The Routledge Circus Studies Reader 2015030586, 9781138915435, 9781138125353

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The Routledge Circus Studies Reader

The Routledge Circus Studies Reader offers an absorbing critical introduc­ tion to this diverse and emerging field. It brings together the work of over 30 scholars in this discipline, including Janet Davis, Helen Stoddart and Peta Tait, to highlight and address the field’s key historical, critical and theoretical issues. It is organised into three accessible sections, Perspectives, Precedents and Presents, which approach historical aspects, current issues, and the future of circus performance. The chapters, grouped together into 13 theme-based sub-sections, provide a clear entry point into the field and emphasise the diversity of approaches available to students and scholars of circus studies. Classic accounts of per­ formance, including pieces by Philippe Petit and Friedrich Nietzsche are included alongside more recent scholarship in the field. Edited by two scholars whose work is deeply rooted in the dynamic world of performance, The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is an essential teach­ ing and study resource for the emerging discipline of circus studies. It also provides a stimulating introduction to the field for lovers of circus. Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, a play­ wright and scholar of drama and performance studies. Her books include Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (2005) and Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus (2012). Katie Lavers is a writer, and a director and producer of inter-media circus. She has a doctorate in circus studies and has published numerous articles in the field.

The Routledge Circus Studies Reader

Edited by Peta Tait and Katie Lavers

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 selection and editorial matter, Peta Tait and Katie Lavers; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Peta Tait and Katie Lavers to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data The Routledge Circus Studies Reader / edited by Peta Tait and Katie Lavers. First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Circus. I. Tait, Peta and Lavers, Katie

GV1801.R68 2016

791.3–dc23

2015030586

ISBN: 978-1-138-91543-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-12535-3 (pbk) Typeset in Sabon by Sunrise Setting Ltd, Paignton, UK

Contents

List of illustrations List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: circus perspectives, precedents and presents

x xii xxiii 1

PETA TAIT AND KATIE LAVERS

PART I

Perspectives Aesthetics 1 Aesthetics

13 13 15

HELEN STODDART

2 The staging of actions: heroes, antiheroes and animal actors

37

PAUL BOUISSAC

3 An epic of new circus

50

MARTINE MALEVAL, translated by JANE MULLETT

4 The man in the red coat: management in the circus

65

RON BEADLE AND DAVID KÖNYÖT

The clown 5 Clowns and clown play LOUISE PEACOCK

79 81

vi

Contents

6 Diminutive catastrophe: clown’s play

105

MAGGI PHILLIPS

Cross-arts 7 Circus music: the eye of the ear

115 117

KIM BASTON

8 Art and androgyny: the aerialist

136

NAOMI RITTER

9 When the future was now: Archaos within a theatre tradition

153

ROBERTA MOCK

Gender and sexuality 10 Respectable female nudity

171 173

JANET M. DAVIS

11 A queer circus: Amok in New York

198

MARK SUSSMAN

Race 12 Celebrated, then implied but finally denied: the erosion of Aboriginal identity in Australian circus, 1850s to 1950s

207

209

MARK ST LEON

Sideshows 13 Freaks of culture: institutions, publics and the subjects of ethnographic knowledge

235

237

RACHEL ADAMS

14 The Jim Rose Circus Side Show: representing the postmodern body in pain CARRIE SANDAHL

269

Contents

Child performers 15 Sensational imbalance: the child acrobat and the mid-Victorians

vii

277

279

BRENDA ASSAEL

Spectators 16 Ecstasy and visceral flesh in motion

297 299

PETA TAIT

17 Marginal body: the British acrobat in reference to sport

313

YORAM S. CARMELI

PART II

Precedents

329

Origins

329

18 The circus and nature in late Georgian England

331

MARIUS KWINT

19 The American circus

349

DON B. WILMETH

20 P.T. Barnum: the legend and the man

359

A.H. SAXON

21 Notes on the Mexican–American circus

377

NICOLÁS KANELLOS

22 The circus and modernity: a commitment to ‘the newer’ and ‘the newest’

386

GILLIAN ARRIGHI

Politics 23 Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War TRACY YING ZHANG

403

405

viii

Contents

24 When pigs could fly and bears could dance: a peculiar institution

430

MIRIAM NEIRICK

25 A contemporary history of circus arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina: the post-dictatorial resurgence and revaluation of circus as a popular art

434

JULIETA INFANTINO

Physical exceptionalism 26 To reach the clouds: my high-wire walk between the Twin Towers

453

455

PHILIPPE PETIT

27 Thus Spoke Zarathustra

461

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, translated by R.J. HOLLINGDALE

Animal performers 28 Why circuses are unsuited to elephants

467 469

LORI ALWARD

29 View from the big top: why elephants belong in North American circuses

489

DENNIS SCHMITT

PART III

Presents

497

30 Female circus performers and art: the shift to creative art forms and its implications

499

MAGALI SIZORN

31 The resilient body in social circus: Father Jesus Silva, Boris Cyrulnik and Peter A. Levine

508

KATIE LAVERS

32 Risk, danger and other paradoxes in circus and Circus Oz parody PETA TAIT

528

Contents

33 The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas: an American strip-tease

ix

546

LOUIS PATRICK LEROUX

34 Contemporary Nordic circus: introduction to the art form

553

TOMI PUROVAARA

35 Contemporary circus research in Québec: building and negotiating an emerging interdisciplinary field

560

LOUIS PATRICK LEROUX

Selected Bibliography Index

572 611

Illustrations

3.1a–c Cirque Plume, Salins, France, 1998 4.1 David Könyöt, Ringmaster Circus Hassani, Chessington

World of Adventure, 1981 5.1 Three Brothers Fratellini 8.1 Acrobate sur la Balle (Acrobat on a Ball), Artist: Pablo

Picasso, 1905 9.1a–c Archaos 10.1 Living statues, c.1903 10.2 May Wirth, c. 1924–7 10.3 Great groups of trained wild beasts,

Barnum & Bailey, 1915 10.4 L’Auto Bolide, Barnum & Bailey, 1905 11.1 Circus Amok, 2008, New York City 12.1 Con Colleano, circa 1922–3 in Australia 12.2 Con Colleano, with his wife, formerly known as

Winnie Trevail the vaudeville singer and dancer,

circa 1930 in USA or Europe 12.3 Con Colleano, circa 1936 in USA or Europe 13.1 Souvenir portrait of Ota Benga at the Saint Louis

Exposition 14.1 Slug the Enigma in the Jim Rose Circus Side Show 15.1 El Nino Farini, circa 1860s 15.2 The Little Acrobat And His Mother, 1872 18.1 Astley’s Amphitheatre, 1807 18.2 Andrew Ducrow, Royal Amphitheatre, 1823 21.1 The García Sisters chorus line from the Carpa García 22.1 FitzGerald Brothers’ New Continental Shows Circus

and Menagerie, 1900 23.1 A woman juggler performs yangge, 1965 23.2 Four men perform the single bar act, 1964 23.3 A revolutionary acrobatic play, Shanghai, 1967

58

65

82

140

154

174

181

189

190

199

221

224

225

244

269

282

285

333

339

384

387

412

412

414

Illustrations xi

25.1 25.2 25.3 25.4 26.1a–d 29.1 31.1 31.2 31.3 32.1 33.1 33.2 33.3 35.1 35.2

Family Videla in ‘Juan Moreira’ Circo Social del Sur, circa mid-1990s Chacovachi in Circo Vachi Circo Social del Sur, Graduation Show, 2015 Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers of the

World Trade Center, 1974 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey elephants Zip Zap Circus School, Cape Town, South Africa Machincuepa, Mexico Cirqiniq, Nunavik, Québec Circus Oz, the flying trapeze cockatoo act, 2005 Cirque du Soleil, the storm scene in KÀ Cirque du Soleil, the boat scene in O Cirque du Soleil, the extravaganza tableau in Zumanity 7 doigts de la main, Fibonacci Project Marion Guyez in “Inacheveux”

438

440

441

448

456

492

521

523

524

535

548

549

550

564

567

Contributors

Rachel Adams is Professor of English and American Studies at Columbia University, where she also directs the Center for the Study of Social Difference. Her most recent book is Raising Henry: A Memoir of Motherhood, Disability, and Discovery (Yale University Press, 2013), which won the Delta Kappa Gamma Educator’s Award. She is also author of Continental Divides: Remapping the Cultures of North America (University of Chicago Press, 2009) and Sideshow U.S.A.: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagination (University of Chicago Press, 2001). She is co-editor of Keywords for Disability Studies (New York University Press, 2015) and The Masculinity Studies Reader (Wiley, 2001). Her arti­ cles have appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, American Quarterly, Signs, Yale Journal of Criticism, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. She has also written for The New York Times, Salon, and The Times (London) and blogs for The Huffington Post. In 2010 she was the recipient of the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award. Lori Alward is a philosopher and the author of ‘Why circuses are unsuited to elephants’ in Elephants and Ethics: Toward a Morality of Coexistence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). Gillian Arrighi is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research has been published in numerous journals including Theatre Journal (on performing animals) and Australasian Drama Studies (on circus history and on teaching devised performance), New Theatre Quarterly (on children and the entertainment industry) and in edited collections on topics including early twentieth cen­ tury amusement parks, and the social construction of archives. Current research includes an investigation into the contribution of children to the global entertainment industry, and an expanding investigation into global ‘youth’ and ‘social’ circus. She is associate editor of the scholarly e-journal, Popular Entertainment Studies, and her recent book (co-edited

Contributors

xiii

with Victor Emeljanow) is Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Her monograph, The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: Spectacle, Identity and Nationhood at the Australian Circus is published by Australian Scholarly Publishing (2015). Brenda Assael is a cultural and social historian of nineteenth and early twen­ tieth century Britain. Her monograph, The Circus and Victorian Society, was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2005. She contributed fourteen entries on circus performers and impresarios to the New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and a chapter on the American circus in Victorian Britain to the Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press edited collection on The American Circus (2012). She is currently work­ ing on a history of the London restaurant between 1840 and 1914, and her article ‘Gastro-cosmopolitanism and the Restaurant in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’ appeared in Historical Journal in 2013. Kim Baston has spent many years working as an actor, director and composer in theatre, circus and film, in the UK and in Australia. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, and also lectures on circus history and culture at the National Institute of Circus Arts (NICA) in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include popular entertainments in the eighteenth century, postmodern cir­ cus, and the intersection of music and theatre. Her recent publications include ‘And now, before your very eyes: The Circus Act and the Archive’ in Performing Digital: Multiple Perspectives on a Living Archive (Ashgate, 2015); ‘Harlequin highlander: spectacular geographies at the Edinburgh Equestrian Circus, 1790–1800’ in Early Popular Visual Culture (2014) and ‘Transatlantic journeys: John Bill Ricketts and the Edinburgh Equestrian Circus’ in Popular Entertainment Studies (2013). Ron Beadle is Professor of Organization and Business Ethics at Northumbria University, UK and convenes The Circus Research Network (Britain and Ireland). His work on virtue ethics has been published in world leading journals including Business Ethics Quarterly, The Journal of Business Ethics and Organization Studies. His empirical research has focused on traditional circuses as working and living communities in which virtues are developed and tested; his current research is extending these studies to both contemporary and social circus. He has presented his work on circus to a variety of international audiences including the Montreal Working Group on Circus Research. Ron is a descend­ ent of the Hungarian Könyöt circus family and is the brother of David Könyöt.

xiv

Contributors

Paul Bouissac is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto (Victoria College). Born and educated in France, he holds a doctorate in linguis­ tics (semiotics) from the University of Paris – Sorbonne. He has pub­ lished numerous articles and book chapters on linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology. He is the author of several books dealing with circus top­ ics: La mesure des gestes (Mouton, 1973), Circus and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1976), Semiotics at the Circus (de Gruyter, 2010), Circus as Multimodal Discourse (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), and Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). He edited the Oxford University Press Encyclopedia of Semiotics (1998). He is cur­ rently engaged in research toward a new work entitled A Circus Memoir. Yoram S. Carmeli is Emeritus Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Haifa, Israel. Since his dissertation, which was based on an ethnographic field study he carried out as a par­ ticipant observer and clown in a British family circus (1975–9, 2002–3), Carmeli has contributed extensively to the field of circus research. Among his publications are analyses of travelling circus, popular circus litera­ ture, circus family life as well as interpretations of particular traditional circus acts, such as acrobatics, clowning, animal acts and images of ‘cru­ elty to animals’ in the circus. In addition to his scholarly work, Carmeli contributes as an expert to the European Colloquium on Circus Culture in Wiesbaden, Germany and teaches at the University of Haifa medical clowns programme. Together with Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli, he has also researched social and political aspects of new reproductive technolo­ gies. Additionally, he has studied the sociology of sport and politics and co-edited, with Kalman Appelbaum, an essay collection on consumption and market-driven society in Israel. Janet M. Davis teaches American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her publications include The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (University of North Carolina Press, 2002), Circus Queen and Tinker Bell: The Life of Tiny Kline (University of Illinois Press, 2008), and The Gospel of Kindness: Animal Welfare and the Making of Modern America (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Her article, ‘Cockfight nationalism: blood sport and the moral politics of empire and nation building’ won the 2014 Constance M. Rourke Prize for the best article published in American Quarterly. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Title VI Program-FLAS in Hindi; the American Association of University Women; and University of Texas-Austin. The Circus Age was a recipi­ ent of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award and the Robert W. Hamilton Book Award. Davis regularly serves as a consultant for muse­ ums and documentary films and her opinion pieces have been published in The New York Times.

Contributors

xv

Julieta Infantino is a Professor at the University of Buenos Aires where she serves as a researcher for the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). She belongs to several research teams linked to the study of popular culture, folklore, heritage and youth practices. She has published books, compilations, and articles in national and international journals. She specializes in the study of Youth, Arts (circus) and Cultural Policy. Her recent publications include: Buenos Aires Circus: Culture, Youth and Politics in Dispute (Buenos Aires: INT (Instituto Nacional del Teatro)), ‘The generational issue from an ethnographic approach. Young circus artists in Buenos Aires’ in Revista Ultima Década (2013), and ‘The Circus of Buenos Aires and its practices: disputed definitions’ in ILHA Journal of Anthropology (2013). Nicolás Kanellos has been a Professor at the University of Houston since 1980. He is founding publisher of the noted Hispanic literary journal The Americas Review (formerly Revista Chicano-Riqueña) and founded Arte Público Press, the nation’s oldest and most esteemed Hispanic publishing house. Arte Público Press is the largest, non-profit publisher of literature by Hispanic authors in the United States. Recognized for his scholarly achievement, awards include the 1996 Denali Press Award of the American Library Association, the 1989 American Book Award Publisher/Editor Category, and the 1988 Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature presented by the White House. His monograph, A History of Hispanic Theater in the United States: Origins to 1940 (University of Texas Press, 1990), received three book awards, including that of the Southwest Council on Latin American Studies. His latest book, Hispanic Immigrant Literature: El Sueño del Retorno (University of Texas Press, 2011), won the PEN Southwest Award for Non-Fiction. In 2008 he was elected to the Spanish American Royal Academy of Literature, Arts and Sciences. David Könyöt is an award-winning clown, ringmaster and producer who is now in his seventh decade of work in traditional circus. His work includes the Circus World Championships in London during the 1970s and he has performed to audiences in Germany, China, Norway, Hong Kong, Monaco, Spain, France, Ireland, and in the United Arab Emirates amongst other places. His career on stage and in stand-up comedy included the lead in the West End production of Pyjama Tops. He is one of the twenty clowns included in the Routledge publication, Clowns: In Conversation with Modern Masters published in 2015. He recently pub­ lished his memoir A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to… (Blurb, 2015). David is a descendent of the Hungarian Könyöt circus family and is the brother of Ron Beadle. Marius Kwint is a cultural historian with a particular interest in the inter­ section between visual culture, science, and the arts. His doctoral thesis

xvi

Contributors

at the University of Oxford, UK was on the Circus in Georgian England, and this work informed his chapter for The Cambridge Companion to Theatre History (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He lectured and ran postgraduate research in History of Art at the University of Oxford for nearly ten years, and was elected Fellow of St Catherine’s College. In 2008 he joined the University of Portsmouth, UK where he is now Reader in Visual Culture. Much of his recent research work has been based on art exhibitions. He was guest curator for the exhibition Brains: the Mind as Matter on the history and practice of neuroscience, at the Wellcome Collection in London in 2012, and co-curator with Sundaram Tagore for the art exhibition Frontiers Reimagined at the Museo di Palazzo Grimani, an official collateral event of the Venice Art Biennale 2015. He has held research fellowships at Harvard University in the USA, and also at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England. Katie Lavers is a writer, academic and creative producer. She has a doctor­ ate in circus studies and is a founding director of the Australian Circus Arts Research Network and has presented her research work on circus in Canada, the USA and Australia. She is a creative producer and direc­ tor of inter-media performance works combining dance, theatre and circus. Her performance works have toured throughout Australasia to major international arts festivals including the Sydney Festival, the Perth International Arts Festival, and the Shanghai China International Arts Festival. Her recent publications include ‘The political body in contem­ porary circus: Philippe Petit and Philippe Ménard’, Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts (2014), ‘Cirque du Soleil and its roots in illegitimate circus’, M/C Journal (2014) and ‘Horses in Modern, New, and Contemporary Circus’, Animal Studies Journal (2015). She is cur­ rently writing a new book on contemporary circus. Louis Patrick Leroux is an Associate Professor at Concordia University and Associate Researcher at the National Circus School of Montreal where he also teaches performance history and aesthetics. He is the founding direc­ tor of the Montreal Working Group on Circus Research and the instigator of the Transnational Transdisciplinary Circus Research Network. He has conducted funded research into the Cirque du Soleil’s impact on Las Vegas and North American cultural industries, Health Equity and the discourse of Social Circus in Ecuador, the State and Conditions of Circus Research in Québec and North America, and circus dramaturgy and creative proc­ ess with the National Circus School of Montreal and 7 fingers. Recent scholarly collections include Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, coedited with Charles Batson (McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming), ‘North–South Circus Circulations’ edited issue of

Contributors

xvii

Québec Studies (2014), and Le jeu des positions. Discours du théâtre québécois with Hervé Guay (Nota Bene, 2014). Martine Maleval has a doctorate in Aesthetics, Sciences and Arts-Based Technologies. She is a Lecturer at the Université de Lorraine and is an Affiliated Researcher at Université de Paris 8’s Scènes du monde, créa­ tion, savoirs critiques research laboratory. She has taught classes at the CNAC, Centre National des Arts du Cirque, in Châlons-en-Champagne. She has written extensively on contemporary circus, physical theatre, street theatre and contemporary dance in a number of journals and edited collections. Her own books include: L’Emergence du nouveau cirque, 1968–1998 (L’Harmattan, 2010), Archaos, cirque de caractère (co-publi­ cation between Actes Sud and CNAC, 2010), and Sur la piste des cirques actuels (L’Harmattan, 2014). She is the co-editor of L’Harmattan’s book series Arts Vivants, part of the Ouverture philosophique imprint. Roberta Mock is Professor of Performance Studies and Director of the Creative Arts and Humanities Research Institute at Plymouth University, UK. She is also the co-director of the AHRC-funded 3D3 Centre for Doctoral Training in the digital arts and performance. She is the author of Jewish Women on Stage, Film and Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and has edited a range of collaborative publications including Performing Processes: Creating Live Performance (University of Chicago Press, 2000), Walking, Writing and Performance: Autobiographical Texts by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith (University of Chicago Press, 2009), Performance, Embodiment and Cultural Memory (with Colin Counsell, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and a special issue on ‘Zombies and performance’ for the journal, Studies in Theatre and Performance (with Lee Miller and Phil Smith, 2014). Her written and practice-led research focuses on the body, gender and sexual­ ity, particularly as it relates to live art and comic performance by women. Her writing has been published in journals including Feminist Review, New Theatre Quarterly, Contemporary Theatre Review, Performance Research and Women and Performance. Jane Mullett has been an aerialist, musician and rigger with Circus Oz and Director of Training at the Flying Fruit Fly Circus. She initiated the devel­ opment of the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne. Her doc­ torate investigated why ‘new’ circus arose in Australia, France and the USA during the 1970s. She was part of the early development team of the ‘Circus Oz Living Archive’. Currently she is a Research Fellow with the Climate Change Adaptation Program, within the Global Cities Research Institute at RMIT University. Her work concentrates on adaptation to a changing climate; particularly the resilience of critical infrastructure and how climate change can be best communicated.

xviii

Contributors

Miriam Neirick is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at California State University, where she teaches courses on Russian History, Women’s History, and the History of Popular Culture. She received her BA in History with a minor in Art History from Wellesley College, and went on to earn her MA and PhD in History, with a focus on Soviet cultural history, from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of When Pigs Could Fly and Bears Could Dance: A History of the Soviet Circus (University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). Friedrick Nietzsche (1844–1900) the influential German philosopher and classical scholar was Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, Switzerland. His first book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music was published in 1872. His other books include Human, All Too Human first published in 1878, Thus Spake Zarathustra published in four parts between 1883 and1885, Good and Evil first published in 1886, and On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols both published in 1889. Louise Peacock is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Theatre Practice at the University of Hull. She is the author of Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance (Intellect, 2009) and Slapstick and Comic Performance: Comedy and Pain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has written articles for scholarly journals and book chapters on slapstick, clowning, com­ media and stand-up comedy. She is currently working on Fifty Years of British Stage Comedy (1965–2015), which is due for publication in 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan. She is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Comedy Studies Research (Brunel University) and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Comedy Studies. She teaches in the areas of clowning, commedia and stage comedy, and regularly directs produc­ tions of commedia dell’arte scenarios. Philippe Petit is the French high-wire walker who came to international prominence when, in 1974, at the age of twenty-five, he performed on a high-wire rigged between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Man on Wire (2008), an award-winning documentary about his Twin Towers walk, has won numerous awards and gained criti­ cal acclaim. He has since performed multiple high wire walks including a crossing of Niagara Falls in a re-enactment of Blondin’s famous walk. He is artist-in-residence at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City and author of Cheating the Impossible: Ideas and Recipes from a Rebellious High-Wire Artist (TED Books, 2012) and To Reach The Clouds (Faber and Faber, 2003). Maggi Phillips (1944–2015) was Associate Professor and Coordinator of Research and Creative Practice at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts in Perth, Western Australia. Originally trained in ballet,

Contributors

xix

she toured the world as a dancer with Casino de Paris, and later with works by Dois Haug of Moulin Rouge. She also worked as a dancer with Swiss National Circus Knie, where she developed her lifelong love for elephants. In 1974, as Brown’s Mart Community Dance Officer, in the Northern Territory of Australia, she established Darwin Dance Mob. In 1980 she was appointed Director of Dance at Brown’s Mart and formed Feats Unlimited, a professional Dance-in-Education company. After she gained her doctorate, as an academic, Maggi Phillips was a passionate advocate of practice as research, and with Cheryl Stock and Kim Vincs, she co-wrote Dancing between Diversity and Consistency: Refining Assessment in Postgraduate Degrees in Dance, published as an ePrint book by QUT ePrints. In 2010, Maggi Phillips received the Australian Dance Award for Services to Dance Education. Tomi Purovaara is well known internationally for his work on circus. From 2002 to 2012 he served as Managing Director of the Cirko – Center for New Circus in Helsinki and was also one of the founders, and the first Managing Director, of the Finnish Circus Information Center from 2006 to 2011. Since 2006 he has served as an Expert on the EU Culture Program application assessment panel, and currently serves on a number of other committees on performing arts both within Finland and abroad. Since 1993 he has worked widely in the fields of performing arts and lit­ erature as a director, producer and writer, and in 2013 he was appointed Executive Director of the Finnish Reading Centre. He is currently the Director of the International Culture Center, Caisa, which is run by Helsinki City Cultural Office. His most recent book is Conversations on Circus Teaching (Mala Performerska Scene, Croatia, 2014). Naomi Ritter is the author of Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer Since Romanticism (University of Missouri, 1989), and House and Individual: The House Motif in German Literature of the 19th Century (Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur Germanistik) first published in 1977. She is also the editor of the book Death in Venice: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan) first published in 1998. Carrie Sandahl is Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago in the Department of Disability and Human Development. She teaches courses in disability studies, and directs Chicago’s Bodies of Work, an organization that supports the development of disability arts and cul­ ture. Her own research and creative activity focus on disability as it intersects with other aspects of identity (race, class, gender, sexuality) in live performance and film. She has published numerous research arti­ cles and an anthology, co-edited with Philip Auslander, entitled Bodies in

xx

Contributors

Commotion: Disability and Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2005), which garnered the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Outstanding Book in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy in 2006. She is currently collaborating on a feature-length documentary Code of the Freaks, a critique of Hollywood’s representation of disability. She is a former faculty member of the School of Theatre at Florida State University. A.H. Saxon is the author of numerous books and articles on the history of theatre, popular entertainment, and circus. His books on circus include P.T Barnum: The Legend and the Man (Columbia University Press, 1989) and The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow & the Romantic Age of the English Circus (Archon Books, 1978). He also edited The Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum that brought together more than 300 of Barnum’s letters and gave new glimpses into Barnum’s life and character. Some of his draft typescripts along with accompanying material are now held at the Department of Special Collections at the University of California Santa Barbara. Mark St Leon is descended from Australia’s earliest circus and showbusiness family, the Australian roots of which date from 1847. From inquiries into his family’s rich past, Mark pioneered the study of Australia’s circus his­ tory, and he is now the internationally recognised authority on the sub­ ject. His book, Circus: The Australian Story, was published by Melbourne Books in May 2011. He is the author of numerous monographs and arti­ cles on Australia’s circus history and has written biographical entries for eight circus identities for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. He has written an extensive entry on circus in Sydney for the online Dictionary of Sydney, which can be viewed at www.dictionaryofsydney.org. Mark is a freelance university lecturer in Sydney in the field of international business education. Dennis Schmitt is the Ringling Bros. Chair of Veterinary Care, and Director of Research and Conservation, and Professor Emeritus at Missouri State University. He has served as a reproductive advisor for the AZA ele­ phant TAG/SSP management group since 1987. He is on the Board of Directors for the International Elephant Foundation, and is a member of the Asian Elephant Specialist Group of the IUCN. Much of his work with elephants has been as a consultant for medical management and breeding programmes at several zoos and circuses in North America. His work resulted in the first elephant produced by artificial insemination. He is currently coordinating Asian elephant conservation projects funded by Ringling Bros. in Sri Lanka through the Ringling Bros. Center for Asian Elephant Research at Rajarata University in Sri Lanka and at the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation in Polk City, Florida.

Contributors

xxi

Magali Sizorn is Senior Lecturer at the Université de Rouen in the Department of Physical Education and Sports. She has carried out extensive research interviewing circus performers in traditional and contemporary cir­ cus, in particular aerialists in France. She is the author of Trapézistes: Enthnosociologiques d’un cirque en mouvement (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013). Helen Stoddart is a Senior Lecturer at Glasgow University working on post-1945 British literature. She has published widely within film and literary studies on diverse subjects such as authorship theory, Federico Fellini, the Gothic novel, A.L. Kennedy, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, and she is the author of two books: Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester University Press, 2000) and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (Routledge, 2006). Currently she is working on a book-length study of urban spaces in the contemporary British novel which examines the work of writers such as J.G Ballard, China Miéville, Magnus Mills, Nicola Barker, Ali Smith, Zadie Smith and Will Self in the context of contemporary critical thinking on space, affect and the ordinary. Mark Sussman is Associate Dean, Academic Affairs, and Associate Professor of Theatre in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal. He is also a Co-Artistic Director and founder of Great Small Works, a theatre company using traditional, popular, and experimental techniques to address social concerns, based in Brooklyn, New York. In Montreal he is the founder and co-producer of the experimental puppetry cabaret Café Concret. He received his doctorate from the NYU department of Performance Studies in 2000 and his essay ‘Notes on new model theat­ ers’ can be found in the Routledge Companion to Puppetry and Material Performance (2015). Peta Tait is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA), Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Wollongong. She was on the executive of Psi (Performance Studies International) from 2005 to 2009. She is a playwright and an academic scholar of drama and performance stud­ ies. She also publishes on body-based arts and phenomenology, and on cultural languages of emotion and affect. She has authored five scholarly books, and has edited and co-edited two further books. She has written over 50 refereed articles and chapters. Her books include: Performing Emotions (Ashgate, 2002), Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (Routledge, 2005), Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and Fighting Nature: Travelling Menageries, Animal Acts and War Shows (Sydney University Press, 2015).

xxii

Contributors

Don B. Wilmeth, Emeritus Professor (retired 2003) at Brown University, is the author, editor, co-editor, or series editor of over seventy books, includ­ ing the award-winning three-volume Cambridge History of American Theatre and a new edition of the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre, a standard in the field. He is a former president of the American Society for Theatre Research and Dean Emeritus of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre. He has lifetime achievement awards from six profes­ sional organizations. In 2008 Brown University awarded him the most prestigious honour given by the Brown University Library, the William Williams Award, and in 2012 The Theatre Museum (NY) presented him with its Theatre History Preservation Award. In 2015 the University of Illinois (PhD, 1964) awarded him its Alumni Achievement Award. He is currently editor of Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Theatre and Performance History series. Tracy Ying Zhang is a Bader postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada. Her research is situated in the fields of critical media studies and feminist political economy, focusing specifically on issues of labour, nationalism, and cul­ tural production in diverse social contexts. Her ongoing research exam­ ines Chinese acrobatics as both an institution and a cultural medium. She traces how acrobatics evolved from a popular entertainment to a socialist performing art, and finally to one of China’s most profitable cultural exports. In 2015, she was selected as a young star researcher by the Fonds de recherche du Québec, and won the award for the best original research paper from the Society and Culture Funds.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank all the contributors and their publishers for their co-operation and assistance with the compilation of this Routledge Circus Studies Reader and for the generous efforts to update contributions. We also sincerely thank all those people who were contacted in the course of compiling this volume. We are grateful for the valuable research assistance provided by Dr Rosemary Farrell. A big thank you to the La Trobe University and the DRP English and Theatre and Drama research grant which provided additional financial support for book chapters to be included. Additional research on risk and for the Reader has been assisted by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant ‘Circus Oz Living Archive’, LP100200118, 2010–14. We would like to thank the Associate Editor Jon Burtt for all his work during the final stages of production. We would also like to thank Ben Pig­ gott at Routledge for his encouragement, support and advice. Peta Tait would like to thank Annie McGuigan for her thoughtful support and express her gratitude to artists and colleagues from the circus worlds including the Circus Oz Living Archive team who continue to enrich her understanding of the form. The publishers wish to thank the following for their permission to publish work in full or as extracts: Helen Stoddart, 2000, Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 79–114. Paul Bouissac, 2012, ‘Staging of actions: heroes, antiheroes and animal actors’, Circus as Multimodal Discourse, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 92–103. © Paul Bouissac. Martine Maleval, 2002, ‘An epic of new circus’, translated by Jane Mullett, Australasian Drama Studies 41: 63–76. Ron Beadle and David Könyöt, 2006, ‘The man in the red coat: management in the circus’, Culture and Organization 12(2): 127–37. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com.

xxiv Acknowledgements Louise Peacock, 2009, Serious Play: Modern Clown Performance, Bristol, UK: Intellect, pp. 19–39. Anna Lise Phillips, for Maggi Phillips, 2013, ‘Diminutive catastrophe: clown’s play’, M/C Journal 16. Online publication. Available at http://journal.media-culture.org. au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle606. Kim Baston, 2010, ‘Circus music: the eye of the ear’, Popular Entertainment Studies 1(2): 6–26. Naomi Ritter, 1989, ‘Art and androgyny: the aerialist’, Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 13(2): 173–93. Roberta Mock, 1994, ‘When the future was now: Archaos within a theatre tradi­ tion’, Massacre 5: 95–116. Updated version. Janet M. Davis, 2002, The Circus Age: Culture And Society Under The American Big Top, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, pp. 82–117. © 2002 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher, www.uncpress.unc.edu. Mark Sussman, 1998, ‘A queer circus: Amok in New York’, in Jan Cohen-Cruz (ed.), Radical Street Performance, pp. 262–70. London: Routledge. Mark St Leon, 2008, ‘Celebrated at first, then implied and finally denied: the erosion of Aboriginal identity in circus, 1851–1960’, Aboriginal History 32: 63–81. Rachel Adams, 2001, Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American Cultural Imagina­ tion, pp. 25–59, reproduced with permission of Rachel Adams and The Univer­ sity of Chicago Press, London, © 2001 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Carrie Sandahl, 1994, ‘The Jim Rose Circus Side Show: representing the postmodern body in pain’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 8(2): 193–201. Brenda Assael, 2005, The Circus and Victorian Society, Charlottesville, VA: Uni­ versity of Virginia Press, pp. 136–52. © 2005 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. Reprinted by kind permission of the University of Virginia Press. Peta Tait, 2005, Circus Bodies, Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, London: Routledge, pp. 141–52. Yoram S. Carmeli, 1996, ‘Marginal body and bourgeois cosmology: the British acrobat in reference to sport’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology 37(3&4): 252–73. Marius Kwint, 2002, ‘The circus and nature in late Georgian England’, in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Histories of Leisure, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, pp. 45–60. © Marius Kwint. Don B. Wilmeth, 1982, Variety Entertainment and Outdoor Amusements: A Refer­ ence Guide, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press pp. 48–75. A.H. Saxon, 1989, P.T. Barnum: the Legend and the Man, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 231–44. © 1989 Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. Nicolás Kanellos, 1984, ‘A brief overview of the Mexican–American circus in the Southwest, The Journal of Popular Culture 18(2): 77–84. Gillian Arrighi, 2012, ‘The circus and modernity: a commitment to “the newer” and “the newest”’, Gillian Arrighi, Early Popular Visual Culture, 10(2): 169–85. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com.

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Tracy Ying Zhang, 2014, ‘Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War’, International Journal of Cultural Pol­ icy, (2014): 1–24. Online publication available at www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ 10.1080/10286632.2014.956665. Miriam Neirick, 2012, When Pigs Could Fly And Bears Could Dance, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 216–19. © 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Reprinted by permission of the University of Wisconsin Press. Julieta Infantino, 2015, ‘A contemporary history of circus arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina: the post-dictatorial resurgence and revaluation of circus as a popular art’, Popular Entertainment Studies 6(1): 42–61. Philippe Petit, 2003, To Reach The Clouds London: Faber and Faber, pp. 163–75. R.J. Hollingdale, 1961, translation of Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, UK: Penguin Books, pp. 41–9. Lori Alward, ‘Why circuses are unsuited to elephants,’ and Dennis Schmitt, ‘View from the big top: why elephants belong in North American circuses,’ in Christen Wemmer and Catherine A. Christen (eds), 2008, Foreword by John Seidensticker. Elephants and Ethics: Towards a Morality of Coexistence, pp. 205–24, 227–34, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Magali Sizorn, 2011, ‘Female circus performers and art: the shift to creative author­ ship and its implications’, in Ivan Kralj (ed.), Zene and Cirkus, Women and Cir­ cus, pp. 75–93, Zagreb: Mala performerska scena. Republished with permission of Ivan Kralj. Katie Lavers, 2014, ‘The resilient body in social circus: Father Jesus Silva, Boris Cyrulnik and Peter A. Levine’, The International Journal of Arts Education 8(3): 47–55. Updated version. Peta Tait, ‘Risk, danger and other paradoxes in circus and Circus Oz parody’. Written for this publication. Louis Patrick Leroux, 2008, ‘The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas: an American strip-tease’, Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses 16: 121–6. Tomi Purovaara, 2012, ‘Part IV – Introduction,’ in Tomi Purovaara with Camilla Damkjær, Stine Degerbøl, Kiki Muukkonen, Katrien Verwilt, Sverre Waage, An Introduction to Contemporary Circus, Stockholm: STUTS, pp. 147–53, pp. 167–9. Reproduced with permission of the publisher. Louis Patrick Leroux, 2014, ‘Contemporary circus research in Québec: building and negotiating an emerging interdisciplinary field’, Theatre Research in Canada 35(2): 263–79.

Please note chapters retain the referencing styles of their original publications including their citation and pagination requirements.

Introduction Circus perspectives, precedents and presents Peta Tait and Katie Lavers

The Routledge Circus Studies Reader presents important innovative analysis of traditional and contemporary animal-free circus. Circus can be recognized in performances ranging from solo street performance with minimal staging to large visual spectacles with music, costumed choreography and techno­ logical effects. The diversity of this popular performance form makes it one of the most exciting and fascinating areas of cultural activity to explore and to analyse for its contribution to society. Readers are invited to consider how circus performance is artistic and ath­ letic, comic and serious, professionally specialized and community based. Acrobatic circus arts are displays of dexterity, precision, physical dynamism and artistic inventiveness. At the same time circus both reflects and influ­ ences a myriad of social practices and ideas: from ritual to spectacle; from transgressive gender, racial and queer sexual identities to the blurring of species identity; from sport to social activism; from philosophical questions to the politics of the nation state; and from modernist technological advance to the twenty-first century risk society. Circus is quicksilver, protean, and mutable; the qualities of liveness are in effect its essence. It has long fascinated audiences who included other art­ ists, historians and journalists. Research on circus offers a rich specialized tradition and Raymond Toole-Stott (1958–71) compiled the historical com­ mentary about circus into a four-volume encyclopedic bibliography. While acknowledging this invaluable legacy, this book is not primarily a circus history. Instead it sets out to expand a reader’s understanding of ways of interpreting circus, past and present, in order to facilitate the expansion of circus arts and their interpretation and study. The chapters in this volume encourage recognition of the circus as mean­ ingful as well as entertaining, indicative of cultural trends, advances and preoccupations. They are selected from a large field for their distinctive approaches. In addition each chapter offers multiple leads to those interested in pursuing further reading and study. Chapters draw on cultural theory to expand the study of circus, and thereby, in turn, enlarge the study of culture.

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Peta Tait and Katie Lavers

Performing definitions The introduction reflects the ongoing exchange between the editors, who hope to convey a sense of the dynamic vitality of the circus form and to stimulate further discussion. The emergence of contemporary circus as a radical art form during the 1970s expanded the places and spaces in which circus arts could be found. Circus was changing. Although many prefer to nostalgically remember an entity of the past, with a few exceptions, this new circus rejected animal acts and therefore the absence of the horses, lions, tigers and elephants emblematic of the traditional twentieth-century circus necessitates an updated definition. One possibility that emerges is that circus reveals itself to be about the human body exploring its physical potential in artistic ways. The word ‘circus’ originated in Greco-Roman usage to mean place or shape. Yet today circus is understood to be a cultural institution as Kenneth Ames recently explains: ‘Although circus promoters traded on the difference and distance of their product from the quotidian world, the circus shared corporate organizational structure and practice’ (Ames 2012: 11–2). The travelling circus had to be highly organized in order to present imagina­ tive worlds. Paul Bouissac, however, approaches circus through perform­ ance analysis, and he explains that ‘the circus is a language’ communicating through codes like those used in society, except that circus sets up a ‘meta­ cultural discourse’ in which ‘some of the cultural elements are combined differently in the system of the circus than in the corresponding everyday instances’ (Bouissac 1976: 5, 8). In a different approach again, Ernest Albre­ cht writes of the artistic motivation of the 1970s circus movement and the Pickle Family Circus and Big Apple Circus that ‘the people who create cir­ cuses of the New American Circus are philosophers and ideologues as well as showmen. They saw circus as high art’ (Albrecht 1995: 8). The imagina­ tive worlds of contemporary circus attract idealists and artists. In searching for a unifying definition to accommodate this diverse per­ formance form, Peta Tait contends that circus is a body-based perform­ ance that is artistic and acrobatic and distinguished by specialized apparatus ranging from weight-bearing belts and mats to complex rigging. Skilled physical action with recognizable equipment sets circus apart from other body-based performance such as physical theatre and dance. By the turn of the twenty-first century the circus is broadly categorized as ‘traditional’ circus, ‘new’ or ‘contemporary’ post-1970s animal-free circus, and educa­ tional community-based ‘social’ circus. These three categories can be further qualified according to historical, aesthetic, company and geographical and/ or national differences. Katie Lavers finds an inherent paradox involved in the process of defin­ ing circus because it seems to be an art form that actively resists contain­ ment through its elemental process of change. As soon as one attempts to

Introduction

3

set boundaries that define or categorize the circus, it mutates, chafes at limitations and transforms itself. When a definition of circus is set up, it invites contestation. The editors both pragmatically agree, however, that the art form requires a reliable definition for its continuation and public prominence. Perhaps our efforts to define circus should describe the component circus skills rather than summarize one entity. Circus performers build on a base of acrobatic training to condition the body and develop/extend physical skills through constant practice and repetition to learn techniques of balancing, tumbling, juggling and object manipulation and to use apparatus on the ground or in the air in order to create an act. Acts have a recognizable repertoire of physi­ cal skills arranged in distinctive patterns. Programmed together these create the traditional circus. Athletic skills and carnivalesque clowning that were once passed down through the generations in a circus (family) business can be learnt now in circus schools and universities. Does this idea of circus acts shaped by recognizable skills continue to be accurate? Throughout the twentieth century, a professional circus act involved highly specialized action with a top tier of feats at the outer lim­ its of physical capacity. The art of the performance required the seamless integration of the muscular action and the apparatus so that the act looked effortless. By the twenty-first century, however, the theatrical qualities of the performance have begun to outweigh athletic striving for feats so that a distinctive act or even the underlying physical skills can be presented in such a way that these are not clearly distinguishable and even the interpretation of circus comedy can be complex. This means that identifiable patterns of skills in acts have become unreliable markers of the circus. Perhaps a definition should instead take into account the wider context? As an institution, circus existed on the social margins and this marginality provided major symbolism within society (e.g. Bouissac 1976). Inspiring visual artists from Degas to Picasso and Chagall, and writers from Kafka to Australian Katharine Susannah Prichard, circus lives are depicted in thou­ sands of books, and over a thousand films including those directed by Fellini and Wim Wenders (e.g. Gustafson 2001). Twenty-first century circus spans family grouping to performance ensembles whose members have a degree in circus arts. The fascinations of art and literature with the traditional circus linger but seem insufficient if not outmoded for a current definition. Therefore does a definition need to acknowledge an unfolding process of change? The broad notion of change evokes the Euro-American circus that originated in England as a largely family business and soon spread to France, Russia and North America (e.g. Speaight 1980b), and then throughout the British colonies as it travelled the nineteenth-century sea trade routes. Even core circus skills, such as acrobatics, clowning and aerial rope-walking, existed long before they were integrated into Astley’s Circus.

4

Peta Tait and Katie Lavers

Was it even possible to identify a separate form in the performance that called itself circus as it emerged at Astley’s and the Royal Circus in the eighteenth century? It evolved out of innovative trick horse-riding by ex-cavalryman Philip Astley, in 1768 in Lambeth, London, and interspersed traditional fairground acts such as clowning, rope-walking and juggling in order to keep spectators amused during the changeover between riding acts in a newly created circular space with spectators seated all around (e.g. Saxon 1968). Circus audiences crossed social classes as the performance blurred the distinction between horse racing, leisure gardens displays and disreputable acts from travelling fairs. It quickly expanded to include theat­ rical pantomime and horses in hippodrama. In addition Astley’s meticulous equestrian choreography soon included visual re-enactments of cavalry bat­ tles. A constant process of co-opting other acts and arts may have consti­ tuted the circus programme but it threatens to diffuse our definition into one of variety entertainment. The circus was dominated by equestrian performance for a hundred years after its inception. By the twentieth century, however, larger tents allowed the rigging of equipment for trapeze acts, and the reliable training of big cats and elephants largely by the Bostock and Hagenbeck businesses brought about the advent of animal acts in the large ‘arena cage’ after 1888 (e.g. Joys 1983; Tait 2012). Clowning, also synonymous with the circus, had changed from a clown rider and a speaking clown commenting on mid-nineteenth­ century life and politics to the nonverbal highly energetic, whiteface, rednose clown of the twentieth-century spectacle (e.g. Towsen 1976a). Oh no! Our definition is turning into a history of circus! We need to clarify its distinguishing features instead. The circus incorporated acrobatic traditions from China, Japan and the Middle East, which links it to the long history of acrobatic entertainments globally. Therefore circus is distinguished by the way it was and remains opportunistic and entrepreneurial. Famously, American circus underwent a transformation through the entrepreneurial drive of P.T. Barnum, and tents able to accommodate audiences of up to 12,000 people required larger, more spectacular visual effects (e.g. Hoh and Rough 2004). A robust approach to the business continues in its current manifestations; for example, Cirque du Soleil is a multi-million dollar industry with an annual revenue of $1 billion in 2012 and $850 million in 2013 (see Chapter 33 by Leroux, this volume). This focus on business and opportunism simply reduces circus to eco­ nomics, which is misleading. Circus was always far more than an enter­ tainment business and, through its competitive striving for innovation, it spread globally and influenced cultural practices: from mechanical inven­ tion to transportation, advertising practices to public spectacle, and, particularly importantly, the development of physical training. Highly muscular women led the way in body-fitting clothing decades before it was commonplace in society.

Introduction

5

The contemporary animal-free circus is itself nearly half a century old and coexistent with the traditional circus rather than replacing it as once proposed. The traditional circus and the contemporary circus forms might appear to be set up in opposition to each other, most notably around the absence of animal acts, but this juxtaposition actually reiterates the ways in which the traditional circus form was never static. While contemporary cir­ cus arts might have originated during an era of social change, these can also be considered to have emerged from the innovative and constantly evolving practices that are recognizable throughout circus history. The considerable artistic exchange and the processes of change that happened throughout the two hundred-year history of circus suggest that contemporary circus can be grouped within an evolution of the form. We agree that in glorious moments, circus is about what human physical­ ity can achieve irrespective of gender, ethnicity, race or disability (e.g. Carter 2014) in athletic performances of visually engaging performing arts. What then is the difference between circus and gymnastics or sports? Performers can have backgrounds in sports or gymnastics, and circus arts are compa­ rable to extreme sports. Circus, however, is focused on performance rather than winning a competition, and on engaging, amazing and delighting audi­ ences. But placing too much emphasis on human physicality understates the evocative power of the art form. The mood of a circus performance is also important. Some relatively simple circus acts gain emotional potency through the expressive power of the body, and additionally with the combi­ nation of music, lighting, spatial context and even the use of scripted text. We agree with Pierrot Bidon: the essence of circus is a sense of representing the world through extreme physical action. Bidon, the founder of the iconic Archaos, also introduced an industrial aesthetic into circus when he created circus spectacles circa 1990 in which he replaced the horse with motorbikes, forklifts, and agricultural machinery, arguing that this substitution was in the spirit of circus since machines were the twentieth-century equivalent of the horse (see Chapter 3 by Maleval, this volume). The sideshow that accompa­ nied the traditional circus (e.g. Goodall 2002) also became fully integrated into contemporary circus aesthetics and especially after Archaos performers excelled at presenting a theatrical persona of the sideshow ‘freak’. Circus sensibilities reflect the sublime to the grotesque (e.g. Russo 1994). In another sense, however, it is possible to question if the body in per­ formance needs to be human or even organic. Could these future specta­ cles of the re-imagined body be circus without the human? What would circus achieve if it were about the potentialities of the post-human body, transgenic, cloned or indeed robotic body? This shape-changing creative cir­ cus art form continues to inspire artists, writers, poets, musicians, painters sculptors and film-makers. In the twenty-first century with the emergence of different technologies changing and extending the possibilities of the human body, we may see circus bodies that are more than biological entities.

6

Peta Tait and Katie Lavers

A working definition might be that circus is an art form which explores the aesthetic potential of extreme physical action by bodies (animal, human and post-human) in defiance of cultural identity categories including spe­ cies, and usually performing live with apparatus in big to small enterprises, often with costuming, music or a sound score, lighting, and technological effects including filmed footage. Audiences have an expectation that circus offers extended muscular action and physical expertise with dynamism that exceeds social norms and is framed in ways that will surprise and excite, and circus is particularly focused on direct engagement with audiences. The skills needed to make circus are a unique blend of acrobatic and artistic and, in its immediacy, its liveness, the circus performer places herself/himself at risk, whether perceived or actual.

Approaching twenty-first century circus1 The chapters in The Routledge Circus Studies Reader reveal multiple facets of the mercurial circus form and they have been selected for distinctive and pluralistic perspectives. The volume locates circus arts in relation to the other arts: music, visual art, theatre, cinema, dance and other artistic expression. It reflects geographical diversity as it also encompasses the political uses of circus and ethical strategies behind socially engaged circus. It demonstrates how the analysis of circus can be complex and especially analysis of the oppressive side of circus arising from its close association with ethnographic shows, menageries and sideshows. Chapters are grouped thematically and these thematic groupings are divided into three sections. The first section, Perspectives, presents key concepts for the interpretation and understanding of the circus form and a range of theoretical approaches that can be used to consider the attributes of circus. In the second section, Precedents, historical origins are analysed from the perspective of recent analytical frameworks and to encompass political, geographical and conceptual diversity. The third section, Presents, demonstrates the global reach of contemporary animal-free circus arts with accounts about developments in France, Spain, Australia, the Nordic coun­ tries and Canada and North America, and it briefly introduces some current research processes and studies. The theme of Aesthetics covers both traditional and contemporary cir­ cus. Helen Stoddart’s erudite discussion of circus aesthetics and art versus entertainment draws on important cultural theorists and considers visual effect over thought in performance. She includes Goffman on framing, Wil­ liams on art as work, Brecht on class and Bergson on laughter and she finds common ground in Artaud’s ideas of ritual and the body as a hieroglyphic. Ultimately the reality of circus is the crucial element even with its tran­ scendent impulse and wondrous effect. Paul Bouissac is one of the most esteemed theorists of circus for his semiotic approach to performance and its

Introduction

7

meta-language and he explains how an act’s actions generate a type of nar­ rative to communicate and achieve transformation that corresponds with Algirdas Greimas’s semiotic grid. His examples include acts with clever dog performers whose comedy is reliant on social perceptions of hierarchies of dog breeds. Jane Mullett’s translation of Martine Maleval’s lyrical short his­ tory of the animal-free circus in France is essential reading. It captures the aesthetic spirit of an artistic movement led by Cirque Plume, Archaos and Cirque Baroque. Ron Beadle and David Könyöt are brothers from the Hun­ garian circus Könyöt family and they collaborate to bring together MacIn­ tyre’s theories of ‘practice-based communities’ and Könyöt’s experience as a ringmaster, in their analysis of the organization of the work of performance within traditional travelling circuses in Britain. The Clown offers two divergent approaches. Although acknowledging the ancient roots of clowning, Louise Peacock focuses on the development of traditional types including the whiteface, the auguste and the tramp of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and follows this through to the mime training principles of Jacques Lecoq. Maggi Phillips, however, explains how clowning captures a state of being and embodies a sense of the futility of life combined with glimpses of its ineffable qualities. She juxtaposes dance and the image of a divine dancer-god, as she finds that clowning confronts larger forces of catastrophe and destruction that face humans. Cross-Arts confirms the inseparable connections across the arts. Kim Baston’s important wide-ranging explanation and analysis of how music is central to circus performance gives numerous examples taken from tradi­ tional British, American and Australian circus from the 1780s to the 1950s. It was the selective accompaniment to Chinese and Japanese acrobatic acts, however, that Baston argues exposes the ideology underlying the use of music in circus performance. Naomi Ritter thoughtfully explores how the boyish aerial acrobat had a profound impact on Friedrich Nietzsche, Picasso, and other artists. Jean Cocteau’s first-person description of a fem­ inine man and the perception of gender as a circus illusion by Thomas Mann’s character Krull led both writers to explain art itself as illusion. She notes how the sexual orientation of these artists comes to the fore. Roberta Mock gives a passionate account of being present at a seminal Archaos performance. She finds Archaos’ historical antecedents in Futurism and avant-garde performance and develops her own circus manifesto. In Gender and Sexuality, Janet Davis’s celebratory discussion of gender in circus history explains how circus women became a type of suffragette ‘new woman’ for their athleticism and daring. Circus media, however, went to considerable effort to present their domesticity, normality and respect­ ability to overcome the moral implications of athleticism and scanty cloth­ ing. Mark Sussman conveys the wonderful dynamic energy of bearded-lady, Jennifer Miller, and Circus Amok in New York in the 1990s with its overt queerness and combination of circus, sideshow and outdoor political per­ formance. Miller herself works between sideshow and circus.

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Peta Tait and Katie Lavers

On Race, Mark St Leon tracks leading nineteenth-century black per­ formers as he describes Aboriginal Australians in Australian circus from the 1850s to 1950s. He explores how Aboriginal performers became circus stars and the profound and variable effects of racial identity and ethnic mas­ querade in performance. In the chapters on identity in Sideshows, Rachel Adams examines the phenomenon of the ethnographic show that emerged out of the nineteenthcentury American freak show tradition, and which manifested the tensions between scientific discourse and mass entertainment. Through two promi­ nent turn-of-the-twentieth-century case studies of exhibited individuals, she considers issues of race and cultural attitudes, and their relation to animal exhibition. Carrie Sandahl positions the Jim Rose Circus Side Show as an ironic ‘full-blown revival of the American Freak show’. She proposes that in a contemporary world saturated with Baudrillard’s simulacra and hyper­ media, the emphasis on the performers’ material bodies doing actions that draw blood and cause pain, encourages a sense of witnessing the ‘authentic’ or the ‘real’. In relation to Child Performers in the circus, Brenda Assael’s explora­ tion of conflicted social attitudes in her elegant history of British circus and society reveals that female and child acrobats were condemned by Christian accusations of immorality. Acrobats were considered repulsive and yet pit­ ied in depictions of circus life in literature and especially in the best-selling waif stories. The latter supported legislative bans despite coherent argu­ ments from circus professionals about significant benefits. For Spectators, Peta Tait considers audience responses to bodies in action within the philosophical framework provided by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. She argues that the immediacy of the visceral experience for spectators additionally implicates the recognition of gen­ der and cultural identity in how sensory responses catch aerial bodies in action. Circus and cinema create concurrent histories by presenting bod­ ies in motion, movement and kinaesthetic action. Yoram Carmeli contrasts sports and circus bodies as he discusses real action and ordinariness, the performer as both subject and object, and a chair balancing act that was spruiked as impossible. In Origins, Marius Kwint applies complex theoretical frameworks to the early circus. He starts from anthropological approaches and structuralist cat­ egories and then introduces ideas of how social order became suspended, informed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. He outlines how conceptual approaches to nature and species difference are relevant and notes how the actions of horse performers elicited emotional responses from audiences and notions of the Romantic wildness of nature. Don Wilmeth’s succinct schol­ arly summary of American circus history is followed by an evaluative survey of the available secondary sources and provides an invaluable resource for the serious study of the circus. Although the detailed survey can only be

Introduction

9

partially reproduced in this volume, its books are listed in the bibliography. An extract from A.H. Saxon’s comprehensive biography of showman P.T. Barnum charts his return to the entertainment business in the circus and how Barnum himself was put on show in the ring. The extract captures the drama involved with mounting the new large-scale tent shows that travelled by railroad and took an unbelievable $1 million in 1872, as well as outlin­ ing the public argument between Barnum and Henry Bergh, President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Nikolás Kanellos describes the evolution of Mexican circus from diverse roots in the activities at the Court of Montezuma and the circus-like activities of the Spanish, to English, Italian and Anglo-American influences in the second half of the nineteenth century. Gillian Arrighi explains how, as an increasingly capital-intensive business always promoting the first, the new, and the newest along with a rapid uptake of technological innovations, the nineteenth-century circus presented modernity in action. She draws on Fredric Jameson’s ideas, and historicizes the work of the first circus historian, Thomas Frost. In the section termed Politics, Tracy Zhang explores the question of why the Chinese government selected circus acrobatics as a tool of cultural diplo­ macy, and the implications for the governments and the acrobats involved. Zhang draws on archival data and interviews with the acrobats who per­ formed in the diplomatic missions of the 1950s and 1970s. Miriam Neirick describes how Soviet circus became infused with revolutionary content, and propagated political messages and established legitimating myths. Yet cir­ cus retained elements of play and ambiguity, remaining open to subjective interpretation. Julieta Infantino explores the re-emergence of circus in postdictatorship Argentina in the 1980s, when artists began to draw on elements from Argentina’s popular entertainment heritage in combination with emerg­ ing performance practices. They were developing a new form of socially and politically engaged circus art. Circus performers who become legendary demonstrate the capacity for Physical Exceptionalism. Philippe Petit writes of his personal experience during his high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in 1974. He conveys the intense nature of his experience in lan­ guage which is at times poetic and even mystical. The extract from Friedrich Nietzsche’s work describes how the rope-walker on high seemed like a type of superman to the prophet Zarathustra for having transcended human limi­ tations. The acrobat falls in the narrative but is preserved in memory as an idealized archetypal figure. In Animal Performers, two companion chapters present the arguments for and against the inclusion of elephants in circus, and these are the most controversial of all animal act inclusions. Lori Alward gives a comprehen­ sive evaluation from the perspective of nonhuman animal rights and brings together key thinkers in the field of animal studies who envisage different human–animal relations to explain why elephant acts should be ended.

10

Peta Tait and Katie Lavers

Dennis Schmitt, however, defends elephants in the circus and clearly articu­ lates circus industry arguments for the continuation of these acts. Some elephants only know life in the circus. The section on Presents does not have further thematic divisions although its examples are geographically diverse. Magali Sizorn outlines her extensive interview research into artistic issues among performers in contemporary circus in France. Artists explain circus and gender identity in relation to the shift from traditional circus forms to the creative invention and authorship in contemporary circus. Interestingly, Katie Lavers traces the beginnings of social circus back to Spain in the 1950s and the work of Jesuit priest Father Jesus Silva. She brings together the writings of French psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik and American psychologist Peter Levine to introduce the concept of the resilient body and propose a possible explanation for some of the successes of social circus. Peta Tait explores paradoxical perceptions of risk and the performance of danger by contrasting examples of flying trapeze acts and acts by Australia’s Circus Oz. She finds that Ulrich Beck’s analysis of ‘the global risk society’ coincides with the resurgence of circus arts, as if circus is its most applicable art form. Louis Patrick Leroux explores the range of aesthetics in the Canadian Cirque du Soleil shows in Las Vegas. Leroux discerns a tension in these Cirque productions between the Quebec roots of the directors and the American market of Las Vegas. Tomi Purov­ aara’s comparative summary of contemporary circus arts and organizations in Europe and Scandinavia outlines common qualities but nonetheless iden­ tifies unique companies in, for example, Finland. He envisages considerable expansion as he looks to the future. As a founding member, Louis Patrick Leroux gives a personal account of how the Montreal Working Group on Circus grew into a network of experts from different fields working together to build vocabulary and research stratagems for the relatively new research field of contemporary circus studies. The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is intended for academic and gen­ eral readers, performers and students of circus arts and circus fans to consider the social value of circus. Even when contemporary circus aes­ thetics renounce traditional circus aesthetics including its effortless grace, qualities remain that are unmistakably circus. The form may change but circus is here to stay.

