are pushing themselves, people who are different, anyone who is doing something they were told they couldn’t. The disability community. Alex Bulmer, Jenny Sealey, Viktoria Modesta, Femmes du Feu, Tina Carter. Vanessa Furlong… she is a huge role model. (Lavers and Burtt Interview 2019)5

Just 30 days out of the hospital, Erin Ball gave a hula hoop performance. She recalls that the main feature of the performance was when she stood up from the stool she was sitting on to loud cheers from her friends and family. She says that the performance gave her confidence, especially when she found her community welcomed her. From that point on, things turned around for her. Although she struggled with the way people stared at her in everyday situations, she found that performing gave her the space to control how she presented herself and how she was seen by others. How did you plan your pathway back into performing? Erin Ball: No road map here. It was a series of ‘I wonder what happens if I do this?’… At the time it felt like the only option. It was the only thing I could imagine myself doing.6

The decision to restart her life in circus as a performer necessitated a complete physical re-imagineering of her body. That first performance gave her a goal and she worked towards it by training and practising her hula hoop routine three times a day for thirty days before she performed it. These sessions got her back into the routine of training. Trapeze had been Erin Ball’s main apparatus before her accident, but afterwards she found that the rope, or the fabric of the silks, wrapping around her body proved easier to handle than trying to wrap her body around a trapeze. At first she was hooping every day to help her with her balance. Then as soon as she found a place to train she had her silks rigged. Silks or tissu is the name given to a circus apparatus that allows the artist to perform aerial acrobatics while suspended from strips of synthetic fabric. Although the ceiling was extremely low, it was perfect for her training at that point. She practised standing in foot locks wearing her prostheses, doing sequences to build her endurance back up, and doing, as she describes it, ‘ALL those pull ups!’ (Fig. 3.1).7 Many conventional circus skills on silks and rope involve winding the silks or rope around the lower legs and feet, and these wraps then act as locks to prevent the performer from sliding or falling. Without her own

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Fig. 3.1 Erin Ball (Photo by Michael East)

physical feet or lower legs to support her weight for these wraps, Erin Ball has had to re-imagineer all the traditional aerial techniques. She has explored new approaches to the skills, in many instances by reworking the traditional hip or waist lock in a way that works for her body. Now she often uses her own versions of hip and waist wraps as locks in place of conventional foot wraps (for technical information regarding these acrobatic aerial manoeuvres see Heller 2005). In order to be able to use a hip or waist wrap as a lock, she has had to develop extra core strength and stronger muscles in her inner thighs to compensate for her new centre

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of gravity, as well as the different body mechanics involved when performing without lower limbs. The physical re-imagineering of her own adaptive body is achieved on a daily basis through rigorous training and body conditioning. As well as re-conditioning her body and investigating ways of developing and re-imagineering traditional circus skills to accommodate her present body, she is also working on the development of new ‘unreal’ limbs. Have you had a big shift in how you think about circus performance? Erin Ball: Yes, absolutely. A lot of things that I did before were very traditional. I was always struggling with how I could come up with ideas… now there are so many ideas that I don’t have enough time to explore them all. (Lavers and Burtt Interview 2018)

Initially, Erin Ball performed with her conventional naturalistic prostheses but she soon started working without any prostheses and also began removing the ‘cosmetic’ covers on her legs.8 Performing without prostheses or leg covers gave her a sense of freedom and the process of rejecting naturalistic prostheses has led to some interesting performance experiments. One performance in which Erin Ball did use conventional naturalistic prostheses was at a fundraising gala. She was wearing a cabaret-style costume with a silk shawl and gloves, with plastic naturalistic legs dressed in fishnet stockings which were attached to her body by garter belts. She began the performance as though performing a playful striptease. The music started and she began descending on a swing from a catwalk 40 foot in the air, moving, taking off the shawl she was wearing and throwing it down into the crowd, taking off the gloves she was wearing and throwing them one by one out to the onlookers. She then undid her garter belts and, as she was throwing her stockings out to the crowd, her naturalistic legs also came off with them and these were also thrown out into the audience, as a cloud of red confetti rained down on them. How did the audience react to that performance? Erin Ball: They did not know what to think! There was a lot of screaming! I came down and did a wheel chair piece on the ground. By the end they were all standing and clapping… they loved it! (Lavers and Burtt Interview 2018)

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This performance embodies a playful rejection of naturalistic limbs as well as an active contestation of the dominance of the normate in Contemporary Circus.

Unreal Limbs and the Extended Body of the Athlete and Performer By the late 1990s ‘naturalistic’ prostheses began to be rejected and contested particularly by performers and athletes. Some extraordinary photographs appeared at the time on the cover of numerous magazines showing Aimee Mullins, the Paralympian, muscled and athletic, a double lower-leg amputee, running at full stretch along a beach in her bikini wearing curved metallic blade prostheses. These photos caused a sensation in the way they challenged not only the existing aesthetics of the normative athletic body, but also in the way they contested ableist assumptions about what the adaptive body could be. These images also challenged the conventional notions of prosthetics as mere functional replacements for human limbs and branched out into a new way of thinking about the adaptive body and its potential. It is this new way of thinking of the adaptive body, in which its potential and its appearance are modified by imaginative and innovative non-naturalistic prostheses, that we term the ‘extended body’. The blades which Aimee Mullins wore were prostheses for elite athletes that had been created by the visionary Van Phillips. In 1976, when Van Phillips was 21, his left leg was severed below the knee in a water-skiing accident. At the hospital, he was measured for a pink, wood-and-rubber leg and sent home. Phillips has said that as an athlete this leg felt ‘like a sentence from hell’ (Phillips cited in Pogash 2008). Van Phillips began researching prosthetics and soon discovered that the artificial limb industry had evolved very little since World War II and the Korean War, and that most prostheses were being designed to resemble the human foot. He imagineered a new type of prosthetic lower leg which did not aim to resemble the original human limb it replaced. Instead, the new prosthesis he imagined was created as a structure to enable him to jump and to land. Van Phillips explored a wide range of imagery and drew on inspirations ranging from ‘pole vaulting, the spring of a diving board and the C shape of a Chinese sword that his father owned’ (ibid.). The result he called the ‘Flex-Foot’, and in 1984, his company, Flex-Foot Incorporated, began selling his designs.

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‘The Cheetah’, the design Aimee Mullins wore in the famous photos, was his design for elite athletes that Mullins herself had helped to develop and refine, which Van Phillips debuted in 1996. In 2000 FlexFoot Incorporated was acquired by the Icelandic firm Ossur who have since further developed the construction of this groundbreaking design. The chief executive of Ossur, Jon Sigurdsson, has since described Van Phillips as ‘a visionary, whose ideas and progressive techniques are central to our heritage’ (Phillips cited in Pogash 2008). Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, in an essay that first appeared in the Japanese journal Energy in 1970, envisioned a possible response to robots which had been created to resemble humans. He proposed that there would be a ‘sudden switch from empathy to revulsion as the robot approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance’ (Mori 1970/2012, 98). Masahiro Mori coined a new term to describe this response: ‘Bukimi no Tani Gensh¯ o (不気味の谷現 象)’. The English translation of this phrase is the ‘Uncanny Valley’. This name refers to the shape mapped on a graph showing the sudden drop in empathetic response as the robot becomes more human-like in appearance. The term began to gain more traction after the original article was translated into English in 2012. In the past few years, there has been an upsurge of interest in Mori’s idea from people working in fields including gaming, robotics and prosthetics. Masahiro Mori believes that the term has attracted attention because it is, in essence, multidisciplinary relating to ‘various disciplines, including philosophy, psychology, and design’ (Mori cited in Kageki 2012). The new Flex-Foot and the Cheetah Legs from Van Phillips completely discard the idea of prosthetic limbs as a simulation of the lost human limbs and in the process also offer the wearer new potential ways of moving. These new lower limbs challenge the idea of the Uncanny Valley and move way beyond it out into a world of imagineered limbs. The move away from replicating human limbs to re-imagineering the body in new forms has been gathering momentum over the past few years. Aimee Mullins has been particularly influential in this area as a Disability advocate and also as an athlete, actress, performer and model. After successfully competing and breaking records wearing her Cheetah Legs in the 1996 Paralympics, Aimee Mullins put out a call to artists and designers to collaborate with her in rethinking prosthetic limbs.

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That idea of designing these carbon-fiber legs that were modeled off of the back legs of a Cheetah was the start, for me, of blowing it wide open […] Why can’t I have glass legs? Why can’t I have legs covered in peacock feathers if I want? Why does this thing always have to have such a heavy social representation of loss, instead of being about something fun and beautiful and creating wearable sculpture? (Mullins cited in Bauck 2018)

She worked with designer Alexander McQueen who designed wooden legs for her that were hand-carved and made out of solid wood, and Mullins wore them on the catwalk for McQueen’s 1999 show. The ensemble that she wore—the brown leather corset, the skirt of cream lace and the carved rich brown wooden legs—formed part of the 2011 retrospective show, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2020). Aimee Mullins went on to invite other artists to work with her. One of the most astonishing collaborations was a pair of legs created with Matthew Barney for the Cremaster Cycle. For Cremaster 3 in 2002, they together created a pair of legs that were completely transparent (Serra et al. 2002). These legs have been described as having designs like plants growing inside them, and they can be seen as extending an invitation to the viewer to read the body itself as ecosystem or cosmos (see Dolezal 2017). The designer and visual artist Sophie de Oliveira Barata is another key figure in this process of the re-imagineering of the body through surreal prosthetics. With her company, The Alternative Limb Project, she has created a range of imagineered bespoke prosthetics in which the wearers of the limbs are given agency to work with her to imagine new limbs for themselves (Alternative Limb Project 2019). The Alternative Limb Project has designed limbs with the Latvian-born London-based singer Viktoria Modesta. One of these limbs is in steampunk black and silver, with inbuilt stereo speakers, and is a celebration of a camp, hybrid aesthetic, a new cyber-burlesque (ibid.). For the 2012 Paralympics Closing Ceremony Viktoria Modesta, performing live with Coldplay, appeared as the ‘Snow Queen’ with one leg that was visibly hollow and looked as though it was carved out of ice and snow. Her ‘Snow Queen’ appeared to be part flesh, part ice. Her extraordinary, sculptural, prosthetic leg glittered with thousands of Swarovski crystals (Pixel 2012). With the Paralympian triathlete JoJo Cranfield, The Alternative Limb Project created an arm with a three-dimensional snake that can be seen

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winding its way through the silicone flesh. Cranfield says the limb makes her feel ‘powerful and sexy’ (Cranfield cited in McKenzie 2013). Keira Roche, the chairperson of the charity Limb Power, envisaged a limb for herself that was jointed like a Victorian doll and looks as though it was made out of a floral, green and white porcelain (Alternative Limb Project, ‘Floral Porcelain Leg’ 2019). With these unique, bespoke limbs The Alternative Limb Project is creating a new world of prosthetics in which the wearer has agency to create the extension they envisage for their own body, and to imagineer a way of physicalising new potential for themselves through their own extended bodies. Barata’s imagineering of her extraordinary ‘limbs for alternative functions’ brings to mind the creations of the Surrealists in the drawing game, ‘Exquisite Corpse’. This game, invented in Paris in 1925 by André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Tanguy and Jacques Prévert, is similar to the word game known as ‘consequences – in which players write in turn on a sheet of paper, fold to conceal what they have written, and pass it on to the next player’ (The Tate Modern 2019). In Exquisite Corpse, the players draw part of a figure in sequence (e.g. a head, a neck) and the paper is folded over so that next player is not influenced by what has been already drawn. In an email to the authors, Sophie de Oliveira Barata of The Alternative Limb Project writes about the comparison of her surreal prosthetics to the game Exquisite Corpse saying, ‘I love the comparison to the Exquisite Corpse drawings. We play that game a lot as a family’.9 In some of the original drawings by the Surrealists the extremities of the body show a violin sitting in place of a head, or limbs replaced by tennis racquets and eyes floating away from a head attached to a curling ribbon.10 The academic Katherine Milligan comments on these Exquisite Corpse drawings: ‘The legibility of the drawings attests to a powerful desire for bodily coherence. At the same time, the drawings extend the Surrealists’ questioning of the limits of individuality […] in physical metaphor. The boundaries of the body are anything but discrete’ (Milligan 1998). The Surrealist Exquisite Corpse drawings pose the question as to how we are to describe the interface between the body and the other elements in the image. Milligan goes on to ask, Are the bodies reaching out into the non-corporeal world or is the non-corporeal world reaching into the bodies? At their edges the corporeal/non-corporeal distinction breaks down, and it becomes impossible to state decisively where the transition from one to the other takes

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place. In particular […] the borders of the body have come to represent the difficulty of determining the limits of the individual. (3)

Sophie de Oliveira Barata and the people with adaptive bodies she works with are picking up on the questions posed by the Surrealists in their Exquisite Corpse drawings and moving them beyond the realm of imaginative drawing through transposing these issues into the actual. They are challenging common preconceptions about the nature of disability, and also posing playful and challenging questions about the malleable nature of the boundaries of an individual’s body, showing the way beyond the Uncanny Valley into the world of unreal limbs and the extended body. Dani Clode, who is originally from New Zealand but now works in London, is another designer working in the area of surreal prosthetic limbs. Her project, ‘The Third Thumb’ (first publicly presented in 2017), shows a wearable articulated thumb attached to the hand to create a third thumb that the wearer is able to move and control with the foot (Dani Clode Design 2019). More recently, she has begun working with Sophie Oliveira de Barata to create an arm for model Kelly Knox which is synchronised to the wearer’s pulse and flashes in time to the wearer’s heartbeat (Alternative Limb Project, ‘Kelly Knox’ 2019). She has also been working with The Alternative Limb Project on a prosthetic called ‘Vine’ which was created in response to Kelly Knox’s interest in the extraterrestrial. This project is described on The Alternative Limb website as, A flora/fauna hybrid, we created verdant armor inspired by terrestrial plants for the surface of the arm, with an alien structure which lies beneath the skin […] There are four degrees-of-freedom within the arm, controlled by Kelly’s big toes. With four force sensors embedded in her shoes, Kelly can flex the four individual sections, or can combine two at a time, to create dynamic curves that react in real-time, allowing Kelly precise control. (Alternative Limb Project, ‘Vine’ 2019)

A video of the ‘Vine’ tentacle being worn by Kelly Knox shows her stretching out to coil the surreal limb around the stem of a cocktail glass. The sophisticated design beneath the skin of the prosthesis involves ‘26 individual vertebrae which allow subtle, organic movements of the arm as it curves and curls around objects’ (ibid.). The innovative aesthetic of unreal limbs and the extended body developed by designers Van Phillips and Sophie de Oliveira Barata has received

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widespread attention in the media and has permeated the zeitgeist. Their groundbreaking designs and innovative approaches to the development of unreal limbs have been accepted and widely adopted by people from the broader community. David Aguilar, who is now 19 years old and is studying bio-engineering at the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya in Spain, was born without his right forearm. In 2008, at the age of nine, he built himself a forearm out of Lego blocks. He has since gone on to build several new versions of this Lego arm. In November 2017 Mr Aguilar, who uses Lego pieces provided by a friend, proudly displayed a fully functioning red and yellow robotic arm, built when he was 18, bending it in the elbow joint and flexing the grabber. The latest models are marked MK followed by the number – a tribute to Iron Man and his MK armour suits. The MKII was a predominantly blue model built from a Lego plane set. (‘David Aguilar’ 2019)

David Aguilar now hosts his own YouTube channel under the name ‘Hand Solo’ and his aim for the future is to create affordable prosthetics for people who need them. The aesthetic and ethos of unreal limbs are also visible in the work of engineer Mat Bowfell who is based in Phillip Island near Melbourne, Australia. When Mat Bowfell was laid off from his position as an engineer working with Toyota, he used his retrenchment money to set up a workshop with some 3D printers and he began to design prosthetic limbs. Crowdfunding has now enabled him to set his workshop up with sophisticated software, prosthetic-grade scanners and 12 3D printers. The crowdfunding also enables him to provide free prosthetic limbs to children all over the world without even having to charge postage. All the children are able to choose their own colours and designs. He has also put his designs for printed prostheses up online with a Creative Commons License. People can take their own measurements, adjust the design accordingly, choose the colours they want and print the design out for themselves. These designs have, to date, been downloaded more than 1000 times (Lazzaro 2018). The work of David Aguilar and Mat Bowfell shows how the aesthetic of surreal and unreal limbs developed as bespoke prostheses by innovative designers in the late 1990s, twenty years later, is now much more widely

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accepted by the general public, with some engineers now focusing on developing low cost, more easily accessible unreal prosthetic limbs.

Unreal Prosthetics and the Extended Body in Contemporary Circus Erin Ball began experimenting with a range of innovative prostheses performing on rope with non-naturalistic or unreal blade legs which have curved metal leg sections attaching to solid wooden feet. Erin Ball has emphasised their unreal construction by exposing the curved metal legs in performance. Erin Ball: I love the idea of the Extended Body. To me, it offers massive possibility where before there were feet and toes, now my body can have whatever function or aesthetic I desire. (Lavers and Burtt Interview March 2018)

She began developing surreal prostheses herself, searching for ideas and inexpensive ways of creating limbs for performance. She has created two different sets of cone legs for performance. The smaller cone legs make her 5 foot 5 inches tall (165.10 cm) when she is standing, while the other set changes her height to 7 foot (213.36 cm). She also has adapted a confetti cannon from a Dollar Store to create a set of ‘Confetti Legs’ that fire confetti out of their ends. Do you move your Confetti Legs prostheses around during performances and fire the confetti at spectators? Erin Ball: I do. When I’m spinning on the silks in my act, I’m doing that. I have kids come up to me quite often and say, ‘Are you “Confetti Legs’”? (Lavers and Burtt Interview March 2018)

One vital question in terms of these different prosthetics in Contemporary Circus, in which the artist has to perform with them often while handbalancing or suspended up in the air performing aerials, is the performer’s centre of gravity. Erin Ball has to renegotiate the extreme changes to her centre of gravity that occur when she is performing without prosthetics, which she often does, to when she performs with light prosthetics that are short, or longer ones which are heavier. This requires her to be truly adaptive in that she has to recalibrate her centre of gravity each time to allow for the changes in size and the inert weight of the various prostheses.

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One Contemporary Circus performance that Erin Ball has developed is called The Extended Body. It involves the use of her wheelchair, and some of the various prosthetic limbs she has developed. This work is performed without music to a slow soundtrack of a woman’s voice describing what Erin Ball is doing on stage as though for a blind spectator. Throughout the performance, she changes her various prosthetic limbs, including her two cone legs, and she uses her Confetti Legs to fire confetti at the audience (Fig. 3.2).

Fig. 3.2 Erin Ball (Photo by Michelle Peek)

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Can you talk about your performance The Extended Body? Erin Ball: Yes, I have been working on a performance called the Extended Body and I do five legs changes in it and as part of the performance I show all of it. I pull out my Allen key and unscrew my legs, pop the pegs out, and each part of the leg is part of the performance. At one point before I remove the legs completely, I still have my liners on, and the liners have pins at the end. The system that I use to attach the liners to the sockets is the pin and lock. And… because I was exploring creative audio descriptions for blind audiences, I was working to make sounds with the different legs. I used a really old metal wheelchair and I used the pins in the liners and banged on the wheel chair to make a soundscape with them. (Lavers and Burtt Interview March 2018)

Erin Ball has performed this work a number of times including at the ‘Circus and Its Others II’ Conference in Prague in 2018 (Ball 2018). One reviewer, Canadian Art ’s Editorial Resident Christiana Myers, has written of this work: Circus performer Erin Ball performed a routine using a wheelchair as a sawhorse, routinely changing or removing her prosthetics for varied effect. In manipulating her physical form, Ball demonstrated ultimate control, a state of being rarely projected onto disabled bodies by the ableist mainstream. The performance concluded as Erin donned a pair of prosthetics from which she promptly shot confetti out into the audience, indicating that disability art can be performative without being therapeutic, progressive without being overtly political and celebratory without being framed as a miracle. (Myers 2019)

A new collaboration is emerging between Erin Ball and the prosthetics designer Kristina Walsh, currently Artist in Residence at the Sarabande Studios run by the Alexander McQueen Foundation in London (Sarabande Foundation 2020). How did you become connected with Erin Ball? Kristina Walsh: Erin popped up on my radar through her silks. I just thought it was incredibly beautiful […] I took aerial silks classes so I could figure out the movements […] I think it’s really important that if you don’t have a physical experience that someone else has, and you’re designing something for them that you are least try to put yourself in their world. So I took some classes and then I sent her through some sketches just as an example of my style.11

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After a series of FaceTime discussions, they decided to work together and Erin Ball went to London to be measured and scanned for fitting new prosthetic limbs. Kristina Walsh, in discussion with Erin Ball, has now created and fabricated a number of preliminary models of different designs to test which of them are suitable for circus work. Kristina Walsh: It’s a very experimental project because even the engineers that I’m working with were like, ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before.’ (Lavers and Burtt Interview August 2018)

The two artists are working together to create new unreal prostheses for Contemporary Circus. In addition to aesthetic innovation they are also in the process of exploring and experimenting with innovative ways to fit the prostheses so that they are able to support the aerialist’s weight in the inverted positions involved in aerial work. Their first design features a pair of silver prosthetic limbs. The limbs take as their starting point the normate aesthetic of pointed feet which is prevalent in much circus performance. In these prostheses that the two artists have developed, however, the shape of the pointed foot is extended and exaggerated to form a surreal silver crescent moon shape that faces backwards and sits at the end of the prosthetic limbs. These limbs refer to the convention of pointed feet but subvert it, and through the exaggeration of the form, also contest it. Erin Ball, through her explorations with the extended body and the use of unreal and surreal limbs, is contesting the normate in Contemporary Circus, and, in the process, leading the way into new and intriguing terrain for circus performers with adaptive bodies. What kinds of responses are you getting to your performances? Erin Ball: Somebody sent me this message the other day and they said, ‘I love how many unexpected reactions I have to your work. You’re in some deep territory.’ And she was saying that my work raises a lot of emotion in her. And I see in the Disability community the reaction has been very supportive and they really appreciate what I’m doing. I get a lot of [people saying] ‘What did I just see?’ 12

Notes 1. Erin Ball (Circus Artist), interviewed by Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt via FaceTime, March 2018. In the following referred to as Lavers and Burtt Interview March 2018.

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2. For videos and blog posts about Erin Ball’s story see her public Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/erin.ball.94. 3. ‘Contemporary Circus’ as a term is used to describe forms of circus that were a continuation of ‘New Circus’ after the late 1990s. We have capitalised this term to avoid confusion with other forms of circus happening now contemporaneously with Contemporary Circus such as ‘Traditional Circus’. For commentaries and approaches to definitions of the term Contemporary Circus and other forms, see also Maleval (2014), Purovaara et al. (2012), and Tait and Lavers (2016). New Circus is the term used to describe the form of circus that is widely considered to have emerged out of the widespread social unrest in 1968. It contested the iconic elements of Traditional Circus such as the animals acts, the circus ring and the ringmaster, and hybridised with different art forms. It was from this form of circus that Contemporary Circus emerged. 4. See also Goodall, p. 15. For a discussion on the architectonic division of space see Performance Studies scholar Richard Schechner: ‘Theater [or performance] places are maps of the cultures where they exist. That is, theater is analogical not only in the literary sense – the stories dramas tell, the convention of explicating action by staging it – but also in the architectonic sense […]. Thus, for example, the Athenian theater of the fifth BCE had as its center the altar of Dionysus’ (2004, 179). 5. Erin Ball (Circus Artist), interviewed by Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt via Facebook Messenger, April 2019. Alex Bulmer is a writer, director and performer who is blind. She was a writer for the BAFTA nominated television series Cast Offs, where all cast members were performers with a disability, for Channel 4 in the UK. She is the artistic director of the UK-based inclusive theatre company, Invisible Flash. She has been a Churchill Fellow and was named one of the UK’s most influential artists with a disability in 2014 (see http://www.alexbulmer.co.uk/). Jenny Sealey is a theatre director who is deaf. She is the artistic director of Graeae Theatre Company, UK’s leading theatre company for deaf and disabled actors (Sealey and Lynch 2012). Viktoria Modesta is creative director, singer/songwriter and self-described ‘bionic performance artist’ who underwent a single below-the-knee amputation to safeguard her future health. The UK-based pop star is a high-profile media celebrity, and appeared in the Closing Ceremony of the Paralympic Games wearing a crystal leg designed by herself and Sophie de Oliveira Barata of The Alternative Limb Project (http://www.viktoriamodesta.com/). Femmes du Feu is a Contemporary Circus company based in Toronto, Canada. In 2018’s Circus Sessions, produced by Femmes du Feu, the company undertook an innovative five day workshop focusing on accessibility in

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11.

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circus (Erlich 2018). Katrina (Tina) Carter is a UK-based circus practitioner and academic writing in the area of Disability Studies and practice. Her PhD dissertation focused on the investigation of ‘disability aesthetics and politics in inclusive aerial practice’. Her research project UNfrIQUE examines the forgotten stories of historical disabled artists and contemporary disabled practitioners (see ‘UNfrIQUE’). She also presented a paper ‘Rolling into Flight – Dis-ing Up Aerial!’ at the Circus and Its Others Conference II in which she explored the ‘pedagogical and choreographic processes’ that inform her ‘Accessible Aerial practice, where the role of difference is one of exciting and creative potential rather than of restrictive limitation’ (Prague 2018). Vanessa Furlong is a Canadian circus artist and artistic director of LEGacy Circus, a Contemporary Circus arts duo she formed with Erin Ball in Canada. Their work explores the creative exploration of ‘leg attachments, mobility aids, traditional and non-traditional circus apparatuses’ (see http://legacycircus.com/). Erin Ball (Circus Artist), interviewed by Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt via Facebook Messenger, March 2018. Erin Ball (Circus Artist), interviewed by Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt via FaceTime, March 2019. For more information on prosthetic covers see ‘Limbs 4 Life’. Sophie de Oliveira Barata (Prosthetics Designer), email message to Katie Lavers, 6 July 2013. ‘Exquisite Corpse’ has been used as an approach to drawing by other artists in particular the British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman (Cadavre exquis/exquisite corpse). Kristina Walsh (Prosthetics Designer), interviewed by Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt via FaceTime, August 2018. In the following referred to as Lavers and Burtt Interview August 2018. Erin Ball (Circus Artist), interviewed by Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt via FaceTime, March 2019.

References Alternative Limb Project. altlimbpro. http://www.thealternativelimbproject. com/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Alternative Limb Project. Floral Porcelain Leg. http://www.thealternativelimb project.com/project/floral-porcelain-leg/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Alternative Limb Project. Kelly Knox. http://www.thealternativelimbproject. com/kelly-knox/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Alternative Limb Project. Vine. http://www.thealternativelimbproject.com/ project/vine/. Accessed 3 May 2020.

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Ball, Erin. ‘Erin Ball.’ Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/erin.ball.94. Accessed 3 May 2020. Ball, Erin. 2018. The Extended Body. Solo Performance. Part of Erin Ball and Keren Zaiontz, ‘Against Ableist Logics: The Adaptive Body in Contemporary Circus Arts.’ Presentation at Circus and Its Others II Conference. Prague, August 2018. Ball, Erin, and Keren Zaiontz. 2018. ‘Against Ableist Logics: The Adaptive Body in Contemporary Circus Arts.’ Presentation at Circus and Its Others II Conference. Prague, August 2018. https://circusanditsothers.com/ schedule/. Accessed 11 February 2020. Bauck, Whitney. 2018. Aimee Mullins on Disability, Design and Becoming an Alexander McQueen Muse. Fashionista, 15 October 2018. https://fashion ista.com/2018/02/aimee-mullins-fashion-disability-fit-symposium. Accessed 3 May 2020. Bulmer, Alex. ‘Alex Bulmer.’ http://www.alexbulmer.co.uk/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Carter, Tina. 2015. UNfrIQUE. Vimeo video, 15:58, posted by Tina Carter. https://vimeo.com/127269529. Accessed 3 May 2020. Carter, Katrina (Tina). 2018. Freaks No More: Rehistoricizing Disabled Circus Artists. Performance Matters 4 (1–2): 141–146. http://performancemattersthejournal.com/index.php/pm/issue/view/7/showToc. Accessed 3 May 2020. Chapman, Dinos, and Jake. Cadavre exquis (Exquisite Corpse). https://www. tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cadavre-exquis-exquisite-corpse. Accessed 3 May 2020. Chico Pixel. 2012. Viktoria Modesta’s Performance as Amazing Snow Queen | Paralympic Games London 2012. Filmed September 2012, YouTube video, 4:04, posted December 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= FSE8xPKncis. Accessed 3 May 2020. Dani Clode Design. The Third Thumb. https://www.daniclodedesign.com/ thethirdthumb. Accessed 3 May 2020. ‘David Aguilar Goes from Playing with Lego to Building Limbs Out of It.’ ABC News, 8 February 2019. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-08/ lego-prosthetic-arm-made-by-man-missing-limb/10792598. Accessed 3 May 2020. Davis, Janet M. 2002. The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press. Dolezal, Luna. 2017. Representing Posthuman Embodiment: Considering Disability and the Case of Aimee Mullins. Women’s Studies 46 (1): 60–75. Erlich, Shay. 2018. Circus Sessions 2018 Makes a Bold Move, Proving That Circus Is for Everybody. Circus Talk, 8 May 2018. https://circustalk.com/

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news/circus-sessions-2018-makes-a-bold-move-proving-that-circus-is-foreverybody/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Fricker, Karen, and Haley Rose Malouin (Eds.). 2018. Circus and Its Others. Performance Matters 4 (1–2). Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Graeae Theatre Company. ‘Graeae.’ https://graeae.org/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Heller, Carrie. 2005. Aerial Circus Training and Safety Manual. Parker, CO: National Writers Press. Kageki, Norri. 2012. An Uncanny Mind: Masahiro Mori on the Uncanny Valley and Beyond. IEEE Spectrum, 12 June 2012. https://spectrum.ieee.org/ automaton/robotics/humanoids/an-uncanny-mind-masahiro-mori-on-theuncanny-valley. Accessed 3 May 2020. Lavers, Katie, and Jon Burtt. 2017. Briefs and Hot Brown Honey: Alternative Bodies in Contemporary Circus. M/C Journal 20 (1): n.p. Lavers, Katie, Louis Patrick Leroux, and Jon Burtt. 2019. Contemporary Circus. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Lazzaro, Kellie. 2018. ‘I Don’t Even Charge Postage’: Phillip Island Engineer Uses 3D Printers to Make Free Prosthetic Limbs. ABC News, 23 October 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-10-23/retrenched-engineermakes-3d-prosthetic-limbs-for-free/10418050. Accessed 3 May 2020. ‘LEGacy Circus.’ http://legacycircus.com/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Limbs 4 Life. 2019. Fact Sheet #07 Prosthetic Appearance and Cosmetic Covers. https://www.limbs4life.org.au/uploads/resources/Fact-Sheet-7.pdf. Accessed 3 May 2020. Maleval, Martine. 2014. Sur la piste des cirques actuels. Paris: L’Harmattan. McKenzie, Sheena. 2013. Snake Arms and Crystal Legs: Artificial Limbs Push Boundaries of Art. CNN, 25 April 2013. http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/ 24/world/europe/alternative-limb-project. Accessed 3 May 2020. Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2020. Alexander McQueen, Ensemble, No. 13, Spring/Summer 1999. In ‘Alexander McQueen, Savage Beauty. May 4–August 7, 2011.’ Metmuseum (blog). https://www.metmuseum.org/ exhibitions/listings/2011/alexander-mcqueen. Accessed 3 May 2020. Milligan, Katherine J. 1998. Exquisite Corpses in America: Ornamented Bodies of the Late Twentieth Century. Dissertations available from ProQuest. AAI9829954. https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/AAI9829954. Accessed 3 May 2020. Modesta, Viktoria. ‘Viktoria Modesta.’ http://www.viktoriamodesta.com/. Accessed 3 May 2020. Mori, Masahiro. 1970/2012. The Uncanny Valley [From the Field]. Trans. K. F. MacDorman and N. Kageki. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine

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(June 2012), 98–100. Translated from Mori, M. 1970. Bukimi No Tani (The Uncanny Valley). Energy 7 (4): 33–35. Myers, Christiana. 2019. On the Complexity of Cripping the Arts. Canadian Art, 12 February 2019. https://canadianart.ca/features/on-the-complexityof-cripping-the-arts/?fbclid=IwAR0EfYktY5Aq7tEXvKmfEyJkVHrOw1ZuRh yB9oDtgja5YmguPCmsIalqkIo. Accessed 3 May 2020. Pogash, Carol. 2008. A Personal Call to a Prosthetic Invention. The New York Times, 2 July 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/sports/ olympics/02cheetah.html. Accessed 3 May 2020. Purovaara, Tomi, and Camilla Damkjaer et al. 2012. Introduction to Contemporary Circus. Stockholm: Stuts/New Nordic Circus Network. Sarabande Foundation. 2020. ‘Sarabande.’ https://www.sarabandefoundation .org. Accessed 3 May 2020. Schechner, Richard. 2004. Performance Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Sealey, Jenny, and Carissa Hope Lynch. 2012. Graeae: An Aesthetic of Access— (De)Cluttering the Clutter. In Identity, Performance and Technology: Practices of Empowerment, Embodiment and Technicity, eds. Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon, 60–76. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Serra, Richard, Matthew Barney, and Aimee Mullins. 2002. Cremaster 3. Directed by Matthew Barney, Glacier Field LLC. Tait, Peta, and Katie Lavers. 2016. Introduction. In The Routledge Circus Studies Reader, eds. Peta Tait and Katie Lavers, 1–11. Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Tate (The Tate Modern). Cadavre Exquis (Exquisite Corpse). https://www. tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cadavre-exquis-exquisite-corpse. Accessed 3 May 2020.