Note 1 We collated the contributions for this volume in 2015, and some of the contrib­ uting authors have sadly passed away since they wrote their chapters. Therefore a number of references and notes in the chapters may not have full details. However, there is sufficient information for readers to source reference details if they wish.

Introduction

11

References Albrecht, Ernest J. (1995) The New American Circus, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida. Ames, Kenneth L. (2012) ‘Introduction: The Circus in America’, in The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth Ames and Matthew Wittmann, New York and New Haven: Bard Graduate Center and Yale University Press: 11–21. Bouissac, Paul. (1976) Circus and Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Carter, Tina. (2014) ‘Dangerous Play: “Supercrip” Aerialists and the Paralympic

Opening Ceremony of London 2012’, About Performance 12 (2012): 83–102.

Goodall, Jane R. (2002) Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, London: Routledge. Gustafson, Donna. (2001) Images from the World Between, Cambridge, MA, and New York: MIT Press and the American Federation of Arts. Hoh, LaVahn G. and Rough, William H. (2004) Step Right Up!: The Adventures of Circus in America, electronic edition, The Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia, available at www.circusinamerica.org/cocoon/ circus/xml (last accessed 12 May 2015). Joys, Joanne Carol. (1983) The Wild Animal Trainer in America, Boulder: Pruett Publishing Co. Russo, Mary. (1994) The Female Grotesque, New York: Routledge. Saxon, A.H. (1968) Enter Foot and Horse, New Haven: Yale University Press. Speaight, George. (1980b) A History of the Circus, London: The Tantivy Press. Tait, Peta. (2012) Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Toole-Stott, Raymond. (1958–71) Circus and Allied Arts, A World Bibliography 1500–1970, Volumes I–IV, Derby: Harpur & Sons. Volume V in manuscript pub­ lication. Towsen, John H. (1976a) Clowns, New York: Hawthorn Books.

Part 1

Perspectives

Aesthetics

Chapter 1

Aesthetics Helen Stoddart

The process of defining the terms of circus aesthetics is very much like, and is linked to, defining its generic identity. Its aesthetic components and their shifting levels of importance in relation to each other have been subject to much change and adaptation according to institutional transformations and technical innovations over the years. At the same time, however, it should still be possible to give a general account of such features which is flexible enough to accommodate historical and cultural fluctuations. One of the key distinctions of which to take account in this respect is between representational and non-representational, mimetic and non-mimetic displays, and these distinctions have a historical context. While the circus before 1782 was an eclectic and opportunistic assemblage of equestrian dis­ play, human and animal tricks and burlesque, the importance of the stage after this, during the so-called Romantic era, transformed the nature of the circus spectacle for a considerable period of time until, under the influence of the American circus in the second half of the nineteenth century, it was in some ways returned to its fairground roots where display took precedence over drama. For critics such as Coxe who have attempted to define the circus in terms of its distinction from the theatre, this return to roots represented a vital casting aside of a ‘national love of compromise’ by the British for an anti-illusionist display of skill: Any performance presented on a stage, framed by a proscenium, is a spectacle based on illusion …. Just as the theatre has a parallel in paint­ ing, so does circus have an analogy in sculpture. You can walk round 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. Their feats of dexterity and balance and strength must never be confused with the make believe world of the actor … for while an actor says he will ‘play his part’, the circus artiste tells you he will ‘work his act’.1

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Helen Stoddart

This view of the circus as work and as ‘a spectacle of actuality’ leads Coxe to a reclassification of the circus as a craft rather than an art because, he believes, it is purely ‘demonstrative’ and, unlike the theatre, has no ‘inter­ pretative’ dimension to it.2 A number of important and controversial assumptions, however, under­ pin these claims. First, the inclusion of acts which are also considered to be ‘stunts’, must lead to a redefinition of the nature of ‘performance’ within circus shows. To a certain extent the performance theorist Erving Goffman’s concept of audience ‘framing’ is of relevance here.3 Goffman argues that spec­ tators habitually establish in their own minds separate ‘frames’ of operation which allow them to distinguish between ‘play frames’, in which they already recognize what they see as either ‘not true’ or ‘nonexistent’ (sic), and those elements of performance which they experience in the social world which have not been transformed into art or fantasy.4 The performance ‘frame’ here, then, works to distance the audience from what happens inside its frame and thereby to relieve them of responsibility for what goes on inside it. Where the circus has been engaged in the presentation of seasonal panto­ mimic drama, clowning and, to a degree, acrobatics, these frame separations hold. However, we have also seen that one of the defining attractions through which the circus distinguishes itself from other spectacular forms is through both the real presence of its dangers in the form of ‘stunt’ acts and, until rela­ tively recently, the frisson attached to the human and animal representatives of other cultures whose very existence, despite perhaps fantastic ornamenta­ tion, was to be proved rather than disputed by their exhibition in the ring. The circus performance ‘frame’, therefore, depends on its periodic expan­ sion and contraction in that although the audience is clearly divided physi­ cally from the scene of performance, their occasional confrontations with the actual existences of the performers arise out of moments of danger in which the impact of the show depends on the audience’s recognition of (and indeed sense of responsibility for) the performer’s proximity to human extinction, rather than merely untruth. Goffman’s model is useful then partly because it draws attention to the ambiguous relationship circus maintains with the con­ cepts of ‘illusion’ and ‘reality’ as it seeks, at different times, to embrace both. Yet Goffman also provides a good example of the way definitions of perform­ ance frequently hinge on assessments of an audience’s ability to negotiate with and interpret the ‘signs’ of representation within a performance, rather than focusing on non-representative elements such as physical skill, balance, strength, agility and daring, which have tended to be the foundations of the most highly rated circus acts and which have sometimes led to their being grouped as sport rather than craft or art.5 This implicit distinction between artistic and physical skill leads us, sec­ ondly, to Coxe’s reinforcement of what Raymond Williams has demon­ strated to be a separation between the terms ‘art’ and ‘work’ which has historically specific origins in mid-nineteenth-century shifts in production

Aesthetics

17

and exchange values. Art and artists therefore were separated from industry which meant they could be seen as forms of activity ‘which were not deter­ mined by immediate exchange’ and which could be at least conceptually abstracted.6 Thus, Williams argues, the ‘artist’ is also to be distinguished from the ‘artisan and craftsman and skilled worker, who are now operatives in terms of a specific definition and organisation of work’.7 To classify the circus within these terms as ‘work’ rather than ‘art’, is to feed the illusion that ‘art’ may not be subject to commodification in the same way as it is in the circus in which exhibitions of skill are perhaps more obviously driven by a thirst for profit-making. Second, Coxe relies on a very selective view of circus history which regards the ‘Romantic age’ of the circus in which the stage was as important as the ring and detailed representational dramas predominated, as a temporary if lengthy blip in an entertainment otherwise dedicated to the pure display of effects. The fact that many of the most wellknown of the so-called ‘new’ circuses have also returned to forms of narra­ tive storytelling in their shows can either be seen, from this purist view of the circus as a discrete genre, as a further example of cross-generic corrup­ tion, or that the ‘skills’ identified by Coxe as part of the ‘craft’ of the circus may also, at times, be incorporated into a wider agenda of representational drama. Third, the question still remains of whether circus could still be con­ sidered art, rather than entertainment, when the acts presented within it are purely demonstrative. It should be pointed out that Coxe is clearly a pas­ sionate devotee of the circus and its history; when he describes it as ‘simply a craft’ next to the ‘art’ of the theatre he bestows greater value on the ‘craft’ since for him this term connotes the associated virtues of authenticity, integ­ rity, vitality and honesty as opposed to art’s implied artifice and effeteness. The relative value attached to art and entertainment respectively has been an issue which has dominated debates about the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture, especially within debates in film and literary studies since the 1970s and it seems that some of the same issues and assumptions are at stake here.8 The first assumption is that art must necessarily, by virtue of being representational, offer the spectator a space between something assumed to be ‘reality’ or ‘actuality’ on the one hand and the artistic rendering of some aspect of that world within representa­ tion. It is this once-removal from the world that facilitates the activity of reflection, interpretation and critique so that art offers us not simply a piece of life but also a way of thinking about it. Forms of avant-garde art such as Brechtian theatre may reject the compulsion to reflect or explain the world as it is, preferring instead to offer a ruptured, fragmented and direct art from which stems a more intellectually active spectator. Nevertheless, a space for cerebral activity is still seen as being an important credential in the establish­ ment of the text’s complexity, and the centrality of the body (rather than the word) to these forms was regarded as a fresh opportunity for exploring the body’s expressive potential.9

18

Helen Stoddart

For Brecht, abstract or non-figurative forms of representation may also be defended in these terms for their capacity to engender in a spectator/ viewer a reassessment or readjustment of some aspect of their relationship to the world around them by ‘turning the object of which one is to be made aware, to which one’s attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary, familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and unex­ pected’.10 Thus the object is made momentarily ‘incomprehensible’ only so that it may be stripped of the assumptions which had previously surrounded it and, thereby, rendered ‘the easier to comprehend’. The difference in forms of popular culture is that they are defined by a series of aesthetic qualities which threaten to seduce, overwhelm, or anaesthetize its spectators with fear and are therefore without the final goal of fresh comprehension.11 In the case of the circus it is the first two of these which pertain most strongly since the circus, without exception, engenders a relationship of spectacular immediacy with its audience and, as I will suggest, the adjectives which surround it indicate that its aesthetics prioritize effect over thought. The question remains, however, of whether these aesthetics of pure effect, rather than analysis, mean that circus is necessarily entertainment rather than art and whether the former may not be valued on its own terms in a way which does not necessarily make it the poor relation of the latter. The surrealist dramatist and theorist of the theatre Antonin Artaud extols the value of ‘pure effects’ in his championing of Balinese theatre’s stress on the primacy of mime and physical gesture in contrast to Western theatre’s ‘subservience … to the lines’.12 Artaud is fascinated by the potential of this theatre to offer ‘a new bodily language no longer based on words’, but rather on ‘signs which emerge(s) through the maze of gestures, pos­ tures, airborne cries’ which, being directly relayed through the body, has ‘an exact meaning that only strikes one intuitively, but violently enough to make any kind of translations into logical, discursive language useless’.13 Still, Artaud’s repetition of his notion that the Balinese actors’ bodies and their costumes are ‘moving hieroglyphs’, a figure repeated in ‘The Theatre of Cruelty’, indicates his desire to identify these bodies as the objects of interpretation, though the meanings they harbour, like the hieroglyph itself, may always contain a certain disclosure since, in ‘supply(ing) us with some of the mind’s most secret perceptions’ they constitute pointers to what, for Artaud, has been long since repressed in ‘the West’.14 Thus, in the ‘codes’ of Artaud’s new language for the theatre, the elements of ritual and gestural, non-textual performance are highly prized and in this sense he draws atten­ tion to their affinity with circus performance which, as we have seen, has always worked through each of these. In the notion of the body as hiero­ glyphic he offers us the suggestion that the performing body, stripped of verbal language, may harbour meanings for an audience and may indeed exist as an element of their immediate effect rather than despite it. None­ theless, his high regard for such techniques is founded on an orientalist

Aesthetics

19

opposition between East and West which sees Eastern performance styles as expressive and with open access to the unconscious in relation to a West which is characterized by logocentrism and its accompanying repressions. This means that the conventional aspect of ritual only appears radical and surprising when it is culturally ‘other’; therefore circus, with its familiar character types and strict division between spectator and performer, smoth­ ers its dangers in the cotton wool of familiarity and minimizes the direct shocks which could be felt by its audiences.15 Other dramatists, however, have attempted to extricate circus techniques from the highly commercial and demotic institution to which they have tra­ ditionally belonged in order to rearticulate them within other contexts. Thus, in an interestingly Brechtian turn, their function and effect may be reviewed and redefined in ways which have been considered radical in either artistic or political terms. An example of the latter is Vladimir Mayakovsky’s play Moscow Is Burning which was commissioned in 1930 by the Soviet Central Agency of Circuses to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution.16 It was performed in the First Moscow State Circus in April of that year (a week after Mayakovsky’s suicide), included a number of well-established circus performers in its cast and followed the conventional circus show which had formed the first half of the evening’s bill. The play mobilizes essentially pan­ tomimic techniques as the vehicles for its satirical portrait of Imperial Russia, working through rallying songs, clowning (for the tsar’s officials and police­ men), a series of tableaux (a huge pyramid representing pre-Revolutionary society with Tsar Nicholas at the top and ‘schackled workers’ (p. 82) at the bottom) and spectacular circus stunts (‘a worker swings from one trapeze to another, hurling down pamphlets’ while the policemen chasing him find their weapons have caused them to become entangled in the rigging). The Tsar himself was played by a ‘gaunt circus dwarf’ (p. 74). At the same time, the sense of continuity which marks the conventional circus pantomime’s narrative structure has been replaced by a montage style in which the jux­ taposition of spectacular enactments is supported by the use of cinematic projections (sometimes multiple projections) throughout the play. The lat­ ter not only reflects the influence of Soviet cinematic practices (most spe­ cifically Sergei Eisenstein’s ‘Montage of Attractions’) on the reinvention of circus spectacle as it is presented here, but, at one point, three simultaneously projected images of, respectively, a ‘moving train’, a ‘horse-drawn tram’ and a ‘busy factory’ capture the conflicting elements of the Soviet economy in which the speed and mechanization necessary in a modern industrialized society must grapple with and update the parts of the country which were still agrarian.17 The circus’s physical machinery, as well as its dramatic fig­ ures and structures, constitute for both Mayakovsky and Eisenstein a radical theatrical language within which a critique of capitalism may be articulated, and is therefore not merely a set of metaphors put to satirical use. As we have seen, then, in political terms, circus as a dramatic form is neither necessarily

20

Helen Stoddart

radical nor reactionary; its language of show, having absorbed and adapted numerous cultural and historical traditions has proved open to widely differ­ ing ideological inflections. Naturally this suggests the necessity of outlining what the elements of the circus’s language are and what values, if any, may be inherent in its fun­ damental terms. A trawl through any collection of circus advertising from almost any period will turn up a very similar collection of adjectives being used to depict the delights on offer. These can be divided up into attributes (exoticism, gorgeousness, skill, novelty, magnificence, danger, display, beauty, action, spectacle) and effects (sensation, delight, wonder, humour, suspense, astonishment) and these in turn may be described through a series of related critical characterizations (realism, comedy, absurdity, burlesque, anomaly, orientalism, eclecticism, melodrama). Most of these terms have featured within previous discusssions of the circus’s history, and from these it is clear that not all of these terms have been of equal value or presence at any given time or place. The shifting priority of some over others is of sig­ nificance here. It will also be important to distinguish between the meaning of these terms as they refer to the circus and their use in relation to other art forms. Realism may sound to the contemporary circus-goer like an odd and incongruous term for describing any aspect of circus performance, even given the notorious critical flexibility, some might claim vagueness, of its application. It is a term with only temporary relevance to the circus, lasting only as long as the hippodrama had its day, and has most relevance when limited to its pre-Romantic (early eighteenth-century) sense of construct­ ing ‘realizations’; that is, giving elaborate form to events, ideas or fictions, without the obligation of offering insights into the ‘true nature’ of the thing represented.18 Even relatively early on, advertising puffs commended shows to their prospective audiences on the basis of their verisimilitude and realism of effect. For example, a puff from 1785 assures us that the: reality of the fox and hounds divests us of every idea of its being a fiction, and therefore we receive the same entertainment as we would receive were we to be spectators of a parcel of taylors in an actual fox chase.19 Given that the drama described here is the most familiar and constantly performed of all burlesque equestrian acts we must doubt whether an audi­ ence might have accepted it in the manner here suggested; however, the fact that the circus, in this case Astley’s, thought to promote itself in these terms indicates the commercial value attached to the reality of effect. Increasingly representational accuracy and detail became cherished values of the largescale hippodramatic productions, especially battle re-enactments, which had gathered momentum at the turn of the century and carried on to the midnineteenth century.

Aesthetics

21

Although what appeared may be labelled realism of a sort, it was above all a spectacular realism which became increasingly dependent on elabora­ tion, expense, luxury and, it claimed, accuracy of painstakingly researched detail. In this sense the circus anticipated the enthusiasm for luxury which crept into stage productions of the 1840s and which, as Michael Booth has observed, was shaping tastes in domestic interiors.20 Astley certainly made much of his ‘indefatigable’ fieldwork, actually travelling in one instance to Flanders in order to ‘obtain a most correct knowledge of the places forming the feats of war and arranging the most essential occurrences that happened, in or near each place, for the accurate information of the public’.21 Saxon claims that during this era drama was often referred to as ‘scientific’ due to the ‘ingenuity and complexity of their stage effects and tricks’ and adds that historical productions particularly were put together ‘with pedantic atten­ tion to historical accuracy’ with the display of the designers’ and machinists’ craftsmanship being a priority and a boast in this project.22 Indeed a puff of 1791 which describes Astley’s ‘Royal Fugitives’ – a drama depicting the Royal flight from Paris – proclaims that the production proves: that all verbal accounts of it are weak, indeed, to conveying any ade­ quate idea of this remarkable event. Astley has, to a demonstration, proved that it could only justly be represented by the aid of scenes, characters and stage decoration.23 Though the circus may have been forced by legal injunction to bypass ‘verbal accounts’, here its publicity is not only championing the superiority of its mute but spectacular mode of representation, which it seems to believe offers a more objectified reality through visual spectacle, but it is also making way for a new form of historical representation: the public representation of pub­ lic events. Most poignantly in this case, the event which receives this theatri­ cal treatment is the liberal Revolution in France and it is precisely because the so-called popular will is in action, expelling and supplanting the private rule of the Royal Family, that the arena in which this plays out must need to be on such an enlarged scale and in more widely accessible modes than printed or more confined theatrical accounts. The history of mass action is thus made available on a mass scale. These reflections lead us to consider Peter Brooks’ claim that the ‘origins of melodrama can be accurately located in the French Revolution’ and, fur­ thermore, that this is the ‘epistemological moment which it illustrates and to which it contributes’.24 During this period (1789–99), he argues, the Church and Monarch, the established forms of authority, or the ‘traditional Sacred’ as he calls them, are completely undermined along with the literary modes which accompanied them: tragedy and the comedy of manners. These two are replaced by melodrama, which needs to be seen as ‘a response to the

22

Helen Stoddart

loss of the tragic vision’ because it exists ‘in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question’.25 With the fall of the ‘traditional Sacred’, a new ‘sacred’ authority is sought in the Law, however the establishment of a new morality through the law leads to the pre-eminence of the melodramatic mode of articulating conflicts in which opposing positions are repeated over and over in clear language, it rehearses their conflicts and combats, it reenacts the menace of evil and the eventual triumph of morality made ‘operative and evident’.26 To this observation, however, should be added the qualification that it would be unlikely that Astley’s newly popularized and accessible version of recent history would, in terms of its content, have necessarily lent political endorse­ ment to the actions of the crowd, even though the hippodramatic form may have allowed for the representation of events on a scale which would not be matched again until the epic cinematic spectacles of the silent cinema such as Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1925), The Crowd (King Vidor, 1927) though, likewise, these did not necessarily couple their spectacular populism with radical politics. Astley was not the only proprietor whose populism was underscored by strong conservative and royalist leanings. Brooks maintains, however, that although melodrama may be classed as either ‘revolutionary or conservative’ in its content, the fact of its generosity of accessibility means that ‘it is in all cases radically democratic’. Though Brooks doesn’t explicitly use the term circus, he none the less traces the origins of this ‘radical’ drama to the pre-revolutionary upgrading of circus interludes such as Jean-Baptiste Nicolet’s tightrope and acrobatics shows on the Boulevard du temple Theatre in 1764 to one of the future ‘temples of melodrama’, the Théâtre de la Gaîté.27 Therefore, rather than see melodrama as something introduced to the circus at a certain early stage in its development which was somehow ousted by the American inva­ sion it is possible to see circus as one, perhaps even the most important of the progenitors of the melodramatic stage and its ‘imagination’, forging a language of gesture, music and visual spectacle in anticipation of the his­ torical moment it would so fully and repeatedly articulate. It is also true that the American circus frequently played out its own histories within this epic format and the huge popularity of the wild west shows orchestrated by figures like Buffalo Bill suggests an obsessive drive to review, rework and relive the domination of the country and its native peoples that was as important to the establishment of a white American identity as the battle of Waterloo was in the continual need to form a British national identity and sense of citizenship. Paradoxically perhaps, the common and determining condition of both circus and theatre in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, which must establish moral authority now in the law, is the legal injunction (in France pre-revolutionary) on the use of prose-based drama. The theatrical language which negotiates moral truths through the playing

Aesthetics

23

out of oppositional positions is itself born of a conflict and negotiation with the law itself. The inclusiveness and populism of circus drama is also echoed in the circus parade, which was not only a supremely good way of drumming up business and attention, but also became a defining component of North American circus spectacle. In many ways it can be seen as a replacement for the lost Renaissance pageant of royal processions of power, in a place which has removed itself from royal influence, and at the same time reju­ venates from this long antiquated tradition two key types of pleasure, as they have been identified by Roy Strong. First, the pageant, and indeed the three-ring circus as a whole, returns its audience to a form of spectatorship in which the ‘old-established means of décor in the form of scattered props and moveable pageant cars enabled everyone placed round three sides of a hall to take part in the visual experience’.28 This stands in contrast to the development in the latter part of the sixteenth century of indoor entertain­ ments (specifically the masque) and proscenium arches which meant that the spectacle was ‘viewable from one point only, for all the lines of per­ spective met in the eyes of the on looking prince’.29 Second, royal parades may have sought to impress the audience in the streets with the spectacular symbols of an authority which extended beyond the limits of the nation but the purpose of the circus spectacle was at once to produce an awe-inspired audience and also, crucially, one which believed it could itself gain access to these exotic, marvellous, disparate worlds and peoples with the price of entry. So the circus extends the democracy of participation in world domin­ ion while the circus performances themselves echo the court fête in which dramatic portrayals Roy Strong suggests ‘enabled the ruler and his court to assimilate themselves momentarily to their heroic exemplars’. Thus, Strong argues that it is in these court dramas that man’s belief in his unchallenged authority over nature finds its ‘most extreme assertion’, and at the same time there are echoes of the circus in his characterization of: their astounding transformations, which defeat magic, defy time and gravity, evoke and dispel the seasons, banish darkness and summon light, draw down even the very influences of the stars from the heavens, they celebrate man’s total comprehension of the laws of nature.30 The circus, in the terms in which I have so far attempted to characterize it, represents both the continuation of this transcendent impulse and its general democratization beyond the confines of the court. It is also significant that circus parades were accompanied not only by mili­ tary-style marching bands but also by Apolonicon (sic) organs and, an instru­ ment which would become synonymous with the circus in the United States, the steam calliope. Most obviously these organ-style instruments both invoke

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and undermine the religious associations of the organ with their piercingly high-pitched notes which must have sounded like some ghastly travesty of the sombre tones of the church organ, the centrepiece of their community, as they called their followers towards their tents of entertainment. It is easy to see, therefore, why much of the objection to the American circus in the midnineteenth century came from Christian groups made uneasy by this rival to the public’s attention, where the concept of ‘congregation’ has always been fostered by an entertainment which directly addresses, ‘educates’, mystifies and encourages the participation of those it assembles within its tents. One of the most important dimensions of circus aesthetics is the concept of anomaly. Of course most forms of art or entertainment, to differing degrees, may offer their audience anomalous objects, ideas or events. Yet rarely can they resist either sorting them out within a narrative or lending the anomaly some higher purpose, as for example in forms of avant-garde art such as sur­ realism, which works to suggest unconscious connections between appar­ ently anomalous objects. The circus, by contrast, finds a pure satisfaction in anomaly which is seen as a delight and an end in itself. Frequently these arise, as Kwint claims, from the performance of ‘banal acts’ in extraordinary positions. This could be something as simple as performing an act upside down, such as Ching Lau Lauro, an early example of an ‘antipodean’, danc­ ing a Scottish hornpipe on his head, but may also equally arise from extraor­ dinary performances in more banal positions such as when wild or domestic animals are trained to perform human skills.31 Examples of this might include the bears riding motorcycles which I recently witnessed in an Indian circus or, perhaps most famously, the cult of the learned or even conjuring pig, horse or ‘the wonderful Spelling or Academic Dog’ in which an attempt is made to dupe the audience into attributing human levels of intelligence to brute animals.32 It is perhaps the first example of such anomalous perform­ ance relationships between human and animals, however, which remains the most surreal sounding in effect. A newspaper puff of 1792 advertises the ‘celebrated Mr. Wildman’s exhibition of bees’, clearly an act imported from the fairground, which consisted of his riding ‘round the Riding Ground with a curious Swarm of Bees on his Arm’ before coaxing them towards his head so that they cluster around it ‘in imitation of a Bob wig’. Mrs Astley soon followed suit with the bees more appropriately forming no doubt a charm­ ing ‘Lady’s muff’ on her arm.33 Anomalies, therefore although nearly always of a physical and spectacularly visual nature also involved jolting the audi­ ence’s received knowledge about mankind’s relationship to the natural and civil world around them by subverting either social custom and/or the order of species. These subversions need not necessarily offer a profound chal­ lenge to general assumptions since the effect of the anomaly seems more often than not to be humorous, absurd or inviting of scepticism and almost always in the service of novelty, which, as discussed above, has always been one of the driving engines of circus aesthetics.

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Much of what appears in circuses as anomaly would also fall into the category of the absurd. However, since this term refers now to some very specific theatrical and literary practices, mostly from the 1940s and 1950s, it is important to make some critical distinctions. As Martin Esslin has already pointed out, ‘avant garde movements are hardly ever entirely novel and unprecedented’ and the Theatre of the Absurd which emerged from writ­ ers such as Eugene Ionesco, Edward Albee, Jean Genet, Albert Camus and Samuel Beckett represents ‘a return to old, even archaic traditions’ which include circus and even pre-circus forms of entertainment such as mime, jug­ gling, acrobatics and foolery or clowning.34 Ionesco, in his polemical writing about theatrical practice however, makes it clear that the context into which such physical practices are inserted is informed by a very different agenda from the circus: People will say that my plays are musical turns or circus acts. So much the better – let’s include the circus in the theatre! Let the playwright be accused of being arbitrary. Yes, the theatre is the place where one can be arbitrary. As a matter of fact, it is not arbitrary. The imagination is not arbitrary, it is revealing …35 Ionesco admires the dangerous and transgressive qualities of the circus as well as its apparently arbitrary combinations and sequences, yet for him, in common with other absurdist dramatists, the arbitrary is always functional in the sense that it is intellectually ‘revealing’ in at least two important ways. First, the Theatre of the Absurd represents a dramatic rendering of the philosophical concepts discussed by a group of existentialist French thinkers (including Camus and Sartre) which could communicate in dra­ matic and visual terms the absence of any overall logic governing the events of the world and therefore the final meaninglessness of existence. The dif­ ference between the Theatre of the Absurd and existentialist theatre is that, whereas the latter philosophizes about this absurd predicament, the former ‘presents it in being – that is, in terms of concrete stage images’.36 In other words, the structure of the plays (often very circular) and the forms of performance involved in them are an integral part of their expression. Ide­ ally this should be both an ‘intellectual exercise’ and a ‘therapeutic effect’ in that, in the course of watching such a play, the spectator is disarmed of habitual anxieties about meaning in the world and no longer has to fabricate optimistic or illusory justifications born of these fears. As a result of this ‘coming clean’ about life’s absurdity, a certain relief should be experienced in that from ‘seeing anxieties formulated he can liberate himself from them. This is the nature of gallows humour and humour noir of world literature, of which the Theatre of the Absurd is the latest example’.37 This then, is a theatre which involves circus-related techniques and images: it is important

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to recognize, however, that the meaning and effect of these is reinflected by a very twentieth-century manifesto which has at its heart a depressive anxiety that it is no longer possible to believe in a supreme being which oversees the universe. Any humour which results, therefore, must first have touched the first base of despair. Thus while the circus clown, for example, and his frantic, nonsensical behaviour may be held within absurdist theatre as emblematic of a modern condition of existence, the circus itself has never been informed by or required any such philosophical framework in order to explain the enjoyment of absurd behaviour. In the Theatre of the Absurd, humour is a last resort, a positive gloss on what is at heart an admission of failure – failure to give the world meaning – whereas in the circus absurdity is not only an end in itself but frequently involves a much more cheerful cel­ ebration of skill and a demonstration of human mastery over the universe, in other words, quite the opposite of the absurdist project. Second, the use of circus techniques and conventions fuels the absurdist foregrounding of nonverbal forms of theatre such as ritualized actions (in clown routines, for example), exaggerated gesture, manipulation of objects and mime so that ideas and character functions are expressed externally and visually or through music rather than the spoken word. Thus, for Ess­ lin: ‘The element of “pure” abstract theatre in the Theatre of the Absurd is an aspect of its anti-literary attitude, its turning away from language as an instrument for expression of the deepest levels of feeling.’38 The cir­ cus, however, has never been self-consciously anti-literary (Ducrow’s most famous and exportable acts were based on adaptations, albeit loose ones, of Byron, Dickens and Shakespeare), nor has it encouraged its spectators to share in this suspicion over the efficacy of language as a mode of expression. The absence of the spoken word in some elements of the circus and the development of acts which circumvent it has evolved partly out of the expe­ diency of avoiding legal injunctions rather than any desire to offer an intel­ lectual critique. So the circus’s relationship to language is arguably a more innocent one in that it seeks merely to bypass the linguistic, not to traduce it. In distinguishing between these two mobilizations of similar techniques it is clear that circus skills and techniques may not in themselves constitute criti­ cal or avant-garde practices when performed in the circus; indeed they may seem reassuringly familiar. Yet when resituated and newly contextualized in the theatre before spectators more accustomed to narrative (if not neces­ sarily realist narrative) drama it is argued that they acquire a certain novel and indeed shocking quality. Now of course the circus has its own avant­ garde practitioners, among whom we could count Que Cirque (French), Cirque Baroque (Canadian) and Legs on the Wall (Australian), yet these relatively recent practices are clearly not those which inspired the theorists of the absurd. Rather they are in many ways a later fusion: a return to circus via the avant-garde ideas on theatre which had percolated through Western theatre and dance schools in the post-1968 period.

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Both circus and sensation novel were highly commercialized forms of mass entertainment and, Cvetkovich argues, such genres were regarded as deval­ ued forms of art ‘through a process that often replicates nineteenth century discourses suspicious of working class readers, female audiences, and affec­ tively powerful or non-realist literature’.39 The moral panics about the circus had more or less died out by the 1840s with the passing of the Theatres Act and as the middle classes became a more substantial component of the audi­ ence in urban circuses. Though the circus was certainly not treated with any seriousness as ‘art’ at this time, it was perhaps its function as family enter­ tainment which led to its being regarded (within utilitarian or functional views of industrial society) as an important part of modern industrial society in that it distracted people from their problems rather than spelled them out in lurid and harrowing detail. Also, since the circus had always been highly commercialized, this dimension of its sensational identity was not seen to be as threatening as it was for defenders of the novel who, as Bourne Taylor argues, saw the sensation novel as threatening a dangerous slippage between ‘the “light reading” of a middle class and predominantly female public on the one hand’ and the melodramatic ‘“mass entertainment” of a relatively newly formed lower-middle and upper-working class readership on the other – and blurred any possible distinction between them’.40 In fact, it is the circus’s identity as commercial entertainment that allows such dis­ tinctions to be so clearly made in that the differential pricing and resulting hierarchy in seating arrangements marks out a spectator’s relationship to the performance in fairly accurate class terms. So the circus itself has rarely included overtly political dramas, aside from the displays of patriotism latent in the battle re-enactments of nineteenthcentury hippodrama. However, this is not to say that there are not latent, and usually highly ambiguous, political implications, not only at the level of aesthetics, as we have seen, but in their content as well. Speaight reports that the first trick-riding act performed by Astley involved getting a horse to lie down on the ground as if dead before it miraculously rose again at Astley’s word. This, however, was soon supplemented by a second act, ‘The Taylor Riding to Brentford’, which would go on to become one of the most frequently performed in the circus worldwide. What is interesting about this act is that it refers to a real political drama of 1768 involving the election of the political radical John Wilkes. Although Wilkes had previously been expelled from the House of Commons he none the less put himself forward for re-election to Parliament as a representative for Brentford in Middlesex. A great many people, inspired by this popular, renegade hero-figure trans­ ported themselves from London to poll their vote for him, with the result that he was returned to Parliament in great style. Astley’s pastiche involved recycling an already popular narrative of a tailor called Billy Button whose abortive attempt to make his way to Brentford has him (often drunk) mak­ ing several attempts to mount his horse, being unable to get his horse to

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move, and being thrown off a speeding horse which eventually chases him out of the ring. There is much significance not only in the events of this scene but in its progress as a staple circus act. On the face of it this might seem a somewhat reactionary drama in which the supporters of the voice of political radicalism are satirized as useless buffoons over whom the audience is encouraged to feel superior.41 Yet at the same time it must be remembered that it was for the very qualities of populism and direct action that Wilkes had become famous so in this sense the laughter at the tailor is in some sense also celebratory of an irreverent, democratic and populist spirit over a Parliament perceived by a growing mercantile class (such as tailors) to be dominated still by aristocratic privilege.42 Despite the aspirational claims made by Astley about the great popularity of his shows with the aristocracy, the audience at Astley’s were far more likely to have been members of this growing middle class whose right to a voice in Parliament Wilkes championed.43 Also important to the inherent political ambiguity of the scene is the fact that it is narratively twice-removed from history in the sense that the tailor-figure was the product of a piece of popular folklore which was then adapted for the circus so the historical and political dimensions of the narrative have already been partially obscured in their transformation into myth. When the piece was performed in other countries local adaptations were made to the title so that in 1773 in the United States of America, Jacob Bates performed ‘The Taylor Humorously Riding to New York’ and in France in 1795 ‘Rognolet et Passe-Carreau’ was performed at Franconi’s.44 This suggests that the dramatic action, its physical dynamics, had meaning on a level over and above that of the political signifi­ cance the scene may have had for its original London audience. This example also furnishes us with a defining instance of clowning in the circus and, as such, suggests a way into understanding the dynamics of circus comedy. As we have already seen, the display of superior levels of dis­ cipline and control over the body is the foundation of circus sensationalism. The ‘The Taylor Riding to Brentford’ sketch suggests that circus clowning is nothing but the flip side to this coin in its staging of bodies which are made the object of laughter precisely for their physical ineptitude and failures of social and physical perception. In this sense Henri Bergson’s 1911 essay on laughter offers some of the most useful terms with which to analyse circus comedy because both his theory of laughter as a form of social discipline and his conception of the human body in broadly mechanistic terms are consistent with circus’s hunger to establish the human body’s power and pre-eminence within a modern, secular and industrialized world.45 Contrary to Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of medieval festive laughter, in which he stresses laughter’s inclusiveness and the relative freedoms which it temporarily grants, Bergson, whilst he insists on laughter’s ‘strictly human’ basis, also defines exclusion and distance as its necessary preconditions.46

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For him, though laughter always connects us to others – is always ‘the laughter of a group’ – it also depends on the emotional separation of that group from the object of their laughter. Emotions such as pity, affection and sympathy needs to be absent from the comic which, he argues, ‘demands something like a momentary anaesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to the intelligence, pure and simple.’47 Whilst for Bakhtin, laughter had been the moment of release from a restrictive and hierarchical medieval social order in which a temporary inversion takes place, Bergson’s terms assume a mod­ ern world in which all subjects are engaged in large-scale organized labour and in which ‘society will therefore be suspicious of all inelasticity of charac­ ter, of mind and even of body, because it is the possible sign of a slumbering activity as well as of an activity with separatist tendencies’ (his emphasis).48 Laughter, then, comes close to being ridicule in that it is seen as a way of curbing both disruptive ‘eccentric’ behaviour and mental and physical pet­ rifaction through the threat of humiliating exposure (laughing at) and thus, for Bergson, has the happy ‘utilitarian aim of general improvement’.49 As this suggests, Bergson’s thesis on laughter is shot through with early twentieth-century modernist anxieties about the automating effect of indus­ trialization on the human body and soul with his stress on the necessity of imagination, elasticity and the facility of adaption as the positive terms which are none the less defined against an underlying negative assumption that the ‘attitudes, gestures, and movements of the human body are laugh­ able in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine’ (his emphasis).50 Mechanization may be a necessary condition for efficient pro­ duction, speed and surplus-value, yet laughter also performs the (at times) dangerously contradictory task of not only jolting humans out of ‘mere’ automatism, rigidity and, possibly, ‘inertia’, but also of working to main­ tain their continuing observation of socially approved rather than ‘eccentric’ forms of behaviour. However, while we may observe the historical specifi­ city and limitation of Bergson’s terms, when we look at the following analy­ sis of what he sees as the perpetual human conflict between ‘reason’ and ‘imagination’, ‘matter’ and ‘grace’, it is precisely these terms which are in tune with the specific dynamics of the circus, itself a product of the indus­ trial revolution: whatever be the doctrine to which our reason assents, our imagination has a very clear-cut philosophy of its own: in every human form it sees the effort of a soul which is shaping matter, a soul which is infinitely supple and perpetually in motion, subject to no law of gravitation, for it is not the earth that attracts it. This soul imparts a portion of its winged lightness to the body it animates: the immateriality which thus passes into matter is what is called gracefulness. Matter, however, is obstinate and resists.51

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Though Bergson never mentions the circus, it is hard to imagine a more keen-sighted summary of the contrary energies which it has traditionally offered across its variety of acts. Equestrian performers and aerialists have conventionally been surrounded by a rhetoric which has precisely empha­ sized ‘winged lightness’ and physical gracefulness and which has served to fuel the fantasy that they are endowed with the facility of defying or resisting gravity. In this sense they are both figures for the imagination, as Bergson suggests, and figures of imagination, in that they seem capable of fantastic physical acts. At the same time, by interspersing these moments of grace with clown routines, the circus reminds us of the ‘matter’ which is ‘obstinate and resists’ as the clumsy, preposterously big-footed Auguste clowns are bound to an earth to which they constantly fall and are defeated both by the tyrannical wit of the white-faced clown and the pieces of every­ day objects and machinery (bicycles, cars, hose pipes) which inevitably get the better of them. The role of the circus in the consolidation of orientalist discourses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century has rarely been mentioned, and yet the circus’s involvement, not only in the representation and dramatiza­ tion of so-called oriental cultures, but also in the accumulation of (human and animal) performers from the East is extensive and complex. First of all there are the coincidences of time and place. As Edward Said has argued, the key period during which the seeds of orientalism were sown were the years following the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798 and the ‘period of immense advance in the institutions and content of Orientalism coincides exactly with the period of unparalleled European expansion; from 1815 to 1914 European direct colonial dominion expanded from about 35 percent of the earth’s surface to about 85 percent of it’.52 Not only does the first of these dates almost exactly coincide with the birth of the equestrian spectacle in the eighteenth-century amphitheatre, but these dramas frequently drew on orien­ tal themes, and the battle re-enactments, re-played colonial victories in India, Africa and China as well as equestrian dramatizations of Romantic literary orientalism.53 Easily the most popular example of the latter was the drama­ tization of Lord Byron’s poem ‘Mazeppa’, in which Adah Isaacs Menken’s cross-dressed performance further fuelled its celebrity reputation by lacing an exoticism of character and place with some well-publicized eroticism.54 This is not to say that the circus as an institution is necessarily or essen­ tially in the service of orientalism since its separate parts have long preceded the historical moment of orientalism. The modern circus may have its roots in eighteenth-century Europe but its various generic components have long since been adopted and adapted into very different forms by most of the countries which were the subjects of colonial expansion described by Said. For example, although the modern Egyptian circus only began at the begin­ ning of this century it was able to draw on a long tradition of acrobats,

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contortionists and clowns going back to 2,500 BC.55 Said himself suggests a certain congruence between the language with which orientalist discourse depicts the orient and the characteristic modes of circus language when he claims that orientalism’s ‘representative figures’ and: tropes … are to the actual Orient … as stylised costumes are to charac­ ters in a play; they are like, for example, the cross that Everyman will carry, or the particolored costume worn by Harlequin in a commedia dell’arte play.56 Circus with, as we have seen, its long-standing reliance on caricature, the pantomimic, commedia dell’arte and pastiche, like orientalism, works through a ‘language [which] is inaccurate … because it is not even trying to be accurate’, and perhaps this is the very reason that the circus’s orientalist discourses have been so flexible and open to reclamation.57 The fact that one of Ducrow’s critics commented on the delightful degree of obscurity which envelops the entire arrangement of the spectacle is testimony to the fact that the circus has always been able to combine performances which encompass specific local references with vagueness or confusion and performative structures of expression which, like the broad symbolic types to which Said refers, are open to constant obscural and renewal across time, space and culture, whilst at the same time, being firmly rooted in Western dramatic structures.58 Just as the European hippodramas had an orientalist tendency to look to the Eastern cultures for subject matter, as well as to fairy tale and momen­ tous historical events and battles, so too did the spectacles, or ‘specs’, which opened and/or closed the three-ring circuses in the United States, reinventing and mixing together the categories of history, myth and culture, most often guided by an energetic combination of exoticism and patriotism. For exam­ ple, the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey spectacle of 1954 (directed by Richard Barstow with aerial choreography by Barbette) consisted of four separate displays, the first of which was called ‘Rocket to the Moon’ which was a vehicle for introducing the Spanish trapeze artist Pinito Del Oro whose entry, sitting astride a space rocket, was perhaps intended to echo her own weightless flights. The second display, ‘Dreamland’, consisted of a variety of fairy-tale characters such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Humpty Dumpty as well as many of the circus animals, and this was followed by a display called ‘Fiesta’, a Mexican-style ensemble which intro­ duced Alexander Könyöt (a dressage rider) alongside Guadeloupe Partida and his congress of wild-riding Charro rope spinners. The climactic dis­ play, entitled. ‘U.N.’, paraded all the flags of the United Nations together with sporting mobile globes, an internationalism which finally gave way to patriotism as a tripartite flag portraying Eisenhower as cadet, general and President was finally raised in the centre ring.59

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In many ways it is the contemporary or ‘new’ circuses such as Cirque du Soleil and Cirque Baroque which represent a return to a circus tradition (of narrative-based, orientalist/mythical dramatic spectacle) as much as they offer deviation or innovation (no animals, ringmaster and so on).60 Both, then, invest in a model of social anthropology which sells cultural otherness as visual spectacle.61 In the case of Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey, its mission to entertain is couched in the Barnum-style rhetoric of education and cultural investigation whilst at the same time consolidating long-standing Western stereotypes, mostly seeming to draw upon the cultures from which the largest ethnic groups in the United States are descended. For example the 1989 Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Program boasts of the painstaking fieldwork performed by Kenneth Feld as he ‘travels the globe’ to Mexico, the People’s Republic of China and the ‘shores of Europe’. On this occasion the spectacular has an African theme which, on the one hand, genuinely seeks to present some of the rituals of the Natal Province through the dances of sev­ eral Bantu warriors, but, on the other hand, it would be hard to find a more dense concentration of colonialist myth. There are constant references to the ‘Dark Continent of Africa’, the ‘jungles of Africa’, the ‘hidden African conti­ nent’ and the ‘uncivilised territory’, as well as the mobilization of a rhetoric of astonishment (‘astonishing Tribal war dance’), incredulity (the ‘Incredible Tahar!’) and fantasy (‘fantastic once-in-a-lifetime adventure’). The central figure, Tahar, is every inch the ‘noble savage’ as he appears from the ‘mist … a man of mystery, his past cloaked in myth’, thus apparently demonstrating that a ‘mystical bond links man and beast’.62 This rhetoric resonates with the language of nineteenth-century colonial­ ism and there seems to be little difference between this and the advertising of nineteenth-century European pantomimes with a colonial theme. Yet not only is this show playing before contemporary and, we can assume, mixedrace audiences, it also seems appropriate to question the seriousness with which such shows might ever have been received. Both Cirque du Soleil and Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey’s The Greatest Show on Earth have regular Las Vegas venues and the combination of earnestness and mimicry, which for many cultural critics are the primary characteristics of kitsch (rather than camp), suggests that, rather than the circus conforming to the conventions of Vegas spectacle, it is the Vegas spectacle which is a descend­ ant of the circus spectacular. In the example of the Tahar show, while the circus demonstrates the earnest intention of presenting ‘authentic’ African rituals and people, the very process of transporting and restaging such ritu­ als within state of the art sound and lighting techniques works to fetishize their gaudy artificiality and, by the same turn, empty them of realism, his­ tory and authenticity.63 Indeed, it seems that in the process of performing ‘Africanness’ for a North American audience, the performance itself can only be read as a pastiche identity circumscribed as we have already seen by the rhetoric of nineteenth-century fantasies about ethnic origins and

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identities. These spectacles therefore, cannot be argued to be undermin­ ing or subverting such discourses in any way, and yet their effectiveness in shaping an audience’s view of Africanness has to be offset against the alter­ native experience, knowledges and images which shape the perceptions of a contemporary audience.

Notes 1 Coxe (1980a), A Seat at the Circus New York: Macmillan, pp. 24–5. 2 Coxe (1980b), ‘Equestrian drama’ in David Bradby, Louis James and Bernard Sharratt (eds), Performance and Politics in Popular Drama: Aspects of Popular Entertainment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 109. 3 See Goffman (1974), Frame Analysis (Garden City, New York: Doubleday).

4 Goffman (1974), Frame Analysis, p. 157.

5 Paul Bouissac’s study is exceptional in this respect in that it attempts to provide

a thorough technical account of the physical dynamics involved in all the central circus acts and to describe their individual internal languages without recourse to metaphor or psychology, see Bouissac (1976), Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 6 Raymond Williams (1984), Keywords (London: Fontana Paperbacks), p. 42.

7 Williams (1984), Keywords, p. 42.

8 See, for example, Colin McCabe (ed.) (1986), High Theory/Low Culture:

Analysing Popular Television and Film (Manchester: Manchester University Press). 9 As Marvin Carlson points out, cabaret, music hall, fairground and circus forms were a central source of theatrical and musical inspiration both for Brecht and for the innovators of the Russian theatre at the beginning of the century such as Vsevolod Meyerhold and Sergei Radlov. He also suggests that these popular forms were valued, not just for their association with the popular, but because they brought conciseness and profundity, clarity and vigour to stage drama (Carlson 1996, Performance: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge, pp. 87–8). See also, Meyerhold’s writings on popular forms, especially ‘The fair­ ground’, in Edward Braun (ed.) (1969), Meyerhold on Theatre (New York: Hill & Wang) and, for an overview of Soviet and pre-Soviet theatrical practice see Konstantin Rudnitsky (1988), Russian and Soviet Theatre, 1905–1932, trans. Roxane Permar (New York: Harry N. Abrams). 10 Bertolt Brecht, ‘Short description of a new technique of acting which produces an alienation effect’ (1951), in John Willett (ed.) (1986), Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen), pp. 143–4. 11 The Marxist critic, James S. Moy, however, has sought to defend circus and variety acts against such views by arguing that circus spectators experience a radical dislocation and (Brechtian) alienation from the content of the perform­ ance because of the way acts either displace one another or are presented simulta­ neously. See ‘Subverting/alienating performance structures’, in James Redmond (ed.) (1987), Themes in Drama, vol. 9 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 12 Antonin Artaud, ‘Oriental and Western theatre’ (1935) trans. Victor Corti in Victor Corti (ed.) (1974), Collected Works of Antonin Artaud, vol. 4 (London: Calder & Boyars), p. 51. 13 Antonin Artaud, ‘On the Balinese theatre’ (1937) trans. Victor Corti in Victor Corti (ed.) (1974), Collected Works of Antonin Artaud, vol. 4 (London: Calder & Boyars), pp. 38–9.

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14 Artaud, ‘On the Balinese theatre’, in Corti (1974), p. 39. See also pp. 44 and 47, ‘The theatre of cruelty’ (first manifesto) (1932) trans. Victor Corti, in Victor Corti (ed.) (1974), Collected Works of Antonin Artaud, vol. 4 (London, Calder & Boyars), pp. 68, 72 and 75. In the latter, Artaud includes a section titled ‘Interpretation’ in which he asserts that ‘the show will be coded from start to finish, like a language’ (p. 75). 15 ‘We intend to do away with the stage and auditorium, replacing them by a kind of single, undivided locale without any partitions of any kind and this will become the very scene of action’, Artaud, ‘The theatre of cruelty’ in Corti (1974), p. 73. Contemporary Catalan-based theatre companies such as Fura dels Baus and Els Joglars are excellent examples of theatre which is much more in the Artaudian tradition than the circus one. 16 The play, together with a series of contemporary critiques of it compiled by Victoria Nes Kirkby, has been translated by Helen Wilga and Ewa Bartos and reproduced in The Drama Review, 17:1 (1973), pp. 64–89. 17 Eisenstein, in turn, acknowledges the aesthetic value of the circus in an essay ‘Montage of attractions; for Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman’ when he claims that ‘film and above all the music hall and the circus constitute the school for the montage-maker, since, properly speaking, putting on a good show (from the formal point of view) means building a strong music hall-circus program’, trans. Daniel Gerould, Drama Review, 18 (1970), p. 79. 18 Williams quotes Samuel Johnson’s definition of realization as ‘an Act of the Imagination, that realises the Event however fictitious’ and its modern use as a term referring to ‘the means and effect of bringing something to life’ (Williams, 1984, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 260). 19 April 1785, Astley’s Cuttings from Newspapers, albums in the British Library, vol. 1, item 656. 20 Though Booth doesn’t discuss the circus in his study of the history of Victorian spectacle, it belongs more than any other form of performance to the nineteenthcentury history and consumption of urban spectacle, in London and Paris, of which much has been written elsewhere, see Michael Booth (1981), Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910 (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 4, and Rachel Bowlby (1985), Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London, Methuen), pp. 1–18. 21 6 March 1794, Astley’s Cuttings, vol. 2, item 92A. 22 Saxon (1968), Enter Foot and Horse, p. 55. 23 29 July 1791. Astley’s Cuttings, vol. 2, items 33c, 34a, 34c and 34d. 24 Peter Brooks ([1976] 1995), The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London, Yale University Press), pp. 14–15. 25 Brooks (1995), The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 15. 26 Brooks (1995), The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 15. 27 Brooks (1995), The Melodramatic Imagination, p. 84. 28 Roy Strong (1972), Splendour at Court (London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson), p. 73. 29 Strong (1972), Splendour at Court, p. 73. 30 Strong (1972), Splendour at Court, p. 74. 31 Kwint (1994), ‘Astley’s amphitheatre and the early circus in England, 1798– 1830’, unpublished PhD Dissertation, Oxford University’, p. 246. See Circus Programmes, vol. 1, benefit poster of 1831, item 32. 32 May 1792, Astley’s Cuttings, vol. 1, item 47c. 33 April 1772, Astley’s Cuttings, vol. 1, items 62 and 64.

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34 Martin Esslin (1969), The Theatre of the Absurd (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books)[1961] 1991), p. 327. See also Arnold P. Hinchcliffe, The Absurd (London: Methuen). 35 Eugene Ionesco (1959), World Theatre, 8(3): 47. 36 Esslin ([1961] 1991), The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 25. 37 Esslin ([1961] 1991), The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 414. 38 Esslin ([1961] 1991), The Theatre of the Absurd, p. 328. 39 Cvetkovich (1992), Mixed Feelings, (Brunswick, NY: Rutgers University Press) p. 15. 40 Jennie Bourne Taylor (1988), In the Secret Theatre, (London: Longman), p. 4. See also Cvetkovich (1992), Mixed Feelings, p. 15. 41 This position is neatly summarized by a contemporary critic quoted in G. Rudé who describes London as a ‘great Bedlam under the dominion of a beggarly, idle and intoxicated mob without keepers, actuated solely by the word Wilkes’ (Rudé, 1962, Wilkes and Liberty, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 50 and 173). 42 Edward Royle argues that although Wilkes was only a ‘symptom of a ground­ swell of radical opinion’, none the less he ‘received support from across the social spectrum’. This ‘appeal to the middle ranks of society most important, for their support was founded on sound commercial and economic interests which were ill-represented under the existing political system’, Modern Britain: A Social History, 1750–1985 (Royle, 1987, London: Edward Arnold, pp. 117 and 118). 43 As Kwint observes, ‘audience descriptions, neighbouring artforms and the main protagonists of the stage and ring (tailors, sailors, sergeants and cobblers) sug­ gests that Astley’s was primarily and most consistently the province of the artisan and yeoman classes’ (Kwint, 1994, ‘Astley’s amphitheatre’, p. 79). In any case, E.P. Thompson qualifies Wilkes’ radicalism by suggesting that he was in the pocket of ‘wealthy tradesmen, merchants and manufacturers of the City who were Wilkes’s most influential supporters’ and that he himself maintained a cer­ tain contempt for his own mass following (see Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 76). 44 George Speaight (1978), ‘Some comic circus entrées’, Theatre Notebook, 32, pp. 24–7. 45 Henri Bergson ([1911] 1935), Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Bred Rothwell (London: Macmillan). 46 Mikhail Bakhtin (1965], 1984), Rabelais and His World, translated by Héleèe Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 59–144. Bergson ([1911] 1935), pp. 3–5. 47 Bergson ([1911] 1935), Laughter, p. 5. 48 Bergson ([1911] 1935), Laughter, p. 19. At the same time Bergson stresses the way in which laughter is connected to the possibility of luxury and surplus in that it is enjoyed only when people have been ‘freed from the worry of selfpreservation’ and may then ‘regard themselves as works of art’ (p. 20). 49 Bergson ([1911] 1935), Laughter, p. 20. This tyrannical and sadistic dimension in laughter is emphasized by Angela Carter in her short essay on clown dynam­ ics in Nights at the Circus, when Buffo the clown claims that the ‘child’s laugh­ ter is pure until he first laughs at a clown’ because ‘the mirth the clown creates is in direct proportion to the humiliation he is forced to endure’ (Carter, [1984] 1994, Nights at the Circus, London, Vintage, p. 119). Norman Manea makes a similar point in his essay on the connection between political tyranny and the control of laughter when he asserts that ‘(r)idicule has its own secret power, that of amusement, and it is vengeful’, ‘On clowns: the dictator and the artist (notes to a text by Fellini) (1990), in On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (Manea, 1994), p. 39.

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Bergson ([1911] 1935), Laughter, p. 29. Bergson ([1911] 1935), Laughter, p. 29. Edward Said Orientalism, (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books [1978] 1995), p. 41. Interestingly, however, as Kwint points out, the ‘incipient nationalisms pro­ voked by Napoleon’s expansionism were none the less ideal subjects for mel­ odramatic sympathy towards the underdog’, for example, ‘British Valour and Indian Tomahawks’ (1800), ‘The British Glory in Egypt’ (1801), ‘The Burmese War; or, the Treacherous Esquimaux’ (1826), ‘The Bombardment and Capture of Canton’ (1858). See Kwint (1994), ‘Astley’s amphitheatre’, Table 6.2. 54 Adah Isaacs Menken, originally an American, later found great fame on the London stage through both her apparently naked performances (though she wore pink leggings) and her famous literary acquaintances (Alexandre Dumas snr, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne). See Bernard Falk (1952, The Naked Lady: A Biography of Adah Isaacs Menken (London, Hutchinson)). 55 Several of the acts performed now may be identical to even more ancient Egyptian traditions. The lady contortionist, or Kowitshouk, is as favourite a spectacle today as, according to carvings found at the temple at Thebes, it was 3,000 years ago. And acrobats, equilibrists, and even a clown, are depicted in wall paintings in the Nile Valley dating to 2500 BC (Hugh Leach, 1994, ‘The Egyptian circus remembered and revisited’, King Pole, 103, June, p. 45). 56 Said ([1978] 1995), Orientalism, p. 71. 57 Said ([1978] 1995), Orientalism, p. 71. 58 August 1832, Astley’s Cuttings, vol. 3, item 1331. 59 Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Program, 1954, Special Collections, Milner Library, State University of Illinois. 60 Recent productions have included ‘Saltimbanco’ (1992/3), ‘Alegria’ (1994/5) and ‘Mystere’ (1993–), all using fairy-tale settings with hazy mythical and multicul­ tural references. 61 Cirque du Soleil designers, one newspaper report claims, are encouraged to draw inspiration from ‘National Geographic and other magazines’, ‘Mystery, not clowns or animals, from new age circus’, The New York Times, 6 April 1998. In line with this, they have signed a twelve-year deal with Walt Disney World in Florida to stage a permanent show there. 62 Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Program, 1989, Harry Hertzberg Collection. 63 The circus has a long-standing tradition of ‘exhibiting’ representatives of African, Asian and South American cultures, though frequently their ethnic difference has been accompanied by some defining oddness or strange ability. Astley presented the ‘Three Monstrous Craws, Wild Born Human Beings’ as inhabitants of an obscure South American tribe, when in fact they were later discovered to be Italian village dwellers suffering from severe gout. See 13 August 1787, Astley’s Cuttings, vol. 1, items 975–7. Between 1935 and 1940 the ‘Brass-Necked Ladies of Padaung’ or the ‘Giraffe Women’ were exhibited at the Olympia Circus in the United States at around the same time as Franz Taaibosch, a South African bushman or Khoisan, otherwise known as ‘Clicko’ (for his distinctive language – generically known as ‘khoikoi’), was presented in Europe and the United States. See Robert Bogdan (1986, ‘Circassian beauties: authentic sideshow fabrications’. Bandwagon, 30(3), May/June: 22–3), Bernth Lindfors (1983, Circus Africans, Journal of American Culture, 6(2): 3–19), and Neil Parsons (1992, ‘“Clicko” or Franz Taaibosch: South African bushman-entertainer in Britain, France, Jamaica and the USA: his life from 1908–1940’, African Studies Association Conference Paper, 21 November).

Chapter 2

The staging of actions Heroes, antiheroes and animal actors Paul Bouissac

A theory of action A circus act is a set of actions, that is, a succession of implemented plans which are ordered according to an overall rhetorical structure. This progres­ sion is determined by the amount of apparent or real uncertainty attached to the completion of the goal. These actions are represented in the sense that they demonstrate various competences to overcome well-defined challenges rather than being spontaneous responses to the ongoing vagaries of life. Cir­ cus actions are not part of open-ended processes although the situations are real and the outcome is always uncertain to a degree. The situations which circus artists negotiate are constructed by the actors themselves. These actions are reiterated day after day in front of an audience or as part of training and rehearsal sessions. When a minor failure occurs during a performance, the action which failed to achieve its goal is repaired by returning to its starting point. Rarely does a serious accident happen but even the best-trained per­ formers can be victims of a physical setback or a technical malfunction. There is no shortage of theories of actions. Logicians, linguists, and semioticians have debated for decades how to define an action because the phenomenology of real life does not provide clear-cut boundaries between actions and between action, reaction, motivation, intention, competence, planning, implementation, context, and consequences. Physical survival and the negotiation of social situations constantly require that we act or abstain from acting. The latter can be, of course, construed as a form of action. Reporting witnessed events or accounting for what we have done in the past is often confused and inconsistent because remembering actions is a challenging task which implies the selective processing of a mass of infor­ mation and the construction of improvised narratives. By contrast, formal narratives in all their forms (folk tales, novels, dramas, comics, films) can be neatly analyzed as sequences of actions which have been organized along the trajectory (the ‘story line’) of a plot. Of course, these actions are represented by literary or theatrical means. Even when stories are complex and convo­ luted, they can be parsed as series of situations, actions, and consequences.

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In the second half of the previous century, the French semiotician Algirdas J. Greimas ([1966] 1986) and his followers elaborated theoretical models in the form of algorithms which were meant to account for all forms of nar­ ratives in whatever medium they could be expressed. These models were inspired by earlier works done in Russia by Vladimir Propp ([1928] 1968) who had identified a limited number of stereotyped functions in Slavic folk tales. From this point of view, actions could be classified in terms of the functions they were implementing with respect to the completion of the nar­ rative. Greimas pushed further the degree of abstraction of this approach and proposed a canonical narrative structure which, he contended, was a universal form of meaning, a sort of a priori form of the human mind which accounted for every single instance of meaningful experience and its articulation in any kind of language. This is not the place to discuss in detail this insightful, albeit controversial theory but some aspects of it seem to be particularly relevant to the understanding of circus acts. After summariz­ ing Greimas’ model we will endeavour to apply this analytical grid to an analysis of the staging of acrobatic acts. We will then show how it can also help to understand acts involving trained animals. In so doing, we will focus on a type of dog act which can be ironically characterized as ‘the dog which is trained to do nothing’. This paradoxical description is all the more interesting as it generates numerous such acts with canines and other spe­ cies, and thus constitutes evidence of the capacity of the circus’s multimodal discourse to reflect upon itself by means of performance. According to Greimas, the general narrative structure is framed as a com­ munication act within which a transformative process occurs. The starting point is a negative value: the subject lacks or has lost an object which will be acquired or found at the end of the process. This process consists of a series of tests which require the clearing of obstacles encountered on the way to achieve the goal. The subject is helped or hindered in this quest by actors (which Greimas called actants to indicate that he meant to coin a generic term to designate abstract narrative functions rather than actual actors in the usual sense of the word). It may be rendered in English by the term ‘agency’ which can be endowed with a more abstract value than ‘agent’. Objects such as a magic wand or a storm can be such agencies in as much as they perform respectively the functions of helping or hindering the progress of the hero toward his or her goal. It may be useful, though, to keep using the neologism ‘actant’ to preserve its usefulness as a metanarrative analytic tool without any hint of ambiguity. In previous works (Bouissac 1976, 2010), I have shown that circus acts mostly conform to this schematic organization of the actions they represent. Indeed, an artist in whatever specialty has to prove what he or she can do before enjoying the recognition by the audience of the status which has been acquired through the performance of exceptional feats. This narrative kernel is sometimes presented in a minimalist form. For instance, a single individual balances on a trapeze in increasingly difficult

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postures until an ultimate action appears to make the impossible possible such as keeping one’s balance standing on the bar without holding the ropes while the trapeze is swinging. But most acts involve complex compositions with two or more acrobats, animals, and elaborate props. These acts can nevertheless be laid out as combinations of this basic narrative lexicon and syntax. Because of the abstract value of the functional terms of the elemen­ tary narrative structure, the actant subject can apply to a couple or a team, and the actant object (the purpose of the quest) can be construed as ‘life’, that is, the eventual survival of the performing individuals. Note, though, that this life which asserts itself at the end of the act has the added value of having triumphed over a major challenge through which the subject has acquired a heroic status. This fundamental narrative structure which gener­ ates all circus acts is what ultimately accounts for their meaning, or, rather, articulates this meaning through a multimodal signifying discourse. Another tenet of Greimas’ theory is that no single term has meaning in itself but only in its relation with other terms. Signification is grounded on systems of opposition which determine the values of the terms. Expressions such as ‘domestic animals’ or ‘possible actions’ logically imply that there are other animals which are not domesticated and actions which are not possible respectively. The translation of these intuitive semantic relations into the idiom of the formal sciences led Greimas to import into this model the distinction made by logicians between contradiction and contrariness. He then asserted the axiomatic proposition that all terms have meaning only through their relations to contrary and contradictory terms, the latter term being also necessarily related to its own contradictory. Therefore, a term A relates to its contrary B and both relate to non-A and non-B, their respective contradictories. For instance, the semantic domain of social rules can be articulated into four related and mutually defining values: (1) what is compulsory; (2) what is prohibited; (3) what is not prohibited; (4) what is not compulsory. It is with respect to this set of relations that terms such as obligation, prohibition, permission, and option derive their differential meanings. As we will see below, such a semiological grid can be used to categorize the represented actions which are displayed in circus acts with respect to our perception of the degree of feasibility of the tasks that the art­ ists set for themselves and the ways in which these tasks are implemented or not in their performance. Whether or not this theoretical view, which was formulated in the wake of structuralism, can survive the test of systematic testing is not our concern here. Probing intuitively its elementary algorithms in confrontation with cultural objects in any medium quickly leads to unmanageable complexity. But, in practical terms, it provides a heuristic point of entry into meaning­ ful complex objects such as literary texts and circus acts. We will see that once actions are categorized in this manner some unifying patterns of mean­ ing emerge from the multimodal discourse of the circus. These recurring

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patterns open interesting perspectives regarding the semantic relationships which hold together the diverse acts in a circus programme to form a con­ sistent system of represented actions as will be shown in the last section of this chapter with respect to acts which involve animals as actors.

The modalities of actions: from doing to making another do The abstract definition of a circus act as the completion of a series of actions which consist of implementing successive plans does not take into consid­ eration that these actions are not simply performed but are staged as being easy, difficult, dangerous, or even insane with respect to normal standards. These perceived qualities which determine the emotional impact of circus acts on their audience can be made formally explicit through modal catego­ ries organized according to a single semiological grid. All actions performed are obviously possible. But their staging can make their goal appear more or less within the reach of a normal human being. The act of equilibrist René Sperlich, for example, can be construed as an increasingly risky game (Bouissac 2012: 39–47). Let us examine now how actions are ‘modalized,’ that is, how they are made to rank on the scale of feasibility in the eyes of the spectators. Two sets of opposite values are correlated: doing versus notdoing, and possible versus impossible. A circus programme usually displays the whole range of combinations of these values: (1) doing the possible; (2) not-doing the possible; (3) doing the impossible; (4) not-doing the impossi­ ble. These are intuitive categories from the point of view of an average circus audience which attends a spectacle: (1) there are skillful actions which are expected to be within the range of possibilities of a trained juggler or acro­ bat even though they could not be achieved by untrained persons; (2) on the other hand, a clown who fails to properly sit down on a chair and collapses in the ring or trips on a straw proves to be unable to do what everybody in the audience could achieve without effort; (3) but a wire-walker who performs a somersault on a thin cable stretched high above the ground is perceived as achieving a goal which belongs within the realm of the impos­ sible for the normal human condition; (4) this is why the risk of failure and death is ever present in the mind of the witnesses of such feats and lethal accidents occasionally occur as the annals of the circus amply document. This eventuality shadows the most extreme acts. The advantage of thus for­ malizing these intuitive categories of action is that it makes it possible to parse circus acts with reflexive precision rather than mere impression, and uncover the clever combinations their designs implement in order to achieve their ultimate goal which is to manipulate the emotions of their audience. Describing the ways in which these categories of action are constructed and transformed offers the most consistent and comprehensive approach to the multimodal discourse analysis of circus spectacles.

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The kernel of a circus action is the implementation of a physically chal­ lenging plan but such actions are performed within a cluster of verbal, musi­ cal, and visual modifiers whose deliberate purpose is to make the actions appear easier or more difficult and dangerous than they actually are. Walk­ ing and dancing on a high wire is for an audience intuitively verging on the impossible. If the music is lighthearted and if the acrobat maintains on his or her face an easy-going smile or an expression of pleasure while cleverly merging his or her technical movements with seductive and affiliative social gestures, the act conveys an impression of wonder if not miracle. The dis­ tance from the spectators makes it possible for the performer to flash wide smiles which occult other facial signs of effort and anxiety. The bright white of the upper teeth which are uncovered in such performed smiles visually offsets the muscular contractions in the upper face, notably around the eyes, an area which is necessarily tense and focused during balancing acts. The same acrobatic feat can instead be displayed with dramatic music, dark cos­ tume, serious face, and exaggerated gestures which emphasize the instability of the process and the threat of a lethal failure. Some acrobats ostentatiously make a sign of the cross before performing a daring feat to indicate that they are prepared to confront death. Some, while the audience applauds at the end of their act, tilt up their face toward the sky and extend their arms in a gesture of gratitude to the divine power without which they would not have survived their ordeal, thus retroactively qualifying their last action as poten­ tially fatal. Whether such signs of religious behaviour are genuine – some acts are truly dangerous – or contrived is irrelevant from the point of view of the ethnography of circus performances. They are essential parts of proc­ esses in which clusters of multimodal signs consistently modify the meaning of the performed action. The artists always create a supplementary signifi­ cation which consists of categorizing their act with respect to the system of modalities which was outlined at the beginning of this chapter. Another kind of qualification of an action as quasi impossible is to stage a controlled failure before succeeding in implementing the plan. Such spec­ tacular failures may require as much skill as the completion of the action itself. It also often involves the production of a cluster of signs of authenti­ cation such as mimicking fear or relief when the acrobat survives a staged loss of balance. The attitudes and behaviour of the assistants who monitor aerial acts from the ground play a significant part in construing the modality of an action as particularly dangerous. If they obviously follow with intense attention the development of the act, as if they were ready to intervene in case of a fall, the audience is entrained to empathize with them and the artist. In fact, in many acts, this staging is functional because in the absence of a safety net the best response to an accidental loss of grip or balance is to ‘break the fall’, that is, to divert the body’s trajectory by pushing it sideways in order to limit

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the severity of the impact on the ground without being oneself hurt by this free-falling crushing weight. The inventories of gestures which have been produced over the past few decades in the context of nonverbal communication research provide means of analyzing the flow of facial expressions, postures, and hand movements which acrobats generate in parallel to the completion of their technical pro­ gramme of action. From this point of view, a circus act can be conceived as a multilinear score. The interpretation of such scores varies with the degree of professionalism or artistic sensibility of the performers. This total cho­ reography constitutes the visual means by which the meaning of the rep­ resented actions is modified with respect to the system of categories which was outlined in the preceding section. Naturally, these deliberate signs are interpreted in the context of the physical situations as they are perceived by the audience and framed by the verbal text within which the acts are embed­ ded. For all humans, stability on the ground is tantamount to safety. The sense of danger increases with instability and height, and the loss of contact with anything that can be gripped or grasped necessarily generates anxiety. The various apparatuses which are constructed in the circus space reproduce extreme situations which precisely create a range of typical risks. At the same time, the verbal discourse either written or spoken and the musical accompaniment provide information regarding the register in which an act must be interpreted. Music and lyrics also have a role to play, for example at the most daring moment of René Sperlich’s balancing act the music of a song by Queen titled ‘The show must go on’ was played by the band, thus adding a potentially tragic connotation to the performance (Bouissac 2012: 40). In some acts, a roll of drums is used to evoke the danger of death. Occasionally, the staging of acrobatic acts includes the presence of a clown who performs spectacular failures and, thus, implements one of the poles of the semantic system of oppositions which was elaborated above concerning actions with respect to possibility and impossibility. This dimension of cir­ cus discourse is most interestingly represented in trained animal acts which, ironically, implement the inverse of the factitive verbal modality: ‘to make someone do something,’ which is one of the four semiological poles, the others being ‘not to make someone do something,’ ‘to make someone not do something,’ and ‘not to make someone not do something.’ We will see in the next section how this system plays out in some typical dog acts. The relationships between the semiological poles are figuratively expressed by the image of a square, thus transforming the fundamental algorithm into a graph formed by four equidistant points and their connecting lines.

Ironical discourse: a dog act in the semiotic square Performing dogs are a regular item in circus programmes. As domestic ani­ mals which are a part of everyday life in most modern societies, they serve

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useful functions as shepherds, sled dogs, search and rescue dogs, and police dogs, or provide their owners with interactive company as pets. They are familiar rather than exotic, and training them to do basic routines is within the competence of most people. However, more advanced training can make them behave as humanized actors in spectacular performances. Acrobat and comedian dogs are well documented in the annals of the circus. This sec­ tion will review and discuss some dog acts in view of the theory of meaning which was outlined earlier in this chapter. Vienna, 21 September 2011. Zirkus Roncalli has pitched its elegant dark blue tent in front of the city hall of the Austrian capital. I am queuing in front of the Rococo-inspired decorations of the circus entrance, readying my notebook and anticipating the acts I plan to document this evening. During the performance I watched the previous day, I had decided to focus on a dog act which appeared in the second part of the programme. It was the last avatar of a series of such acts I had witnessed over the past 50 years. Each one, though, had original variations both in the training of the dog and the staging of the performance. After a breathtaking aerial demonstration, followed by thundering applause, a brief blackout signals the beginning of a new act. Soft back­ ground music seeps from the orchestra as a modestly costumed, humble looking man enters the ring followed by a phlegmatic female Boxer dog. ‘Hello, my name is Vitaly and this is my partner Klishko.’ The dog stands, motionless, next to the man. Boxers have very expressive faces with bulging eyes with a strong contrast between their dark pupil and light sclera which makes the direction of their glance clearly visible from a distance. She looks intensely at him while he speaks and gesticulates. But all this excitement is met with a bland, almost judgemental expression on her face. He extends his leg high in front of her and orders: ‘Jump!’ Instead, she lies down still looking at him in passive defiance. He lowers his extended leg in order to make the task easier but to no avail as she remains flat on the ground. He gives up the idea of a jump and lifts her up onto all fours and readies her for a walk between his legs as he makes the first big step. But she stops walking as soon as she is under him and lifts one of her back legs close to his trousers in the manner of a male dog which relieves itself against a tree trunk or a lamp post. Vitaly takes off his shoe and mimics that it is full of smelly urine. He wants to shame her by putting the shoe under her nose but she turns her face away. He carries her on a low table and orders: ‘sit down’ and he pushes her back so that she sits down. ‘Smile!’ and he lifts the two corners of her flabby Boxer’s lips. The trainer announces that Klishko is going to imitate a butterfly and he moves her ears up and down, then that she is going to imitate an elephant and he fixes on her nose a multicolour contraption which unfolds by itself and vaguely evokes the form of a trunk. Now she is going to balance a white billiard ball on her forehead, keeping perfectly still. But the first attempt is a failure: the ball rolls down. The second attempt is

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successful and the audience is requested to applaud. But the dog lowers her head and it becomes obvious that, this time, the ball had been stuck in place by the trainer because it stays on top of her head when she looks toward the ground. Finally, she lies on her back and he tries to have her keep one of her front legs up but it falls down along her body as soon as he releases his grip. After a series of apparent training failures, the man sheepishly bows to the audience when suddenly Klishko executes a perfect somersault and exits with her trainer as the star of the act. This kind of act is of special interest for our inquiry because it foregrounds the discursive nature of circus performances. There is indeed not a single move which is not verbalized in parallel with what is done (or, in this case, not done) in the ring. Other acts are necessarily embedded within a text both printed in the programme and uttered in the verbal introduction by the speaker: the name of the artists and their specialties, and various additional qualifications. The nature of some acts, such as clown acts, involves real or fictive dialogues. But Vitaly’s act, like the one we will discuss below, is contin­ uously both verbal and nonverbal. The two strands unfold at the same time and the meaning of this multimodal discourse is produced by this very con­ junction: a programmatic description of spectacular feats which do not occur. This results in the construction of the animal actor, in these cases a dog, as the manipulator of the trainer, a ‘trick’ which reveals the semiotic negative, so to speak, of trained animal acts through an inversion of the signs. Before going further into this analysis, let us consider an act which was presented about three decades ago in the second part of the previous cen­ tury. Douglas Kossmayer, under the stage name of Eddie Windsor, and his female Bassett hound, Lola, performed in many circuses and variety shows. Dressed in a smart, flashy business suit, Eddie Windsor made his entry with self-assurance and great elegance. He eloquently introduced his partner, ‘Lola Bassett’, suggesting by his words and gesture that she was a gorgeous girl, and kept looking toward the ring curtain or the theatre wing in expec­ tation of her arrival. To the audience’s surprise and delight a long Bassett hound appeared from under the artists’ entrance curtain lifting the hem of the curtain with its head (or from the wing in stage performances), slowly walking with an air of insouciance. Eddie Windsor kept describing her glamorous demeanour in terms which every move of the dog denied. With her long ears almost reaching the ground, Lola stopped beside her trainer, looking up at him with adoring eyes. Eddie Windsor then announced in the same emphatic tone of voice the extraordinary exercises that Lola was going to perform. First, she would sit down. But she kept the same position. He ordered, demanded, threatened, and even begged with no result. Eventually, he pushed down her back to make her sit and, with a triumphal gesture, acknowledged the laughter and applause of the audience. The act unfolded along the same lines as the trainer was creating new situations and was giving new orders which the dog nonchalantly ignored. After a table was brought

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to the centre of the ring, Lola was urged to jump upon it but Eddie Wind­ sor had to lift her, putting her front paws on the edge of the table, then, he slowly pushed her up inch by inch until she was lying flat on the top. Midway through this sequence, half her body was on the table while the other half was hanging down the side. The same process was repeated with verbal vari­ ants when the trick consisted of jumping down from the table. At this point on the floor she was presented with a hoop which the trainer held high. His emphatic command ‘Jump, tiger!’ was met with laughter by the audience and indifference from the dog. The hoop was lowered by degrees with the com­ mand becoming a supplication until the hoop touched the ground. Lola then slowly walked through it and stopped. Eddie Windsor was perspiring and ostensibly wiped his forehead. He had lifted this heavy dog, pushed it, pulled it, and talked at a fast rate continuously. It was time for the act to come to an end. With his hands behind his back, holding the hoop at some distance from the ground, he bowed to the audience. Suddenly lively and alert, Lola trotted toward his back and made a fast jump through the hoop. Comparing Kossmayer’s and Vitaly’s dog acts which were observed more than two decades apart shows that they were generated by the same formula, or algorithm, with variations in the selection of the breed and the staging of the tricks. They both relied on identical training techniques and produced similar reactions from the public. The challenge is to understand with some precision the kind of meaning this type of act produces in the context of the circus because this meaning cannot be explained as the completion of remarkable actions. Their multimodal discourse is in fact a metadiscourse which offers ironic comments upon the whole paradigm of circus acts based on trained animals. This discourse is, as we will see below, a reflection on factitive actions since it is the dog which appears to manipulate the trainer while, at the same time, it is obvious that it is the trainer who has trained the dog to perform negatively. But these acts have to be understood also in the context of the whole para­ digm of circus dog acts. Such acts typically involve six to ten animals of the same kind or of mixed breeds which are made to sit on stools arranged in a row close to the artists’ entrance in order to free most of the ring for per­ forming their tricks. There are numerous thematic variations conveyed by the costume(s) of the trainer(s) and the way in which the dogs are decorated with fancy collars or hats and capes. They execute, usually one or two at a time, some acrobatics such as walking on their hind or front legs, jumping through hoops, climbing ladders, balancing a balloon on their head, somer­ saulting, and the like. Some are billed as educated in a higher sense and they perform the same tricks as educated horses: counting, dialoguing, identify­ ing objects or persons on command. Lynne and David Rosaire’s dog act, which was observed several times in the 1970s and 1980s, provides an interesting example in which the for­ mal operations at work in both regular dog acts and acts which stage a

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dog ‘trained to do nothing’ are complemented by the case of a dog which ‘does tricks without being trained’. This is, of course, the result of a training which actualizes one of the logical possibilities of the factitive grid which was not implemented in the dog acts we reviewed so far. Lynne and David Rosaire enter the ring each holding five Pekinese dogs in their arms. They bring them to a bench on the side of the ring and the dogs take their places on this elevated platform where they will stay until they are called in turn to the centre and will return after their tricks are completed. At a distance from the bench, there is a small doghouse in which the audience can notice a little mutt of indistinct breed. The act unfolds as follows: the Pekinese, one or two at a time, perform tricks in succession under the vigilant eyes of the trainers and as soon as a trick is finished, while David or Lynne drive the dogs back to their place on the bench, the little fellow dashes out of the doghouse and quickly performs by itself behind their back the tricks which have just been performed by the Pekinese with much encouragement and occasional prompting. The trainers act out as if they were displeased by such insubordination and the mutt rushes back to his doghouse. This sce­ nario is repeated several times and the mutt, called Sheba as we will learn below, steals the show. This act was presented in the programme of the Swiss Circus Knie in 1977 and it was commented on in French as follows in the illustrated mag­ azine featuring photographs of the acts which was for sale at the entrance of the tent: How elegant are the ten Pekinese dogs presented by David Rosaire! Their aristocratic look does not prevent them, though, from taking part in a most funny act. As they perform their serious tricks, an insolent little mutt of no pedigreed lineage dares to mingle with their games. Behind the trainer’s back, she mischievously imitates the feats of her high class partners. She mocks her displeased master and, naturally, the public falls for her. [Translation mine] This text, which most members of the audience are likely to have read as they were scanning the printed programme before the show started, provides an interpretation of the action through articulating the difference between the two classes of actors in sociological terms: on the one hand, an elite group, the aristocratic pedigreed Pekinese; on the other hand, a commoner of the worst kind, a ‘bastard’ or a ‘mutt’ in the canine breeding language. The text also opposes two types of behaviour characterizing the trainer: on the one hand, a technical competence which allows him to make the dogs do what he wants (implementing his plan); on the other hand, a lack of power to prevent an insubordinate individual dog from imitating them, thus undermining his plan while implementing the whole semantic array of the factitive semantic structure.

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But we will find that there are more dimensions if we further explore deeper layers of cultural meanings by making explicit the categories of agents, actions, and names involved in this act. It activates indeed a powerful network of sociopolitical values. Domestic animals such as dogs can be cat­ egorized as useful or non-useful. The former perform tasks such as guarding cattle, protecting their owners and their properties, pulling sleds, helping the blind, hunting, rescuing, and so on; the latter are luxury objects which not only do not work but also are fed, pampered, and served by their masters who spend a part of their disposable income to maintain pets. Thus dogs are associated with social class distinction. As was clearly expressed in the programme’s introductory text to this act, Pekinese symbolize not only the leisure class by association but also the aristocratic elite whose concern for genealogies they embody. Dogs are indeed classified as indigenous or exotic. The latter, such as the Pekinese as their name indicates, are redundantly luxurious artifacts. Their association with highbrow culture is confirmed by their trained behaviour which evokes sports, dance, and other actions per­ formed for the sake of it rather than some practical result. In addition, they are carried into the ring in the arms of their trainers and they sit on specially decorated circus stools when they do not execute their tricks. By contrast, the mutt is sheltered in a doghouse of a kind typically found in a common household. This dog is not identifiable through its breed because it is the result of free genetic mixing. Such dogs are valued for their individual qualities, for instance, loyalty and intelligence, instead of their genealogy. It bears all the signs of being indigenous: it is a common European female mutt. However, it embodies at the same time an apparent contradiction as its name is Sheba, a name marked as doubly exotic since it comes from the Old Testa­ ment (Book of Kings I, 8) and refers to the exotic country whose queen visited Solomon. The irony of the name outdoes the exoticism of the Pekinese in the same way that the mutt’s actions outperform their exercises. It is interesting to note that Sheba’s persona and performance are the sym­ metrical inverse of those of Lola Bassett. Although the two acts were not part of the same programme, we must keep in mind that dog trainers, like any other circus artists, are very much aware of the history of their trade and the contemporary productions of their colleagues. The equivalent of literary sources and intertextuality plays an important part in the creativity of these artists. The generation of an act may not be the deliberate twist­ ing of another act but may spring from spontaneous variations in quest of originality. Novelty, in circus as in poetry, arises from tacit but consistent transformations. Innovations remain under semiotic constraints if they are to qualify as circus performances. Let us return for a moment to Doug­ las Kossmayer’s act and compare it to the act of the Pekinese and Sheba. The general algorithm which generates the representation of the distinct modalities of actions is at work in both the Rosaires’ and Kossmayer’s acts.

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Factitivity is the common basis but it is deployed through different logical implementations. In David Rosaire’s act, the trainer demonstrates his com­ petence with respect to making the Pekinese do what he wants them to do. They behave like obedient pupils lined up on their benches. He and his partner use schoolmasters’ gestures. The dogs’ goodwill is uniformly dis­ tributed. Rebel Sheba actualizes the three remaining modalities in her suc­ cessive interventions: first, she instantiates the apparent incompetence of the trainer to make her do something since she does tricks by herself; second, she shows that he cannot make her not do the tricks since he unsuccess­ fully tries to prevent her from doing these tricks; finally, she forces him to accept her doing, thus not making her not do something since he eventually gives up and lets her do what she wants. Parallel to the reiterated proofs of the trainer’s competence with regard to the Pekinese, Sheba implements the other poles of the semiotic square and thus undoes, so to speak, the whole process of training which consists precisely of acquiring this competence by progressing from impotence to the control of an animal’s behaviour and the capacity of preventing an animal from doing something. This is the prereq­ uisite for making this animal do something which the animal does not want to do. And, finally, the trainer makes the animal do what he wants it to do as is the case with the Pekinese. This process represents the transformation from total spontaneity to absolute control through intermediary stages. Lola Bassett instantiates the same undoing of the competence of her trainer but from an inverted position since not only can he not make her do what he wants but she makes him do what he wants her to do by forcing on him her passive resistance instead of active rebellious actions. Her eventual display of competence implies that her whole behaviour was deliberate. All this, of course, is the result of a sophisticated training which takes the very process of training as the topic of the act, thus producing what can be legitimately considered to be a metadiscursive discourse. Finally, there is another layer of meaning in which the acts are contras­ tively related. The gender dimension is indeed played out in as much as the two dogs, Lola Bassett and Sheba, are introduced as females. However, the former is manipulative while the latter is competitive. Lola’s feminin­ ity is marked by her makeup and her ‘diamond-stud’ collar whereas Sheba is scruffy and jewel-free. Lola plays the role of a kept woman, the kind of femme fatale for whom a king would give up his kingdom. After all, Douglas Kossmayer’s stage name was Windsor. Sheba outdoes both her trainer and the other dogs which are construed as males in the text which introduces the act. She achieves her goals through her own merits in a competitive and proactive way. She encapsulates at first in her persona three symbolic values: underdog, underclass, and ‘undergender,’ so to speak, and at the end she comes out on top by reversing these values.

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But there is more. These two dogs perform through their actions a change in the status of their trainers whose factitive competencies are put in jeopardy. They transform them into the equivalents of clowns in as much as the two trainers eventually prove to be unable to do the possible since any dog owner can in theory make his or her dog obey. This opens an interesting window on a more complex semiotic system according to which all the circus icons – acrobats, clowns, and trainers – are defined by their positions not only with respect to animals but, more to the point, to factitive categories in general. Indeed, the acrobats make themselves do what is necessary to achieve the impossible, that is, they implement a reflexive factitive category of action. However, this system would not be complete if the opposition between domestic and wild animals was not factored in. Domestic animals are those animals which are made to do what we want. Wild animals can be defined as those animals which cannot be made to do what we want. Therefore, the clowns who usually deal with domestic animals of lower status (pigs, cows, donkeys, mules, and geese) remain in the sphere of the possible and even fall into negative values when they prove themselves unable to control these animals. Trainers belong to two different categories depending on whether they deal with domestic animals of higher status like dogs and horses or wild animals which qualify them as able to perform the impossible. The multimodal discourse of the circus as a whole is sustained by a con­ sistent system of action categories and displays. Under the apparent vari­ ety of its acts the full gamut of its combinatorial potential is actualized. Reaching goals and meeting challenges are such fundamental actions which define human life that it is no wonder the circus makes so much sense for its audience. The actions it represents in its rituals are the very mirrors of everybody’s life and destiny. Heroes, antiheroes, and animal actors are mutually defined with respect to the system of the modalities of actions we have elaborated above. It is through this syntax that their statuses are transformed in the course of an act. It is, so to speak, the motor of the cir­ cus discursive dynamics.

References Bouissac, Paul (1976) Circus and Culture, A Semiotic Approach, Bloomington: Indi­ ana University Press. Bouissac, Paul (2010) Semiotics at the Circus, New York: Berlin: Walter de Gru­ yter. Bouissac, Paul (2012) Circus as Multimodal Discourse: Performance, Meaning, and Ritual, London: Bloomsbury. Greimas, Algirdas J. (1986) Semantique Structurale: Recherche de Methode, Paris: Puf. Propp, Vladimir ([1928]1968) Morphology of the Folktalke, translated by L. Scott, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Chapter 3

An epic of new circus Martine Maleval translated by Jane Mullett

Introduction France celebrated 2001–2 as the Year of the Circus and a sizable amount of historical and analytical material related to contemporary French circus was published. Avant-garde Circus! from which Maleval’s essay ‘L’épopée du nouveau cirque’ is taken is one such book. In the essay, Maleval sets the historical context by referring to the precursor of three of the most resilient and long-lived contemporary French circuses, Cirque Plume, Archaos and Cirque Baroque. She provides a brief history of these three circuses includ­ ing descriptions of specific elements in their performances that are indicative of their work. She then uses these observations to propose a description of the characteristics of contemporary French circus. Reading Maleval’s essay highlights the parallel that can be drawn between contemporary circus in those countries with a ‘new circus’ tradition, includ­ ing France, Australia, Canada and America. Comparable historical anteced­ ents and analogous aesthetic characteristics can be found in each country’s ‘new circus’ history. To date, such accounts have been restricted mainly to the analysis of new circus in one or two countries1 although the new French writing is starting to examine the wider base of contemporary circus.2 The contribution of Australia to new circus is little understood and referred to fleetingly, if at all, in the international literature. Within Australia, although there has been a great deal of work done on traditional circus, particularly by Mark St Leon,3 and on the contemporary circus, particularly by Peta Tait,4 there has been little comparison with circus, overseas. This may be partly due to a lack of translated material. Thus, it may be that Australia’s contemporary circus is not yet located fully within its international context. In her analysis, Maleval has concentrated on describing the popular, often political, theatre which is one of the two art forms that have histori­ cally nurtured new circus. She has not included the traditional circus which, I maintain, has been equally necessary to the formation and growth of con­ temporary circus. Nonetheless, Maleval’s essay provides an indication of the breadth of contemporary French circus and its accompanying scholarly

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51

tradition, both of which are significantly supported by the government’s cultural policy.5 This translation represents my first foray into this arena and I would like to thank Martine Maleval for the trust she has shown in allowing this trans­ lation to be published.

An epic of new circus Cirque Plume, Archaos, Cirque Baroque were amongst the new circus pioneers that challenged conventions at the end of the 1970s. These three troupes, these ‘agitators’ aimed to produce not spectacles of facile entertain­ ment, but to develop an art form. New circus represents an essential change in the history of circus. In order to establish a brief history of what is called new circus6 we could, for argument’s sake, locate the start of this artistic and cultural phenomenon on the [French] streets in 1973. Not because such a genre existed then, or sud­ denly emerged, but because Christian Taguet set up the company Les Puits aux Images that in 1987 become Cirque Baroque. However, after examining the many innovations in live performance of the 1970s we could also use 1975 as the start date, when the caravans of Paul Rouleau and Pierre Pillot (creator of Archaos in 1986) began to traverse the south of France. Or, if we project ourselves onto a café terrace in Avignon, we could observe the Baron Aligre, not yet called Bartabas (inventor of the equestrian and musi­ cal theatre Zingaro in 1984), mount his horse and provoke the customers by tossing rats. At the same time, in Franche-Comté these antics were counterparted by the brass band of the brothers Kudlak (founders of Cirque Plume in 1983).7 As nomads without theatres, profoundly embedded in the heart of urban and rural life, these groups are highly symbolic of the utopian claims and reappraisals which both destabilized and revitalized live performance in this tumultuous and rebellious epoch. Into the midst of these adventurous escapades are woven, deliberately but delicately, the threads that allow us to establish, a priori, a recognizable aesthetic of new circus. Thus it is not possi­ ble to question the context and causes of its emergence, or to analyse its inten­ tions and forms, without first establishing a clear relationship between these innovative figures of the performing arts (who rose up and engaged in the criticism of the time and in the transformation of the cultural foundations of the society) and the spirit of protest that crystallized in the May 1968 revolt. Nonetheless, these young troublemakers inherited, consciously or not, aes­ thetic and theatrical practices of the 1960s that had already confronted many problematic fundamentals including the relationship between performance and audience, the place of the body and its dramatic engagement against the primacy of the text, the mode of collective creation, and the essential expan­ sion of professionalism. According to Jules Cordières, the founder of Le Palais de Merveilles, one must work to ‘make everyone the interpreter of their

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own dreams’.8 In the midst of these many and various experiments we can see the emergence of current political preoccupations, and simultaneously a radical critique of a theatrical scene judged to be ossified.9 This process of ‘a theatrical crisis’10 resulted in ‘a fragmentation of the traditional theatri­ cal forms’.11 It placed them outside the traditional theatre (including in the factories) and was regarded as a social act. It was no longer ‘for each one alone, and became an act of all’.12 It claimed to be celebratory and collective, aspiring to create conditions for real communication with a wider section of the public. It began in the cracks opened by the uproar on the streets where political utopianists mixed with artists engaged in noisy creation.13 Groups and people such as Laurent Berman and Anne Quesemand and their Théâtre à bretelles, Jérôme Savary and his Grand Magic Circus, represented two not unrelated genres – street theatre and new circus – and were becoming pro­ gressively more entrenched in the French cultural landscape. Born and developed on the fringes of ‘high culture’, but deserted by authorities little concerned with aiding these strange, unorthodox (and no doubt dangerous) expressions, these genres were recognized and legitimized after the election of François Mitterand in 1981 and the installation of Jack Lang as the Minister for Culture. Mitterand doubled his minister’s budget and funds were at last injected into street theatre, circus, and contemporary dance which had been neglected by previous governments; the foundations for their development were established. The creation of the National Centre for the Circus Arts (CNAC) in 1985 is one of the measures that, in hind­ sight, can be seen as a determining factor for the future of circus, especially for ‘new circus’. In fact, the post-secondary education that is delivered there is multidisciplinary and directs the student to develop skills that will enable them to take part in ensemble performance and participate in the new kind of circus arts that are under development, rather than to produce autono­ mous circus acts.14 The new circus evolved chaotically during the 1970s and 1980s with the key features to its impending identity still uncertain and fragmentary. The agitators who gave cohesion to these surprising and original works (and insisted on the artistic and cultural dimension of their direction) advocated for the elaboration and construction of an authentic art form, rather than the easy production of mere entertainment. In order to examine the promise of these heroic times, we will concentrate on three journeys, three aesthetic directions which are particularly revealing.

Baroque: ‘un cirque à lire’ [a circus to be read] Christian Taguet, after studying comedy and music, spending time in a brass band at The Beaux-Arts (1969–70), and being involved in film collabora­ tions, began his theatrical career at the National Theatre of Strasbourg. In 1973 he founded a company of street acrobats (saltimbanques)15 called Les

An epic of new circus

53

Puits aux Images. Self-taught, he surrounded himself with artists who, like the majority of those engaged in this movement, were not born into the circus. These circus apprentices learnt circus skills during rehearsals and perfected them during their shows. Some discovered and used the circus schools [that had appeared], for amateurs or professionals. In the tradition of treading the boards, these pounders of the platform took as their repertoire the farces of Molière, such as La Jalousie du Bar­ bouillé and Le Médecin volant, extracts of Mistero Buffo by Dario Fo, La Justice du corregidor by Casona and Le Cogne trottoir by Paillette. In 1979 the company created a circus show in a tent. From then on music played a central part in the structure of the productions. Nino Rota, Kurt Weill, Yiddish songs, François Rauber and others provided the music that was then interpreted by the orchestra. The company’s participation in festi­ vals increased and touring became international. In 1987, Le Cirque Baroque was claimed to be the first ‘spectacle de création’ – creatively produced show – followed by Baroque II one year later. After Trapèze dans l’azuré (1990), Noir Baroque (1992), Le Puits aux Images reached a critical stage in their work. The ‘return’ to earlier commedia dell’arte practices indicated their desire to counter the primacy of the text by introducing physical work. They concentrated especially on acrobatics, with which they had already experi­ mented in terms of its relationship with text, in the search for a more precise correspondence between text and gesture. The desire to enter into a creative dialogue with circus corresponded with the desire to push this investment in the physical as far as possible. Indeed, circus techniques are an extreme case. They mobilize the body in its entirety. The mind cannot disassociate without putting the integrity of the performance at risk. This promotes a shift in the territory of the dramatization. Once completely contained within the text, it can now be seen to be invested in the body, but also in the set, the props and other areas. The design is devoted to the creation of images (visual and aural) that produce a particular ambience. Noire Baroque was symbolic of this evolution: in this creation we descended into an infamous cabaret in an unspecified time and place (clarified in the synopsis). The music (accor­ dion waltz, jazz by Laurent Attali and Pierre Billon), the costumes, sudden changes of rhythm, and the set, all imposed a shape and created a structural framework. The meeting of Christian Taguet with the Chilean founders of Teatro del Silencio, Maurico Celedon and Agustin Letelier, was pivotal to the develop­ ment of Cirque Baroque. Their contribution to the direction of Candides (1995) brought important elements to each scenic component and was essen­ tial to the overall theatrical effect. Agustin Letelier continued this collabora­ tion in Ningen (1998) and Frankenstein (1999). These three creations were inspired by the respective literary works; a tale by Voltaire, the writing of Yukio Mishima, and the novel by Mary Shelley. In each show, the universe

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of the writers was evoked to give weight to the work. Relevant bibliographic extracts, significant events from the appropriate epoch, and recurrent themes in the writers’ works were transformed into stage images. This interweaving of historical and cultural references allowed the works to be read on many levels. Cirque Baroque used street theatre techniques that aid immediate visibility, even over distance, and result in constant movement by the per­ former. They also responded to another difficulty, that which arises because the circus artist must stay in the character dictated by the dramaturgy while their body is engaged in a physical skill that demands total concentration which in turn disengages them from their character. Accordingly, they used masks to highlight the expressive lines on their faces and convey the identity of their character.16 Their costumes were also significantly different. The uneven progression of the scenes and the changing musical styles were the punctuations that supported the dramatic tension. Apart from the emphasis on a direct storyline and its hidden motifs the themes tackled corresponded to questions that relate to our collective history or act on our contemporary society: homosexuality, rigidity of cultural codes, Japanese culture, fascina­ tion with violence (Ningen), the dangers inherent in cloning (Frankenstein), problems posed by the evolution of science and technology and the fears that this arouses. From a critique of the primacy of text, we arrive at a redefinition of its place. When the text is present, it is integrated into, or equal to, the visual and sound elements. It participates in the elaboration of thematic coherence, whether that is narrative or incidental. However the desire for theatricaliza­ tion still imposes a discursive linearity. This manifests itself as a subtext. It runs as an underground thread and, although flashbacks are possible, it allows for movement from a beginning to an end, a chronology of events. Each fragment is part of the production of a harmony, or a discord, having its own rationale in that it participates in the whole through the relationship of all its parts. It is the same for the circus acts which are not presented for themselves but as carriers of a specific value; for example, like the wirewalker balanced above the brokers on the stock exchange floor, moving symbolically and feverishly in relation to the market (Ningen). ‘Since its creation Cirque Baroque hasn’t stopped telling stories under the guise of circus shows with the splendours, the emotions, the laughter and the tension that they provoke’.17 This is how Christian Taguet presents his company’s direction. Circus is mixed subtly with theatre, mime and dance. We must therefore read these contemporary frescoes which draw their complexity from a multitude of references where fiction and reality rub up against one another. The aesthetic choice of using a story that is strongly inspired by a literary work is equal to the intention to produce a discourse born of society about society.

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Archaos: ‘l’Art pour l’essential et l’accessoire’ [art for necessity and accessory]18 In the summer of 1975 a number of horse-drawn caravans took off around Brittany, travelled through the centre of France and onto Europe. A farmer, Paul Rouleau and a schoolteacher, Pierre Pillot, thus gave life to Cirque Bidon. Between fire-eaters, musicians and acrobats, the ‘enlightened farm­ yard’ [a domestic animal act] was presented: First the father Max Cador, then the mother Ursula and her daughter Eléanore, finally her stormy fiancé the Mexican acrobat cock called Las Vegas. (The announcement made to the public confirms) it’s a little fake (c’est un peu bidon).19 Pierre Pillot entered the circus looking for the real life that was promised but unrealized after May 1968. It is also true that the struggle was progres­ sively deserting the streets for want of a political perspective and that a withdrawal into an idealized past seemed preferable to an uncertain future that was losing its grip. Brimming with the experience of the whole gamut of human and acro­ batic behaviour, Pierre Bidon (the name assumed by Pierre Pillot after he left Cirque Bidon) created in 1986 a personal definition of circus in Archaos, the ‘circus of character’. After having played with what was endangered in rural life, he invested the circus with the symbols of modernity linked to urban renewal and subjected it to an essential critical regard. Guy Carrara, a minor participant at this stage, offers this excerpt: ‘At ARCHAOS, all that we want we find, all that we declare we will do we do, it’s all very important but we don’t give a toss’.20 Pierrot Bidon, by calling Archaos an ‘archaic outlet of chaos’ implies that we are not unmarked by the past and the antiquated is not alien to us. He affirms that ‘Archaos is without doubt the most traditional of all the circuses’.21 For Bidon, when Astley invented the modern circus in 1768 he combined ‘in the one show elements taken from the social and cultural environment of his epoch’. He provoked encounters between sundry, illassorted artists assembled in the same place, the circus ring. He based his show on the means of communication of his age, the horse. Pierrot Bidon believes that ‘the approach of Archaos is rigorously identical. The difference resides only in the environment of our age’, in the invasion by machines, the new sporting practices, the development of the media, the evolution of the comic, the influence of the cinema. Besides, we cannot remain indif­ ferent to the consequences linked to urbanization which, for Pierre Bidon, ‘has engendered new creations and the exacerbation of the primary human emotions which are loneliness, love, violence and cruelty’. This profession of faith applies to his shows which develop ‘new exploits, a new poetry of

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images, an inventive original creativity joined by an overflowing force of mockery’, indeed a ‘new’ circus resembling an image of the tensions which intersect the society it interprets. By 1986, semi-trailers had replaced the caravans, suburban vacant lots the country villages. Le Chapiteau de cordes I (1987) had loneliness as its theme. Le Chapiteau de cordes 2 (1988) is dedicated to violence. Love and tenderness were the object of The Last Show on Earth (1989). In 1990, by the time the company had grown to include twenty artists and decided to split in two, it was one of the most important circus enterprises in the world. It was also the year of the ‘bouinax’.22 Les Bouinax were characters who, by their gestures, their costume and their accessories echoed the world of work. They were implicated in simple intrigues, in a dramaturgy close to fairy tale, and regularly opposed the corrugated-iron clowns. In 1991, BX-91, Beau comme la guerre was produced at the same time as Metal Clown – Le choc des cultures. DJ92 (1992) was a show with equal impact to the two previ­ ously cited that questioned the permanence of passionate love from within the margins of society. The actions of Metal Clown developed along an eighty metre long corridor flanked on either side by the public. As around a circus ring, the audience on one side of the performing space formed part of the backdrop for the specta­ tors on the other. This space was further adapted for the use of motorbikes, cars and trucks just as the circus designed by Astley corresponded to the fourteen steps of the galloping horse. Bubbling with the life of a Brazilian street besieged by modern day troubadours, we are plunged into the heart of the tormented history of Brazil. The street was the right place for telling this epic, which expressed popular aspirations tragically and sensually. The people, who freed themselves from the stamp of the oppressors (the con­ quistadors), led the fight against enslavement and claimed their liberty, and were inevitably forced to play out this route to their future. Thus, it was the capoeira dancers who fought tooth and nail against the henchmen of the powermongers: the corrugated-iron clown, army helmeted, jack-booted and covered with a carapace of corrugated iron. There was also a confrontation of cultures as each camp was backed by an orchestra, Bahia Axé Bahia for one, the Thunder Dogs for the other, and the music was either Latin-Amer­ ican or rock. A line of rhythm could be read as a story in itself, providing essential landmarks to the understanding of the contradictory movements of this tale, while the commentaries on the struggles were called like a football match. The significance of Metal Clown was reinforced by the contempora­ neity of its intention. Indeed, how can we be unaware of the claims of the landless peasants and the struggle against world neo-liberalism that cuts through Brazilian society today? If Archaos rallied circus artists with or without their own acts, it sent them on a course that was not hard to follow. Actions, sounds, smells, and lights alternated with one another and the prevailing chaos resulted from

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the freedom left to ‘the instinctive part of creation which must remain, the most important element of all if it is to service the initial ideas’.23 The shocks came from the juxtaposition of antagonistic elements: a chainsaw massacre could follow an aerial corde act where the physical body asserted its weighty presence; a romantic hand-to-hand duet was able to evolve under the benign gaze of a cripple in a wheelchair. A pivotal moment in the history of Archaos occurred in 1995. Pierrot Bidon abandoned the company and pursued his interests towards new ter­ ritory (Guinea, Brazil). Guy Carrara successively mounted Game Over (1995), Game Over 2 (1997) and In Vitro – La légende des clones (1999) in which the totalitarianism of the media and the folly of the scientists involved in cloning are consecutively committed for trial. The use of video images on a big screen forced the director to use a traditional frontal approach to the stage. The projections appeared as a shifting and constrained backdrop. In these works, the humans are prisoners of routine and daily violence and must submit to elements that are not naturally but culturally imposed by the development of society. The fight for survival and life was manifest in bodies that rebelled and pushed themselves to the limits in the circus skills, thus underlining an exuberant salvation. So the illusions which veil reality are destroyed to be renewed and be destroyed again. Archaos stands out in the history of circus whatever the disciples of a pure tradition say, and has left its mark on the field of live performance through its capacity to produce work that is both salutary and scandalous. As Henry Meschonnic writes; ‘[It has] the specific struggle for itself. Not against the traditional oeuvre, but against the socialization of the oeuvre. The repetition’.24 Archaos developed its singularity in two ways: through a link with the past because it broke with the established and figurative canon, not to destroy it, but in order to create its own work; and through a link to the present, through contemporary productions, because it started with an original and inimitable vision.

Le cirque selon Plume; ‘Un poème en acte. À partager’

[The circus according to Plume: ‘A poem enacted.

To be shared’]25

‘Let’s make a journey to happiness’ promised the advertisement for Le Grand Spectacle de Léa Traction et la gamelle aux étoiles. Thus the group of friends who made up the band, Léa Traction, can be seen to have lived in close relationship with the extravagant and bold ideas of the 1970s. However, in 1983 after hanging out on the streets as troubadours, fire-eaters and brass players, Bernard Kudlak, his brother and their friends, made the tent show, Amour, jonglage et falbalas, and Cirque Plume was born [impelled by a

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love of the circus]. The artistic direction was carried by intentionally mixing theatre and circus, and sustained by strongly privileging music and song as a structuring presence. In their tent, these self-taught artists were joined by circus performers ready to work their own skills into a show that could be conceived as a whole. Little by little, each member of the troupe improved and found their place (for example Bernard Kudlak director, Robert Miny composer). Thus, the logic of the show construction developed. If the exterior aspect of the tent is synonymous with itinerancy and dreams of travelling, its interior was the reverse. The ring was actually banished from Cirque Plume’s vision, which developed a frontal performing space for aesthetic and technical reasons. The elaborate images that were introduced, like Chinese shadow play and optical illusions, required a space that pro­ vided enough depth to bring them into being. In its shows, Cirque Plume presented breaks in the stories, which followed or were connected to one another without obvious links outside of a linear narrative. The coherence, which nonetheless existed, was found as in dreams, in the association of ideas, in wordplay and object-play. Although the versa­ tility of the artists permitted the building of characters (and their continua­ tion throughout the show) the stories of Cirque Plume were re-constructed, re-awakening our imaginative faculty by the effects they produced. After Le jongleur de l’arc-en-ciel (1987), an opera for children, and Le spectacle de cirque et de merveilles (1988), Cirque Plume clarified its style, by organizing its creations around themes. The theatrical and musical anchor of its earlier practice had not been erased. It profoundly marked the discov­ ered or derived aesthetic direction. The succession of circus acts persisted,

Figure 3.1a Cirque Plume, Salins, France, 1998.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Yves Perton (photographer) and Cirque Plume.

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but they were not determined by a principle of discontinuity. Acts were not singled out because they were not conceived as an end in themselves. On the contrary, they were integrated into complex scenes that nourished the oftenimpromptu interventions of active elements on different levels: including sounds, rhythms, colours, and cut-up or shifting forms. The musical element was developed like a backdrop onto which ges­ tures and movements, objects and shadows were grafted. Set pieces grad­ ually leave room for innovative compositions that enrich and restore the ‘recycling’ spirit that is so often evident in street arts. Thus, parts could be interpreted ‘live’ by the accompanying orchestra of four soloists installed in front of individual tables on which stood a set of stemmed glasses capable of producing many octaves with distinct and fascinating ringing sounds. As if they were colours, the sounds emerge from a palette of rich and thin tones that together create a curious atmosphere. In the use of animated and sound images, the beings and objects are dealt with at face value, but more so for what they are not, rather than what they are. It is more the hidden sense of situations and of objects that is exploited rather than their illusory manifestation which is questioned. No Animo Mas Anima (1990) represented a turning point in Cirque Plume’s history. This show represented the start of the validation of their artistic work (reinforced through a National Circus Prize, the enthusiasm of the media and increasing audience numbers). It is true that by the start of this decade new circus had been recognized and finally acknowledged as a respectable genre, notably because it became more clearly defined through the production of such works. These productions exhibited strong, as yet undetermined qualities, and displayed uncategorized features that led to a

Figure 3.1b Cirque Plume, Salins, France, 1998.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Yves Perton (photographer) and Cirque Plume.

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definition of an art form by trial and error. These productions claimed the status of an artwork and carved out a place at the centre of the performing arts. The disappearance of animals (for ecological and economic reasons)26 is one of the major characteristics of new circus. In terms of the genesis of modern circus and its relation to the history and evolution of spectacle and ‘the colonies’ (featuring Astley and his horses, fairground artists and their bears, dogs and monkeys, and the colonial fascination with exotic animals, camels and dromedaries), Western circus still remains for many an animal show. Thus, the absence of animals from the midst of new circus points to a profound break. No animo mas anima can perhaps be considered as a showmanifesto. Cirque Plume, moreover, gave the nod to traditional circus. After having burst out of a cardboard box, an artist with an ‘appropriate’ body went through conventional exercises performed by wildcats: jumping over obstacles, leaping through a flaming hoop, parading around wearing a stud­ ded dog collar, submitting to his trainer, a mistress of erotica clothed in a black dress. The power of such mockery provoked laughter. The inversion of roles, the upheaval that disrupts the normal order of things provokes surprise and reappraisal. Toiles (1994), a similar play on concealment and revelation, was emblem­ atic of Cirque Plume’s ‘circus-thinking’, which aims to create symbol rather than overplay an act. Thus, the juggler’s balls of light (two white, one red) finish as haloes on the heads of the musicians and as the clown’s nose and, when the violinist sitting on village roofs (shown by shadow-play) is eclipsed, his shadow, which had been left suspended, is approached by the

Figure 3.1c Cirque Plume, Salins, France, 1998.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Yves Perton (photographer) and Cirque Plume.

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wire-walker who dances on the notes of the instrument. From L’Harmonie est-elle municipale? (1996) to Mélanges (Opera-Piume) (1999), Cirque Plume refined its wish to produce popular shows that were accessible to the largest audience and took up the challenge of finding a language capable of adapting the mythology of the traditional circus while differentiating itself from it in the belief that a real show would be able to transmit a particular philosophy of life. Bernard Kudlak writes: ‘When we make a show, it is likely that we recount a poem thought of by the populace …’.27 In concluding these brief reflections on the work of Cirque Baroque, Archaos, and Cirque Plume, we are able to identify some of the significant aesthetic traits of new circus. While in the common imagination the circus conjures images of tents, trained animals, clowns, trapeze artists, and drum rolls, these shows consist of moments of amusement and do not have the sta­ tus of works of art. The claimants to the invention of new circus, by declar­ ing that they want to create an art form, have fundamentally modified the conception of a circus show. Their productions move away from the one fixed tradition without submitting to the dogmas of the established live show. This results from an artistic intention sustained by a focused statement of an objective. However, this relies on new rules, the first of which paradoxically is that there are no rules. In this sense, this freedom of culture evokes the distant echo of the slogans of 1968 such as ‘it is forbidden to forbid’. The sites of circus are diverse. Indeed, if the new circus artists still haunt the tents, they do not exclude the possibility of inventing original places for performance (for example a glass cupola for Dromesko, a wooden frame for the cathedral which covers the stables and the ring at Zingaro) or the right of the circus to install itself on the proscenium arch stage. All are imaginable and possible, since the choice of site is often linked to the artistic aims of the troupe or those of a particular show. Even the ring is no longer inevitable. When it is used, its use is often nonconformist, exploring the perimeter and developing unexpected trajectories, demythologizing a centre corrupted by the periphery. Contemporary forms of circus are distinguished by the structure of the shows, notably by the relationship between the different elements and moments that are determined by a clear aesthetic direction. This, in turn, is guided by and anticipated by the style of the company. Circus skills are not the only point of emotional tension as there is no concentrated pursuit of unconditional audience support. There is no promotion of an idealized body. The music has the power to act on the action through the ambience it creates, but beyond this it is accepted as an objective in its own right developing in parallel with the main ideas. The light actively accentuates the performances but responds above all to the need to sculpt the space and create convincing emotions through colour and its own ethereal reality. The costumes, masks, and make-up give the artists a fictional dimension, ena­ bling the artists to assume other characters.

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Before a performance the public is coaxed into an appropriate mood: they are invited to share a tea or a subtly flavoured drink, their olfactory senses are awakened with waves of incense, which are sometimes integrated into the performance space. These convivial practices seek to reduce the distance between the audience and the actors and bring them closer to the art and to each other (as in the tent where they are found shoulder to shoulder). The circus artists are naturally impelled toward multiskilled perform­ ance, either in a collective creation or in response to the context of the performance onstage or in the ring. The frequent presence of a specific context or story produces situations that require characters be taken into consideration. The performers invest themselves in the project and are not content to be in the background. The significant load they carry drives them to exceed the limits of their art. They wear costumes, personalise their gear and accept that the relationship they nurture with it could be disrupted. They collaborate with the musicians, the dancers, and the comedians when they are not attempting these other arts themselves. The architecture sup­ porting the structuring of the show allows for a plurality of dimensions, a palette of composite elements to be placed in movement and tension. From a series of dramatized moments, we move to the need to express a dramaturgy. And from that moment, the designer will no doubt endeavour to shatter the arrangement. The linear and coded discontinuity – which introduces equivalent elements one after the other – gives up its place to a multidimensional projection of fragments, shards dipped in contemporary reality. Their juxtapositions and their confrontations provide an entry into something truly original. Even if it is very difficult to portray these intangible rules that characterize new circus, the principles still apply in various combinations to all three com­ panies examined here, and apply equally to all others who have worked in this era including La Companie Foraine (1984), Les Oiseaux fous (1984), Le Cirque du Docteur Paradi (1985), La Companie Volte Face (1986), La Com­ pagnie Rasposo (1987), and Le Cirque en Kit (1988), among others. An inclu­ sive, systematic, aesthetic analysis meets an original artistic direction in this work, affirming its modernity by its openness to the world and to history.

Notes 1 Ernest Albrecht (1995), The New American Circus (Gainesville: University Press of Florida). 2 Pascal Jacob (2002), Le Cirque: du théâtre equestre aux arts de la piste (Bologne: Larousse); Dominique Mauclair (2002), Planète Cirque, (Baixas: Balzac) (2002). 3 Mark St Leon (1983), Spangles and Sawdust: The Circus in Australia (Richmond: Greenhouse Publications); The Wizard of the Wire: the story of Con Colleano (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993); ‘Circus in Australia’, Australasian Drama Studies 35 (1999): 155–71.

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4 Peta Tait (1996a), ‘Danger Delights; Texts of Gender and Race in Aerial Performance’, New Theatre Quarterly, 12: 43–9; Tait (1996b), ‘Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom’, Theatre Journal 48(1): 27–34; Tait (1998a), ‘Defying Gravity; Trends and Meanings’, Real Time, 24: 31–2; Tait (1998b), ‘Performing Sexed Bodies in Physical Theatre’ in Veronica Kelly (ed.), Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s (Amsterdam: Rodopi); Tait (1999), ‘Circus Bodies as Theatre Animals’, Australasian Drama Studies, 35: 129–43. 5 Dominique Forette (1998), Les Arts de la Piste: une activité fragile entre tradi­ tion et innovation (Paris: Le Conseil Économique et Social); J-M. Guy (2001b), ‘Les Arts du Cirque en France 2001’, Chronique 28 (Paris: Association Française d’Action Artistique – AFFA, Ministère des Affaires éstrangères). 6 The term new circus is used by convention. It is necessary to acknowledge the historical and aesthetic implications involved in this usage, and to clarify that when we speak of new circus, we don’t neglect the specifics that feed it such that new circuses would be a more appropriate expression. 7 For a more detailed reading of the adventures of this period refer to: Bernard Bégardi, Jean-Pierre Estournet and Sylvie Meunier (1990), L’Autre Cirque (Paris: Mermon). 8 Jules Cordières (1976), ‘Faire de chacun l’interprète de ses propres rêves’, La Fête, cette hantise … Paris Autrement, 7: 162–6. 9 The circus has been subject to a similar critique by those recognized as its reform­ ers. Their work has been significant in the context of transmission, notably through the creation of the Annie Fratellini and the Alexis Gruss schools. In terms of performance in the ring, it is worth mentioning Le Cirque Bonjour, founded by Jean-Baptiste Thierrée and Victoria Chaplin which, like other groups, func­ tioned as a co-operative venture. 10 Émile Copferman (1972), La mise en crise théàtrical (Paris: Maspéro). 11 Copferman (1972), p. 59. 12 Giovanni Lista (1997), La Scène moderne (Arles/Paris: Actes Sud/Carré), p. 31. 13 The reader can refer to the collective work edited by Johnny Ebstein and Philippe Invernel, Le Théâtre d’intervention depuis 1968, in two volumes L’Age d’Homme (1983). 14 On the history of this institution see the study by Pascal Jacob (1996), ‘Première décennie du CNAC’, Arts de la Piste 1; Martine Maleval (2000), ‘Materiaux dispersés pour un portrait du CNAC’, Arts de la Piste, 19: 18–20; Anne-Marie Gourdon (ed.) (2005), Une école pour un cirque de création: les parti-pris péda­ gogiques du CNAC, La Formation pluridisciplinaire de l’interprète du spectacle vivant (Paris: Editions du CNRS). 15 From the Italian saltimbanco, literally ‘saute en banc’ (banc or banque signifying ‘the boards’) that is ‘jumps on the boards’. 16 The masks used in Candides were quickly abandoned because they placed too much constraint on the circus artist, limiting among other things their field of vision. 17 Christian Taguet, ‘Propos Ningen’, retrieved from www.les-petitsruisseaux.com/ cirque/baroque.html (access date unknown). 18 Guy Carrara (1998), ‘The foundation – the shape’: Archaos, cirque de charac­ tère, (press release, December 1998). 19 Quotes from extracts of ‘Le Cirque Bidon’, photographs by B. Leasing, (Pandora, 1981). 20 Carrara (1998).