PART II

Technological Invention: Engineering (on) the Circus Stage

CHAPTER 4

Circus as Laboratory: Imagineering Legitimacy Mark St Leon

In late eighteenth-century London, a former cavalryman, Philip Astley (1742–1814) and his contemporaries invented a new genre of entertainment that would be called ‘circus’. When Astley presented equestrian entertainments in the first circus edifice of modern times—Astley’s Amphitheatre, a permanent building on the south side of the Thames— he augmented his programme with displays by itinerant entertainers that he brought from the fairground. For well over 200 years, such entertainers—ropewalkers, acrobats, jugglers and so on—had been placed at the bottom of the English class hierarchy alongside ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ (Manning-Sanders 1952, 20). By employing these entertainers, circus assumed their lowly social standing. Despite the intersection of three interlocking pieces of restrictive legislation: the Theatrical Licensing, Disorderley Houses and Vagrancy Acts, Astley and his contemporaries succeeded in securing a degree of legitimacy for ‘circus’ through a long

M. St Leon (B) Independent Scholar, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_4

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series of artistic, legal and managerial manoeuvres. Nevertheless, circus had acquired a marginalised status (see Stoddart 2000, 50). The Australian colonial circus entrepreneur was not required to ‘invent’ circus but was required to adapt—and therefore legitimise—its character, management and rationale in order to accommodate the challenges and the possibilities of its novel antipodean setting. Beyond lapses in taste and decorum, the circus posed little threat to the prevailing social order, and even contributed to its maintenance by providing, like the festivals and carnivals of yore, a de facto medium of social fraternisation (see Burke 1994, 201). For more than a century until the 1950s, the circus was the principal medium by which Australians were entertained; a potpourri of popular culture that toured between city and town, through the bush and across the outback. Circus proprietors kept abreast of advances in technology not only to lower the costs of touring and production and/or improve their revenue-generating capability but as symbols of prestige. Technological innovations in the areas of accommodation, lighting and transportation were of consistent interest, as will be outlined in this paper. Innovation in programming—artistic novelty—while not unwelcomed, represented a greater challenge owing to the paucity of supply and the costs and risks involved, as will also be outlined in this chapter. While circus proprietors were keen to foster innovations in costuming, performance techniques, support equipment, promotion and music, these areas will not be addressed at length in this chapter and await scholarly attention elsewhere. Reaching its public was more than just a matter of physical presence for the circus in Australia. Since its inception, Australian circus has had to generate audiences from a population continuously and rapidly changing in size, character and domicile. The circus had not only to establish its legitimacy but create, shape and continuously update that legitimacy to connect with its public and to accommodate the prevailing social order. The pursuit of legitimacy was, and continues to be, a constant theme in Australian circus.

Literature and Terminology Most academically grounded literature on circus in its Australian context has emphasised cultural and social, rather than managerial,

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operational and organisational perspectives (see Beadle 2003). Some exceptions are a study on the role of accounting information in circus in Australia (Cummings and St Leon 2008) and an investigation of maritime themes in Australia’s circus history (St Leon 2009). The essays on circus collected and edited by Tait and Lavers (2016) are peppered with numerous references to topics of an operational or organisational nature, many of which are pertinent to the Australian context. Moody (2000) and Kwint (2002) studied the role of legitimacy in securing the foundation of circus in England. In Australia, Arrighi (2015) demonstrated how FitzGerald Bros Circus philosophically evoked the spirit of Australian nationhood to seek legitimacy during the Federation era by which time circus was well-established as a global entertainment form. Otherwise, little research has been undertaken to methodically explain how Australia’s circus entrepreneurs ‘imagineered’ legitimacy in different eras and in contexts dissimilar to Europe and North America. Consequently, this chapter has relied on information extracted from Australian contemporary newspapers and magazines, civil records and oral interviews (from the author’s personal collection). The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines legitimacy as an object or action that embodies ‘genuineness’, conforms to some ‘law, rule or principle’ and, in the case of art, conveys ‘aesthetic merit and serious intent’ (2007, 1577). However, in recent decades, a body of ‘legitimacy theory’ has emerged within the discipline of management which better informs our understanding of the term as it relates to an organisational entity, even a circus. This theory posits that organisations continually seek to ensure that they operate within the bounds and norms of their respective societies and that their activities are perceived by outside parties to be ‘legitimate’. However, since these bounds and norms are subject to change, an organisation must respond to the environment in which it operates. Legitimacy theory rests on the notion that the expectations that society and an entity hold of each other are contained within an implied ‘social contract’: the entity’s survival and growth will depend upon (a) the delivery of some socially desirable result and (b) the distribution of economic, social or political benefits to groups within society. A constant tension exists between forces that strive to legitimise the social contract and those forces that strive to de-legitimise it (Deegan 2013, 112–113).

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Touring Opened just before the gold rushes of the 1850s, the first Australian circus enterprises were modest imitations of Astley’s in London, then regarded as the international fountainhead of circus. With a population of only 10,000 and an economy that depended critically on its penal purpose, the remote coastal settlement of Launceston, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) held the least promise as the site for Australia’s first successful circus. Yet in Launceston, several conditions serendipitously emerged that led to the establishment of Australia’s first successful circus enterprise: a willing and capable entrepreneur in Robert Avis Radford; the availability of performers (many of whom were emancipated convicts); and a central location in the midst of a horse-oriented settlement where matters of entertainment were typically non-intellectual in character. Radford opened his ‘Astley’s Amphitheatre on a limited scale’ outside his inn, The Horse & Jockey in York Street, Launceston, on the evening of 27 December 1847 (Cornwall Chronicle, 1 and 29 December 1847). The fire of circus activity was subsequently lit by Radford or others in the coastal settlements of Hobart Town (1848), Port Philip (1849), Sydney (1850), Adelaide (1850) and Geelong (1852). Amphitheatres had been built in European cities since the late eighteenth century but no such endowment awaited Australia’s early circus entrepreneurs. The few, early colonial amphitheatres were hastily built in unsavoury areas that tended to confirm, coincidentally or not, the social standing of the entertainment. The immediate vicinity of Malcom’s Royal Australian Circus (known later as Malcom’s Amphitheatre) in Sydney’s York Street in 1850 was ‘not of the sweetest’ (Sydney Sportsman, 7 February 1906). Despite their constant appeals to genteel patronage, early colonial circus entrepreneurs necessarily catered for both upper and lower orders, and the divergent values of each. The moral guardians of the day were quick to perceive lapses in taste (Peoples’ Advocate, 7 December 1850). Troupes of performers drawn from these early amphitheatres occasionally visited outlying suburbs, towns, pleasure grounds or local races but the paucity of interior settlement and lack of adequate road systems did not immediately justify the formation of permanent touring troupes. Early colonial circus activity was anchored where the population was concentrated: several colonial capitals and a handful of coastal townships. Alternative entertainment offerings were few and colonial licensing authorities looked favourably on equestrian-based amusements as ‘innocent’ and ‘less

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objectionable than some (theatre) performances’ (Robson 1983, 177; Archives Office of Tasmania: CSO 24/4/58). However, a fixed-location amphitheatre could only sustain patronage as long as its entrepreneur could (a) sustain novelty and (b) preclude competition. Novelty could not be readily developed locally nor readily procured from London or other distant sources of circus talent. Competition could not be indefinitely precluded since all manner of entertainments—theatrical, musical, operatic, marionette and others—were continually being put before an increasingly cosmopolitan colonial public. Furthermore, the fixed-location amphitheatre was at the mercy of the local economy (see Thorne 1971, 125; Cornwall Chronicle, 10 January 1849). The entertainers who travelled early modern Europe had discovered—and the circus men who travelled the American frontier had already re-discovered—that it was (a) more economical to change audiences than change programme and (b) to change audiences it was more economical to travel than remain in one location (see Burke 1994, 201). A professional English circus man, Henry Burton, probably understood this lesson better than most colonial circus men. Arriving in Australia late in 1849, Burton methodically transferred his professional circus experience to the colonial context by inaugurating his own—and Australia’s first—peripatetic circus early in 1851. After an inaugural season given at Botany Bay on the outskirts of Sydney, Burton took his company by road to Parramatta and then overland to Maitland, just as the first Australian gold rush broke out. From Maitland, ‘(in) spite of the great difficulties of taking circus paraphernalia along unmade roads, Burton… took his troupe across country towards [the goldfields of] Ophir’ (Salmon 1904, n.p.). Returning to Sydney 15 months later, in September 1852, Burton and his troupe had not only completed the first significant touring ‘loop’ by a circus but demonstrated the colonial feasibility of a peripatetic circus, rudimentary travelling conditions notwithstanding (see Sydney Morning Herald, 17 September 1852). As goldfield activity began to decline after 1854, the gold diggers returned to the few coastal cities or settled in the emerging interior townships. In the cities, audiences were no longer dominated by lower orders of emancipated convicts and their progeny but now included a significant proportion of freely-arrived and better-educated migrants from a variety of countries (see Parsons 1995, 566). Fixed-location circus entrepreneurs had opened the colonies’ first fixed-location amphitheatres but, as the ‘novelty of circus and equestrian performances palled’, they were obliged

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to offer increasingly cosmopolitan audiences a greater diversity of entertainment (Irvin 1971, 231). In Sydney in 1856, Malcom’s Amphitheatre was remodelled and reopened as Our Lyceum Theatre, with an inaugural season of Shakespeare. In Melbourne in 1857, Lewis’s so-named Astley’s Amphitheatre, opened only three years earlier, was transformed into the Princess’s Theatre and Opera House (Parsons 1995, 465). As these amphitheatres were transformed into conventional theatres, the equestrians, acrobats and ropewalkers they had once employed were absorbed into an emerging itinerant circus industry comprised of small companies of performers that travelled along expanding trade routes to deliver equestrian-based entertainment to the emerging settlements of the interior. These companies were organised and led by men who were not only imbued with circus skills but prepared to commit to a peripatetic existence. Until the emergence of cinema chains in the 1920s and 1930s, circus entertainments reached more of the common people than any other form of entertainment. The circus was an instrument of social levelling since a typical performance accommodated people of all social classes, and of any age, sex and race. Golding Ashton, landed as a boy convict in 1837, emulated the equestrians he saw in Hobart Town in 1848 and formed an itinerant equestrian troupe that he brought to Port Phillip [Melbourne] in 1849 before travelling overland to Sydney where he performed in a makeshift ring on the city outskirts. By 1873, having re-named himself ‘James Henry’ Ashton to conceal his convict past, he was touring Queensland with his own circus, a ‘large measure of success’ rewarding his efforts to ‘provide innocent amusement of all classes’ (Australian Town & Country Journal, 3 May 1873). However, Australia’s circus routes did not immediately spring into existence. Between 1851 and 1861 the population of the six Australian colonies nearly trebled, growing from 405,356 to 1,145,585 (Cole 1954, 193). In the 1860s and 1870s, vast areas of Australia’s interior were opened up for European settlement due to pastoral and agricultural expansion (see Ward 1958, 135; Teo and White 2003, 77). The early circus people constantly explored the frontiers of settlement, gathering a breadth of knowledge of life and social conditions in their travels. A wide range of competing logistical factors had to be negotiated by the itinerant circus proprietors before prioritising their touring objectives. There were the adverse ‘push’ factors—such as inclement weather, recessional economies, competitive threats, bushfires and floods—which deflected a

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circus away from a route or region; and the seductive ‘pull’ factors— such as population, prosperity, accessibility, climate, local events and the absence of competition which lured a circus in a particular direction. By trial and error, over time, recognisable routes and touring directions and preferences were developed. These were gradually massaged into, if not more-or-less formalised routes, then more-or-less defined seasonal touring areas. Circus loads were lightened of all but the essential paraphernalia necessary to present equestrian-based performances. By continuously touring, the peripatetic circus could service different localities and maximise economies of scale. As in provincial England and frontier America, these troupes were rather small and ‘rapid movement from place to place reduced the pressure on them to produce constant innovation in the nature and variety of the entertainments presented’ (Stoddart 2000, 22). By the early 1900s, Australia was one of the most urbanised nations on earth (Davison et al. 1987, 192). Suburban rail systems allowed swift, mass late-night transport for suburban patrons of inner-city entertainments such as a large visiting circus (Brown 1986, 827; Cusack 1973, 181). Advertising its Sydney season in 1893, Fitzgerald Bros Circus drew attention to its position on ground opposite Redfern (now Central) Station, a position convenient to ‘the whole of the Western and Illawarra railway suburbs’ (Bulletin, 20 May 1893). Despite Australia’s increasing population, motorisation and infrastructural improvements, the minimisation of competition was still a key factor in circus management for Australia’s four remaining, and evidently thriving, mainstream circuses in 1973: while ‘a big city like Sydney might, maybe, profitably support two circuses at the same time, different circuses in the same country town within six months of one another almost inevitably means a financial disaster for the second trier’ (Cornford 1973). The peripatetic circus avoided the problem of the fixed-location amphitheatre by erecting its tent/s in a central, conspicuous position— the ‘lot’ in circus jargon—in each city and town visited, typically vacant ground in proximity to a school or hotel: ‘The success of circus in those days… was the impact that a tented township had on the people’ (St Leon 1984, 173). Visibility and respectability, however, were not without their contradictions. Almost always in the public view, the slightest transgression of law or social decorum, whether real or apparent, could attract opprobrium. The living conditions of circus people were easily visible to the outside world. To an observer at Portland, Victoria, it looked to be

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‘a hard, hard life’ (Hamilton Spectator, 8 April 1879). The professional showman went to some length to ‘imagineer’ their image—their legitimacy—in the eyes of the public wherever possible, or necessary. As late as the 1930s: ‘When you were putting your tents up, Papa would always put the cookhouse away from facing the street so that people wouldn’t see you cooking on the fire’ (St Leon 1984, 286). The ability of a showman to successfully negotiate these often contradictory forces could mean the difference between commercial success and failure. Stereotypically negative attitudes of circus people were observed well into the twentieth century. In Ashton’s Circus in the 1970s: ‘[H]ouses are good, but at the same time there is the feeling that a troupe of gypsies has camped on the common, that they will be dirty and dishonest and perhaps the washing had better be brought in’ (Fernandez 1971, 27). Even the new circus groups of the late twentieth century, did not escape condescension, as a former director of Circus Oz, Sue Broadway, wrote: ‘Houses were very small, and local people regarded us suspiciously as a bunch of weirdo hippies. Regional Australia was clearly unready for a circus with no animals, scruffy old trucks and a line-up that included women with crew cuts and men in frocks’ (Broadway 1999, 178).

Circus Accommodation and Lighting Touring the Australian colonies from 1851, Henry Burton initially relied on cumbersome, demountable pavilions of timber and canvas similar to those used by provincial touring circuses in the British Isles. As circus proprietors on the American frontier had found as early as 1825, canvas tents were more easily raised, lowered, stored and transported. The arrival of American circus men in the colonies from 1851 may have given some impetus to the colonial adoption of canvas tents. Tents were a flexible, transportable and adaptable form of circus accommodation (Anon 1905). By the summer of 1853–1854, a number of circus troupes were travelling regional Australia with canvas tents, although Burton was still making use of a demountable pavilion as late as 1857 (Maitland Mercury, 28 December 1853; Bell’s Life in Victoria, 14 November 1857; Webber 1996, 12). The early circus tents were single pole structures, meaning that the centre pole supporting the tent—the ‘king’ pole in circus jargon—was placed in the centre of the ring, necessarily limiting the amount of action that could be executed in the ring during the performance. Two king

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poles, on the other hand, positioned at each end of the circus ring, left the ring—typically 42 feet in diameter—free for action. The two-pole arrangement also allowed more extensive apparatus—a trapeze act, for example—to be positioned above the ring. By the insertion of one or more middlepieces, a two-pole tent could be enlarged to suit the location and exploit economies of scale as occasion required (Anon 1905). A tent’s size and configuration were also symbols of prestige and sources of pride and therefore symbols and source of legitimacy. In 1878, St Leon claimed that his ‘new and costly’ canvas circus tent accommodated 3000 people although only the colonial capitals and major provincial centres offered audiences of this size (Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 1878). Not only could size and style of circus accommodation ‘imagineer’ legitimacy, so also could circus lighting. Until the introduction of reliable electric systems, circus proprietors struggled to find a system of lighting that was affordable and available, as well as safe and effective. Opening his circus on the goldfields of Sofala (NSW) in only canvas ‘side-walls’, the circus man John Jones fashioned lights from ‘fish tins filled with mud and some fat and rags in the centre… [which] were stuck around outside the ring’ (Bulletin, 9 March 1895). In its early traversals of the Australian bush, Ashton’s Circus was illuminated with lamps made of old socks that burned in tins of fat. Dozens of these crude lamps were needed to adequately illuminate the ring (Fernandez 1971, 15). In 1873, Burton illuminated his circus ‘brilliantly and odourlessly’ with two circular gasoliers that were fuelled by naphtha, an inflammable constituent of asphalt and bitumen (Mercury, 4 March 1873). Between the 1870s and the early 1900s, descriptions of circus lighting systems refer to ‘gassaline’ [sic], ‘kerosene’ and ‘acetylene’. A ‘plentiful supply of gaslight’ illuminated the entrance to the St Leon tent at Bendigo, Victoria, in 1879, while the interior was also ‘brilliantly’ lit, presumably by the same method (Bendigo Advertiser, 18 February 1879). By 1916, acetylene gas was going ‘out of vogue’ due to the difficulties of transporting hundredweight drums and of procuring replacement burners in the country towns (St Leon 1984, 152). Electric lighting, or a crude form thereof, was used in Australian circus as early as 1884 when Jenny Woodyear and her husband promoted their circus, appropriately, as Woodyear’s Electric Circus (Bulletin, 30 August 1884). By 1887, Gus and Alf St Leon boasted for their circus ‘the latest

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American sensation, the New York Beacon Light’ which was not only ‘superior to gas’ but ‘nearly equal to the great electric light’ (Ballarat Star, 19 January 1887). In the early 1900s, large circuses such as Wirth Brothers and FitzGerald Brothers used town-generated electric power for their city seasons, and the electric lights placed outside their tents were ‘pretty glamorous and very well presented’ (St Leon 1984, 176). In Melbourne, the Olympia circus building used, at first, by the FitzGeralds and later by the Wirths, was supplied with city electricity as early as 1902 (ibid., 80). In 1920, the small Holden Bros Circus, after using kerosene lighting until 1914, then acetylene, switched to electricity. Produced from a portable petrol-driven generator attached to an old King motor vehicle, ‘the farm people came from miles around to see this new type of lighting’ implicitly ‘imagineering’ some measure of legitimacy for the visiting Holden circus (Outdoor Showman, undated clipping).

The Bush The colonial circus strengthened its image—its legitimacy—by supporting local appeals for flood relief, local building funds for churches, hospitals and orphanages. Many travelling circuses confined, or significantly restricted, their activities to rural areas, coming no closer to the larger cities than the outlying suburbs. In the regions, a ‘folksy’ legitimacy could be ‘imagineered’ in ways it could not in the metropolis. The evening the St Leon circus opened in Goulburn (NSW), late in 1884, an extensive fire broke out in Auburn Street destroying over £2000 worth of property. ‘Yeoman service’ was done by the men of the circus, who worked ‘like Trojans’ in saving property and in endeavouring to quell the fire (Goulburn Evening Penny Post, 11 December 1884). Nevertheless, ‘Old World’ attitudes towards circus people began to appear as colonial capitals and townships achieved prosperity and respectability following the gold rushes (Cannon 1973, 247). When, from the 1880s, annual country shows were established to spread farming knowledge and bond rural communities, circuses increasingly aligned their itineraries with the emerging ‘show’ circuits only to find that lesser forms of entertainment usually followed in their wake (see Broome with Jackomos 1984, 21). The appearance of these ‘Old World’ attitudes was fostered by the arrival of ‘a class of journalist-editors who had been highly educated in Britain’ (Cannon 1973, 253). Local show committees, dominated by a new colonial landed gentry, were inclined to impose traditional

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English attitudes on itinerant show people (Broome with Jackomos 1984, 23). Although still raising no threat to the emerging colonial social order, circus companies, large and small, major and minor, were increasingly labelled with implicitly condescending descriptions such as, ‘this style of amusement’, ‘this description of show’, ‘travelling tentage’, ‘this kind of entertainment’, ‘this class of entertainment’ and so on (Wagga Wagga Advertiser, 25 December 1878; Bendigo Advertiser, 18 February 1879; Border Watch, 16 April 1879; South Australian Register, 5 March 1883; Daily Telegraph, 17 December 1883). All of Australia’s circus people, whatever their standing, were tarnished by unflattering episodes widely reported in the provincial press such as the circus proprietor who absconded from Wagga Wagga (NSW) in 1861 without paying £13 of bills for printing, horse feed, board and lodging (Yass Courier, 16 January 1861), and the case of two Indian jugglers, Mahomet Abdallah and Mahomet Cassim, of Burton’s Circus, who were convicted, probably unjustly, for murder in 1863 (Golden Age, 27 May 1863). By the 1870s, there were references to the immorality ‘too often found in circuses’, the ‘vulgarity’ and the ‘coarse jests which, while they raise a laugh among the mob, cause a flush to rise to the cheek of the refined and respectable’ (Newcastle Morning Herald, 24 February 1882; Launceston Examiner, 2 February 1884). Fairly or unfairly, one’s character tends to be judged by the character one keeps. The ‘grand circus’ that descended on Casino (NSW) for the 1880 race week was described as one of a ‘host of Bohemians’ including panorama and freak shows, Punch and Judy and a hurdy-gurdy, many of which were ‘very contemptible exhibitions, and only intended to support loafers’ (Clarence & Richmond Examiner, 7 August 1880). The response of peripatetic circus proprietors to these developments was to ‘imagineer’ various defensive, self-legitimising devices. Early colonial circus advertising was peppered with self-serving statements such as: ‘The strictest attention will be paid to ensure becoming order and conduct; also that no immoral language or improper performance be introduced by the clown or any of the company, in order that the most fastidious can visit this place of amusement without the slightest repugnance’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 19 September 1851). Circus proprietors strived to differentiate their offerings from the inferior itinerant entertainments in whose company they often found themselves: ‘The Agricultural Shows were absolute gold mines for us… However, tricksters and fakirs grew in numbers around us, and we were forced to use strong methods

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to awaken the public to the nature of these people. We always took care to keep the name of the circus people unsullied’ (Wirth 1933, 31). The adoption of attractive—often Latinate—professional pseudonyms or ‘noms d’arène’ had come into vogue in circus in England early in the nineteenth century and proved particularly useful in the Australian context (see Frost cited in Saxon 1978, 25). Embellishing the names of companies with qualifying superlatives such as ‘Royal’, ‘National’ or ‘Great American’ could ‘imagineer’ an air of legitimacy, albeit contrived. Proprietors of major circuses courted the ‘distinguished patronage’ of the colonial upper-orders especially during lengthy city seasons, while these eminent patrons gladly relished the opportunity to display and confirm the presence of British power and authority (see Sydney Morning Herald, 18 April 1851, 29 May 1893; Maitland Mercury, 10 May 1851; St Leon 1984, 79).

Delivering Novelty The horse was the foundation of the nineteenth-century circus programme, not only because the horse was prized by audiences but because the horse was understood by audiences. The horse played a vital role in pre-motorised society, whether as a beast of burden, a form of transport or a means of recreation. In the Australian colonies, it was only natural that: ‘In a horse-loving country [sic], circuses are of course popular. Perhaps in no other part of the world can a circus obtain so critical and appreciative an audience’ (Twopeny 1883, repr. 1973, 219–220). Yet, audiences, like markets, demand novelty in what is delivered, in how it is delivered, or both. In a remote, entertainment-deprived country township, the infrequent visit of a travelling circus was a novelty even if the content of its programme contained no more than what was economically feasible, whether truly novel or not. In his fixed-location amphitheatre in Launceston in 1848, Radford had presented an elaborate equestrian-based pantomime, ‘Richard Coeur De Lion’, after two months’ preparation with specially written music and elaborate period costumes (Cornwall Chronicle, 15 January, 11 March 1848). Yet, such a production was too complex and expensive to be produced and toured by an itinerant circus. What could be produced and toured were endless displays of trick horses, horsemanship, acrobatics, juggling and endless variations thereof.

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Eventually, the absence of genuine novelty in itinerant circus programmes began to spark condemnation in regional Australia, at least amongst the more perceptive of the population, while the steadilyincreasing variety of toured entertainments inevitably invited critical comparisons between the genres. Upwards of 400 people were ‘highly delighted’ with the evening’s entertainment given by the ‘60 men and horses’ of Burton’s National Circus when it visited Windeyer near Mudgee (NSW) in 1861 but, in Adelaide, only 18 months later, Burton’s performances were described as ‘mutton and damper’ (Bell’s Life in Victoria, 31 January 1863). To be fair, travelling the backblocks, itinerant proprietors faced immense challenges, financial and logistical, in procuring novel acts from Sydney or Melbourne, not to mention London, Paris or New York: [the] expenses of a travelling circus, such as this are far greater than one would imagine, and when such remarks are uttered as ‘why don’t they get this’ and ‘why don’t they get that’ the thought perhaps does not strike one that ‘this’ and ‘that’ represents perhaps £50 a week additional expenses. Judging from appearances a circus seems to be a money making concern, but from our knowledge of facts and experiences related to us by circus proprietors it is a very up and down kind of business and only such men as St Leon, Burton and one or two more are able to grapple with the difficulties of the profession. (Gundagai Times, 20 December 1878)

Allusions to a company brimming with imported talent, making ‘positively their first appearance in the colonies’, appeared in the circus advertising from time to time (Newcastle Morning Herald, 4 November 1878). This usually implied the engagement of individual artists or troupes of artists in possession of—to Australian eyes at least—some originality. These artists had often landed in the colonies ‘on spec’ or had remained behind after touring the colonies with a large, visiting—typically American—circus. Owing apparently to St Leon’s determination to tackle the issue of novelty head-on, his new circus was, by October 1878, only three years after its launch, ‘as familiar as Burton’s and by all accounts more popular’, its performances ‘more varied than we sometimes meet with in the ordinary travelling circus’ (Bathurst Times, 27 October 1877; Gundagai Times, 23 November 1877). St Leon claimed his circus to be: the only one that, for the season of 1878, actually presents something new; quite often and with sufficient reason, we hear the remark, particularly

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from middle-aged persons and those past the prime of life, that ‘Circuses are all alike, see one and you have seen them all’. Determined that no visitor to my establishment shall have reason to make a remark similar to the one above, I have made a new departure in the mode and manner of exhibiting a circus. (Newcastle Morning Herald, 4 November 1878)

But, whatever St Leon’s good intentions, he could not sustain this freshness indefinitely. By the time of its 1883 Adelaide season, we read that the St Leon performances were ‘of the usual kind’ and in most cases were ‘nothing extraordinary’, their ‘zest and completeness’ only partly compensating for the absence of ‘startling’ novelty (South Australian Advertiser, 5, 6 March 1883). And even the acts of horses and horsemanship started to lose their former allure. When Harmston’s, a circus organised in San Francisco under English management, opened in the Crystal Palace Ring in Sydney’s York Street on 15 May 1890, its daring rider Gilbarto (the nom d’arène of an American rider, Gilbert Eldred) performed a ‘remarkable’ series of backward and forward somersaults on horseback, a novelty in Australia. The huge audience loudly cheered the skilful and daring performer (Sydney Morning Herald, 17 May 1890). But within a decade of Gilbarto’s feats, the tastes of Australian circus audiences no longer called for: ‘riding… They want more gymnasts and aerial acts, in short, music hall turns. Somersault riders they will not stand at any price, no matter how clever the performers might be’ (Anon 1901). By the early 1900s, a new generation of Australian circus entrepreneurs moved steadily but purposefully beyond the limited pool of local circus talent to import, with increasing regularity, novelties from other parts of the world, especially England, Europe and America. From their trips abroad, the FitzGerald brothers arrived at a new formula for their circus operations in Australia: organised along the lines, albeit smaller, of an American railroad circus, an Australian ‘firm of management’ that drew on the major circuses, vaudeville and music halls of Europe and America for each year’s programme. By regularly introducing imported novelties to Australian audiences, the FitzGeralds effectively replaced the need for large American circuses to visit Australia. In an assertion of selfcongratulation, the FitzGerald brothers claimed that ‘the firm’ (FitzGerald Bros Circus) was delivering what the people wanted, thereby overturning the notion that the foreign-owned circus was alone capable of satisfying ‘the key exacting demands of Australian patrons’ (Sydney Morning

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Herald, 10 September 1900). Dan FitzGerald observed that ‘the people here crave… novelty and you must give it… to keep abreast of the times’. On the other hand, his contemporary George Wirth, considered that a novelty ‘must be something entirely new, and not merely a new way of doing [old] things’ (Anon 1905; Wirth, George 1933). Wirth Brothers’ Circus engaged its principal acts from America and Europe each year through its close association with America’s leading circus organisation, the Ringlings, and the Frank Wirth agency in New York. Australian acts, if employed by Wirth Brothers’ Circus at all, were relegated to a supporting role on the programme or surreptitiously presented as foreign importations. Nevertheless, it would take the introduction of television from 1956 onwards to seriously deprive Australian circus of its audiences. By the 1960s, television’s spread and increased rail charges had seriously eroded the conventional economics of Australian circus. In 1962 it was reported that: Television in Australia is comparatively new and being a novelty has made a terrific impact on show business especially circuses. Sydney is a city of two and a half million people, to say nothing of the floating population, yet circuses give it a wide berth because people will not leave their homes to go and sit in a tent when they can see excellent circus pictures on their TV sets. (see Baker 1962)

Unrelenting urbanisation was another factor that undermined the economics of Australian circus. Between 1911 and 1996, the proportion of the Australian population living in regional areas declined from 43% to 14% (Vamplew 1987, 41). The arrival, set-up and presence of a circus in a regional township were no longer the novelties they had been. The artistic content of a circus programme held no surprises for a generation that was more mobile and better informed. In 1974, five years after the closure of Bullen Bros Circus, Stafford Bullen was quoted as saying: ‘I don’t think we will ever put the circus back on the road again… It is not what it used to be any more. People have other forms of entertainment and the kids in the country are moving down to the cities when they have the chance’ (Sunday Telegraph, 18 August 1974).

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Road Systems and Transport If the peripatetic circus was the logical successor to the fixed-location amphitheatre, the choices to be made transport modes (chiefly, horsedrawn wagons, railway cars, ships and motor vehicles) and between transport systems (chiefly, roads, bridges, ports and railways) could materially ‘imagineer’ legitimacy. Just as the content of a circus programme is determined as much by the supply and availability of suitable artists as by the constantly evolving demand for entertainment and novelty, choices between transport modes and systems were determined as much by their availability as by their feasibility. In England, travelling circuses benefitted from the improved provincial road networks that began to appear by the late eighteenth century after the passage of the Turnpike Acts (Harrop 1989, 3–4). In Australia, on the other hand, roadmaking activity, zealously pursued during the convict era, fell into stagnation during the 1840s and 1850s. During the great era of pastoral expansion, colonial roadmaking policies favoured the development of ‘natural’ roads (that required little or no modification to the underlying topography). With limited funds, colonial governments gave preference to railway construction rather than interior roads, knowing that teamsters could still cope with poorly formed roads, no matter how inadequate (Kennedy 1992, 136–137). At the onset of the Gold Rush, rough country tracks were best traversed by foot, packhorse or bullock dray (Ward 1958, 95). As circus touring became regularised, more sophisticated transport modes and transport systems were required (see Stoddart 2000, 22). By 1853, lightly built American vehicles—buggies, carts and four-wheeled coaches and wagons, all horse-drawn—‘that dispensed with the need for roads’ could be seen negotiating tracks previously impassable to anything except a bullock dray (Ward 1958, 124; Shann 1938, 284–285). Moving out of its Deniliquin winter quarters to take to the road in the spring of 1871, Burton’s Circus was conveyed by ‘new wagons of a very superior build… [which] superseded the more roughly constructed and jolting vehicles of the olden times’ (Riverine Herald, 20 September 1871). We can read reports of the progress of a circus being retarded by the ‘heavy state of the roads’ between Beaufort and Ballarat (1879), ‘the frightful state of the roads between Windsor and Wollombi’ (1886), and the ‘bad state of the roads’ between Barmedman and Temora (1898) (Evening Post, 13 December 1879; Newcastle Morning Herald, 30

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March 1886; Wyalong Argus, 9 August 1898). By the early 1900s, the state of Victoria offered circus people the best travelling conditions since its towns were closer together than the towns of the other major ‘circus’ states, New South Wales and Queensland. Because Vicoiria’s towns were closer together the councils had more money to spend on maintenance of the roads (St Leon 1984, 187). Macadamised roads of blue metal only began to appear in the years prior to the First World War (ibid., 183). As critical as they were to the operation of a circus, the construction of transport systems and the manufacture of different types of transport modes were largely exogenous —beyond the control—of circus entrepreneurs. Their availability and adequacy were determined by factors external to the circus entity: government and private investment in the case of the former, and the initiative of local manufacturers and/or importers in the case of the latter. What was within the control—endogenous —of the circus entrepreneurs was how transport systems and transport modes, to the extent they were available and whatever their state of adequacy, could be used and/or deployed. The favoured wagon builder of major Australian provincial circuses in the early 1900s was the firm of Dallinger in Albury. The bandwagon that Dallinger made for Eroni Bros Circus: ‘was beautiful to look at, mostly glasswork. It had a curve up the back and used to have seats. We [musicians] used to sit facing the street this side and facing the street that side, back to back. It was a magnificent sight. We used to put four horses on that, four greys’ (St Leon 1984, 202). The Dallinger-built living wagons of Eroni Bros Circus made a strong impression on townspeople in 1906: ‘No set of circus vehicles that we have seen have presented a brighter appearance. The life that these people [author’s italics] lead is necessarily one of hardship but in the splendidly fitted up vans there are at least some of the comforts of home’ (Parkes Examiner, 15 August 1906). The typical Australian circus wagon, light and high-wheeled, was built to cope with a wide variety of travelling conditions. When the American showman, Bud Atkinson, took his American Circus & Wild West Shows overland to Melbourne from Sydney in the autumn of 1913, he relied on the heavy, low-wheeled American-built wagons that he brought from San Francisco (see St Leon 1984, 159). Atkinson’s vehicles proved cumbersome on the rain-soaked, outback roads of New South Wales and Victoria. Within a few months he was bankrupt (Herald, 31 March 1913). In 1916, during a great drought, Gus St Leon’s Great United Circus ‘hired a big motor truck and a driver to cart… horse feed along with us

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because you couldn’t buy it in the towns’ (St Leon 1984, 139). In 1923, Holden Bros Circus started to replace its ten horse-drawn wagons with motor vehicles. By 1925, Holden’s had 12 motor vehicles, could play as many as six towns a week (instead of the usual three or four) and could easily move from its home state of Victoria into the neighbouring states of South Australia and New South Wales (Shoalhaven Telegraph, 16 May 1927, 16 February 1928). Motorisation freed a circus of the limitations of horse-drawn transport, allowing proprietors to ‘crowd profits into as few nights as possible and keep moving on to where fresh profits could be made’ (Bulletin, undated clipping, c. 1924). Motorisation was imagineered as much by the hunger for prestige as by economics and expediency. City-based motor vehicle distributors recognised the promotional potential of the motorised circus and offered generous discounts to circus proprietors to display their brand of vehicle throughout the country districts (see King 1989). In 1955, Bullen’s Circus was transported by 53 vehicles (dieselpowered trucks, semi-trailers and tractors and caravans) and three prestigious cars (a Daimler, Rolls-Royce and Packard). The circus convoy travelled by road, up to 16,000 kilometres a year, around Australia and New Zealand (Outdoor Showman, December 1955, 15; Cunningham 2006, 77). By this time, Australia’s worst roads were sealed (Cunningham 2006, 47).