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21 Pierrot Pillot-Bidon (1991), ‘Archaos and traditional circus’, in ‘Archaos, Character Circus’ program for Metal Clown – BX-91, p. 12. All quotes in this paragraph are from this program. 22 ‘bouinax’: the handyperson, do it yourself … to make something out of nothing. 23 Carrara (1998). 24 Henri Meschonnic (1993), Modernity (Paris: Gallimard), p. 71. 25 Bernard Kudlak (1999), ‘What is a Cirque Plume show?’ Mixed-Opera Plume press release. 26 In a time preoccupied with the defence of endangered species, animals in cages appal rather than charm us. Besides, interviewing a menagerie is onerous. 27 Interview with Bernard Kudlak by Stephanie Besson, retrieved from www.cir­ queplume.com (access date unknown).

Chapter 4

The man in the red coat Management in the circus Ron Beadle and David Könyöt

Figure 4.1 David Könyöt, Ringmaster Circus Hassani, Chessington World of Adventure, 1981. Source: Photograph courtesy of Peter Lavery (photographer) and David Könyöt.

A sharp whistle sounds Under the big top the lights dim and noise is reduced to hands grasping at crumbs of popcorn and the expectant shrieks of small children, some of whom know what’s coming – ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, welcome to Circus Harlequin’. Behind the ring doors, an unseen man in a red coat announces the greeting. At this signal lights spin around the tent, the band begins a marching tune and the drapes of the ring doors rise.1 They reveal a woman in a one-piece sequinned leotard2 leading out a troop of smiling artists dressed in multicoloured costumes. They enter a sawdust

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ring, 42 feet wide,3 and each strides out alternately to the right and to the left. When the sequinned woman reaches the halfway point the artists step on to the ring fence and wave to an audience clapping in time to the beat of the drum. The show has begun. As the final beat sounds the artists jog out of the ring. Unnoticed by the audience the man in the red coat4 has emerged from the ring doors. At the moment of the last artist’s disappearance the spotlight finds him. He is the ringmaster5 and from now until the final member of the audience has left the tent, he will manage the show.

Introduction: why MacIntyre, why circus? A revival in the use of Aristotelian virtue notions is evident across studies of management, organisations and professions (Tsoukas and Cummings 1997). Virtue Ethics was, for example, the focus of special editions of Organisation Studies and the Journal of Management, Spirituality and Religion in 2006. Central to this revival, regarded as ‘a constant source of inspiration for criti­ cal theorists of management’ (Du Gay 2000: 15) and as a ‘major contem­ porary thinker’ (Taylor 1992: ix), is Alasdair MacIntyre. In this chapter we will attempt to illustrate MacIntyre’s writing about organisations by draw­ ing on our experience of the travelling circus. We begin with a sketch of the conceptual architecture of practices, institutions and goods that frames his understanding of the role of the virtues in organisations. MacIntyre argues that the development of virtues requires the context of what he calls a ‘practice’. This is defined as: any coherent and complex form of socially established co-operative activity through which goods internal to that activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. (MacIntyre 1985: 187) Internal goods (the goods of excellence) derived from practices are here con­ trasted with external goods (the goods of effectiveness) such as fame, power and profit. Characteristically, the importance of the virtues for agents is first realised through early participation in and witness of practices. Such experi­ ence demonstrates the inherence of such attributes as practical judgement (phronêsis), courage, justice, fortitude and temperance to the successful achievement of goods internal to practices. Contingence, rather than inher­ ence, however, marks their relations to the acquisition of external goods. However, practices generally and characteristically require institutions to generate the external goods necessary to sustain them:

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Institutions are characteristically and necessarily concerned with … external goods. They are involved in acquiring money and other mate­ rial goods; they are structured in terms of power and status, and they distribute money, power and status as rewards. Nor could they do oth­ erwise if they are to sustain not only themselves, but also the prac­ tices of which they are the bearers. For no practices can survive for any length of time unsustained by institutions. Indeed so intimate is the relationship of practices to institutions – and consequently of the goods external to the goods internal to the practices in question – that institu­ tions and practices characteristically form a single causal order in which the ideals and the creativity of the practice are always vulnerable to the acquisitiveness of the institution, in which the cooperative care for com­ mon goods of the practice is always vulnerable to the competitiveness of the institution. In this context the essential feature of the virtues is clear. Without them, without justice, courage and truthfulness, prac­ tices could not resist the corrupting power of institutions. (MacIntyre 1985: 184) For MacIntyre this tension between practices and institutions provides a characteristic theme to organisational life. Although not the only condition for the flourishing of practices, Moore and Beadle (2006) argue that their mode of institutionalisation and environment appear key arbiters; those who manage institutions are required to balance the claims of internal and external goods. Whilst MacIntyre’s criticisms of conventional management in its failure to do this are well known (Beadle 2002) it is none the less evi­ dent in his work that the proper exercise of this function is itself a specific practice (the proper form of politics) requiring the exercise of the virtues: the making and sustaining of forms of human community – and there­ fore of institutions – itself has all the characteristics of a practice, and moreover of a practice which stands in a peculiarly close relationship to the exercise of the virtues … (MacIntyre 1985: 194) This chapter explores these ideas by considering the experience of managing in a traditional circus and focuses on the use of the virtue of phronêsis in this role. This is prompted by the suggestion (Beadle 2003) that circus might be an example of a practice-based community, MacIntyre’s ideal of an institu­ tional mode in which practices and the virtues they house are characteristi­ cally protected from the distorting potential of external goods. Why do we believe this case is worth making? This question cannot be answered without an initial statement about authorship. This chapter has been written by two members of a circus fam­ ily, a current practitioner, David Könyöt and his brother, Ron Beadle, an

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academic. David was brought up in the circus and having spent a few years as a cabaret artist has worked and lived in circus as ringmaster, white-face and auguste (lead) clown, producer and circus proprietor for over 30 years. Ron was brought up outside of the circus, teaches organisation theory and pub­ lishes predominantly on the application of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. In making a prima facie case for applying Aristotle’s virtue ethics ideas in the context of circus our first point is that this is not the first occasion in which the argument has been made. In Hard Times (1989 [1854]) Dickens contrasts a virtuous circus with the vicious tendencies in nineteenth-century intellectual and organisational life. The ineliminable physicality of circus, its vitality, spontaneity and danger marks it out in Dickens’ imagination as an aesthetic, moral and rational alternative to the grim formalities of technical rationality, its people presenting virtues of lived experience over Gradgrind’s values of abstract reasoning (Smith 1999). Second, our experience confirms that circus artists themselves describe excellence in ways which accord closely to Alasdair MacIntyre’s (1985, 1999) descriptions of internal goods and Dickens’ characterisation. Good acts and good shows are defined by their exhibition of the virtues of circus life – they involve complicated artistic displays, physical prowess in versatil­ ity, balance, dexterity, strength, grace and dispositions of character involv­ ing pride in performance, determination, courage and tacit knowledge of matters such as audience reaction, timing, and the mood of animals. Such capabilities and dispositions are those cited by circus artists (although their relative importance differs between acts) in maintaining a clear discrimina­ tion between themselves (in circus parlance ‘pros’) and outsiders (‘jossers’), between good acts and bad and by extension between shows. Third, circus as an institutional invention sustains a range of formerly dis­ parate practices (each with their own internal goods) through enabling them (at least when the institution is in good order) to realise an adequate return (MacIntyre’s idea of ‘external goods’). The first modern (recorded) instance of the creation of a closed circular arena for performance presentations in 1768 ‘transformed the equestrian performances from a public spectacle from which people wandered towards and away (dropping payment if they so wished into circulating hats), to a pay-on-entry arena’ (Stoddart 2000: 14) and soon ‘acts were improved and multiplied in the various competitors’ attempts to outdo each other and draw in greater crowds’ (Stoddart 2000: 14) Circus can be seen as an exemplar of the necessity of institutional ‘hous­ ing’ of practices. Fourth, the development of the different circus arts was accompa­ nied by features common to the life of each and accord with those cited by MacIntyre as being essential elements of the life of practices. These include the necessity of apprenticeship (MacIntyre 1999: 88–9) and a discourse in which standards of excellence are rooted in a history of performance and more particularly of conflict and competition between

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different approaches to performance over time (encompassing tricks, cos­ tume, make-up, lighting, music, tempo and props) that defines a discernable tradition (MacIntyre 1985: 188–94). Finally and perhaps more controversially is the appropriateness of Knight’s commentary on MacIntyre’s notion of the practice-based community, that form of community in which practices flourish and institutions balance the needs of internal and external goods: it is now only in such discrete communities of practice, and in familial and bipartisan relations, rather than in more integrated communities of locality, that most people have the opportunity to cultivate virtue and practical reasoning. (Knight 1998: 23–4) Circus people have routinely and characteristically seen themselves as a ‘breed apart’ (Davis 2002: 10), inhabiting what Carmeli has termed ‘a mode of survival which is a mode of existence’ (Carmeli 1987: 770). There is for us a prima facie case to suggest that circus – as a mode of institutionalisation – is the type of discrete community to which Knight refers. This chapter proceeds with a discussion of method before describing the work of the ringmaster and the organisation of work in the circus. It uses a series of incidents from this context to illustrate the use of the virtue of phronêsis, practical wisdom in this role as illustration of an element of Mac­ Intyre’s argument as to the criticality of the virtues in sustaining institutions. It concludes with some reflections on circus in the context of the idea of practice-based community. A note on method This chapter is a moment, albeit a public moment, in an ongoing conver­ sation between the authors. It shares a number of features with narrative ethnography in providing ‘a window into [the author’s] personal lives in the field’ (Tedlock 1991: 77). The process of this chapter’s construction (as we recall it) developed from conversations in the late 1990s about the paucity of publicly available data on British circuses and of circus studies within the management and organi­ sational literature. Other than in ‘Circus’ publications, particularly King Pole – the magazine of the UK Circus Friends Association – there is no pub­ licly available source of data about the numbers of touring circuses, much less any record of the number or demographics of those who work in it. At the same time we were both concerned that the tradition of travelling circus in Britain is under threat (Stacey 2004) and should be written up while there were still practitioners able to discuss it. As Kornberger and Clegg high­ light, the West ‘has always had a lack of understanding of nomadic cultures’

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(Kornberger and Clegg 2003: 82). The marginality of circus is apparent to its small group of academic researchers: The circus, and the circus artist, like the marginals that Foucault dis­ cusses, are positioned, literally and figuratively, on the periphery, placed beyond the immediate comprehension of the ‘normal’ person on the street, in this sense invisible to, or outside the bounds of the normal. (Little 1995: 18) We have found a peculiar and inviting symmetry in the marginality of circus, the commitment to ethnography in the few extant treatments of circus in journals6 and the marginality MacIntyre claims for the few remaining prac­ tice-based communities which may be found in modern social orders.

The organisation of work in the traditional circus7 The essential unit of the production process in the traditional travelling circus is the family and this marks a distinctive feature of its employment relations (Carmeli 1991). Traditional circuses are privately owned (owners are known as ‘directors’ in circus parlance) and shows are developed for a season through the employment of the director’s family and others in offer­ ing a programme of acts. Individuals are rarely hired (Carmeli 1987, 1991). Members of the director’s family and those ‘housed’ by the director fall into a patron–client relationship in which the patron provides ‘employment, accommodation [and] vehicles, in addition to poor cash payments’ (Carmeli 1987: 765). For other performers, contracts normally stipulate a weekly payment for the act(s) provided by the family. It is worth emphasising that these are con­ tracts for service rather than employment, circus artists work in small family businesses. Additional income is earned on a commission basis through the ‘sellings’ of programmes, face-painting, foodstuffs, novelty items, raffle tick­ ets, photographs with artists and children’s rides (where there are animals). The presentation of acts is negotiated between the artists and the director (sometimes with the assistance of the ringmaster) when the artists arrive at the show’s winter quarters (often an owned or hired farmer’s field, this will contain the tent, rigging, lighting, and so on, and provide a home for the director’s family in the winter months when the circus does not tour). This includes the order of the programme, music, duration, lighting and (depend­ ing on the extent of choreography) costumes. The extent to which the physical content is open to negotiation is limited. The contract will stipulate the provision of an act(s) whose features are already circumscribed by tradition (including the movement from simpler to more difficult tricks) and by prior presentation (often through videos provided by performers or their agents). A director will not ask a juggler

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to walk a tightrope. Clowns are more likely to be asked to integrate their material into the owner’s vision for the show given that the range of their activities is potentially wider – they can perform complete acts (known as entrées), run-ins (also known as the ‘reprise’, the idea here is that they per­ form a comic version of the preceding act) in addition to informal interac­ tion with the audience. The discretion of the director is far more evident in living arrangements and house rules relating to such matters as where to site vehicles around the show (known as ‘setting the show’), the hours during which the show provides electricity, the provision of petrol and other essentials, hanging out of washing, the order of pulling onto and off the site and the involvement of the artists in build-ups (erecting the tent, seats and equipment) and pulldowns (their removal) on site.

The ringmaster The role of the ringmaster outlined here is part of the definition of the tra­ ditional one-ring travelling circus (Stroud 1999; Beadle 2003). Other shows using the title ‘circus’ do not use a ringmaster or use one in a more lim­ ited way (Lister 2004). Larger shows may employ an Equestrian Director, a Front of House Manager (for the Booking Office and Let-Ins), an Artistic Director, Chief Ring Boy and others using a managerial framework similar to that in theatre. In such cases the ringmaster is employed as a compère. At the other end of the spectrum some small circus directors dispense with a ringmaster and carry out their functions themselves. This model is so preva­ lent in Britain that the role of the ringmaster helps distinguish richer from poorer shows. However, in the traditional one-ring circus the focus of the ringmaster’s work is the ring. Forty-five minutes before each show (there are normally two or three each day) it is the ringmaster’s responsibility to ‘properly dress’, rake and level the ring (essential for safety), to see that any matting is laid evenly, and that the ring-fence is assembled and clean. In addition the ringmaster will check that the artists’ rigging is secure, although this is primarily the responsibility of the artists themselves. A few minutes before the show the ringmaster will check that the ring-boys, musicians and artists are dressed and in their places. The ring-boys are manual workers, hired and travelling with some shows for their eight to nine month season, in others hired in each town as casual labour, in others a combination of the two. They will be uniformed in the colours of the circus during the show and work on the build-ups and pull-downs, cleaning up after animals and so on. Most reasonably sized shows employ musicians, although in small shows these are replaced by taped music and in others a combination of both. The ringmaster will normally monitor the ‘let-in’ to ensure that the audi­ ence is fully seated before the show begins. During the show the ringmaster

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combines managerial work with a performing role as compère. The ringmas­ ter manages variance. He can change the order of acts, can order perform­ ance by the clowns or musicians to cover for any unexpected gaps between acts, can order acts to reduce or extend their time in the ring (the final show of a circus’ stay in town – pull-down day – commonly being shorter than the others) and if significant problems emerge (accidents, animal escapes, fires, and so on) can order the clearing of the tent. A number of ‘secrets of performance’ (Carmeli 1991) such as learning how to clean a ring carpet without a broom (and without removing the carpet from the ring) mark elements of the practice. 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 (‘The famous triple somersault has only been attempted by a handful of the world’s best trapeze artists …’). The ring­ master and the clowns are normally the only speakers in a circus show, the former marking both the show’s official interpretation and standing as a counterpoint to the anonymity of the other artists. His status and authority thus established becomes available for playful undermining through acting as a foil for the clowns, although the extent of this is reduced as the extent of scripting increases. The ringmaster, like all managers, can be seen as occupying a boundary position between directors, artists, other workers and consumers of the cir­ cus. Maintaining a consistent relationship in which boundaries of legitimate action are adhered to reduces the opportunity for conflict and confusion. The maintenance of boundaries requires a number of routines. Alone among employees of the circus the ringmaster will not enter another artist’s caravan (in circus parlance ‘wagon’) unless it is part of an invitation for all other artists, and the same rule applies to other artists entering his wagon. This is essential to avoid accusations of favouritism and to maintain a social distancing necessary to enable managerial authority to be exercised. One consequence of the ringmaster’s authority is the ostensible reversal of power relations where circus directors perform in the show. In this situation the ringmaster’s authority extends to the director as to other artists. He can order changes to the duration of their act(s), the order in which acts appear and so on in the same way as he could with any other artist. As significant is that the director will not instruct the artists during the show. Holding such discretionary power over the director is essential to the acceptance of the ringmaster’s authority by other artists. The ringmaster acts in a minimally formalised organisational context. Other than the use of a largely standardised circus contract the baroque panoply of organisational representations found elsewhere (mission state­ ments, job descriptions, person specifications, technical specifications, quality systems, performance management systems and so on) are absent. Relations are governed informally and in this context we will present much

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of the ringmaster’s work as involving the virtue of phronêsis, the virtue of the exercise of practical judgement and the virtue without which ‘none of the virtues of character can be exercised’ (MacIntyre 1985: 154).

Practical judgement in the ringmaster’s role Drawing on MacIntyre and other Aristotelian sources, Smith (1999) argues that teaching should be seen as a role whose accomplishment requires phronêsis and which is irreducible to technical and formal specification so beloved of government and educational managers. Phronêsis requires both technical skill and understanding of relevant rules but is the virtue that judges the appropriateness of their use in situations whose definition is part of the exercise of the virtue (see also Tsoukas and Cummings 1997). We shall follow Smith’s reasoning here in making our argument to establish its importance to the proper conduct of ringmastery. Smith argues through extended examples that: the defining features of practical judgment include flexibility, attentive­ ness (understood as including alertness and sensitivity), matters of char­ acter and experience, and the ineliminability of ethical considerations. (Smith 1999: 331) The virtues of practical judgement allow practitioners to generate the ‘thick descriptions’ of situations that enable discriminations to be made between courses of action in ostensibly similar situations. Decisions are rarely mat­ ters of inference requiring only that a decision follows the identification of an appropriate rule in the context of established facts. What is required is a form of moral sensitivity aware of relevant rules, the peculiarities of particular cases, the general form of the relationship between them and the characteristic errors (self-indulgence, institutional and professional absorp­ tion figure as examples) that are to be avoided in taking decisions and in being with others. In the context of education Smith argues that this constitutes an alter­ native language to that of techno-instrumental rationality to describe the activities of teacher whilst admitting that this case may be ‘a puny thing’ (Smith 1999: 337) in the face of the leviathan of technicism. In the tradi­ tional circus, however, the leviathan is absent. We have chosen three stories to illustrate the role of practical judgement in the ringmaster’s work. The wire-walker A wire-walker whose closing trick was a double backward somersault would go into a whole routine of falling off, getting back on the wire and com­ pleting the trick to rapturous applause. He would do this on two or three

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occasions if there was a woman in the audience who he wanted to impress. The problem was that he would do this even if there was only a small audi­ ence and especially on a pull-down night. The ringmaster had warned the wire-walker but to no avail until finally in one show when he fell for the third time and asked for a glass of water the ringmaster had the main lights turned down and the wire-walker’s props removed while he was sitting on the floor in the spotlight. When the lights came on the ringmaster announced that due to nervous exhaustion the wire-walker could no longer continue. The wire-walker desisted from more than one fake fall thereafter. The clowns A clown act had a poor sense of time and would always go over their allot­ ted 15 minutes in the ring. The solution came following a conversation with the bandleader after which the whole last show, not just the clown act, was played one beat faster than usual, resulting in a saving of 10 to 12 minutes. Throughout the remainder of the season no-one noticed the change. The director The interval normally lasts for 15 to 20 minutes and provides an opportunity for significant income generation through additional ‘sellings’. Some direc­ tors over-rule their ringmaster to extend the interval for as long as it takes to serve the final customer. The interval can last for anything up to 40 minutes when pony rides and other forms of children’s entertainment are offered. Such intervals are felt by circus artists to insult the audience, undermine the integrity of the show and the authority of the ringmaster. Varied interval lengths additionally cause problems for the warm-up routines of those per­ forming after the interval. Resulting delays to the start of the next show can become a point of conflict between the ringmaster (whose responsibility this is) and the director who has imperilled it. Good ringmasters avoid working for shows where directors do this. In each of these stories the ringmaster’s knowledge of the acts and atten­ tion to variance is evident in the way in which the situation is understood. In every case the variance manifests itself in some dimension of time (the acts and intervals taking too long) measured against some tradition-informed notion of an appropriate length of time for the activity. The stories as we have told them equally demonstrate that responses to these situations vary according to judgements in which a number of contextual features are brought into play – these include whether the show is taking place on a pull down night, which intensifies the impact of overrunning; whether those overrunning are aware of this; whether alternatives to confronta­ tion with the person/people involved are available; whether confrontation

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is warranted (there is a general predisposition against this); and what form confrontation could take. In each story direct confrontation was avoided. In our view these stories illustrate Smith’s characterisation of phronêsis involving flexibility of response, attentiveness to circumstances, judgements of character and ethical considerations. Moreover the stories can be con­ structed to reflect MacIntyre’s framework. All three stories understand the role of the ringmaster in terms that fit well with the protection of the internal goods of the practice (the idea of a ‘good show’). In two of them this is threatened by the attempted achievement of the external goods of flirtation or increased revenue and the other entailed a correction of inadequate attention to detail. How­ ever, the effectiveness of the ringmaster in rectifying the perceived prob­ lems is largely if not wholly dependent on extant power relations – the mode of institutionalisation evident in the show. In the first two cases the ringmaster used his power to achieve an outcome, in the latter the direc­ tor over-ruled him.

Discussion: circus as a practice-based community Circus presents a series of paradoxes when considered in the light of Mac­ Intyre’s work. It exhibits many of the features of practice-based commu­ nities – the requirement of apprenticeship, the importance of tradition, the protection of internal goods and a relationship between work and life that demonstrates a far closer identification than that in modern economic orders. People do not work in circus, they live circus. Indeed Carmeli has argued that part of the attraction of circus in its heyday was precisely that promise of totality, an image of a unified and unchanging life ‘performa­ tively objectified and constituted as beyond history and relations’ (Carmeli 1997: 12). For Carmeli, however, this notion is a myth, ‘part of the circus dream’ (Carmeli 1997: 12), ‘an illusionary totality … conjured for the circus specta­ tors, a totality for which the spectators in the fragmentary, industrial order nostalgically yearn’ (Carmeli 2001: 157). Experienced circus exhibits ele­ ments of fragmentation and conflict that mark other employment environ­ ments. Apart from the directors’ family and ‘house’ most artists do not stay with the same circus beyond a season and either move between shows or between bouts of employment and unemployment as circuses change acts, go bankrupt and split. The employees of the circus, the ring-boys and tentmen (where these are present) are employed on a temporary basis and are often regarded by artists and directors as expendable. Within circuses the relationships between artists and directors vary in both their permanence and quality. Relationships between artists are themselves marked and marred by their transience. One new artist:

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learned a painful lesson about circus life; that people may become the centre and meaning of your existence, for a while the closest friends, you eat, drink, sleep, laugh, cry in their company, then they go away and you never see them again. (Stroud 1999: 58) Carmeli highlights the contradiction between the public perception of circus (and we might add Dickens’ characterisation of it) as a totalising community and the performer’s experience of transience when he argues that the per­ former is anchored not to any individual institution but to circus ‘as a mode of performance’ and to familial identification (Carmeli 1991: 282–3). The institutional impermanence of individual circuses coupled with their private ownership structure and concomitant power relations are probative to their definition as practice-based communities despite the number of practicebased features that are exemplified in circus life. Individual circuses may be seen as both temporary communities exhibit­ ing features of practice-based life and institutions whose need to embody managerial authority in particular individuals (albeit without the ideological and rhetorical features prevalent in other managerial systems) stems from this latter feature. In those circuses employing a ringmaster to perform this managerial function it is this person who stands at the centre of the contra­ dictions to which this dual character of this circus gives rise. The ringmaster personifies these contradictions and much of his labour consists in making and exercising the virtue of phronêsis in the attempt to balance the demands of directors, performers and his own sense of identity rooted in a notion of giving a good show. This type of discussion, however, is incomplete without considering whether the attempt to construct an essentialist attribution of the status of practice-based community to an institutional mode (in this case circus) is itself misplaced, perhaps the task is better understood as involving the vir­ tue of phronêsis (if we can) in making judgements as to whether individual circuses meet the conditions necessary to be considered as practice-based communities. For MacIntyre the mode of institutionalisation is critical to such judgement: All practices find their social embodiment in institutions or organizations (Chess is a practice, chess clubs are organizations). But it is always of cru­ cial importance to distinguish those features of social life which belong to some particular practice from those which belong to the institution or organization in which it is embedded. The goods internal to a practice are those which give point and purpose to both roles and relationships. The distribution of power that characterizes a particular institution or organization will determine whether the roles and relationship in ques­ tion are or are not instruments of domination or oppression.8

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Finale ‘Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, have you enjoyed your visit to the Circus?’ ‘YES.’ ‘I can’t hear you.’ ‘YES!’ ‘That’s better. Now make sure you tell your neighbours and friends to come and see us. We are only in town till Sunday performing twice daily at two thirty in the afternoon and at six o’clock. And remember Circus is still the Greatest Show on Earth!’

Acknowledgements We are grateful to two anonymous referees from whose comments we have gained much and to those who commented on an earlier version of this chapter at its presentation to the ‘Management and Goodness’ stream of the Third International Critical Management Studies Conference in Man­ chester, 2001.

Notes 1 These will be manually pulled by two ring-boys on either side or, in a richer cir­ cus will be rigged by a system of pulleys known as paging. 2 Invented by Jules Léotard specifically for circus performance. 3 This is the size of ring which allows a rider to stand on a horse while it canters around the perimeter, a dimension introduced in the eighteenth century by Philip Astley, the former hussar and founder of the modern circus. 4 The circus impresario, friend of the British Royal Family and Conservative Councillor on London County Council, Bertram Mills introduced the Red Coat, in the 1920s. Before this, the ringmaster had worn black tails. 5 Normally the job is performed by a man and we will use ‘he’ to reflect this, although ringmistresses have emerged recently in British circuses. The first allwomen circus appeared in Australia in 1991 (Davis 2002: 235). 6 Particularly the work of Yoram Carmeli, much of which is cited here and with whom David has enjoyed a long friendship. 7 We have avoided a formal definition of this here largely because formal definition is inappropriate to an understanding which is continuously contested between circus people themselves. 8 Alasdair MacIntyre, personal correspondence, 26 June 2000.

References Beadle, Ron (2002) The Misappropriation of MacIntyre, Reason in Practice, 2(2), 45–54. Beadle, Ron (2003) In search of a peculiar goodness: towards a reading of Nell Stroud’s Josser – Days and Nights in the Circus, Tamara: The Postmodern Journal of Critical Organization Science, 3(2), 60–8.

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Carmeli, Yoram (1987) Played by their own Play: fission and fusion in British cir­ cuses, The Sociological Review, 35(4), 744–74. Carmeli, Yoram (1991) Performance and family in the world of British circus, Semi­ otica, 85(3/4), 257–89. Carmeli, Yoram (1997) The sight of cruelty: the case of circus animal acts, Visual Anthropology, 10, 1–15. Carmeli, Yoram (2001) Circus play, circus talk and the nostalgia for a total order, Journal of Popular Culture, 35(3), 157–64. Davis, Janet (2002) The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. Dickens, Charles ([1854] 1989) Hard Times, edited by Paul Shilke, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Du Gay, Paul (2000) In Praise of Bureaucracy, New York: Sage. Knight, Kelvin (ed.) (1998) The MacIntyre Reader, Oxford: Polity Press. Kornberger, M. and Clegg, S. (2003) The architecture of complexity, Culture and Organisation, 9(2), June, 75–91. Lister, David (2004) The billion dollar circus, The Independent on Sunday Arts and Books Review, 2 January, 2–4. Little, Kenneth (1995) Surveilling circus archaos: transgression and the spaces of power in popular entertainment, Journal of Popular Culture, 29(1), 15–28. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1985) After Virtue, 2nd edn with corrections, London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1999) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, London: Duckworth. Moore, Geoff and Beadle, Ron (2006) In search of organisational virtue in busi­ ness: agents, goods, practices, institutions and environments, Organisation Stud­ ies, 27(3), 369–89. Smith, Richard (1999) Paths of judgment: the revival of practical wisdom, Educa­ tional Philosophy and Theory, 31(3), 327–40. Stacey, Don (2004) The most serious threat to circus in decades, World’s Fair April 2–8, 1 and 16. Stoddart, Helen (2000) Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation, Man­ chester: Manchester University Press. Stroud, Nell (1999) Josser: Days and Nights in the Circus, London: Little, Brown & Co. Taylor, Charles (1992) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press. Tedlock, Barbara (1991) From participant observation to the observation of par­ ticipation: the emergence of narrative ethnography, Journal of Anthropological Research, 41, 69–84. Tsoukas, Haridimos and Cummings, Stephen (1997) Marginalization and recovery: the emergence of Aristotelian organization studies, Organization Studies, 18(4), 655–83.

The clown

Chapter 5

Clowns and clown play Louise Peacock

Definitions of the clown types found in the circus and in the theatre are derived from a number of sources (most of these clown types remain decid­ edly male regardless of the gender of the performer). The Auguste, Whiteface and Tramp have long been familiar in the world of circus and these types and their variants, therefore, provide a good starting point for exploring clown­ ing. Sometimes the long established circus labels can be applied to theatre clowns but more often these more modern clowns demand a different tax­ onomy. Much of this chapter will focus on establishing a taxonomy of clown types and the nature of their play which will provide a reference point for the analyses of clown performance which follow. Some of the definitions offered (Clown Show, Clown Theatre, and Clown Actor) are original definitions cre­ ated by the author to fix some landmarks in a relatively uncharted territory and reference will be made to the terms clown and bouffon as used by Lecoq and also to Wright’s (2006) definitions of simple, pathetic and tragic clowns. The term clownesque is also considered later in this chapter as a way of dis­ cussing the overlap between clown theatre and physical theatre.

Traditional clown types Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries there was very lit­ tle development or change in the nature of the clown. Clown types devel­ oped around the basic dichotomy of talking and non-talking. Famous clowns before the end of the nineteenth century include the talking clowns Billy Hayden (whose acts revolved around internal illogicality) and Whimsical Walker and Ducrow, Gontard, Durang, Rice, Auriol (skill or acrobat clowns). By the end of the nineteenth century, two key clown types had been established: the Whiteface and the Auguste. A third, the counter-Auguste was created by Albert Fratellini in the 1920s and a fourth, The Tramp or Hobo clown, was popularized in the United States again in the 1920s by clowns such as Otto Griebling, Emmett Kelly and, on film, Charlie Chaplin. It is these types which will be defined and traced through to their continued existence in clown performance in modern society. As clowning has developed these later types

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have absorbed the activities carried out by clown parleurs (talking clowns) and acrobat clowns so that now we may see, for example, an acrobatic Auguste such as Oleg Popov who includes slack-rope work in his act.

The Whiteface The Whiteface clown was a development from the clown parleur (as exem­ plified by Billy Hayden). The Whiteface had a sense of importance which was reflected in his make-up and costume. Face make-up consisted of a plain white base on to which elegant lips and delicate eyebrows could be painted. François Fratellini (one of the three Fratellini brothers who became famous in France in the 1920s) can be taken as an example. Images of François Fratellini clearly show the elegance of his make-up in comparison with that of his brothers Paul (the Auguste) and Albert (the more grotesque counterAuguste) (Figure 5.1). Onto his white base were painted gracefully curving eyebrows, his nos­ trils and eyes were highlighted and his lips were darkened. The Whiteface clown’s costume was very smart. It was often a tight-fitting outfit with trou­ sers which stopped at the knee. On the lower leg the clown wore stockings. The fabric was richly covered and sparkly. The outfit would be completed by a neat conical hat. The costume signified to the audience apparent sta­ tus, wealth and control and this semiotic message was reinforced when the Whiteface was seen in combination with the Auguste.

Figure 5.1 Three Brothers Fratellini.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Topfoto (Topfoto RV8010-7).

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The Auguste The Auguste clown made its first appearance in 1877 although there are conflicting stories, as Hugill (1980) and Towsen (1976a) suggest, as to how the name originated. In contrast to the Whiteface, the Auguste was clumsy, incompetent, and eager to do well but, ultimately, incapable and provided a butt for the tricks and jokes of the Whiteface. The role of the Auguste has been adopted and developed by a number of clowns over the years. Such clowns include Tom Belling, Chocolat, Grock, Paul Fratellini and Coco the Clown. The Auguste’s costume is typified by clothing which does not fit, including trousers which are too long or too short, too tight or too baggy; a jacket which is too big or too small; shoes or boots which are often overly long and a hat. In the early days of the Auguste, the costume tended to be comprised of an ill-fit­ ting dinner suit. The Auguste tries to be smart but fails. His costume has all the elements of clothing required by a smart gentleman but the mis-sizing of each article of that clothing creates a haphazard effect. More recently the Auguste often, but not always, has wild hair, often red in colour. Early Augustes wore very subdued make-up but after Albert Fratellini created the counter-Auguste, the original Auguste tradition has faded as it has been replaced by the conven­ tions of the counter-Auguste. The term Auguste, following the widespread influence of Albert Fratellini can now be taken to mean a clown whose clothes are an unusual mix of colours, patterns and sizes. Typically the Auguste wears a red nose and Augustes now tend to adopt the pattern of a white base onto which exaggerated features are painted such as an oversize mouth and huge eyebrows. As Davison suggests ‘any understanding of clown in our own times cannot escape the figure of the Auguste’ (Davison 2013: 65). The costume can be viewed as a parody of the ringmaster’s costume. The counter-Auguste now tends to be more subdued both in costume and make-up, often without a red nose. In this way the traditions of the Auguste and counter-Auguste have been reversed with the once subdued Auguste becoming more garish and extrovert. The more subdued style which was once associated with the original Auguste has become much more established in Europe than in the United States and it is sometimes referred to as the European Auguste.

The Tramp There is one further important clown type: the Tramp. The Tramp or hobo originated in America in the 1920s and can be seen as a variation of the Auguste. The main characteristic of the Tramp clown is that he looks uncared for. The elements of costume are similar to those of the Auguste but in addi­ tion to being wrongly sized they are also very shabby. The Tramp’s make-up usually includes painted on stubble and a down-turned mouth, often high­ lighted in white. Typically the Tramp looks mournful and connects with his audience by appealing for pity. Famous Tramp clowns included Joe Jackson, Emmett Kelly, Otto Griebling and, of course, on film, Charlie Chaplin.

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Double acts/group play As soon as the Whiteface and Auguste came into existence they tended to be paired. This pairing increases the varieties of play which become possible. One early pairing was Footit and Chocolat, who began working together in France in 1894. Their partnership can be taken as indicative of the way such acts work. Footit was the Whiteface and Chocolat was the Auguste. According to Towsen, Footit ‘reunited the great twin traditions of the talking and acro­ batic clowns’ (Towsen 1976a: 218). Whilst Footit had a circus background (his father ran the Great Footit Allied Circus), Chocolat (a Cuban whose real name was Raphael Padilla) was unskilled. Chocolat developed an Auguste character who was ‘a would-be man of the world, a fool attempting to appear dignified but rarely getting away with it’ (Towsen 1976a: 219). Together the pair began to establish the conventions by which the Whiteface is always in control while the Auguste tries desperately to match up to his higher status partner. Later pairings continued this notion of status imbalance because it provides a good source of play. The clowns’ irritation with each other can be played out to the audience and the audience can be encouraged to take sides. In this way they are drawn more firmly into the play frame established by the clowns. Rémy (1997) provides us with records of some of the entrées performed by a number of clown acts. One of these was performed by LuLu (the Whiteface) and Tonio (the Auguste) in 1950 (Rémy 1997: 196–203). In this entrée the Whiteface is a barber in need of an assistant. The Auguste is hired as the assistant and promptly gets tangled up in the barber’s smock. He annoys LuLu by interfering when they have a customer. He keeps knocking the customer down and each time he does something wrong LuLu gets more cross with him. At each point the reaction of the clown can be played to the audience. As well as each clown being able to interact with the props of the entrée there is the added element of interacting with each other as a source of play. As can clearly be seen at this point the Whiteface is still the dominant partner on stage and this was usually the case offstage too. The Whiteface, Antonet, always retained the upper hand over his working partner by being the one who approached other clowns each time he needed a new collabora­ tor. However, one of his partners, Grock, was the Auguste who began to change this situation by creating entrées and routines in which the Whiteface became the foil to the Auguste. This is true to such an extent that, later in Grock’s career, the Whiteface is not even identified, with Grock being billed as ‘Grock and partner’. This dominance of Grock over his partner made the transition into theatre, working almost as a solo clown, much easier for him. In the first decade of the twentieth century a further development in clown­ ing occurred when the Fratellini brothers began working as a group of three clowns (a Whiteface, an Auguste and a second more grotesque counterAuguste). This expansion in numbers allowed for the development of more complex entrées with a greater range of dramatic contrast. The performance

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style of the Fratellini exemplified ensemble performance and this ensemble was a significant development in moving entrée performance towards theatre per­ formance despite the fact that the Fratellini were committed circus perform­ ers. Other trios and groups followed in their wake such as Los Rivels and the Pickles Family clowns and their influence can be traced to the ensemble clown companies of today such as Mimirichi and Tricicle. Whilst these early clown types are helpful in identifying and discussing clowns, it is also important to consider how far a clown can be defined by what he actually does, the type of play in which he engages. Clowning rou­ tines and actions can be classified into types. These types are ‘interruption of ceremony’, ‘subversion and parody’, ‘physical skill’ (acrobatics, juggling, contortion, high wire), ‘incompetence’, ‘interaction with objects’, ‘interac­ tion with other clowns’, ‘status’, ‘food’ and, more recently, ‘the exploration of the human condition’. The ‘interruption of and commenting on a ceremony’ exists in many types of clowning and is in itself a form of subversion, incorporating elements of parody. The main function of clowns in the Pueblo (New Mexico and Ari­ zona), Mayo-Yaqui (Sonora, Mexico) and Maidu (North East California) peoples is to interrupt religious ceremonies and to comment on them. These clowns disrupt the ceremony in a display of transgression but the clowning is, in fact, an integral part of the ceremony and the use of make-up or mask clearly indicates the role and nature of the clown. Interruptions on a less socially significant level occur when the clown interrupts the ringmaster in a circus. In both of these examples the clowns model playful behaviour as a way of responding to authority figures or potentially dull situations. The Maidu clown’s interruption of ceremony is closely linked to the clown’s frequent recourse to subversionary tactics and the use of parody. The sacred clowns’ treatment of the priests can be seen as parodic as they often mock the priest’s style of chanting, moving and dancing. More recently, parody for the circus clown operates in two ways. The first is self-referential within the circus; the clown parodies the act which has gone before. In Cirque du Soleil’s Alegría one clown enters with a candle which symbolizes a minimalist parody of the fire act which went before and which used flames in a much more dra­ matic way than the clown is able to. Second, clown acts may parody or sati­ rize events which are happening in wider society. Popov, the Russian clown, constructed a routine which centred on a washing machine which initially was able to wash hens, turning them from black to white but which ultimately fell apart. Popov developed this sketch in reaction to common problems with Soviet washing machines at the time. Greater use of parody and subversion has been made towards the later part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in the work of Dario Fo and the political demonstrations of the now largely dormant CIRCA (Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army). In many areas of clowning, clowns display considerable physical skill. For example, some Native American clowns leap from rooftops. Circus clowns,

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as well as clowning, are able to demonstrate a range of other circus skills. Popov is able to perform on the slack wire. Grock (a Swiss clown whose career began in 1903 and ended in 1954) was a musical clown able to play many instruments. Coco, another Russian clown performing earlier than Popov beginning in the 1920s, trained in several areas of the circus such as juggling and slack-rope before focusing on clowning. Another significant physical element in clowning is the clown’s ability to mime. Circus, and by extension clowning, is not and never has been a primarily verbal form. It has also long been a nomadic form with circuses touring the world in search of new audiences. For the juggler, the acrobat, the equi­ librist, the language spoken by the audience is not significant as the impact of their acts relies on physical skill not verbal communication. For the clown, where verbal exchanges might form an important part of the act, the mat­ ter of language had to be addressed. A range of techniques was developed in order to allow clowns to communicate fully with their audiences. Some clowns chose not to speak, often using whistles or squeakers instead. Other clowns reduced the language in their act to a minimum and compensated for lack of verbal communication by improving their physical and mime skills, ensuring that their act could be understood wherever they went. Failure or ‘incompetence’ is a staple ingredient of clown performance. Simon goes so far as to suggest that ‘the potential for a clown’s success or failure is what rivets us to the action’ (Simon 2009: 49). Clowns demon­ strate their inability to complete whatever exploit they have begun. In doing so they speak to the inner vulnerability of the audience whose members are often bound by societal conventions which value success over failure. When the clown provokes laughter by failing, he provides a release valve and allows his audience to enjoy a feeling of superiority which relates to the Hobbesian theory of superiority in relation to laughter. Clown sketches which focus on specific examples of incompetence such as tripping and/or falling as part of the laughter provocation are relying on the laughter release mechanism which occurs psychologically when we believe someone may have been hurt but then realize they have not. According to Bergson the ‘laughable element … consists of a certain mechanical elasticity’ (Bergson 1911: 10). We might expect the person to avoid the trip or fall by checking the impulse to fall but we laugh when they do not. In this way the clown who slips on the age-old banana skin is funny as long as he gets up with only pretence of being hurt. If he turns out to be really hurt, the audience stops laughing. Clowns in the theatre are able to create much longer sequences involving failure or incom­ petence due to the longer time frame of their performance. The remaining elements of clown routines – ‘interaction with objects’, ‘interaction with others’, ‘status’ and ‘food’ – are most readily exempli­ fied in the work of both circus clowns and theatre clowns and have been developed in response to the clown’s limited use of language based sketches. Remove language and the remaining sketch must communicate clearly and immediately through physical action. In many ways these elements are

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interconnected because clown interaction, whether with objects or other clowns, tends to be governed by status. For example, the clown who per­ forms the simple ‘walk-around’ act (a circus clown act where the clown fills in between other acts by working around the circus ring, entertaining the audience) of trying to pick up a ball or balloon is engaged in a status inter­ action. Every time he goes to pick up the balloon, he kicks it. The balloon floats into the air and the clown cannot reach it. As soon as the balloon falls to earth the sequence is repeated. Each time, through look and gesture the clown signals to the audience that this time he will succeed and then time and time again he fails. In this routine the clown has lower status than the bal­ loon because it always defeats him. Of course, in a way the balloon does not defeat him; he defeats himself because he remains unaware throughout that it is his own fault that the balloon keeps heading skywards. In this way the whole act is a demonstration of performed incompetence in which the clown cannot establish a higher status than the object which he seeks to control. A particular kind of interaction with objects is found in what can be defined as ‘mechanical play’. Rather than playing with an everyday object, such as the balloon, ‘mechanical play’ involves a clown interacting with a mechanical gadget which has usually been specially constructed. Interaction of this nature is particularly popular in the circus and clowns who created these mechanical gadgets were often known as ‘producing clowns’. One of the most important ‘producing clowns’ was Lou Jacobs who performed with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey from 1925 to 1985. Jacobs constructed mechanical and gadget based entrées where the clown’s body in combination with a machine or gadget becomes the source of humour. A new range of games opens up when the potentially vulnerable body of the clown is pitted against the poten­ tially dangerous gadget. The audience’s laughter is provoked either by relief when the clown finally emerges from the entrée physically intact or by incon­ gruity, as in the following example. One of Jacob’s most famous production gags is the tiny car entrée, described by Hugill as follows: Behind the scenes he will cram his six-foot-one-inch frame and enormous clown shoes into the car; then he will speed around the ring accompa­ nied by numerous backfirings and midget policemen and finally emerge from the tiny vehicle to roars of laughter and disbelief. Jacobs’ early career as a contortionist is obviously a great help to him, for the car is a mere yard long and a foot-and-a-half high. (Hugill 1980: 215) In such an act the humour lies not in the relationship between the clown and the audience but rather in the surprise at Jacobs’ size when he extri­ cates himself from the car. The presence of what Hugill describes as ‘midget policemen’ suggests that the driver of the car will prove to be equally small. Jacobs’ extrication of himself limb by limb is funny because it is unexpected and the entirely visual humour is reinforced by the contrast between his

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extreme height and the lack of height of his fellow performers. It is entirely incongruous that such a tall clown should extricate himself from such a small vehicle. The audience gains additional pleasure from recognizing the levels of skill required by the act. Circus routines involving one or more clowns tend to work according to a clearly defined status order with the Whiteface usually having higher status than the bumbling Auguste. In brief, the Whiteface is usually competent, neat and high status whilst the Auguste is bumbling, untidy and low status. Occa­ sionally the Auguste’s status becomes so low that it crosses back into high status again. In this way the Auguste can take control of the routine because his continually bungled attempts at whatever task he has been set prevent the rou­ tine from moving on or prevent the Whiteface from achieving what he wishes to achieve. The Whiteface clown was the traditional clown of the seventeenth and eighteenth century stage. It is common also in the circus and is often con­ sidered to be a descendant of Pierrot and Pedrolino in Commedia dell’Arte. Food plays a significant part in clowning in many cultures. The Maidu clown uses his acorn bread (which plays an important part in the religious ceremony) as a symbol of his transgression by eating it before the ceremony has finished. Circus clowns also develop routines which focus on food. For example, one common entrée involves the clown adopting the role of waiter. In circus scenes such as this it is inevitable that the food will not actually be eaten. It is much more likely to be thrown at other clowns or at the audi­ ence, or both (as seen in Billy’s Smarts Circus, Hull, 2003). Clowning with food is both transgressive and regressive (a common time for playing with or throwing food is when we are young children). More recently clowns in the theatre deal with what it means to be human. Through a number of the actions listed above but particularly through incompetence clowns develop performance pieces which deal with themes such as what it means to be a success (usually by repeatedly failing), what is important in life (often the relationships we form with those around us and how we cope when we are left alone). The clown’s traditional role as both an outsider and a truth-teller render him perfectly placed to comment on the interaction between individuals and the societies in which they live. With the exception of performances focused on the human condition, all of the above clown actions demonstrate transgression of, or deviance from socially accepted norms. In clowning there are a number of common trans­ gressions or deviations from the societally defined norm: clowns fail and are stupid; they misbehave socially, for example by throwing water and food. They are violent. Clown acts often involve scatological jokes about urinating, defecating and breaking wind. Clown actions can also involve sexual antics which involve a level of obscenity which would not be acceptable in every­ day society. All of these contravene the conventions established by society for morally and socially acceptable behaviour. Lapses from the behavioural norm also involve interacting with objects in ways which are not common in everyday life. Common deviations can be identified as: behavioural,

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disruption of performance conventions, and linguistic. These deviations can occur within any of the types of clown routine identified earlier.

Behavioural deviance One form of ‘behavioural deviance’ involves interacting with objects in ways which are not common in everyday life. In each of these cases the audience members can feel superior as they recognize what the clown should be doing with the object. At the same time the audience members may experience a vicarious pleasure in witnessing the clown behaving in ways in which they may wish to behave but which the constraints of society forbid. Misus­ ing objects is often an example of the topsy-turvy way in which the clown views the world. Such performances are entertaining but do not offer any form of societal catharsis or relief. On the other hand, performed violence and performed sexual activity within clown acts which also comes within this category of deviance may well have a cathartic function. According to Cheesmond, ‘the figure of the clown/jester fulfilled, or was conceived to ful­ fil, a therapeutic/antagonistic purpose in the regulation and moderation of individual or establishment aspirations’ (Cheesmond 2007: 9). There are examples of sexually obscene clowning to be found in the Hatambura clown figure of Sri Lanka who, in one ritual, indulges in mimed imitations of intercourse together with imagery connected to masturba­ tion, ejaculation and orgasm. There are similarities in performance style between these ritual performance and the less transgressive performances of Western circus clowns (in the use of props, costume and mask or make-up) but Cheesmond suggests that here ‘the comedy functions also as a therapy and an exorcism for key collective and individual problems and anxieties’ (Cheesmond 2007: 11). Examples of transgressively violent clowning can be found in the clowns of Archaos circus who threaten the audience with chainsaws. In one sequence drawn from Metal Clown I the clowns combine sexual performance and violence by performing an execution by cutting off a clown’s head which is then used by a female clown to simulate oral sex. Whilst the execution and the oral sex are simulated both actions are highly charged transgressive acts which are likely to shock an audience rather than offering any kind of catharsis. The clowns know that they are only playing and that no harm will come to the audience but the anarchic performance still minimizes the communication of play or makes it so aggressive that the audience struggles to remain within the play frame.

Disruption of performance conventions The circus clown sometimes interrupts other acts and thus transgresses perfor­ mative conventions, except that ironically this transgression is so well-estab­ lished in the circus that it has almost become an expected mode of behaviour for clowns. In this case it would be more transgressive not to transgress.

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From an analysis of practice, these conventions of transgression can be seen as cathartic. They create a release valve for society where behaviour which is tempting to the individual but criticized by society can be enacted and, as a result of the clown’s creation of audience empathy, can be shared vicariously without fear of retribution. In the structure of traditional circuses the clown acts often allowed for the release of tension by being placed imme­ diately after a ‘fear’ act such as lion taming, now largely a thing of the past. Circus clowns perpetrate another form of performative disruption in their interactive destruction of the usual spectator/performer boundaries by mov­ ing out of the circus ring and into the audience. In the circus this has come to be expected but transgression is still possible when the clown goes further in his interaction with an audience member than the audience expects. An example of this is a common clown entrée which involves spraying the audi­ ence with water. Such spraying is likely to be accepted as part of the fun as long as no one member of the audience is unfairly targeted and left soaking wet. The moment a member of the audience is singled out and soaked, the clown has found a way of extending the disruption beyond the limits of expectation and acceptability towards transgression. This is a transgression, literally in physical terms, of the boundary between actor and spectator and of accepted social interaction. In a circus the ‘run-in’ clowns fill the gaps between the other acts whilst equipment is cleared from, or brought into, the ring. The act which they per­ form at this point may take place around the ring edge or occupy the centre of the ring. The routine may contain a simple narrative such as preparing for a music recital or the act may parody the previous act with an acrobat act being followed by a clown tumbling act. Rarely, if ever, is there a nar­ rative line which runs through the totality of clown routines in the circus performance. Kelly and Otto Griebling’s ice gag, performed in 1933 as part of the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, is an exception to this rule. This routine comprised of a series of entrances made by Kelly and Griebling throughout a performance. When they first appear Kelly has a 25lb block of ice on his back and Griebling is calling for ‘Missus Jones’. They return several times as the performance progresses. Finally Kelly appears licking an ice-cube with Griebling still calling hopefully for ‘Missus Jones’ (Kelly 1956: 101). A series of clown entrances which build a narrative (in this case around the delivery of a rapidly melting block of ice) in this way is, ironically, more transgressive of the usual circus structure than the clowns who simply pro­ vide a variety of distractions between the other acts. A final kind of disruption of performance clowning arises when the internal logic of the routine is destroyed for comic effect. Commonly, clowns use mime and physical skill to establish a situation in which the audience can follow the internal logic of the scene even if the sequence of events would be unlikely in normal life. This logic is then destroyed, often by the arrival or intrusion of another clown who appears to be unaware of the established logic. For example,

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in Slava’s Snowshow (seen at The Lyceum, Sheffield, November 2013) Slava and a green clown are on a bed which is being used as a boat. This is indi­ cated to the audience by use of a sail, by another clown lying horizontally on a skateboard with a shark’s fin on his back and by sound effects. An internal logic for the routine appears to have been set. Then the green clown gets off the bed and walks away. There is no sound of water. Slava steps off the bed and his foot makes a splash as it makes contact with the ‘water’. Slava pauses and looks out to the audience and in this way the internal illogicality is highlighted. Nothing can be taken for granted in a clown presented reality, no matter how carefully it appears to have been established. Similar distor­ tions of reality occurred in Chris Lynam’s Eric the Fred show (seen at Jacksons Lane, London in January 2015). In this show the character created by Lynam interacts with a projected version of himself which blurs the bounda­ ries between what might be real and what might be imagined.

Linguistic variation Clowns employ a variety of techniques for disturbing the usual linguistic modes of communication current in any society. The most obvious distur­ bance of societal conventions is to abstain from speaking completely. Many clown routines are mimed with the only noises coming either from props or sound effects. In this last instance it may be that each time the clown opens his mouth to speak another clown’s horn or drum makes such a noise that he cannot be heard. This strikes the audience as humorous for a number of reasons. First, the horn noise seemingly issuing from the clown’s mouth is incongruous. Second, the audience is witnessing a status battle, and the clown who tries, unsuccessfully, to speak, is being beaten in the status battle by the clown who drowns him out. Other clowns replace the spoken word with a series of whistles, accompa­ nied by gestures which make the narrative content of their whistling clear. This occurs in a common ‘walk-around’ in which the clown pits different sections of the audience against each other in a cheering competition. The whistle attracts the audience’s attention and can be used expressively to indicate the clown’s pleasure or displeasure with their efforts (Billy Smart’s Circus, Hull, 2003). Traditionally the absence of language in circus clown­ ing (as mentioned earlier) may have arisen from the clown’s need to be understood in whichever country he was performing. Acts and routines which relied heavily on language and wordplay were at a disadvantage for international touring. When clowns did perform spoken routines in coun­ tries other than their own their strong accents could make them difficult to understand. To compensate for any loss of comprehension the clowns turned the accent into a virtue, creating laughter out of pronouncing the words appallingly, saying the wrong word or wilfully misunderstanding what the ringmaster or any other performer is saying to them. For example,

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Billy Hayden when performing in Paris would entertain the French audience by deliberately mangling the French language (Towsen 1976a). What has become evident is that it is not simply what the clown does that makes him funny (although action and interaction are vital), it is who he is. The audience must be able to empathize with the character who struggles to get things right but he must not descend to such depths that our attitude towards him becomes mocking or satirical. Whilst we may not have experi­ enced the clown’s social status for ourselves there has to be a commonality, a meeting point between what the clown shows and what we have felt. Out of such a meeting point comes the prompting to take the clown and his vul­ nerability to our hearts. Then when he manages to triumph we cheer whole­ heartedly at his success because it is what we would wish for ourselves. To these definitions of clown types and clown routines I have added the terms Clown Theatre, Clown Shows, and Clown Actors which facilitate analysis of the ways in which clown types may combine and which help in clarifying the positioning of the performance along a spectrum with circus at one end and theatre at the other. Both Wright and Lecoq focus on the indi­ vidual performer without seeking to define the theatrical genre within which the performer appears. The definitions below seek to identify the different settings within which clowns can be found in the theatre. How the audience responds to the clown performer will be governed as much by setting and expectation as by individual performance techniques. Clown Shows are those which are closest to classic circus clowning. The acts performed could readily form part of a circus but take on a different resonance through being performed in a theatre space and through the sus­ tained nature of the show uninterrupted by other acts. In publicity for the show the word clown is likely to be prominent in communicating the style of performance to the potential audience. Later the work of a number of clowns and clown companies including Les Witloof, Mimirichi, and Tricicle will be analyzed as examples of Clown Shows. Clown Theatre is theatre where all the performers are clowns and where the visual aesthetic is surreal or has elements of fantasy about it. The per­ formance is not based on a script but will have been devised by the com­ pany in keeping with the skills and strengths of the performers. It may or may not involve the spoken word but there is likely to be close interaction between the performers and music or sound effects. Clown Theatre also tends to establish an interactive relationship between the performers and the audience which may involve the performers leaving the stage. Examples of Clown Theatre include Slava Polunin, Nani and Ingimarrson, Nola Rae and Teatr Licedei. These shows tend to have a narrative thrust in which plot or character motivation or both are explored and in this way they are closer to the linear impetus of conventional theatre than the performances defined as Clown Shows. When the clown performer creates fixed characters (like Polunin’s early clown character, Asisyai) then the shows created are more

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likely to reveal the performer’s personal philosophy and the show becomes an expression of that. This personal expression may then be taken on by other performers as has been the case with Slava’s Snowshow. In terms of publicity the word clown may appear in the description of the show but it will not be as prominent as it was in the clown show publicity. It may also appear in combination with the definition of mime or the whole show may be described as physical comedy. In this area, then, distinctions between areas and styles of performance become blurred and a potential audience may not have such clear expectations of the performance. Shows featuring clown actors tend to have a thematic or abstract content which may originate within something the performer wishes to commu­ nicate as is the case with Only Fools (No Horses) (Woods 2005) which was commissioned by Angela De Castro. The significant difference between this and Clown Theatre is the dominance of text and the interaction of the clown actor with non-clown actors. Some performers, like De Castro, move between these categories so that for a show like Only Fools she can be defined as a clown actor, whereas for earlier shows like The Gift or whilst she was playing ‘Rough’ in Slava’s Snowshow she might more read­ ily be defined as a clown theatre performer. This highlights the flexibility of these labels and demonstrates the need to evaluate each production accord­ ing to its performance style. Clown actors can be found operating in a range of relationships to their text. In the case of De Castro, the text was commissioned by the clown. Earlier examples of collaboration between clown and writer are to be found in the works of Shakespeare whose clown characters were often written for specific performers whose talents were well-known to the writer. What remains in the text gives an indication of the possibilities for clowning, and where the clowning was primarily verbal; relying on puns and quips, the text gives a clear idea of the content of the performance. The nature of the performance in terms of delivery and physical or sight gags is lost to us in its original form but the text allows for the clown character to be brought to life again by subsequent performers. Further relationships between clown and text are to be found in the work of Beckett where there are indications within the text (as is the case in Waiting for Godot, Act Without Words 1 and Act Without Words 2) that a clown style of performance may be appro­ priate and in the work of Fo who performs his own plays in the style of a clown jester but whose texts are also available for interpretation by other performers. For the clown performer working in Clown Theatre or as a Clown Actor there are three levels in creating a performance (unlike the more common acting duality of the actor and the role). For the clown per­ former the three elements can be identified as follows: the performer, the persona (the clown found within the performer) and the personage (the part played by the performer whilst in the clown state).

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The term clownesque is here taken to mean theatre which is influenced by clowning both in its process of creation and in the act of performance. The outcome is often a playful theatrical performance. Thus clown and clown techniques may, in the case of devised or collaborative theatre, have influenced the development of the piece. Subsequently the use of clown techniques (connection to the audience, play, the flop, separations, the clock, the drop) or clown semiotics (make-up and costume) in performance may provoke a different response in the audience to that produced by other genres of theatre. It is also likely that theatre companies working in this way may acknowledge the influence of clowning on their work1 (Kneehigh Theatre) but are unlikely to define themselves as creating clown theatre. The work of theatre companies such as Complicite provides examples of the clownesque. However, helpful as these suggested definitions of clowning are, it is unlikely that they would exist in the ways that they do, or indeed that thea­ tre clowning would exist in the way it does, without the underlying princi­ ples established by Jacques Lecoq (1921–99). One difficulty in researching Lecoq’s influence on clowning in particular and British theatre in general is the paucity of material on his working methods. Necessarily much of what follows is drawn from The Moving Body (Lecoq 2002) and Thea­ tre of Movement and Gesture (Lecoq 2006) with additional material from the only other two full-length books which focus on Lecoq; Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre (ed. Chamberlain and Yarrow 2002) and Simon Murray’s Jacques Lecoq (Murray 2003). To further supplement this some personal responses to Lecoq’s teaching of clowning have been sought from graduates of Lecoq’s school. Lecoq introduced clown into the training programme of The Interna­ tional Theatre School in the 1960s expecting it to be a temporary element of the training. In line with Lecoq’s notion of ‘Tout Bouge’, clowning might have been expected to disappear at some point between the 1960s and the present. However, as Lecoq himself observed in The Moving Body, ‘Today I notice that the students are always asking to work on clowns and consider it one of the high points of the school’s educational journey’ (Lecoq 2002: 158). Lecoq’s teaching covered two distinct forms of clowning: Clown and Bouffons at L’Ecole International de Théâtre from the mid-1960s. Whilst bouffon clowning is less common in contemporary theatre, the form is still worthy of consideration. Initiated in its modern form (the original form dates back to medieval times) by Lecoq, bouffon is now also taught by Philippe Gaulier whose courses echo those which he studied formerly with Lecoq. Bim Mason, another Lecoq graduate, sometimes performs as a bouffon and John Wright (British Theatre Director and founder of Trestle Theatre Com­ pany) offers a range of exercises for working with bouffon in Why is That so Funny? (Wright 2006). Bouffon has influenced the work of British theatre companies such as Peepolykus, Right Size and Trestle Theatre.

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Vicious play For Lecoq, bouffons were ‘people who believe in nothing and make fun of everything’ (Lecoq 2002: 124). The play in which they engage and in which they encourage the audience to engage is not the naive fun of the simple clown. Instead it has a vicious, potentially risky element. Also impor­ tantly, whilst clowns may appear alone bouffons always appear as part of a gang, making them potentially more dangerous. A key difference for Lecoq between clown and bouffon is that ‘while we make fun of the clown, the bouffon makes fun of us. At the heart of the bouffon is a mockery pushed to the point of parody’ (Lecoq 2006: 118). Lecoq identifies two levels of parody offered by bouffons; the first parodies through mimicry and can be identified as the friendly stage of bouffon performance. Beyond this level comes a second, potentially more spiteful level in which the bouffon parodies deeply held convictions. It was this level of parody which prompted Lecoq to experiment with creating strange body shapes for bouffons (effectively whole body masks). This corporeal transformation has its roots in the tra­ dition of the medieval King’s fool and prevents the parody from becoming too spiteful. In transforming themselves physically, actors playing bouffons were able to make the unacceptable acceptable. Bim Mason suggests that bouffons were taken up by street performers and performers in new circus because ‘they may have experienced prejudice towards the world of beggars, travellers and the disadvantaged and are excited by the use of comedy as a weapon rather than the naive, sexless comedy of clowns’ (Mason 2002: 52). Mason here identifies the distinction between bouffons and clowns: bouffons are potentially nastier and more knowing than their naive clown counterparts. This perhaps arises from the ability of bouffons to ‘confront [the] public with their own limitations’ (Mason 2002: 53). By presenting an image of the physically malformed, bouffons place themselves beyond criti­ cal comment in our politically correct world. They also free themselves to comment more sharply on society. ‘If you look “worse than life” from the outset, you tend to feel less inhibited about making comments about some­ body else, especially if they look socially more acceptable than you’ (Wright 2006: 304). Bouffons are one step further removed from everyday reality than clowns and they, therefore, can go one step further in their comments on the world around them. Wright, therefore, acknowledges that bouffons are confrontational in a way which clowns are not. Lecoq’s other, more far-reaching, definition is that of ‘clown’. Put simply, for Lecoq the ‘clown’, unlike other theatrical performers, has an immediate contact with his audience ‘he comes to life by playing with the people who are looking at him’ (Lecoq 2002: 157). Central to this is the concept of jeu – play. The underlying principles of jeu and complicité are both central to the way in which Lecoq teaches clowns to reach out to their audience. For Lecoq, following in the theatrical footsteps of Copeau and Meyerhold, jeu

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or play is vital. Whilst Gaulier teaches Le Jeu as a discrete course at his training school, for Lecoq the concept of jeu runs through all his teaching. This distinction is recognized by Murray (2002: 33) and Alan Fairbairn (in Murray) further emphasizes the importance of play: ‘The whole notion of play is essential to Lecoq’s School’ (Murray 2002: 33). Fairbairn goes on to suggest that for Lecoq play is closely connected to the idea of making the most of the theatrical material available to the performer. The importance of play to Lecoq is demonstrated by the fact that when the time comes to select which students will continue from the first year of the course to the second, ‘the main criterion for selection is the actor’s capacity for play’ (Lecoq 2002: 103). Play, therefore, is not a technique but a state of being, a readiness to perform. It is ‘the motor of performance. The driving force is not what to play but how it should be played’ (Lecoq 2002: 118). For Lecoq, play exists in the space between the actor’s ego and the character he is playing. This raises the notion, as Turner and Winnicott suggest, that play exists in a space between the real and the imagined, containing elements of both but belonging to neither. Murray offers a convincing summary of the significance of play in Lecoq’s way of working: Play is a dynamic principle which informs the quality of interaction between performers and their audience, but also opens up possibilities for action which can … liberate the actor. (Murray 2002: 34) Play, then, operates on a number of levels: it can be the motor of the per­ formance driving the actor forward; it can exist between actors in a scene; and it can, and according to Lecoq should, exist between the actors and the audience. Lecoq makes this final element of play clear in his analysis of the interaction between a clown and his audience: ‘It is not possible to be a clown for an audience; you play with an audience’ (Lecoq 2002: 157). Closely related to jeu is the concept of complicité. Lecoq offers the follow­ ing example of complicité in action: ‘Two characters pass, each one meets the other’s eye and comes to a stop’ (Lecoq 2002: 34). Complicité, at one level, is a silent communication, an unspoken understanding. Like jeu, complicité can occur between the actors on the stage and between the actors and the audience. Out of complicité, play may arise. Murray suggests the reverse, that ‘complicité is an outcome of successful play’ (Murray 2002: 72). It is likely, however, that the relationship between the two is symbiotic: complicité leads to play and play leads to complicité. Complicité is closely connected to the concept of ensemble, representing as it does, what might be described as col­ lective imagining. When two performers’ imaginations work in the same way instinctively in the moment of performance or rehearsal, they are experienc­ ing complicité. In playful performance, that which creates an open relation between the performer and the spectator where communication transcends

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the stage/audience division, complicité occurs when the actor and the audi­ ence experience instinctive communication. The concepts of jeu and complic­ ité lie at the heart of Lecoq’s approach to clowning. Lecoq’s clowning is quite distinct from common conceptions of circus clowning. Clowns in training at the Lecoq School do use the traditional red nose (which Lecoq came to see as the smallest mask) but this was intro­ duced by Pierre Byland when he returned to teach at the school and was not part of Lecoq’s original conception of clowning. ‘The reference to cir­ cus, which is bound to surface as soon as clowns are mentioned, remains marginal, in my view.… Apart from the comic register, we took no external models, either formal or stylistic’ (Lecoq 2002: 154). Initially, for Lecoq, clowning was about encouraging the student performer to reveal ‘the per­ son underneath, stripped bare for all to see’ as ‘the clown doesn’t exist aside from the actor performing him’ (Lecoq 2002: 154). Students were encouraged to reveal their own vulnerabilities and weaknesses on stage and in rehearsal. Lecoq believed that this personal vulnerability could be a source of great dramatic strength. From this came the notion of the ‘search for “one’s own clown”’ (Lecoq 2002: 154). The idea that each individ­ ual has one or more clowns within him or herself is situated at the heart of Lecoq’s approach to clowning and, subsequently, to the approaches of Byland and Gaulier. Indeed the notion of the ‘inner clown’ is also to be found in the work of Angela De Castro and is referred to in the training publicity of other organizations such as ‘NosetoNose’ (www.nosetonose. info) and ‘Bataclown’ (www.bataclown.com). For Lecoq, the concept of jeu is connected with the idea of clown because the clown’s success depends on his ability to play with his audience. It can be argued that clown is a natural conclusion – a drawing together of all Lecoq’s teaching from the starting point of Jeu and Neutral Mask. After years of offering clown training as part of his two year programme, Lecoq came to the conclusion that: They [clowns] have become as important as the neutral mask, but working in reverse. While the neutral mask is all-inclusive, a common denominator which can be shared by all, the clown brings out the indi­ vidual in his singularity. (Lecoq 2002: 158–9) It is clear, therefore, that the creation and performance of a clown is a par­ ticularly personal process in which the student or performer is encouraged to reveal his or her personal insecurities which are offered to the audience members to give them a sense of being drawn into the performer’s world. This sharing of vulnerability encourages the audience to empathize with the clown. Another important feature of creating a clown is what Lecoq identifies as ‘Discover the audience’. The clown does not simply perform in

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front of the audience, he or she plays with the audience, connects with them. ‘Unlike theatre characters, the contact the clown has with his audience is immediate, he comes to life by playing with the people who are looking at him’ (Lecoq 2002: 157). Another important feature of clown for Lecoq is that ‘clowning also demands a feat, one that defies logic; overturning a certain order it thus allows one to denounce the recognized order’ (Lecoq 2006: 115). This notion of clown logic is central to many clown performances in that it allows the clown to look at the world anew, with the eyes of an unknowing innocence and, out of this, comes an increased potential for play. In Lecoq’s work can be found the beginning of principles of clown techniques for theatre per­ formance which have been taken up and extended by John Wright, Philippe Gaulier and Angela De Castro. As Wright suggests ‘Clowning turns idiocy into an art form’ (Wright 2006: 180). This concept of clown has been developed in a variety of ways in con­ temporary theatre. John Wright offers four definitions which are an aid to analyzing and discussing clown performance. These definitions are simple clown, boss clown, pathetic clown and tragic clown. Wright’s definitions do not describe different kinds of clown in the way the terms Whiteface and Auguste do. Instead Wright’s terms describe different levels of clowning which draw different emotional responses from the audience. So whilst it is unlikely that a circus clown will switch from Whiteface to Auguste in the course of a single performance, it is quite possible that a simple clown may become a pathetic clown or a pathetic clown become a tragic one depending on the way in which the clown responds to provocation within the scene. Wright describes the simple clown as ‘fun-loving, childlike, amoral, irre­ sponsible, mercurial, bizarre, destructive, chaotic and anarchic’ (Wright 2006: 203–4). The simple clown plays in front of and with his audience. This accords with Lecoq’s view of the centrality of play to clowning. Like Lecoq, Wright identifies the personal aspect of clowning: ‘A Clown is a credibly stupid version of you’ (Wright 2006: 193). He also recognizes the importance of what he identifies as bafflement. Just as we each have our own clown, we each have our own state of bafflement which Wright suggests is vital for the simple clown. Potentially, a state of bafflement is a rescue strategy which comes into play when the clown is caught out or confused. By revealing his bafflement he can make time for himself and signal his difficulty to the audience. Wright offers a number of examples from clown performance: Grock would punctuate his work with the constant question ‘Pour quoi?’ That was his point of bafflement. Simon McBurney, of Complic­ ité, would use his usual slight stutter: ‘I-I-I-er …’. Angela De Castro will look at us as if to say ‘Oh dear’ and then adjust her trousers. (Wright 2006: 195)

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It is important that bafflement is a state rather than a technique. If as a performer your point of bafflement becomes too fixed, it is unlikely to produce effective communication with the audience. Wright also empha­ sizes the importance of self in clowning. In order to discover his or her clown a performer must be able to access all these aspects of his or her personality. When clowning, these aspects of the self are not performed but revealed. Within the frame of simple clown a boss clown may emerge. The boss clown is what Wright defines as a provocateur in that the boss clown pro­ vokes developments in the scene. He may, for example, give the simple clowns a job to do which they are not capable of completing successfully. There is a direct parallel here to the status interactions in circus perform­ ance between Augustes and Whiteface clowns. The emergence of a boss clown allows for the creation of conflict which in turn creates the opportu­ nity for introducing or extending narrative within the scene. Simple clowns may work alone by establishing a relationship with the audience, attempt­ ing exploits and communicating bafflement. The introduction of a boss clown allows for greater complexity. According to Wright (2006) the boss clown is not a role because in the anarchic world of clowning any clown could become the boss at any time. By facilitating the introduction of dra­ matic conflict the boss clown also helps move towards the creation of a narrative which in turn aids in the creation of longer and more developed clown sequences. The pathetic clown, as defined by Wright, is unlikely to perform alone because he needs to find games in which he reacts to the other people in the scene and puts their feelings before his own. In contrast, the simple clown responds spontaneously and playfully to the world. In addition to this the pathetic clown has to establish a ‘credible emotional engagement with the dramatic situation in hand’ (Wright 2006: 226). In this way he plays com­ edy without debunking it. The nature of the performance is more subtle and thus the pathetic clown increases his own and the audience’s emotional engagement with the scene. If the principles of simple clown are to use the point of bafflement, find games to play, develop complicity and avoid acting then the principles of pathetic clown are to ‘find games where you react to other people in the scene and put their feelings before your own’ (Wright 2006: 226), to avoid the obvious, to go for clashes and to do the things which the audience members would not do in the situation. It is clear here that there is a development of the level of engagement on the part of the clown between simple and pathetic. The fascination of simple clown lies in us seeing the separation between the pretence of the game and the naked reality of the person behind the game.… In pathetic clown, the drop, the moment of separation, becomes

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an emotional transition and this change of feeling relaunches your clown­ ing, so you start another game to rescue yourself from the flop of the first … in tragic clown there is no rescue. (Wright 2006: 237) For Wright, tragic clown connects not with the notion of making us laugh but with the idea of extending play as far as it will go. Clowning in this way pulls the clown in a number of directions at the same time. The desire to make the audience laugh is likely to be present, just as it was in simple clown but that impetus is over-ridden by whatever preoccupation lies at the heart of the clown’s tragedy. The simple clown gives away his dignity when he debunks the comedy of his situation. The tragic clown retains his dignity and the audience is encouraged to respect him as he transcends the idiocy of the simple clown. The bafflement of the simple clown becomes the trauma of the tragic clown. In this kind of clown performance the audience’s atten­ tion is held by the clown’s determination and perseverance. In tragic clown there is a potential for the clown to develop: ‘there’s the potential of a huge transcendent arc – from the hapless idiot, deserving little but our ridicule, to the focused, dignified and determined protagonist, whom we’ve grown to admire and respect’ (Wright 2006: 238). There is a strong connection between what Wright and Lecoq believe can be achieved through clowning. Wright’s pathetic and tragic clowns are extensions of clown as taught by Lecoq. At the heart of all of them is the notion of play and the importance of establishing complicity with the other performers and with the audience. The idea of the clown flop is found in Lecoq, Gaulier and De Castro’s teaching of clown. In The Moving Body, Lecoq identifies two kinds of flop; these are the pretentious flop and the accidental flop (Lecoq 2002: 160). By this Lecoq indicates that whilst all clowns working in the way he suggests share a central action of trying to complete an exploit and failing, there are different ways in which the failure may be shared with the audience. As Weitz suggests, ‘Clowns fail hopelessly, imaginatively, unluckily, trium­ phantly, heartbreakingly and barely – and if, perchance, they succeed, it happens by accident or misdirection’ (Weitz 2012: 80). In the pretentious flop the clown performs a simple exploit which he believes to be a fitting example of his own brilliance. The humour, therefore, arises from the audi­ ence’s superior recognition of the fact that what the clown is doing is really nothing special. The more the clown communicates his pride in his achieve­ ment the funnier the audience will find him. On the other hand, with the accidental flop where the clown fails to complete his exploit the humour arises from the clown’s incompetence. This kind of flop is particularly funny when the exploit is relatively simple. The audience members recognize that they could easily complete the task which the clown is struggling with. At the opening of Slava’s Snowshow De Castro as the green clown, ‘Rough’, repeatedly fails to cross her arms. This is an example of the accidental flop.

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Crossing one’s arms is a simple manoeuvre which the clown should be able to complete but again and again, she fails. The audience members, adults and children alike, feel superior because they are able to complete the exploit. The idea of an exploit is central to the way Lecoq’s clowns oper­ ate. Whilst they enjoy being in front of an audience and playing with them through establishing a sense of complicité, their presence alone has a limited potential for creating humour. The flop, whether pretentious or accidental, has to be deliberate. As Gaul­ ier identifies, in clown training many clowns flop unintentionally and the results are not amusing; they are painful to watch. Therefore Gaulier sug­ gests that the flop helps the clown to play but: In my school, we call him Mr Flop, because we treat him with a hell of a lot of respect. It is funny that playing with Mr Flop happens as the end after many, many other flops that weren’t at all deliberate, that weren’t playmates then. (www.ecolephilippegaulier.com) This echoes Lecoq’s experience when he first introduced the teaching of clowning by drawing his students into a circle and asking them to enter the circle and be funny. He reports how student after student failed until ‘they stopped improvising and went back to their seats feeling frustrated, confused and embarrassed. It was at that point, when they saw their weak­ nesses, that everyone burst out laughing’ (Lecoq 2002: 154). For Gaulier, the flop is also linked to the idea of pleasure. If Mr Flop is a playmate then the clown ‘lets the audience see the great delight of a child who wants to stay on the stage … if the pleasure in staying is great, then the clown is forgiven. He’s allowed to be no good over and over’ (www.ecole­ philippegaulier.com). De Castro’s clown training (she trained with Gaulier) also has this emphasis on what she describes as the clown’s ‘pleasure to be in the moment’ (How to be a Stupid, London, November 2005). Beyond flop and exploit John Wright also identifies the importance of separations which can be established through use of drop and clock. Wright offers the follow­ ing definition: ‘A drop is an abrupt and clear separation, a clock is the small­ est of all’ (Wright 2006: 201). Separations are also closely connected to the idea that a clown can debunk what he has been doing. In order to debunk a sequence of play the clown needs to be able to distance himself from the play and comment on it to the audience from a distance. ‘Separations enable you to keep a comfortable distance from what you are playing’ (Wright 2006: 202). All of these techniques can be used in clown performance regardless of its setting. They can also be used in performances which are not purely clown performances but which use clown techniques to establish a playful theatrical performance.

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In identifying the similarity in conceptualization of clown between Lecoq and his one-time student Gaulier, it is also important to highlight the differ­ ences in their approaches to delivering training. Clown training, in common perhaps with other areas of actor training, is a field where the attitude and teaching style of the tutor significantly affect the experience of the student and their likely success in finding their clown. Lecoq opened doors for his students; he ‘never pretended to “teach the territories” … one doesn’t come out having done a clown training’ (Laura Eades, personal correspondence 2006). For Lecoq, clowning was another territory which could create possi­ bilities for a performer. Gaulier’s approach to teaching can be a difficult and painful experience as ‘Gaulier [is] extremely inconsistent with his expres­ sions of approval, both across behaviours and across students’ (Purcell Gates 2011: 237). According to another former student, Mark Evans, ‘Gaulier also used to like to produce a certain amount of panic – he would declare a three knocks and you’re out policy.… You learn to live on the edge of failure and recognize the importance of this to clowning’ (Mark Evans, personal cor­ respondence 2006). In Lecoq’s approach, clown is a natural progression for the students. For Gaulier, the clown comes at the end of his training course but he is much more concerned with the notion of failure. Andy Crook (who trained with both Lecoq and Gaulier) describes how Gaulier ‘pushed us very hard with that being quite cruel at times (I got hit and slapped sev­ eral times)’ (Andy Crook, personal correspondence 2006). Crook identifies the difference between the two practitioners as ‘with Lecoq clown was a fantastic thing, with Gaulier clown was a disaster. But for Gaulier disaster is the clown’. This contrast lies at the heart of the two differing approaches. Another significant difference is that Lecoq’s teaching, as already identified revolves around the students finding their inner clown whilst those who have studied with Gaulier report how he gave people clowns often in such a way that the student was encouraged to transgress type. As mentioned above little is recorded concerning clown training beyond Lecoq. However, from personal experience, I am able to describe one approach developed by Angela De Castro. Her training course ‘How to be a Stupid’ (offered by the Why Not Institute) is influenced by both Lecoq and Gaulier and her emphasis is on using play to open participants up to reveal elements of their inner selves in their clowns. Recently De Castro has offered both one- and two-week courses introducing her approach to clowning. The two-week course offers participants the opportunity to establish their clowns more securely and to experiment with a wider range of clown improvisations. For De Castro, clowning is a state rather than a charac­ ter which coincides with Wright’s view. Students are encouraged to find their inner clown in a positive and supportive atmosphere through exercises which focus participants on increasing their self-awareness and ability to accept the notion of failure. Once a supportive and playful group dynamic has been established participants work through exercises which are intended

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to improve their ability to connect with the audience (complicité), to give and take focus, to find games on stage and to show their pleasure to be in the moment. De Castro also introduces specific clown techniques such as the double take and participants spend time discovering costumes for their clowns which are ‘not to do with a show, but to live with. It is for life. It is like a skin’ (‘How to be a Stupid’ course material). At the end of the first day in order to help individuals find appropriate costumes De Castro guides the participants through a meditation and visualization exercise which takes them to their ‘Land of Why Not’. In this land they are asked to visualize their perfect selves, in whatever form that may take. After the visualization participants draw an image of their ‘Land of Why Not’ and put themselves into the image. This is a metaphorical exercise and they may appear in the land as anything. They may be a person, an animal, an imagined creature or even one of the elements. Anything is possible. From this image they then draw inspiration to help them find a costume for their clown. The costume may relate to the colours, shapes and textures of the image. Many partici­ pants find this exercise challenging because it requires a letting go of every­ day agendas and judgements. Some participants find costumes which are too ridiculous; others costumes which are too ordinary or which restrict them. As participants strive to discover their costumes De Castro sometimes offers help; sometimes leaves individuals to work through their own difficulties. The discovery of a good costume helps the clown to create a link between ‘the contemporary world of the day by day where we live most of the time’ and the nonverbal ‘land of the imagination where we sometimes visit’ (De Castro teaching comments). De Castro begins each day of her courses with a meeting which enables her to introduce the focus of that day and to pre­ pare the participants for the exercises that lie ahead. Whilst the meetings are not intended to be therapeutic, the emotional challenges which De Castro’s highly personal approach to clowning presents means that participants can make use of the chance to check in to explain how they are responding to the work they are doing. These sessions reinforce the supportive nature of the group and increase the likelihood that participants will take risks in the exercises that follow. The one-week course ends with a particularly challenging exercise. Pairs of clowns come on to the stage charged with being funny. If you stop being funny (or don’t start being funny) De Castro starts to countdown from five. The clowns have to change tack, trying new strategies to avoid failure. This balance of support and an awareness of the closeness of failure lies at the heart of finding one’s inner clown. During the two-week course De Castro encourages the participants to establish a stronger connection between them and their clown by making them write to their clown and then by making them write a response whilst they are in the clown state. As clowning for De Castro is a state, not a technique, she provides participants with a list of commandments to help them access the qualities necessary to reach and sustain the clown state. These include

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notions like truth, curiosity, pleasure, commitment, imagination, surrender, spontaneity, compassion, naivety, freedom and serenity. De Castro’s clown work represents an example of an approach to clowning which relies on participants making use of their inner self to discover their inner clown. Doing this enables them to introduce a greater level of play and playfulness into their clowns, into their everyday lives and into their performance.

Note 1 One example of this can be found in the teachers’ resource pack on the website of Kneehigh Theatre.

References Bergson, Henri, Laughter, London, Macmillan, 1911. Chamberlain, Franc and Yarrow, Ralph, Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre, London, Routledge, 2002. Cheesmond, Robert, ‘Where the Antic Sits’ in David Robb, Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Theatre, Fiction and Film (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 9–24. Davison, Jon, Clown: Readings in Theatre Practice, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmil­ lan, 2013. Hugill, Beryl, Bring on the Clowns, London, David and Charles, 1980. Lecoq, Jacques, The Moving Body, London, Methuen, 2002. Lecoq, Jaques, McCaw, D., Kernaghan, L. and Bradby, D., trans., Theatre of Move­ ment and Gesture, London, Routledge, 2006. Mason, Bim, ‘The Well of Possibilities: Theoretical and Practical Uses of Lecoq’s Teaching’ in Franc Chamberlain and Ralph Yarrow (eds), Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre (London, Routledge Harwood, 2002), pp. 45–55. Murray, Simon, Jacques Lecoq, London, Routledge, 2003. Murray, Simon, ‘Tout Bouge: Jacques Lecoq, Modern Mime and the Zero Body. A Pedagogy for the Creative Actor’, in Franc Chamberlain and Ralph Yarrow (eds), Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre (London, Routledge Harwood, 2002), pp. 17–44. Purcell Gates, Laura, ‘Locating the Self: Narratives and Practices of Authenticity in French Clown Training’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2:2 (2011), pp. 231–42. Remy, Tristan and Bernard Sahlins, trans., Clown Scenes, Chicago, Ivan R Dee, 1997.

Simon, Eli, The Art Of Clowning. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Towsen, John, Clowns, New York, Hawthorn Books, 1976a.

Weitz, Eric, ‘Failure as Success: On Clowns and Laughing Bodies’, Performance

Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17:1 (2012), pp 79–87. Woods, Sarah, Only Fools, No Horses, unpublished play, 2005. Wright, John, Why is that so Funny? London, Nick Hern Books, 2006.

Chapter 6

Diminutive catastrophe Clown’s play Maggi Phillips

Introduction Clowns can be seen as enacting catastrophe with a small ‘c’. They are experts in ‘failing better’ who perhaps live on the cusp of turning catastrophe into a metaphorical whirlwind while ameliorating the devastation that lies therein. They also have the propensity to succumb to the devastation, masking their own sense of the void with the gestures of play. In this chapter, knowledge about clowns emerges from my experience, working with circus clowns in Circus Knie (Switzerland) and Circo Tihany (South America), observing per­ formances and films about clowns, and reading, primarily in European fic­ tion, of clowns in multiple guises. The exposure to a diverse range of texts, visual media and performance, has led me to the possibility that clowning is not only a conceptual discipline but also a state of being that is yet to be fully recognised.

Diminutive catastrophe I have an idea (probably a long held obsession) of the clown as a diminutive figure of catastrophe, of catastrophe with a very small ‘c’. In the context of this incisive academic dialogue on relationships between catastrophe and creativity where writers are challenged with the horrendous tragedies that nature and humans unleash on the planet, this inept character appears to be utterly insignificant and, moreover, unworthy of any claim to creativity. A clown does not solve problems in the grand scheme of society: if any­ thing he/she simply highlights problems, arguably in a fatalistic manner where innovation may be an alien concept. Invariably, as Eric Weitz (2012) observes, when clowns depart from their moment on the stage, laughter evaporates and the world settles back into the relentless shades of oppression and injustice. In response to the natural forces of destruction – earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, and volcanic eruptions – as much as to the forces of rage in war and ethnic cleansing that humans inflict on one another, a clown makes but a tiny gesture. Curiously, though, those fingers brushing dust off a threadbare jacket may speak volumes.

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Paradox is the crux of this exploration. Clowns, the best of them, project the fragility of human value on a screen beyond measure and across many layers and scales of metaphorical understanding (Big Apple Circus 2013; Stradda 2013). Why do odd tramps and ordinary inept people seem to pivot against the immense flows of loss and outrage which tend to pervade our understanding of the global condition today? Can Samuel Beckett’s call to arms of ‘failing better’ in the vein of Charlie Chaplin, Oleg Popov, or James Thiérrée offer a creative avenue to pursue (Bala 2010; Coover 2000; Salisbury 2005)? Do they reflect other ways of knowing in the face of big ‘C’ Catastrophes?

Creation and catastrophe To wrestle with these questions, I wish to begin by proposing a big picture view of earth-life wherein, across inconceivable aeons, huge physical catas­ trophes have wrought unimaginable damage on the ecological ‘complete­ ness’ of the time. I am not a palaeontologist or an evolutionary scientist but I suspect that, if human life is taken out of the equation, the planet since time immemorial has been battered by ‘disaster’ which changed but ulti­ mately did not destroy the earth. Evolution is replete with narratives of spe­ cies wiped out by ice-ages, volcanoes, earthquakes, and meteors and yet the organism of this planet has survived and even regenerated. In metaphorical territory, the Sanskrit philosophers have a wise take on this process. Indian concepts are always multiple, crowded with possibilities, but I find there is something intriguing in the premise (even if it is impossible to tie down) of Shiva’s dance: Shiva Nataraja destroys creation by his Tandava Dance, or the Dance of Eternity. As he dances, everything disintegrates, apparently into noth­ ingness. Then, out of the thin vapours, matter and life are recreated again. Shiva also dances in the hearts of his devotees as the Great Soul. As he dances, one’s egotism is consumed and one is rendered pure in soul and without any spiritual blemish. (Ghosh 1965: 109–10) For a dancer, the central location of dance in life’s creation forces is a power­ ful idea but I am also interested in how this metaphysical perspective aligns with current scientific views. How could these ancient thinkers predict evo­ lutionary processes? Somehow, in the mix of experiential observation and speculation, they foresaw the complexity of time and, moreover, appreci­ ated the necessary interdependence of creation and destruction (creativity and catastrophe). In comparison to Western thought which privileges pro­ gression – and here evolution is a prime example – Hindu conceptualisation

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appears to prefer fatalism or a cyclical system of understanding that negates the potential of change to make things better. However, delving more closely into scientific narratives on evolution, the progression of life forms to the human species has involved the decimation of an uncountable number of other living possibilities. Contrariwise, Shiva’s Dance of Eternity is premised on endless diachronic change crossed vertically by reincarnation, through which progression and regression are equally expressed. I offer this simplistic view of both accounts of creation merely to point out that the interdepend­ ency of destruction and creation is deeply embodied in human knowledge. To introduce the clown figure into this idea, I have to turn to the minutiae of destruction and creation; to examples in the everyday nature of regenera­ tion through catastrophe. I have memories of touring in the Northern Terri­ tory of Australia amidst strident green shoots bursting out of a fire-tortured landscape or, earlier in Paris, of the snow-crusted earth being torn asunder by spring’s awakening. We all have countless memories of such small-scale transformations of pain and destruction into startling glimpses of beauty. It is at this scale of creative wrestling that I see the clown playing his/her role. In the tension between fatalism and, from a human point of view, pro­ jections of the right to progression, a clown occupying the stage vacated by Shiva might stamp out a slight rhythm of his/her own with little or no meaning in the action. The brush on the sleeve might be hard to detect in an evolutionary or Hindu timescale but zoom down to the here and now of performance exchange and the scene may be quite different.

Turning the lens onto the small-scale Small-scale clowns tend to be tiny bundles or, sometimes, gangly unbundles of ineptitude, careering through the simplest tasks with preposterous incom­ petence or, alternatively, imbibing complexity with virtuosic delicacy – take Charlie Chaplin’s shoe-lace spaghetti twirling and nibbling on nailbones as an example. Clowns disrupt normalcy in small eddies of activity which often wreak paths of destruction within the tightly ordered rage of social formations. The momentum is chaotic and, not dissimilar to storms, clownish enactment bears down not so much to threaten human life but to disrupt what we humans desire and formulate as the natural order of deco­ rum and success. Instead of the terror driven to consciousness by cyclones and hurricanes, the clown’s chaos is superficially benign. When Chaplin’s generous but unrealistic gesture to save the tightrope-act is thwarted by an escaped monkey, or when Thiérrée conducts a spirited debate with the wall of his abode in the midst of an identity crisis (Raoul), life is not threatened. Such incongruous and chaotic trajectories generate laughter and, some­ times, sadness. Moreover, as Weitz observes, ‘the clown-like imagination, unfettered by earthly logic, urges us to entertain unlikely avenues of thought

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and action’ (Weitz 2012: 87). While it may seem insensitive, I suggest that similar responses of laughter, sadness and unlikely avenues of thought and action emerge in the aftermath of cataclysmic events. Fear, unquestionably, saturates big states of catastrophe. Slide down the scale and intriguing parallels between fear and laughter emerge, one being a clown’s encapsulation of vulnerability and his/her stoic determination to con­ tinue, to persevere no matter what. There are many ways to express this conti­ nuity: Beckett’s characters are forever waiting, fearful that nothing will arrive, yet occupy themselves with variations of cruelty and amusement through the interminable passage of time. A reverse action occurs in Grock’s insistence that he can play his tiny violin, in spite of his ever-collapsing chair. It never occurs to him to find another chair or play standing up: that, in an incongru­ ous way, would admit defeat because this chair and his playing constitute Grock’s compulsion to succeed. Fear of failure generates multiple innovations in his relationship with the chair and in his playing skills. Storm-like, the pur­ suit of a singular idea in both instances triggers chaotic consequences. Physical destruction may be slight in such ephemeral storms but the act, the being in the world, does leave its mark on those who witness its passage. I would like to offer a mark left in me by a slight gesture on the part of a clown. I choose this one among many because the singular idea played out in Circus Knie (Switzerland) back in the early 1970s does not conform to the usual parameters. This Knie season featured Dimitri, an Italian-Swiss clown, as the principal attraction. Following clown conventions, Dimitri appeared across the production as active glue between the various circus acts, his per­ sona operating as an odd-jobs man to fix and clean. For instance, he inter­ vened in the elephant act as a cleaner, scrubbing and polishing the elephant’s skin with little effect and tuned, with much difficulty, a tiny fiddle for the grand orchestration to come. But Dimitri was also given moments of his own and this is the one that has lodged in my memory. Dimitri enters the brightly lit and empty circus ring with a broom in hand. The audience at this point have accepted the signal that Dimitri’s interludes prepare the ring for the next attraction – to sweep, as it were, the sawdust back to neutrality. He surveys the circle for a moment and then takes a posi­ tion on the periphery to begin what appears to be a regular clean-up. The initial brushes over the sawdust, however, produce an unexpected result – the light rather than the sawdust responds to his broom stokes. Bafflement swiftly passes as an idea takes hold: the diminutive figure trots off to the other side of the ring and, after a deep breath and a quick glance to see if anyone is looking (we all are), nudges the next edge of light. Triumphantly, the pattern is pursued with increasing nimbleness, until the figure with the broom stands before a pin-spot of light at the ring’s centre. He hesitates, checks again about unwanted surveillance, and then, in a single strike (poof), sweeps light and the world into darkness.

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This particular clown gesture contradicts usual commentaries of inepti­ tude and failure associated with clown figures but the incongruity of sweeping light and the narrative of the little man who scores a win lie thor­ oughly in the characteristic grounds of clownish behaviour. Moreover, the enactment of this simple idea illustrates for me today, as much as it did on its initial viewing, how powerful a slight clown gesture can be. This catas­ trophe with a very small ‘c:’ the little man with nothing but a broom and an idea destroyed, like the great god Shiva, the world of light. Jesse McKnight’s discussion of the peculiar attraction of two little men of the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Bloom and Charlie Chaplin, could also apply to Dimitri: They are at sixes and sevens here on earth but in tune with the stars, buffoons of time, and heroes of eternity. In the petty cogs of the causal, they appear foolish; in the grand swirl of the universe, they are wise, outmaneuvering their assailants and winning the race or the girl against all odds or merely retaining their skins and their dignity by nightfall. (McKnight 2008: 496)

Clowning as a state of mind/consciousness Another perspective on a clown’s relationship to ideas of catastrophe which I would like to examine is embedded in the discussion above but, at the same time, deviates by way of a harsh tangent from the beatitude and almost sacred qualities attributed by McKnight’s (2008) and my own visions of the rhythmic gestures of these diminutive figures. Beckett’s advice in Worstward Ho (1983) is a fruitful starting place wherein the directive is ‘to keep on try­ ing even if the hope of success is dashed again and again by failure: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better”’ (cited in Le Feuvre 2010: 13). True to the masterful wordsmith, these apparently simple words are not transparent; rather, they deflect a range of contradic­ tory interpretations. Yes, failure can facilitate open, flexible and alternative thought which guards against fanatical and ultra-orthodox certitude: ‘Fail­ ure […] is free to honour other ways of knowing, other construals of power’ (Werry and O’Gorman 2012: 107). On the other hand, failure can mask a horrifying realisation of the utter meaninglessness of human existence. It is as if catastrophe is etched lightly in external clown behaviour and scarred pitilessly deep in the psyches that drive the comic behaviour. Pupils of the pre-eminent clown teacher Jacques Lecoq suggest that theat­ rical clowning pivots on ‘finding that basic state of vulnerability and allow­ ing the audience to exist in that state with you’ (Butler 2012: 64). Butler argues that this ‘state of clowning’ is ‘a state of anti-intellectualism, a kind of pure emotion’ (Butler 2012: 64). From my perspective, there is also an emotional stratum in which the state or condition involves an adult anxiety

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desiring to protect the child’s view of the world with a fierceness equal to that of a mother hen protecting her brood. A clown knows the catastrophe of him/herself but refuses to let that knowledge (of failure) become an end. An obstinate resilience, even a frank acknowledgement of hopelessness, makes a clown not so much pure emotion or childlike but a kind of knowledgeable avenger of states of loss. Here I need to admit that I attribute the clowning state or consciousness to an intricate lineage inclusive of the named clowns, Grock, Chaplin, Popov, Dimitri, and Thiérrée, which extends to a whole host of others who never entered a circus or performance ring: Mikhail Dostoyevsky’s Mushkin (the holy Russian fool), Henry Miller’s Auguste, Salman Rushdie’s Saleem, Jacques Tati, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, Jean Cocteau, Eric Satie’s sonic whimsy, and Pina Bausch’s choreography. In the following observation, the overlay of catastrophe and play is a crucial indi­ cation of this intricate lineage: Heiner Müller compared Pina Bausch’s universe to the world of fairy tales. ‘History invades it like trouble, like summer flies.… The territory is an unknown planet, an emerging island product of an ignored (forgotten or future) catastrophe.… The whole is nothing but children’s play. (Biro 1998: 68) Bausch clearly recognises and is interested in the catastrophic moments or psychological wiring of life and her works are not exempt from comic (clown­ ish) modulations in the play of violence and despair that often takes centre stage. In fact, Bausch probably plays on ambivalence between despair and play more explicitly than most artists. From one angle, this ambivalence is generational, as her adult performers bear the weight of oppression within the structures (and remembering of) childhood games. An artistic masterstroke in this regard is the tripling reproduction over many years of her work exploring gender negotiations at a social dance gathering: Kontakhof. Initially, the work was performed by Bausch’s regular company of mature, if diverse, dancers (Bausch 1977), then by an elderly ensemble, some of whom had appeared in the original production (Kontakhof), and, finally, by a group of adolescents in 2010. The latter version became the subject of a documentary film, Danc­ ing Dreams (2010), which revealed the fidelity of the re-enactment, subtly transformed by the brashness and uncertainty of the teenage protagonists playing predetermined roles and moves. Viewing the three productions sideby-side reveals socialised relations of power and desire, resonant of Michel Foucault’s seminal observations (Foucault 1997), and the catastrophe of gender relations subtly caught in generational change. The debility of each age group becomes apparent. None is able to engage in communication and free-play (dream) without negotiating an unyielding sexual terrain and, more often than not, the misinterpretation of one human to another within social conventions. Bausch’s affinity to the juxtaposition of childhood aspiration and adult despair places her in clown territory.

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Becoming ‘inhuman’ or sacrificial A variation on this condition of a relentless pursuit of failure is raised by Joshua Delpech-Ramey in an argument for the ‘inhuman’ rights of clowns. His premise matches a ‘grotesque attachment to the world of things’ to a clown’s existence that is ‘victimized by an excessive drive to exist in spite of all limitation. The clown is, in some sense, condemned to immortality’ (Delpech-Ramey 2010: 133). In Delpech-Ramey’s terms: Chaplin is human not because his are the anxieties and frustrations of a man unable to realize his destiny, but because Chaplin – nearly starv­ ing, nearly homeless, a ghost in the machine – cannot not resist ‘the temptation to exist,’ the giddiness of making something out of nothing, pancakes out of sawdust. In some sense the clown can survive every accident because s/he is an undead immortal, demiurge of a world with­ out history. (Delpech-Ramey 2010: 133) The play on a clown’s ‘undead’ propensity, on his/her capacity to survive at all costs, provides a counterpoint to a tragic lens which has not been able, in human rights terms, to transcend ‘man’s inhumanity to man’. It might also be argued that this capacity to survive resists nature’s blindness to the plight of humankind (and vice versa). While I admire the skilful argument to place clowns as centrepieces in the formulation of alternative and possibly more potent human rights legislations, I’m not absolutely convinced that the clown condition, as I see it, provides a less mysterious and tragic state from which justice can be administered. Lear and his fool almost become interchangeable at the end of Shakespeare’s tragedy: both grapple with but cannot resolve the problem of justice. There is a little book written by Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder ([1948] 1974), which bears upon this aspect of a clown’s condition. In a postscript, Miller, more notorious for his sexually explicit fiction, states his belief in the unique status of clowns: Joy is like a river: it flows ceaselessly. It seems to me this is the mes­ sage which the clown is trying to convey to us, that we should partici­ pate through ceaseless flow and movement, that we should not stop to reflect, compare, analyse, possess, but flow on and through, endlessly, like music. This is the gift of surrender, and the clown makes it symboli­ cally. It is for us to make it real. (Miller 1948: 47) Miller’s fictional Auguste’s ‘special privilege [was] to re-enact the errors, the foibles, the stupidities, all the misunderstandings which plague human kind. To be ineptitude itself’ (Miller 1948: 29). With overtones of a

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Christian resurrection, Auguste surrenders himself and, thereby, flows on through death, his eyes ‘wide open, gazing with a candour unbelievable at the thin sliver of a moon which had just become visible in the heavens’ (Miller 1948: 40). It may be difficult to reconcile ineptitude with a Christ figure but those clowns who have made some sort of mark on human imag­ ination tend to wander across territories designated as sacred and profane with a certain insouciance and privilege. They are individuals who become question marks: puzzles not meant to be solved. Maybe similar glimpses of the ineffable occur in tiny, miniscule shifts of consciousness, like the mark given to me by Dimitri and Chaplin and the unending list of clowns and clown conditions that have gifted their diminutive catastrophes to the problem of creativity, of rebirth after and in the face of destruction. With McKnight, I dedicate the last word to Chaplin, who speaks with final authority on the subject: ‘Be brave enough to face the veil and lift it, and see and know the void it hides, and stand before that void and know that within yourself is your world’ (McKnight 2008: 505). Thus poised, the diminutive clown figure may not carry the ferment of Shiva’s message of destruction and rebirth, he/she may not bear the strength to creatively reconstruct or re-birth normality after catastrophic devasta­ tion. But a clown, and all the humanity given to the collisions of laughter and tears, may provide an inept response to the powerlessness which, as humans, we face in catastrophe and death. Does this mean that creativity is inimical with catastrophe or that existing with catastrophe implies creativ­ ity? As noted at the beginning, these ruminations concern small ‘c’ catastro­ phes. They are known otherwise as clowns.

References Bala, Michael (2010) The clown, Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche, 4(1): 50–71.

Bausch, Pina (1977) Kontakthof. Wuppertal Dance Theatre.

Big Apple Circus (2013) Circopedia, 27 February. 2013. Available at www.circope­ dia.org/index.php/MainPage (accessed 4 November 2015). Biro, Yvette (1998) Heartbreaking fragments, magnificent whole: Pina Bausch’s new minimyths, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 20(2): 68–72. Butler, Lauren (2012) Everything seemed new: clown as embodied critical pedagogy, Theatre Topics, 22(1): 63–72. Coover, Robert (2000) Tears of a clown, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 42(1): 81–3. Dancing Dreams (2010) Directors Anne Linsel and Rainer Hoffmann. First Run Features. Delpech-Ramey, Joshua (2010) Sublime comedy: on the inhuman rights of clowns, SubStance, 39(2): 131–41. Foucault, Michel (1997) The ethics of the concern for self as practice of freedom, in Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow, New York: The New Press: 281–302.

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Ghosh, Oroon (1965) The Dance of Shiva and Other Tales from India, New York: New American Library. Kontakthof with Ladies and Gentlemen over ’65 (2007) Director Pina Bausch. Paris: L’Arche Editeur. Le Feuvre, Lisa (2010) Introduction, in Failure: Documents of Contemporary Art, edited by Lisa Le Feuvre, London: Whitechapel Gallery: 12–21. McKnight, Jesse H. (2008) Chaplin and Joyce: a mutual understanding of gesture, James Joyce Quarterly, 45(3–4): 493–506. Miller, Henry ([1948] 1974) The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, New York: New Directions Books. Raoul (2012) Director James Thiérrée. Regal Theatre, Perth. Salisbury, Laura (2005) Beside oneself: Beckett, comic tremor and solicitude, Paral­ lax, 11(4): 81–92. Stradda (2013) Stradda: Le Magazine de la Creation hors les Murs, 27 February. 2013. Retrieved from www.horslesmurs.fr/-Decouvrez-le-magazine-.html (access date unknown). Weitz, Eric (2012) Failure as success: on clowns and laughing bodies, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(1): 79–87. Werry, Margaret and O’Gorman, Róisín (2012) The anatomy of failure: an inven­ tory, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(1): 105–10.

Cross-arts

Chapter 7

Circus music The eye of the ear Kim Baston

Since the mid-nineteenth century, circus has incorporated a style of present­ ing music in which the music is prominent, yet remains subordinate to the physical performance. Thomas Draxe, an early seventeenth century theolo­ gian, stated that ‘musicke is the eye of the ear’1 and this chapter considers how what the ear hears might influence how the eye sees and reads the circus spectacle. Examples are drawn from British, American and Australian circus to illustrate commonalities of a performance form that, with its focus on physical action rather than on the spoken word, has been successfully trans­ planted from its beginnings with Philip Astley’s equestrian performances in London in 1768 to become a global entertainment form. It also considers how the dominant Euro–American tradition (a tradition that also prevails in Australia) has incorporated Chinese and Japanese acrobatic performers (who come from a long established tradition of their own), and argues that the cultural assimilation of these performers has also been achieved through musical means. I argue that circus music is both reflective of changes in pop­ ular music and also constitutive of what is popular. While situated within a historical context and adapting to changes in popular sensibility, music also performs a role in shaping spectatorial reception. Although circus music has changed over time, the role it performs within this entertainment form has remained remarkably constant. The ‘blaring’, ‘brassy’ sound of the wind band is the sound most identi­ fied with circus music (a one bar quotation of Julius Fucik’s ‘Entry of the Gladiators’, for example, is usually enough to signify ‘circus’). The sudden stops, the ta-da of the surprise major chord, the suspense-laden drum rolls are musical practices that underpin the ritual nature of the circus act and, like the recurring physical skills of circus performers, ‘produce standards through repetition that become continuous with the past’.2 The ‘sound’ of circus music consists of the combination of a predominant instrumentation, a particular repertoire, and a distinct set of performance practices and it is this combination that distinguishes it from any other performing art that involves such a prominent use of music.

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Research for this chapter involved an extensive search of circus commen­ taries, with the reward often only a handful of vague references, as there is no specialist body of research on circus music. Most references to historical circus music and musicians within general histories of circus consist of brief indications of repertoire, or, of the nature of the circus band.3 The semioti­ cian, Paul Bouissac, provides some useful analytical material about music as one element of his discussion of circus, but does not deal with it at length, citing the complexity of the subject.4 There are also fleeting references in a number of circus biographies, of which Mervyn King’s is the most exten­ sive.5 Writings by circus musicians, who should logically provide the most useful record of actual practices, are anecdotal and scarce.6 While a considerable amount of music from the American circus has been published, there appears to be very little original music that survives, or has yet come to light, from the Australian circus.7 John Whiteoak has produced some pioneering work on Australian traditional circus music to which this study is indebted.8 This chapter, therefore, provides an overview of the development of circus music from 1780 to 1950. To do so, it draws on primary sources from Britain, America and Australia – countries with continuous and mutually influential circus traditions – and builds on the existing scholarly work. It can, however, only be an overview of a rich field of performance that is still waiting to be fully explored by scholars.

Music in the early modern circus9 In the early modern circus, before the establishment of the wind band as the preferred accompaniment, the choice of instrumentation was opportunistic, reflecting the ‘diverse and often jumbled network of performing practices and organizations which incorporated entertainments taken from fairground and theatre’10 that comprised the earliest circuses. Limited information exists for the earliest equestrian performances by Astley although they were appar­ ently accompanied by ‘rudimentary music played on French horns and a drum’.11 Engravings of the various incarnations of Astley’s Amphitheatre12 reveal diverse musical ensembles that included string and keyboard instru­ ments. Similarly, as James S. Moy notes, no detailed information exists con­ cerning the ‘grand Band, under the direction of Mr. Young’, used at John B. Ricketts’ circus in Philadelphia in 1794, though it appears likely to have included piano, clarinet and violin by 1796.13 As by 1790 the early circus regularly included pantomimes, ballets, and burlettas, it appears that the flexibility of boundaries between the early circus and other genres of theatri­ cal performance extends to the nature of the musical ensemble used. Ricketts, founder of the circus in America, used music as a prominent draw card in his advertising after 1795, emphasising the use of new compo­ sitions, although it is impossible to gauge the extent of composed material.

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John Durang, a clown in Ricketts’ circus, gave ‘music compiler’ as one of his roles and it is reasonable to assume that early circus music contained a mix of popular tunes and songs drawn from both folk and art music tradi­ tions. Durang’s memoirs contain a notated hornpipe, which was composed for him by ‘Mr Hoffmaster, a German Dwarf, in New York, 1785’14 a tune now more commonly known as the ‘Manchester Hornpipe’. Ricketts and Astley similarly had tunes named after them and these still form part of the folk repertoire.15 Before Ricketts arrived in America his last performances were for the newly established Equestrian Circus in Edinburgh, and in 1791 a collec­ tion of music from that year’s circus season was published. The collection contains a predominance of short dances in duple or triple time such as hornpipes, marches and jigs.16 Included with the musical items clearly iden­ tified with the circus performance are other items of similar dance music composed by the author of the manuscript, John Watlen, and by other subscribers to the publication. The circus-identified music is both similar to, and situated within, the repertoire of music for social dancing. The link between the dance and the circus is a significant one, both in the develop­ ment of the circus form and in the accompanying repertoire. The influence of both formal and popular dances in the early modern circus is seen in references to rope-dancers such as ‘la belle Espagniola’ who ‘danced a hornpipe and a Spanish fandango, clicking castanets, without a pole’17 or to the success of Alexandre Placide, a ballet dancer who was, according to Durang, ‘the best tightrope dancer that ever was in America’.18 Social dances would also be performed on horseback, or presented ‘as them­ selves’ as part of the entertainment program, a practice which Ricketts trans­ ported to America in 1792. Ricketts, for a performance in 1795, advertised that he would ‘ride a single horse in full speed, [and] dance to the tune of THE FLOWERS OF EDINBURGH in the character of a Highland Laddie’19 and Durang listed dancing and singing as part of his ‘business’.20 The inclusion of social dancing within circus performance continued through later developments. For example, the success of the twentieth cen­ tury wire-walker, Con Colleano, resulted not only from his extraordinary acrobatic prowess as the first performer to achieve a forward somersault on the wire, but also from his skill as a dancer, performing ‘his tangos, jotas and fandangos with the unsurpassed grace of a prima ballerina’.21

Development of the wind band The wind or brass band that became established during the 1870s and 1880s as the circus accompaniment of choice similarly situated the cir­ cus band in the midst of the dominant musical ensembles of the time.22 Both the American wind band and the brass bands of Britain and Australia have their roots in military bands.23 Military bands played both on ritual

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and processional occasions, and also provided entertainment, which would include accompanying social dancing.24 For processional and outdoor play­ ing, brass instruments have the benefit of being both loud and relatively easy to play on the move. At the circus, prior to the development of ampli­ fication, loud was an important quality for drawing maximum attention during parades and also for coping with the expanding scale of the circus spectacle, particularly the three-ring circus that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century in America. The repertoire of the traditional circus band in America, developing during the late-nineteenth century,25 ranged from military style marches to selections of both classical and popular tunes. The publishing company, Barnhouse, based in Oscaloosa, Iowa, became particularly associated with the publica­ tion of original circus music by Fred Jewell, Karl L. King, and others, and this repertoire was imported to both the British and Australian circus.26 But, as in the British circus, while there was a significant presence of specifically com­ posed circus music, much of the repertoire was arranged from other sources with little apparent distinction between the ‘high’ and the ‘low-brow’. E.H. Bostock’s description of the ‘high-class fare’ the band provided for the Bos­ tock and Wombwell travelling menagerie in England in the 1870s includes Handel’s ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ alongside the decidedly non-classical ‘Life’s a Bumper’.27 The mixture of classical and popular music, arranged for the brass or wind ensemble, positions the circus band within the practices of the developing wind band movement in America and the brass band movements of Great Britain and Australia.28 The itinerant nature of the circus, and its ability to offer employment to proficient musicians, put it in a unique position of cul­ tural exchange with the town bands. Dave Russell considers that the travel­ ling circus and menagerie bands in England influenced both the training of local bands and the popularisation of ‘art’ music, particularly arrangements of operatic airs.29 Arthur Taylor considers that ‘Wombwell’s was reputed to be the most influential band of them all’30 and notes that this band was drawn for many years from brass band musicians, the most prominent being George Ellis (who led the Accrington Brass Band in the 1840s and who toured with Wombwell for several years),31 and Adam Westall, a virtuoso ophicleide player from the same band.32 That some musicians continued to perform in both community-based bands and the circus is indicated by Tay­ lor’s observation that Bertram Mill’s Circus employed the St Hilda Colliery Band for its seasons at Olympia during the 1920s.33 The circus in Australia, as it developed from both the British and American models, also shows a crossover between a brass band tradition and the circus. The circuses of the Wirths, Fitzgeralds, and St Leons in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were all praised for possessing particularly fine bands.34 The circus band, on occasion, provided a bridge between the travel­ ling circus and the town. Mervyn King, who joined St Leon’s circus as a child in 1915, stated:

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Every town had its own band. Bands were a popular thing then. On the odd occasion a local musician came down and asked to have a blow with the band. The St Leons used to say, ‘Yes, certainly.’ I don’t think they ever knocked them back.35 The circus band was thus able to both reflect and influence the musical culture of the towns it travelled through. When Fitzgeralds’ Circus toured through regional New South Wales in the late-nineteenth century, the bandleader, Carl Von Der Mehden, was reported on at least one occasion to have conducted the town brass band at the remote mining community of Broken Hill, and apparently taught them some of his own composi­ tions.36 His reputation as bandleader was such that on a tour to New Zealand in 1894–5, a local band welcomed the circus by playing one of his compositions.37 It appears that the band for St Leon’s Circus might have been influential in introducing some of the published band repertoire from America. Mick Perry, of Perry’s Circus stated: They were all good musicians, all the St Leon boys. They used to get all their music from America. They used to leave all the other bands here for dead when they had the latest stuff from America – foxtrots, marches, rags.… As soon as anything new come out in the way of marches, any new stuff at all, over it would come. Any they didn’t like they’d throw into the fire and burn it, but there was very little that they used to burn because it was all such good stuff…38 The circus band existed, therefore, in a continuum of both musical and social practice, and while, as an entertainment form, circus has often been consid­ ered to have a transient, outsider status, the music used is the music of the settled population. In Australia, despite the decline in the use of a full circus band during the second half of the twentieth century, the link with tradition remained. On 3 December 1965, for example, Ashton’s Circus employed, for the princely sum of £1 and the inducement of free tickets, the entire Woorayl Municipal Band (an apparently undistinguished though long-established small town band) to play for the traditional pre-show concert.39 The brass or wind band has performed a long-standing and remarkably consistent role in circus performance, and its heyday coincides with the efflorescence of the travelling circus. Its decline is associated with the use of recorded music, the introduction of more economically viable small ensem­ bles (such as the Hammond organ, drum kit and trumpet trios that became common in smaller circuses during the 1960s), and the growing influence of the rock counterculture that became associated with the ‘new circus’ move­ ment that began in the 1970s.40

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Circus and rhythm Regardless of the instrumentation or repertoire of the circus band, the ele­ ment that continues to underpin the function of circus music is rhythm matched to the style of act, rather than distinctive harmonic or melodic features. For example, a street tightrope walker and stilt dancer interviewed by Henry Mayhew in the mid-nineteenth century stated: My wife and the girls all have their turns at the rope, following each other in their performances. The band generally plays quadrilles, or a waltz, or anything; it don’t matter what it is, so long as it is the proper time.41 Traditional circus maintained a correlation between certain rhythms and certain acts. Mervyn King mentioned the need for a ‘good strong heavy march for a lion act’, while a 6/8 march would be used for an equestrian act and a waltz for flying acts.42 George Speaight similarly noted the use of waltz for flying trapeze, Risley (foot juggling) and balancing acts, military marches for weight lifting and strong man acts, dance galops for fixed bars, springboard and ground acrobatics and the quadrille for horse acts.43 The music of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century circus was predi­ cated on two particular rhythmic elements: the rhythm of the dance and the rhythm of the horse. The equestrian acts that formed the basis of the early modern circus, and continued as a staple throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, demonstrated aspects of both the natural rhyth­ mic movement of the horse (cantering and galloping) and of the training of horses to undertake dance-like movements and patterns in both liberty and haute-école acts.44 In jockey acts (those involving balancing or acrobatics on the bare back of a moving horse) the regularity of the animal’s rhythm, its ‘even pace’ and ‘smooth gait’ was paramount in ensuring the success of the act and the safety of the performers who would have been in danger of falling from a horse which suddenly varied its speed or step.45 The regularity of rhythm took precedence over a fast tempo, even if the latter was to be desired. Given this precedence, and an obvious natural similarity of rhythm between different horses, it is understandable that particular meters (6/8 for a canter, a fast 2/4 for a gallop) predominated in these acts. Music was there­ fore primarily selected for the presence of suitable rhythm; the tempo of that rhythm was then determined by the speed of the particular horse act. Rhythm is also the core element in music for social dancing, with melody and harmony as secondary elements. As Mayhew’s anonymous street per­ former indicates, tunes are seemingly interchangeable, provided the rhythm and tempo are appropriate to support the dance steps. Dance music not only provides the rhythmic underpinning to the steps of the dance, but also cues for different sections, or changes in movement during the course of