Rail Transport From 1854, when the first railway was opened in Melbourne, railway lines were gradually extended inland. In 1875, the year before the first Australian tour by a large American rail-based circus, there were only 437 miles of railway in New South Wales. Ten years later, the colony had 1732 miles of track. The colonial rail systems of the four south-eastern colonies were linked at Albury (1883), Serviceton (1887) and Wallangarra (1888). In 1917, Western Australia was linked by rail to the eastern states (Blainey 2003, 90–94; Ward 1958, 194–195; Adam-Smith 1983, 225ff). Queensland’s coastal rail line reached the major ports of Bundaberg (1881), Gladstone (1897) and Rockhampton (1903), but it was 1924 before Cairns was reachable by rail from Brisbane without interruption. Until then, the incomplete rail lines and the lack of formed roads were major inconveniences for a large touring circus wanting to tour north Queensland (St Leon 1984, 199). Single rail lines were constructed

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inland from Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville to reach, respectively, Charleville (1887), Longreach (1892) and Winton (1899). These westward lines increased inland touring possibilities. A circus could play by rail to the end of one line, ‘then do a couple of hundred miles and pick the train up again’ on another line and return to the coast (King 1989; St Leon 1984, 330). Rail transport enabled a circus to cover more territory, more quickly, and avoid the constraints of poor roads, unbridged rivers, horse-drawn transport and inclement weather. At the same time, rail transport fostered greater concentrations of population in terms of urbanisation and by temporarily conveying people from outlying areas for events such as annual agricultural shows and race weeks. Nevertheless, rail was expensive, rail gauges were inconsistent between the colonies (later, states) and rail-based circus routes were necessarily determined by the rail lines available. The unification of America’s eastern and western states by rail in 1869 facilitated the visits of eastern-based circuses to the western seaboard, the obvious springboard for a tour of Australasia. By the time the American circus man, William Washington ‘Chilly Billy’ Cole, brought his circus to Australia, the remaining few miles of ‘coaching’ between Sydney and Melbourne had been eliminated, making possible a rail journey between the two cities of 28 to 30 hours (Gaylord 1880). ‘Cole was the first to take a circus to California and back entirely by rail… During 1880… he sailed with his circus from San Francisco, played a phenomenally profitable season in Australia and New Zealand and returned to California in 1881’ (May 1932, 178–179). The spectacle and example of these large American rail-based circuses encouraged colonial circus men to experiment with rail transport. In 1885, the Wirths sent ‘all the tents, boxes, poles and paraphernalia’ for their circus by train across the 90 miles of desert that lay between Murray Bridge and Bordertown, South Australia, and then drove the empty wagons for ‘four or five days’ across the ‘dreary, monotonous desert’ known as The Mallee (Wirth 1925, 33–34). By 1888, the Wirths had made the final transition from wagon to rail, the decision driven by reasons of both economy and comfort but probably prestige as well: [We] returned to Melbourne… and… took to the railway while some new wagons were being built. We played Geelong, Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Dandenong, where our horses and wagons were waiting for us,

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and then toured Gippsland with the wagons. Once again, however, the same discontented feeling came over us all and we decided to take to the train for good, so we sold our working stock, horses and wagons… This time we stuck to the railway and thus begun a new phase in our life. (Wirth 1925, 41–44)

Visiting the United States in 1895, Dan FitzGerald found that America was: ‘the greatest place in the world for the circus… The railway companies offer such facilities, and the lighting, loading, etc., are so easily arranged’ (Anon 1895). In the early 1900s, the circus supremacy of Australia came down to a contest between the young nation’s two rail-based circuses, FitzGerald Bros and Wirth Bros. The triumph of Wirth’s by 1906 proved that Australia, in that age, could not support more than one large circus company of international standing, since ‘the population wasn’t there, the roads weren’t there [and] rail was pretty dear’ (St Leon 1984, 274). In 1911, Wirth’s served a population of around 4.5 million, travelling over some 26,000 kilometres of track. The Wirth circus train made ‘jumps’ of as much as 250 kilometres a day. The Wirth circus, ‘a bigger, more costly proposition than it ever was before’, was ‘a perfected science’: Within two hours of the show, we are all aboard the train, with the whole of our equipment, and ready to go to sleep – in sleepers and other carriages set apart for us – until we reach the next town the following morning… For the special trains by which we travel in the different states we pay 10 shillings a mile. As we sometimes jump as much as 150 miles at a time, you can form some idea as to what this works out at. (Anon 1911)

Along the American pattern, Wirth’s ran special trains to bring people in to see the circus from outlying towns as far as 50 miles away. Visiting Molong in 1916, Wirth Bros attracted ‘quite an influx of country residents to the event and the townspeople turned out in force’ (Molong Argus, 23 June 1916). If it could be afforded, rail transport enabled more circus to be delivered more quickly, more frequently and to more people. For any circus that could afford the cost of rail transport, the arrival in a country town of as many as two circus trains hauled by powerful locomotives unequivocally ‘imagineered’ its legitimacy before admiring townspeople. As the only circus to consistently rely on rail travel during the twentieth century, Wirth’s Circus ‘imagineered’ its status as Australia’s de facto national circus, a status Wirth’s maintained until its liquidation

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in 1963, ironically precipitated by the unrelenting rise in the cost of rail transport.

Conclusion Circus is not a static phenomenon, either as an art form or as a business proposition. The circus was a child of the Industrial Revolution, a medium intended to economically deliver popular entertainment to England’s newly urbanised masses. Although Australia’s circus entrepreneurs were relieved of the task of inventing the concept of circus, they were nevertheless faced with the challenge of securing their ‘legitimacy’ in a new antipodean setting. The record shows that legitimacy was secured by creating an identity, bonding with communities and maintaining visibility. Whether on the circus lot of a country town or within the confines of a circus camped in the middle of the bush, Australia’s circus entrepreneurs achieved legitimacy through diligently ‘imagineering’ innovations in areas such as circus accommodation, lighting, transportation and programming novelty. The peripatetic circus was thus not only a genre of entertainment but also a moving ‘laboratory’ within in which new solutions to operational problems were conceived and implemented.

References Adam-Smith, Patsy. 1983. When We Rode the Rails. Sydney: Lansdowne Press. Anon. 1882. Circus Life. Imperial Review, 8 October. Anon. 1895. A Circus Proprietor’s Career: A Chat with Mr. Dan FitzGerald. Sunday Times, 5 November 1895, 10. Anon. 1901. Circus Life in Australia. The Australasian Stage, n.p. Anon. 1905. Some Elephants and FitzGerald’s Circus. The Bulletin, 20 April 1905, 20. Anon. 1911. The Wirths and their Circus. The Theatre, 1 May 1911. Archives Office of Tasmania: Correspondence between Colonial Secretary’s Office and Robert Avis Radford, 1847, CSO 24/4/58. Arrighi, Gillian. 2015. The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: Spectacle, Identity and Nationhood at the Australian Circus. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Baker, Sidney. 1962. Letter to the Editor. Hobby Bandwagon, 6. Beadle, Ronald. 2003. The Discovery of a Peculiar Good: Towards a Reading of Nell Stroud’s Josser: Days and Nights in the Circus. Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science 2 (3): 60–68.

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Blainey, Geoffrey. 2003. Black Kettle and Full Moon: Daily Life in a Vanished Australia. Melbourne: Penguin Book. Broadway, Sue. 1999. Circus Oz—The First Seven Years. Australasian Drama Studies October 35: 172–183. Broome, Richard with Alex Jackomos. 1984. Sideshow Alley. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Brown, Robin. 1986. Collins Milestones in Australian History: 1788 to the Present. Sydney: Collins. Burke, Peter. 1994. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate. Cannon, Michael. 1973. Life in the Country: Australia in the Victorian Age. vol. 2. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson (Australia) Ltd. Cole, George Douglas Howard. 1954. Introduction to Economic History, 1750– 1950, 1954. London: Macmillan. Cornford, Peter. 1973. The Circus Lives. The National Times, November, 12. Cummings, Lorne, and Mark Valentine St Leon. 2008. Juggling the Books: The Use of Accounting Information in Circus in Australia. Accounting History 14 (1–2): 11–33. Cunningham, Bryan with Brenton Bullen. 2006. Mr Bullen’s Elephants. Mahout Publications. Cusack, Frank. 1973. Bendigo: A History. Melbourne: Heinemann. Davison, Graeme, John William McCarty, and Alisa McLeary. 1987. Australians 1888. Sydney: Fairfax, Syme, Weldon & Associates. Deegan, Craig. 2013. Australian Financial Accounting. 7th edition, North Ryde: MacGraw Hill (Education) Pty Limited. Fernandez, Natalie. 1971. Circus Saga: Ashton’s. Sydney: Ashton’s Circus Pty Limited. Gaylord, John B. 1880. Letter to ‘Friend Davis’ dated Melbourne 12 October, held by Pfening Collection, Columbus, Ohio. Harrop, Josephine. 1989. Victorian Portable Theatres. London: The Society for Theatre Research. Irvin, Eric. 1971. Theatre Comes to Australia. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press. Kennedy, Malcolm J. 1992. Hauling the Loads: A History of Australia’s Working Horses and Bullocks. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. King, Mervyn. 1989. Recorded and Transcribed interview with Mark St Leon, Sydney. Kwint, Marius. 2002. ‘The Legitimisation of the Circus in Late Georgian England’ Past & Present 174, (February–March): 72–115. Manning-Sanders, Ruth. 1952. The English Circus. London: Werner Laurie. May, Earl Chapin. 1932. The Circus from Rome to Ringling. New York: Dover. Moody, Jane. 2000. Illegitimate: Theatre in London, 1770–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Press, Oxford University (Ed.). 2007. Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parsons, Philip (Ed.). 1995. Companion to Theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press Pty Limited in association with Cambridge University Press. Robson, Leslie Lloyd 1983. A History of Tasmania. Volume 1: Van Diemen’s Land from the Earliest Times to 1855. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Salmon, Mary. 1904. An Old-Time Circus. Australian Town and Country Journal, 3 August. Saxon, Arthur H. 1978. The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow & the Romantic Age of English Circus. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Shann, Edward. 1938. An Economic History of Australia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. St Leon, Mark Valentine. 2009. Long Voyages and Muscular Vigour: Maritime Themes in Australia’s Circus History. The Great Circle: Journal of the Australian Association of Maritime History 31 (1): 30–58. St Leon, Mark Valentine (Ed.). 1984. Australian Circus Reminiscences. Wahroonga, NSW: The Author. Stoddart, Helen. 2000. Rings of Desire. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tait, Peta, and Katie Lavers (Eds.). 2016. The Routledge Circus Studies Reader. Abingdon: Routledge. Teo, H. M., and R. White (Eds.). 2003. Cultural History in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Press. Thorne, Ross. 1971. Theatre Buildings in Australia to 1905: From the Time of the First Settlement to the Arrival of Cinema. Sydney: Architectural Research Foundation, University of Sydney. Twopeny, Richard Ernest Nowell. 1883 (repr. 1973). Town Life in Australia. Sydney: Sydney University Press. Vamplew, Wray (Ed.). 1987. Australians: Historical Statistics. Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates. Ward, R. 1958. The Australian Legend. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Webber, Kimberley (Ed.). 1996. Circus: The Jandaschewsky Story. Sydney: Powerhouse Publishing. Wirth, George. 1925. Round the World with a Circus. Melbourne: Troedel & Cooper. Wirth, George. 1933. Under the Big Top: The Life Story of George Wirth, Circus Proprietor, Told by Himself. Life, 15 May 1933. Wirth, Philip. 1933. A Lifetime with an Australian Circus. Melbourne: Troedel & Cooper Pty Limited.

CHAPTER 5

Circus and Electricity: Staging Connexions Between Science and Popular Entertainments Gillian Arrighi

Historically we acknowledge the emergence of the modern circus during the late eighteenth century, customarily dating it to 1768. Geographically we can locate this watershed moment in London, on the south side of the Thames, when the military-trained equestrian, Philip Astley, demonstrated that his unusual abilities as a trick horse rider were amplified by his bent for entrepreneurship and a talent for showmanship. The moment of Astley’s initiative was synchronous with the shift occurring in western society emanating from enlightenment thinking and scientific discoveries, as well as the effects of the human drift to cities that gave rise to an urban spectator base curious and eager for entertainment (see Berman 1982). Amidst the social and political changes arising from the innovations of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, Astley’s entrepreneurial initiative was linguistically cast in the promise of new experiences (Arrighi 2012). Many of the acts and demonstrations of highly developed physical skills he

G. Arrighi (B) University of Newcastle, Newcastle, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_5

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introduced into his programmes had ancient origins. Some were, as circus semiotician Paul Bouissac (2014) observes, linked to ritual or religious practices, but the modern circus, since Astley, has maintained a firmly secular foundation, based on the commercial transaction of exhibiting skills at the limits of human ability, for a paying audience seeking novel entertainment experiences. Modernising forces of industry and commerce also inflected scientific research undertaken during the late eighteenth century—the so-called second scientific revolution—when steam power underpinned the transition to industrial scaled manufacturing processes, and early scientific experiments sought to harness electricity, a force that was ‘revolutionary in a more comprehensive and spectacular way […] epitomizing the Promethean spirit of the age’ (Knellwolf and Goodall 2008, 2). Jane R. Goodall has described experimentation with electricity as the science that ‘caught the revolutionary imagination most powerfully’ during this period, identifying its attraction as being due to ‘its immediately dramatic manifestations […] its exhilarating potentialities as a life science’ (2008, 118). Experiments undertaken in the early eighteenth century by Stephen Gray investigating the transference of electrical charge using materials naturally possessing either conductive or insulating qualities (see Essig 2003) teleologically led to late eighteenth-century experiments and discoveries in the emerging science of electricity by Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, Luigi Galvani and Erasmus Darwin, amongst others. In their various enquiries, these pioneers sought to understand, describe, harness and apply some measure of the natural and usually invisible forces of electrical current, identifying the charge in ‘electrical fluid’ as both positive and negative (Franklin), as central to life in the known world or cosmos (Priestley), and as a potential force in the animation (and possible re-animation) of life (Galvani, Darwin). Frequently aligned with the mythical Prometheus—a Titan who stole fire from the Gods, gave it to mankind, and thereby spurred the development of human civilisation—early philosopher-scientists experimenting with the source, nature and control of electrical forces have been cast as playing with the divine. As Priestley (a theologian, natural philosopher and chemist) expressed it, humans might ‘aspire to the moral perfections of the great author of all things’ through experimentation with electricity and what it might create (Priestley 1775, xviii, cited in Goodall 2008, 118). Three electrical inventors of the late nineteenth century have also been cast in the semi-divine,

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yet also revolutionary, Promethean mode: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. These ‘three titans of America’s Gilded Age’ have been described by Jill Jonnes as being ‘among the Promethean few who dreamed of the possibilities hidden in this ethereal force of nature’ (2003, xiii). At its most fundamental, electrical science harnesses natural and largely invisible forces. Following the late nineteenth-century ‘age of electricity’, we are attuned to the historical outcome that scientific discovery, followed by industrial application, directed those forces for the improvement and advancement of society; the science of electricity and its effects makes the invisible visible. I would like to draw a parallel here to the circus, by observing that at their most advanced, circus performers also scientifically harness the invisible forces of the human body, and through performances that are both novel and elite, they make visible the outer limits of human discipline, willpower, physical capacity and embodied grace. Contrary to the early philosopher-scientists who worked with the forces of electricity, leading circus performers have always been showcased in the secular domain of the entertainment ring. Irrespective of the early pioneers of electrical science being cast at times as revolutionaries who played with divine forces, public demonstrations of the spectacular effects of electricity during the late nineteenth century epitomised the fundamental qualities of secular showmanship. A little more than a century after Astley’s first public shows exemplified the spirit and aesthetics of the modern circus, the full-blown showmanship of the circus and the spectacular wonders of electricity were each on display at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago (also called the World’s Columbian Exhibition because it commemorated the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus). Circus was a popular attraction at the World’s Fair, where ‘Hagenbeck’s Zoological Arena Company’ from Germany played to over two million paying customers during the six-month exhibition. The huge number of national and international visitors to Carl Hagenbeck’s circus pavilion was just a portion, however, of the estimated twenty-eight million people who attended the enormous Fair precinct that was brilliantly lit and powered by the new technology of electricity. This ‘City of Light’ employed twelve 1,000-horsepower generators to illuminate large fountains, power four enormous spotlights, as well as the incandescent lights festooning the many buildings (see Nye 1995; Seifer 1996). American entrepreneur and engineer George Westinghouse Jr’s electric company

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won the contract to light the Chicago World’s Fair using Nikola Tesla’s patented polyphase alternating current (AC) system and this spectacular demonstration of Tesla’s efficient, safe, reliable and constant electrical distribution is regarded as a major development bolstering global acceptance of AC electricity, over the direct current system (DC) that Thomas Edison’s General Electric company sought to make the national standard.1 Tesla’s demonstrations of electrical effects using high-voltage, highfrequency alternating current elicited wonder and astonishment in the audiences attending his lecture-performances—the same kind of human marvelling that the circus has always sought to generate in its audiences. Despite universal recognition of Tesla’s unique contribution to electrical engineering, the extravagant showmanship of his theatrical stunts led the popular press of his day to treat him ‘by turns as a visionary and a fraud’ (Marvin 1988, 137).2 As this chapter explores, late nineteenth-century circuses, circus-style performances in various popular genres, and new developments in the harnessing of electricity have more in common than has been previously acknowledged. Central to the connexions between circus and electrical science discussed here are the elements of spectacle and showmanship. This chapter intellectually builds on two earlier publications, ‘The Circus and Modernity’ (Arrighi 2012) in which I argued that leading circus organisations of the long nineteenth century ‘demonstrated a commitment to innovation that embraced many of the ideas and socioeconomic processes now generally accepted as belonging to or emerging out of modernity’ (169), and ‘Synthesising Circus Aesthetics and Science’ (Arrighi 2019), in which I examine popular circus-style acts at the turn of the twentieth century that emerged from contemporary scientific interest in natural history, human physiology and health sciences, to argue the circus and variety theatre both ‘mediated science for Australia’s popular audiences’ (1). A natural companion to those two earlier essays, this chapter explores the nuanced relationship between the ‘new’ popular entertainment genre of circus and the ‘new’ science of electrical engineering during the nineteenth century. Bringing to light intersections of various kinds between the circus and electrical science during the early histories of each, this chapter does not seek to provide a catalogue of when various circuses adopted electricity as a source of lighting and artificial energy (for this alone would make for a dull study), but instead drills

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down into the ways that electricity and the circus overlapped. Spectacular showmanship inflected public demonstrations by inventor scientists, while electricity, quite apart from driving industrial and aesthetic developments of the circus, also became a metaphor for some of the circus’s most intriguing acts.

Electricity: A New Source of Power, Artificial Light, Aesthetics and Metaphor for the Circus Circuses had flirted with the science of electricity from as early as 1852 when Dan Rice (the famous American clown), tried out electricity as a power source for lighting his circus ring. Circus historian Antony Hippisley Coxe recounts Rice’s somewhat arcane explanation as to why he abandoned it: ‘because of “the injurious effect it had upon those suffering from pulmonary complaints and the tender brains of young children”’ (1980, 37), then adds his own level-headed insight: ‘One cannot help thinking that the real reason was more likely to have been the unreliability of the dynamos’ (ibid.). American circus historian Janet Davis has pointed out that the Gilded Age circuses of Cooper and Bailey and W. W. Cole invested in the machinery required to illuminate their shows with electricity in 1879, but owing to the relatively unwieldy dimensions of the electrical generators of this era, and the challenges these posed to the circus’s highly regimented travelling schedule, this ‘system of lighting was abandoned’ (Davis 2002, 251, n. 43). Embarking on a logistically challenging trans-Pacific tour to Australia in 1881, however, W. W. Cole’s ‘Circus, Menagerie, Aquarium, and Congress of Living Wonders’ rekindled its industrial relationship with electrical generators; it is historically significant for being the first show in Australia to use electrically generated light as its primary source of illumination (see Arrighi 2019). As I have discussed elsewhere, press coverage of Cole’s shows debated the merits or otherwise of the company’s electric lamps, with journalistic review and popular opinion ranging across a reception spectrum from complaint—for showing human and production defects too plainly and making performers look ‘pasty’—to validation—for being worth the price of a ticket to see the show (ibid.). Promoting the synthesis of science and circus by drawing attention to the technologising of its circus site through electric lighting, W. W. Cole’s circus consciously displayed the wonders of electricity as both a novelty and an exemplar of modernity, while unwittingly heralding what the future of mainstream entertainment would look like.

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From 1884 through to 1886, at least one other circus organisation touring eastern Australia’s cities and regional towns transported electric generators for its primary source of performance illumination. The intriguingly named ‘Madame Woodyear’s Electric Circus and Great London Equesquiriculum’ traded on five culturally engaging ideas to entice audiences to its shows: the innovative modernity of electricity, on display for all to see if they paid for admission; London, as the nominative source of its acts; elite equestrianism, a genre of popular entertainment supremely appealing to colonial Australian audiences at this time; the broad-based popularity of circus entertainment; and the leadership of an enterprising woman—the alluringly titled Madame Woodyear. Madame Woodyear’s primarily equestrian and acrobatic circus was named the ‘Electric Circus’ because when presenting its shows in country districts (as distinct from Australia’s east coast gas-powered urban centres), the show was illuminated by electrical generators (‘Madame Woodyear’s Circus’ 1884, 9). Madame Woodyear’s enterprise was an early demonstration of the aesthetic interaction of human and horsepower—a synergy infused with elegance and physical grace on the part of both human and equine performers—alongside the modern innovation of electrically generated illumination. Circus scholar Peta Tait has recently examined the replacement of horse performers by electrically powered machines in early modernist circuses touring Asia circa 1915. Tait’s nuanced analysis of this modernising shift away from ‘equine capital’ is underscored by her research concerning the high potential for mortality of horses in shipping transit, and the modernising advances of technological change brought about by the colonisation of Asian territories by European imperial interests (2018). It is meaningful to note that within thirty years or so of Madame Woodyear’s enterprise, the electric generator was one of numerous modernising forces that would reduce the presence of the horse in circus performance, replacing ‘horsepower’ with electric power in more ways than one. The history of the modern circus (since Astley) and of the technological developments driving modernity are intrinsically entwined (see Arrighi 2012), primarily because the circus has always been an ‘early adopter’ of new technologies (see Rogers 1962), a crucial partner in the synergistic relationship that continues to this day between scientific development and the entertainment industry. Within the ‘Diffusions of Innovations’ theory brought forward and popularised by Rogers (1962), the modern circus of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was, in its most aesthetically

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elite and industrialised forms, a cultural force that advanced the spread of new ideas, new trends and the popular acceptance of new technologies arising from scientific discoveries. The modern circus was a conduit for what we can usefully describe as ‘popular science’. Large industrial circuses of the late nineteenth century were ‘communication channels’ (after Rogers) that plugged into ‘social systems’ (again, after Rogers); these ‘social systems’ were comprised of its highly suggestible, large and enthusiastic urban audiences. According to the apposite ‘Diffusions of Innovations’ theory posited by Rogers, the modern circus provided the ‘human capital’ that advocated for various new scientific innovations, including electricity. As an adjunct to this analysis, however, it is important to remember the role of public entertainment more broadly in the development of electric lighting; as David E. Nye observes, ‘electric lighting had its origins in the theatre’ (1995, 29). An electric arc lamp simulated the qualities of a sunrise at the Paris opera in 1849; within six years an electrical expert, L. J. Duboscq was employed at the opera to design ‘spotlights, rainbows, lightning, and luminous fountains’ (ibid., 30). According to Nye, in 1877 Duboscq ‘published a catalogue of electrical apparatus for sale to other theatres, including electric arc lamps in several sizes’ (ibid.). A few years later, in 1883, Niblo’s Garden in New York showcased lighting effects provided by the Edison Electric Company and staged ‘chorus girls with lights flashing from their foreheads as they flourished electrically lighted wands’ (ibid., 30, citing Bergman 1977, 278–286 and Josephson 1959, 272–273). From the mid-1890s onwards, leading American circuses that plied their trade through trans-continental touring adopted electricity as their primary source of lighting: Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show used electricity to power spotlights in 1896; Barnum & Bailey began using electricity to illuminate its Big Top circa 1905 using a gasoline engine and dynamo; and in 1909 Ringling Brothers also began using electricity (Davis 2002, 251, n. 43; Stoddart 2000, 34–35). Research by circus scholars Davis and Stoddart signifies that the tentative adoption of electricity by Dan Rice in 1852, and by W. W. Cole, Cooper and Bailey and Madame Woodyear’s circuses between 1879 and 1884, was genuinely pioneering; in the course of their travels these circuses would have introduced ‘the look’ and ‘the presence’ of the invisible, odourless power of electricity to rural and otherwise extra-urban communities for the first time. Nye posits that: ‘[f]rom its inception the public has understood lighting as a powerful symbolic medium, and yet the history of lighting usually has been presented as the

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triumph of science in providing the useful’ (1995, 2). Following Nye’s prompting, it is important to observe that early adoption of electricity by these circuses was functional, but it was also a source of the type of wonder the circus has always traded in and promoted, and it symbolised these organisations’ commitment to, and in a sense, ownership of, modernity and its innovative forces for inexorable social change. Of the numerous autobiographical reminiscences of circus entrepreneurs and performers spanning the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that of ‘Lord’ George Sanger, titled Seventy Years a Showman, provides us with an authentic espousal of the prevailing cultural and societal attitudes to showmen and circuses during the seventy years from 1835 through 1905. Born in 1827 to showfolk parents who earned their living by travelling the British Isles showing their peepshow, Sanger retired in 1905, recognised as the most successful circus entrepreneur to have emerged in Britain, with an entertainment empire that had made inroads into the Continent, owned multiple circuses in the UK, as well as a zoo at Margate. Sanger’s memoirs span the nineteenth-century showman’s use of lighting sources, from primitive flares through to electricity, and his precise descriptions of evolving light sources are dotted throughout. His earliest mention is of flares, hung outside the showmen’s booths, ‘horrible, odorous things, consisting of three prongs set in a shallow iron or tin dish… their spluttering, smoky flame was our chief illuminant’ (1935, 75). Sanger appeals to his early twentieth-century reader: ‘Think of it, you who only know the brilliance of gas and electricity, and you may be able to realize something of the disadvantages that night brought to those old-time showmen’ (ibid.). Flares gave way to naphtha lamps, and to oxy-hydrogen or limelight, with Sanger learning how to ‘make the oxygen gas from a mixture of perchlorate of potash and other things that any local chemist could supply’, together with hydrogen ‘obtained from the ordinary gas of commerce’ (181). Sanger’s memorial of a society moving through rapid industrial change is imbued with the circus entrepreneur’s recognition of himself ‘as an individual driven by the possibilities of the modernizing age’ (Arrighi 2012, 181). Years before major circuses such as W. W. Cole’s and Cooper and Bailey’s began to utilise cumbersome generators to produce electric light, ingenious circus performances were metaphorically and linguistically aligned with the emerging science of electrical engineering and the dynamic caprices that the very notion of electricity conjured up. In 1870

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a cross-dressed male aerialist—formerly known as El Nino, now appearing as the female aerial specialist Lulu—drew rapturous responses from audiences in Paris (and later in London and the United States) for ‘a particularly inventive aerial act’ (Tait 2005, 67), the climax of which was a leap upwards of twenty-five feet. Lulu and her leap summoned references to flight from press reviewers, with Jane R. Goodall more recently describing Lulu as ‘a precursor of Peter Pan from the gravity-free Never Never Land, caught in a state of magical androgyny’ (Goodall 2002, 198). Tait has explained the fine detail of the act and the apparatus that was visible to the audience: ‘The act was performed between three trapezes and two covered mid-air wooden platforms, 18 and 16 inches wide’ (2005, 67). Preceded by twelve tricks, inclusive of body revolutions and somersaults between trapezes, it was Lulu’s trick number thirteen that astonished audiences when she was ‘propelled… 25 feet straight up in the air to land, feet first, on to a platform’ (ibid.). This was followed by ‘three somersaults from the platform down to the net’ (ibid.). Lulu’s unique performance also propelled her to international stardom and questions about how this seemingly impossible feat was achieved intrigued audiences for years. Fortunately, Tait has also explained the material technology that made Lulu’s leap possible: ‘The eight-foot-high spring propulsion mechanism was hidden under the stage so it appeared as if Lulu’s stiff body jumped up, unaided – Lulu stood on a pedestal above a piston that was released by stretched rubber straps’ (ibid.). So, while it was not the as-yet mysterious and invisible electricity powering the extraordinary upwards bound, electricity was, as Goodall explains, metaphorically associated with Lulu’s act and its effect on audiences. She reports that ‘according to the New York Times, Lulu’s performance was “so intensely emotional as to impart an electric shock to the beholders”’ (Goodall 2002, 198, citing Peacock 1995, 211).

Circus as Spectacle | Electricity as Spectacle The popularity and prevalence of circus performance achieved a critical mass during the period 1870–1920 in the United States, the UK and Australia.3 As I have argued elsewhere, the largest circuses of this period were a product of western industrialising societies (see Arrighi 2012). Whether in the United States, Britain or Australia, the arrival of major circuses in a city or town, via railway, road or sea, was a public spectacle, as was the

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establishment of the circus site, with the raising of the Big Top and pitching of the tent town for circus employees, the horse stud, performing ring animals and menagerie animals. Performances at these circuses aimed to be spectacular, surprising, awe inspiring—demonstrating the outer limits of human physical achievement, dexterity and synergy with non-human animals. Spectacle is one of the quintessential coefficients of the modern circus. Hippisley Coxe provides an insightful explanation of the circus as ‘the spectacle of actuality’ (1980, 25). Proposing the theatre has a parallel in painting, he designates circus as analogous to sculpture: ‘You can walk around it. It can be seen from all sides. There can be no illusion, for there are eyes all round to prove that there is no deception. The performers actually do exactly what they appear to do. […] The circus, then, is the spectacle of actuality’ (ibid.). Musing on the meaning of ‘spectacle’, Hippisley Coxe turns to Pierre Bost’s explanation of the term within the context of the circus: A man alone with his thoughts is not a spectacle… A spectacle demands that Man, brought face to face with either events or other men, should react to them… An unhappy man is not a spectacle until he weeps or shouts. Therefore there must be something physical about a spectacle; boxing is a spectacle, chess is not. (ibid., citing Bost 1931, n.p.)