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the dance, through characteristic phrase structures. Rhythm also appears to have been the predominant factor in the choice of music to accompany other circus routines, even as the circus developed to incorporate acts that were less obviously tied to equine or dance rhythms. However, if the choice of music for an act is predominantly determined by its support for the act’s physical rhythm, it is also possible that this rhythm has an effect upon the viewing of the act and this extends its function beyond that of simple accom­ paniment. It is possible that the presence of a dominant and regular auditory rhythm might impose an impression of a regular visual rhythm. This could be because the ear ‘analyses, processes and synthesizes faster than the eye’.46 While this appears to be a largely unexplored area in studies of musical perception, there are indications of this possibility within scholarship on film music. For example, Nicholas Cook, in a discussion of a sequence of exploding volcanoes in Disney’s Fantasia, notes that the impression of met­ ric regularity perceived in the combination of image and score, disappears when the image is watched without sound. He argues that the images are ‘appropriated by the audible rhythms of the score’.47 In an influential study involving the use of commutation tests (in which different soundtracks are applied to the same film sequence to gauge their effect on spectatorial per­ ception), Annabel J. Cohen has shown that perception of abstract physical shapes is influenced by musical rhythm. Her study involved the perception of a video animation involving three geometric objects and the way in which music influenced the perception of those objects. Noting that one object, a small triangle, seemed [according to her test subjects] to be ‘more active with one of the musical scores’, she considers it likely that the congruence between the temporal patterns (in effect the rhythm) of the music and the videoed motion of the triangle led to a focusing of attention on that figure rather than on the other figures present.48 Spectators of haute école and liberty equestrian routines (which are usu­ ally symmetrically patterned like military drills or the ensemble movements of the corps de ballet)49 have frequently commented on the fact that the horses appear to dance to the music. For example, a review of Chiarini’s Royal Circus from the Sydney Morning Herald, 1873, describing the Arab steed ridden by a Miss Holloway, stated that the horse ‘danced to the music in a very intelligent and even graceful manner’.50 But horses do not dance or keep time to music.51 Bouissac considers that: The musical accompaniment iconicizes [sic] the horses’ movements by reducing them to a rhythm, either to achieve complete harmony, as is the case in liberty horse acts, or to achieve individual regularity, as in ‘haute école’ acts (dancing horses).52

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The music appears to stimulate the visual perception of synchronisation, and this will be aided by the presence not only of well-trained horses, but also, logically, of a trainer who is musically aware enough to cue them to regular phrase lengths, and a bandleader who is able to match the musical tempo to the act.53 Circus music and emotional reassurance While the core musical elements of rhythm and tempo support the physi­ cal requirements of circus acts and arguably effect the visual perception of synchronisation, the instrumentation and musical smorgasbord compris­ ing the repertoire do not only conform to cultural norms but also fulfil an important emotional function. One recent study considering the recognis­ ability of emotion characteristics of music in a cross-cultural context lists the characteristics of ‘joyful’ music as being ‘fast in tempo, major in mode, wide in pitch, high in loudness, regular in rhythm and low in complex­ ity’.54 The majority of the repertoire played by the circus wind band exhibits all these characteristics.55 Measured against other comparable repertoires, circus music could even be considered as demonstrating ‘über-joyfulness’. In comparison with marches played by military bands, for example, circus marches consistently demonstrate wider pitch relationships in melodies, are taken at a faster pace, and played louder.56 They are also predominantly in the major mode. Regularity of rhythm, as noted above, underpins the circus act, and the structural simplicity and regularity of the musical forms most often employed in the circus band repertoire fulfils the requirement of ‘low complexity’. As William E. Studwell, Charles Conrad and Bruce R. Schueneman note, the common form of the circus march consists of two sections: the march proper (the first section), followed by what might be considered a ‘trio’ sec­ tion.57 Similar to other music of this period, the trio modulates to a related key (in the circus repertoire this is often to the subdominant) and is often ‘of a more sedate and stately character’ than the opening march.58 Often the end of a trio section features a ‘breakstrain’, or in circus parlance, a ‘dog­ fight’, which returns to the more exciting atmosphere of the opening.59 As the tonality and characteristic harmonic progressions form part of the Euro– American classical and related traditions, so the consistent use of a binary/ ternary structure is similarly an expression of that tradition; these structures are the most common forms of music as in the da capo aria or the standard 32-bar Tin Pan Alley song. If the circus act includes both exhilaration and risk, the predominantly ‘joyful’ emotional quality expressed by traditional circus music confirms the function of the music to provide both excitement and simultaneous reassur­ ance. While the thrill of the circus spectacle includes the ‘demonstration and taunting of danger’,60 the crucial element is that the performer ultimately

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demonstrates mastery of that danger. As Helen Stoddart notes, in the case of mishap ‘it is the unspoken law of the circus that the performer always gets up again and leaves the ring a conqueror of animal, machinery or gravity’.61 Loss of control and the attendant risk of real physical injury are, for obvious reasons, undesirable. The acknowledgement of danger can be seen in the culmination of the circus act, the ‘glory’ trick, which is frequently underlined by a cessation of the music into a tension-inducing drum roll, marking the climax of the act. Following the marking of the most difficult or dangerous trick, for which the drum roll functions as a ritual framing (and as ritual framing is, in itself, reassuring), the music will typically resume in a ‘joyful’ coda. The diffi­ cult tricks will often be performed in silence, which, in the extraordinarily noisy environment that characterises the bigger circuses, provides the aural equivalent of the bodily sensation of ‘holding of breath’.62 But this is only momentary, the resumption of the music instantly relaxes the tension. The predominant emotional role of the music is to affirm the demonstra­ tion of control and this provides, in effect, a meta-discourse. This meta-dis­ course also underlies the musical practice of ‘marking the tricks’, such as the crash of the cymbal to underline particular moments of physical action. This marking always occurs at the point of successful completion of the action, at the moment when mastery has been demonstrated; it is also there to stimu­ late audience participation, via applause, in the recognition of that mastery. While the predominant mode in circus music is the joyfully reassuring major, the more chromatically unstable and less ‘reassuring’ minor mode appears most commonly as the accompaniment for animal acts, particu­ larly wild animal acts. The ‘good strong heavy march for a lion act’, noted above by Mervyn King, is likely to be in the minor key. As the big cat acts also enunciate the meta-discourse of control, often framing the trainer as a heroic figure triumphing over the odds, the use of the minor mode could appear to undermine this discourse. But is this the case? The two predominant approaches to the presentation of the lion in tra­ ditional circus are either as a savage beast to be mastered by the trainer (en férocité) or in a quieter mode demonstrating ease and familiarity with the animal (en douceur or en pelotage),63 and both these approaches sug­ gest different musical choices. In a discussion of lion acts, Bouissac notes various musical choices that could be made, choices that he considers act as a ‘supplementary modifier’ to the act. He lists as examples ‘a tragic Wagnerian-type overture, an exotic tune, a typical ethnic tune, a national anthem, or popular contemporary music’.64 The self-presentation of the trainer, including costume and choice of props used will further determine, and be determined by, the choice of music. The ‘glam-rock’ appearance of Gunther Gebel-Williams in the 1970s or the ‘Indian rajah’ costume worn by Rudolf Matthies thirty years earlier65 both suggest obvious directions for the accompanying music, whether by supporting the narrative of contemporary

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relevance in the first example or the narrative of exoticism suggested by the second. The potentially destabilising minor mode is more commonly associ­ ated with acts presented as ‘exotic’, and with big cat acts, particularly those presented en férocité. The minor key circus marches, like the more common major mode marches, also generally contain a trio section, but the customary modulation for the trio section is not to the subdominant, but to a major key, thus often confin­ ing the more unsettling qualities of the minor to a relatively brief section. In an act in which the lions are framed (often in the publicity) as savage brutes direct from the jungle, but often revealed (in the more usual eventuality of a non-attack) as rather well-behaved, the use of the minor key can therefore be considered as another manifestation of the ‘hyperbole related to the glo­ rification of danger’ which Mullett considers to be the function of the drum roll. Mullett considers this ‘hyperbole’ to be a specific direction of attention for the audience, both to highlight a genuine physical risk for the performer and to stimulate a perception of risk where little exists.66 While less emotionally reassuring than major mode compositions, the minor key marches are, more importantly and with few exceptions, laden with varieties of musical ‘orientalism’. For big cat acts, the standard musi­ cal tropes that signify this imagined exotic include ‘primitive’ highly regular drum rhythms and the use of the augmented second interval. Although this is a characteristic interval in some non-European-scales such as the Arabic hijaz mode,67 the use of this exoticism, like similar musical exoticism in films, is geographically vague, inhabiting an area that includes north Africa (e.g. ‘In The Soudan’), travelling through various ‘Middle Eastern’ locations (‘Vision Of Salome’ and ‘Cyrus The Great’) to India (‘Hindustan’ and ‘Star of India’).68 Importantly, however, these ‘exotic’ features are still couched within the formal musical structures and rhythmic organisation of the clas­ sical Western harmonic tradition, appearing largely as decorative features to the usual march/trio format. In the context of the big cat act, this reinforces not just the exotic, but also the ‘primitive’, the ‘savage’, the ‘jungle’. But while the initial presentation of the minor in the musical accompaniment may serve to reinforce the sense of danger, the return of the major mode, and the use of other ‘joyful’ circus marches for the ‘cage-clearer’ (the galop to accompany the usually swift exit of the animals from the circus ring at the end of the act) affirms not just a demonstration of control but a demonstra­ tion of imperial control, over savage beast and savage music alike. ‘Exotic’ circus music, unsurprisingly, has been often used to accompany ‘exotic’ performers, although there is a geographical shift towards the deco­ rative features that signify ‘Far East’ in the case of music accompanying Chi­ nese and Japanese performers. Chinese and Japanese performers have a long cultural heritage of acrobatic performance which includes musical traditions that are very different from their Western counterparts. Nevertheless, Chi­ nese and Japanese acrobatics have transferred easily to the Euro–American circus form.

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In Rosemary Farrell’s account of Chinese acrobatics in Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century, she notes that the highly skilled Chinese acrobats were praised in reviews and considers that, as ‘cultural envoys’, these performers helped to temporarily destabilise the negative social attitudes towards Chinese migrants current in Australia during that period. In contrast, performances by Chinese singers and musicians were ‘decried as discordant’.69 This suggests that while the skilled acrobatic body could be understood within an Australian cultural framework of circus performance, the presumably equally skilled musicians could not cross the cultural barrier. While the acrobat performing within Chinese cultural per­ formance would naturally use Chinese music, it appears unlikely that this would be the case within the Australian circus context. In Australia, the beginning of a process of assimilation of the ‘cultural other’ can be tentatively identified in the case of Japanese performers, as the historical circumstances surrounding the presence of these performers has a clear beginning with the Meiji period and Japan’s reconnection with the West. David Sissons has identified 1867 as the date that the first Japanese acrobats arrived in Australia.70 The performances of Lenton and Smith’s Great Dragon Troupe, a troupe of Japanese acrobats who toured Australia between 1867 and 1869, were praised, according to Sissons, apart from their ‘hideous’ music. The efforts of the two female shamisen accompanists (the wife and daughter of two of the acrobats) were described as: a constant scrape on a pair of fiddles, extracting a sort of music, which to an uneducated ear, bore a close resemblance to discord, but which in process of time might become tolerable.71 As Sisson’s research reveals, the troupe appeared in lecture halls, Mechanics’ Institutes and theatres, performing their acrobatic skills alongside demon­ strations of Japanese life and customs, and examples of Japanese theatre. The presentation of this troupe to Australian colonial audiences occurred within a framework of ethnographic performance in which the cultural dif­ ference of these performers was the main attraction. The lofty purpose of these performances was described by the Ballarat Courier as being able to ‘afford an insight to Japanese Manners and Customs, and to exhibit the general character of Japanese Theatrical Representations’.72 The shamisen players participated, therefore, within a framework of cultural ‘otherness’, to be wondered at, if not necessarily enjoyed. In 1876, Ridge’s Royal Tycoon Circus, a circus containing a number of Japanese performers, engaged the Wirth’s family band to accompany the performances.73 St Leon notes a report of a performance by this circus at Cowra, New South Wales, in March 1880, which praised the band as ‘well worth listening to, several operatic selections being rendered with exquisite taste’.74 While there is no indication of exactly what music accompanied the

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acts of the Japanese performers, it appears unlikely from this that Japanese music was used. Within the relentlessly commercial world of circus enter­ prise, it was obviously pragmatic, if the aim was to entertain the general public, to use the popular music of the predominantly white Anglo-Saxon audience. While it is difficult to ascertain the exact music used for Chinese or Japanese performances within Australian circus, by the beginning of the twentieth century the ‘Chinese orientalist’ repertoire of the American circus would have been available to the Australian market. Karl King’s compo­ sition ‘Ung-Kung-Foy-Ya: A Chinese Intermezzo’,75 which was apparently written for Chinese acrobats, is a representative example of this repertoire and employs a number of standard ‘Chinese-icities’.76 As Derek Scott notes, ‘pentatonicism and parallel fourths are the basic signifiers for chinoiserie’,77 and these recur within the Western classical repertoire, within the domestic piano market and the Broadway song, and as signifiers of the ‘Far East’ in film music.78 As is common within the exotic circus repertoire, this composi­ tion uses the minor mode, and, as with many other pieces in this category, the trio section of the march reverts to the major and the ‘Chinese-icities’ give way to a Westernised melody that is practically indistinguishable from non-exotic marches. The exotic is again reduced to a selection of decorative timbres contained within a popular Occidental musical form and harmonic language, and thus, while acknowledging other cultural identities, simulta­ neously erases them. A rare indication of the attitudes of the performers themselves to the music used as accompaniment for their acts is given in Merle Evans’ biography: Once a group of Chinese tumblers insisted on Western music for their act. They just liked the tune. Merle obliged but the act lost all its zip and appeal. He quickly pointed this out. The tumblers asked what he’d suggest. He resurrected two ancient tunes called ‘Fantan’ and ‘In Old Pekin’. The acrobats liked his choice and their act improved so much they turned completely against Western Music.79 While the year is not indicated in this example, ‘Fantan’ was used during the 1954 Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus season to accompany The Yong Sister and Brothers, Chinese contortionists. Chinese and Japanese performers appear to have been treated interchangeably, as both ‘In Old Pekin’ and ‘Ung-Kung-Foy-Ya’ were used the following year to accompany the Japanese wire-walker, Takeo Usui.80 Farrell argues that ‘the circus ring became a safe place for Chinese acro­ bats, and … their acts seem to have offered opportunities for neutralis­ ing preconceived socially constructed bias, discrimination and anxiety’.81 I suggest, though, that if these performances were framed by the accom­ paniment of ‘orientalist’ circus music, which both sanitises and renders

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safe the exotic ‘other’, yet simultaneously emphasises ethnic difference, the ‘seen identity’ of the Chinese or Japanese performer is ‘heard’ through the complicating haze of a musical language that signifies an East appro­ priated and assimilated by the West. The skilled acrobatic body of the Chinese and Japanese performer might inspire awe, but within the context of the dominant Euro–American circus tradition this is always racially marked. Through the eye in the ear provided by ‘Orientalist’ circus music, the circus ring also becomes a place where Chinese and Japanese acrobats can be ‘safely’ viewed. The apparent interchangeability of circus tunes masks how circus music functions, not only to accompany acts in the ring, but also to produce that action. The core elements of tempo and rhythm, while possibly the main determinant in the selection of suitable music, also are able to produce a visual reading of synchronisation. The ‘joyfulness’ produced by the tonal harmonic and melodic musical elements provides the emotional reassurance that ensures that the presentation of risk is exhilarating rather than heartstopping, and affirms the demonstration of control by the skilled acrobatic body. Because circus music was firmly situated as popular music, and was performed by the popular musical ensembles of the day, it also performed social and cultural reassurance. Yet it is in the construction of the cultural ‘other’ that the ideological underpinning of this seemingly uncomplicated genre of music is revealed.

Notes 1 Thomas Draxe (1654), Bibliotheca Scholastica Instructissima, or, a Treasury of Ancient Adagies and Sententious Proverbs (Londini: Excudebat S.G., impensis Jos. Kirten), 134. 2 Peta Tait (2005), Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London: Routledge), 5. 3 For example see George Speaight (1980b), A History of the Circus (London: Tantivy); Antony Hippisley Coxe (1980a), A Seat at the Circus (London: Evans Brothers); John Culhane (1990), The American Circus (New York: Henry Holt); Mark St Leon (1983), Spangles and Sawdust: The Circus in Australia (Melbourne: Greenhouse). These are comprehensive histories of, respectively, the British, American and Australian circus. 4 Paul Bouissac (1976), Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 195. 5 St Leon (1990a), The Silver Road: The Life of Mervyn King, Circus Man (Springwood, NSW: Butterfly). 6 There are only two published biographies of circus musicians: Gene Plowden (1971), Merle Evans: Maestro of the Circus (Miami: E.A Seamann), which deals with Merle Evans, the legendary bandmaster of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus (RBBBC) and Clifford Edward Watkins (2003), Showman: the Life and Music of Perry George Lowery (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi). Lowery was a pioneering African-American bandleader who ran the sideshow band at RBBBC for a number of years.

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7 A comprehensive selection of American circus music is published (in skeletal form) in Studwell, Conrad and Schueneman (1999), Circus Songs: An Annotated Anthology (New York: Haworth). This book also provides a short historical overview of American circus music. There appears to be no comparable account of British circus music. 8 John Whiteoak (1999a), The Development of Australian Circus Music, Australasian Drama Studies, 35: 59–72; Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836–1970 (Sydney: Currency). There is an extended section on Australian circus music in St Leon (2007), Circus and Nation: A Critical Enquiry into Circus in its Australian Setting 1847–2006 (PhD dissertation, University of Sydney): 325–8. 9 The terminology used in this research to designate specific historical periods within the development of circus is derived from a number of sources. What is termed the ‘modern’ circus is generally dated from 1768 and attributed to Astley’s displays of equestrian skills within what became the standard 42-foot ring (see for example Coxe 1980a, Seat at the Circus, 22–3; Tait (2005), Circus Bodies, 5). I will designate the period up to the 1850s as ‘early modern circus’. I will use the term ‘traditional circus’ to refer to the modern circus after the midnineteenth century, reflecting what Tait calls the ‘institutional form of circus’ (Tait 2005, Circus Bodies, 5), a term which includes contemporary companies still working within that framework. ‘Traditional circus’ as a term is used in this way by a number of scholars (e.g. Whiteoak 1999a, Australian Circus Music; Tait 2005, Circus Bodies). ‘New circus’ is the term used to refer to the range of circus companies departing from traditional practices, the beginning of which is usually dated to the 1970s (Jane Mullett (2006), Circus Alternatives: The Rise of New Circus in Australia, the United States, Canada and France (PhD dissertation, La Trobe University). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to con­ sider the increasingly diverse spectacles of what is now commonly termed ‘new circus’, though many of the functions of music outlined here remain applicable. See, for example, my article on the work of contemporary Brisbane company, Circa (Baston 2010, Jacques Brel and Circus Performance: The compiled score as discourse in The Space Between by Circa, Australasian Drama Studies, 56: 154–69. 10 Helen Stoddart (2000), Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 3. 11 Marius Kwint (2002), The Legitimization of the Circus in Late Georgian England, Past and Present, 174(1): 76. These would not have been modern valve horns but earlier versions using crooks. At this period it is not clear whether the method of hand-stopping, devised by Hampel in Dresden between 1750 and 1760, and which gave a full chromatic range to the horn, was being used in England. It is possible the first mention of hand-stopping in England dates to 1772 (W.F.H. Blandford 1922, Studies on the Horn. No.l: The French Horn in England, The Musical Times, 63(954): 544–7). Thus the complexity or otherwise of the music used would of necessity depend on the type of horn used. 12 For example, see Speaight (1980b), History of the Circus, 37. 13 James S. Moy (1978a), Entertainments at John B. Ricketts’s Circus, 1793–1800, Educational Theatre Journal, 30(2): 192–3. 14 Alan S. Downer (ed.) (1966), The Memoir of John Durang: American Actor 1785–1816 (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press), 22. 15 Downer (1966), 69. According to The Fiddler’s Companion, a comprehensive website for traditional music, ‘Ricketts Hornpipe’ remains a popular hornpipe tune in American traditional music, with a version recorded on 78rpm by Dan

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

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Sullivan’s Shamrock Band. It was imported back to England and appears under various names, including ‘Pigeon On The Gate’ (Kuntz, Fiddler’s Companion http://ibiblio.org/fiddlers/circus.htm accessed 8 January 2008). Kuntz also lists as current tunes ‘Leslie’s Hornpipe’, a corruption of the original title ‘Astley’s Hornpipe’ or ‘Astley’s Ride’. The title of ‘Pigeon on the Gate’ in this context, refers to a dance step, the pigeon wing, in which the dancer leaps into the air, bringing the legs together (Douglas S Harvey 2009, Strolling Players in Albany, Montreal, and Quebec City, 1797 and 1810: Performance, Class, and Empire, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 38: 239). As both Durang and Placide were known to have performed this step on the rope, it is also possible that ‘gate’ refers to the rope. John Watlen (1791), The Celebrated Circus Tunes Perform’d at Edinburgh This Season, with the Addition of Some New Reels and Strathspeys Set for the Piano Forte or Violin and Bass by John Watlen (Edinburgh: self-published). Four of these tunes (three duple time country dances and one jig) bear the dedication ‘Perform’d by Mr Rickets’. Speaight (1980b), History of the Circus, 17.

Downer (1966), John Durang, 68.

Moy (1978a), Entertainments, 192.

Downer (1966), John Durang, 68.

Mark St Leon (1986), The Great Con Colleano, This Australia, 6(1): 16.

William E. Studwell, Charles P. Conrad and Bruce R. Schueneman (1999), Circus

Songs: An Annotated Anthology (New York: Haworth), xii. Richard K. Hansen (2005), The American Wind Band: A Cultural History (GIA: Chicago), 45; see also Raoul F. Camus (1976), Military Music of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); Trevor Herbert (2000a), Nineteenth Century Bands; Making a Movement, in The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History, edited by Trevor Herbert (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 10–60. See, for example, Richard Franko Goldman (1961), The Wind Band: Its Literature and Technique (Westport, CT: Greenwood), 38; Lewis Winstock (1970), Songs & Music of the Redcoats: A History of the War Music of the British Army 1642– 1902 (London: Leo Cooper), 158–9. Studwell et al. (1999) date the ‘golden age’ of circus music from 1900 to 1930 and consider the preference for the wind band developed from the 1870s onwards (Studwell et al. 1999, Circus Songs, xii–xiii). It is possible that this preference was established even earlier in Australia, with the influential Hore’s Saxe Horn Band, which played for Rowe’s American Circus in 1852 (Whiteoak 1999b, Playing Ad Lib, 33). Whiteoak (1999a, Australian Circus Music, 60). The Barnhouse publishing com­ pany was founded in 1886 (Diane Parr Walker (1983), From ‘Hawk-Eye March and Quick Step’ to ‘Caprice Hongrois’: Music Publishing in Iowa, American Music, 1(4): 42–62. It maintains an extensive catalogue of band and circus music to the present day. E.H. Bostock (1927), Menageries, Circuses and Theatres (New York: Benjamin Blom), 33. Dave Russell (1987), Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 185; Whiteoak (1999b), Playing Ad Lib, 69–71. Russell (1987), p. 186. Russell considers this practice was current in Great Britain from the 1830s until the 1920s. Arthur R. Taylor (1979), Brass Bands (Granada: London), 28.

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31 Taylor (1979), 25. Taylor also notes that members of the Bolton Old Band toured during the summer with Cooke’s Circus (Taylor 1979, 28). Taylor unfor­ tunately gives no dates so this would have been sometime between 1850 and 1884 when the band disbanded. Wombwell’s band appears to have been influen­ tial for much of the nineteenth century. Trevor Herbert also notes the influence of circus bands in his study of the Cyfarthfa Band from Merthyr Tydfil, including a visit by Wombwell’s Circus in the early 1840s (Herbert 1990, The repertory of a Victorian provincial brass band, Popular Music, 9(1): 118 and note 6, 131). 32 Taylor (1979), Brass Bands, 28. The ophicleide is a keyed bass brass instrument which replaced the serpent (‘ophicleide’ means ‘keyed serpent’) in the early nine­ teenth century and was, in its turn, superseded by the bass tuba. 33 Taylor (1979), 129. 34 St Leon (2007), Circus and Nation, 325–8. Wirth’s Circus was founded by four brothers, all German musicians, who initially learned circus performance skills while playing in the band for Ashton’s Circus (George Wirth, 1925, Round the World with a Circus, Melbourne: Troedel and Cooper, 141). Hugh McMahon, a virtuoso cornet player and a prominent figure in the Australian brass band movement, toured with Wirth’s Circus in the late 1920s (Jack Greaves and Chris Earl (2001), Legends in Brass: Australian Brass Band Achievers of the 20th Century (Kangaroos Flat, Australia: Muso’s Media), 39. Bert Houten, a bass (tuba) player with St Leon’s Circus, had previously played with a brass band in St Kilda, Melbourne, and Harold Barlow, a cornet player with the same cir­ cus, apparently went on to perform in the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (Sadie St Leon, 1984, in Mark St Leon, Australian Circus Reminiscences, New South Wales: Jones St Ultimo, 123, copy 11 of limited edition of 50). See also Whiteoak (1999a), Australian Circus Music, 63 and (1999b), Playing Ad Lib, 69–82 for the links between brass bands and the circus. 35 St Leon (1990a), The Silver Road, 56. Mervyn King founded Silver’s Circus, a significant post-World War II circus in Australia. 36 I am indebted to local historian, Craig Wood, for sharing the information that in 1897 a local brass band played a duet piece written by Von der Mehden, titled ‘The Two Horns’. This might have been a handwritten piece, as little informa­ tion exists on whether his music was published before 1900 (Craig Wood, email messages to author 20 and 31 July 2009). 37 I am also indebted to Dr Gillian Arrighi for this information (email message to author 20 August 2009). 38 Mick Perry (1984), in St Leon, Australian Circus Reminiscences, 200. Perry’s reminiscences cover the early twentieth century. 39 Ed Hattam (1992), A History of the Woorayl Municipal Band 1892–1992 (Hues Graphics: Leongatha), 14. This was a band based in Leongatha, a small farming town in regional Victoria. 40 See Mullett (2005), Circus Alternatives, 181. 41 Henry Mayhew ([1851] 1967), London Labour and the London Poor (London: Frank Cass), vol. 3, 150. 42 St Leon (1990a), The Silver Road, 55. 43 Speaight considers these practices were established by the end of the nineteenth century (History of the Circus, 99). The sections of the quadrille are danced to either 2/4 or 6/8 rhythms. 44 Both liberty acts (in which the horses have no rider but are directed to perform synchronised routines), and haute-école acts (where a complex series of steps are engaged in by horse and rider, similar to the art of dressage) are described fully by Coxe (1980a), A Seat at the Circus, 91–103, 169–79.

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45 St Leon (1990b), May Wirth: An Unbelieveable Lady Bareback Rider, Bandwagon, May–June (1990b), 6; Coxe (1980a), A Seat at the Circus, 53. 46 Michel Chion (1994), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen translated by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press), 10. 47 Nicholas Cook, Analysing Musical Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 208. 48 Annabel J. Cohen (2000), Film Music: Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology, in Music and Cinema, edited by James Buhler, Carol Flinn and David Neumeyer (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press), 363. 49 Bouissac (1976), Circus and Culture, 134. 50 St Leon (1983), Spangles and Sawdust, 75 51 Speaight (1980b), History of the Circus, 59; Coxe (1980a), A Seat at the Circus, 169; Moy (1978a), Entertainments, 192. See also Sverre O. Braathen (1958), Circus Bands: Their Rise and Fall (Evanston, IL: The Instrumentalist), 8. John Durang also noted that as the first equestrian performers to appear in Canada, their dancing horses were considered ‘supernatural’. He goes on to note that the Canadians, while ‘ignorent [sic] of the science’ were actually right and ‘a horse can not keep time to music – we allways [sic] adapted our music to keep time with the horses’ (Downer 1966, Memoir of John Durang, 69). 52 Bouissac (1976), Circus and Culture, 131. 53 A rare and interesting insight into the musical awareness of the trainer exists in one account of the mixed reactions to the Stravinsky score, Circus Polka for a Young Elephant, an elephant ballet written for the Ringling Brothers’ 1942 season, choreographed by Balanchine. While the band, led by Merle Evans, apparently struggled with the modernist difficulties of the score, more of a problem was that ‘the elephant boys could never pick out the changing rhythms of the piece so that they could “cue” the pachyderms with their hooks when it was time for the bulls to pick up their feet and “dance”’ (Ernest. J. Albrecht 1989, A Ringling by Any Other Name: The Story of John Ringling North and His Circus (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 129). However there appear to be so many apocryphal stories surrounding the history of this particularly famous piece, including that the elephants reacted very badly to the music, that it is hard to separate fact from fiction. Culhane, for example, notes that 425 performances of the ballet took place without any reports of bad behaviour by the elephants (Culhane 1990, The American Circus, 243). Although elephants presumably have the same limitations when it comes to music as horses at least one critic was fooled, noting that ‘Modoc, the elephant, danced with amazing grace and in time to the tune’ (Albrecht 1989, A Ringling, 129). The roots of this opinion are buried deep in history. Aelian also considered that elephants could dance to music (Aelian 1958, On the Characteristics of Animals Vol II (11) translated by A.F Scholfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 102–3). 54 Balkwill, Thompson and Matsunaga (2004), Recognition of Emotion in Japanese, Western, and Hindustani Music by Japanese Listeners, Japanese Psychological Research, (464), 337. 55 As in the collection of music provided in Studwell et al. (1999), Circus Songs.

56 Dr Charles Conrad, personal communication, 25 January 2009.

57 As, for example, in a minuet and trio.

58 Studwell et al. (1999), Circus Songs, xiv.

59 Studwell et al. (1999), xiv.

60 Stoddart (2000), Rings of Desire, 4.

61 Stoddart (2000), 95.

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62 Tait (2005), Circus Bodies, 142. St Leon describes the band playing during Colleano’s performances as introducing a trick with a drum roll but thereafter remaining silent during the attempt at the trick, though he interprets this as being for the purposes of not disturbing his concentration (St Leon 1993, The Wizard of the Wire: The Story of Con Colleano (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies, 131). 63 Stokes, ‘Lion Griefs’: The Wild Animal Act as Theatre, New Theatre Quarterly, 20(2), 140. 64 Bouissac (1976), Circus and Culture, 95. 65 These descriptions are provided by Stokes (2004), 145–6. 66 Mullett (2005), Circus Alternatives, 166. Mullett is specifically discussing the use of the drum roll as ‘hyperbole’, but her observations are also applicable to the presentation of wild animal acts. 67 For a discussion of musical Orientalism, including its relation to the hijaz scale, see Derek B. Scott (1998), Orientalism and Musical Style, The Musical Quarterly, 82(2), 309–35. 68 These titles are examples of ‘oriental’ pieces written in the first two decades of the twentieth century and which continued to recirculate in American circus compa­ nies at least until the 1970s. ‘In The Soudan’ (Gabriel Sebek, 1906) was used for Trevor Bale’s tigers in 1963 at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus (RBBBC). ‘Cyrus The Great’ (Karl L. King, 1921) was used by Pablo Noel in his lion act during the 1970s (RBBBC). ‘Vision Of Salome’ (J. Bodewalt Lampe, 1908) was used for the simultaneously presented Damoo Dhotre’s mixed cat act and Rudoph Matthies’ tiger act in 1948 (the third act was, incongruously, polar bears) (RBBBC). ‘Hindustan’ (Oliver Wallace/Harold Weeks, 1918) was used for Joe Horwath’s cat act in 1950 (Roger Bros. Circus), and also for Tajana’s tiger act in 1976 (Hanneford Circus). Even Gebel-Williams, who generally used more contemporary music, often from film and television, would sometimes enter to music from this ‘oriental’ repertoire. ‘Star Of India’ (John W. Bratton, 1908), for example, was used for his tiger act in 1970 (RBBBC) (Sounds of the Circus, ‘How the Music was Used’, www.euchroni3.net/sotc/songs4.html accessed 12 March 2009). 69 Rosemary Farrell (2007), Chinese Acrobatics Unmasked, Australasian Drama Studies, 50: 43. 70 David C.S. Sissons (1999), Japanese Acrobatic Troupes Touring Australasia 1867–1900, Australasian Drama Studies, 35: 74. 71 Sissons (1999), 84. 72 Ballarat Courier, 14 February 1868 (cited in Sissons 1999, Japanese Acrobatic Troupes, 78). 73 This was before the Wirths established their own, very successful circus. 74 St Leon (2007), Circus and Nation, 327. 75 Published by Barnhouse, 1919. 76 The term is taken from Roland Barthes (1977), Image/Music/Text translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana), 48–9. 77 Scott (1998), Orientalism, 323. Scott also notes that it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the musical signifiers appeared that became charac­ teristic of ‘orientalism’ (Scott 1998: 321). However, in Australia, a ‘Chinese Song and Dance’ by Charles Schultz that was used in a pantomime by J.C. Williamson, circa l879, does contain some of the decorative grace notes that become a feature of later ‘oriental’ music. 78 There is a substantial quantity of ‘exotic’ songs and piano music published in England and much of this repertoire was also distributed in Australia, for example by Allen & Co. Pty Ltd of Melbourne. Allen & Co. also published a

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similar repertoire by Australian composers that exhibits a similar geographical spread of favoured ‘exotic’ locations. Examples of ‘Far-Eastern-icity’ include ‘A Japanese Love Song’, by May H. Brahe (1910), ‘Chinese Lantern Dance’ and ‘Japanese Dance’ by Eugene Blore (circa l920), ‘Japonette’ by Frederick Hall (1929). Examples can also be found from other Australian publishers. In Sydney, W.H. Paling published ‘Japanese Lullaby’ by Clement Scott (1914) and Alberts & Son ‘Japloo Baby’ (1907), from an opera, The Grey Kimono. The sheet music published from pantomimes with exotic settings might also have encouraged the popularity of this music, for example, ‘Somewhere South of Shanghai’ by Jack Lumsdaine was featured in J.C. Williamson’s production of Aladdin (1925). All of these feature the typical devices of musical chinoiserie/japonisme. Erno Rapée’s 1924 cue compendium for silent film accompanists, Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (North Stratford, NH: Ayer Company, 2002) also con­ tains examples, including one entitled Chinese–Japanese by Otto Langey, indi­ cating the interchangeability of these two ethnicities to the occidental eye. 79 Plowden (1971), Merle Evans, 71–2. ‘In Old Pekin’ was written by Karl L. King (and published by Barnhouse) in 1923. According to Studwell et al., ‘Fantan’, a ‘Chinese marche characteristique’ composed by Bert R. Anthony, ‘was most likely written around the turn of the century’ (Studwell et al. 1999, Circus Songs, 12). In context, this is ‘Western’ music as in ‘country and western’, or, as called at the time, ‘Western swing’. 80 Sounds of the Circus, ‘How the Music was Used’. 81 Farrell (2007), Chinese Acrobatics Unmasked, 43.

Chapter 8

Art and androgyny The aerialist Naomi Ritter

Here I wish to discuss some linked pieces in the complex mosaic of a trend in literature and the arts. My focus rests on a figure particularly compelling to writers and artists of the early twentieth century: the aerialist. Among the many circus performers who have fascinated artists since Romanticism, the clown and the acrobat predominate.1 Like the Romantics, we may see in the tightrope-artiste the ‘serious’ side of the show: grace, skill, agility, even the daring conquest of human limits. Conversely, the clown demon­ strates the utter reversal of such values: clumsiness, stupidity, an all-too­ human image of our own inadequacy. Here I will pursue one aspect of the aerial artist-figure, its perceived sexual ambiguity. Two major European writers, Jean Cocteau and Thomas Mann, develop opposing aesthetics from their remarkably comparable views of such androgyny. To my knowledge, no one has yet attempted this comparison. So I must state clearly that I do not imply a general link between these two writers or their work. Indeed, despite their mutual admiration, the two make a decidedly odd couple.2 Accordingly, I focus only on the potent thematic cluster – aerial acrobatics as an androgynous fantasy – that their two texts illumine.

Background To begin with, we need some grasp of the aerial image in the nineteenth cen­ tury. Banville set the pattern for what I call ‘the vertical metaphor.’ He and other writers – Gautier, Barbey d’Aurevilly – saw in trapeze acts a parallel for the daring ambition and the formal skill of the artist. In the last of his Odes Funambulesques of 1857, Banville makes his sauteur, gone mad with the joy of his act, transcend the circus itself: … Plus loin! Plus haut! je vois encor les boursiers à lunettes d’or, des critiques, des demoiselles et des réalistes en feu. Plus haut! Plus loin! de l’air! du bleu! Des ailes! des ailes! des ailes!

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Enfin, de son vil échafaud, Le clown sauta si haut, si haut, Qu’il creva le plafond de toiles Au son du cor et du tambour, Et, le coeur dévoré d’amour, Alla rouler dans les étoiles. (Banville 1972: 290) Further! Higher! I can still see/ The brokers with their opera glasses,/ The critics, the young girls,/ And the avid realists./ Higher! Further! Air! Sky!/ Wings! Wings! Wings! Finally, the clown/ Sprang so high, so high,/ That he burst the canvas ceiling/ To the thunder of horns and drums,/ And, his heart devoured by love,/ He went roiling among the stars. The aspirations of this acrobat spring from social protest, for he soars into the sky in order to escape the petit-bourgeois audience. Thus the vaulter attains a blazing immortality; he becomes a member of the galaxy. His act liberates the performer from all earthly bounds. Translated into metaphor, the artist escapes the petty human world through art. Since Banville, writers have seen the flight of the artist both negatively, as a release from the miseries of earth, and positively, as a symbol of transcend­ ence. The juxtaposition of these two ideas, escape and liberation, creates a major tension in l’art pour l’art. Art as flight-from-reality points toward the hermetic attitudes of Surrealism, Dada and the Absurdist movements. The other aspect of flight, the striving to surpass ordinary experience cul­ minates in Nietzsche’s image of the Übermensch. In the language of Gaston Bachelard (1959), Nietzsche epitomizes the ‘montagnard’, the ‘imagination aerienne’. Zarathustra sees in his aerialist, the rope-dancer of his Prologue, the potential for ultimate transcendence. Indeed the self-overcoming that he preaches goes so far beyond the present state of mankind that we must understand the Übermensch as an abstraction only. The author of the nineteenth century was seeking a new identity suitable for the Industrial Age, the era of what Walter Benjamin (1968) calls ‘high capitalism’. Without patrons, the artist became like any day labourer, sell­ ing his wares commercially. Hence the drive of the writer to elevate himself above the rest of society. Transcendence became a psychological need, which we note in many forms since Romanticism. Ascent characterizes the period, be it in the ‘arriviste’ young men on the make in Balzac or the spirituality of heroes in Hugo. The sauteur of Banville has symbolic value, since he was the first to concretize the Romantic imagery of flight in the aerialist. One need only compare ‘Elévation’ by Baudelaire and ‘L’Azur’ by Mallarmé to sense the metaphoric power of this vaulter in Banville.3

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After Nietzsche we understandably find few European writers obsessed with ascent. Whether or not we see him as the last bearer of Romantic ide­ alism, we must note that his heirs have not even attempted his ambitious heights. In our century, transcendence yields to another Nietzschean trait: relativity. In the era that produced the Holocaust, writers could no longer believe in the ability of mankind to surpass its own present character. On the contrary, all idealism seems to have perished by 1914, the true end of the nineteenth century. Harry Levin charts this journey as moving ‘from the most heroic to the least heroic values, from the battlefield of Waterloo to the sickroom of Proust’ (Levin 1950: 82). George Bernard Shaw put it simi­ larly: ‘The first half of the nineteenth century thought itself the greatest of all centuries. The second half discovered it was the wickedest of all centuries’ (Dickens 1966: 332). In our time, the image of the acrobat continues to express the superi­ ority of the artist, who still sees himself as a daring young man on a fly­ ing trapeze. But this transcendence is undercut by irony and ambiguity, outgrowths of the relativity I have just noted. The uncertain identity of the artist still haunts our literature. In his Zuckerman trilogy, Philip Roth (1985) poses the same question that Joyce did: Who is the artist? For both the writers I treat here, the questionable nature of the artist assumes a sexual form that accords with the relative sexual liberation of their time: androgyny. Such ambivalence in their aerialists provides an apt metaphor for the mystery of the artist himself.4 The acrobats of both Cocteau and Mann hark back to a ‘classic’ common ancestor, the acrobat Miss Urania in Huysmans’ À Rebours of 1884. Des Esseintes imagines this woman as a male lover for himself: En tête du défilé des maitresses … était Miss Urania, une Américaine, au corps bien découplé, aux jambes nerveuses, aux muscles d’acier, aux bras de fonte … à mesure qu’il s’admirait sa souplesse et sa force, il voyait un artificiel changement de sexe se produire en elle; ses mièvreries de femelle s’effaçaient de plus en plus, tandis que se développaient, à leur place, les charmes agiles et puissants d’un mâle; en un mot, après avoir tout d’abord été femme, puis, aprés avoir hésité, aprés avoir avoisiné l’androgyne, elle semblait se résoudre, se préciser, devenir complétement un homme.… Des Esseintes … en vint éprouver de son côté, l’impression que lui-même se féminisait, et il envia décidément la possession de cette femme … il comformait ses rêves, en posant la série de ses propres pen­ sées sur les lévres inconscientes de la femme, en relisant ses intentions qu’il plaçait dans le sourire immuable et fixe de l’histrionne tournant sur son trapèze. (Huysmans 1970: 140–1)

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Heading the procession of mistresses … was an American girl with a supple figure, sinewy legs, muscles of steel, and arms of iron.… The more he admired her suppleness and strength, the more he thought he saw an artificial change of sex operating in her; her mincing movements and feminine affectations became less obtrusive, while she developed in their place the charms of agility and vigour in a male. In a word, having been at first a woman, then, after hesitating, being something like an androgyne, she now seemed to become decisively a man.… Des Esseintes came to think that, for his part, he was becoming feminine, and he was seized with the desire to possess this woman … he confirmed his fantasy by attributing the same inverted thoughts as his own to the unconscious mind of this woman, reading his own desires repeated in the fixed smile that hovered on the lips of the performer on her trapeze. (Huysmans 1966: 110–1) For both Cocteau and Mann, the aerialist arouses similar fantasies of sex change in the male spectator. But they both also go far beyond Huysmans in their use of this ambivalent figure as a symbol of their aesthetics. For them, the primary meaning of any circus act lies in its creating of illusion. Hence the acrobatics of either a man or a woman who appears to be of the opposite sex bears the double illusion of the spectacle itself and ambivalent sex also. And although their attitudes toward illusion differ sharply, both Cocteau and Mann see it as the basis of art.

Balance Before comparing our two texts, let us consider a painting that not only bridges the wide intellectual gap between Huysmans and Cocteau; it also introduces another determining element into the image of the androgynous acrobat. I refer to L’Acrobate sur la balle of 1905 (Figure 8.1), one of Picasso’s many works that celebrate the milieu of the saltimbanque. We note right away the contrast offered by the street show: the agile, spritelike girl beside her colleague, the massive weight-lifter. Picasso imaged the male generally as square, and the female as round (Axsom 1979: 221). The girl gives an essential image of precarious balance, precisely what any artist must achieve. That is, the saltimbanque offers an apt metaphor for the dual existence of the artist, who must entertain the same conventional society that treats him as an outsider. (Whoever doubts the survival of that ‘romantic’ prejudice should talk to any actor who has recently tried in vain to buy a chic condominium in New York City.) The professional and personal lives of the artist must exist at odds with each other, and he must balance somehow between the two. Here lies one basic metaphor involved, not only in the saltimbanques of Picasso, but also in most literature of the entertainer since Romanticism. As Politzer says, the

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Figure 8.1 Acrobate sur la Balle (Acrobat on a Ball), Artist: Pablo Picasso, 1905. Note: Oil on canvas, 147 x 95 cm, held at The Pushkin Museum, Moscow.

circus is a Zwischenreich, a realm between. Accordingly, many artists have seen in this show their own duality. Picasso sharpens the ambivalence of his acrobat by making her adolescent. Her age itself suggests the bridging of two separate realms, that of the child and that of the adult. She barely balances on the orb, just as she executes that risky dance holding both the freedom of the child and the limitation of the adult. Furthermore, she embodies that moment of ambivalent sexuality when puberty begins. Again in contrast to the unquestionably male Hercules, she seems to hover between both sexes. Her body could well be that of a boy, while her face and hairdo are femi­ nine. Reviewing this and similar canvases, Apollinaire said of such figures: The adolescent sisters, treading and balancing themselves on the great balls of the saltimbanques, impart to those spheres the movements of the planets. These girlish adolescents, children still, have the anxieties of innocence; animals teach them the religious mysteries. Some harlequins accompany the aura of the women and resemble them, neither male nor female … placed at the outer limits of life, the animals are human and the sexes indistinct. (Apollinaire 1972: 16)

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The background of this picture, that mysterious Symbolist Nowhere, also contains a distant image of motherhood that suggests the probable but hazy future of this girl. Indeed she balances between the background mother and the foreground male: a symbol of ambivalent sexuality.

Cocteau (1889–1963) This idea of the paradoxical balance of the androgynous acrobat develops further in the work of Picasso’s colleague, friend and would-be lover, Coc­ teau. His most famous androgynes appear in the films Orphée and Le Sang d’un Poète. There we see the actual transvestite who inspired the female figure of Death in Orphée, a man called Barbette. This Texan, Vander Clyde, performed a trapeze act in elaborate drag, which he finally removed in an artful strip-tease. In his essay of 1926, ‘Le Numéro Barbette’, Cocteau describes the shock of the crowd when, after five encores, Barbette shows that he has created ‘an unforgettable lie’: he removes his wig (Cocteau 1950: 262). These shows at the Cirque Médrano quickly became a sensation in the 1920s, and the literati made Barbette their darling. there assembled at the ringside a tout Paris audience such as formerly gave color to the Cigale and chic to the Diaghilev ballet. For his triumphal entry (and certainly on the first white carpet and to the first Schéhérazade music that the Médrano had ever known), he wore, besides his diapha­ nous white skirts, fifty pounds of white ostrich plumes. Before and after his chute d’ange fall, which against the blue background of the Médrano took on the mythical quality of a new Phaethon deserting the sky, his dressing room was filled with what Lone Stars would call the crème de la crème. It only remained for Barbette to call forth from a leading literary journal the comparison, ‘He is apparently like Wagner, of whom it was said, he was only himself when dressed as a woman.’ (Flanner 1972: 73) For Cocteau, one of his closest dévotées, Barbette represents just this blatant exhibit of male femininity. This artiste goes well beyond the marvel of his dangerous aerial act, admirable enough in itself. But the unique genius of Barbette lies in exploiting, even glorifying his split sexuality. So Cocteau finds in this man-woman a double alter ego. In fact, the personal tie bore special intensity in 1926. The poet had only recently recovered from two crushing events: the typhoid death of his first beloved, Raymond Radiguet, and his first cure for opium poisoning. At a time when Cocteau was pain­ fully probing his own existence, the literally spectacular homosexuality of Barbette seemed like an epiphany.5

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Beyond such personal meaning, Cocteau finds in this actor two cherished aesthetic ideals. First, Barbette attains a craftsmanlike perfection in his art; second, he transcends both the male and the female in embodying pure sex­ ual beauty: ‘il plait à ceux qui voient en lui la femme, à ceux qui devinent en lui l’homme, et à d’autres dont l’âme est émue par le sexe surnaturel de beauté’ (Cocteau 1950: 261) (he pleases those who see in him the woman, those who divine in him the man, and others whose soul is moved by the supernatural sex of beauty).6 Francis Steegmuller calls the essay of Cocteau ‘a classic in the literature of aesthetics’ (Steegmuller 1970: 368). Cocteau describes his artistic ideals through a journalistic account of the aerial act he sees. Watching Barbette prepare backstage, he marvels at the three-hour ritual involving costume and make-up. In his scrupulous attention to this process, Barbette belongs to the tradition of the great clowns or the Cambodian dancers who are sewn into their costumes each night. Cocteau compares this moment to Greek fables, where young men become trees, flowers. Calling Barbette Apollolike, he clearly heroizes the ability of the artiste to shed, like a god, his given gender. So even before the act begins, we grasp its essential meaning as transformation. Cocteau bears passionate witness to an event that literally changes the identity of the performer. Furthermore, we find here the domi­ nant theme of the essay, artifice, that keystone of Cocteau’s aesthetics that harks back to Baudelaire.7 In describing the genius of Barbette in capturing, even parodying the eternal feminine, Cocteau sums up this ideal of falseness: Car n’oubliez pas, nous sommes dans cette lumière magique du théâtre, dans cette boîte à malice où le vrai n’a plus cours, où le naturel n’a plus aucune valeur, où les petites tailles s’allongent, les hautes statures rapetissent, où des tours de cartes et de passe-passe dont le public ne soupçonne pas la difficulté, parviennent seuls à tenir le coup. Ici Bar­ bette sera la femme comme Guitry était le général russe. Il me fera com­ prendre que les grands pays et les grandes civilisations ne confiaient pas seulement par décence les rôles de femmes à des hommes. Il nous rappellera François Fratellini m’expliquant, alors que je m’épuisais à ne pouvoir rien obtenir d’un clown anglais dans le rôle du bookmaker du ‘Boeuf sur le Toit,’ qu’un anglais ne pouvait pas faire l’Anglais! … Quel recul! quels efforts! quelles leçons de métier! A les entendre … j’ai appris les secrets de la scène. (Cocteau 1950: 260) Don’t forget, we are in the magic light of the theater, in that magic box where reality no longer exists, where the natural no longer counts, where small people grow large and tall ones diminish, where card tricks and sleight of hand, their difficulties unknown to the public, are the

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only things which succeed. Here Barbette will be as much woman as Guitry was Russian general. He will make me understand that great civilizations did not entrust women’s roles to men simply because of decency. He will remind us of François Fratellini, who explained to me why I could not get an English clown to play the bookmaker in The Ox on the Roof: an Englishman cannot play an Englishman! … What detachment! What concentration! What lessons in professionalism! By listening to such people … I learned the secrets of the stage. (Crosland 1972: 223) Next comes an exemplary list of the lies of the theater, all of which express Cocteau’s essential idea of art as illusion. Like these examples, Barbette offers the basic paradox of all art, which succeeds only by rendering a plural vision of many things that often contradict each other. Art, says Cocteau, resembles the self-transforming acrobat: both are ultimately indeterminate.

Mann (1875–1955) The opposite of Barbette – namely, a female aerialist suggesting maleness – also reveals the aesthetics of Mann. In the first chapter of Book III of Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, written in 1951, Felix delights in a Parisian circus, particularly its star acrobat, Andromache. Her name artfully combines classic heroism with the word androgyne. Krull begins his rhapsodic account of her death-defying act with a physical description that highlights her ambiguous sex. Sie war von etwas mehr als mittlerer Weibesgrösse.… Ihre Brust war geringfügig, ihr Becken schmal, die Muskulatur ihrer Arme, wie sich versteht, stärker ausgebildet als sonst bei Frauen, und ihre greifenden Hände zwar nicht von männlicher Grösse, aber doch auch nicht klein genug, um die Frage ganz auszuschalten, ob sie, in Gottes Namen, denn vielleicht heimlich ein Jüngling sei. (Mann 1960, 7: 458–9) She was of more than average size for a woman.… Her breasts were meagre, her hips narrow, the muscles of her arms, naturally enough, more developed than in other women, and her amazing hands, though not as big as a man’s, were nonetheless not so small as to rule out the question whether she might not, Heaven forfend, be a boy in disguise. (Mann 1957: 157) However, upon recognizing the essentially female shape of this figure, Krull starts to muse on the precise nature of her sexuality. Perhaps the double message of this body reveals the demands of its craft. Acute physical exertion

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may preclude a normal sexual identity. Here we find that idea, characteristic of Mann, that the artist cannot partake of ordinary life. This sense that crea­ tivity alienates one from the rest of humanity forms a major tension for most of his artist figures. (It does not even exist for Cocteau, whose creative types would never dream of comparing themselves to businessmen.) zu wohl erkannte man, daß dieser strenge Körper das, was andere der Liebe geben, an seine abenteuerliche Kunstleistung verausgabte.… Ein ernster Engel der Tollkühnheit war sie mit gelösten Lippen und ges­ pannten Nüstern, eine unnahbare Amazone des Luftraumes unter dem Zeltdach, hoch über der Menge, der vor starrer Andacht die Begierde nach ihr verging. (Mann 1960, 7: 460) One recognized too well that this disciplined body lavished upon the adventurous accomplishments of her art what others devote to love.… A solemn angel of daring with parted lips and dilated nostrils, that is what she was, an unapproachable Amazon of the realms of space beyond the canvas, high above the crowd, whose lust for her was trans­ formed into awe. (Mann 1957: 158–9) Specifically, Krull wonders whether Andromache might be the lover of Mus­ tafa, the burly animal trainer. He, at least, would equal her in daring; they could be comrades in the face of death. But no, surrendering to love would dangerously weaken her. ‘Sie hätte fehlgegriffen, ich war dessen sicher, wenn sich der Kühnheitsengel zum Weibe erniedrigt hätte, und wäre schmählich­ tödlich zur Erde gestürzt’ (Mann 1960, 7: 463). (She would have slipped, I was sure, if this angel of daring had debased herself as a mere woman, she would have fallen to a shameful death [Mann 1957: 160–1].) Andromache, then, is superhuman. She reminds us of Nietzsche’s ropedancer, the would-be Übermensch, who falls only because he surrenders to the all-too-human weakness of uncertainty. This acrobat loses his balance when a jester taunts him. Nietzsche did not accidentally choose a rope-dancer to depict his morality of living dangerously. Similarly, the fatal risk flaunted by Barbette also magnetizes Cocteau, who constantly allegorizes Death. He calls the acrobat ‘a strange coachman of death’ (Cocteau 1950: 258). Krull further specifies the superhuman aura of Andromache by placing her atop his circus hierarchy. She stands closer to the angels than the beasts, those at the opposite end of the scale represented by this show. The androgyny of Andromache relates her to many similar figures in both Krull and other works of Mann. Indeed the earnest tone Krull adopts to describe her, contrasting with his usual deadpan irony, shows that Andromache raises some of the serious concerns of the author. Considering

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her ambivalent sex in its broadest meaning as duality per se, we see that she reiterates that pervasive theme of Mann, the dual identity of the art­ ist. Take only one comparable example from Tonio Kröger. In decrying his uncertainties to Lisaveta, Tonio says, ‘Ist der Künstler überhaupt ein Mann? Man frage das Weib danach! Mir scheint, wir Künstler teilen alle ein wenig das Schicksal jener präparierten päpstlichen Sänger’ (8:296). (Is the artist a man at all? Ask a woman about that! I think we artists share a bit of the fate of those castrated Papal singers) (Mann, n.d.). Note that here again Mann poses the problem in terms of gender ambivalence. Like Andromache, the castrato exemplifies the split identity of the artist as specifically sexual. We see Krull’s identification with such ambiguity throughout his life. The many costumes of his childhood suggest an early cleft between the man and his masks. What Heller calls his ‘hermetic ambivalencies’ recall the con­ stant transformations of both the patron-deity of Krull, Hermes-Aphrodite, and the element named for it, mercury (Heller 1979: 294). Felix finds the first earthly parallel for this pair in a brother and sister who mysteriously fascinate him from a hotel balcony in Frankfurt. These two look exotic – Spanish or South American perhaps. A foreign origin often marks specially significant, even fateful and symbolic figures in Mann. Think of that enig­ matic traveller (‘not a Bavarian type’) whom Aschenbach sees before leaving Munich. This foreigner prefigures, almost as portentously as Aschenbach’s dream of a rank jungle, his irresistible trip to Venice and death. As for the Frankfurt pair, Krull sees them elevated high above him, thus godlike; they anticipate the divine Andromache. Krull finds this couple just as spellbind­ ing as he does the aerialist. And again the vision of duality prompts thoughts of love. Liebesträume, Träume des Entzückens und des Vereinigungsstrebens – ich kann sie nicht anders nennen, obgleich sie keiner Einzelgestalt, sondern einem Doppelwesen glichen, einem flüchtig-innig erblickten Geschwister­ paar ungleichen Geschlechts – meines eigenen und des anderen, also des schönen. Aber die Schönheit lag hier im Doppelten, in der lieblichen Zwei­ heit … Liebesträume, die ich liebte, eben weil sie von … ursprünglicher Ungetrenntheit und Unbestimmtheit, doppelten und das heißt doch erst: ganzen Sinnes waren, das berückend Menschliche in beiderlei Geschlech­ tsgestalt selig umfassten. (Mann 1960, 7: 346, italics mine) Dreams of love, dreams of delight and a longing for union – I cannot name them otherwise, though they concerned not a single image but a double creature, a pair fleetingly but profoundly glimpsed, a brother and sister – a representative of my own sex and the other, the fair one. But the beauty here lay in the duality, the charming doubleness.… Dreams

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of love, dreams that I loved precisely because they were of … primal indivisibility and indeterminacy, which means that only then is there a significant whole blessedly embracing what is beguilingly human in both sexes. (Mann 1957: 66) This last phrase, ‘what is beguilingly human in both sexes’, recalls what Cocteau terms ‘the supernatural sex of beauty’. Moreover, the whole pas­ sage identifies another theme, closely linked to androgyny, that Cocteau also implies: incest. Mann probably adopted this motif of sibling incest from Greek and Roman mythology, which always hovers in the background of this book that ruthlessly parodies myth. As Delcourt (1958) and Busst (1967) show in detail, incest and androgyny have overlapped in ways that characterize many eras since antiquity. Indeed we may expand this thematic cluster to include narcissism. All three traits express aspects of the problem a culture has in accommodating two permanent features of human nature: oneness and duality.8 Both Cocteau and Mann treat incest repeatedly. Two of Cocteau’s major plays, both re-created as films, depend on sibling and parent–child couplings: Les Enfants Terribles and Les Parents Terribles. The lesser play La Machine Infernale gives his contemporary version of the Oedipal mother–son passion. Given Cocteau’s obsessive reworking of Greek myth, his modern versions of incest seem inevitable. Mann’s early story ‘Wälsungenblut’ (The Blood of the Walsungs) satirizes a Wagnerian sibling union supposedly inspired by the first of three brother–sister pairs in his own family. Remarkably enough, the Mann children appeared in this sequence: Erika 1905–Klaus 1906; Golo 1909–Monika 1910; Elisabeth 1918–Michael 1919.9 Krull himself exemplifies a sexuality constantly shifting between the one and the two. We get hints of the bisexual in his relations with Marquis Ven­ osta and Lord Kilmarnock. Other dual beings appear in the confusing pair of Spanish women, Zaza and Zouzou. And a final sexual deception closes the book in the hilarious exchange of Frau Kuckuck for her daughter. Such dualities ultimately express what Charles Neider calls ‘the artist’s intermedi­ ary position’ (Neider 1947: 353). This critic interprets the ambivalence in Mann more narrowly than I do: he sees here a specifically Freudian clue to identity. ‘All that Mann has written about the artist … disguises a basically sexual motif: the ambivalence between masculine and feminine traits in the artist … more expressly stated, the artist’s ambivalence between his mother and his father (Neider 1947: 353).10 In any case, we may see the many double images that fascinate Mann as a sign of his own striving for unity. Here lies perhaps the only theme seri­ ously proposed in this novel, the theory of underlying universal oneness in nature that Professor Kuckuck espouses. ‘The artist does many things, but

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universality is his need and unity his obsession. Such is the oneness ironically concealed behind the narrative disunity of the picaresque, the acquisitive and amatory episodes of the mobile rogue’ (Heilman 1965: 151). Since the eighteenth century at least, German writers have been expressing the urge toward Ganzheit, oneness. Peter Gay pursues the theme as crucial for the twentieth century in the chapter ‘The Hunger for Wholeness’ in Weimar Culture (Gay 1968).

Conclusions Perhaps the prime difference between our two texts concerns narrative voice. Cocteau writes in the first person as a critic, author and homosexual. He clearly identifies with his admired subject. Mann, however, writes in the persona of Krull as artist of illusion. Hence the involvement of the author seems deftly mediated by his narrator, who hardly resembles Mann at all. The author himself does not identify with the adored Andromache. Yet recently, since three volumes of his diaries began to appear in 1977, Mann scholars have seriously discussed his own homosexuality. Feuerlicht gives an exhaustive account of letter and diary references to the major male objects of desire for Mann, Paul Ehrenberg and Klaus Heuser. Ehrenberg, a successful painter and womanizer who attracted the unmar­ ried Mann, probably served as model for Rudi Schwerdtfeger in Doktor Faustas; the experience with Heuser dates from summer vacations on Sylt in 1927 and 1928. The diary entries force us to challenge our received image of Mann as solidly conventional. Most surprisingly, he claims more ‘nor­ mality’ in his attachments to the two men than in his long, ostensibly happy marriage (Mann 1977: 412). One wonders how to square this thought with the simplistic attack on homoerotic love in ‘Uber die Ehe’ (1925).11 This essay now reads as one of Mann’s intellectually weakest, exemplify­ ing the perils of his rigorously dialectical thinking: Deutlich wie nirgends zeigt sich … wie Tugend und Sittlichkeit Sache des Lebens sind, nichts anderes als ein kategorischer Imperativ, der Lebensbefehl – während aller Aesthetismus pessimistisch-orgiastischer Natur, dass heisst, des Todes ist. Dass alles Künstlertum dazu neigt, zum Abgrunde tendiert, ist nur allzu gewiss. (Mann 1960, X: 199) More clearly than anywhere else, we see that virtue and morality are the stuff of life, nothing other than a categorical imperative, the command to live – while all aestheticism is of a pessimistic-orgiastic nature, in short: the stuff of death. That all artistry is susceptible to such an abyss is all too certain.

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This last sentence is a virtual self-quotation from Tod in Venedig of four­ teen years earlier. Seeing love between men as only a narcissistic deathwish, Mann ignores the extraordinary talent and perceptiveness of most homosexual artists, who give society just what it needs: critique, protest, revolt. Think of his own son Klaus! In personal terms, this essay verges repulsively on self-congratulation. Comparing it with the presumably more honest diary entry of nine years later, we see Mann as confused at best, hypocritical at worst. Writing on this study, Feuerlicht confirms my suspicion that Mann too identifies, albeit subliminally, with his airborne androgyne. Moreover, this mannish woman thus subtly expresses some of the same erotic aesthetics that the complementary woman-like man, Barbette, does openly for Coc­ teau. Here lies the major link between these two pieces. Barbette blatantly manipulates the illusion of having two sexes; Andromache merely appears boyish. Yet both figures tell us something similar. They both show that the artist must dwell in fantasy; he always wears a mask. How can he better subvert and transcend his own identity than by changing sex? In becoming his own opposite, the modern artist attains Baudelaire’s great ideal of simul­ taneity, the art of being both inside and outside oneself: ‘être hors de chez soi’ (Baudelaire 1975, 2: 692). The circus offers the perfect home for the androgyne, that creature who lives between two sexes. Again, we note, the popular show represents a Zwischenreich. Firmly tied to the ordinary world in its earthy realism, the vulgar spectacle suggests yet another, exotic realm. Furthermore, the vagrant life of ‘fahrende Leute’, wanderers, connotes the ‘between-ness’ of indeter­ minacy. Krull places the angelic Andromache closer to heaven than earth, so his circus tent also has divine dimensions. Here too we see a similarity with Cocteau: his circus world forms a crucial part of the myth of redemp­ tion through art that pervades his work. In the phrase ‘the supernatural sex of beauty’ we sense his transcendent vision of the artist. One recalls the relation of Zarathustra to the rope-dancer, who falls and dies but survives spiritually in the doctrine that Zarathustra preaches. In a comparable way, the art of Barbette, surpassing his given gender, exemplifies the redemptive art that Cocteau proposes.12 For both Cocteau and Mann, such duality as that of the androgyne lies at the root of art. Cocteau says: L’art naît du coït entre l’élément mâle et l’élément femelle qui nous com­ posent tous, plus équilibrés chez l’artiste que chez les autres hommes. Il résulte d’une sorte d’inceste, d’amour de soi avec soi, de parthénogenèse. C’est ce qui rend le mariage si dangereux chez les artistes, pour lesquels il représente un pléonasme, un effort de monstre vers la norme. (Cocteau 1930: 110–1)

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Art is born of the coitus between the masculine and the feminine ele­ ment of which we are all composed, in finer balance in the artist than in others. It results from a sort of incest, a love of self for self, a partheno­ genesis. This is what makes marriage so dangerous for artists, for whom it represents a pleonasm, a monster’s attempt to approach the norm. Ultimately, however, our two authors differ sharply on the aesthetics of effect. For Krull, reception constitutes about three-fourths of the success of art. In fact, his crucial identification with all performers depends on his own effectiveness with an audience. Hence, he feels superior to the rest of the spectators. ‘Sie genossen nur, und Genuss ist ein leidender Zustand, in welchem niemand sich genügt, der sich zum Tätigen, zum Selber-Ausüben, geboren fühlt’ (Mann 1960, 7: 463–4). (‘They merely enjoyed, and enjoy­ ment is a passive condition, which does not suffice for someone who feels born for active achievement’, Mann 1957: 161.) Like Andromache and her troupe, Krull knows how to manipulate an audience; he too creates an illusion in order to gain approval. He sees himself as part of their profession, ‘part of the general vocation of producing effects, of gratifying and enchanting an audience’ (Mann 1957: 161). (‘vom Fach der Wirkung, der Menschenbeglückung und bezauberung’ [Mann 1960: 463]). Here Krull invokes just that Wirkungsästhetik that Mann deplored as the worst feature of art itself. The trickster exemplifies the amoral artist, the centre of Mann’s Platonic view of art as corrupt by nature. In Krull, of course, he adopts a gaily ironic tone toward his con-man artist, for Mann parodies the whole genre of the Bildungsroman. Specifically, Felix burlesques the idealistic hero of Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit. For Cocteau, as we have seen, the greatest art is three-quarters artifice. He considers playing the opposite sex a marvel; the Baudelairean liberation that comes from cheating nature. With his penchant for paradox, this poet believes that art must go against the grain. Fowlie claims that the aesthetics of Cocteau emerged from one crucial lesson of the two greatest masters of the twentieth century, Picasso and Stravinsky. Namely, ‘art must insult the habits of art’ (Fowlie 1966: 37). I find Cocteau’s ideals already quite devel­ oped when he met these two (Picasso in 1915, Stravinsky in 1910), but of course they exerted a potent influence. In any case, the idea of art as a constant rebellion against the world as given contradicts the aesthetics of Mann. It relates well to the attitude of Klaus Mann, who often acknowledged the influence of Cocteau as a coun­ ter-weight to his father (see note 9). For him, who condemns the Platenesque craving for beauty – read death – art borders on immorality when it rejects prevailing social norms. The conclusions of these two writers could hardly differ more: ‘Art is illusion, hence morally suspect’ versus ‘Hurray for the lies of art!’ Yet they both believe the artist must transcend convention; both show the artist’s nature as an androgynous expression of difference.

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Notes Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 1 Indeed we may see this pair as the two poles of the show itself: the adept versus the inept. Or, in larger metaphoric terms: heroic aspiration versus comic fail­ ure. The spectator enjoys a deep catharsis in watching these evocations of the two mythic extremes of the human condition. Fellini depicts just this rhythmic alternation of awe and ridicule in The Clowns, whose first part re-creates circus shows he saw as a boy. 2 The letter from Thomas Mann of 8 October 1947 expresses his lasting respect for Cocteau, whose La Machine Infernale he planned to translate (Mann 1963: 552–3). Also, for Cocteau’s generous praise of Mann, see Mann (1977), p. 441. Elsewhere Mann speaks of his work on ‘Die vertauschten Köpfe’ as an ‘erstma­ lige Annäherung an die französisch-surrealistische Sphäre (Cocteau), zu der ich mich längst hingezogen fühlte’, ‘a first approach to the French-surrealist sphere of Cocteau, which has attracted me for a long time’ (Kroll 1986: 158). 3 The admiration of many Romantics for ballet dancers depends on the same meta­ phor of superiority, in both literal and figurative senses. In their marvellous defi­ ance of gravity, dancers engage our wish for weightlessness. Athletes can do the same thing, though sports lack the aesthetic aspect of dance. The athlete, relying solely on physical mastery, still belongs to the world of technique, while the dancer uses technique only as a means to the end of interpretation or abstract design. 4 Apart from androgyny, psychoanalysts of the circus have a field day with aerialists, who suggest a wealth of erotic play (see Tarachow 1951 and Storey 1985). Even without the Freudian notion of sexual soaring, any spectator can readily fantasize the aerial act, with its entwined limbs, its ropes, wires and trapezes. What the nineteenth-century idealistic artist saw as a heroic mastery of space, of human fate itself, later became a particularly free erotic dance. Consider the sexual acrobatics of the circus artistes in Max Beckmann, or the tumbler-lovers closing Rainer Maria Rilke’s fifth Duino Elegy (1922), with their ‘Türme aus Lust’ towers of joy. 5 The title of one of Cocteau’s books, La Difficulté d’être (The Difficulty of Being) reflects the fragility of his own sense of identity. The phrase comes from the aged Fontenelle, who told his doctor he felt well, except for ‘une certaine difficulté d’être’. Cocteau added that Fontenelle felt that way only at the end, while he had the problem all his life (Fowlie 1966: 138). 6 Cocteau uses this telling phrase repeatedly in his autobiographical works. It first characterizes the touchstone appeal of his boyhood love, Dargelos, captured on film in Les Enfants Terribles (1950). 7 We find a germ for the Barbette essay in a poem Cocteau wrote in 1920, after see­ ing an illusionistic female aerialist. ‘Aerogyne!/ Elle ment avec son corps/ Mieux que l’esprit n’imagine/ Les mensonges du décor …’ (Aerogyne! The lies she tells with her body/ Thwart the mind’s attempts to see through/ The lies of the décor …) (quoted in Steegmuller 1970: 327). 8 The sense of our dual nature lies deep in the subconscious, according to Jung and other theorists. Even pop psychology now tells us that ‘normal’ people bear various amounts of the feminine and the masculine. Hence the acceptance of rebellion when traditional sex roles prove unsatisfactory. Men become feminized, women turn mannish. We will probably never escape such division, which goes back to the ancient definition of man as matter and woman as spirit. Böhme, Zinzendorf, Ballanche and Swedenborg developed powerful theologies from such notions. Probably the most familiar poetic version of the narcissist union with self appears in Novalis. And even the relatively ‘modern’ Péladan claimed in La Science de l’Amour (1911) that there is a third sex: people whose souls have a

Art and androgyny: the aerialist

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10

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different gender than their bodies (Busst 1967: 57). See also James Walter Jones (1986), The Third Sex in German Literature from the Turn of the Century to 1933, Wisconsin: dissertation. The incest theme connects Cocteau and Mann directly, since Mann wanted to translate the Oedipal La Machine Infernale for the Zürich Schauspielhaus (see note 2 above). A more intriguing link in this regard concerns the close rela­ tion between Cocteau and Mann’s son Klaus. The profound admiration that this exiled journalist felt for Cocteau went well beyond their obvious kinship in homoerotic aestheticism and the reliance on drugs. Klaus Mann adapted Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles (1929) as Geschwister (1930), stressing the incestuous bond at the centre of the novel. Klaus Mann found personal reso­ nances in the brother–sister pair of Cocteau that recall his own close tie to his androgynous sister Erika. Kroll calls Mann’s play ‘ein hohes Lied seiner Liebe zu [Erika]’ ‘a song of Solomon of his love for her’ (3, 98). Exner, specifically shunning the diaries in favour of textual examples, expands the repertoire of sexually ambivalent characters beyond the familiar homoerotic and bisexual types in Tonio Kröger, Der Tod in Venedig, Der Zauberberg, and Doktor Faustas. Joseph, for instance, he calls the prime symbol of androgynous harmony; Krull is ‘pansexual’ (Exner 1984: 274, 262). While welcoming Exner’s broadening of our thematic category. I cannot agree that Mann’s androgynous figures represent wholeness and perfection. Like Andromache, they fascinate us precisely as dual beings: both male and female. So they never achieve the integ­ rity that Mann imposed on his own public life only by suppressing his homoerotic side. Hence these androgynes appear problematic indeed. Green has written a long and intriguing book on the enacting of this myth among the English ‘dandy-aesthetes’ of this century. Such ‘Sonnenkinder’ (a term bor­ rowed from Bachofen) – Harold Acton, Brian Howard, Evelyn Waugh, Auden, the Sitwells – sought the salvation of pure style in defying the prevailing culture of industry, finance and war. Naturally, for most of Green’s examples, the escape from patriarchal evil had to be homosexual. Many ‘Sunnenkinder’ also sought redemp­ tion in Marxism or the Catholic Church, Cf. Klaus Mann, who tried Marxism in the thirties, and Cocteau, who ‘converted’ to pious Catholicism in 1925. Here again Cocteau relates well to Nietzsche, though I know of only one critic who makes this link. Crowson believes that Cocteau became just ‘the poet of life’ that Nietzsche called for in the Superman (Crowson 1978: 173). Not only does Nietzsche idealize art as the only salvation available to man: both writers also assume the irrational basis of art. Both their writing styles depend on contradiction and paradox. Moreover, they both regard dance as the supreme form of creativ­ ity. Nietzsche reacted against the dry abstractions typical of the Germanic mind, proclaiming knowledge as joyful in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Dance expresses such joy in much of his imagery, from Zarathustra to Götzendämmerung. Cocteau found in the ballet his optimal form of multifaceted creativity.

References Apollinaire, Guillaume (1972) Chronicles of Art, edited by Leroy Breunig, translated by Susan Suleiman, London: Thames and Hudson. Axsom, Richard (1979) Parade; Cubism as Theater, New York: Garland. Bachelard, Gaston (1959) L’Air et les Songes, Paris: Corti. Banville, Theodor de (1972) Oeuvres Complétes 1, Geneva: Slatkine. Baudelaire, Charles (1975) Oeuvres Poétiques, edited by Claude Pichois, Paris: Gallimard.

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Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, New York: Scho­ ken Books. Busst, A.J.L. (1967) The image of the androgyne in the nineteenth century, in Romantic Mythologies, edited by Ian Fletcher, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 1–95. Cocteau, Jean (1930) Opium, Paris: Stock. Cocteau, Jean (1950) Oeuvres Complètes IX, Lausanne: Margeurat, pp. 257–63. Crosland, Margaret (1972) Ed. and intro. Cocteau’s World, New York: Dodd Mead. Crowson, Lydia (1978) The Esthetic of Jean Cocteau, Hanover: University Presses of New England. Delcourt, Marie (1958) Hermaphrodite. Mythes et Riles de la Bisexualité dans l’Antiquité Classique, Paris: Grasset. Dickens, Charles (1966) Hard Times, New York: Norton. Exner, Richard (1984) Das berückend Menschliche oder Androgynie in der Liter­ atur, Neue Deutsche Hefte, 31(2): 254–76. Feuerlicht, Ignace (1982) Thomas Mann and Homoeroticism, Germanic Review, 57(3): 89–97. Flanner, Janet (1972) Paris was Yesterday, New York: Viking. Fowlie, Wallace (1966) Jean Cocteau, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gay, Peter (1968) The hunger for wholeness, in Weimar Culture, edited by Peter Gay, New York: Harper & Row, Chapter 4. Green, Martin (1976) Children of the Sun, New York: Basic Books. Heilman, Robert (1965) Variations on picaresque, in Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Henry Hatfield, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, p. 151. Heller, Erich (1979) Thomas Mann, The Ironic German, South Bend: Regnery. Huysmans, J.-K. (1970) À Rebours, Paris; Fasquelle. Huysmans, J.-K. (1966) Against the Grain, translated by Robert Baldick. Baltimore: Penguin. Kroll, Fredric (ed.) (1986) Klaus Mann Schriftenreihe, 3, 5, Wiesbaden: Blahak. Levin, Harry (1950) From Priam to Birotteau, Yale French Studies, 6: 75–82. Mann, Thomas (n.d.) Tonio Kröger, ebook, retrieved on 26 November 2015 from www.gutenberg.org/files/23313/23313-h/23313-h.htm. Mann, Thomas (1957) Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, translated by Denver Lindley, New York: New American Library. Mann, Thomas (1960) Gesammelte Werke, 7, 8, 10, Frankfurt: Fischer. Mann, Thomas (1963) Briefe 1937–47, Frankfurt: Fischer. Mann, Thomas (1977) Tagebücher 1933–1934, edited by Peter de Mendelssohn, Frankfurt: Fischer. Neider, Charles (1947) The artist as bourgeois, The Stature of Thomas Mann, edited by Charles Neider, New York: New Directions. Politzer, Heinz (1965) Franz Kafka der Künstler, Frankfurt: Fischer. Roth, Philip (1985) Zuckerman Bound, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Steegmuller, Francis (1970) Cocteau, A Biography, Boston: Little, Brown. Storey, Robert (1985) Pierrots on the Stage of Desire, Princeton: Princeton Univer­ sity Press. Tarachow, Sidney (1951) Circuses and clowns, Psychoanalysis and the Social Sci­ ences, edited by Geza Roheim, New York: International University Press.

Chapter 9

When the future was now Archaos within a theatre tradition Roberta Mock

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! … Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. (The Manifesto of Futurism, 1909 in Marinetti 1972)

To begin Live performance is ephemeral. If you did not see the French circus Archaos during their six-year existence, no words on this page will be able to evoke for you the essence of their work. Archaos was the circus that juggled chainsaws and generated acres of newsprint through a publicity machine that spewed out sensational stories of risk, madness and debauchery. At the heart of this mythologization were the company’s corrugated-iron and leather clad Metal Clowns who decapi­ tated one another, ignited firecrackers between their legs and engaged in despicable acts, such as apparently gang-raping a blind trapeze artist on stage. However, Archaos was always careful to balance this infernal vision with the materialization of uplift and transcendence: Jean-Paul Lefevre’s bal­ letic trick cycling, the high wire mastery of Didier Pasquette, or Raquel and Anna de Andrade’s delicate and demanding pole-balancing, high above the audience, swathed in white cotton. And Archaos also offered sex: raunchy, funny, hot, ridiculous. With his racoon-like kholed eyes, wearing a leather vest and G-string, Pascalito Vionet employed a full-sized crane as a flying trapeze, before choosing a member of the audience, pulling her back by the hair and kissing her passionately until she gasped for breath. In the course of an evening with Archaos, we participated in the nullifica­ tion of body and soul, material apparatus and the spirit of authority. We vicariously destroyed the old world through apocalyptic scenes of terror, wonder and jubilation. This act of renewal and communal revitalization was celebrated by joining Archaos in a joyous dance amidst burnt-out cars and lingering whiffs of sulfur.

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Figure 9.1a Archaos.

Source: Courtesy of Gavin Evans (photographer).

When Archaos succumbed to capitalist restrictions and over ambition (ironically the very objects of their ridicule) and went bankrupt in February 1992, they were a company at the top of the world – the biggest circus in Europe. I am convinced the company’s influence will linger far beyond their lifespan. They will continue to shape theatre, whether text-based or devised, so-called elitist art theatre, or else popular entertainment. While I believe that Archaos was theatrical and dramatic, I do not believe that they were theatre (at least in a sense we can understand within our cultural tradition) or drama. I also do not wish to imply that Archaos consciously followed a theatrical tradition in their work. Chances are, they made it up as they went along, with the unavoidable influence of twentieth century aesthetic vocabulary lurking in the background. (There is a story that Archaos impr­ essario, Pierrot Bidon, was the first person to walk out, after 10 minutes, of an Ariane Mnouchkine epic in Avignon. He said that theatre would give him ‘bad ideas’.) This chapter explores the role of circus skills and the machine in drama. My conclusion is a proposition, a manifesto if you will, for a theatre of spectacle: a plea for a combination of actuality and illusion which will revi­ talize our tired concept of legitimate theatre. This is not a new idea. In the words of the playwright Eugène Ionesco, ‘I think one discovers more than one invents, and that invention is really discovery or rediscovery’.1 I am taking what excited me about Archaos – the originality of their approach, which indeed was an expansion of the ideas of others – and am attempting

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to contextualize it through a history of European avant-garde performance that includes the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Guillaume Apol­ linaire, Antonin Artaud, Jérôme Savary and Peter Brook. I am also holding a séance, foolhardily trying to analyze a memory, in the hope of preserving in some small way the spirit of Archaos.

War/machine ‘We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness’, begins Futurism’s initial manifesto, published by Marinetti in 1909.2 It is an audacious tract, set in the context of a European avant-garde entrenched in expressionistic projections of subjective psychology and its hatred of contemporary materialistic and mechanistic society. Futurism glorified the energy and speed of the machine age, wanting to ‘hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the cir­ cle of its orbit’. Beauty was to be sought in struggle, revolt, and war – ‘the world’s only hygiene’. From 1910 onwards, the Futurists were declaiming their manifestoes, giving concerts, exhibiting visual art, reading poems, and performing their short ‘sintesi’ – often simultaneously – at provocative ‘serate’ or ‘evenings’. Marinetti, the self-proclaimed ‘caffeine of Europe’, was at the forefront. Marinetti’s Futurism was an uncompromising repudiation of grey areas, Nietzschean maxims which attacked any agency which made history out of art. He envisioned the unfolding götterdämmerung, something like the ‘twilight of the gods’ of shamanistic tradition, in which collective initiation swallowed up time by death, followed by communal renewal. The assault on the control complex had to be total to avoid the reconstitution of the entire edifice. Determined to eradicate the inefficient old world order, the attrac­ tion to a Fascism which opposed aristocratic consensus seems almost inevi­ table. Marinetti befriended Benito Mussolini as early as 1914, and praised the future dictator frequently in the daily newspaper, Roma Futurista. Mari­ netti saw Mussolini as an exuberant, overwhelming, revolutionary national­ ist who was ‘free as the wind’, and believed that war was the only method of guaranteeing a new world order. In Archaos’s last show, Metal Clown (1991), the only option left to the indigenous Brazilians (together with slaves brought from Angola) was to wage war against the conquistadors, who are represented by the title char­ acters. It was seen as a valid and, more importantly, effective option; not only do they succeed in abolishing slavery, but they overthrow the dictator borne of its demise and finally destroy all remnants of the European colonial invasion. Archaos returned to the ‘beautiful war’ of the just cause; it is no coincidence that their show BX-91, made in the same year, was subtitled ‘Beau Comme la Guerre’.

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As R.W. Flint points out, Marinetti’s idealistic fighting man (and Mari­ netti was one of them himself) contained all the ingredients of Renaissance virtù: ‘a true valor behind the clownish urbanity, a good soldier’s kind of loy­ alty, the Hemingway type of courage.’3 Marinetti was still living in the preHolocaust years of wars fought by professionals (or else willing amateurs); the myth of civilian safety was prevalent, atrocities committed upon them by invading armies considered inevitable by-products rather than legitimate tactics of war. Archaos, on the other hand, had at their disposal eighty years of documentary evidence supporting horrific consequences unimaginable in 1909, and were drawing upon an aesthetic vocabulary of post-nuclear dys­ topia which had been popular since the late 1970s, portrayed in movies like Blade Runner and Mad Max. Deyan Sudjic suggested, in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, that rioting and arson could transform the city into a work of art: The troubling thing about Armageddon is how beautiful it looks from a distance. The burning boulevards of Los Angeles, stretching mile after mile to the horizon, their rigid rectilinear grid blurred by smoke, but simultaneously incised on the retina by spreading orange flames, were clearly a vision from hell. But mingled with the dread that image pro­ voked, was also the stinging shock of the recognition of an aesthetic response to it.4 Archaos implicitly shared not only Marinetti’s libertarian justification of war, but also his position that it raises a post-Apocalyptic aesthetic con­ sciousness. However, whereas Futurism believed that it was the machine which would lead the way to a purer society in its aftermath, Archaos’s stance on technol­ ogy remained far more ambiguous. The circus presented often contradictory visions of the machine. There was the full-bodied liberation provided by the motorcycle, embodying all the Futurist tenets of courage in the face of fear and death, extended to the elaborate mechanical crane which allowed tra­ peze artists to soar above the banal Middleworld, and the inherent freedom of the travelling alternative society itself (as old as entertainment, but in the case of Archaos, facilitated greatly by automotive technology). On the other hand, Archaos’s wanton destruction of machinery, the frus­ tration and manipulation of their Metal Clowns, indicated that there is also technology which represses a population: binds it to assembly-line jobs or work behind computers, alienates communities from their natural environ­ ments or else redefines the environments, places people in moving metal boxes with mechanics too complex to understand, makes freedom a commodity. This is not something that Marinetti was able to foresee, and it explains why the Futurist machine was pure, simple and clean, while Archaos’s was

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altogether shabbier, dirtier and less reliable. In Archaos’s world, cars were arbitrarily crashed, dropped from heights, and employed as moving aquari­ ums or else as venues for sexual assault. When the Futurists suspended inanimate objects on stage with the performers, they were stylish geometric shapes; Archaos hung a burning effigy from a trapeze. What is relevant to this discussion is that Archaos offered, like the Futurists, an aesthetic revolv­ ing around the machine, not simply as a device which services a performance, but as an object central to its purpose.

Sex, sound, sensation Along with eradicating museums, libraries and academies as agents of ‘passéist’ (or conservative) stagnation, Futurism attacked Christian morality which was said to have been created to defend man’s psychological structure from the excesses of sensuality. Accordingly, such morality became redun­ dant with Futurist divinity: ‘Human energy centupled by speed will master Time and Space’.5 Speed, the synthesis of every courage in action, answers the mysteries of the meaning of the universe (i.e. one lives to live, and live fast). Speed also rechannels the energy and re-affirmation of the body which Christianity sought to repress. As such, one may be able to endure the Futur­ ist ‘scorn of women’, encoded in the first and subsequent manifestoes, with slightly more tolerance. What Marinetti rejected was ‘amore’: sentimental lechery or romantic obsession. In ‘Against Amore and Parliamentarianism’, he supported the suffragettes and wrote that women find themselves in an

Figure 9.1b Archaos.

Source: Courtesy of Gavin Evans (photographer).

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inferior societal position due to ‘intellectual and erotic slavery’. In ‘Mar­ riage and the Family’, the Futurist position is that marriage is nothing but ‘legal prostitution’. Marinetti was an advocate of ‘the fine fury of an excit­ ing, strengthening, muscular dance’, and as such, women would cease to be magnets for sentimental passion and lust, and life could remain a series of affirmative, revitalizing activities of ‘body-madness’. Archaos’s stage world was sexually complex and often dynamically con­ tradictory, embracing both ugly carnal violence and moments of intensely erotic beauty. And so, as the barely clothed acrobats Gelbrich Bierma and Peter Van Valeknhoef wrap around one another and lyrically mingle bodies in Bouinax (1990), a group of clown roadies masturbate voyeuristically. Jean-Claude Grenier, a dwarf with paraplegia, whizzes past the couple in his electric wheelchair and places an apple in the man’s mouth which the woman shares upside-down. For Adam and Eve, the snake’s gift of an apple meant a fall from grace and, like the snake, a person born with physical dis­ abilities was traditionally considered to be a portent of doom in Christianity. Grenier, however, is a symbol of liberation. He releases the couple from the repressive hell-on-earth inhabited by the debased and debasing clowns. With its jouissance, skillful body-madness (in opposition to psychology), centrality of machinery, strong atmosphere of danger, and disparagement of sentiment, Archaos’s performances seem to embrace the key tenets of Futurist performance. This is no coincidence. Many of the facets and components of variety theatre – that is, music halls, cabarets, nightclubs and circuses – were used to exemplify Futurist theatre. In 1913, a Futurist manifesto was published entitled ‘The Variety Theatre’ which exalted performance fed by swift actuality, erroneously assuming that variety theatre had no traditions. Rather, as the manifesto points out, the circus is forced to repeatedly invent new elements of astonishment in order to amuse subsequent generations of audiences, thus giving it an a-historical veneer. This indeed explains a large degree of Archaos’s success. By the 1980s, traditional circus had become stale to contemporary audiences: the tricks were old-hat, the animals unac­ ceptable in an age of environmental concern, the violence and danger less convincing than what could be seen daily on television, the sequinned glam­ our and paste-on smiles incompatible with the grime of both circus and life in general. Archaos created a circus that was ‘new’, while retaining all the masterful and death-defying ingredients of old. The Futurists assumed they re-invented a theatre without a history. What they achieved was a synthesis of traditional popular entertainment and new literary sensibility within a theatre environment: music hall and burlesque techniques mixed with anti-naturalistic symbolism on the stage. Archaos, by contrast, created popular entertainment which added drama to a circus context. It is a technique as old as modern circus itself, although the combi­ nation of ring and stage fell out of fashion by the late 1800s, probably due to the unsuitability of contemporary expectations of literary narrative and theatrical conventions to popular spectacle.

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Equestrian drama, a centrepiece of circus, was born of comedy riding acts which went beyond ‘feats presented’ to ‘scenes played’. From 1789, when ‘The Storming of the Bastille’ was re-enacted just three weeks after the event, equestrian drama informed audiences, who lacked modern recourse to mass-media, of actual events (often liberally adapted). While documen­ tary spectacle enjoyed great popularity, there came a rise in more fictional­ ized equestrian drama. William Cooke lost £40,000 in seven years during the mid-nineteenth century presenting Shakespeare and grand opera on horseback. Lord George Sanger and his brother, determined not to make the same mistakes, steered the genre towards zoological pantomimes which eventually led to a separation of spectacle and drama.6 Not surprisingly, this coincided with the rise of realistic theatre in Europe, André Antoine’s literalism in France and, later, Henrik Ibsen’s naturalism. Archaos’s performances have often been described as ‘surreal’. It is a term with many connotations, including its re-interpretation as postmodern pastiche common in contemporary advertising. To Guillaume Apollinaire – who first coined the term in 1917 by subtitling his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias ‘Drame Surréaliste’ – surrealism meant creating art more real than reality by expressing essences rather than appearances: When man wanted to imitate walking, he created the wheel, which does not resemble a leg. In the same way he has created surrealism uncon­ sciously.7 Apollinaire had been greatly influenced by Futurism; his first encounter with Futurist painters, Boccioni and Severini, was recorded in 1911 and Fernande Olivier has described volatile all-night drinking sessions with Apollinaire and Picasso in Marinetti’s hotel room that same year. Granted, Apollinaire, as self-appointed champion of Cubism, was at this stage interested in Futur­ ist philosophies of visual art and their revolutionary views on literary syntax (which he emulated in Alcools). Even then, his only unqualified praise was for the Futurists’ ‘audacity’; their Italian chauvinism he considered ‘puerile’ in relation to the chauvinism he displayed towards his adopted France. Nev­ ertheless, in 1913 Apollinaire wrote a pro-Futurist proclamation entitled ‘L’Antitradition Futuriste’ in which he made lavish gifts to them of two commodities, ‘merde’ and roses. Certainly Apollinaire’s play, Les Mamelles, owes a great deal to Marinetti and the 1915 manifesto, ‘The Futurist Syn­ thetic Theater’, in particular. ‘Synthetic’, the Futurists stated, meant ‘very brief’: To compress into a few minutes, into a few words and gestures, innu­ merable situations, sensibilities, ideas, sensations, facts, and Symbols.8

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This brevity, in keeping with their concern for speed and motion, was one of the aspects of variety theatre which had been praised in the earlier manifesto. Synthetic theatre was not only a rejection of traditional concepts ‘which – from the age of the Greeks to the present – has become ever more dogmatic, stupidly logical, meticulous, pedantic and strangulating, instead of becoming simpler’, it was an attempt to create dynamic performances of ‘lightning-like intuition’ and ‘suggestive and revealing actuality’. The manifesto exalted a theatre of simultaneous experience, one which is alogical since in life one never grasps an event entirely in all its causes and consequences. Since every­ day life bombards us with chaotic fragments of interconnected events, theatre should excite an audience, allow it to forget the monotony of life ‘by sweeping it through a labyrinth of sensations imprinted on the most exacerbated origi­ nality and combined in unpredictable ways’. What is implied is that, above all, an audience should be aware of the fact that it is in a theatre, subjected to – and a participant in – extraordinary experiences. Marinetti proposed that itching powder should be placed upon the seats of the spectators; an entire performance was to consist of an audience, sitting in the dark, provoked into yelling for light (the lights would then rise and the curtain immediately fall). Archaos productions might be best understood as a series of ‘sintesi’, providing us with outrageous snapshots of the world of which we are a part. Like the Futurists, they attempted to break through the classifications which insist that theatre is an interpretative art while circus a demonstrative craft, creating performance that was both spectacle of illusion and spec­ tacle of actuality. The stilt-walker becomes a pimp in a pink mac, who is also a South American dictator. The juggler’s balls are not just props; they are the castrated pimp’s testicles. The circus ring becomes a rhythmic street where flowers, drinks and prostitutes are sold, clothes and cars are washed. The clowns are conquistadors, outlaws, roadies, rapists, variously ‘us’ and ‘them’. Brazilian acrobats are slaves who become a human machine to destroy their oppressors. Aerial dancers are angels of death. Cavalcades of cars are traffic jams teeming with activity. This is surely Futurist synthesis, ‘simultaneità’, extralogical ambiences that interpenetrate with many differ­ ent times put into action simultaneously. It is also directly in keeping with André Breton’s codified Surrealism, based upon the omnipotence of dream and disinterested play of thought ‘in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern’.9 It is possible to plot a lineage of artistic influence from Marinetti to Apol­ linaire to Breton to Antonin Artaud, and the affinity between Artaud’s theo­ ries and Futurist polemic (in effect, if not intention) is obvious. In 1938, a dozen years after he was banished from surrealist circles, ostensibly for wanting to produce plays on a professional stage, Artaud published what was to become a blueprint for later avant-garde theatre-makers. In Le Théâ­ tre et Son Double, he called for ‘synthetic expressions of cerebral energy’ with a complete rejection of realism and a call for new theatrical language:

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For theatre can only happen the moment the inconceivable really begins, where poetry taking place on stage, nourishes and superheats created symbols.10 Artaud’s concept of a ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ is a desire to confront an audience with its own inner struggles, thereby creating a poetical, magically liberating theatre. Like Archaos, the world Artaud evokes is violent and iniquitous. In ‘Theatre and the Plague’, he isolates the dark mood of all fables to the ‘origi­ nal division of sexes and slaughter of essences that come with creation’: Theatre, like the plague, is made in the image of this slaughter, this essential division. It unravels conflicts, liberates powers, releases poten­ tial and if these and the powers are dark, this is not the fault of the plague or theatre, but life.11 Once again, we find an artist prepared, in theory at least, to resort to vio­ lence. In ‘Production and Metaphysics’, Artaud claimed that if it was thea­ tre’s role to be concerned with destroying the state of society, it was ‘even more a matter for machine-guns’. Just as Futurist synthetic theatre was ‘a specialized reality which violently assaults the nerves’, Artaud proposed: a theatre where violent physical images pulverise, mesmerise the audi­ ence’s sensibilities, caught in the drama as if in a vortex of higher forces.12 Archaos was a planned total attack on the senses. Even so, many critics seemed to have missed the point that sensory assault was not a vehicle for a message, but the message itself: It is not theatre, but a spectacle of contradictions,… It seems to include everything yet comes to nothing. (Fraser, The Scotsman, 1989) The Archaos onslaught stuns by being so totally pointless yet totally absorbing. (Fraser, The Scotsman, 1991) The effect produced by Archaos was due to a disorienting combination of sensory bombardment and the annihilation of distance between audience and performance. And so we deliciously tolerated having mackerel heads spat at us by a bleach-blond girl in flippers, or getting splashed when the rotund, hairy Archaos chef, Jean-Pierre Venet disrobed and showered in close proximity. We accepted the strait-jacketed fugitive pursued through the bleachers by a chainsaw-wielding lover before being hauled into a wire cage. And we allowed a young woman in a leopard-skin leotard to be

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plucked from our midst and decapitated, her twitching head pressed to a skinhead’s groin. When another critic asserted that ‘Order, in fact, comes out of Archaos’, he was referring to fact that the company’s apparently wild anarchy and recklessness belied the professional discipline which such a performance requires. Sound was an integral element of the bombardment for both the Futurists and Artaud. The role of codified language has been depreciated first because no words can accurately express the deepest of human experiences and, sec­ ond, because words, which should be expressions of thought, often mimic thought processes void of life. ‘The myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word’, wrote Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy on the theatrical power of concrete action: ‘The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than that which the poet himself is able to put into words and concepts’.13 For Archaos, the use of spoken language would have been superfluous to their needs, reducing the French company’s international appeal through inaccessibility. In his 1913 manifesto, ‘The Art of Noise’, the Futurist Luigi Russolo (1971) advocated sound and music with the passionate energy to course through the nervous system, using a barrage of musical machinery, just like the ‘house bands’ – The Last Band on Earth, The Chihuahuas and The Thun­ der Dogs – that drove Archaos performances with their high-powered rock. Archaos also produced an alarming cacophony of mechanical noise – often sounds which, if heard within a domestic context, would provoke reactions no more significant than momentary recognition – and fully employed the six ‘families of noises’ suggested by Russolo for his Futurist orchestra: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Roars, Thunders, Explosions, Bursts, Crashes, Booms; Whistles, Hisses, Puffs; Whispers, Murmurs, Grumbles, Buzzes, Bubblings; Screeches, Creaks, Rustles, Hums, Crackles, Rubs; Percussion noises using: metal, wood, skin, rock, terracotta, etc.; Voices of animals and humans: shouts, shrieks, moans, yells, howls, laughs, groans, sobs.14

Within an enclosed environment, the sounds of engines revving, chainsaws growling, cars backfiring, and fireworks exploding take on an awesome emotive power.

Circus in theatre Although circus theoretically found a home in anti-naturalistic theatre that welcomed sensory and physical symbolism, very little was actually incorporated in practice. Variety theatre-style burlesque played a part in the comic opera of Gilbert and Sullivan and, indeed, vaudeville and music

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hall eventually found a position in the ‘legitimate’ theatre of Apollinaire and, later, so-called Absurdists like Ionesco and Samuel Beckett. Even the Futurists, for all their exaltation of ‘jugglers, ballerinas, gymnasts, colorful riding masters, spiral cyclones of dancers spinning on the points of their feet,’15 didn’t manage to actually include them in performance (although their use of stunt pilots and parachutists probably embodies the spirit of circus spectacular to as great an extent). Of all the pre-World War I theatre practitioners, it is probably Jean Coc­ teau who experimented most extensively with circus skills. His first devised movement piece, Parade, was performed by the Diaghilev Ballet Russe in 1917 (which had also produced the Futurist Giacoma Balla’s Feu d’artifice the previous year). In 1920, Cocteau delved further into circus with Le Boeuf sur le Toit, performed by the three Fratellinis, and his Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel of the following year was a ‘mimeplay’ and ballet accompanied by actors dressed as giant phonographs. What separates Cocteau from the Futur­ ists, however, is his emphasis on the gentle, the non-aggressive ‘frivolity’ of his subject matter. Ionesco said of Cocteau’s playfulness and ‘confetti’: Nothing expresses better than these itinerant and precarious festivities the precariousness of life, the fragility of beauty, evanescence.16 Circus had become a metaphor for childhood, for purity, for by-gone days, rather than a provocative instrument of physical renewal. Closest in spirit to Archaos’s full-bodied spectacle was Le Grand Magic Circus, founded by Jérôme Savery in 1966, although Savary’s ‘life shows’ tended to be embued with rather more peace and love flower-power opti­ mism (as was the wont in the late 1960s) than Archaos’s post-Apocalyp­ tic cityscapes. Archaos’s circus history of Brazil is reminiscent of Savary’s Zartan which, featuring Tarzan’s ‘deprived brother’, traced the ‘marvellous story of colonialism from the Middle Ages to the present’.17 The produc­ tion included fireworks and smoke to provide a permanent atmosphere of war and battle, interspersed with ‘touching little love scenes’, improvisation, acrobatics, and extensive exchanges between the audience and performers. Just as Archaos refused to avoid the unpleasant in portraying decapitation, castration and rape, neither did Savary shy away from the grotesque: in The Raft of the Medusa, the audience (which Savary described as ‘active in pas­ sivity’ in relation to Zartan) watched the water-based action through a net which gradually filled up with bloodied corpses until the spectator’s vision was almost entirely blocked. Savary was determined to create theatre in which the audience played a central role: ‘We don’t play for the people, we play with them.’18 The greatest difference between Archaos and Le Grand Magic Circus is Archaos’s centrality of the mechanical object in performance. One needs only compare Savary’s list of materials required to produce Zartan – which

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included such items as false vampire teeth, cardboard palm trees and, at his most extravagant, ropes and pulleys, a grand piano and a sound system – to Archaos’s litany of automobiles and ex-military cranes (a press release stated that the company would shatter 70 televisions, wreck 14 cars and smash 7 shopping trollies every week during their five month Bouinax tour in 1990). Savary’s work also differed from Archaos in that he attempted to work with text, entering more traditional theatrical realms. His 1966 produc­ tion of Fernando Arrabal’s Le Labyrinthe, however, actually abandoned the script and dropped Fernando Arrabal’s name from the programme when it evolved into a ‘Dionysian festival’ which differed from performance to performance. (This production is notable for featuring a flautist suspended upside down above the audience. Archaos repeated the trick with a clari­ netist.) It was his production of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme in 1981, making full use of acrobats, belly dancers, jugglers and rock music, which best demonstrated the potential of circus skills in text-based thea­ tre. According to David Bradby, the production demonstrated ‘the triumph of low culture over high culture in a vigorous affirmation of the popular sources of both Molière’s and Savary’s art’.19 Peter Brook’s 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Mid­ summer Night’s Dream is probably theatre’s most famous collision with circus. But despite Brook’s huge acknowledgement to Artaud, culminating in his 1963 ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ season at the LAMDA Theatre with Charles Marowitz, his Dream Circus probably owed more to Cocteau than Artaud’s vision of angry assault. His lovers were pony-riders and jugglers; his fair­ ies trapeze artistes; his rustics, clowns. There was plate-spinning and stiltwalking, confetti and dazzle. The circus elements have been described as ‘charming’, ‘innocent’ and ‘adorable’.20 Although the production became more ‘adult’ and ‘sexual’ in its second part, this was accompanied by the disintegration of the circus atmosphere, ‘the shock of reality’. So Brook never used circus, like Archaos or Savary, as a physical manifestation of life’s complexity; it had been reduced to a childhood myth. Furthermore, Brook absorbed this circus myth as a metaphor for the dream; the skills themselves, while used symbolically, were essentially sold as part of the circus package. In the end, Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream served to reinforce the sepa­ ration of circus and theatre, circus being a foreign commodity imported for flavour. While the Futurists may have wanted their performance clean, they certainly didn’t want it safe. Archaos rejected both.

A spectacle of actuality and illusion Archaos transformed my notions of theatre: what theatre could be, what it should be and what it is. As a critic at the Edinburgh Festival in 1989, I must have seen thirty shows in the week before wandering unsuspectingly into

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The Last Show on Earth and at least that many in the week which followed. It was not simply the highlight of the festival for me. No performance has affected me to such a degree before or since. What I discovered was tremen­ dous skill, humour, eroticism, unbridled joy, and an uncanny portrayal of the world in which I live. My world – our world – is chaotic, illogical, dangerous, passionate, and full of possibilities. I had relished the theatre since childhood. And yet, dur­ ing one evening I realized that I was being sold a product which in no way reached its potential. The theatre I had previously seen was devoid of the insecure process of its creation. For theatre-makers, it remained unpredict­ able, risky, an activity teeming with fraught excitement and tight deadlines. As an audience, we received a semblance of order, an evening out as warm and safe as a neatly ribboned gift. The theatre disguised its unruliness and had begun to pall in comparison to the exuberance of the world at large. Anxiety was only created in the potential for an actor to forget a line, for a flat to collapse, for an ASM to be accidentally caught in the light – and these proofs of fallibility never cease to charm me. Archaos frightened me in a way theatre never had, in a way film never had. I have locked my doors and huddled under a blanket while watching a horror movie but, in the end, it is simply a strip of celluloid and I felt no physical danger. Theatre has the advantage of living in actual time; the per­ formers share our space. I want to be confronted – by myself, by the world. I want to be challenged. I want to feel like I’m walking down a dark alley at midnight, nearly positive that I’m safe, nearly positive that the unexpected lurks behind every rubbish bin.

Figure 9.1c Archaos.

Source: Courtesy of Gavin Evans (photographer).

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We need a forum for our fears and dreams. They need to be realized, released so we may liberate ourselves. We do not dream of people sitting in a room, talking (however passionately), drinking tea. Our dreams and nightmares are not ordered because the world which surrounds us is not. If this chaos terrifies us, it also reassures us since, if everything fits together like a painstakingly assembled jigsaw, if everybody fulfilled prescribed functions, there would be no scope for possibilities – for change, for dreams. We need symbols, myths. We need the outlandish, the mundane. We need to laugh at what we can’t find in the streets, and at what we daren’t laugh at when we find it in the streets. We need to be frightened by what we don’t want to find. We need to be frightened by what we are embarrassed to be seen to be frightened of. This is what theatre is for. It is ironic that the smaller the world has become, the more alienated we have become. We did not feel alienated by our small plots of land, our families, our neighbourhoods. Television has brought the far-flung recesses of the world into our homes; the problems of these once-fairy-tale lands have become our problems. Aeroplanes allow us to visit these lands but they suspend us unnaturally in space. Our cars have provided us with convenient access to beach and mountain. But we are now in a position where we need the cars more than we want them. Simple, necessary acts like collecting food have become impossible without an automobile. For every dream, a night­ mare. For every freedom, a restriction. The machine is central to our lives. The theatre has a duty to reflect this. The theatre must reflect this if it wishes to fulfil our needs, if it wants to play a role in our society. When the theatre loses touch with our realities, when it lives in a self-referential historical vacuum, we will dispense with it alto­ gether. The machine has revolutionized our stages, only to be hidden from the public if it can’t be seen to be actively participating in the production’s technology (and, usually, not even then). We may see the working of light­ ing equipment, but not the working of a lawn mower. The machine in the theatre has become like toilet paper or a condom, necessary but shamefully concealed, so we can preserve the myth of the world without the machine. A ‘real’ world consisting only of human beings. Liberation from the machine, liberation because of the machine, fear of the machine, fear of dependence – these are our dreams and nightmares. Our theatre must feature microwaves, motorcycles and mulchers. It must portray burning buildings and bedrooms. Tenderness and animosity. Mak­ ing love and making war. Then it will speak to us. It can speak to us through movement, music, noise, silence, and words. Yes, words! They are part of our world. Although actions may speak louder, we must not discard what has serviced us so well, what continues to service and, more so, enlighten, provoke, and delight. The theatre must use every tool at its disposal, every­ thing that is meaningful, everything that speaks to our dreams and night­ mares. Archaos have pointed us in the right direction. We need to create a spectacle of actuality and illusion.

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Notes 1 Eugène Ionesco (1989), cited in James Roose-Evans, Experimental Theatre: From Stanislavsky to Peter Book (London: Routledge), p. 74. 2 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1972), ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ in Marinetti: Selected Writings translated by R.W. Flint (London: Secker & Warburg), p. 41. 3 R.W. Flint (1972), Marinetti: Selected Writings, p. 8. 4 Deyan Sudjic (1992), ‘Seductive image of burning boulevards’ in The Guardian, 8 May. 5 Marinetti, ‘The New Religion-Morality of Speed’ in Flint (1972), Marinetti: Selected Writings, p. 95. 6 For a more detailed discussion of equestrian drama, see Coxe (1980b), ‘Equestrian Drama and the Circus’ in Bradby, James, Sharrat, Performance and politics in popular drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980b). 7 Guillaume Apollinaire (1966), Preface to ‘The Breasts of Tiresias’ in Benedikt and Wellwarth, Modern French Theatre (New York: E.P. Dutton), p. 56. 8 Marinetti, ‘The Futurist Synthetic Theatre’ in Flint (1972), Marinetti: Selected Writings, p. 124. 9 André Breton (1972), Manifestoes of Surrealism translated by Seaver and Lane (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press), p. 26. 10 Antonin Artaud (1970), The Theatre and Its Double translated by Victor Corti (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), p. 18. 11 Artaud (1970), p. 21. 12 Artaud (1970), p. 63. 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in Martin Esslin (1980), The Theatre of the Absurd (Middlesex: Penguin Books), p. 329. 14 Luigi Russolo (1971), ‘The Art of Noise’ in Michael Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: E.P. Dutton), pp. 171–2. 15 Marinetti (1913) ‘The Variety Theater,’ The Mask: A Quarterly Journal of the Art of the Theatre, 6(3) (Jan. 1914): 188–93. 16 Eugène Ionesco, quoted in Esslin (1957), Theatre of the Absurd, p. 387. 17 Jérôme Savary (1970), ‘Zartan’, The Drama Review, 15(1) (Fall): 89. 18 Savary, quoted in Whitton (1987), Stage Directors in Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 187. 19 David Bradby, quoted in Whitton (1987), Stage Directors in Modern France, p. 189. 20 Donald Richie (1971), ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ The Drama Review, 15(3) (Spring): 331–2.

Bibliography Archaos production chronology (Themes of productions supplied by Archaos in their Metal Clown pro­ gramme.) 1986 1987

LE CIRQUE DE CARACTERE Poesie du Voyage (The Poetry of the Travellers) LE CHAPITEAU DE CORDES 1 La Solitude (Loneliness)

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1988 1989 1990

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LE CHAPITEAU DE CORDES 2 La Violence (Violence) THE LAST SHOW ON EARTH Amour et Tendresse (Love and Tenderness) The formation of a second circus Archaos 1: THE LAST SHOW ON EARTH Archaos 2: BOUINAX Archaos 1: BX-91 Archaos 2: METAL CLOWN Le Shoc de Culture (Culture Clash)

Documenting Archaos Please note that this list is by no means exhaustive. As the Metal Clown programme points out, undoubtedly with some exaggeration, ‘The com­ pany’s previous visits to the UK have generated a total of two acres of news coverage.’ Archaos: Cirque de Caractere. Programme for ‘Metal Clown’ and ‘BX-91’, 1991. Archaos: Cirque Revolutionnaire. Photographs by Gavin Evans (Edinburgh: PE Press, no date). ‘Biking Warriors’, N.M.E., 23 June 1990. Coles, Joanna. ‘World’s biggest circus folds up its tent after descent into chaos’, The Guardian, February 1992. De Suinn, Colin. The Theatre, August 1991. Evening Post, 22 June 1990. Evening Times (Glasgow), 23 July 1990. The Face, July 1990. Glasgow Herald, 3 July and 21 July 1990. The Guardian, 30 June and 23 July 1990. Hay, Malcolm. ‘Brazil Nuts’, Time Out, 30 October 1991. Irish Times, 18 July 1990. Lezard, Nick. ‘The heart of the tin men’, The Independent, 1 November 1991. McClellan, Jim. The Face, November 1991. Nadin, Joanna. Unpublished dissertation (University of Hull, 1991). Observer Scotland, 25 July 1990. The Scotsman, 21 July 1990. Vidal, John. ‘Archaos Theory’, The Guardian, 31 October 1991. Vidal, John. Tape recorded interview with Archaos in ‘Guardian Talks’, 26 August 1990 (Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh).

When the future was now: Archaos

Review of ‘The Last Show on Earth’: Fraser, Douglas. The Scotsman, 18 August 1989.

Reviews of ‘Bouinax’: Billington, Michael. The Guardian, 14 August 1990.

Eyres, Harry. The Times, 16 August 1990.

Fraser, Douglas. The Scotsman, 13 August 1990.

Morris, Jessica. Review ’90, August 1990.

Spencer, Charles. The Daily Telegraph, 25 August 1990.

Tinker, Jack. The Daily Mail, 17 August 1990.

Reviews of ‘BX 91: Beau Comme La Guerre’: Coles, Joanna. The Guardian, 21 August 1991.

Fraser, Douglas. The Scotsman, 17 August 1991.

Morrison, Alan. The List, 16 August 1991.

Spencer, Charles. The Daily Telegraph, 30 August 1991.

Reviews of ‘Metal Clown’: Bayley, Clare. What’s On, 13 November 1991.

Carroll, Oda. Dublin Event Guide, 15 October 1991.

Christopher, James. Time Out, 20 November 1991.

Dolan, Siobhan. The Independent, 8 November 1991.

Eyres, Harry. The Times, 7 November 1991.

Spencer, Charles. The Daily Telegraph, 8 November 1991.

Stanfield, Keith. City Limits, 14 November 1991.

On television: Archaos: A Circus Spectacular, Channel 4, December 1991. Edinburgh Nights, BBC2, August 1990.

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Gender and sexuality

Chapter 10

Respectable female nudity Janet M. Davis

In 1896 the New Woman came to the circus. That year, Barnum & Bailey’s program contained “Three Graceful, Original and Interesting Equestrian Novelties,” which playfully suggested that the “New Woman” might create a new social order dominated by women: The New Woman supreme in the arena for the first time anywhere. Novel and picturesque exhibition of the assertion of the rights of the twentieth-century girl … in the circus. A positive usurpation of the ring in which man has no part. Progressive maidens fascinatingly conducting an entire equestrian act in up to date costumes.1 During this act and other “New Woman numbers,” women, clad in “becom­ ing” bloomers, “of the most trim fitting, advanced new woman dress reform pattern,” played all roles in the arena: ringmaster, groom and object holder. Press releases announced that “no man is allowed to occupy that sacred ground of territory.”2 In the collapsible canvas world of the circus, these “New Women” seem­ ingly erased corporeal boundaries between the sexes. Women performers proudly displayed rippling bodies while demonstrating impressive feats of strength and handling dangerous animals. In 1911 Barnum & Bailey pro­ vided detailed muscle measurements of a German weightlifter, Katie Sand­ wina, and declared: “She tosses husband about like Biscuit. Frau Sandwina is Giantess in Strength.”3 At the circus, some women wore full, flowing beards. The lady giantess towered over the curious crowds at the sideshow. African, Asian, Latin American, and Australian women at the “ethnologi­ cal congress” easily defeated men in athletic contests. Moreover, the circus was a comfortable space for women who felt alienated by social norms. Mabel Stark, a tough big-cat trainer whose body was, in the words of one colleague, “a network of scars” from frequent cat bites, knew as a teenager that she did not share her female classmates’ predilections for dating and socializing.4 After seeing a circus as a child in Princeton, Kentucky, Stark

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knew that she would eventually join a traveling show. Thereafter, she spent her spare time at the zoo watching the animals; while working as a nurse as a young adult, Stark “ran away” to California, met the showman Al Sands, and in 1913 joined the Al G. Barnes circus.5 In an era when a majority of women’s roles were still circumscribed by Victorian ideals of domestic­ ity and feminine propriety, circus women’s performances celebrated female power, thereby representing a startling alternative to contemporary social norms. These “New Women” were also nearly nude (Figure 10.1). Thousands of lithographs saturated the site of each future show, portraying barely dressed women in a range of bodily attitudes: on the trapeze, with snakes, lions, horses, or clowns, or en masse as members of a giant chorus. In perform­ ance, lithe, scantily clad acrobats and bareback riders freely twisted and contorted their bodies. Wearing a short skirt and nearly sleeveless top, the “Lady Hercules” lifted prodigious weights. Spangled female animal trainers wrestled “man-eating” tigers, while spray-painted, virtually naked women posed topless, nearly bottomless, and motionless as nymphs, Venuses or maidens in the “Act Beautiful” or statue act, a turn-of-the-century variant on the antebellum tableaux vivants, or living pictures genre. But showmen were keenly aware of circus women’s transgressive poten­ tial. As a result, they repositioned these strong, athletic, traveling women into traditional gender categories: as models of domestic womanliness, and as objects of titillation. In their elaborate advertising campaigns,

Figure 10.1 Living statues, c.1903.

Source: Courtesy of the Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Archives.

Notes: Photographer: Frederick Whitman Glasier, 1866–1950. Black and white photograph,

copy from glass plate negative, 8 x 10 inches, Negative Number 639.