Adding clarification to this insight, Hippisley Coxe notes that while the spectacle of sporting contexts is not predetermined, at the circus ‘[e]verything is calculated and timed to a fraction of an inch and a split second’ (ibid.).4 Discussion here about circus as spectacle leads to my next point about electricity as spectacle during the same era, and events that showcased electricity as an aesthetic and spectacular element of popular entertainment. Communication historian Carolyn Marvin has contended that of the many electrical inventions and innovations of this period, ‘[t]he electric light was the great late-nineteenth-century medium of the spectacle, dazzling its audiences with novel messages’ (1988, 6). For Marvin, the public’s fascination with electricity and its myriad possibilities led to the social imaginary that ‘it was the premier mass medium of the future’ (ibid.).5 During the latter years of the nineteenth century when circuses were experimenting with transportable generators, electric light was also showcased for its own spectacular allure as a feature of body-based popular entertainment. At London’s Tivoli Music Hall in 1893, a performer

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named Maria Leyton performed a Serpentine Dance, an emerging style of solo dance considered an evolution of the skirt dance (both of which are closely associated with variety and burlesque venues of the era). Where the skirt dance featured the display and skilful manipulation of a long, flowing skirt, the serpentine dancer was characteristically clad in voluminous swathes of fine fabric that she swirled and whipped up around her body. The principal meaning of Leyton’s act was not limited to the corporeality and skill of the dancer herself but extended to the personification of light and electricity, and at this cultural moment in time, also to modernity and progress. Her dress was studded with electric lamps ‘which suddenly burst into light on all parts of her as the flowing blue draperies swirl[ed] round her tight clad form’ (‘The Latest London Sensation’ 1893, 2). Not insignificantly for the focus of this chapter, the details of Leyton’s performance were reported half a world away in Sydney, Australia, for a public readership enthusiastic to stay abreast of entertainment and fashion trends in the cultural centres of the northern hemisphere, London and New York. Theatre industry reportage of this variety theatre act would have been transmitted to press offices in Australia via the electrically powered telegraph. Nine years earlier, in 1884, the US-based Electric Girl Lighting Company employed and hired young women as personal servants for social functions; the gimmick of this hire-a-servant enterprise was that the young women’s clothing was embellished with filament lamps. Promoted as ‘girls of fifty candle power each in quantities to suit householders’ the ‘illuminated girls’ were, according to Marvin, a ‘potent status symbol of a passing age, and electrical light as ornamental object, a dazzling display of opulence that signified status in a new one’ (1988, 138). Niblo’s Garden theatre in New York produced its chorus line of girls with flashing foreheads and electrically lit wands in the previous year (1883)—perhaps this fashion for electrically decorated young women was an instance of swift cultural transference from the popular theatre to the industrial environment. But for Maria Leyton and other variety/vaudeville performers and producers of this era who theatrically framed the electric light as a spectacle for its own sake, electricity inscribed the dancing body rather than merely decorated it. Foremost in the synthesis of electricity and dance was the American-born Loie Fuller, who meshed ‘the metaphors and the methods of both high art and science’ during the 1890s (Coffman 2002, 77). Far more aesthetic, subtle and scientific in her processes than the ‘illuminated girls’, Fuller did not adorn herself with electric light bulbs, but

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experimented with the creation of coloured light and the ways that light sources could be projected onto her extravagantly fluttering gowns. Fuller is regarded as a modernist innovator whose unique dance style emerged from a synthesis of the new technology of electric light and her flamboyant re-imagining of the skirt dance—her Serpentine or Butterfly Dances are considered the original model, emulated and approximated by dancers in other countries. As an example, La Belle Rose (aka Millie FitzGerald) appeared with the Australian FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus in 1895 performing a Serpentine Dance in Fuller’s style. With a technological twist that also inscribed her dancing body, photos of Australian political celebrities of the era were projected onto the diaphanous fabric that swirled around her body (see Arrighi 2015). Whether adorned or overwritten as a spectacle of technological inscription, the bodies of the Electric Girl servants-for-hire, the chorus girls at Niblo’s Garden, Maria Leyton, Loie Fuller and the many emulators of these various performances can, in a sense, be considered as electrically transformed bodies. During this era, electrical transformation of the human body with various apparatus, devices and medical processes—all of which purported to harness the healing powers electricity was believed capable of—was becoming big business. In a society increasingly connected through industrialised information mechanisms such as the electric telegraph and cheap mass-circulating print media, the marketing of readily available electrotherapy devices built on the long held belief that mysterious vital forces, whether magnetic or electric, were somehow fundamental to life.6 Unsurprisingly, contemporary fascination with the healing and regenerative powers of electricity manifested in circus acts—the circus was, after all, the popular showcase for human physical force, energy, strength and vigour. When undertaking a tenting tour of Ireland in 1886, the circus of Powell and Clarke promoted their show as ‘illuminated by the recently invented American Circus Electric Light’ and travelling with them was a troupe of performers who called themselves the Electric Family. Their particular specialty was explained in a promotional handbill: ‘by a freak of nature… [they] possess the marvellous power of conveying electricity to anyone approaching them’ (Hippisley Coxe 1980, 37). As many other circus performers around the turn of the century would do when their specialty act was in some way connected to the emerging health sciences,

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the Electric Family’s advertising mobilised the contemporary medical profession’s advocacy for electricity as the cure for manifold illnesses and ailments. Influenced by all kinds of advances in medical knowledge, circuses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries staged acts that in various ways referenced innovative ideas about health and physical culture. Just as they zealously sought out the new technologies that were driving industrialisation of daily, urbanised living, circuses were agents that mediated recent scientific knowledge for their popular audiences (see Arrighi 2019).

Spectacle and Showmanship by Innovators of Circus and Electrical Science at the Chicago World’s Fair (1893) As prefaced earlier in this chapter, the wonders of electricity and the spectacle of the circus at its most astonishing were separately showcased at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Showmanship on a grand and industrial level underpinned the demonstrational lecture-cum-performances by Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-born electrical engineer, inventor and visionary who had been resident in America for some years. Elite showmanship was also a vital element of the German circus of Carl Hagenbeck, at the centre of which were exceptionally trained animal acts presenting fairy-tale like scenarios that were unique within the global entertainment industry. Audiences witnessed both domestic and exotic animals working together in novel circus tricks as well as surprising scenes of inter-species harmony that challenged conventional understanding about the natural predator-prey relationship and the human-animal divide. Electricity serviced the nearly seven-hundred-acre precinct where these separate events played, powering amenities and futuristic transportation options such as moving sidewalks, an electric internal railway, electrical elevators and fifty battery-powered gondolas that plied the precinct’s canals for the estimated twenty-eight million visitors who flowed through the gates from 1 May to 30 October 1893 (as well as for the sixty thousand exhibitors). By day, the Fair was described as the ‘White City’, due to its layout of waterways conjuring up ideas of Venice, and its temporary architecture of monumental proportions with palatial facades resembling marble. By night the Fair was called the ‘City of Light’, when the precinct’s use

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of powerful arc lights and search lights dazzled the eyes of evening visitors. The Fair ‘had more lighting than any city in the country, and eleven times more light than had been used at the Paris Exposition five years earlier. Some visitors saw more artificial light at the fair than they had previously seen in their entire lives’ (Nye 1995, 38). As specially constructed, liminal social spaces, the many World’s Fairs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century provided visitors with an ambitious glimpse into a possible future and the opportunity to witness fantastic inventions that had the potential to shape human behaviour and social conventions in time to come. In the temporary, artificial and closed-off environment of the World’s Fair, the smartest and the cleverest outputs of human endeavour were on display. Within the field of circus production, the show presented by German animal impresario Carl Hagenbeck exemplified the most sophisticated human engagement with animals yet presented to audiences. Carl Hagenbeck oversaw numerous business interests as a global animal dealer, animal trainer, circus owner and entrepreneur of ethnographic people shows (Rothfels 2002, 202). By the 1870s, after inheriting his father’s Hamburg based animal trading business, he had built up the largest exotic animal dealership in Europe (ibid., 49). During the second half of the nineteenth century, ideas had surfaced proposing an approach to training animals that was slower and kinder than the confrontational, aggressive methods customarily employed by circus and menagerie animal handlers.7 Carl Hagenbeck and his insights concerning animal intelligence and animals’ varying personalities are historically attributed with revolutionising the circus animal act through his innovative training methods. Convinced that animals were cognitive beings whose ‘intelligence differs from the human in degree only, not in kind’ (Hagenbeck 1909, 124), his methods were received as modern and in-step with the emerging science of human psychology. Occupying its own pavilion, ‘Hagenbeck’s Zoological Arena Company’ performed seven shows a day. A contemporary report estimated two million people paid the admission fee of twenty-five cents (Halligan 1894, 82), an attendance figure substantiated by the Exposition’s Department of Collections, which recorded the company had gross receipts of $526,708.65 (see Doolin Catalogue). Hagenbeck’s numerous innovations in the training, display and the performance action of circus animal acts included the large circular cage which enclosed the entire performance ring. During Hagenbeck’s World’s Fair engagement he presented

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numerous inter-species animal acts involving predator-class and prey-class animals working closely together in dramatic scenarios produced from learned behaviour.8 Several animal equestrian acts including a dog riding a lion, and a lion riding a horse were also presented. In the latter, the lion performed equestrian tricks usually reserved for human riders: ‘he leaped over hurdles while on horseback and balanced with another lion on board’ (Halligan 1894, 82). All of these extraordinary feats of interspecies collaboration occurred under the glare of modern electric light. Underpinning the spectacular Hagenbeck-trained animal tricks, scenarios and tableaux that took place with industrial precision seven times a day during the six months of the Fair was a meta-narrative about the progress and sophistication of western European culture. Hagenbeck’s animal performances evinced a pinnacle of control over nature, a mastery that transformed the animals’ instinctive behaviour. Large exotic animals of the predator class were, in defiance of the hierarchical order of life on earth, trained to enact learned behaviour alongside animals that were their natural prey, and the narrative scenes they played out represented culturally civilised patterns of human behaviour. Elsewhere at the World’s Fair precinct, human mastery and control of the natural forces of electricity were spectacularly demonstrated at the Electricity Pavilion. With a footprint of two football fields in length and roughly one football field in width, the Electricity Pavilion was topped with ‘a dozen elegant minarets, four of which rose 169 feet [55 metres] above the hall’ (Seifer 1996, 118), and it was lit with ‘1.8 million candle power’ (Nye 1995, 39), almost all of which was distributed by alternating current, unequivocally demonstrating the dominance of the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co.’s Tesla Polyphase System over Thomas Edison’s direct current system. The Electricity Pavilion housed an automated Scenic Theater that was capable of continuous performances while operated by just one man. Showing a Swiss Alpine Village and the comings and goings of seventy-five inhabitants over the course of a twenty-four hour period, it replicated ‘as realistically as possible the natural transitions of light during one day, starting at nightfall… and included sunset, the stars, moonlight, dawn, a thunderstorm, and a rainbow’ (Nye 1995, 41). As Nye observes, this theatre, devoid of human performers, ‘was completely artificial, a simulacrum of an ideal world showing, as is characteristic of world’s fairs, man’s increasing control over nature’ (ibid.).

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Major electrical-engineering corporations maintained exhibition spaces within the Electricity Pavilion, the largest and most flamboyant installations were those of Westinghouse and Edison’s General Electric company. Exhibits of Tesla’s numerous inventions occupied a discrete area within the Westinghouse space and included a visually and aurally sensational display of sheets of lightning discharged between two insulated plates; but it was Tesla’s extraordinary week of public lecture-demonstrations in late August that exemplified ‘man’s increasing control over nature’. Reporting on the event, the Chicago Tribune of 26 August described the tumult to witness Tesla’s inaugural performance: People crowded about the doors and clamoured for admittance… The great majority of those who came, came with the expectation of seeing Tesla pass a current of 250,000 volts through his body… Ten dollars was offered for a single seat, and offered in vain. Only members of the Electrical Congress, with their wives, were admitted, and not even they unless they were provided with credentials. (cited in Seifer 1996, 120)

Tesla, the ‘Wizard of Physics’,9 exemplified a spectacular showmanship that was undoubtedly brave and correlative to the courage of elite circus performers. Bordering on the magical, in his performances he played with frequencies, luminescence and massive sparks, demonstrated his marvellous inventions referred to by others as ‘Tesla’s Animals’, and for the supreme climax of his show, lit himself up in an extraordinary corporeal display as 250,000 volts of electrical current passed through his body. At a demonstration in St Louis earlier that year he had explained to his audience that for this demonstration he charged his body from an electric coil he had invented: I can make the electricity vibrate at the rate of a million times a second. The molecules of the air are then violently agitated, so violently that they become luminous, and streams of light then come out from the hand. In the same manner I am able to take in the hand a bulb of glass filled with certain substances and make them spring into light. (Electrical World, 29 April 1893, cited in Seifer 1996, 112)

Artificial lighting in the halls where Tesla performed his lectureperformances were dimmed so that the audience could see the streamers of light breaking out on his clothes; eyewitness reports marvelled at the flames shooting from his head and the lightning issuing from his

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fingers, a sensation that Tesla described as like the pricking of a needle and, in his fingertips, a burning sensation. While his body was still full of charge from his coil device, Tesla demonstrated various other feats such as ‘the running of motors by way of energy through his body and the lighting of a variety of colourful tubes which the inventor waved about as if they were phosphorescent rapiers’ (ibid.). Tesla—the visionary and immensely talented inventor—was also a showman. In the era that fostered spectacular showmanship, Teslas’s spectacles of actuality (after Hippisley Coxe) engendered human marvelling, wonder and astonishment of the kind generated by the leading circuses of the day (such as Carl Hagenbeck’s), and Tesla’s demonstrations of the manifestations and exhilarating potentialities of electricity would have been ‘at home’ within the shows of the foremost circuses of the era. The World’s Colombian Exhibition of 1893 staged the international convergence of a leading innovator of the science of electricity (Nikola Tesla) and a leading innovator of the circus (Carl Hagenbeck). Acknowledging electricity as both a metaphor and a force of nature—an invisible power charge that human skill and intelligence have harnessed and transformed—this chapter has brought to light the nuanced relationship that existed between the circus and the emerging science of electrical engineering during the nineteenth century.

Notes 1. The ‘Current War’ between Edison and Westinghouse and the centrality of Tesla’s inventions to this industrial battle are thoroughly documented in Seifer (1996) and Jonnes (2003). 2. This may be because of Tesla’s futuristic ideas that he was unable to deliver during his lifetime, such as fighting machines that would replace human soldiers on battlefields, and wireless connectivity between people in different parts of the globe (see Seifer 1996). 3. This phenomenon has been examined within the national contexts of circus performance in the UK, the United States, and Australia; see, for example, Assael (2005), Davis (2002), St. Leon (1983, 2005) and Arrighi (2015). 4. Use of the term ‘spectacle’ in this context should not be conflated with the discrete circus performance event named the spectacle, or spec, that featured in American railroad circuses of the late nineteenth century. According to Davis ‘all circus specs shared a defining characteristic: they told a story—either fictional (fairy tales, myths), biblical, or based on foreign affairs, past or present’ (2002, 286).

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5. In her thesis Marvin trans-historically points to electric light laying the technological ground for cinema and later, television. 6. Medical doctors applied high-frequency currents to patients suffering from various ailments such as diabetes, obesity, rheumatism and gout. Widely publicised validation of medical research by leading hospitals, and by the medical organisations that oversaw the ethics of the medical profession, in turn generated a trickle-down influence upon popular culture. All kinds of every day commodities were manufactured with claims for electrotherapeutic properties, including ‘pills, soaps, teas, potions, lotions, apparel, and jewelry’ (Marvin 1988, 129–130). An electric corset was invented to protect the modesty of females (anyone touching the wearer received a minor electrical zap), but perhaps one of the most commonly advertised electric healing devices was the vibrating electric belt. Numerous manufacturers produced their own version, with claims to potently improve the deleterious effects of the urbanising age, such as debilitation, loss of natural vigour, impotency, kidney troubles, nervousness, sleeplessness, poor memory, weak back and general ill health. 7. Rothfels cites the manual Haney’s Art of Training Animals which was published in 1869 (2002, 156). 8. Heinrich Mehrmann, one of Hagenbeck’s trainers, featured in the second half of the show with twelve set pieces, amongst which were the extraordinary inter-species ‘performances’ by predator- and prey-class animals: 5. The Hurdle Race—Boarhounds leaping over Hurdles which are supported by Lions and Tigers; 6. The See Saw—Performed by Lion, Tigers, Panthers and Bears; 7. The Zoological Staircase—comprising Lions, Tigers and Boarhounds; 10. Steeple Chase of the Boarhounds—Leaping over living hurdles of Lions and Tigers; 11. Triumphant Drive of the Lion Prince— Dressed in Royal Robes and Crowned, drawn in his chariot by two Bengal Tigers and having two Boarhounds as footmen; 12. The Great Zoological Pyramid—consisting of Lions, Tigers, Panthers, Leopards, Bears and Dogs (Rothfels 2002, 152–153, citing the official souvenir programme for Hagenbeck’s Arena and World’s Museum). 9. This is the phrase used to introduce Nikola Tesla to an audience of electrical engineers at the Agricultural Hall of the World’s Fair on 25 August 1893 (Seifer 1996, 121).

References ‘Madame Woodyear’s Circus.’ 1884. Sydney Morning Herald, 1 September 1884, 9. ‘The Latest London Sensation.’ 1893. Illustrated Sydney News, 21 January 1893, 2.

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Arrighi, Gillian. 2012. The Circus and Modernity: A Commitment to ‘the Newer’ and ‘the Newest’. Early Popular Visual Culture 10 (2): 169–185. Arrighi, Gillian. 2015. The FitzGerald Brothers Circus: Spectacle, Identity and Nationhood at the Australian Circus. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Arrighi, Gillian. 2019. Synthesising Circus Aesthetics and Science: Australian Circus and Variety Theatre at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. Early Visual Popular Culture 17 (1): 1–19. Assael, Brenda. 2005. The Circus and Victorian Society. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Bergman, Gösta M. 1977. Lighting in the Theater. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. London: Verso. Bouissac, Paul. 2014. Circus as Multimodal Discourse: Performance, Meaning and Ritual. London: Bloomsbury. Coffman, Elizabeth. 2002. Women in Motion: Loie Fuller and the “Interpenetration” of Art and Science. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 17 (1): 73–105. Davis, Janet M. 2002. The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Doolin Catalogue No. 57, Concession 87, Granted to Hagenbeck’s Zoological Arena Company to Operate a Zoological Show. World’s Columbian Exposition. Department of Collections—May 1 1893, to February 10 1894, Concessions, Appendix ‘E’. Essig, Mark. 2003. Edison and the Electric Chair. New York: Walker and Co. Goodall, Jane R. 2002. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin: Out of the Natural Order. London and New York: Routledge. Goodall, Jane R. 2008. Electrical Romanticism. In Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830, eds. Christa Knellwolf and Jane R. Goodall, 117–132. Surry, UK: Ashgate. Hagenbeck, Carl. 1909. Of Beasts and Men. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Halligan, Jewell N., and John McGovern. 1894. Halligan’s illustrated World: A Portfolio of Photographic Views of the World’s Columbian Exposition/Carefully Selected by Jewell N. Halligan with an Introductory Article and Descriptions by John McGovern, editor. London and New York: Jewell N. Halligan. Hippisley Coxe, Antony. 1980. A Seat at the Circus. Hamden, CT: Archon. Knellwolf, Christa, and Jane R. Goodall (Eds.). 2008. Frankenstein’s Science: Experimentation and Discovery in Romantic Culture, 1780–1830. Surry, UK: Ashgate. Jonnes, Jill. 2003. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York: Random House.

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Josephson, Matthew. 1959. Edison, A Biography. New York: McGraw-Hill. Marvin, Caroline. 1988. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nye, David E. 1995. Electrifying America: Social Meaning of a New Technology, 1880–1940. Cambridge and London: MIT Press. Peacock, Shane. 1995. The Great Farini: The High-Wire Life of William Hunt. Toronto: Viking. Priestley, Joseph. 1775. The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments, 3rd ed., vol 2. London: Bathurst and Lowndes. Rogers, Everett M. 1962. Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Rothfels, Nigel. 2002. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. St. Leon, Mark. 1983. Spangles and Sawdust: The Circus in Australia. Richmond, VIC: Greenhouse Publications. St. Leon, Mark. 2005. Circus in Australia, 3 vols. Penshurst, NSW: Mark St. Leon & Associates. Sanger, ‘Lord’ George. 1935. Seventy Years a Showman. London: Dent. Seifer, Marc J. 1996. Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla. Secaucus, NJ: Birch Lane Press. Stoddart, Helen. 2000. Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tait, Peta. 2005. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London: Routledge. Tait, Peta. 2018. Replacing Injured Horses, Cross-Dressing and Dust: Modernist Circus Technologies in Asia. Studies in Theatre and Performance 38 (2): 149– 164.

CHAPTER 6

Technologies of Risk, Fear and Fun: Human and Nonhuman Circus Performance Peta Tait

This chapter explores technologies of physical risk and safety in nineteenth-century circus aerial performance and in circus-influenced athleticism in the twentieth century. It considers examples of technological invention that progressed the performance of human physical feats and at times involving nonhuman animals (henceforth animals). The Hanlon Brothers, who became known as the Hanlon-Lees Brothers after 1870, adapted acrobatic action and aerial technology in their pioneering nineteenth-century act and subsequently developed aerial safety equipment and new stage machinery for acrobatic pantomime. This chapter contends that the example of the Hanlon-Lees reveals that equipment invention is integral to the circus and its continuing artistic innovation and illustrates how one invention inspired further technological advances. In particular, the bounce of the aerialist on a safety net in circus inspired the twentieth-century invention of the trampoline by George Nissen and trampoline action became a leisure activity, a new circus act, and an

P. Tait (B) La Trobe University, Bundoora, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_6

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Olympic sport (Nelson 2010; Graves 1945). This chapter asks: What theatrical emotions intersect with these performance technologies? As body-based arts performed with apparatus (Tait 2005, 2), it is the contention here that circus acts rely on technological invention to advance the athletic and aesthetic innovation and this then influences social practices. But newly invented equipment often brings additional physical risks for the acrobat, even though this means that the circus can theatrically heighten the emotional impact. While excitement tinged with fear characterised the aerial work of the Hanlon-Lees and their later grotesque comic pantomimes to scare audiences, Nissen created the opposite emotional effect with impressions of joyous fun and relaxed enjoyment. Since both the Hanlon-Lees during the 1860–1870s and Nissen in the 1930–1940s undertook their early artistic activity in a society under threat of war, this suggests divergent responses in performance to risk and fear within society. Similarly, both included animals in the performance but while the Hanlon-Lees exploited impressions of frightening menace, Nissen sought to deliver reassurance and comic playfulness. A human bouncing on a trampoline might have conveyed harmless exuberance, but the kangaroo on the trampoline in Nissen’s performance stunt designed to attract the attention of the media, inadvertently counteracted this impression by suggesting instead that the kangaroo might be fearful.

Danger and Safety Invention As I argue elsewhere, the invention of the risk-taking flying trapeze act by Jules Léotard in 1859 was also paradoxically the beginning of the history of safety in aerial performance (Tait 2016, 532). Here, however, I am emphasising how aerial performance is also a history of technological invention. Léotard in Europe, his imitators and successors, minimised the risk of leaping between three to four trapeze bars suspended mid-air by practising to achieve physical mastery, and Léotard first worked with mattresses on the stage below. A forerunner to the swinging trapeze apparatus existed in the gymnasium and it was adapted by Léotard for suspension in the air; his father owned a gymnasium and Léotard was familiar with its equipment and reportedly first practiced his act there (Tait 2005, 11–12). There was possibly a static bar in use in the 1850s (Thayer 2005, 139). The acrobatic troupe, the Hanlon-Lees presented the first flying action with trapeze in the USA and subsequently developed aerial safety equipment and stage machinery in theatre over the following decades (Tait

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2005, 25–26). The invention of the trapeze apparatus led to Léotard’s innovation of human flying action and the Hanlon-Lees’ experimentation with aerial athleticism. Thus, equipment invention shaped the development of acrobatic and aerial performance in the circus. Aerial performance is emblematic of what Bernard Stiegler (2008) recognises as the transformation of the human body and perceptions through the use of technology. The spectator attending performances in the 1860s might have wondered if the aerialist controlled the flying action or the new trapeze equipment propelled the human performer through space. In actuality, this performance was only possible because of the combination of technology and the performing body. Stiegler contrasts a prescientific philosophical concept of technology as ‘the discourse of describing and explaining the evolution of specialized procedures and techniques, arts and trades’ with its subsequent association with science (2008, 94). Accordingly, Stiegler is concerned with how ideas of the human and ontological being become changed over time creating ‘technics’ in which humanity functions with technology in codependent ways. Stiegler’s larger philosophical point is that the utilisation of technology compensates for ontologies of insufficiency, and within traditions of thought revealing the long-standing human reliance on technology. In the instance of aerial action, however, the new technology allowed performers to compensate for physical limitations of the human body in the imitation of flight. The Hanlon Brothers—Thomas, George, William, Alfred, Edward and the adopted Frederick—had been child acrobats in the Risley acrobatic balance troupe of Professor Lees and, as they became older, they acquired a reputation for creating performance on lighter suspended apparatus (Tait 2005, 25–26). In imitation of Léotard’s act in 1861 and in order to outdo him, William Hanlon leapt and caught the first, the second and the third of the swinging trapeze bars that were rigged 7.62 metres (25 feet) above the heads of the audience, and travelled the 37.5 metres (123 feet) down the length of the auditorium to land on a wooden platform. Trapeze acts—synonymous with the circus—were performed in theatre buildings where the equipment was suspended from the ceiling (see Gossard 1994), two decades before circus tents regularly inserted the rig with poles. The arrangement of the Brothers’ trapeze apparatus was called a ‘Zampillaerostation’ and the other brothers followed William in the action (McKinven 1998, 14, illustration). For the finale, William was shot from a cannon across the length of the venue where he would

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catch hold of a trapeze bar. As the show developed, the Brothers added riskier action in which, at the end of swinging between the three trapezes, the performer leapt onto a horizontal ladder suspended mid-air across three metres (10 feet), and from one end of the ladder to the other, and then leapt 3.65 metres (12 feet) to a hanging rope in a feat named the ‘leap for life’ that had preceded trapeze action (Thayer 2005). While these acts were recognised as a celebration of muscular prowess (Tait 2005), they were also a triumph of equipment invention. The early trapeze acts were about the physical risk of leaping or flying between two bars. Since aerialists rarely fall, spectators did not necessarily see the ongoing risk posed by the apparatus which had to be rigged with precision and, over time, equipment could fail due to wear and metal fatigue. It is problems with equipment and its use that remain a major occupational hazard for aerialists (Tait 2016). The risk of bodily injury from aerial action was, and is, minimised by a performer’s focus on working safety and on well-maintained and routinely checked equipment. This safety protocol is masked, however, with theatrical illusion to heighten the appearance of danger for spectators. The flying trapeze action could be mastered with practice but the cannon act and the leap to a rope remained more risky. Cannon acts in which the human body was projected into space would fade from the circus in the second half of the twentieth century because even relentless practising did not prevent accidents. As well as performer attitudes about an acceptable level of risk, attitudes within the wider world influence social receptivity to risky practices in performance. The actual risk of aerial performance is not always perceived and corresponds with how actual-risk versus perceived-risk has theoretical and practical applications with respect to technologies and changed behaviour in the contemporary world in a wide range of social contexts, including car accidents, industrial pollution and health hazards (Covello and Flamm 1983). As Ulrich Beck (2009) argues, concern with manageable risk in corporate culture in late twentieth-century developed society coincides with a perceived increase in threats to social life through terrorism, political and financial instability and environmental change, and these threats seem to offset the technological advancement and problemsolving capacity of modernity. To what extent, then, was the escalation in the performance of risk through technological invention in historic circus acts also a response

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to wider preoccupations? The Hanlon-Lees—as the Hanlons—first performed the flying trapeze act on 12 December 1861 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during the turmoil at the approach of civil war in the USA (McKinven 1998, 14–17). The performance background was imbued with the fears of an imminent war, so the aerial act was also a demonstration of physical courage in this context. It might be argued that audiences were receptive to such fear-inducing performances because of a wider current of fear. Fear in wartime was acknowledged by soldiers in World Wars I and II as manifesting in physical symptoms such as trembling hands and sleeplessness, and the military recognised that there was a significantly increased additional fear due to the increased mechanisation of the new weapons in these two wars (Bourke 2001, 314–315). As well, the receptivity of audiences to performance making fun of physical fear might be a response to the psychologies of fear created by ideologies, political incitement and events surrounding conflict (Linke and Smith 2009). The Hanlon-Lees left the USA to tour internationally before returning after the civil war ended in 1865 and there was a serious accident on that tour. Although the Hanlon-Lees had injuries, the first serious accident happened to Thomas in the ‘leap for life’ when he missed his hold on the rope and fell. He landed on the stage footlights and suffered head injuries. His physical suffering led to his suicide three years later. In the 1860s most circus acts involved an element of physical risk and there was a comparatively high number of accidents in the new aerial acts, with five or six serious accidents reported each year (Tait 2016, 533). This rate of serious injury seemed to proportionately decrease over the next two decades because the number of aerialists significantly increases, which suggests the subsequent strategies for safety had become effective. The 1865 accident of Thomas influenced the Hanlon-Lees in two distinct directions that set major precedents for both circus and theatrical pantomime. Firstly, they set about improving safety equipment for aerial acts in a dual strategy. They pioneered the use of the safety net to hang below the flying trapeze apparatus. As well they used safety lines which were known as the mechanic’s belt, a thick belt worn by the gymnast with attached cables and which had been invented by Spencer Stokes sometime in the 1850s (Gossard 1994, 60). Widely used in training, the safety line attaches to the performer and is held by a support person on the ground. Or a safety line can be attached to the apparatus and used during performance. Secondly, the Hanlon-Lees Brothers ceased aerial

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performance about 1870 and instead began creating extraordinary acrobatic pantomimes with grotesque aesthetics. This pantomime work put the Hanlon-Lees at the forefront of the invention of theatrical technology and they became leading inventors of nineteenth-century stage machinery. The Hanlon-Lees claimed to have invented a rope safety net to place below the aerial action, which is probably accurate even though it was being used by another act in the same year (Gossard 1994, 60). Certainly the Hanlon-Lees publicly advocated for the use of safety equipment. Their use of the safety net was described in a newspaper account in 1869 with a casting act in which one of the young apprentice acrobats, known as ‘little Bob’, was thrown between two catchers at either end of the performance space (Tait 2005, 27). The performer in the casting act is thrown from one catcher to another catcher in contrast to more skilled flying action from a trapeze bar to the catcher. In this instance, the catchers were suspended from the Hanlon-invented horizontal bars. The apprentices continued to perform as aerialists under the Hanlon-Volta name from 1870 and in circuses. The safety net became standard equipment in flying acts in the circus in which the performer lets go of the trapeze bar to fly through air. It is clearly seen by the audience whereas safety lines are more difficult to see. Aerial acts at various times omitted the net to heighten an impression of danger but it became standard in Euro-American circus from the 1980s. This reflects the way that performer attitudes to the actual level of physical risk change in developed countries in this period correspond with a social shift in the designation of risk, which Beck (2009) identifies. Safety line and net equipment remain in wide use in developed countries in the twenty-first century. The safety net offered protection to the flyer moving from the trapeze bar to the catcher because it was placed directly below the performance area and the rigged aerial equipment. It visually reassured spectators as they watched a flying trapeze act with an upside down catcher hanging from a swinging trapeze bar to catch the flyer moving through space. Over time, the height of the equipment and length of the flying action increased. Flying trapeze acts became lead acts in the twentieth-century circus and, together with the trained animal act, became emblematic of the traditional circus (Tait 2012). The risks that are apparent to spectators include the catcher missing the wrist and forearm of the performer moving at speed or the performer overshooting the catcher. But the actual risk of injury from a missed catch or a mistimed somersault or turn remains

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even with the safety net below, because it provides only limited protection for a body travelling at speed. There is a risk of injury if the performer falls into the net in the wrong way, and of serious accident if the performer misses the net or bounces out of the net. The action of the safety net bounce, however, became incorporated back into aerial acts, which makes the safety net an extension of the apparatus in performance. The performer lands in the safety net but springs back into the air in a rebound action and sometimes with sufficient upward momentum to grab a trapeze bar again. This rebound action is widely used for theatrical effect in aerial acts and it inspired George Nissen to invent the trampoline (see below).

Machinery of Fear Perhaps it is not surprising that the Hanlon Brothers, who extended the physical limits of the human body through their aerial flying action on new equipment, progressed to creating acrobatic theatrical pantomimes with clever technical effects in which the body became ensconced in the equipment. While the Hanlon-Lees became highly successful in Europe and in the USA over three decades for their comic and fantasy pantomimes with slapstick acrobatic action, the earliest pantomimes in Paris in the 1870s included beheadings, skeletons and other ploys to simulate mayhem and death, which made them infamous (McKinven 1998; Cosdon 2006; Jürgens 2014). The Hanlon-Lees used the equipment to adapt and expand the clowning action of stock pantomime identities and with the deliberate intention to surprise and shock if not also to scare their audiences. If the perceived fear that an aerialist might fall and be fatally injured typified audience responses to aerial acts, it is ideas of violent accident and death that the Hanlon-Lees continued to explore in their highly imaginative theatre. John McKinven (1998) reproduces descriptions by contemporary observers of the pantomime narratives as well as descriptions and drawings of the American machine patents, which this chapter draws on and summarises below. The crucial point remains that technologies of inventive stage machinery were central to the theatre of the Hanlon-Lees and how it delivered illusionist tricks set within dark and threatening fantasy narratives. The acrobatic approach was possibly influenced by the act and action forged by the ground-based acrobatic family

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troupe of Garibaldi Ravel in the USA, including one feat showing a performer apparently physically flattened by a heavy roller and then reappearing whole. The Hanlon-Lees excelled at this type of illusionary acrobatic manoeuvre compiled into an evening-length pantomime. The imaginative effects were made possible by the stage machines, which were largely invented by William who sought patents for them (McKinven 1998, 30, 63, 88–103). The Hanlon-Lees did not invent the genre of fast fighting acrobatic pantomime but, through technological invention and fantastic narratives combined with recognisable settings, they greatly enlarged its scope by turning it into macabre theatre. The stock characters of popular performance were deployed into highly fanciful scenarios of life and death. In a butcher’s shop scene in an early production called Pierrot the Terrible, the eyes of sheep’s heads winked, calf tongues moved, and Pierrot was buried under animal carcasses in grotesque activity that seemingly brought the dead animals back to life. If this suggests the energetic effects of the new science of electric current, it also points to the living dead that would become a genre of later popular culture. Anna-Sophie Jürgens locates their work within the social perception of convulsive bodies, explaining that they heightened and exaggerated the display of ‘erotic viscerality in motion and the bestial side of human bodies’ (2019, 15). Towards the end of Pierrot the Terrible, Pierrot accidently lies down in a bed with the beautiful sleeping Columbine in explicit erotic action. The Hanlon-Lees’ pantomimes potentially connected with ambivalent social attitudes towards medical treatment, its technologies and death creating a forerunner to later gruesome dramas. Jonathan Marshall (2016) analyses in detail how a theatrical process reflected the public engagement of doctors such as Jean-Martin Charcot (who treated hysterics and pioneered neurology), and how this medical theatre intersected with French artistic theatre in the presentation of typologies of medical symptoms. At the turn of the twentieth century, a distinct collaboration between medicine and theatre created the Grand Guignol which presented short farces and horror narratives (Marshall 2016). The macabre theatre of the Hanlon-Lees, starting with skits in the 1860s, connected the English physical comic tradition with these later forms, and the Brothers were hired for a pantomime touring to Paris from England in 1870, full of ‘clowns, gymnasts, tricks and machines’ (McKinven 1998, 31). They arrived in Paris with Henri Agoust, to a city under threat from the Franco-Prussian war, and soon left but returned after

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the war in 1872 with their adapted and enlarged Harlequin or Pierrot and Columbine pantomimes. These included The Village Barber in which the barber cuts off heads, and the aforementioned Pierrot the Terrible in which customers in a tailoring shop were attacked and strangled. A trick in which Columbine disappeared through a bed mattress (in a mechanical opening) was indicative of how equipment underpinned the stage illusions of the Hanlon-Lees. These disappearances and reappearances were spectacular and no doubt amazement contributed to the appeal of these popular productions and possibly also puzzlement over the mechanism would have been part of the emotional effect. By the late 1870s, the HanlonLees had developed the stage machinery for more socially acceptable scenarios, such as presenting passengers on a ship moving at sea that went from a scene of passengers dining and dancing to one in which passengers were thrown up into the air during a storm. One passenger was thrown into a piano, with his head appearing at the bottom of the piano and his legs at the top (McKinven 1998, 42, drawn image). Scenes of shipwreck and the sea depths became staples of the Hanlon-Lees’ repertoire across productions which changed considerably in remounted versions. The Brothers progressed to create The Trip to Switzerland (Le Voyage en Suisse) in 1879 and Fantasma from 1884 with its illusions of being at the bottom of the sea, which ran for years in the USA albeit with regular narrative changes (Cosdon 2006). Similarly, Superba ran for twenty years and closed in 1912 and Mark Cosdon (2006) analyses how these successful productions were achieved due to the considerable business acumen of the Hanlon-Lees. Some of the Fantasma tricks included a body disappearing through a revolving door, then a washstand and then a wall and in Superba, a body appearing to dive straight through a seated man (McKinven 1998, 75). A spectator commented that the Hanlon-Lees’ characteristic violence ‘startled’ audiences and even female clowns were physically hit (McKinven 1998, 34). The Hanlon-Lees’ pantomimes reflected the way the emotions of startlement or surprise are considered to connect to fear, and this was being conceptualised around the time of the early HanlonLees pantomimes. Paul Ekman explains that the emotions studied by Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals published in 1872 presented ‘robust evidence’ for the existence of the emotions of ‘anger, disgust, sadness, enjoyment, and fear/surprise’ but not for the separation of surprise and fear (1999, 390). Ekman, like Darwin, studied the emotions through observations of facial expressions and

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confirmed that a clear difference between fear and surprise could not be established. From the mid-twentieth century, Ekman investigates how people recognise the facial expressions of these five emotions across cultures and that it was hardest for participants in his research to distinguish surprise and fear on faces (1999, 379). Surprise and fear may or may not be separate conditions and can seem to flow into one other. While the Hanlon-Lees set out to surprise with their pantomimes, these can be said to mimic, and potentially induce, fear. In her extended analysis of the origins of violent clowning and the Hanlon-Lees pantomime and locating them within the lineage of the violent joker who emerges in twentieth-century cinema, Jürgens discerns that the genre corresponds with what Adorno’s aesthetic theory of the sublime identified as the ‘violence of the new’, and slapstick violence was a particular feature of these new acrobatic works (2014, 444). She describes how the Hanlon-Lees ‘showed death unsparingly and hyperbolically direct, always cutting to the worse-case scenario’ as they did when the survivors of a shipwreck were rescued but then murdered (2014, 444). This ‘dark side of art’ undermines the reassuring aesthetic experience through its deformation, and yet it remains alluring (Jürgens 2014, 445). Such art takes advantage of the appeal of contradictory emotions such as fascination and repulsion from encountering ghoulish depictions. The Hanlon-Lees’ pantomimes also created comic interpretations of everyday activity, so the disasters that featured in a number of productions reflected some of the anxieties that circulated in society about technological accidents. For example, there were actual risks with travelling at sea or on land that would have been an underlying social concern, and the Hanlon-Lees dramatised such possibilities. The Trip to Switzerland included a live horse and carriage which became involved in an accident and, as the carriage (invention) fell apart, passengers were thrown across the stage—to land unscathed. This sequence performed the fear of the eventuality of a horse and carriage accident. The Hanlon-Lees’ theatre revealed human dependency on the technology in tandem with a fear of its fallibility, perhaps even a warning about the ‘technics’. Accidents that copied life’s reality, however, were often staged with illogical sequences that made them seem more dreamlike, as if in a nightmare. In contrast, the horse that pulled the carriage added to the realness of the staging. Interestingly, acrobats and the Hanlon-Lees were described with animal and bird metaphors such as leaping like a cat or monkey or flying like a bird (Banville 1995, 8). Animals were also included to

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heighten impressions of clowning as well as grotesque action; kittens appeared in an early work and a goat triumphed in the clowning action in one version of Fantasma. A script for a 1914 missing film version survives in which a goat butts the clown Pico (George Hanlon) off a bridge into the water and follows him through a window of a house. The use of the domesticated animals in the Hanlon-Lees’ productions reinforced ideas of comic action, since audience members would have some familiarity with the animals. Whether this was an actual goat is unclear but the goat is making a fool of the clown to comic effect through seeming to copy his behaviour and to reinforce the contrast between moments of repose and those of frenetic activity. This is also an example of how contradictory emotions could be emphasised through the inclusion of a particular animal in the pantomime. For example, Darwin summarises a view held at that time that while ‘goats appear such placid animals, the males often join in furious contest’ (1999, 114). The goat accompanies Pico in a car to a castle before Pico ends up in a dungeon under the sea where fighting lobsters, crabs and swordfish appear, and an octopus attacks him (McKinven 1998, 74–76). Surprise-inducing action with animals might have been comic but these less familiar marine animals served a different emotional purpose. In his analysis of the facial expression of humans and selective animal species, Darwin presented a progressive sequence from astonishment to fear and horror (1999, 142, 278). Such a progression is suggestive of a sequence created by the Hanlon-Lees’ pantomimes. Darwin finds that surprise and fear are accompanied by faster heart rates and breathing and intensified expressions, and in animals, by reactions such as shaking or fur bristling in the familiar example of cats. Domesticated animals might not be feared, but the Hanlon-Lees’ inclusion of an octopus coincides with the deliberate provocation of fear in the artistic imagination by the early nineteenth century when it was depicted as a monster of the sea threatening ships (see Tiffin 2014). It was magnified in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, published in 1870, which contained an illustration of sailors axing a tendril in self-defence (Tiffin 2014, 158). Helen Tiffin explains how the octopus reflected a ‘fear of being ensnared and engulfed’, even though humans paradoxically consume these animals as food (2014, 160). Animals were surrounded by emotions in cultural perspectives that became polarised in positive or negative ways, and the octopus was a feared creature and the villain in imaginative fiction until the science of the twentieth century dispelled such misconceptions and

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recognised the emotional sensitivity and intellectual capacity of the species (Tiffin 2014). To some extent, the Hanlon-Lees’ pantomimes with animals sought to elicit particular emotions, but oscillations between fear and amusement potentially destabilised the spectator’s emotional attitudes to animals. Pantomimes that reconfigured impressive acrobatic identity in grotesque violent action evoked surprise and shock that connected with fear but was dissipated by comic twists. The emotional effect of scaring audiences was contradictory when it was also enjoyable—such contradiction is indicative of the function of emotions more broadly. The frequency of war in the social worlds of the Hanlon-Lees suggests that the audiences faced with actual risk and fear were receptive to pantomime that made fun of fear and death. The whole effect was underpinned by the stage technology, so there was an additional level of engagement in the puzzle over how the trick was achieved. Technologies of fear were potentially offset by curiosity about how the theatrical illusion was created.

Trampoline Invention Trampoline action can be found in circus acts, sport and leisure activities, and in 2000, it became a sport in the Olympics. It owes its origins to safety nets used in flying trapeze acts. American college gymnast and tumbler, George Nissen, invented a basic trampoline in 1934 to assist with his training after he witnessed the rebound action of a flying trapeze aerialist landing in a safety net (Nelson 2010).1 Nissen was at the University of Iowa and, with the assistance of the School of Engineering, he built a basic trampoline, first with canvas in a steel frame and then with rubber from the inner-tubing of car wheels in an improved version. Nissen went on to perform a ‘rebound tumbling’ trampoline act in fairs and in schools with two other performers, calling themselves the Three Leonardos (Nelson 2010). They toured as far south as Mexico City and the name of the apparatus is derived from the Spanish word for springboard, trampolin. Nissen had initially intended to make a round apparatus but found that it was not as spatially efficient as a rectangular design; the latter was easier for the bouncer to orient him or herself. From his childhood experience on backyard trampolines to performing in a trampoline act with Cirque du Soleil, Welby Altidor asks: ‘What’s behind the joy and the enchantment that we can feel when we see

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someone jump higher and higher on a trampoline?’ (2017, 88) By asking the question, Altidor recognises the importance of these bodily-felt responses to a body-in-action and, although he does not answer the question directly in his analysis of creative challenges, he recognises that the action appeals to spectators through the body’s sensory and emotional engagement. Perhaps the performance conveys a sense of physical freedom and release in a familiar action. Perhaps the trampoline action can be said to divert attention away from fear and anxiety with its exuberant bouncing motion that makes a performer seem full of life. Regardless it has also been described as being able to startle observers (Altidor 2017, 89). Trampoline action conveys enjoyment, but the early use was also caught up in World War II and new equipment in the war effort, in this instance, for naval training of pilots to improve balance and orientation. Nissen co-partnered a business manufacturing trampolines during World War II and, after the war, he bought out his partner and expanded the business (‘George Nissen’ n.d.). Nissen continued performing on the trapeze and in 1950 he married Annie, an acrobat from the Netherlands, and they continued to perform as a duo touring the trampoline act. In 1956 Nissen co-partnered a manufacturing branch in England (‘George Nissen’ n.d.). Leisure trampoline centres proliferated to become widely used outside the USA. Trampoline equipment was integrated into the circus as acrobatic apparatus by the 1940s. For example, it was an act in the large American Cole Brothers Circus by 1943 (Programmes, Milner Library). There was a trampoline act in 1945 in Billy Smart’s inaugural New World Circus in England by the Wallabies, who created ‘a veritable whirlwind of tumbling and trampoline agilities’ (Graves 1945, 12). While trampoline bouncing became an accessible popular leisure activity through Nissen’s commercial enterprise, it remained part of the traditional circus, and reached the iconic world-leading circus, Barnum and Bailey Circus, The Greatest Show on Earth possibly by 1949 but it was definitely listed in the programme as the number 11 act in 1966 (Programmes, Milner Library). The circuit for the professional circus trampoline act seems to have become increasingly competitive by the 1960s judging by a concern about employment covered by a trade newspaper. The trampoline act of the Four Kovacs, comprising three female and one male performer, claimed that they had been unable to get a season with a British circus for fourteen years because international acts acquired all the work (‘Vaudeville:

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No Brit Circus Work’ 1966). The Kovacs were accomplished, since they had toured the USA for ten years and Europe for four years, but could not get hired in Britain. The British union, The Variety Artists Federation, decided to impose a ban on foreign trampoline acts in 1966 in order to assist. The trampoline equipment in circus linked ground-based acrobatic action with aerial action; it was used for both types of circus acts. Antony Hippisley Coxe describes how the performing body in the circus presented athletic turns and somersaults that were beautiful because the trampoline spring or bounce made them slower (1980, 208–209). This trampoline spring in, for example, forward double somersaults with a twist, also contained dangers by extending the physical distance into space. For example, there was a risk of injury if a performer bounced too high or too wide and did not land on the trampoline fully—a risk comparable to missing the aerial safety net. Circus trampoline acts required intensive training to develop the skills to be professionally successful although young athletes could move into circus performance as happened in Russia. For example, Coxe describes an aerial act by the Russian Zementov Troupe touring in England in which two bars were rigged above a ten-metre-long trampoline so it functioned like a springboard but gave more bounce to propel the performer higher. The trampoline was taken up by world-leading acts, such as The Flying Gaonas, who achieved a landmark triple somersault in a flying trapeze act in 1966 (Tait 2005, 115), and the group used two additional upright frames at the end of a trampoline for a catcher to hang from in order to catch the performer doing three somersaults (Coxe 1980, 209). Coxe also points out that the trampoline action could be turned into comic action as the performer falls flat or bounces upright. Meanwhile, action on the trampoline developed as a gymnastic sport that spread internationally, and it was widely adopted as a leisure pursuit and then within family backyards. By 1960 Nissen had become concerned that above-ground trampolines presented some major risks and there were injuries and eventually fatalities (‘Trampoline History’ n.d.). Nissen’s solution was to embed the trampoline below ground. Subsequently, the use of netting around the above-ground equipment improved the safety of the household trampoline. The wide appeal of trampoline action lies with the enjoyment of the bodily sensation of bouncing up into the air, at least for humans.

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Rebounding Kangaroo Fear In a fascinating and slightly disturbing photographic image, Nissen is captured mid-air on the trampoline with a kangaroo also in a mid-air bounce (Nelson 2010). The photograph caption reads that Nissen ‘rented a kangaroo to help demonstrate his trampoline in New York’s Central Park in 1960’ (ibid.). The kangaroo does spring in its bodily movement but being made to rebound into the air at such height must have been distressing for the animal. A second image suggests that the kangaroo had no control, as the animal’s body appears spread out as if flailing midair (‘Trampoline History’ n.d.). Nissen recounts that a Long Island animal supplier had two kangaroos and the grown male would cost US$50 to rent because he kicked and a second kangaroo, who would not kick, cost Nissen US$150 to rent. Apparently the photographs were considered comic and created a publicity storm. Nissen calls the kangaroo ‘stupid’ because ‘if he rides up on his tail, he’s gonna kick. But he can’t kick you while he’s flat-footed. He telegraphs his punch’ (‘Trampoline History’ n.d.). Instead, Nissen learnt to grab the front paws and manoeuvre the kangaroo out of kicking. Nissen bounced at one end of the trampoline, which bounced the animal at the other end. There is no apparent concern for the animal in this enforced bouncing action. What was described as stupidity on the part of the kangaroo appears to be defensive behaviour and probably fear. The kangaroo does have jumping action that seems like bouncing, but the placement of the kangaroo on the trampoline equipment imposed an uncontrollable bounce on the kangaroo’s body. The kangaroo’s stationary position was not compatible with placement on a sprung surface because its active jumping movement happens as one integrated action of the body. Stephen Jackson and Karl Vernes explain that bipedal hopping is energetically economical and intended for speed, which makes it physiologically difficult to break down each movement (2010, 138–141). Macropods such as kangaroos evade dangers and predators this way and defensive actions include ‘high-standing, kicking, thumping the tail and hopping’ (Jackson and Vernes 2010, 118). Foot thumping is intended to startle and warn other kangaroos of a threat. The kangaroo shows defensive movement and possibly fear in Nissen’s account and in the second image. It seems Nissen, however, had a culturally inflected idea of a kangaroo. The kangaroo that became an emblem of Australian identity was an

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abstracted entity, since the physiology, habits and habitat of the living animals only began to be fully studied from the 1970s (Jackson and Vernes 2010; THINKK online). The kangaroo had been a popular animal exhibit in zoos and menageries in the nineteenth century, and kangaroo and wallaby species proved adaptable to northern hemisphere climates. Particular qualities were highlighted to appeal to spectators in nineteenth-century England, with the kangaroo mother and with a joey in the pouch becoming emblematic of a gentle and friendly animal (Tait 2011). The kangaroo then underwent an identity change, most notably as a masculinised fighter. In the 1890s the male kangaroo was framed in a boxing act by a human boxer, and initially in a business owned by a female owner (Tait 2011; Golder and Kirkby 2003). From 1967, however, Australia’s iconic kangaroo was Skippy in the television programme, Skippy, and featured as a family pet and child’s friend undertaking heroic deeds to rescue the children. These various types of kangaroo identity in popular culture were accompanied by misconceptions in keeping with how humans interpret animal lives through our emotional framing (Tait 2012). The boxing kangaroo was still occasionally present as an act in the mid-twentieth-century circus, internationally if not in Australia. This was a manufactured identity since kangaroos fight each other in highly selective circumstances and in play, and within prescribed physical limits that do not harm the opponent—although a kick from a grown male kangaroo can cause serious injury to a human. The boxing kangaroo act in the circus proved unreliable because the kangaroo had to be staged to appear to fight through the fighting movement of the human presenter and visible props such as boxing gloves. There were a handful of kangaroos that appeared over time but generally they were a very minor circus act. Nonetheless, Nissen may have been once again borrowing from the circus by publicising the trampoline with an Australian identity. There is an interesting coincidence in which the trampoline and its action in circus were framed by the geographical identity of Australianness. In particular, the acrobatic troupe, the Wallabies and their manager, John Wallace Llewelyn Pugh, became associated with trampoline acts in the American circus during the 1940s. This association of Australian animal identity with a human acrobatic circus act proved a highly successful promotional strategy; Pugh created female acts of acrobatic action and later aerial choruses for the mid-twentieth-century circuses touring Europe and England. He was an English acrobat who had joined the Australian Army in World War I and, returning to Australia as an ex-soldier, he was entitled

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to use the prefix ‘digger’ and he was known internationally as Digger Pugh (Tait 2011). The mostly female Wallabies were touring in Australia on the Tivoli circuit in the 1930s before touring back through parts of Asia to reach Europe in 1935, repeating this tour in 1938 (Tait 2011). These were largely ground-based acrobatic acts that added trampoline sometime before 1943, but after 1953, Pugh promoted aerial ballets with a chorus of up to twenty female performers on various aerial apparatus. Pugh’s troupes were decidedly theatrical with showgirl aesthetics, although they were named after Australian animals and birds such as the Wallabies and the Cockatoos. Most of the performers were not actually Australian nationals since the acts were organised from London. But these human acts had an imaginative overlay of Australian nomenclature to suggest an exotic geography and imaginary fauna. Cultural ideas of cute and friendly animals and birds reinforced a perception of the act as a pleasing, enjoyable experience for audiences. Pugh’s Wallabies adapted the act to include the trampoline apparatus and they appeared in Cole Brothers Circus in the USA in 1942 during World War II, before returning to England in 1943, appearing in the 1945–1946 Billy Smart’s Circus (Graves 1945). After appearing at the Royal Variety Performance in 1946, Pugh acts returned to the USA in 1948 to appear with the Coles, and in 1949 appeared with Ringling Bros, Barnum and Bailey Circus, The Greatest Show on Earth. I am assuming that they performed the trampoline act during much of this time although this is not clear. What is clearer is that Australian nomenclature downplayed risk and fear for the acrobatic and aerial action that set out to enchant. Nissen was most likely elaborating on this pre-existing association of Australian geonational identity with a trampoline circus act when he placed a kangaroo on the trampoline to increase its promotional allure. But the photograph of the kangaroo mid-air seems to capture the fright of the animal projected into space. Viewers in 1960, however, were encountering a kangaroo through the emotional framing of cultural representation of friend (or fighter) rather than scrutinising the body’s physiology. The photograph sought to convey that this endearing animal was playing with a human friend in joyous and comic bouncing on the trampoline. The embodied connection between types of backyard trampoline, gymnastic competition and circus acts continues (Altidor 2017), even though variation in the trampoline equipment has proliferated and depends on

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the context in which it is used. For example, the trampoline used in gymnastic sports is bigger and wider and designed to bounce the body—up to 10.5 metres (35 feet) into the air—with more force (Torkelson 2005; Yeadon and Hiley 2017). The gymnast must learn to fall safely and, when indoors, to avoid hitting the ceiling. The use of trampoline apparatus in contemporary circus has created new aesthetic physical action. Ex-athletes working for Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba with Boris Verkhovsky created a trampoline act first performed in 1998 that involved the performers bouncing on to a wall and taking a few steps sideways at a horizontal angle before returning to the trampoline in a feat achieved with difficulty (Altidor 2017, 89). The nexus of technological innovation and inventive bodily action had come full circle back into the circus.

Conclusion An emotional effect was central to the new technologies in performances of both the Hanlon-Lees and Nissen, and animals were used to heighten such impressions. They sought completely different emotional effects and while the performance of fear was alleviated by comic action with animals in Hanlon-Lees’ pantomimes, the fear of the kangaroo could not be completely hidden behind playful and comic bouncing in the trampoline act. While the Hanlon-Lees’ aerial acts forged new limits for the physical action of flying, it was the invention of safety equipment that had a lasting crucial impact on aerial performance. The evocation of fear to scare audiences in the long-running pantomimes of the Hanlon-Lees was highly influential, but again it was the technological invention that made grotesque action and macabre death convincing and set new precedents for what stage machinery could achieve. If Nissen initially sought to exploit the utility of the trampoline for gym training equipment and athletic action, he switched to performance and subsequently to encouraging the public to participate as he championed the enjoyable capacity of the equipment for everyone. This was a very successful undertaking. Consequently, the aesthetic of trampoline acts in the circus needed to accommodate its wide accessibility and the particular emotional associations of enjoyment that accompanied this technology. Trampoline equipment has become ubiquitous in signifying the pleasurable fun of bouncing.

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Note 1. The ensuing information and first photograph of Nissen with a kangaroo come from this online article by Valerie Nelson (2010). Nissen was born 3 February 1914 and died 7 April 2010. I have not obtained Nissen’s biography written by his daughter: Dagmar Nissen Munn. 2010. My Father’s Dream of an Olympic Trampoline. Tucson: Wheatmark.

References Altidor, Welby. 2017. Practicing Creative Courage. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Beck, Ulrich. 2009. World at Risk. Trans. by Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourke, Joanna. 2001. The Emotions in War: Fear and the British and American Military, 1914–45. Historical Research 74 (185): 314–330. Cosdon, Mark. 2006. ‘Serving the Purpose Amply’: The Hanlon Brothers’ Le Voyage En Suisse. Journal of American Drama and Theatre 18 (2): 71–100. Covello, Vincent, and Gary Flamm (Eds.). 1983. The Analysis of Actual Versus Perceived Risks. Boston, MA: Springer. Coxe, Antony Hippisley. 1980. A Seat at the Circus. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Darwin, Charles. 1999. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: Fontana Press. de Banville, Théodore. 1995. Preface. In Mémoires et Pantomimes des Frères Hanlon Lees, by Frères Hanlon Lees (George Hanlon), 5–15. Paris: Reverchon et Vollet (n.d). Document électronique 1995. Ekman, Paul. 1999. Afterword. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, by Charles Darwin, 363–393. London: Fontana Press. ‘George Nissen’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Nissen. Accessed 10 September 2018. Golder, Hilary, and Diane Kirkby. 2003. Mrs. Mayne and Her Boxing Kangaroo: A Married Woman Tests Her Property Rights in Colonial New South Wales. Law and History Review 21 (32): 585–605. Gossard, Steve. 1994. A Reckless Era of Aerial Performance, the Evolution of the Trapeze. Manuscript publication, c/- Milner Library, Illinois State University. Graves, Edward. 1945. New World’s Circus Opens Season. World’s Fair, 13 April 1945, 12. Jackson, Stephen, and Karl Vernes. 2010. Kangaroo. Sydney: Allen and Unwin. Jürgens, Anna-Sophie. 2014. Batman’s Joker, a neo-modern clown of Violence. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5 (4): 441–454. Jürgens, Anna-Sophie. 2019. Fun-de-siècle: Dance, Popular Spectacles and the Circus. Tanz & Archiv 8: 172–188.

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Linke, Uli, and Danielle Taana Smith (Eds.). 2009. Cultures of Fear: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press. Marshall, Jonathan. 2016. Performing Neurology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. McKinven, John A. 1998. The Hanlon Brothers. Glenwood, IL: David Meyer Magic Books. Nelson, Valerie J. 2010. George Nissen Dies at 96: Inventor of the Modern Trampoline. LA Times, 10 April. http://www.latimes.com/sports/more/lame-george-nissen10-2010apr10-story.html. Accessed 25 May 2018. Programmes, Special Collections, Milner Library, Illinois State University, USA, author’s notes, viewed in 2003. Stiegler, Bernard. 2008. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Stanford University Press. Tait, Peta. 2005. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. London: Routledge. Tait, Peta. 2011. Circus Oz and Kangaroos: Performing Fauna and Animalness for Geo-National Identity. Australian Studies 3, e-publication. http://www. nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/australian-studies/index0. Tait, Peta. 2012. Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tait, Peta. 2016. Risk, Danger and Other Paradoxes in Circus and Circus Oz. In The Routledge Circus Studies Reader, eds. Peta Tait and Katie Lavers, 528–545. London: Routledge. Thayer, Stuart. 2005. A History of Circus Acts. Seattle: Dauven and Thayer. THINKK, The Think Tank For Kangaroos. http://thinkkangaroos.uts.edu.au/. Accessed 17 April 2019. Tiffin, Helen. 2014. What Lies Below: Cephalopods and Humans. In Captured: The Animal Within Culture, ed. Melissa Boyde, 152–174. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Torkelson, Charlene. 2005. The Big Bounce. Listener Magazine 58 (7): 24–26. docview/230511949?rfr_id = info%3Axri%2Fsid%3Aprimo. First viewed 1 April 2019. ‘Trampoline History: George Nissen—The Man and the Kangaroo.’ http:// www.wvtc.co.uk/history19.htm. Accessed 10 September 2018. ‘Vaudeville: No Brit Circus Work for Trampoline Act in 14 Years.’ 1966. Variety (Archive 1905–2000) 244 (9): 50. Yeadon, M. R., and M. J. Hiley. 2017. Twist Limits for Late Twisting Double Somersault on Trampoline. Journal of Biomechanics 58: 174–178.

PART III

Techno-Imaginaries: Imagineering Circus in Other Media

CHAPTER 7

The Circus and the Magic Lantern: A Portfolio of Hand-Painted Mechanical Magic Lantern Slides Martyn Jolly and Elisa deCourcy

In establishing new spaces for wondrous spectacle during the nineteenth century, magic lantern shows and circus performances increasingly came to rely on mechanical technologies to produce effect. The wooden-framed magic lantern slides reproduced in this chapter were hand-painted in transparent, brilliant colour in the latter part of the century. Most were designed to project images onto a screen that became animated when expertly manipulated by a lanternist. They used separate layers of glass which moved over each other to produce the illusion of motion. In ‘rackwork slides’ a handle turned a rack and pinion mechanism to rotate discs of glass in opposite directions so that, for example, fireworks appeared to spurt outward from a central point. In ‘lever slides’ one disc of glass

M. Jolly (B) · E. deCourcy Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] E. deCourcy e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_7

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was pivoted back and forth over a second disc so a baby might appear to be rocked. In ‘slipping slides’ either one or two rectangular sheets of glass were rapidly shifted over one another. Black matting revealed one part of a figure, while simultaneously concealing another. Through this technique—the precursor to the matts, layers and composites of contemporary digital animation1 —figures appear to move: acrobats leap, clowns’ eyes dart from left to right, and dogs bound through hoops. Mechanical slides such as those featured in this portfolio were produced in great quantity by American and British manufacturers and exported around the world. Research has begun on the relationship between the fairground and magic lantern slides in Europe.2 However, in contextualising this portfolio we will focus on their use in one particular context: nineteenth-century Australia, where a vibrant and diverse visual culture developed both in the large colonial capitals and in the remote frontier settlements. We know from numerous Australian newspaper accounts that, at the same time as they were being entertained at the music hall and the circus, audiences across Australia were also laughing at slides such as the ones reproduced in this chapter (see Jolly 2019). A few of the slides are branded with the stamp of their maker, such as the Birmingham scientific instrument makers Carpenter and Westley, while many others remain unattributed. A Catalogue of Scientific Instruments by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company from 1866 shows that mechanical slides could be purchased for two shillings each. About fifteen per cent of its list of over three hundred different ‘comic animated’ subjects related to the tradition of the circus—harlequins, clowns, jugglers, acrobats and Punch and Judy. Alternatively, magic lanternists could rent slides at a few pence a night to host shows in home parlours, schoolrooms, church halls, hotel salons or theatre auditoriums. Like the circus, the magic lantern had become an intrinsic part of popular culture. For example at the turn to the twentieth century the Melbourne photography company, Gunn’s, claimed that it had loaned out 10,000 slides in one year (Gunn c1901, 4). The images reproduced here demonstrate the deep thematic and technical affinities between the magic lantern and the circus. Although both would evolve into discrete genres of mass-entertainment by the early twentieth century, they nonetheless shared historical origins on the roads of Europe, from at least the seventeenth century. At the same time as street tumblers, puppeteers and conjurers worked Europe’s streets (Burke 1994), so-called savoyards or ‘galantee showmen’ travelled across Europe

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with magic lanterns on their backs, giving ‘raree’ or ‘peep’ shows on the streets or in houses (Mannoni 2000). By the late eighteenth century some entrepreneurs, such as Étienne-Gaspard Robertson in Paris, had combined magic lantern technology with theatrical staging and machinery to develop elaborate phantasmagoria exhibitions where ghosts and skeletons appeared out of thin air (Heard 2006, 76–79), while others, such as Philip Astley in London, had incorporated acrobatics and clowning into equestrian displays to develop the circus (St Leon 2011, 86). By the mid-nineteenth century, Australian theatre had become a particularly loose and fertile environment of experimentation where diverse modes of entertainment collided in single shows. A Sydney Gazette advertisement from 1835 gives some sense of this provisional bricolage. For Mr Grove’s 31 October benefit night at the Theatre Royal there was the ‘Grand Romantic and Nautical Drama of Robinson Crusoe’, which was followed by ‘The PHANTASMAGORIA or MAGIC LANTHORN [sic], being a novelty never yet produced in the Colony’ (1835, 1). Then, it was promised, ‘Mr Hughes from the London Theatre will go through a variety of evolutions on the SLACK ROPE’. The evening’s entertainment was to conclude with the ‘laughable farce of NO!’ (1835, 1). This programme of attractions bridged narrative and spectacle, projected illusions and embodied contortions; it brought together different performers, traditions and technologies in a new space of experience. The disparate mix of literary, mechanical, rational and novel acts, imported from the metropolitan capitals of the United States and Britain, and staged for immigrant audiences, was to continue with a further proliferation of theatrical forms in the 1840s. For instance, in early 1848 a pair of Englishmen—the daguerreotypist J. W. Newland and blackface minstrel J. P. Hydes—arrived in Sydney from New Orleans. Shortly thereafter, in April 1848, The Sydney Chronicle advertised a ‘NOVELTY FOR ONE WEEK ONLY’ at the Royal Victoria Theatre (25 April 1848, 3). Newland showed a ‘beautiful scientific exhibition of dissolving views’ through a magic lantern he had specially imported into Australia from London. The slides included ‘Punch before dinner’ transforming to ‘Punch after dinner’, presumably with a ballooning belly. Hydes performed as a ‘Congo Minstrel’ singing a ‘variety of Ethiopian Melodies […] interspersed with original conundrums funnyicities, etc’, an act he had learned in New Orleans (25 April 1848, 3). The carnivalesque elements and exaggerated bodies of both Newland’s and Hydes’ latest ‘novelties’ link older

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traditions of clowning and illusion with emerging modern, transnational apparatuses of entertainment. The mid-century saw both an increasing proliferation, and a gradual separation and consolidation, of different forms of popular entertainment in Australia. The well-established staples of drama, farce and song continued (Waterhouse 1995), as did the magic lantern demonstrations and acrobatic displays. These were joined by pantomimes featuring elaborate mechanical ‘transition scenes’ and posed ‘tableaux vivant’ (Callaway 2000), as well as large and elaborate moving panoramas (Colligan 2002). The theatrical entrepreneur George Coppin brought British magicians to Australia in 1855 and 1858 (Parsons 1995, 336), as well as imported a gas balloon and two aeronauts for balloon ascents staged from his Cremorne Gardens, which were developed in imitation of London’s Vauxhall pleasure gardens (Parsons 1995, 167). In 1852 the British puppeteer, Albany Brown, brought his Royal Marionette Theatre to Australia. At various times he advertised puppet shows, ‘extraordinary feats in legerdemain’ by ‘Signor Blitz the WIZARD OF THE SOUTH’, diorama models, a mirrored curtain, ‘upwards of 200’ ‘moving mechanical figures’ and the moving painted panoramas by Beaufoy Merlin. Later, Merlin incorporated ‘spectral illusions’, based on the ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ illusion, into the theatrical show ‘The Castle Spectre’ (Barker 2018; Bradshaw 1985).3 In the 1860s Ellen Sohier and her phrenologist husband Philemon toured Australia with a waxworks showing tableaux of criminals, bushrangers and explorers modelled by Max Kreitmayer (Gilmour 2015; Colligan 2005), while later performers such as Frank Weston travelled for decades with minstrel shows and patent medicine shows (Parsons 1995, 634; Waterhouse 1990). These various ‘curiosities’ highlight an enduring quest to extend, expand and manipulate sight in the pursuit of wonder, across disparate genres of performance and demonstration. The new theatrical spaces required for this explosion of spectacle and entertainment acted as testing pits for broader innovations in the industrialisation of light, engineering and mechanics, which would be adapted and appropriated into civic and domestic technologies over the remainder of the century. For instance, the balloonists and magic lanternists— who needed to generate their own gas to lift their balloons or illuminate their projections—anticipated the increasing use of gas to progressively light shops, theatres and city streets through the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s (Fowles 1848; Schivelbusch 1988). By 1858, in newspapers such as Hobart’s Colonial Times, the well-known names of theatrical ‘mechanists’

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(such as William Charles Duke)—who were responsible for scenery painting, stage machinery and lighting effects—had become almost as important as the names of actors or managers in promoting spectacular theatrical entertainments. New, relatively stable traditions such as ‘legitimate’ theatre, the lecture circuit and vaudeville, emerged out of this volatile mid-century period, while the magic lantern and the circus continued to develop in parallel. The circus consolidated into travelling tent shows, where a mobile space for an equestrian ring was erected from town to town (St Leon 2011). At night, a circular chandelier of tallow wicks hoisted up the central pole lit the ring around which the audience sat to see equestrian, acrobatic and clown acts. While within the circus tent artificial lighting cast a general illumination over the performers in the centre of the audience, the apparatus of the magic lantern demanded complete and instantaneous control over light and dark, as well as an audience all facing the screen. It still occasionally occupied major theatres for large dissolving view shows, but it also took to the road, and temporarily occupied hotels, school rooms and church halls where the gas or oil lighting could be regulated for an evening of ‘illustrated songs’, a travel lecture, or a temperance lecture (Hartrick 2017). However, although separate, the magic lantern and the circus remained fundamentally linked by their ability to use various physical and mechanical devices to amplify and transform space. They separated light from darkness, turned night into day and enlarged the quotidian into the wonderful. For instance, the husband and young son of the colonial diarist Louise Anne Meredith, after visiting Melbourne’s Cremorne Gardens on an evening in 1861, brought her back ‘marvellous accounts’ of its ‘acrobats, dancers, jugglers, singing, music, variegated lamps, fireworks and pyrotechnic tableaux’ (Meredith 1861, 101–102). But, when she herself visited during the following day: ‘[a]n outside and daylight view of this scene of enchantment revealed only dim and sadly diminished glories. […] [A]n ungainly fabric of canvas and scaffolding, the dull material foundations for magical illusions at night, were the chief objects visible’ (101– 102). The organised production of ‘magical illusion’ from ‘dull material foundations’ was what connected the circus and the magic lantern. Although the magic lantern and the circus rarely met directly in Australia during the later nineteenth century, they nonetheless shared the same popular cultural space where they both vividly, if briefly, transformed everyday experience. In 1870 the celebrated Australian author Marcus

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Clarke (1846–1881) satirised Australian colonial life with a series of short stories set in the fictional ‘up country’ township of ‘Bullocktown’. In ‘How the Circus Came to Bullocktown’ Clarke’s picaresque town is visited by an itinerant magic lanternist who, although drunk and constantly heckled by the butcher’s son, attempts to ‘illustrate’ a lecture on the Siege of Sebastopol, as well as showing a ‘comic set of magic lantern slides representing Chinamen seized by sailors, rats entering the practicable mouth of sleeping miners, and marvelous men in red garments chasing anatomically alarming youths in blue’ (1870, 6). After that memorable evening the township is visited by ‘Buncombe’s Imperial Yanko-American Circus’, with the acrobats the ‘Boneless Brothers of Blazing Beet’, ‘Mademoiselle Zepherina the fairy Equestrienne’, ‘Mr Stanislaus Buncombe the Machiavellian Clown’, a ‘mysterious beast’ and a ‘sword swallower’ (Clarke 1870, 6). Clarke takes delight in describing the ‘Triumphal Entry of the Circus Riders’ into Bullocktown—‘unreal heroes, mock marauders, motley clowns, and pasteboard knights-in-armour’—which he contrasts with the reality of the colonial town—‘the sordid little wooden stores, the grey, grim gumtrees, the staring public-house, the unmetalled roads, the dispiriting “newness” of the whole place’. Nonetheless, ‘in the course of an hour or so a wondrous erection of poles and canvas […] rose into being. On the top of this canvas mushroom flew in the hot wind an enormous flag. The “circus” had become a fact’ (1870, 6). In Clarke’s story the comical attempts of both the magic lantern and the circus to bring the latest in outside entertainment to a colonial town is what defines the colonial experience itself. The deep affinities between the magic lantern and the circus are captured in the material culture and technical structure of these experiences. In 1877 the Sydney Mail reproduced an article from the popular science magazine Scientific American explaining how ‘To Draw and Paint Magic Lantern Slides’ (20 January 1877, 71). It emphasised the enduring fit of circus caricatures as popular articulated slide subjects, recommending that ‘the best outlines are funny men and women, animals, birds and grotesque figure, sheets of characters, clowns, harlequins etc.’ (20 January 1877, 71). The popularity of circus subjects for magic lantern mechanical slides relates not only to their shared historical roots, but also the affinity of their technical structures. Both the cone of light projected in a darkened room, and the ‘wondrous erection of poles and canvas’ mushrooming in a township, carved an enlarged space of illusion and transformation out of the everyday. Both the magic lantern and the circus were modern, mechanical

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entertainments, relying on the acceleration, amplification and projection of physical forces to produce spectacle. Both were transnational, embedded in the global circulation of skills, apparatuses and formats. And both were mobile, consolidating new emergent audiences within the interstitial spaces between the inherited traditions of the legitimate theatre, ‘rational’ amusements, the church pulpit, and the schoolroom. By delighting once more in the ingenious mechanisms of the magic lantern slides used during this crucial period in the development of our contemporary entertainment spaces and apparatuses, and by understanding their interaction with other emerging modes of communication in the volatile culture of colonial Australia, we can perhaps recapture some of the deep histories of technology and experience which continue to underpin today’s live spectacles and screen media.

Portfolio of Magic Lantern Slides4 See Figs. 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5, 7.6, 7.7, 7.8, 7.9, and 7.10).

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Fig. 7.1 ‘Two acrobats jumping’, three states of an animated, hand-painted, double-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

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Fig. 7.2 ‘Clown with jumping dog on a stage’, two states of an animated, handpainted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

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Fig. 7.3 ‘Disassembled Harlequin’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

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Fig. 7.4 ‘Juggler’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, lever-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, W. C. Hughes, Optician, London, c1870s. Collection: National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra

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Fig. 7.5 ‘Two acrobats jumping’, three superimposed states of an animated, hand-painted, double-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

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Fig. 7.6 ‘Clown losing head’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Bill Douglas Centre, Exeter University

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Fig. 7.7 ‘An acrobat jumping between ladders’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

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Fig. 7.8 ‘Clown and cauldron’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

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Fig. 7.9 ‘Clown with whip and jumping dog’, two states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

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Fig. 7.10 ‘Clown with animated eyes’, four states of an animated, hand-painted, single-slipping, glass, magic lantern slide, c1890s. Collection: Heritage in the Limelight

Notes 1. The connections between the magic lantern and digital culture within the broader history of animation and media are just beginning to be explored, see, for instance, Browne (2019) and Furniss (2016).

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2. For instance the ‘B-magic’ research project from the University of Antwerp has placed the fairground at the centre of its research into the magic lantern and its cultural impact as a visual mass medium in Belgium, see Vanhoutte and Jonckheere (2019). 3. The Pepper’s Ghost illusion, where a large sheet of glass inclined at an angle in front of an audience reflected an image that appeared to float spectrally within the scene visible through the glass, was introduced to the Royal Polytechnic Institution, London, in 1862. 4. The research and writing of this chapter were supported by the Australian Research Council Project, ‘Heritage in the Limelight: The Magic Lantern in Australia and the World’ DP160102509.

References Anon. 1866. Catalogue of Scientific Instruments by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company, Optical Department, Part 1, Magic Lanterns and Dissolving View Apparatus. London, Stereoscopic and Photographic Company. Barker, Geoffrey. 2018. Beaufoy Merlin: Photographer and Showman 1830–1873. From the Collections of the State Library of New South Wales. Accessed 3 April 2019, n.p. Bradshaw, Richard. 1985. The Merlin of the South. Australasian Drama Studies 7: 82. Browne, Kieran. 2019. Making Old Media New. https://kieranbrowne.com/ research/making-old-media-new/. Accessed 23 April 2019. Burke, Peter. 1994. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate, 94. Callaway, Anita. 2000. Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth Century Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Clarke, Marcus. 1870. The Sketcher: How the Circus Came to Bullock Town. The Australasian, 20 August 1870, 6–7. Colligan, Mimi. 2002. Canvas Documentaries: Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth Century Australia and New Zealand. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Colligan, Mimi. 2005. Kreitmayer, Maximilian Ludwig (1830–1906). In Australian Dictionary of Biography. http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ kreitmayer-maximilian-ludwig-max-13034. Accessed 10 April 2019. Fowles, Joseph. 1848. Sydney in 1848. 2nd ed. re-print, 1962. Sydney: Ure Smith. Furniss, Maureen. 2016. A New History of Animation. London: Thames & Hudson. Gilmour, Joanna. 2015. Sideshow Alley: Infamy, the Macabre and the Portrait. Canberra: National Portrait Gallery.

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Gunn, Alex. c1901. List of Apparatus, Dissolving Views, Etc Etc. Melbourne: Alex Gunn. Hartrick, Elizabeth. 2017. The Magic Lantern in Colonial Australia and New Zealand. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publications. Heard, Mervyn. 2006. Phantasmagoria: The Secret Life of the Magic Lantern. Hastings: The Projection Box. Jolly, Martyn. 2019. The Magic Lantern at the Edge of Empire: The Experience of Dissolving Views and Phantasmagoria in Colonial Australia. In A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slides in the History of Learning, eds. Sarah Dellman and Frank Kessler. KINtop Studies in Early Cinema. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Mannoni, Laurent. 2000. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Trans. and ed. Richard Crangle. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Meredith, Louisa Anne. 1861. Over the Straits: A Visit to Victoria. London: Chapman and Hall. Parsons, Philip (Ed.) 1995. Companion to the Theatre in Australia. Sydney: Currency Press. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. 1988. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press. St Leon, Mark. 2011. Circus: The Australian Story. Melbourne: Melbourne Books. Vanhoutte, Kurt, and Evelien Jonckheere. 2019. Metempsychosis as Attraction on the Fairground: The Migration of a Ghost. Early Popular Visual Culture 17 (2). Waterhouse, Richard. 1990. From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville: The Australian Popular Stage 1788–1914. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Waterhouse, Richard. 1995. Private Pleasures, Public Leisure: A History of Australian Popular Culture Since 1788. Sydney: Longman Australia. ‘To Draw and Paint Magic Lantern Slides.’ 1877. The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 20 January 1877, 71. ‘Theatre Royal, Sydney, Mr Grove’s Benefit Night.’ 1835. Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 31 October 1835, 1. ‘Novelty, for One Week Only, Royal Victoria Theatre.’ 1848. Sydney Chronicle, 25 April 1848, 3.

CHAPTER 8

The Circus and Technologies of Animation Ruth Richards

The circus has often provided a source of inspiration and has been the subject of representation in cinematic animation, from the earliest animated projections of Charles-Émile Reynaud, to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life (John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, 1998), to Dumbo (Tim Burton, 2019), itself a remake of the 1941 classic which was only the fourth feature-length animation of the Walt Disney Animation Studios (as they are now known). In Circus as Multimodal Discourse, Paul Bouissac describes the encounter between belief and disbelief that occurs for an audience when witnessing the tricks and performances of circus magicians. Although modern audiences are aware of the manipulation and staging behind these tricks and magical transformations, we still ‘admire the cleverness of these sleight-of-hand artists and the inventiveness of their props which fool our attention and create illusions which defy our understanding’ (2012, 50). The knowledge that human skill (the result of many years of training and practice) is behind such illusions does not lessen the enjoyment, and the spectacle of the performance still produces a sense of wonder. This chapter contends that early animation—through

R. Richards (B) RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_8

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its own parallel commingling of magic and mechanics—becomes a site to draw out this same sense of wonder and spectacle. Animation as an art form has been associated since its earliest days with conceptions of magical transformations and illusion (transformations of still images into moving ones, and infusing those images with the illusion of life). Beyond the rich realm of playful and imaginative performances, settings and scenarios that the circus offers as a source of inspiration for animated film, the parallel preoccupations with illusion and transformation can be considered the shared underlying concerns of animation and circus. This chapter will first discuss key animated representations of circus, before exploring the links between circus and the tradition of lightning cartoons, vaudeville and music hall performances, invoking technologies of animation as a means to enact and produce wonder and spectacle. As Helen Stoddart has described in her discussions of circus and early cinema, both forms of entertainment ‘have at their core spectacular fantasies of flight and pleasure in defying or playing with the laws of gravity in astonishing ways’ (2015, 2). Animation pushes these spectacular fantasies further still, undertaking magical transformations of the drawn line or animated object which yet remain impossible in live-action content. For early animation in particular, the illusion of life and movement produced by these moving images sometimes conflicted with the desire to show and exhibit, as artists and cartoonists sought to foreground their constructed nature by revealing the hand of the animator bringing these images to life. Here, I draw on Tom Gunning’s concept of the ‘cinema of attractions’, that quality of early cinema and animation which celebrated ‘its ability to show something’ in order to further draw out the ways early animation (re)enacts these encounters between belief and disbelief (2006, 382). This is perhaps where circus and early animation diverge; where circus seeks to hide the mechanics of the illusion in order to continue to preserve and enhance the spectacle of the trick, for early animation and the cinema of attractions, the ‘cinematic manipulation’ (or in this case, animatic) is the source of the attraction (Gunning 2006, 384). It should be acknowledged that the term ‘animation’ is broadly encompassing and refers to various styles, techniques and modes of production including drawn, inked and painted animation, direct-on-film animation (where the animation is scratched or painted directly on a film strip), object and material animation (using puppetry, clay, sand), as well as 3D, computer-generated or digital animation. This list is by no means exhaustive, but is intended to speak to the ubiquity of animation within

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contemporary moving image and popular culture, and reflects how the term itself is used within this chapter. It is generally agreed within animation studies, however, that animation can trace its beginnings to the pre-cinematic optical toys and devices that experimented with producing the illusion of movement (Cholodenko 1991; Wells 1998; Furniss 2016). These devices, along with photography and other technologies of motion, optics and entertainment, have been considered precursors to the eventual emergence of the cinematic and animatic apparatus.

Animated Representations of Circus ‘See an Elephant Fly’—Extending the Limits of Physical Reality While the term ‘animation’ broadly encompasses a variety of techniques, styles and aesthetics created using any number of technologies, for many it has come to signify classical Hollywood animation, and, in particular, the films of the Walt Disney Animation Studios. In 1941, Disney introduced audiences to ‘the world’s one and only flying elephant’. Dumbo is perhaps the most well-known animated film to feature the circus as its setting. In his review, film theorist Siegfried Kracauer describes Dumbo as a ‘charming picture filled with marvelously conceived episodes’ (2012, 139). In the film’s opening scenes the titular elephant is delivered to his mother, Mrs. Jumbo, via stork. It is soon revealed that the young elephant calf has unusually enormous ears; he is given the cruel nickname, Dumbo, and becomes an object of ridicule in the eyes of the other elephant matriarchs. Soon after, Dumbo is ripped away from his mother after she violently retaliates against circus-goers teasing and harassing him. After causing chaos due to his unruly ears during the elephant act, Dumbo is made a circus clown, which only compounds the other elephants’ disdain for him. Eventually, with the help of his self-appointed manager Timothy Q. Mouse and a flock of crows, Dumbo discovers that his gigantic ears allow him to fly. He stuns everyone at the circus, becoming the main attraction, which allows him to reunite with his mother. Some of the ‘marvelously conceived episodes’ Kracauer refers to in Dumbo include ‘the erection of the circus tent – a sequence in which reality is transferred to a strange, exciting sphere’ and the ‘beautifully developed play of the champagne pearls’ (2012, 140). The erection of the circus tent, set to the rolling tune, ‘Song of the Roustabouts’, sees the elephants and a group of ‘happy-hearted’ roustabouts setting up the

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big top at their newly arrived at location in the dead of night against an increasingly ferocious storm. Men and elephants pound stakes into the ground with sledgehammers, while elephants and camels haul tent poles and canvas on their backs, battling the increasingly harsh elements. The wind and rain pick up, lightning flashes as the centre pole of the big top is raised, and the bold, chanting rhythm of the roustabouts song fades into the night. Here, Dumbo dramatises and reimagines the often unseen process behind the construction of the Big Top. The ‘champagne pearls’ Kracauer mentions likely refer to the famous ‘Pink Elephants’ sequence: after visiting his imprisoned mother, Dumbo and Timothy accidentally drink a large amount of champagne and become intoxicated. What follows is a surrealistic, psychedelic scene in which ‘pearls’ of champagne bubbles metamorphose into multi-coloured, sinister elephants with hollow black eyes (at times vaguely reminiscent of clown makeup). Mark Langer suggests that Dumbo’s hallucinations follow the suggestion made previously by one of the clowns, which is that elephants are made of rubber: ‘Bendable, stretchable bubbles without psychological characteristics float through the air in a ballet of mutilation and metamorphosis’ (1990, 317). The bodies of the parading pink elephants contort, stretch, transform, burst and reform as cymbals clash. The ‘bendable, stretchable’ bubbles of the pink elephants sequence recall animation’s plasmaticness, a term coined by Sergei Eisenstein. Plasmaticness refers to animation’s ability to act like a ‘primal protoplasm’, a ‘rejection of once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to dynamically assume any form’ (1988, 21). Disney feature animation is often associated with a hyper-realist aesthetic, which, as described by animation scholar Paul Wells, ‘aspires to the creation of a realistic image system which echoes the “realism” of the live-action film’ (1998, 25). However, a key characteristic of animation is its potential to break from the laws of physical reality. It is precisely this quality Kracauer professes to have admired in early Disney animation: In Plane Crazy, Disney’s first Mickey Mouse cartoon [USA 1928], a little auto is changed through the power of the cartoonist’s pen alone into an airplane, which takes flight with Mickey at the controls. In Dumbo a similar miracle occurs: the baby elephant suddenly spreads his ears and volplanes through the air like a Pegasus or a bomber. (139)

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However, Kracauer takes issue with Dumbo’s ‘magic feather’, which the crows tell Dumbo will grant him the ability to spread his ears and fly. As the audience is already aware, Dumbo does not fly because of the feather’s magical powers of transformation; rather it holds a placebo effect (he flies because he believes the feather grants him powers). According to Kracauer, this ‘psychological effect’ of the magic feather signals a shift in Disney away from the miraculous cartoon metamorphoses of earlier films, towards a reality more closely aligned with our own. For Kracauer, the appeal of Disney animation had been their defiance of the traditional laws of reality. This defiance was evident in the metamorphoses of early Mickey Mouse cartoons, which emerged ‘out of the observed relations between shapes or movements; the more ruthlessly they destroy familiar connections, the more they are justified – the more they manifest the artist’s power over his material’ (139). There was no need for the animator to rely on narrative devices to explain away these breaks in reality—they just were. For Kracauer, Dumbo relies too much on an aesthetics of realism, with Dumbo’s magic feather threatening to undercut what Disney had accomplished previously with their ‘ruthless’ metamorphoses. Dumbo lacks the sense of plasmaticness that Kracauer (and Eisenstein) found so attractive with the early Mickey Mouse cartoons and Disney’s Silly Symphonies, relying too much on the narrative device of the magic feather as explanation for Dumbo’s flight. However, although Dumbo lacks the extreme plasticity of earlier Disney animation, Dumbo’s flight is still in defiance of the laws of physical reality. Where else can we see an elephant fly, if not in animation? In this scene, Dumbo reminds us of animation’s ability to push and extend the limits of physical reality. When Dumbo repeats this dramatic feat in the big top, he leaves the audience (including his fellow circus performers) with a profound sense of wonder. The film remains perhaps the most significant animated representation of the circus today. Magic and Mechanics—‘Proto-Cinema’, Lightning Cartoons and Comic Performance Dumbo may be the most recognisable representation of animated circus, but it is not the first. Circus (as well as those acts and performers commonly associated with the circus) has long been a source of inspiration and a popular subject matter for animated images. Indeed, the moving images which are generally described as the world’s earliest animated

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public projections featured images of clowns and the circus. In 1892 at the Musée Grévin in Paris, Charles-Émile Reynaud projected Poor Pierrot (Pauvre Pierrot ) using his invention, the Théâtre Optique. Reynaud’s animated projections were called Pantomimes Lumineuses —luminous pantomimes. Poor Pierrot features the titular pantomime figure as he sneaks into Columbine’s garden in an attempt to serenade her. Unbeknownst to him, his rival Harlequin (whom Columbine favours) is hiding there, and chases the drunken, cowed Pierrot away. Only a short fragment of Pauvre Pierrot remains today, but it originally consisted of 500 individual drawings and lasted approximately fifteen minutes. Another of Reynaud’s projections, The Clown and His Dogs (Clown et ses Chiens 1892), depicted clowns and circus acts, the projection beginning with ‘a clown entering a circus ring and greeting the audience. He then proceeds to do a series of tricks with three dogs: We see them jumping through hoops, walking on a ball, and jumping over a wand’ (Myrent 1989, 196). The Clown and His Dogs consisted of at least 300 individual images and lasted approximately ten minutes. Prior to the invention of the Théâtre Optique, experimentation with moving images had occurred through the use of various optical toys and mechanical devices including the magic lantern, automata, the zoetrope and the praxinoscope. The zoetrope was a spinning drum with a strip of images on the inside; a viewer would look through slits in the side of the spinning drum to see the still images transformed into a looped motion. The praxinoscope—a device which Reynaud had previously patented in 1877—operated via similar principles to the zoetrope, except viewers saw the images reflected around a central mirrored drum. The Théâtre Optique has been described as a ‘large-scale praxinoscope’ (Furniss 2016, 24), but while devices such as the zoetrope and praxinoscope relied on looped or cyclical actions, the Théâtre Optique was remarkable in that it produced the illusion of movement through a succession of still images that allowed action and narrative to unfold in a linear progression. The Théâtre Optique also utilised a double projection system—a static background was projected, with a second projection of moving elements on top of this which Reynaud could manipulate: ‘Reynaud is said to have indicated Pierrot’s hesitation by reversing the direction of the strip as he climbed a wall, and dropped down again. Finally the forwards direction resumed as he emboldens himself’ (Leslie 2013, 75). Part of the attraction of Reynaud’s invention lay in the spectacle of the projection itself. Reynaud’s luminous pantomimes brought images of vaudeville and the

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circus to the screen, delighting audiences through the wondrous spectacle of moving images. Although the Théâtre Optique has been described as ‘proto-cinema’ (Wells 1998, 2), and as a device which anticipated the development of animated film, there is no singular line of development of animation—it is perhaps better described as an art form of multiple, converging histories. Tom Gunning, for instance, in emphasising the roots of animation in pre-cinematic devices of transformation, pays close attention to the blow book and the flipbook. Gunning describes these devices as emerging out of the realm of Natural Magic, an ‘oxymoronic term’ which ‘can be used to trace the emergence of a scientific worldview from a magical and cosmological one’ (2013, 56). In this collision of the scientific, the magical and the cosmological, ‘Natural Magic’s fascination with the effects of wonder generated by technical devices working on human perception constitutes the fertile ground from which cinema and animation spring’ (2013, 57). The blow book (a device which appeared as early as 1550) worked via a ‘conjuror’ or ‘magician’ asking a spectator to blow on the pages of the book while the performer would surreptitiously flick hidden notches or tabs to reveal different sets of images as they so wished—to the onlooker, it would appear as if one’s breath had magically conjured the images. However, whereas the blow book ‘maintained different levels of knowledge between the canny manipulator of the book and its duped viewer’—a device relying on showmanship, misdirection and illusionist performance—the flipbook would bind a series of static images together which would then produce a sequential motion or action when flipped through rapidly (Gunning 2013, 62). The flipbook required no special skill or knowledge to operate, and in contrast to the blow book’s reliance on a sense of magical transformation, the flipbook reflected ‘an attitude towards the analysis of motion and of brief intervals of time’ (Gunning 2013, 63). This magical transformation of the image, which Esther Leslie describes as ‘a combination of movement and stillness’, has remained in many ways the underlying principle of animation to this day; ‘[t]he question that animation poses again and again, and answers in its various ways is: how does a concocted substance or thing that is apparently inert begin to move, become restless?’ (Leslie 2013, 76). The blow book in particular relied on the performance of the conjurer or magician, and many other examples of early animation took up and incorporated the performative, emerging alongside vaudeville and music hall acts. Malcolm Cook (2015) has written extensively on the

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lightning cartoon act of music hall performances (prominent from the 1870s through to the 1890s) and how it anticipated and contributed to the emergence of animation film. As a live stage performance, the lightning cartoon made ‘a performance out of the act of drawing’ by emphasising ‘an artist’s skill through the speed and accuracy with which they could produce that drawing’ (Cook 2015, 48). With the invention of the motion picture camera, these performances began to be filmed, and soon cartoonists such as Walter Booth and J. Stuart Blackton were introducing trick film effects which ‘saw a progression from the straight lightning cartoon to the drawn images taking on an independent agency’ (Cook 2015, 54). Early lightning cartoon films would often show the hand of the animator reaching into frame to create, or sometimes erase, a drawing. This is demonstrated in American cartoonist and animator Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). As the title suggests, this lightning sketch film depicts a series of transforming faces and caricatured figures, and even features a clown performing a series of tricks with a trained dog. According to Wells, the film ‘signals its comic intentions by drawing upon the circus tradition of the clown “pulling a funny face”’ (1998, 128). The film ends with Blackton’s hand re-entering the frame and erasing the lines of the clown’s body, the hand pausing as the clown kicks out his remaining leg as if in protest while half-erased. Cook writes that the performance of the lightning cartoon ‘involved a dislocation between the time it took to produce the drawing and the spectator’s cognition of it’; thus, when the lightning cartoon began to become incorporated into early moving images, ‘these various performance times were exacerbated, with their constitution more readily apparent, and they were added to by the nature of the mechanical production of the performance’ (55). The lightning cartoon film thus expanded upon and transformed the music hall performance. The transforming, animated images themselves would invoke the audience’s sense of wonder and delight, while the hand of the animator reminded these same audiences of the artifice behind the images.

Circus and the Tradition of Lightning Cartoons Making a Show: The Animator as Ringmaster Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) not only followed and incorporated these styles of performance, but also presented the titular creature

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as if she were a trained circus animal. Before his experiments with animation, McCay was a cartoonist (who drew and authored comic strips) and a lightning cartoonist. McCay’s earlier short animations include Little Nemo in Slumberland (1911) and How A Mosquito Operates (1912), but it was with Gertie the Dinosaur that ‘McCay gained full recognition, incorporating his animation within a vaudeville act’ (Wells 2009, 86). The film opens with McCay and a group of his peers coming across the mounted bones of a ‘Dinosaurus’ in a museum. McCay bets the others he can make ‘the Dinosaurus live again by a series of hand-drawn cartoons’. At a formal dinner, he unveils and introduces his guests to Gertie. He stands in front of a large blank sheet of paper and draws the image of his dinosaurus in the manner of a lightning cartoonist. When it is pointed out the bet was that he could make the drawing move, he tears his quick sketch of Gertie away to reveal an already drawn landscape—a lake and the rocky surrounds of a cave. Motioning to the cave, McCay declares that: ‘Gertie, – yes, her name is Gertie – will come out of that cave and do everything I tell her to do’. McCay then asks Gertie to come out and ‘make a pretty bow’. Gertie comes out of her cave, shuffles her feet and bows to the audience; soon she is performing other tricks that McCay asks of her. At times she misbehaves and McCay scolds her, which causes her to cry. She dances to music, gets distracted by a sea serpent, and in one remarkable scene, picks up a woolly mammoth that wanders through the frame and tosses it into the lake. For Gertie’s ‘grand finale’, McCay himself appears to enter the drawing, and to prove that Gertie is not afraid of him, climbs on her back. She carries him off-screen as he brandishes a whip and bows. Gertie the Dinosaur is in many ways a film about performance, making a show of both its dinosaur star and animation process. The film depicts McCay at work in the process of animating Gertie, drawing each individual frame. He explains in the film, ‘I made ten thousand cartoons – each one a little bit different from the one preceding it’. McCay not only performs the act of drawing, animation and of lightning cartoonist, he also performs the role of a circus ringmaster. Ron Beadle and David Konyot define the role of the ringmaster as combining managerial work with a more performative aspect: ‘As a performer the ringmaster opens and closes the show, makes safety announcements, introduces the acts and stresses the difficulty of tricks and the virtues of the performer’ (2016, 72). This perfectly describes the interaction between McCay and Gertie. Wells notes that McCay is ‘dressed as a ringmaster’ (2009, 86), and describes Gertie as ‘a combination of circus animal and domestic pet’

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(87). Although he does not further draw out Gertie the Dinosaur’s emulation of a circus act, Wells elaborates on what is considered McCay’s greatest contribution to animation—the beginnings of character or personality animation, where ‘Gertie’s charisma was reflected in a playfulness appealing both to adults and children, yet characterized by the allure of being an animal’ (2009, 87). Gertie’s parallels to a circus act are also evident in the posters and fliers used to promote her; one poster refers to her as ‘the Wonderful Trained Dinosaurus’ and as ‘The Greatest Animal Act in the World!!!’ with ‘performances’—rather than viewings or screenings—listed at certain times of the day. The poster proclaims that Gertie laughs, cries and dances the tango; and that she is one of the funniest novelties. Dinosaurs and circuses find themselves connected through animation once again thanks to the 1921 silhouette animation The First Circus , animated by puppeteer Tony Sarg and produced by Herbert M. Dawley Productions. The First Circus opens with the intertitles, ‘In 1871 P.T. Barnum started his now world famous circus’, followed by a procession of silhouetted circus animals including a caged lion, a giraffe and an elephant. The next intertitle reads: ‘But – he was small potatoes compared to STONEHENGE CIRCUS 30,009 years ago’. Sarg’s film proceeds to playfully imagine what a dinosaur circus may have looked like. Stone-age men struggle to control a Sauropod-like dinosaur using spears, as a human figure performs acrobatics by jumping and tumbling off the dinosaurs head and tail. A female tightrope walker appears, and the dinosaur lifts her up to its head using its tail. The tightrope walker waits as a snake slithers into view, becoming a makeshift tightrope suspended between the dinosaurs neck and tail. The acrobat walks the tightrope-snake, balancing and performing the splits. The film ends in chaos as the dinosaur suddenly revolts, launching the acrobat into the air and snatching one of the cavemen off the cliff where they have been watching the performance. Circus Clowns in Early Animation Besides drawing inspiration from circus animal performances, early animation also demonstrated a fascination with the figure of the circus clown. Poor Pierrot (discussed above) is one such example and indeed was not an unusual choice for the subject of Reynaud’s projections given the popularity of the character during this time period. As Helen Borowitz demonstrates in her extensive examination of conceptions of the clown

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in French art and literature, ‘the clown was a symbol of the human condition’ and was a popular subject for artworks of the period (1984, 23). While Reynaud’s Pierrot was somewhat pitiable, the clown in animation (and indeed, popular culture and entertainment) soon evolved into a figure of mischief. Émile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie (1908), for example, features a mischievous clown-like figure (indicated by his costume) who undergoes a series of surreal metamorphoses; trapped in a glass bottle, the bottle transforms into a blooming flower from which the clown emerges unscathed and triumphant, before the flower turns into the trunk of an elephant. The elephant then transforms into a jailhouse, and when the clown attempts to escape by leaping out a window, his body breaks apart. Here, Cohl’s hand enters the frame and puts the clown back together. The clown inflates himself, floats through the frame and alights on the back of a horse, waving his hat happily in thanks. In animation, the clown body is allowed to fragment completely and returns to its original form without consequence. The animated clown takes on further mischievous and transgressive dimensions in the Fleischer Brothers’ Out of the Inkwell series (1918–1929) from Hollywood’s silent cartoon era. Koko the Clown was brought to life through the use of the rotoscope, a device which allowed an animator to trace over live-action footage frame-by-frame in order to create a movement that was more ‘fluid’ and ‘lifelike’. The Out of the Inkwell series often featured Koko ‘escaping’ the inkwell and the trappings of the page much to the annoyance of his creator (played by Max Fleischer), who would then struggle to force him back into the inkwell. The 1921 short Invisible Ink exemplifies Koko’s mischievousness: Koko rides an invisible bicycle that Max Fleischer has drawn in invisible ink (much to Fleischer’s annoyance, as he was hoping to one-up the clown). Rather than quietly returning to the inkwell, Koko escapes the drawing board and leads the animator on a chase through the city streets, leaving a drawn chalk line behind him as a trail. At one point, Koko drops a vase on Fleischer’s head, before finally escaping by diving into the bottle of invisible ink. In the Out of the Inkwell series, rather than the hand of the animator simply reaching in to interfere with the drawing, it is the animated figure itself that transgresses the boundaries between the animated world and the real world. The illusion at play here is an encounter between the real and the imagined.

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Animation as a Means to Enact and Produce Wonder and Spectacle Siegfried Zielinski describes animation as a ‘sensational phenomenon’ that should be explored in the ‘broader context of the deep time relations of arts, sciences, and technologies’ (2013, 26). This view is echoed by Maureen Furniss, who writes that animation and the cinema were made possible through the various convergences of science, technology and art, with audiences introduced to projection of moving images (through magiclantern shows) in ‘an atmosphere of spectacle’ (2016, 25). It is clear that in the early development of animated images, through a convergence of scientific ideas of mechanics and optics, and animistic notions of magical transformation, the experience of the audience was one of wonderment. As Wells explains: Still intrinsic to the understanding of these developments was the idea of the moving image as essentially magical – something colourful, playful and ‘miraculous’ in its manipulation of still images. This notion was essentially eradicated by the realism of early cinema photography, but perpetuated in trick films and forms akin to, and instrumental in, the continuing development of animated film. (1998, 12)

In the development of early animated film, Wells and others emphasise the miraculous manipulation of still images as the key driving force behind the sense of wonder evoked in the audience. This aligns with Tom Gunning’s influential conception of the cinema of attractions, which emphasised exhibition over narrative. While the cinema of attractions is not dynamically opposed to narrative, story is a secondary consideration to the ‘visual curiosity’; the cinema of attractions supplies pleasure through ‘an exciting spectacle – a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself’ (2006, 384). For Gunning, trick films such as those performed by Georges Méliès are emblematic of the cinema of attractions, as even Méliès did not consider the narrative of primary importance and considered it only insofar as it served as a vehicle for his stage effects and tricks (2006, 382). Méliès is the most prominent figure of trick films and early cinema and is widely considered one of early cinema’s greatest performers, magicians and innovators. Maureen Furniss notes that the effects of trick films ‘were seen as somewhat comparable to magic tricks, part of the range of explainable phenomena and feats of conjuring that had fascinated society throughout

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the nineteenth century’ (2016, 33). An example of one of Méliès’s simple trick films, which relied heavily on representations of stage illusions and vanishing acts, is the 1896 film The Vanishing Lady: Méliès walks on stage in formal attire reminiscent of a showman or stage magician and invites a lady to join him on stage. He places a newspaper on the floor and a wooden chair on top before inviting the lady to sit. He covers her in a blanket completely. Here, through the use of a jump cut, he removes the blanket to reveal the lady has vanished. Waving his hands as if to summon her back, a second jump cut makes it appear as if a skeleton has magically appeared out of thin air. Gesturing in a mock show of disbelief, Méliès covers the skeleton with the blanket again, before a final jump cut and removal of the blanket reveals the vanished lady has returned. Here, Méliès plays the role of a circus or stage magician. His ‘constant bowing and gesturing’ to the audience is evidence of a cinema that is ‘willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator’ (Gunning 2006, 382). It is this willingness to rupture which is also visible in the lightning cartoon films of Cohl, McCay, and Blackton seen in the repeated intervention of the hand of the animator, showing the desire of the cartoonist to foreground their process. As the cinema of attractions gave way to the dominance of narrative, animation studios (Disney in particular) began to aspire towards a hyper-realist aesthetic, and many animators also began to de-emphasise the intruding hand of the artist. However, the memory of the human hand remains in the metamorphic transformations of animated images today; Norman M. Klein refers to this memory of the lightning hand, the mid-point in the cycle of transformation, as the animorph, and thus metamorphosis itself (including the digital morphs of the computergraphic era) as the ‘surfacing of the hidden’ (2000, 25). Although the technical feat of animation in itself is also a source of wonder and awe, it is also a feat enacted by the performance and artistry of the animators.

Sleight-of-Hand: Conclusion on Circus and Cinematic Animation The pleasure and attraction of early animation can be understood as aligning with the attractions of the circus, although they differ in whether they choose to show and exhibit the machinations behind the trick, or conceal them. Bouissac reminds us that the circus is a site of tension between

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truth and deception. It is at once described as a place where the ‘spectacles are true and genuine’ while ‘another commonplace of the discourse on the circus is that it is a world of lies and deception’ (2012, 199). The wondrous spectacles of early moving images can be understood as emerging out of the same collision between the magical and the scientific, the transformation of inanimate images into animated images, and the interaction between the real and the imagined. Bouissac writes that circus skills and artefacts were designed to ‘create illusions and support the claim of some individuals that they could fly, walk on water, control fierce animals, and keep objects moving around or simply appear from nothing and vanish into thin air’ (2012, 50). These spectacles provide a sense of ‘emotional gratification’ which when performed in the circus is ‘beyond truth and deception, belief and disbelief’ (2012, 50). Animation through its own powers of sleight-of-hand and production processes creates the same illusions of life and movement, with the power to make objects appear, disappear, transform and diverge from the laws of physical reality altogether. Animation too allows people (and elephants) to fly, walk on water, move objects in astonishing ways and vanish into nothingness. The powers of production and mechanics behind the illusion of both animation and circus does not cancel out the emotional gratification of the audience upon witnessing these acts of magical transformation. Today, technologies of animation and the moving image are converging with circus in newer and more innovative ways. Circuses often incorporate projection art into their performances in order to enhance the spectacle, or use holographic projection to replace live animal acts altogether. Cavalia, an equestrian company based in Montreal focusing primarily on live horse performances (hippodramas), incorporated ‘lighting effects and projections, which create exquisite environments, including a giant hologram of a horse that appears periodically’ in their show which toured internationally in 2013 (Baston 2016, 27). In 2012, Cirque du Soleil and James Cameron produced the fantasy film Worlds Away, directed by Andrew Adamson. The film is loosely structured around the love story of a young woman and a circus aerialist who find themselves wandering through the fantastical worlds of Cirque du Soleil. The film moves between a variety of Cirque du Soleil shows and performances, and was shot in 3D. While the love story serves to loosely structure the narrative, the film aims to capture and further dramatise the theatrical acrobatic performances of the circus using 3D projection and cinematic technologies. Circus Roncalli, founded in Germany in 1976, has phased out the

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use of live circus animals and instead makes use of projected holograms. The holograms, which feature images of elephants, horses and even fish, are projected within the circus ring (Warfield 2019). And in 2019, Tim Burton’s remake of Dumbo was released in cinemas worldwide. This new iteration of the film is a hybrid of computer-generated animation and liveaction, allowing the titular (and now digitally animated) elephant to fly in a live-action world. These animated acts of magic, wonder and spectacle, like magic acts in the circus, endure as ‘a fragile remnant of the age of wonderment embedded in a secular form of mass entertainment’ (Bouissac 2012, 50). Animation and the projection of moving images continue to serve as a means to provide an atmosphere of spectacle and wonderment in modern-day circuses, recalling the emergence of early animation.

References Baston, Kim. 2016. ‘New’ Hippodrome, or ‘Old’ Circus?: Legacy and Innovation in Contemporary Equestrian Performance. Popular Entertainment Studies 7: 1–2, 21–38. Beadle, Ron, and David Konyot. 2016. The Man in the Red Coat: Management in the Circus. In The Routledge Circus Studies Reader, eds. Peta Tait and Katie Lavers, 65–78. New York: Routledge. Borowitz, Helen O. 1984. Painted Smiles: Sad Clowns in French Art and Literature. The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 71 (1) (Jan 1984): 23–35. Bouissac, Paul. 2012. Circus as Multimodal Discourse: Performance, Meaning, and Ritual. London: Bloomsbury. Cholodenko, Alan. 1991. Introduction. In The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, ed. Alan Cholodenko, 9–36. Sydney: Power Publications. Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away. Directed by Andrew Adamson, produced by James Cameron. Paramount Pictures, Cirque du Soleil Burlesco. 2012. Clown et ses Chiens. Directed by Charles-Émile Reynaud. 1892. Cook, Malcolm. 2015. Performance Times: The Lightning Cartoon and the Emergence of Animation. In Performing New Media, 1890–1915, ed. Kaveh Askari et.al., 48–56. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dumbo. Directed by Samuel Armstrong, Norman Ferguson, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen and John Elliotte. Walt Disney Productions. 1941. Dumbo. Directed by Tim Burton. Walt Disney Pictures. 2019. Eisenstein, Sergei. 1988. Eisenstein on Disney. Ed. Jay Leyda, translated by. Alan Upchurch. London: Methuen. Furniss, Maureen. 2016. A New History of Animation. New York: Thames & Hudson.

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Gertie the Dinosaur. Directed by Winsor McCay. 1914. Gunning, Tom. 2006. The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde. In The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven, 381–388. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gunning, Tom. 2013. The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion. In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan, 53–69. New York: Routledge. Klein, Norman M. 2000. Animation and Animorphs: A Brief Disappearing Act. In Meta-morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change, ed. Vivian Sobchack, 21–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kracauer, Siegfried. 2012. Siegfried Kracauer’s American Writings: Essays on Film and Popular Culture. Eds. Johannes von Moltke and Kristy Rawson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Langer, Mark. 1990. Regionalism in Disney Animation: Pink Elephants and Dumbo. Film History 4: 305–321. Leslie, Esther. 2013. Animation’s Petrified Unrest. In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan, 73–93. New York: Routledge. Myrent, Glenn. 1989. Emile Reynaud: First Motion Picture Cartoonist. Film History 3: 191–202. Pauvre Pierrot. Directed by Charles-Émile Reynaud. 1892. Stoddart, Helen. 2015. The Circus and Early Cinema: Gravity, Narrative, and Machines. Studies in Popular Culture 38: 1–17. The Vanishing Lady. Directed by Georges Méliès. 1896. Warfield, Kristen. 2019. This Animal Free Circus Is Such a Stunning Show. The Dodo. https://www.thedodo.com/in-the-wild/austrian-circusholograph-animals. Accessed 1 February 2019. Wells, Paul. 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge. Wells, Paul. 2009. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Zielinski, Siegfried. 2013. Expanded Animation: A Short Genealogy in Words and Images. In Pervasive Animation, ed. Suzanne Buchan, 25–51. New York: Routledge.

CHAPTER 9

Engineering Circus Enchantment: Automagic Technology and Electrifying Performances in Fiction Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Robert C. Williamson

Circus is a versatile frame for interpreting our relationship with technology. Looking in from different perspectives, the authors in this volume wire the connections between circus and technology, their transhistorical presence and interdisciplinary expansiveness. In the process, they contribute new insights into the history of technology in popular entertainments, into the role the circus plays in the advancement, application and popularisation of technological advancement, and into its role in embracing, taming and enhancing technology-related desires and uncertainties. This chapter adds another perspective by exploring narratives constructed out of the interplay of circus and technology. What do awe-inspiring spectacles or effects of engineering look like in circus fiction? Does technology

A.-S. Jürgens (B) · R. C. Williamson Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] R. C. Williamson e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0_9

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in circus fiction lead to the playful reconfiguration of normative corporeality, thus enhancing human autonomy? In what ways do (imaginary) technologies affect, or even redefine, what circus is in fiction? What kind of cultural work does the interweaving of circus, technology and fiction do? This chapter explores stories of captivating and animating technology in literary and filmic circus contexts, focusing on cultural imaginaries of the (re)creation of circus acts through technology. The protagonists in these stories are not originally part of the ‘show’ (as circus troupe members or performers) but they are captivated, if not captured, by circuses and their technology. The stories are about immersion and illusion at the circustechnology interface, about human life transferred into artifice, and about the ambivalence around power and control over the body demonstrated by technology and circus. The purpose of this chapter is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to paint a tableau of scenarios in which fictional circuses—entire shows—are created and experienced through technological ingenuity, clarifying how this ingenuity can be defined in relation to entertainment magic and virtual reality. These are phenomena not yet mapped out in this volume. On the other hand, it seeks to point to some of the intriguing narratives starring circus performers—performing bodies—whose physicality is technologically and electrically enhanced, and (thus) redefined by technology as somatic eccentricity. The discussion of circus engineering, machinery and the ‘technologicalness’ (Bell 2005, 43) of fictional circus throughout this chapter shows that technology is not merely a creative and ‘knowledgeable arrangement of forces and materials’ (Batteau 2010, 14) in fiction, but also a powerful, chameleonic protagonist that builds worlds of meaning, and acts as a nerve-centre in a pulsating network of identifications and confrontations of contrasting notions of technological culture and our techno-cultural future. Technology is ‘culture because it performs the task of reflecting a world back to us and articulating its own (increasingly definitive) version of reality’ (Graham 2002, 30). To bring Science, Circus and Technology full circle, this chapter resumes themes from the first part of this volume (‘Engineered to Promote Awe: Circus (and) Bodies’) by exploring performing bodies, circus showmanship, electrical science and the paradigmatic modern model for our tales about technological autonomy: the Frankenstein story. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to the rise of corporeal circus extravaganzas through Frankensteinian body engineering. This is a gap in our

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understanding of technology-and-circus in culture that will be addressed through the discussion of fictional texts in which popular performance, monstrous body engineering and life-giving electrical apparatus jostle and intersect with each other. By calling attention to the comic archetype of the circus in particular, this chapter lays bare the dynamic ways in which clowns participate in ontological and existential debates stemming from their complex position between animate and inanimate matter, humour and violence, life and death, person and object. Elucidating the mechanics of immersive, illusive and electrifying circus scenarios created through imaginary technology, our discussion provides a fictional angle to Gillian Arrighi’s chapter on electricity in circus historical settings, albeit with a focus on ‘bodily’ electricity (currents applied to bodies). It considers how fiction negotiates pre-existing historical and cultural traditions. Examining ambiguous fictional forms of ‘animation’ for entertainment purposes, the discussion also transports into another medium Ruth Richards’s examination of the animated body as a subject of manipulation, exaggeration and reconfiguration (see her chapter in this volume).1 Considering a range of examples, chosen because they are typologically pervasive, with an inherent ability to ‘narrate’ cultural meaning, the aim is to uncover facets of a discourse around circus, fiction and technology as it stands in the present by shedding light on some of its historical foundations.

Engineering Illusion and Immersion: Circus, Magic and Virtual Reality In circus contexts, magic is an art of misdirection and (thus) deception that creates illusions for entertainment purposes by means of technical tricks and technological effects.2 Examples are optical illusions (induced among others by magic lanterns) or enchanted gardens (with flowers magically springing to life), bottles that pour ‘wine or water at will (an old trick now performed more efficiently with new techniques)’, and feats in which birds disappear from one cage just to magically reappear in another (During 2002, 100). Entertainment magicians influence the perception of their audiences by making them believe they are witnessing something impossible that is, however, not entangled with its double, supernatural magic (During 2002, 61). Due to this ‘secular’ approach, show magicians are called ‘the scientists of show business’ (Christopher 2006, 6).

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Stage magicians use an ensemble of forces and practices behind which technological and scientific knowledge can be suspected. From an onlooker’s perspective, show magic is a technique that goes beyond the limits of the spectator’s technical knowledge. ‘Technology’ in this context also goes beyond the practical application of knowledge as embodied in machines and engines, although these embodiments may be involved in the show. The relationship between technically produced magic and technology is thus ambiguous and complex, and stage magic has been defined as both a technology—if considered a means for an achievable purpose— and a non-technical technique (see Stockhammer 2000, 5). In circus fiction, this intricate network of meaning around magic and technology manifests in magic illusions produced by technical means. It also acts as a trapdoor towards the supernatural, when ‘real magic’ appears under the guise of engineered legerdemain. An example of the latter is the Cirque des Rêves in Erin Morgenstern’s 2011 novel The Night Circus .3 The fictional creators of this show promise they ‘will destroy the presumptions and preconceived notions of what a circus is and make it something else entirely, something new’ (74). Accordingly, under the cover of a circus, they stage feats of genuine magic that push the boundaries of reality into the supernatural. Within its myriad of black-and-white striped tents, the Cirque des Rêves does not offer conventional acts featuring elephants or clowns, but rather fantastic attractions such as a carousel whose figures (including gryphons and wyverns, 146) come to life, an Ice Garden full of living plants made of frozen water, and a Cloud Maze inviting visitors to climb into the sky. This show is ‘[m]ore than a circus, really’ (73). The whole circus emerges from the occult art of two competing magicians (there is a supernatural connection between their brain function and the way the circus operates) seeking to outdo each other by generating evermore innovative circus tableaux, and doing so with style and panache. In fact, the Cirque des Rêves is explicitly engineered to promote awe: there is ‘[i]ngenuity in its engineering and structure. [The show is to] be infused with the mesmerizing, and perhaps a touch of mystery’ (74). Although imagineered by magicians, the circus employs an engineer to run the contrivances. The engineer believes that typically ‘stage magicians employ engineers to make their tricks appear to be something they are not’, but in this case, he provides ‘the opposite service, helping actual magic appear to be clever construction’ (182). The fictional Cirque des Rêves in Morgenstern’s novel is an experimental ground for changing the notion of what a circus act is. No longer

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a passively watched scenario, it becomes a multisensory interactive space of experience: Cirque des Rêves visitors do not sit and observe, but climb clouds in a circus tent. The circus’s magician-engineers thus make it possible for audiences to ‘enter’ the show as an ‘artificial environment which is experienced through sensory stimuli (such as sights and sounds)’ and ‘partially determine what happens in the environment’—which is how artificial reality is defined (see Merriam-Webster). Continuously generating new acts in an infinite number of tents in their secluded circus space, in which they can at will modify parameters of time and space (for modelling and experiment), these circus magicians act like computers, creating and controlling a ‘simulated’ environment. The Cirque des Rêves expands the perspective of its audience by turning space into something dynamic and dependent on the direction of the onlookers’ gaze—as does virtual reality, according to media theoretician Oliver Grau (2003, 16). Every visit to the circus is different and includes a new infinite number of tents and possible perspectives, which is what makes it so attractive and desirable to its fans. And they are ‘enthusiasts, devotees. Addicts. Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent’ (178). The secret lies in the fact that the Cirque des Rêves is ‘an immersive entertainment’ (74). As such it is mentally absorbing, intellectually and aesthetically stimulating, and ‘characterized by diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening’ (Grau 2003, 13). Circus as a virtual reality—an immersive entertainment—is literally computer-generated in The Thaw. Produced in 1996, The Thaw is the 39th episode of Star Trek Voyager, an American science fiction television series emerging from the Star Trek mould in the 1990s, in which the protagonists—Voyager crew members and three aliens—explore a surreal circus-like virtual reality created by a supercomputer attached to their brains. The attachment is involuntary; the protagonists’ brains are held captive by the machine. Unexpectedly, the computer transforms their worst fears into ‘reality’ by creating a violent clown. To ensure his existence, this clown, a computer-generated brain clown that invades their minds, holds hostages: he is able to read thoughts and to induce death in the living. In contrast to Morgenstern’s The Night Circus , visitors of this circus do not experience unprecedented, miraculous entertainment. Instead, one of the Voyager’s crew members is tortured by the clown, who transforms him into a geriatric and then into a newborn (states of total helplessness), thus capitalising on this crew member’s most secret

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and terrible fears. The clown also threatens the crew member with physical violence through insane surgery, and death, before randomly guillotining one of the aliens.4 Another, quite different, example in literary fiction of an overwhelming, and therefore threatening, computer-generated circus is the ‘Sirkus’ in Peter Carey’s 1994 novel The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. Carey’s novel ingeniously confronts two circus systems and cultures: one based on a blend of ‘traditional’5 and ‘avant-garde circus’ (directly referring to historical avant-gardists engaging in circus experiments), the other based on comic, futuristic, high-tech Sirkus. The Sirkus engages in cultural imperialism. It stages entertainment technology as an aggressive cultural force by littering its small neighbour country with innumerable tents full of thrilling ‘techno’-entertainment sucking audiences in, and away from traditional, indigenous spectacles; like a maelstrom. Sirkus tents smell of cordite and are shaped ‘spectacularly’, for instance in the form of a ‘slice of pie, with the stage at the apex’, and equipped (partly) with elevated seats (accessible via an elevator) and auto-bars ‘to dream about’ (164, italics in original). The Sirkus’s success lies in its strategy to cleverly adapt the show to what is local, and in its captivating technologies: it provides rushes of pleasure (Carey 1994, 163) by staging holograms, high-tech animations, laser and under-water shows (in which performers can speak thanks to innovative Sirkus technology), and cyborgs that resemble human-sized vertical wind-up mice, among other creatures and figures (340, 342; for a description of the Water Sirkus, see 338–343). Sirkus programmes, engineered by ‘sparkmajoors’, blur the boundaries between human, non-human and technological performers. Thus, one cannot always tell the difference between moving holographic images, Sirkus performers and, for instance, Class IV Sirkus Simi-performers (simulacra of animal performers). The latter are strongly reminiscent of the animated characters—Mickey Mouse in particular— that give a mechanised impression in Disney-movies and are likewise an amalgamation of technology and fantasy, magic and machinery. Moving ‘automatically and magically’, Sirkus artists can be called ‘automagic’ (to use a word created by Dorfman and Mattelart 1975, 29; see also Richard’s chapter in this book). Travelling between these antagonistic countries, the eponymous protagonist in The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (a comic performer from the overpowered, smaller circus country and an enemy of Sirkus’s colonial ambitions) rearranges his body contours by being sewn into the husk

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of an eviscerated, holy Sirkus-Mouse cyborg. As a result, Tristan becomes a performing technototem (see Jürgens 2019) that drives its audiences wild: ‘They stretched their hands out towards the Mouse as if it would bless them with Sirkus jobs, parkside apartments, topsoil ten feet thick, and the Mouse […] struck poses, rolled, tumbled, held its hand across its mouth in a giggle’ (317). But that is not all: ‘They picked [him] up and held [him] in the air making a collective noise, a sort of sighing. They were devotees, worshippers. They wanted to eat Bruder Mouse, to fuck him, smother him’ (ibid.). Worshipped but unable to remove the cyborg shuck without assistance, Tristan is literally ‘immersed’ in Sirkus culture. Only within the fetishised hull—a pars-pro-toto of the Sirkus’s hegemonic ideology of cultural over-moulding—can Tristan enter the enemy’s country and engage in subversive activities. ‘Adopting’ Sirkus technology, he becomes an automagic Trojan cyborg, enhancing his autonomy through technomorphic performance. Immersed in Sirkus technology, Tristan turns into a magician, casting a spell over, and enchanting, his audience—with a trick, as ‘[a]ny sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ (Arthur C. Clarke quoted in Petroski 2010, 48). Quod erat demonstrandum. Circus is a body-based art form using apparatus (see Peta Tait in this book) to generate marvelling and polysensory experiences. In the circus scenarios in Tristan Smith, The Thaw and The Night Circus , human physical skill is dramatised, replaced by technology or mechanically enhanced. Technology—whether implemented through magicians, computer machines or cybernetic costumes—controls or aims at controlling the actions and thoughts of other people. It manipulates desires, terror and wonder in fictional circus audiences, and can thus be called a fictional version of what Alfred Gell (1988) termed the ‘technology of enchantment’. Ever since humans started developing technical ability (not just ‘tools’) they have produced technical accomplishments for diversion and pleasure, to charm and surprise an audience—to enchant them (Gell 1988, 7). While enchantment positively overwhelms circus visitors in The Night Circus as a fictional ‘technological-cum-magical system’ (to use another of Gell’s terms, 9), it overpowers them as a virtual circus trap in The Thaw—two stories in which, by means of technology, circus space is a hermetically closed-off space of ‘real’ illusion, an all-embracing sensory sphere, or alternative reality, operating according to unknown (‘magic’ and computer-based) laws. Similarly to Tristan Smith in his cyborg Sirkus costume, visitors experience an involvement in immersion and illusion. In

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The Thaw this is extended into a psychic experience, a temporarily altered state of consciousness including visual alteration and psychedelic personal development. In short: a very bad trip induced by a computer clown. As he runs on some kind of (futuristic?) electricity, the computer clown also belongs to a much older tradition of cultural practice and literary discourse around spectacles of technological showmanship, and even of clowning, on the popular stage, where electricity is a wonderful and magical phenomenon (see Morus 2011, 123)—a kind of magic that, apparently, could not always be controlled, however. This is particularly true for acts involving electricity that comes from sources other than a central power supply.

Engineered Back to Life: Electricity and Popular Performance in Fiction Popular Electricity In early twentieth-century America, midnight ghost shows were a peculiar form of mixed-media entertainment combining new technologies (‘science’ and magic). These performances were followed in the 1930s and 1940s by horror movies. Held in movie theatres, ghost shows presented magic horror and séance-like performances in sets that resembled laboratories and dungeons (see Kattelman 2010). They were fronted by magicians, often playing the role of mad scientists or doctors (appropriately named Dr. Silkini, Dr. Zomb or Dr. Ogre Banshee; ibid., 27). A signature effect of these shows was the blackout, often introduced by flashes of light blinding the audience to enhance overall effect. Audiences were startled by instantaneous blackouts (and eerie apparitions presented in the dark), a new experience of technology. Ghost shows borrowed from much older entertainment traditions. They combined and updated para-magical practices (known from spiritualist séances), electrical effects and performance routines employed, for example, by ‘electrical’ healers (During 2002, 85–87), magic lanternists (see Jolly and deCourcy in this volume) and illusionists such as the famous Harry Houdini (whose 1898-99 act, for example, was refurbished with new costumes and state settings, ‘handsome, gorgeous and bewildering with bright hued plush embellishments and variegated colored electrical effects’, see Silverman 1996, 20). Starring ‘scientist’-characters, ghost shows also echoed the mutual arrangements of theatre, popular spectacles

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and science, expressed in science performances for centuries, underlining that scientific knowledge has always been deeply embedded in cultural practices. As Watt-Smith (2013) and Morus (1998, 2007, 2010), among others, have clarified, carefully rehearsed awe-inspiring demonstrations appealing to the senses were important parts of scientific practice in the mid- and late nineteenth century and its ‘scientific culture of sensation’ (Morus 2010, 814). For example, in London, various kinds of institutions presented different kinds of scientific performances, thereby illustrating the theatrical relationship between actor (scientist-ringmasters) and audience. Commercial exhibition spaces for practical science (e.g. London’s Polytechnic Institution and Adelaide Gallery) amazed the crowds with spectacular shows of entertaining projections and electrical induction coils alongside pantomimes and magic shows (Watt-Smith 2013, 309). Lectures on electricity at the Royal Institute, on the other hand, did not employ such ‘messy machines’ (Morus 2011, 70, 75), but were presented by scientists whose methods occasionally resembled those of stage magicians (see Watt-Smith 2013, 313 on Michael Faraday). Electricity as ‘a science of wonder’ and ‘science of showmanship’ (Morus 2011, 8) became ‘the ultimate symbol’ (ibid., 10), not only of the human ability to dominate and control the powers of nature, but also of everything that Victorians thought positive about their ‘century of progress’ (ibid.). But electricity in the nineteenth century was not merely associated with splendid science shows, the life-changing illumination of cities and show spaces through electric light (see Arrighi in this volume), as there were other revolutionary inventions such as the electromagnetic telegraph and growing electrical industries. Particularly in the first decades of the 1800s, it was linked to discussions of the origins of life (from which Faraday achieved to exclude it) and to experiments around (superficial) appearances of animation. Biologically generated electricity and the effect of electricity on bodies were explored by Luigi Galvani in the 1780s and 1790s. He used electro-stimulation techniques and dissected animals (to which electric currents were applied in order to stimulate the contraction of muscles). The electro-stimulation technique of deceased limbs was taken a step further by Luigi’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, who (around 1800) performed famous public demonstrations on human corpses, staging ‘reanimation’ as the centrepiece of his theatrical science shows, in which Aldini ‘contented himself with the role of spasmodic puppeteer’ (Houe

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in Levy 2018, 57). Contemporary accounts describe these flamboyant experiments, detailing how they seemed to bring dead bodies back to life: the deceased human body ‘became violently agitated and even raised itself as if about to walk, the arms alternately rose and fell and the forearm was made to hold a weight of several pounds, while the fists clenched and beat violently the table upon which the body lay’ (Turney 1998, 22; see also Morus 2011, 52–54). Galvanic experiments in post-mortem reanimation and the (apparently) (re)animating power of electricity—and thus the horrifying potentialities of science—became influential, seminal themes in literature and popular culture, most prominently associated with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel and its myriad interpretations (see e.g. Morus 1998; Goodall 1999; Haynes 2017). Shelley’s description of the monster’s animation is evasive and brief, only hinting at the involvement of electricity, but has since inspired iconic and influential Frankensteinian recreation scenes—at its most groundbreaking in the black-and-white film industry of Universal and Hammer productions (featuring e.g. Lon Chaney Jr.)—emphasising strange machinery, vials, electric currents and rearranged lightening. Its legacy lives on in circus fiction. Frankensteinian body engineering—electricity on show, sensational and ‘magic’ (re)animation—takes on fascinating shapes in cultural fantasies around circus. For instance, as we will see below, for over 200 years, clowns, the circus’s comic characters, have appeared as both Frankensteinian ‘monsters’, featuring ‘funny’ bodies, and Frankensteinian body engineers. They have not merely blurred the margins of life and death by being cut open and being anatomically rearranged, but also by engaging in these activities themselves. They have attacked the integrity of bodies in scenic displays of body horror—a kind of midnight ghost show in their own right. Recent examples include Dr Frankenstein’s Travelling Freakshow, a show so ‘darkly comical and sickly twisted’ that ‘Mary Shelley will roll in her grave…’ (Tin Shed Theatre Company). The show stages sadistic electroshock treatments and oversized slapstick in its exploration of where, after being brought to life, the monster has ended up (in a freak show). In the 2015 science-fantasy film Victor Frankenstein, before becoming his partner in monster-making, Victor’s assistant is a hunchback clown in a circus; and in the 2016 programme of the German Circus of Horror, the monster-artificer himself appears as a violent clown, strapping a spectator into what looks like an electric chair (Fig. 9.1). Two literary texts exploring the Frankenstein theme in broadly defined circus contexts

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Fig. 9.1 Zirkus des Horrors (Circus of Horror), Berlin 2016 (Photo by Jürgen Bürgin)

clarify the relationship between fiction, electric engineering and the battle for supremacy over the electrical circus body: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (1962) and The Pilo Traveling Show by Will Elliott (2015).

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Case Study 1—Electrifying Circus Machinations: Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury In Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel Something Wicked This Way Comes , ‘Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show—Fantoccini, Marionette Circus and Your Plain Meadow Carnival’—is a ‘cross-continental Pandemonium Theatre Company’ that combines ‘side-show and unnatural museums, international!’ (27, 60, 148), luring its victims into its ugly underbelly with a variety of attractions. The latter include a Wax Museum, a Mirror Maze, a carnival band, animal wagons, clowns and performances by all kinds of freaks including an Illustrated Man (whose tattoos are alive) and Monsieur Guillotine (who, wearing black tights and a black hood over his head, engages in head chopping). The show lives off the soul and life forces of those visitors it is able to enslave by offering them the chance to live out their secret fantasies. A ‘lunatic carousel’ (59), which changes the age of those who ride it, is the show’s major asset: it shaves off the riders’ years, but also makes them become part of the show in hideous ways—for instance, by ultimately transforming them into suffering freak ‘performers’. In fact, this is the ‘fuel, gas’ on which the carnival runs (154): ‘it gorges on fear and pain. That’s the fuel, the vapour that spins the carousel, the raw stuffs of terror, the excruciating agony of guilt, the screams from real or imagined wounds. The carnival sucks that gas, ignites it, and chugs along its way’ (155). As revealed towards the end of the novel, the operators—Cooger and Dark—have been engaging in this form of ‘recruiting’ for many centuries, being the first beneficiaries from the merry-go-round’s rejuvenescence capacity. What we witness here is a sort of ‘co-evolution’ of performers and technology. A striking feature and trope—if not a protagonist—in this novel is the shadowy entertainment technology itself, the show’s machines and widgets. Playing church music backwards and looking like it comes straight from an early twentieth-century black-and-white movie (45), the carnival arrives in a black ‘Funeral Train’ (42): ‘The train put wheels under them and here they run down the long road out of the Gothic and Baroque; look at their wagons and coaches, the carving like medieval shrines, all of its stuff once drawn by horses, mules, or, maybe men’ (154). The reader is also informed in detail about the ‘taps and brass knockings, a faint squeal and whistle of calliope steam’ (62) that are somewhere in the carousel machinery; about the ‘smack calliope’ inside the merry-goround that ‘rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed

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its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choke and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes’ (63). Later (after repair), the carousel ‘spasmed to life’, its calliope fluting up ‘malodorous steams of music’ (120). These machines can be used by people outside the circus to bring about the circus’s destruction. In the course of the novel, two curious thirteen-year-old boys (who will eventually help destroy the Pandemonium) thus catch a whiff of the pernicious goings-on in the Shadow Show and wisely realise that ‘[a]ll kinds of things can go wrong with people on that darn machine’ (100). In fact, they become themselves responsible for a momentous incident and, as a result, are at high risk of being abducted by the freak show. By hitting the switch handle of the carousel— ‘The control box spat. Lightning jumped to the sky’ (81)—they send Cooger, the impresario, into a furious spin on the out-of-control merrygo-round until he is one hundred and twenty or thirty years old, smells ‘of moon swamps and old Egyptian bandages’ and looks like ‘a collapse of bones and albino wax’, ‘something found in museums, wrapped in nicotine linens, sealed in glass’ (83, 86). In a truly Frankensteinian scene, disguised as a new illusory act for some unexpected policemen prying around, Cooger is then engineered back to life on an electric chair, cheered by shouts of ‘Come alive!’. ‘[E]lectricity alive sheathed over’ the mummy, held up by some straps, but ‘flint-rock dead’. It ‘swarmed on his cold shell ears’, ‘flickered in his deep-as-an-abandoned-stone-well nostrils’, ‘crept blue eels of power on his praying-mantis fingers and his grasshopper knees’ (89). The result is impressive: ‘So the old man’s hair stood up in prickling fumes. Sparks, bled from his fingernails, dripped seething spatters on pine planks. Green simmerings wove shuttles through dead eyelids’ (90). Finally brought back to life only by ‘the fire of whitehot electric chair machines’, the man ‘who lives with lightning’ stares ‘like a broken camera’ (91, 99). They call it: ‘The new act. Mr Electrico’ (88). The technological pleasures in this literary tableau build on Bradbury’s own experiences with electricity in non-fictional circus. Widely known for his novels Fahrenheit 451 (1953), The Martian Chronicles (1950) and I Sing the Body Electric (1969), Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was a life-long enthusiast of Lon Chaney, magic and magicians (King 1981, 418; Bradbury 1980b, 27). As a child he wished to become a magician himself and was ‘madly in love with carnivals and circuses’ (Bradbury 1980a, xii). He remembers watching the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, for which he also worked as a roustabout: ‘We had no money for tickets.

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So we earned our tickets by coiling tent ropes, lugging soda-pop bottles, watering the animals… As payment, we got in free for the weekend’ (ibid.). For Bradbury, the circus world is as bright as travelling carnivals and freak shows are dark, but they belong together like the two sides of a Janus-face. He calls the circus the ‘outsized offspring’ of the carnival (Bradbury 1980b, 26).6 ‘The magic was there, of course’, he remembers about carnivals, ‘but it was a different kind of magic’ (Bradbury 1980a, xvii). Bradbury recalls how, at age 12, he attended one performance in Dill’s Travelling Show, a sideshow and Carnival that sharply stands out in his memory. The show was introduced by the barker with ‘Here come ten thousand volts!’ and featured an unfrocked minister-turned-performer, ‘Mr. Electrico’, whom Bradbury would eventually befriend. The author remembers the flamboyant act: ‘A switch was thrown and blue sparks hissed from Mr. Electrico’s fingertips. He quivered in the surge of raw electricity, his face burning like white phosphor as the current sizzled his frail body. Fire squirmed in his ears. Flames danced in his nostrils. Blue light ran along his tongue and jittered his teeth’ (Bradbury 1980a, xviii). According to childhood memories of the fiction writer, this was such a beautiful sight—‘like being knighted by God’—that he shut his eyes and ‘cupped the grand lightning to gather it in’ (ibid.). Something Wicked This Way Comes (as well as the 1946 short story ‘The Electrocution’, in which a sideshow performer, Electra, turns into a ghost via electrocution) is a tribute to the experiences and passions (darkly reshaped) of Bradbury’s youth, and his sideshow pantheism. The novel reminds us that electric chairs do not only have a history in the penitentiary system but also in popular entertainments (see During 2002, 131; Morus 2011, 10): they ambiguously offer life and death. Bradbury’s fiction depicts the electric chair as both a performance prop and an infernal apparatus superimposing electricity onto the strapped-up living and the dead who, as a result, are transformed into uncanny sideshow marionettes and analogues of human beings—parodies of historical ambitions to control the otherwise wayward human body through electricity.

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Case Study 2—Flesh of Light: The Pilo Circus Saga by Will Elliott and the Frankensteinian Clowniverse Bradbury’s protagonists were not born to be electrified. Nor was the equally unfortunate protagonist in another novel in which technologyinduced posthumous performance shows another of its faces: the grinning skull of the clown. With the aim to stand out ‘among the violencepornographers’ of contemporary literary writers, as he recently stated, ironically, perhaps (in Jürgens 2020d), Australian author Will Elliott paints an extravagant circus world as a pyrotechnical mix of horror, humour and extreme characters in his novels The Pilo Family Circus (2006) and The Pilo Traveling Show (2015).7 Pilo’s infernal circus machine provides an array of attractions (like Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium in Something Wicked This Way Comes ), including a Funhouse, Freak Show, Sideshow Alley, Magic Show and a giant marquee in the middle with the Main Stage for acrobats and clown acts. Pilo’s show is both circus and carnival, an outlandish insanatorium. This alternative universe is engineered as a farm for human souls: the better entertained visitors are, and the more they laugh at the funnies, buy trinkets and souvenirs and behave themselves ‘like sheep on Ritalin’ (2006, 136), the more soul dust they lose. This powder (little diamond crystals), once collected by the circus folks and consumed, makes almost all their wishes come true (while the circus visitors leave the show in an irremediable zombie-like state). Sure enough, the ‘mechanics of the circus’ are as strange as its ‘harvest mechanism’ (2006, 201; 2015, 37). The showgrounds can be entered not merely through magic gates but also via a very long descent in thousands of special elevators intended to reach the circus from all across the world (2006, 51). The boss clown carries around weird gizmos (he has a chainsaw in his pocket; 2015, 130). His fellow clown mainly communicates via mechanical, siren-loud kettle noise (‘HMMMMMM! HMMMMM!’ or ‘EEEEEEEEEEEEE – EEEEEEEEEEEEE – EEEEEEEEEEEEE!’; 2006, 130). In addition, the siblings who are in charge of the circus, Kurt and George Pilo,8 engage in ongoing mutual murder attempts, for instance by rigging up the other’s bed with electric wires that are hooked up to a generator (2006, 216). It is no wonder that a perfect world for George would be a world in which ‘everyone would be controllable through knobs, joysticks, and levers’ (2015, 31). This is not far-fetched, as both the circus

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freaks and clowns are created by the circus, that is, by the Matter Manipulator (the ‘MM’) in his hellish electrical workshop, known as the Funhouse. Dubbed ‘Flesh Sculptor’, the MM builds freaks. They include, among others, a Severed-Head (who is alive), Tallow (whose ‘act’ consists in melting: ‘Skin was running like candle wax, bubbling and dripping to the ground in pools before hardening into flesh-coloured lumps on the glass floor’; 2006, 66) and Fatso (who ‘was doing his special act: eating himself’; 2015, 78). The MM also produces the white face paint— ‘rocket fuel for the body’ (2006, 132)—that transforms the protagonist Jamie into a different self, a murderous clown psycho. Before engaging in rocket clowning, Jamie had been chloroformed, kidnapped and dragged into the circus by Doopy, Gonko and Goshy, three infernally deranged, sadistic clowns. In the second book, the MM has to exhume and recreate these clowns from scratch, by means of a spark-spitting ‘something resembling an electric chair’ (2015, 36). ‘He brings out a spatula, razor, a portable freezer holding lumps of human flesh, a sack heavy with rolled up skin, scissors, some pink gloop’ before measuring out ‘a large swath of skin’ that he ‘plugs in a machine with antennas and flickering dials next to the big wired-up chair’ (36–37). After shouting ‘Breathe! Breathe!’, the clown corpses come alive: The floor is a repulsive mess of off-cuts in discarded piles, bones pieces leaking marrow. Lumps of flesh and organs sit in buckets. There’s a zap in the air which stands hairs on end, more richness of graveyard and garbage can stink than surely have ever existed in just one room before. But there in the chair, with a blank expression behind newly applied face paint, is Doopy. His head is big and round as a basketball, with black bristles sticking out here and there. He is short, pot-bellied, glancing apologetically at the entire world. Blinking, breathing. Alive. (39)

Inanimate matter moving of its own accord is perceived to be a fundamental violation of natural law and thus the essence of monstrosity (see Hanafi 2000, 121). Frankensteinian monstrosity is taken to another level in Will Elliott’s text, in which clown corpses are resurrected for pure entertainment (of circus audiences and fraternal challenge), and even ‘enhanced’: the MM ‘upgrades’ the clowns by adding additional limbs, one of which is used by clown Goshy for inseminating flower pots. The little clown plants

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growing out of them, which look alike and cry ‘Help!’, add another original facet to the Frankensteinian ‘perversion of single sex baby-building’ (Twitchell 1983, 62) and to the Frankensteinian clowniverse. Human life transformed into artifice is the core of the Frankenstein saga, and a kernel of the circus. A space for superior physicality, physical eccentricities and somatic hyperboles, circus presents corporeal exaggerations and contortions performed on the human shape. Clowns, in particular, are associated with ‘funny’ bodily excrescence (e.g. monumental red noses, feet in size-90-shoes). They are also associated with comic agency in relation to technology; in literature they carry chainsaws in their pockets or wear a cyborg-carapace as a costume (see above). Traditionally, on the sawdust stage, clowns approach ‘nature with a swagger, determined to change it into something it never has been and never would be if left to itself’—which is how performance technologist Thomas Gilbert defines the engineer (1978, 3). Clowns personify the fact that ‘engineering’ relates to the Latin ingenium—‘ingenuity’, ‘cleverness’ and ‘invention’ (UNESCO, 24)—when doing activities such as hammering leaking water back into a tube, inflating balloons with a leaf-blower or unrolling toilet paper by means of a hairdryer. By devising and implementing such ‘highly imaginative concept[s] or technology’, they embody its most extremum: ‘imagineering’ (OED). Through imagineering/engineering and (comic) bodies evoking an alternative biology, clowns and circus have been linked to the Frankenstein matrix, which has created significant cultural and aesthetic styles influential to this day. There are comic Frankenstein adaptations delving into the delicious art of clowning,9 and comic performers who are associated with Shelley’s story: performers such as Joseph Grimaldi, one of the most celebrated entertainers of the early 1800s, or the clown who becomes Victor’s assistant in the 2015 movie (see above). There are comic scientist-imagineers ‘giving birth’ to artificial creatures with far-reaching comic ramifications (e.g. in early cinema), and even extraterrestrial cannibal clowns (e.g. the 1988 cult film Killer Klowns from Outer Space) whose circus tent gives electric shocks when touched, and who engage in alien galvanism when ‘reanimating’ a deceased human—by playing it like a hand-puppet (see Jürgens 2020b, c). Echoing sensationalist science, the intermedial cultural discourse around the Frankenstein narrative and clowning explores both the clown as a body engineer (transforming the human body into an object of ridicule) and the Frankensteinian monster-clown link. As the Pilo circus saga manifests, the patchwork wretch and the comic performer

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are not only associated with non-verbal idiocy, a ‘lack of social graces; impulsive, crude or violent assaults against others [and] mechanical or clumsy motor coordination’, as Joel Schechter (1985, 99) points out, but also with (more or less comic) pathology expressed by the playful dismemberment, disintegration and estrangement of normative corporeality, or the transformation of its ordinary qualities or capacities, staging the comic celebration of corporeal instability, mutability and capacity for transformation. Comic pathological body aesthetics that challenge enlightened logic thus emerge from the explosive amalgamation of clowning and the Frankenstein mould.

Conclusion: Engineering Circus Enchantment Providing popular entertainment unlike any other we have seen in this edited collection, the circus novels discussed in this chapter present a heavy mix of technology, showmanship, brave new electrical circus worlds and a culture of (comic) violence that not only participates in fictional negotiation of what it means to be human (see Graham 2002), but that also conflates and reshuffles many aspects brought up in this volume. They feature imagineers who promote awe (albeit to take advantage of their audiences), and engineers of performances and bodies. They demonstrate how, through technology, magical or supernatural power is transformed into stage-performance power. They typify how, in fictional circus contexts, machinery plays a crucial action-triggering effect. In all the narratives discussed in this chapter, circus is engineered as a mask. The circus mask as a technique of accomplishing desired aims (e.g. outdoing other magicians, blotting out the neighbour island’s culture, milking a favourite drug from the audience) is at the same time concealment (hiding the magic/technique) and discovery (revealing the magic/technique).10 It has a double effect: whereas its outside surface affects its surroundings (e.g. by thoroughly stimulating addicted fans and luring future victims into the show), its inside surface affects the imagineers of the fictional circuses themselves (who reconsider what circus is and how to best use it for their purposes). With Wolfgang Iser we can conclude: ‘Because it facilitates an ecstatic condition of being himself and standing outside himself, the mask is a paradigm of fictionality which discloses itself as a deception in order to show that such deceptions are

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always modes of revelation’ (1993, 76). Behind the mask of entertainment, engineers in literary circus contexts (such as the Matter Manipulator) run apparatuses and carry through enterprises by skilful or artful contrivance (see Merriam-Webster). Exceeding any scientific licence by using technology like magic wands, creating spectacular bodies and playing a trick on death, they also act as magicians—and ‘fictors’. Originally, a fictor (a word on which the better-known word ‘fiction’ is based) is not merely an inventor of stories, but a sculptor creating three-dimensional artefacts (Japp 1995, 47). Created by magicians, computers, futuristic technologists and unearthly dark forces, the fictional circuses examined in this chapter are structural systems of cooperation components in which the structural and functional integrity of the whole is a complex amalgam of its parts. They are sophisticated systems with alien design scenarios, and a ‘design problem’: a fragile structural integrity. For instance, the virtual reality clown, Cooger and Dark, and the Pilos, all face the risk that someone will find out the true nature of their operating conditions and ultimate purpose. They experience engineering failures: technical, operational and unpredictable failure due to the curiosity of their visitors (e.g. school boys spying around). Curiosity in these contexts can thus be called an extreme condition or a risk. At the same time, the circus and carnival machinery in Something Wicked and the Pilo saga also dramatises what has been called ‘living curiosity’ in a much older lineage of pre-industrial exhibitions and the Barnumesque ‘arena for the genesis of strange and exotic human forms’ (see Jane Goodall in this volume). While posthuman circus performances are rooted in the conventions of the necrophilic Frankenstein myth, virtual circus worlds offer new forms of ‘post-bodied’ activity (Graham 2002, 5). While the ‘posthuman evolution’ (the development of human/machine fusion) is said to be clearly under way—at least according to Dinello (2005, 4)—the technologisation of the human body depicted in these scenarios (e.g. The Thaw) offers an interesting alternative corporeality to the ‘usual suspects’ (cyborgs, robots, etc.) (see Graham 2002)—a clown. The clown and its circus can be read as a sign of the technologisation of the mind and, thus, an expression of what Simon Cooper calls a ‘paranoid sensibility’ in popular culture: ‘Our fears of the increased capacity of technology to affect our lives, whether through more pervasive surveillance mechanisms or through the manufacture of powerful technological illusions’ (2002, 1). Through this lens, the violent brain clown is a sign of how technology and the effects

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of ever-increasing technological mediation of our lives work subtly, ‘and behind our backs, to reconstruct the mode of our being human’ (ibid.). Some of the fictional circus engineers discussed in this chapter, it seems, share a malevolent attitude towards humanity. Or do they invite us to think about circus technology as a way to break out from our entrapment in the real? Facing this question, one might ‘prefer to remain unenlightened, to better appreciate the dark’ (Morgenstern 2012, 230), or joyfully anticipate the future of techno-clowning—which might be in virtual reality. Virtual reality—as an extension or artistic prolongation of ‘traditional’ circus—and circus—as a model for virtual reality—are far from being pure fiction; the special effect artist, fictor and director of the 1988 American science fiction horror comedy film Killer Klowns from Outer Space Stephen Chiodo considers a virtual reality experience as an alternative to a conventional film sequel to his cult movie (see Chiodo in Jürgens 2020a), in order to bring back alien clowns in an act of progressive techno-optimism. Expectations are high as to how they would interpret the perennial clownesque death-and-resurrection theme and the circus’s technological future.

Notes 1. In addition, this chapter draws on conversations around ‘The Engineer as Performer’, a 2018 conference presentation by Robert C. Williamson exploring engineering from the perspective of performance art. 2. As early as 1785, the English equestrian and creator of the modern circus, Philip Astley (1742–1814), published Natural Magic or Physical Amusements Revealed, one of the first formative books on illusions for both the stage and the sawdust ring (Christopher 2006, 92, 414; During 2002, 93, 99). Historically magic acts have long been included in circus or protocircus entertainments (see, e.g., During 2002, 28–30). In the big top, visible from all sides, they face particularly difficult conditions when concealing the mechanics of their tricks from the audience. This is why acts such as the spiriting away of a living lion, accomplished by the Russian Kio (who is known as one of the most innovative illusionists in circus history), are considered outstanding (Zmeck 1966, 127; Christopher 2006, 243, 414). Other famous circus magicians are, for instance, the Great Carmo, travelling with his own circus; the Great Lafayette (who transformed himself into a lion in the arena), and the young Houdini, who not only performed in sideshows and Punch-and-Judy shows as ‘Projea, the Wild Man of Mexico’ and clown, respectively, but later presented his escape

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acts—the so-called Greatest Magical Feats Since Biblical Times—in Circus Busch, Circus Corty-Althoff, and Circus Beketow/Circus Schumann (Silverman 1996, 8, 12, 19–21, 33, 86, 165, 180, 184; Steinmeyer 2004, 151). For another example of the connection between magic and circus, see the 1996 patent (DE19637340A1, Germany) for a ‘Circus or theatre magic trick’ by the magician Jewgenij Schmarloskij for a performance of magic and mink dressage (premiered in Moscow Circus in 1982). Other literary examples exploring ‘real magic’ in circus contexts are the novels Circus of Dr Lao by Charles Finney (1933), Mr Vertigo by Paul Auster (1994) and Circus Galacticus by Deva Fagan (2011). For a detailed discussion of magic in literary circus, see Jürgens 2016, 82–85, 344–357. Not surprisingly, the science fiction genre (fiction and film) is a particularly productive breeding ground for the amalgamation of circus and technology. Circus personnel appear in many futuristic ‘techno’ contexts: as a brainless clown robot thug (e.g. in ‘The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’, the fourth and final serial of the 25th season of the British sci-fi television series Doctor Who from 1988/1989); as a silly human clown pretending to be a robot (Woody Allen as Miles Monroe in his 1973 movie Sleeper); as a pseudoflesh robot performing in a freak show (in the 1999 sci-fi novel The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus by American writer Harry Harrison); and in the form of the familiar (slapstick) clowns Abbott and Costello hijacking a rocketship (Abbott and Costello Go to Mars 1953). Although raised by a computer, a rather domesticated version of the ‘computer clown’ is Mork (aka Robin Williams) in the American sitcom Mork & Mindy (1978–1982). An alien clown from a planet on which humour is forbidden, he is sent to Planet Earth to study human behaviour. Mork attempts to hide among humans by ‘disguising’ as a human and adopting human mannerisms—through the study of Laurel and Hardy movies. For more details on clowns and circus in space narratives, see Jürgens 2020b. ‘Traditional circus’ (although an unsatisfactory term that does not come close to covering the magnitude of what it designates) serves to denote the broad picture of circus at the time of its heyday around the year 1900. A ‘traditional’ circus thus consists of at least one main tent; its troupe leads a nomadic lifestyle, it presents acts by human and animal performers, and it may involve freak performers and other sideshow attractions (not performing in the main tent). For a much more comprehensive discussion of the term, see Jürgens 2016, 35–37. Although freak shows and American carnival are not synonymous with the circus, in our cultural imaginaries of the big top, circus and freak performers tend to fuse. For detailed discussion, see Jürgens 2016, 53–59 and 2020b. It is interesting to note within the context of the Frankensteinian circus story by Will Elliott (the Australian author), as an uncanny titbit, that Ray

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Bradbury published the abovementioned short story The Electrocution in The Californian under the pseudonym ‘William Elliott’ (Bradbury 1980a, 11). 8. Behind the facade of impresario, Kurt hides that he is a crocodile-like prehistoric creature with an ‘upside-down shark’s jaw’ full of tusk-like teeth, looking ‘closer to dinosaur than man’ (2015, 284, 290), which adds to Richards’s analysis of dinosaurs in circus films in this volume. 9. For an overview of burlesque and comic Frankenstein stories, see e.g. Forry (1990), Turney (1998, 150–151), Picart (2003). Examples include Frankenstein; or The Model Man from 1849, a play combining the monster story with the harlequinade of pantomime (with the Creature playing the part of Clown) and the 1915 Frankenstein adaptation The Last Laugh, ‘the first adaptation in which electricity rather than alchemy provides the primary means of animation’ (Forry 1990, 89, cf. 55). 10. See also the concept of technology as a ‘mode of revealing’, coming to presence ‘in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place’ (Heidegger in Bolin 2012, 1). Revolving around the Greek roots of ‘technology’ (‘techn¯e’ standing for art or craft, and ‘-logía’ referring to the study of something) and the affinities between technology and knowledge, ‘techn¯e’ is defined as ‘the activity of gaining insight through cultural or artistic practice’ (2).

References Batteau, Allen W. 2010. Technology and Culture. Long Grove: Waveland Press. Bell, David. 2005. Science, Technology and Culture. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Bolin, Göran. 2012. Introduction: Cultural Technologies in Cultures of Technology. In Cultural Technologies: The Shaping of Culture in Media and Society, ed. Göran Bolin, 1–15. New York: Routledge. Bradbury, Ray. 1977. Something Wicked This Way Comes. London: Graton. Bradbury, Ray. 1980a. The Last Circus & The Electrocution. Introduction by William F. Nolan. Northridge: Lord John Press. Bradbury, Ray. 1980b. Under the Mushroom Tent, an Afterword by Ray Bradbury. In The Last Circus & The Electrocution, 25–27. Northridge: Lord John Press. Carey, Peter. 1994. The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith. London: Faber and Faber. Christopher, Milbourne. 2006. The Illustrated History of Magic. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers. Cooper, Simon. 2002. Technoculture and Critical Theory: In the Service of the Machine? London and New York: Routledge.

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Dinello, Daniel. 2005. Technophobia!: Science Fiction Visions of Posthuman Technology. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. 1975. How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic. New York: International General. During, Simon. 2002. Modern Enchantments: The Culture Power of Secular Magic. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Elliott, Will. 2006. The Pilo Family Circus. Sydney: ABC. Elliott, Will. 2015. The Pilo Traveling Show. Portland: Underland Press. Forry, Steven Earl. 1990. Hideous Progenies: Dramatizations of Frankenstein from Mary Shelley to the Present. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gell, Alfred. 1988. Technology and Magic. Anthropology Today 4 (2): 6–9. Gilbert, Thomas F. 1978. Human Competence: Engineering Worthy Performance. New York: McGraw-Hill. Goodall, Jane. 1999. Frankenstein and the Reprobate’s Conscience. Studies in the Novel 31 (1): 19–43. Graham, Elaine L. 2002. Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Grau, Oliver. 2003. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hanafi, Zakiya. 2000. The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press. Haynes, Roslynn D. 2017. From Madman to Crime Fighter: The Scientist in Western Culture. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Iser, Wolfgang. 1993. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Japp, Uwe. 1995. Die literarische Fiktion. In Die Dichter lügen, nicht: Über Erkenntnis, Literatur und Leser, eds. Carola Hilmes and Dietrich Mathy, 47– 58. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Jürgens, Anna-Sophie. 2019. Costumes of Belonging: ‘Fitting In’ Circus Fabrics in the Novels The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith by Peter Carey and The Pilo Family Circus by Will Elliott, and the Costume-Cum-Body Art of Leigh Bowery. In Social Beings, Future Belongings: Reimagining the Social, eds. D. Bissell, M. Bruce, H. Keane and A. Tsalapatanis, 98–104. London: Routledge. Jürgens, Anna-Sophie, and Stephen Chiodo. 2020a. ‘Greatest Klown on Earth’— And the Killer Klowns from Outer Space. Stephen Chiodo in conversation with Anna-Sophie Jürgens. Comedy Studies 11 (1): 133–141. Jürgens, Anna-Sophie. 2020b. Clowns in Space: An Introduction to Circus Aliens and Spaced-Out Comic Performers. In Outer Space and Popular Culture: Influences and Interaction. Southern Space Studies, ed. Annette Froehlich, 71–89. Cham: Springer.

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Jürgens, Anna-Sophie. 2020c. Side-Splitting Amusement: On Comic Scientists— The Sciency Type of Violent Clowns? Comedy Studies 11 (1): 121–132. Jürgens, Anna-Sophie, and Will Elliott. 2020d. Humorectomy: Engineering Comic Clown Violence—Will Elliott in Conversation with Anna-Sophie Jürgens. Comedy Studies 11 (1): 155–161. Kattelman, Beth A. 2010. Magic, Monsters, and Movies: America’s Midnight Ghost Shows. Theatre Journal 62 (1): 23–39. King, Stephen. 1981. Danse macabre: Die Welt des Horrors in Literatur und Film. München: Heyne. Levy, Joel. 2018. Frankenstein and the Birth of Science. London: Andre Deutsch. Merriam Webster. Virtual Reality. https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/virtual%20reality. Accessed 29 April 2019. Merriam Webster. Engineer. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ engineer. Accessed 29 April 2019. Morgenstern, Erin. 2012. The Night Circus. London: Vintage. Morus, Iwan Rhys. 1998. Frankenstein’s Children: Electricity, Exhibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth-Century London. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Morus, Iwan Rhys. 2010. Worlds of Wonder: Sensation and the Victorian Scientific Performance. ISIS 101 (4): 806–816. Morus, Iwan Rhys. 2007. ‘More the Aspect of Magic than Anything Natural’: The Philosophy of Demonstration. In Science in the Marketplace, Nineteenth Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman, 337– 370. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morus, Iwan Rhys. 2011. Shocking Bodies: Life, Death & Electricity in Victorian England. Gloucestershire: The History Press. Petroski, Henry. 2010. The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems. New York: Knopf. Picart, Caroline J. 2003. Remaking the Frankenstein Myth on Film: Between Laughter and Horror. Albany: State University of New York Press. Schechter, Joel. 1985. Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Schmarloskij, Jewgenij. 1998. Circus or Theatre Magic Trick. Patent number DE 000019637340 A1. German Patent and Trade Mark Office. https:// depatisnet.dpma.de/DepatisNet/depatisnet?window=1&space=main& content=treffer&action=textpdf&docid=DE000019637340A1. Accessed 2 August 2018. Silverman, Kenneth. 1996. Houdini!!!: The Career of Erich Weiss. HarperPerennial: New York. Steinmeyer, Jim. 2004. Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear. New York: Carroll & Graf.

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Index

A Adelaide gallery, 167 Adorno, 110 Aerial performance, 7, 101–104, 106, 118 Agoust, Henri, 108 Aguilar, David, 45 Albany Brown, 126 Aldini, Giovanni, 167 The Alternative Limb Project, 42–44, 50 American Museum, 15, 18, 20–23, 25, 30, 36 Ashton, Leslie, 62, 64, 65 Astley (Philip Astley), 5, 57, 60, 62, 81–83, 86, 125, 178 Atkinson, Bud, 73 Autonomy, 160, 165 B Bailey, James A., 27–29, 85, 87, 88 Barney, Matthew, 42 Barnstormers, 1 Barnum & Bailey, 2, 28, 29, 87, 171

Barnum (P.T. Barnum), 2–6, 10, 15, 18–29, 36, 113, 117, 152 Bill, Buffalo, 87 Bonassus, 17 Bouissac, Paul, 82, 143, 155–157 Bowfell, Mat, 45 Bradbury, Ray, 169–171, 180 Breton, André, 43 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 16 Bullen Bros Circus, 71 Bullen, Stafford, 71, 74 Burton, Henry, 61, 64, 65, 69 Burton’s Circus, 67, 72 Burton’s National Circus, 69 Burton, Tim, 143, 157 C Cannon, Michael, 66 Carey, Peter, 164 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 108 Cheetah Legs, 41 Chicago World’s Fair, 84, 93 Chorus girls, 87, 92

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 A.-S. Jürgens (ed.), Circus, Science and Technology, Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43298-0

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186

INDEX

Cinema of Attractions, 144, 154, 155 Circus and Its Others, 34, 48, 51 Circus of Horror, 168 Circus Oz, 64 Circus Renz, 1 Circus Roncalli, 156 Cirque des Rêves, 162, 163 Cirque d’Hiver, 8 Cirque du Soleil, 112, 118, 156 Cirque Molier, 2 Cirque Napoléon, 7 Clarke, Marcus, 128 Clown, xviii, 9, 67, 85, 111, 127, 145, 146, 148, 150, 152, 153, 163, 164, 166, 173–175, 177–180 Clown et ses Chiens , 148 Cohl, Émile, 153, 155 Cole Brothers Circus, 113, 117 Cole, W.W., 85, 87, 88, 117 Columbine, 108, 109, 148 Columbus , 29 Confetti Legs, 46, 47 Congress of Nations, 24, 25 Contemporary circus, xvi, xvii, 3, 34–36, 40, 46, 47, 49–51, 118 Cooper, Simon, 27, 85, 87, 88, 177 Coppin, George, 126 Coxe, Antony Hippisley, 85, 90, 92, 97, 114

D Dallinger, 73 Darwin, Charles, 109, 111 Darwin, Erasmus, 82 Daston, Lorraine, 16, 17 de Oliveira Barata, Sophie, 42–44, 50, 51 Dickens, Charles, 18 Disability, xv, 35, 36, 41, 44, 48, 50, 51

Disney, 145–147, 155 Duchamp, Marcel, 43 Dumbo, 143, 145–147, 157

E Edison, Thomson, 83, 84, 87, 95–97 Electrical engineering, xviii, 7, 84, 88, 97 Electric circus, 86 Electric company, 83, 84, 87, 96 Electric family, 92, 93 Electric Girl Lighting Company, 91 Electricity pavilion, 95, 96 The Electrocution, 172, 180 Elliott, Will, 169, 173, 174, 179, 180 Enchantment, 112, 127, 165, 176 Eroni Bros Circus, 73 Exquisite Corpse, 43, 44, 51 The Extended Body, 6, 34, 40, 44, 46, 47, 49, 52

F Fantasma, 109, 111 Fantasmagorie, 153 The First Circus , 57, 152 FitzGerald, 66, 70, 71, 76, 92 Fitzgerald Bros Circus, 59, 63 FitzGerald Brothers, 66, 70, 92 Flex-Foot, 40, 41 The Flying Gaonas, 114 Folies-Bergère, 7, 8 Frankenstein, 5, 6, 10, 16, 17, 21–23, 160, 168, 175–177, 180 Franklin, Benjamin, 82 Freak show, 22, 26, 67 Fuller, Loie, 91, 92

G Galerie des Machines , 2

INDEX

Galvani, Luigi, 82, 167 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, 35 Gertie the Dinosaur, 150–152 Gilbarto, 70 Grand Guignol, 108 The Greatest Show on Earth, 3, 27–30, 113, 117 Grévin, Musée, 148 Grimaldi, Joseph, 175 Gunning, Tom, 144, 149, 154, 155 Gus St Leon, 65, 73

H Hagenbeck, Carl, 83, 93–95, 97, 98 Hanlon, 105 Hanlon Brothers, 101, 103, 107 Hanlon-Lees, 7, 101–103, 105–112, 118 Hanlon-Volta, 106 Hard Times , 18 Harlequin, 109, 124, 128, 148 Harmston, 70 Hippodrome, 8, 23–27 Holden Bros Circus, 66 Houdini, Harry, 166, 178 Hydes, J.P., 125

I Imagineer, v–vii, 4, 6, 26, 43, 64, 65, 67, 68, 72, 176 Ingenuity, 4, 160, 175

J Johnson, William Henry, 20–22 JoJo Cranfield, 42

K Kangaroo, 102, 115–119

187

Killer Klowns from Outer Space, 175, 178 Kiralfy, Imre, 29 Knox, Kelly, 44 Koko the Clown, 153 Kovacs, 113, 114 Kracauer, Siegfried, 145–147 L Laboratory, 77 La Nouba, 118 Léotard, Jules, 102, 103 Lind, Jenny, 19, 20 Living curiosities, 5, 20–22 Lulu, 89 Lyceum Theatre, 62 M Magician, 126, 143, 149, 154, 155, 161–163, 165–167, 171, 176–179 Magic Lantern, xvi, 8, 10, 123–129, 139, 140, 148, 161 Malcom’s Amphitheatre, 62 Malcom’s Royal Australian Circus, 60 McCay, Winsor, 150–152, 155 McQueen, Alexander, 42, 48 Méliès, Georges, 154, 155 Merlin, Beaufoy, 126 Mickey Mouse, 146, 147, 164 Midnight ghost show, 166, 168 Minstrel, 125, 126 Missing Link, 21, 26, 30 Mobility mania, 2 Modernity, 2, 17, 84–86, 88, 91, 104 Modern wonders, 6 Modesta, Viktoria, 42, 50 Monstrous body, 161 Morgenstern, Erin, 162, 163, 178 Mr. Electrico, 172 Mullins, Aimee, 40–42

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INDEX

N Natural Magic, 149 The Night Circus , 162, 163, 165 Nissen, George, 7, 101, 102, 107, 112–119 Normate, 35, 36, 40, 49 North, John Ringling, 71 O Olympics, 112 Olympic sport, 102 Out of the Inkwell , 153 P Pantomime, 1, 2, 22, 30, 68, 101, 102, 105–112, 118, 126, 148, 167, 180 Park, Katherine, 16, 17 Pauvre Pierrot , 148 Peale, Charles Wilson, 19 Phillips, Van, 40, 41, 44 Pierrot, 108, 109, 148, 153 Pierrot The Terrible, 108, 109 The Pilo Family Circus , 173 The Pilo Traveling Show, 169, 173 Polytechnic Institution, 140, 167 Posthumous performance, 9, 173 praxinoscope, 148 Presumption, or the Fate of Frankenstein, 16 Prévert, Jacques, 43 Priestley, Joseph, 82 Princess’s Theatre and Opera House, 62 Prosthetic limb, 6, 34, 41, 44–47, 49 Punch, 18 Punch and Judy, 67, 124 R Reynaud, Charles-Émile, 143, 148, 152, 153

Ringling Brothers, 87, 117, 171 Risley acrobatic balance troupe, 103 Robertson, Étienne-Gaspard, 125 Royal Marionette Theatre, 126 Royal Victoria Theatre, 125

S Safety net, 7, 101, 105–107, 112, 114 Sanger, George, 88 Sarabande Studios, 48 Schechter, Joel, 176 Shelley, Mary, xvi, 16, 17, 21, 168, 175 Sirkus, 164, 165 Something wicked this way comes , 169, 170, 172, 173 Star Trek, 163 Stiegler, Bernard, 103 St Leon circus, 66 Stoddart, Helen, 58, 63, 72, 87, 144 Stratton, Charles, 19, 20 Superba, 109 Surreal, 6, 42–46, 49, 153, 163 surrealism, 43, 44

T Tanguy, Yves, 43 Techn¯e, 180 Telegraph, 91, 92, 115, 167 Tesla, Nikola, 83, 84, 93, 96–98 Tesla’s Animals, 96 The Thaw, 163, 165, 166, 177 Théâtre Optique, 148, 149 The Third Thumb, 44 Tivoli, 90, 117 Trampoline, 7, 101, 102, 107, 112–118 Trapeze, 2, 37, 65, 89, 102–107, 112–114 The Trip to Switzerland, 109, 110

INDEX

U Uncanny Valley, 41, 44 UNfrIQUE, 36, 51 The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, 164

V The Vanishing Lady, 155 Vaudeville, 36, 70, 91, 127, 144, 148, 149, 151 Verne, Jules, 7, 111 Victor Frankenstein, 17, 168 The Village Barber, 109 Violent clown, 163, 168 Virtual reality, 9, 160, 161, 163, 177, 178

W Wallabies, 113, 116, 117

189

Walsh, Kristina, 34, 48, 49, 51 Washington, William, 75 Westinghouse, George, 83, 96, 97 What Is It?, 20–22, 30 Wild West, 73, 87 Wirth Brothers, 66, 76 Wirth, Frank, 71 Wirth, George, 71, 75, 76 Wonders and the Order of Nature, 16 Woodyear, Jenny, 65 Woodyear, Madame, 86, 87 Woodyear’s Electric Circus, 65, 86 World’s Columbian Exhibition, 83 World’s Fairs, 26, 27, 83, 93–95, 98 Z Zampillaerostation, 103 Zementov Troupe, 114 Zip, 20, 22, 30 Zoetrope, 148