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proprietors used gender, race, class, and representations of empire to create an irresistible sexual striptease under the guise of “clean” family entertainment. Arguing that there is no such thing as generic nudity, this chapter examines how nudity in some contexts was “respectable” and in other contexts salacious—the distinction was often created by racial stere­ otypes. Nudity itself is a historical construction and will be considered here in the context of dress standards at the turn of the century. Because American women generally wore full skirts and long-sleeved shirtwaists at this time, virtually anything short of that coverage could be construed as “nude,” including the wearing of leotards, tights, or short-sleeved dresses above the knee. Proprietors presented white women as quintessential models of civilized, athletic womanliness, while they exhibited women of color (or Euro-Ameri­ can women in racial disguise) as live, educational artifacts, whose nudity was an integral part of their racial “authenticity.” Although this chapter focuses on the representational strategies of circuses owned by Euro-Americans, one should not assume that only white circus folk were concerned about respect­ ability during the Progressive Era. People of color in the amusement industry were equally attuned to the tensions between propriety and sexual display. For example, a poster for the African-American blues singer Ma Rainey and the “Smart Set” promised “The Greatest Colored Show on Earth … The Biggest Bevy of Singing and Dancing Girls You Have Ever Seen … Eve­ rything Clean, Moral and Refined.”6 In all cases, however, these claims of propriety were made with a wink. Showmen’s constant emphasis on female performers’ lives, loves, and body-hugging tights became yet another way to talk about sex.7

The historical context Impresarios’ focus on circus women’s propriety at the turn of the century was particularly striking because they had downplayed the presence of female players just fifty years earlier. In antebellum America, reformers’ responses to female circus players—indeed, to the circus as a whole—was unfavorable. In Chillicothe, Ohio, and Rochester, New York, as well as other communities, the Presbyterian and Methodist clergy condemned the circus’s celebration of the body, its connection to the theater, and its omnipresent shell games. Dating back to the colonial period, antitheater laws were often rooted in Enlightenment thought. William Penn, among other colonial figures, argued that the cosmos was fixed and that external appearances revealed eternal truths. According to the media scholar Robert Allen, the theater’s emphasis on mimicry, spectacle, and inversions of gender and class sharply confounded the rationalistic idea that the world was what it seemed.8 Critics also charged that neither circus workers nor the class of peo­ ple whom the circus attracted engaged in productive labor. The editor of

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a religious periodical in Lexington, Kentucky, lambasted Joshuah Purdy Brown’s circus in 1831 because it encouraged “idleness, intemperate drink­ ing, profanity, a taste for low company [and] boisterous vulgarity.”9 Con­ necticut, home to P.T. Barnum, outlawed the circus altogether until 1840. The state legislature forbade any unusual feats of the body for monetary gain. Circuses continued to travel to Connecticut, but they could not adver­ tise in newspapers for fear of arrest.10 During the Second Great Awakening in Rochester, New York, town clergymen in this part of the “Burned-Over District” led the movement to close a permanent circus building and turned it into a soap factory.11 From 1824 until the early twentieth century, the Vermont legislature virtually taxed the circus out of the state instead of banning it outright.12 P.T. Barnum himself explained why the antebellum circus deserved to be censured: In those days the circus was very justly the object of the Church’s animad­ versions. [I]n afterpiece, “The Tailor of Tamworth” or “Pete Jenkins,” … drunken characters were represented and broad jokes, suited to the groundlings, were given. Its fun consisted of the clown’s vulgar jests, emphasized with still more vulgar and suggestive gestures, lest provi­ dentially the point might be lost. Educational features the circus of that day had none. Its employees were mostly of the rowdy element, and it had a following of card-sharpers, pickpockets and swindlers generally, who were countenanced by some of the circus proprietors, with whom they shared their ill-gotten gains. Its advent was dreaded by all law abiding people, who knew that with it would inevitably cause disorder, drunkenness and riot.13 Antebellum circus audience members targeted circus women as disreputa­ ble. Most objections centered on costuming. Although tights and leotards were not worn until after the Civil War, antebellum players wore stockings under knee-length skirts—a far cry from the proper, heavily corseted, longsleeved, floor-length dress of the period.14 One woman recalled that as a child in 1857, her grandmother forbade her to go to a circus: [Grandmother] said it was all right to look at the creatures God had made, but she did not think He ever intended that women should go only half dressed and stand up and ride on horses bare back, or jump through hoops, in the air.15 Purity reformers and audiences both frequently thought that all female entertainers were prostitutes because they exposed their bodies for pay. Even women audience members were often treated with suspicion. Dur­ ing the first half of the nineteenth century, American theater managers

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commonly reserved the third tier of seats, or upper gallery, for prostitutes and their customers as a site of sexual exchange.16 Because they were often banned by law for their bodily spectacles, circuses deemphasized their women players; some even excluded women altogether. In 1840 an advertisement for the Raymond, Waring and Company circus guaranteed that its production in Philadelphia would contain no women: [T]he introduction of Females into an Equestrian Establishment is not calculated to advance [the Chestnut Street Amphitheatre’s] interests, while they not unfrequently mar the harmony of the entertainments, and bring the whole exhibition into disrepute. It never was ordained by Nature that woman should degrade the representatives of her sex which are not calculated for any other than the stalwart male.17 The circus was hardly the only nineteenth-century entertainment to censure the display of seminude women. Robert Allen has written that burlesque was a battleground where nineteenth-century Americans fought over shifting attitudes about gender and class. When the English actress Lydia Thompson and her burlesque troupe of “British Blondes” arrived in New York City in 1868, thousands of New Yorkers thronged to Wood’s Theater in lower Manhattan, where the thinly clad actresses performed male roles and ver­ bally poked fun at social norms. Local authorities tolerated the troupe only at this working-class venue; when the popular “British Blondes” moved to a reputable theater, Niblo’s Garden, the press, local government officials, and reformers condemned the troupe. Unlike contemporary ballet, in which seminude women played silent, otherworldly nymphs and fairies, or melo­ drama, in which actresses typically played pious, sexless roles, in burlesque the performer talked and leered openly at her audience. Consequently, theat­ ers catering to decent male and female audiences banned burlesque, which rapidly moved to the male world of the concert hall and increasingly was characterized by acts of mute bodily exhibition.18 In distinct contrast to burlesque’s downward historical trajectory, the cir­ cus became more reputable over time. Circus proprietors increasingly used women to sell their productions as decent. Posters portrayed well-attired white women and families as part of the turn-of-the-century audience.19 Impresarios adopted this sales strategy, in part because they knew that their patrons had changed. In antebellum America, men constituted the great majority of the circus audience. The virtual absence of women at the circus mirrored larger limitations on women’s presence in public life. The prevail­ ing ideology of separate spheres—whereby women’s sanctioned role was in the home while men engaged in paid labor in the public world—helps explain why few women frequented antebellum circuses and why circus women were commonly censured. Although poor women participated in the

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paid labor market throughout their lives, bourgeois women became increas­ ingly privatized, owing largely to changes in the American economy. Before the nineteenth century, the American labor market was characterized by a patriarchal system of household and shop production in which male family members worked as artisans or farmers; the home and the workplace were the same. By the mid-nineteenth century, paid work occurred away from the home because the market economy and its attendant systems of factory and wage labor had generally proletarianized the artisan and small farmer. As a result, the distinctions between public and private life became more sharply drawn.20 Many women were publicly active in church-based vol­ untary associations connected to abolitionism, temperance, marital prop­ erty reform, and women’s suffrage, but their activism was predicated upon their maternal authority. Novels and new women’s magazines like Godey’s Lady’s Book (1836–98) stressed the primacy of women’s domestic role as the moral guardian of the home. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Victorian distinctions between public and private spheres were crumbling. As part of this sea change, a growing number of families attended the circus, and female acts became increasingly visible and socially acceptable.21 Circus women’s heightened presence occurred just as more women were participating in paid labor and public activism. At mid-century, the majority of female paid laborers had worked in the private, familial setting of domestic service; its decline in the second half of the nineteenth century paralleled the ascendancy of factory production.22 Concurrently, with the growth of corporations and service industries during the Gilded Age, young and single native-born women worked as office clerks (especially after the advent of the typewriter in 1873) and in retail sales at sprawling new department stores. Although many young women gave their parents a share of their earnings, they also had some dis­ posable income and congregated at a variety of public amusements. Kathy Peiss argues that the rise of urban factory labor with distinct hours helped create a heterosocial leisure culture in which young, unmarried workingclass men and women shared their nonworking hours together.23 But the specter of young women “loose” in the streets was unsettling to some. Jane Addams, a founder of Hull House, noted, “Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon city streets and to work under alien roofs.”24 From 1889 onward, new settlement houses and clubs served as spaces where young working women could engage in “uplifting” cultural activities that would distract them from the “tantalizing” world of popular amusements out in the streets. Women also became increasingly visible in public life by participating in a raft of Progressive reform movements. Women activists across the country worked to ameliorate poverty, social unrest, and racism through diverse

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organizations such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1874) and the National Association of Colored Women (1896). Like members of ante­ bellum voluntary associations, women reformers during the late nineteenth century argued that their domestic and maternal “nature” gave them spe­ cial authority to push for social reform outside electoral channels, because women did not yet have the vote. But unlike the antebellum reformers, who effected social change through private institutions and “moral suasion,” Progressive women embraced the public sphere by turning to the state. Before the Nineteenth Amendment for women’s suffrage was finally ratified in 1920, women suffragists held street parades, open-air meetings, and pick­ ets outside the White House, using tactics they had learned in part from the flamboyant English suffragists Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.25 The suffragists’ colorful tactics mirrored the spectacular display of the female body at the circus. Josie DeMott Robinson, a bareback rider, played an active role in the suffrage movement; at rallies, she posed atop her rear­ ing horse for publicity photographs.26 Circus day, with huge crowds, was a highly visible occasion on which to promote the vote. On 4 July 1912, members of the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association drove an auto­ mobile to the Ringling Bros. circus grounds in Racine, where they were well received by circus employees. The suffragists spent their day distributing literature to the circus crowd.27 Women’s public activism occurred alongside growing popular references to sexuality. In 1913 the magazine Current Opinion proclaimed that it was “Sex O’Clock in America!”28 At dance halls across the nation, young, unmarried women and men danced closely, doing the turkey trot and the slow shimmy with abandon. Built in 1897, Coney Island’s Steeplechase amusement park offered young couples plenty of opportunities to kiss and hug in the dark, meandering “Tunnel of Love.”29 The vaudeville actresses Eva Tanguay and Gertrude Hoffmann portrayed themselves as worldly “personalities.”30 In his first visit to the United States in 1909, Sigmund Freud postulated that sexuality was the defining aspect of the human expe­ rience, from infancy to old age. After 1910 a group of young intellectuals known as the Greenwich Village sex radicals denounced state-sanctioned monogamous marriages in favor of multiple sexual partnerships. Progressive purity reformers were called to action partly because of new attitudes about female desire. During the nineteenth century, Victorian social theorists believed bourgeois women to be asexual; consequently, reformers saw prostitution as a “necessary evil,” a way to quell the potentially danger­ ous sexual appetite of the white male. But by 1900 social theorists viewed all women—regardless of race or class—as sexual beings, capable of ama­ tive feelings and able to satisfy their husbands’ passions, which rendered the prostitute’s services obsolete. The English sexologist Havelock Ellis (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 6 volumes, 1897–1910) and the Swedish theorist

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Ellen Key (Love and Marriage, 1911), argued that women’s sexual passions equaled men’s. In this intellectual context, the “necessary evil” had become the intolerable “social evil.” Local red-light abatement acts (beginning in 1909) and the federal Mann Act (1910) attempted to legislate prostitution out of existence.31 The rise of the physical-culture movement also challenged older ide­ als about female sexuality. Just as women’s public activism contradicted prevailing notions about separate spheres, women’s athleticism at the turn of the century confounded the standard of the neurasthenic, asexual woman. After she suffered a series of emotional breakdowns, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s husband subjected her to the monotonous “rest cure.” But Gilman regained her strength and sanity only when she went back to her writing and her exercise routine at the gymnasium.32 Susan Cahn has noted that the women’s physical-culture movement experienced some of its growth at new women’s and coeducational colleges. The number of women attending college increased from 11,000 in 1870 to 85,000 in 1900 to 283,000 in 1920.33 In a collegial setting, young women played basketball, baseball, tennis, and golf. Wage-earning women also partici­ pated in athletic activities. Factory managers extolled women’s physicaleducation programs at the workplace to foster increased productivity and company loyalty. Settlement house workers, YWCA chapters, and local members of the Playground Association of America (1906) organized athletic events for urban children to promote better physical and moral health. Furthermore, the Progressive advocates of the playground move­ ment may have designed urban play areas with the circus in mind: chil­ dren could build their bodies and spirits by twirling on the Roman rings, or swinging on a tiny trapeze, just like well-toned circus acrobats. Physical-education reformers posited that female athletic activity was crucial to moral, physical, and even “racial” well-being. During the “bicycle craze” of the late 1880s and 1890s, thousands of women took up the novel pastime of bicycling. Frances Willard, leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, learned how to ride at the age of fifty-three. New women’s magazines frequently mentioned women’s athleticism with exciting stories about exploring the world, training animals, or climbing mountains: “How I Climbed a 14,000-Foot Mountain,” by Dora Keen, triumphantly recounted Keen’s dangerous adventures on the Weisshorn in Switzerland.34 In the context of women’s participation in physical fitness, and the concurrent growth of a leisure culture in which a greater number of women became tourists, the lady thrill act—in which a woman rode a bicycle on a high wire or climbed a mountain—demonstrated women’s public physicality in American culture. But female athleticism had its share of critics. Despite the medical profes­ sion’s general praise for the bicycle, several authorities claimed that cycling caused tremendous reproductive damage, specifically uterine displacement.

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Moreover, bicycle saddles reportedly allowed women to masturbate while riding, thereby reducing procreative desire and hastening the decline of native-born fecundity.35 Still others charged that repeated cycling could create an ugly “bicycle face,” characterized by a hard, clenched jaw and bulging eyes. Similarly, one commentator asserted that “circus face” was a malady brought on by excessive female athleticism under the big top.36 Physicians and intellectuals called the female athlete and the “New Woman” a danger to traditional notions of domestic propriety.37 The scientific com­ munity often represented them as “mannish,” a liminal “third sex” nei­ ther female nor male.38 Theodore Roosevelt and the president of Clark University, G. Stanley Hall, both claimed that the progress of American civilization depended in part upon preserving sexual differentiation. They flatly stated that women should spend their reproductive lives as wives and mothers while men should dominate public life. Roosevelt, for one, growled, “When men fear work or fear righteous war, when women fear mother­ hood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and well it is that they should van­ ish from the earth (Figure 10.2).”39 In line with this logic, the New Woman was seen as largely responsible for “race suicide,” because she delayed or refused motherhood in favor of higher education, paid labor, and public activism.40 But the magazine Ladies Home Calisthenics (1890) argued that athletic activity in fact diminished the threat of race suicide, because female athletes were strong, healthy, and able to bear larger families.41

Figure 10.2 May Wirth, c. 1924–7.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wis., BBK-N45-WTHM-28.

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In the milieu of the women’s physical-culture movement, audiences could read circus women’s meager dress as a function of wholesome athleticism. Physical-fitness advocates argued that women’s bodies should be free of tight, cumbersome clothing. An anticorset movement began in the 1830s and gained wide acceptance among physical-culture proponents by the end of the century.42 Nineteenth-century anticorset advocates included Catharine Beecher, Dioclesian Lewis, and Thomas Wentworth Higgins, who charged that this fashionable device was responsible for respiratory difficulties, bod­ ily malformations, and reproductive failure. The traveling phrenologist and nineteenth-century impresario Orson Fowler claimed that “tight lacing” caused shortness of breath, sexual excitement, and delirium: Who does not know that, therefore, tight-lacing around the waist keeps the blood from returning freely to the heart, and retains it in the bowels and neighboring organs, and thereby inflames all the organs of the abdo­ men, which thereby excites amative desires? (emphasis in original)43 Around 1900 visual images of uncorseted female athletes were increasingly common, both in publications of the physical-culture movement and on the pages of the Police Gazette. Bernarr Macfadden, an athlete, publish­ ing mogul, and huckster, placed photographs of unbound female athletes throughout the pages of his popular magazine Physical Culture to boost circulation rates. When Macfadden assumed management of the magazine in 1899, its anemic circulation was approximately 3,000. By 1901 Macfad­ den’s vigorous marketing tactics and pictures of nearly nude women had caused circulation to skyrocket to over 100,000!44 The genesis of the American empire provided an important sociopolitical context in which circus proprietors could promote female nudity as instruc­ tive. Women’s increased participation in the public sphere and the rise of physical culture enhanced circus women’s public viability. But they alone do not sufficiently explain why showmen focused on the female performer as a symbol of the circus’s propriety, because women in other areas of popular culture were still regulated. Anthony Comstock, for one, arrested Macfad­ den shortly before the Physical Culture Show of 1905 in New York City for presenting “lewd” pictures of reclining athletic women dressed in union suits and a man dressed in a leopard-skin breech cloth.45 But popular images of exotic nudity in toys, games, storybooks, and ethnological exhibits became increasingly commonplace once the United States gained control of noncon­ tiguous territories after the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. World’s fair organizers, the publishers of National Geographic (1888), and circus impresarios alike used nonwhite women’s bodies to make educational claims. Racial “color” defined the degree of nudity that was deemed appropriate for display. National Geographic, for one, in

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1896 first published photographs of bare-breasted black women.46 Euro– Americans easily accepted such photographs of women of color as edify­ ing, while topless white women were found only at seedy carnival cooch shows and nascent strip joints—not on the pages of a decent magazine or big “Sunday School” circus. National Geographic first photographed topless white women in the 1980s—and then only from behind!47 Turn­ of-the-century impresarios, however, still drew public attention to seminude white female bodies, but they used different strategies to do so.

“The lady dainty” under the big top How did turn-of-the-century showmen transform the female circus ath­ lete into a highly publicized “queen of the arena”? Looking at posters and Express releases, one might conclude that women dominated the circus, because female aerialists, rope walkers, bareback riders, animal trainers, and acrobats were omnipresent in circus advertising. But these marketing efforts were disproportionate to women’s actual numbers. For instance, in 1891 Adam Forepaugh employed thirty male and twelve female big-top per­ formers.48 Barnum & Bailey’s circus in 1896 had sixty-two male and thirtyfour female principal big-top players, in addition to approximately 1,000 chorus members and many sideshow acts.49 Proprietors employed sentimental discourses of domesticity to neutralize the sexualized presence of strong, seemingly placeless circus women, who publicly exhibited themselves for pay in front of huge crowds. The circus woman supposedly abhorred modern life and shunned crowded cities dur­ ing the off-season.50 Circus press agents paid special attention to the origins of big-top women as a way to mitigate the possible public impression that circus women were anonymous, roving exhibitionists. Yet circus promot­ ers paid little attention to the origins and social standing of the male acts. Circus media emphasized that the female performer never traveled alone; during the show season, her parents, brother, or husband invariably accom­ panied her, often appearing with her under the big top. Hardly a woman on the loose, she remained under the protective gaze of her family. Showmen billed the typical female big-top player as a member of an old, distinguished family troupe, preferably from Europe. In contrast to the itin­ erant, tented American circus, the European circus was consistently respect­ able; intimate, one-ring productions took place in elaborate, permanent circus buildings in front of royalty and upper-class audiences. As a child, the American female big-top player reportedly learned her craft from her parents, who had performed for the crowned heads of Europe. One press release noted that over two-thirds of Barnum & Bailey’s acts were Euro­ pean, the majority of them English, and that the women of the circus were “ladies … of good breeding.”51

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Three circus stars of the early twentieth century, Josie DeMott Robinson, Lillian Leitzel, and May Wirth, came from old circus families. Robinson, an American bareback rider from the 1880s to the turn of the century, was the product of a long line of illustrious French riders and horse trainers who fraternized with Napoleon Bonaparte; Robinson grew up around the circus because her parents owned the DeMott and Ward Circus.52 Born in Breslau, Germany, in 1892, Leitzel became an aerialist as a child and performed with her mother, Elinor Pelikan, a Czech aerialist. As part of her mother’s troupe, the Leamy Ladies (named after their American manager, Edward T. Leamy), Leitzel came to the United States in 1908 and debuted with the Ringling Bros. circus in 1915 as a solo artist.53 May Wirth, an Australian bareback rider born in 1894, was the daughter of impoverished, itinerant circus play­ ers. After May’s parents separated when she was seven years old, she was adopted by the Wirths, a well-established Australian circus family. When May opened as a center-ring star for Ringling Bros. in 1912, press releases did not dwell on her indigent early childhood (which was well known in Australia, where some speculated that she was an aboriginal), but instead depicted her as a member of an old foreign circus family.54 Circus media stressed female players’ class status. Unlike many male bigtop stars, or circus owners who promoted themselves as industrious “rags­ to-riches” characters, female circus stars were supposed to be born into respectability. Upward mobility was a trope of the male capitalist, not the female performer. Barnum & Bailey’s aerialist Nettie Carroll was reported to be a member of an aristocratic Ohio family. Beautiful “in face and form,” Carroll was from the “smartest set,” yet she chose the travel and excite­ ment of circus life, despite her mother’s desire that she settle down and get married.55 Isabella Butler, an American who performed the “Dip of Death” with Barnum & Bailey from 1906 to 1908, was a “refined” student studying medicine at Vassar College.56 Programs described Miss Lotta Jewel, a rider with the Carl Hagenbeck circus in 1906, as a paragon of elite American womanhood: Miss Lotta Jewel is a splendid type of Gibsonesque American beauty and an ardent devotee of the invigorating and health-giving-out-of­ door-life. A personal fortune has made possible liberal indulgence in her favorite pastimes—riding and driving—and she is the proud posses­ sor of the finest stable of privately owned roadsters and saddle horses in New York City.57 The unmarried woman performer was reportedly on the threshold of mar­ riage. Days before a circus arrived, press agents like Barnum & Bailey’s Tody Hamilton flooded local papers with titillating “inside” stories about circus women, such as “Quits Ballet for Fortune: Romance of an English Girl Who Married against the Wishes of Her Parents,” “The Women of the

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Circus: How They Live and Love,” and “Big Circus Tents Cover a Very Pretty Circus Romance: Fair Italian Acrobat Wears Her Lover’s Picture on Her Collar: He Holds a Trusted Position.”58 In addition to heightening the audience’s curiosity, these stories presented the single female big-top player as a decent lady, who desired domesticity over the transient and potentially liberating life of sawdust and spangles. Marriage was good publicity fodder, not limited to circus women; press agents frequently advertised impending nuptials for animal stars as well. The tantalizing prospect of sexual activity in captivity motivated animal “wed­ dings” and drew big crowds to the menagerie. Primates, in particular, were popular subjects. A new scientific category in 1758, the order Primates had long been a metaphor, as the historian Donna Haraway has shown, for the politics of gender, race, class, and empire.59 The union of two chimpanzees, Chiko “the $10,000.00 Chimpanzee”60 and Johanna, dominated Barnum & Bailey’s press releases in December 1893 while the menagerie was stationed at Central Park. Although the chimp couple never got closer than eight feet from each other,61 press agents wrote detailed accounts about their physi­ cal interaction: Chiko was sexually aggressive while Johanna was chaste; yet she had a “grip like steel,” and the couple fought furiously at their first meeting. One headline fairly shouted: “Chiko Wanted to Shake Hands but When Johanna Resented His Familiarity, He Nearly Tore His Lady Chim­ panzee’s Ear Off.”62 Johanna humorously “aped” human conventions: [S]he does whatever she sees people doing about her, as if anxious to get into the ‘swim’ of human society. She wears skirts and housewrappers, smokes cigarettes, stirs her toddy with a spoon, and drinks it off like a seasoned old justice.63 Circus writers waxed melodramatic when Chiko abruptly died at the end of the 1894 season: “His widow now bemoans her fate / He was so cute and slick, O! / And wears her mourning ‘up to date,’ / For was he not her Chiko?”64 Johanna’s keeper, Matt McKay, observed that the grieving chim­ panzee covered her eyes “with almost perfectly shaped hands” for nearly one month after Chiko’s death.65 At the circus, animals were templates for human desire, for social norms and transgressions. Johanna, the strong, earthy chimp, caricatured the strict gender constructions that constricted her human coworkers: she was stronger than her husband, smoked cigars, and drank alcohol. But race shaped gender stereotypes, even in the “raceless” animal world, because press agents used the same stereotypes to describe Johanna that they used to advertise non­ white women: Johanna was immodest and was brawnier and bolder than men. For that matter, Johanna and Chiko were caged next to people of color at the ethnological congress.

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In another section of the same menagerie tent, the “Happy Family” pre­ sented a startling scene of domestic bliss. First presented at traveling menag­ eries, this group of mortal animal enemies positioned together in the same cage became popular at P.T. Barnum’s American Museum (1841–68). There, on the fifth floor, Barnum exhibited his own “Happy Family”: a melange of drowsy, well-fed monkeys, dogs, rats, cats, pigeons, owls, porcupines, guinea pigs, cocks, and hounds, all in the same large cage in front of thou­ sands of self-styled “happy families” each day.66 In contrast to the animals, the placeless Euro-American female circus stars purportedly preferred life at home. These women reportedly had tea and sewing clubs, and according to one writer, “The thoughts of many of them as they go flying through hoops, or whirling through the air on a tra­ peze, are in some faraway home with their children.”67 In a press release, Mrs. George O. Starr, a former bareback rider, and “Zazel,” a cannonball stunt artist who was married to a Barnum & Bailey manager, advertised the up-right circus woman:68 The domestic instinct is very strong among circus women, for the rea­ son that they are deprived of home life a great part of every year. She finds an outlet in many little ways, one of which is an appeal to the chef in charge of the dining car to be allowed to bake a cake.… [In some instances] [i]t isn’t all unusual for them to go to one of the houses along near the track and ask the woman who lives there to let them use her kitchen. Almost always they get permission and after­ wards pay her for it. They sew too, and many do pretty exceedingly fancy work.69 In an interview with troupe members of the Barnum & Bailey circus in 1908, Harriet Quimby characterized the backstage environment as “whole­ some,” filled with modest females, many of them mothers whose children were also part of the production. Barnum & Bailey’s press agent Dexter Fel­ lows claimed that backstage one would “see the domestic side of circus.”70 Dixie Willson, a secondary big-top player who rode in the opening specta­ cle, or tournament, with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey in 1921 spent the $22 that she earned in her first paycheck71 on curtains, pictures, a potted plant, silk pillows, and a rose-colored lamp for her four-by-six-foot home on the circus train.72 May Wirth, wearing her trademark pink bow in her bobbed brown hair as she performed a full forward somersault midgallop atop her horse, was portrayed as a sweet, shy young woman. After her marriage to Frank White (who took her surname) in 1919, not only was May the greatest woman rider in the world, she was reported to be a devoted wife, a sentiment captured nicely in this radio interview from 1942, five years after Wirth retired from the circus:

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It was quite another kind of accident which took me out of the circus.… I fell in love.… Now I have a home in Forest Hills. We still have the horses and I still ride once in a while. But my main interest is discover­ ing appetizing salads, planting successful flower gardens and tending to spring housecleaning.73 Despite well-publicized claims of happy, nomadic family life, several circuses prohibited young (that is, nonperforming) children from traveling with the show. In 1916 the bear trainers Emil Pallenberg and his wife were forced to leave their two-week-old son Emil Jr. on a farm in Connecticut for Barnum & Bailey’s show season.74 Jules Turnour, a clown, sadly recalled the death of his beloved son faraway in New York while Turnour was on the road. Just before going on to a packed house, he received a telegram from his wife say­ ing that his son was gravely ill: There I stood in fool’s garb, with the hot tears streaming down my make-up. I heard a voice say merrily: ‘Come, Jules, we’re waiting for you.’ So I had to go out into that crowded arena with a breaking heart, and disport myself that the mob might laugh—playing with a dummy [rag] child while my own lay dying.75 Publicity pieces invariably mentioned the husbands of female stars to prove that women’s primary loyalties lay with their husbands. Yet the reality con­ tradicted these images. In 1906 Barnum & Bailey managers hailed Josie DeMott Robinson as a courageous heroine: Robinson had been retired from the circus from 1890 to 1905 after marrying Charles Robinson, son of the showman John Robinson, and reportedly returned as a noble way of easing her husband, a former politician, out of debt. In the words of one headline: “From Home of Riches to the Bareback Ring: Left Circus Ring as Rich Man’s Bride: Returns to Aid Husband: Josie DeMott, Somersaulting Eques­ trian Aiding Husband, the Son of Showman Robinson to Retrieve Losses.”76 But in reality, Robinson came back to the circus because she found married life as a “gillie” (circus outsider) suffocating. Through marriage and retire­ ment, she had become a “mummy,” “choked and imprisoned by corsets and fashion.”77 While in retirement, she took up bicycling to regain her strength and to avoid the corset, but ultimately Robinson was set free only when she left her husband and returned to the circus ring. Robinson felt that the circus was a haven: “I knew that world. I loved it, and I felt safe there.”78 Images of Annie Oakley were equally paradoxical—domestic and norma­ tive on the one hand, subversive on the other. Playing “Little Sure Shot” at Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (1885–1902), Oakley was reported to be “the sweet heart of the entire male population of the country.”79 Proprietors advertised her as a homebody and true patriot who performed pro bono for American

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troops during World War I.80 Her brother recalled that Oakley was “quick as a cat” in shooting, but nonetheless: She was always a lady, always reserved and always modest. Wouldn’t tie her shoes in front of a stranger. She was always a Christian, and she said her prayers every night on her knees, wherever she was, just like a trusting little child.81 Press agents depicted Oakley as a happy, devoted wife to her husband, Frank Butler, who frequently performed with her. Yet as the theater histo­ rian Tracy Davis points out, endangering her husband was a central part of Oakley’s act. During her seventeen years with Buffalo Bill, Oakley frequently used Butler as her target—she shot apples off his head, or razed the ashes off his cigarette, while he smoked. Furthermore, Oakley chose to perform in full, stereotypical Western wear—cowboy hat, long skirt, vest, long-sleeved blouse, and boots—rejecting the brief garb of the circus woman. Press agents rarely noted Butler’s part in Oakley’s act, instead focusing on Oakley’s good character and legendary self-taught shooting skills.82 Although showmen likely intended such promotions to diffuse the unsettling implications of a wife symbolically shooting her husband in public, these containment strate­ gies were sometimes unsuccessful. For one, Hearst newspapers reported in 1903 that Oakley was a cross-dressing thief. But Oakley triumphed in the end after she sued Hearst for libel and won.83 Impresarios extended women’s love of domesticity to female animal train­ ers. Articles delighted in revealing that many lady lion tamers were afraid of mice and spiders.84 Contemporary magazines acknowledged that the image of a “gentle” woman handling wild beasts was arousing: “When we go to see a woman run these risks, we give secret play to barbaric emotions which in spite of years of civilization are yet latent in us.”85 Female animal trainers and handlers were generally more physically interactive with their beasts than male trainers. Lucia Zora, whose husband Fred Alispaw taught her how to train animals with the Sells-Floto circus, performed several dar­ ing acts with her elephants and big cats. Her most spectacular act involved riding atop the tusks of Snyder, the killer elephant, while he stood on his hind legs.86 Mabel Stark recalled that she got her first circus job with the Al Barnes circus in 1913 because the manager, Al Sands, thought that Stark, a petite blonde, would look alluring to audiences while she handled nasty tigers.87 Stark created the first circus wrestling act with a tiger, in which she and Rajah (whom she raised from a cub) rolled around the sawdust arena to music.88 Although women trainers wore protective paramilitary clothing during their acts, lithographs often depicted them in bare, glittering garb. Like their male cohorts, women animal trainers proudly recounted their stoicism. Stark recalled many instances of finishing her act with blood pouring into her boots from her lacerated thighs and calves while smiling

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calmly at the audience. Stark asserted, “I am not afraid. I like the challenge of [the cats’] roaring defiance.… I know that my will is stronger than their rippling muscles.”89 Stark’s bravado notwithstanding, programs referred to her as “the Lady Dainty in a den of ferocious tigers.”90 And despite the “masculine” strength and cool calm required for performing animal acts with elephants, bears, and big cats, showmen used these stunts to heighten prescribed gender differences (Figure 10.3). Women usually worked with smaller, non-threatening animals such as birds and dogs. The equestrienne and trainer Ella Bradna performed the “Act Beautiful,” in which a bevy of trained birds, horse, and dogs assisted Bradna, the “Lady Dainty of the arena,” in a “most beautiful and altogether delightful display of color and charm.”91 Circus women also performed with automotive “brutes” and, in the 1920s, airplanes. The brothers Charles and J. Frank Duryea were bicy­ cle engineers who built the first workable American gasoline-powered automobile in 1893; in the early twentieth century Henry Ford created affordable American cars based on European models like the 1901 Mer­ cedes. Ford was so deluged with orders for his 1906 Model N that he was motivated to introduce his Model T in 1908, a more economical and reliable car.92 In this technological environment, the circus coupled this new mode of transportation with another nascent technology: flight. From 1905 to 1908 Barnum & Bailey featured the “L’Auto-Bolide, ‘The Dip of

Figure 10.3 Great groups of trained wild beasts, Barnum & Bailey, 1915. Source: Lithograph courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wisconsin, with permission from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey®, The Greatest Show on Earth®, BNL39-15-1F-5.

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Death,’” a chilling, highly dangerous automobile act in which the driver raced down a steep track, ending in a free-falling somersault before the car landed upright on a different track (Figure 10.4).93 The stunt required com­ plicated machinery: a four-story dromedary-shaped steel structure which held a forty-foot chasm—to be crossed by the somersaulting auto. The car was raised to the top of the platform with a cable in front of the audience, so that the crowd could “see the machine and study its construction.” The driver, a French woman named Mademoiselle Mauricia de Tiers, entered the car at the top of the platform, sped down the steep track, performed the loop-de-loop, and landed upright on the other side of the track.94 At San Francisco in 1905, “most of the crowd were satisfied that the quiet lit­ tle French girl was flirting with the ferryman of the Styx when she trusted herself entirely to the laws of inertia. There was a universal sigh of relief when the dip of death was accomplished safely.”95 These acrobatic female stunt drivers were ubiquitous in circus advertise­ ments. Tiers and Isabella Butler, the American woman who replaced her in 1906, were the subject of hundreds of Barnum & Bailey stories published throughout the United States and Canada. In all, impresarios described these women as small, beautiful, and well-bred “heroines,” who were vulnerable

Figure 10.4 L’Auto Bolide, Barnum & Bailey, 1905. Source: Lithograph courtesy of Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wisconsin, with permission from Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey®, The Greatest Show on Earth®, BNL39-05-1F-4.

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yet fearless New Women. To prevent audiences from becoming bored with the lone flipping automobile, Barnum & Bailey’s proprietors expanded the perilous act for the 1908 season: now two women, the sisters Caroline and Nettie Rague, drove separate cars down a 60 percent grade on separate tracks, one underneath the other. One car somersaulted across a twentyfoot chasm while the other simultaneously shot out straight beneath it. Both landed on the other side of the track at the same time.96 Women’s costuming was another vehicle for domestication and eroticism. Circus media constantly justified bare apparel with stories about healthy, wholesome female circus athletes. Brief clothing was also critical to the safety of circus women, who somersaulted atop galloping horses, twirled through space from the flying trapeze, gyrated madly on the Roman rings, and pranced around on the high wire forty feet aloft. In addition, perform­ ers and proprietors justified scant dress as evidence of good character. Julia Lowanda, a popular Cuban-born bareback rider at the turn of the century, reasoned that the circus woman’s athletic activity made her more seemly than the society woman: We never keep the shockingly late hours of the society maiden or matron, and the fact that we live almost entirely in the open air makes us strong and healthy. In fact, instead of being dyspeptic and irritable, we find life worth living and we are cheerful.97 A Hagenbeck-Wallace circus program also pointed to female circus athletes’ vigor: “Circus women … keep in good health by taking two or three cold baths daily in the dressing tents and by plenty of physical exercise out of doors.”98 In the ring, the nearly nude female body was both sexually attractive and strong. Yet outside the ring, showmen classified these muscular bodies into normative categories. Josie DeMott Robinson recalled that upon leaving the ring in her scanty costume, she was required to don a long skirt immediately: Of course skirts would endanger our lives when we were performing so scanty attire was the thing, but the minute the act was over out came the long skirt or cloak immediately, and I was told not to be so immodest as to stand around half naked. There was no sense in it.99 Gender masking was another element of disguise at the circus. Big-top “women” who were really men were costumed and marketed in virtually the same manner as “dainty darlings.” Reported to be extremely desira­ ble, they were also from good families. Albert Hodgini, sporting a cascade of thick, long, brown curls, smooth skin, and a small, corseted waist, played the “Original Miss Daisy” with the Ringling Bros. from 1908 to 1914. English by birth, Hodgini’s circus family tried to make itself more intriguing

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and salable by changing its name from Hodges to Hodgini, to capitalize on Anglo and American stereotypes of Italians as a racial Other. To establish his credibility with the audience as a woman, Albert Hodgini began his act by riding sidesaddle. Eventually, he performed a series of handstands atop a horse, somersaulted madly, and then juggled a bunch of bottles and plates while still riding the same horse. Reportedly, Hodgini attracted wealthy male suitors who were later embarrassed once they found that Miss Daisy was a man.100 In some respects, Hodgini’s act was radical because it demonstrated that gender was a fluid, performative category: wearing the correct clothing, makeup, and wig, Hodgini could play female. But Hodgini’s potential ability to cross gender boundaries was limited, paradoxically, by the very gender norms that his act denaturalized. Hodg­ ini’s act deftly brought potential gender transgressions back into the rubric of respectability, because his gender play suggested that there was a single standard of appropriate female appearance and comportment. Although his identity as Miss Daisy was secret, press releases constantly teased audiences about Hodgini’s “real” identity by stating that Miss Daisy per­ formed stunts that a woman had yet to accomplish. When his maleness was eventually “discovered” by the circus press—ever hoping to increase a performer’s salability—Hodgini’s publicity photographs confirmed his identity as a decent family man with a wife and two children. As Judith Butler suggests, drag is not intrinsically subversive; instead, showmen could use it to bolster social norms.101

Notes 1 “Official Program of Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth,” Madison Square Garden, Apr. 20–25, 1896, n.p., L. T. Lee Barnum & Bailey Scrapbook (LTLBBS), Todd-McLean Physical Culture Collection, University of Texas, Austin. 2 “Barnum Talks of the Shows of His Grandsons,” n.p., 1896, LTLBBS. 3 “She Tosses Husband About Like Biscuit,” n.p., 1911, GT-2 Barnum & Bailey Vertical File, Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center (RLPLRC), Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wis. 4 Kelly (1954), Clown: 102, New York: Prentice Hall. 5 Stark, as told to Gertrude Orr (1940), Hold That Tiger, Caldwell, Idaho: The

Caxton Printers, Ltd: 28–30, Published Circus Memoir Collection, RLPLRC.

6 Hughes and Meltzer (1967), Black Magic, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice

Hall: 69. 7 Michel Foucault’s work helps illuminate how circus proprietors used respect­ ability as a vehicle for erotic exhibition. Foucault analyzes how the so-called age of repression that accompanied the rise of the bourgeoisie in eighteenth-century Europe actually widened the parameters of sexual discourse. Here, sex became increasingly interconnected with power relations, made manifest through dis­ course and institutions: the insane asylum, hospital, and boys’ secondary schools. Foucault (1990), The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, translated by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage. 8 Allen (1991), Horrible Prettiness, Burlesque and American Culture, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press: 46–7.

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9 Thomas Skillman quoted in Thayer (1997), Traveling Showmen, Seattle, WA: Peanut Butter Publishing: 84. 10 Thayer, “The Anti-Circus Laws in Connecticut 1773–1840,” Bandwagon: Journal of the Circus Historical Society 20 (January–February 1976): 18. 11 Johnson (1978), A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, New York: Oxford University Press: 115. 12 Thayer, “Legislating the Shows: Vermont, 1824–1933,” Bandwagon 25 (July– August 1981): 20. 13 Barnum (1888), Life of P. T. Barnum, Buffalo, NY: Courier: 348. 14 Thayer (1997), Traveling Showmen: 94. 15 Caroline Cowles Richards quoted in Thayer (1997): 85–6. 16 Dozens of prostitutes entered the theater through a separate entrance at least an hour before the main doors were opened. In the third tier, prostitutes drank at nearby bars, met new and regular patrons, and sometimes engaged in sexual relations during the show. Allen (1991), Horrible Prettiness: 50, 52–3. 17 Advertisement for Raymond, Waring and Co., Circus, Chestnut Street Amphitheatre, Philadelphia, n.p., June 20, 1840, Newspaper Advertisement Collection, RLPLRC. 18 Allen (1991), Horrible Prettiness, chapters 3–6. 19 Likewise, female sexual spectacle was acceptable to middle-class audiences in other amusements like Ziegfeld’s Follies (1907) and Benjamin Franklin Keith’s vaudeville shows. Ziegfeld’s Follies divested the cabaret of its working-class ori­ gins with performances in spacious middle-class vaudeville theaters by silent, athletic, boyish female dancers. Though barely dressed, the dancers, like the female circus performers, were marketed in press releases as wholesome “girls next door.” Allen (1991), 272. 20 For more on the gendered consequences of the “market revolution,” see Douglas (1977), The Feminization of American Culture, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Ryan, Mary (1981), Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 21 It is difficult to determine the actual proportion of women and children in the turn-of-the-century circus audience because shows did not keep attend­ ance records or detailed notes about the gender composition of their audiences. However, the visual evidence—photographs, lithographs, and early films of live circus performances—as well as constant route book references, show that women and children attended the circus in large numbers. 22 By 1920 African-American women accounted for the majority of domestic workers because racist hiring practices virtually barred them from the indus­ trial workplace. With the rapid expansion of the industrial sector after the Civil War, the process of mechanization deskilled many factory occupations previously performed by skilled (white male) craft unionists. Employers sought young, unorganized women (nearly all AFL-affiliated unions refused membership to women) who would accept low-paying, unskilled factory jobs in the garment industry among others. D’Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle (1988), Intimate Matters, Chicago: Chicago University Press: 189; Cott, Nancy (1987), The Grounding of Modern Feminism, New Haven: Yale University Press: 21–3. 23 Peiss, Kathy (1986), Cheap Amusements, Philadelphia: Temple University Press: introduction. 24 Addams, Jane (1912), The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, NY: Macmillan: 5.

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25 See Finnegan, Margaret (1999), Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women, New York: Columbia University Press. 26 Robinson, Josephine DeMott (1925), The Circus Lady, NY: Crowell: 276–7. 27 “Ringling Bros. Help Wisconsin: Wives Are Members of Suffrage Society— Allow Campaigning on Circus Grounds,” Woman’s Journal, July 13, 1912 (citation courtesy of Susan Traverso). 28 D’Emilio and Freedman (1988), Intimate Matters: 234. 29 Peiss (1986), Cheap Amusements: 134–7. 30 Glenn, “‘Give an Imitation of Me.’: Vaudeville Mimics and the Play of the Self,” American Quarterly 50 (March 1998): 47–76. 31 Rosen, Ruth (1982), The Lost Sisterhood, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 33. 32 See Vertinsky (1990), The Eternally Wounded Woman. 33 Evans, Sara (1989), Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America: 147; Cahn (1994), Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, New York: The Free Press: 23. 34 Dora Keen (1913), “How I Climbed a 14,000-Foot Mountain,” Ladies’ Home Journal, August(7): 41. 35 Green, Harvey (1986), Fit for America, New York: Pantheon Books: 229–32. 36 Cahn, Susan (1994), Coming on Strong, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 15–16; Murray, “On the Road with the ‘Big Show,’” Cosmopolitan, June 1900: 127–8. 37 Carol Smith-Rosenberg identifies the New Woman as an upper- or middle-class single professional white woman who chose higher education over mother­ hood. I define the New Woman more broadly here to include all women in the public sphere around the turn of the century, including activists and workers outside the home, like circus women, because many readily identified them­ selves as “New Women.” Smith-Rosenberg (1985), Disorderly Conduct, New York: A. A. Knopf: 265. 38 Smith-Rosenberg (1985), Disorderly Conduct: 265. 39 Roosevelt, Theodore (1902), The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses NY: The Century Co.: 4. 40 Bederman, Gail (1995), Manliness and Civilization, Chicago: Chicago University Press, especially chapters 3–5. 41 Green (1986), Fit for America: 225. 42 See Todd, Susan (1999), Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. 43 O.S. Fowler ([1844] 1850), “Tight-Lacing”: 11. 44 Green (1986), Fit for America: 92, 242–5. 45 Green (1986), Fit for America: 246. 46 Lutz, Catherine and Collins, Jane (1993), Reading National Geographic, Chicago: Chicago University Press: 115–16. 47 Lutz and Collins observe that in the late twentieth century, National Geographic editors used computer technology to darken a partly naked Polynesian woman, making her “look more native” so that her nudity would be more acceptable to American audiences (Lutz and Collins 1993: 82, 115–16). 48 Frank S. Redmond (1891), “Official Route Book of the Adam Forepaugh Shows, Season 1891” (Buffalo: Courier): 25–6, Route Book Collection, RLPLRC. 49 “Parade List Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth, Season 1896,” n.p., LTLBBS. 50 According to one female circus worker, “You never see a circus woman in a city after the season is over. She flees from them, I can tell you. She detests the

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54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

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noise and the hustle, and almost without exception, they live in the little coun­ try towns where they practice through the winter, go early to bed and are in fine condition when the season opens.” “Life as a Woman of the Circus Is Not All Glitter: Hard Work and Discipline Her Lot,” New York Evening Telegram, August 27, 1902, BBPCB 1902–3, JMRMA. “Is a Thing of the Past: Big Barnum & Bailey Exhibition Delighted Many Anderson People,” Anderson (Ind.) Herald, September 30, 1903, BBPCB 1902–3, JMRMA. Robinson (1925), The Circus Lady: 4–16. Leitzel’s father, a Hungarian army officer, became a dictatorial theatrical impresario who managed his family’s career in Europe until they left him and worked on their own. Taylor, Center Ring: 222–3, Circus Memoir Collection, RLPLRC. May’s father, Johnny Zinga, trained her to tumble and perform as a contor­ tionist when she was just three years old. Although May’s early childhood was spent in poverty, she quickly became accustomed to a comfortable life with her new family. Her adoptive mother, Marizles Wirth, wrote in her diary that May was filthy when she came to live with the Wirths. Immediately, Marizles shaved May’s head and made her wear a white cap; May cried when she saw her hair fall out but was comforted when her new mother told her that her hair would grow back curly. The Black Collection, Marizles Wirth’s Diary: 56–7, JMRMA; Mark St. Leon, “An Unbelievable Lady: Bareback Rider May Wirth”: 4–5. “From Village Bell [sic] to Queen of the Arena: Famous Beauty Thrills Circus Spectators by Feats in Mid-Air,” New York Journal, March 25, 1903, BBPCB 1902–3, JMRMA. “What Makes Auto in the L’Auto Bolide Twist Wrong Side Up?” Rural Examiner, n.p., August 4, 1906, BBPCB 1906, JMRMA. “The Carl Hagenbeck Greater Shows Embracing Grand Triple Circus East India Exposition,” Ottumwa, Iowa, July 11, 1906 (Buffalo: Courier, 1906), Program Collection, RLPLRC. “Quits Ballet for Fortune,” Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1903, BBPCB 1902–3; “The Women of the Circus,” n.d., n.p., BBPCB 1906–7; “Big Circus Tents Cover a Very Pretty Circus Romance: Fair Italian Acrobat Wears Her Lover’s Picture on Her Collar: He Holds a Trusted Position: Mama Objects but There May Be a Marriage before the Season is Over,” New York Times, April 28, 1903, BBPCB 1902–3, all from JMRMA. Haraway, Donna (1989), Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge: 10–25. $184,821 in 2000. “Chiko Stuffed for Good,” New York World, January 16, 1895, BBPCB 1895, JMRMA. “Chiko Wanted to Shake Hands But When Johanna Resented His Familiarity, He Nearly Tore His Lady Chimpanzee’s Ear Off,” New York World, December 19, 1893, BBPCB 1894, vol. 1, JMRMA. “The Barnum & Bailey Show,” n.p., n.d., Decatur, Ill., 1897, Newspaper Advertisement Collection, RLPLRC. Charles Andreas, “Day by Day with Barnum & Bailey, Season of 1904” (Buffalo: Courier, 1904): 76–8, Route Book Collection, RLPLRC. “Johanna Back at the Park,” New York Recorder, BBPCB 1895, JMRMA. Harris, Neil (1973), Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum, New York: Little, Brown and Co.: 165–6.

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67 “Circus Women Just Like All Human Beings: You Thought Them Mere Cigarette Smoking Chatter Boxes, Paint-Bedaubed, Etc.,” Des Moines News, September 3, 1907, BBPCB 1906–7, JMRMA. 68 Much of this quotation appeared verbatim in show programs over the next two decades. See, for example, “Circus Women and Children Healthy, Happy, ‘Homey’ Gypsies,” Barnum & Bailey program, road edition, season 1914, 39–40, Program Collection, RLPLRC. 69 “Life as a Woman of the Circus Is Not All Glitter: Hard Work and Discipline Her Lot,” New York Evening Telegram, August 27, 1902, BBPCB 1902–3, JMRMA. 70 Harriet Quimby, “The Feminine Side of Sawdust and Spangles,” Leslie’s Weekly, April 16, 1908: 374, Periodicals Collection, RLPLRC. 71 $183 in 2000. 72 Willson, Dixie (1936), Where the World Folds Up at Night, New York: D. Appleton & Co.: 80, Published Circus Memoir Collection, RLPLRC. 73 “Script for Interview between May Wirth and Adelaide Hawley, ‘Woman’s Page of the Air,’” Station WABC, 485 Madison Avenue, New York City, July 29, 1942, May Wirth Vertical File, RLPLRC. 74 Tiny Kline, “Showground-Bound” (unpublished memoir): 136–7, Manuscript Collection, RLPLRC. 75 Turnour in Marcosson, Isaac (1910), The Autobiography of a Clown as Told to Isaac F. Marcosson, New York: Moffat, Yard and Co.: 77. 76 “From Home of Riches to the Bareback Ring,” St. Louis Post, May 12, 1907, BBPCB 1906–7, JMRMA. 77 Robinson (1925), The Circus Lady: 175–8. 78 Robinson (1925): 216. 79 Caption on back of postcard of Annie Oakley, a “Shini Color” by “Colourpicture,” Boston, Annie Oakley Vertical File, RLPLRC. 80 In a tribute to Oakley after her death, Paul Gould reminisced about Oakley’s patriotism: “When [Oakley] toured Europe, she appeared before William Hohenzollern, Crown Prince of Germany, later to become Wilhelm II. At his imperial request she shot a cigarette from his mouth. Years later when the war broke out, Annie bitterly wrote the Kaiser saying she was sorry she had hit only the cigarette—and asked for another shot.” From Paul Gould, “The Lady Could Shoot,” Buick Magazine, November 1946: 12, Annie Oakley Vertical File, RLPLRC. 81 “Darke County Plans a Statue,” Columbus (Ohio) Sunday Dispatch Magazine, April 24, 1949, 27, Annie Oakley Vertical File, RLPLRC. 82 Davis (1992), “Shotgun Wedlock: Annie Oakley’s power politics in the Wild West,” in Laurence Senelick (ed.) Gender in Performance, Hanover, NH: Tufts University Press: 141–57. 83 Davis (1992), “Shotgun Wedlock”: 141–57. 84 These are two of many such examples: “Girl Tamer Faints at Mouse in Her Trunk: Kittie Florenz of Barnum & Bailey Circus Is Afraid of a Mouse, but Not of Her Lion Prince,” Boston Journal, May 15, 1907, BBPCB 1907, JMRMA; also, see the newspaper reporter Courtney Ryley Cooper’s description of Lucia Zora: “a woman whose appearance bespoke complexities; dominant, willing to face all and dare all, if by so doing an object might be attained; with the strength, the courage, the resourcefulness to pit one’s self against adversar­ ies before which men might quail, yet wholly a woman, to be frightened by a spider and cry for sympathy at the prick of an embroidery needle.” Courtney Riley Cooper, preface to Zora, Lucia, Sawdust and Spangles, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co.: viii, Circus Memoir Collection, RLPLRC.

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85 Lucia Trevor Lee (1904), Women Who Conquer Beasts, Twentieth Century Home, October: 6–8, George Chindahl Collection, Box 1, Folder 21, RLPLRC. 86 Zora (1928), Sawdust and Spangles: 39–40.

87 Stark (1938), Hold That Tiger: 50–5.

88 Stark (1938), Hold That Tiger: 124–5.

89 Stark (1938), Hold That Tiger: 13. Stark also recounted her most serious acci­ dent, which occurred in 1928 with the John Robinson Company in Bangor, Maine. Because of weather delays, Stark’s tigers had not been fed or watered in twenty-four hours, and had to perform immediately upon arrival. One tiger, Sheik, became surly during the show and initiated a group attack upon Stark, whose left leg was nearly severed. All of Stark’s limbs were broken and she almost died, but miraculously she recovered after five weeks in the hospital. Stark (1938), Hold That Tiger: 230–45. 90 “Official Program of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows Season 1923,” road edition (New York: Select, 1923), Program Collection, RLPLRC. 91 “Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Magazine and Daily Review, Season 1920,” Madison Square Garden (New York: Select, 1920), Program Collection, RLPLRC 92 Flink, James (1988), The Automobile Age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: chapters 1–4. 93 See Tiny Kline, “Showground-Bound,” for a description of the dangers of this stunt, p. 344. 94 “L’Auto Bolide’ Seattle Times, August 13, 1905, BBPCB 1905, JMRMA. 95 Charles Andress (ed.) (1905), “The Official Route Book of Barnum & Bailey, Season of 1905” (Buffalo: Courier): 88, Route Book Collection, RLPLRC. 96 “Circus Act to Close Death’s Plunge,” New York Journal, May 21, 1908, BBPCB 1908, JMRMA. 97 “How Circus Women Enjoy Life,” Sunday Leader, n.p., June 17, 1906, Julia Lowande Vertical File, RLPLRC. 98 “Circus Women in the Winter Time,” “Carl Hagenbeck Circus Official Program Magazine and Daily Review” (Chicago: W.F. Hall, 1916): 10, Program Collection, RLPLRC. 99 Robinson (1925), The Circus Lady: 71, 175–8, 276–7. 100 Dubuque, “The Original Miss Daisy,” Bandwagon 23 (November–December 1979): 26–8; see also Vertical File for Albert Hodgini Family, RLPLRC. 101 Using films like Some Like It Hot, Victor, Victoria, and Tootsie, Judith Butler demonstrates how heterosexual culture can appropriate drag to reaffirm nor­ mative ideologies about sexuality. “This is drag as high het [sic] entertainment … such films are functional in providing a ritualistic release for a heterosexual economy that must constantly police its own boundaries against the invasion of queerness.” Butler (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex,” New York: Routledge: 126.

Chapter 11

A queer circus Amok in New York Mark Sussman

Jennifer Miller is screaming. Three dancers on stilts, Tanya Gagne, Sarah Johnson and Miller herself, burst through the magenta velour curtains in giant flame-colored costumes and hurtle toward the audience. The crowd sits, stands and sprawls in a half-circle, separated from the Circus Amok traveling ring by the foot-high painted plywood circular curb, its portable backstage made by a quickly assembled steel scaffolding proscenium masked by curtains and brightly painted canvas. Some adults have brought lawn chairs. Kids, many of them curious observers throughout the day of stage setup and performer warm-ups, press close to the edge, sometimes spilling onto the stage floor. It is summer 1996 and we are in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, in a small, paved park beneath the entrance to the bridge to Manhattan. Miller lets it out of her system: the tension and energy of expectation that has built since parking the rented truck, unloading the scaffolding, stage floor, props and costumes, rehearsing bits, dealing with (usually electrical) emergencies and giving notes whenever a performer is free. The scream has become traditional in this, the third summer season of free, outdoor circuses in New York City parks and community gardens. She screams her transition from producer/director to performer and Bearded Ringmistress Extraordinaire. It’s a call to battle, or at least a call to satirical, political performance in the variety format of the free street circus—the trademark of this Bessie Award-winning troupe (see Figure 11.1). Miller has been a mobile presence, shuttling between the avant-garde dance and performance world, the East Coast sideshow circuit, and more recently her role as a professor at Brook­ lyn’s Pratt Institute. She travels easily in a given season between New York’s historically experimental venues (Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space 122 or La MaMa, Experimental Theatre Club) and Sideshows By the Seashore, which bills itself as the last remaining ‘ten-in-one’ sideshow attrac­ tion on the Coney Island boardwalk. Circus Amok mixes the aesthetics and verbal styles of these worlds, particularly in its relation to its audience and its occupation of public space, taking elements from popular traditions as well as from the avant-garde scene.

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Figure 11.1 Circus Amok 2008, New York City. Source: Image courtesy of Circus Amok and Shehani Fernando (photographer). Note: Performers–Amy Verebay, Becca Blackwell, Fernando Wanderley, Ashley Brockington, Carlton Ward, Jennifer Miller, Michelle Matlock, and Cindy Greenberg.

The traditional sideshow belongs to the commercial environment of car­ nival. Consisting of rides, games, food concessions and ‘shows,’ carnival is, in the words of Brooks McNamara, a mobile marketplace of popular entertainments and unusual attractions. Sideshows travel within a tempo­ rary city that occupies an empty lot, public park or other marginal public space for a limited time. The financial success of a sideshow depends on the virtuosity of the ‘talker,’ an oral poet who sells the attraction to an audience of passersby, usually speaking from the ‘bally platform’ outside the show (McNamara 1992: 9–19). The bally is a form of advertising, a linguistic performance in which the talker transforms distracted strollers and carnival­ goers into an audience willing to pay the admission price for a variety show that cycles through a series of acts and then returns to the beginning in a day-long loop. The sideshow is possibly the most basic and disturbing form of solo performance, in which humans have, since colonial times, been dis­ played for being—ethnologically, physiologically or otherwise—different. For years, Miller’s regular summer gig was performing the character Xenobia, confronting Coney Island audiences ten times a day with a mix of fire-eating, machete-juggling and a monologue/rant that at once demystifies and displays her self: a woman with a beard who performs amazing stage tricks, shares the sideshow stage with the Human Blockhead, the Elastic Woman and the Illustrated Man and lives a normal life—much like any feminist, lesbian performance artist and circus director, graced with more facial hair and vocal political discourse. In a sense, Circus Amok is that

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too—a normal one-ring traveling circus with drag queen clowns, papier­ mâché animals instead of live ones, concerns about the quality of everyday New York life and the disappearance of the American public sphere, and utopian visions of a world with less homophobia and more fashion acces­ sories made from the finest recycled materials. At the Coney Island Sideshow, Xenobia is one of the acts displayed on the ‘inside,’ and she takes firm control of the content of her act. Her beard is never simply an object of display; it functions as an occasion for thoughtful looking, a medium through which to show the fluidity and playfulness of gender identity—in this case, her queerness expressed through a heterogene­ ous mix of elements: flying machetes, consumed fire, improvised storytell­ ing, circus tricks and the beard. On a hot, sunny day in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn (once a neighborhood of Dominican, Salvadoran and Satmar Hasidic communities jammed in and around former factory buildings and warehouses prior, in 1996, to waves of Giuliani-era rezoning and Bloomberg-era implementation of massive high-rise real estate development, waterfront gentrification and hipster settlement) with an audience of local kids and adults craning their heads out of buildings above a small concrete park, Miller is both the ‘out­ side talker’ and center of the attraction. She shares the stage with a wildly creative and committed company, who apply make-up, set props, stretch and warm up on the mats in the ring during the hour before show time. Circus Amok was born as ‘The Ozone Show: A Circus of Environmental Destruction,’ performed by The Stratospheric Circus Company at Perform­ ance Space 122 in October, 1989. It was, as Miller remembers it, ‘just a show,’ not a regularly performing company, although several original and veteran members still return to work with the circus as its history unfolds. After two decades of surviving increased real economic challenges to small arts groups in New York, Circus Amok continues to reinvent the circus form, borrowing drag fantasy from Charles Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridic­ ulous, large-scale transformation and puppet-animal acts from Bread and Puppet Theater’s Domestic Resurrection Circus, and the outdoor bally and verbal rhythm and repertoire from the Sideshow, as well as an acrobatic movement vocabulary from postmodern dance. Since that first project, Miller has collaborated with a crew of performers, many of whom double as freelance artists and technicians for theater and dance the rest of the year, most of whom she has trained in the traditional arts, lingo and folklore of the circus. It is a porous group that dwindles during the year, growing to its greatest force during the summer months of rehearsals and the performing weeks in September. The crew of performers who regularly choreograph, dance, write, design and teach includes Becca Blackwell, Ashley Brockington, Gregory Corbino, Victor Vauban, Michelle Matlock, Sarah Johnson, Carlton Ward, and Cathy Weis. Most have solo performance careers or other companies and jump into the Amok company

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as schedules and life paths permit. Band director Jenny Romaine leads a ver­ satile power ensemble of musicians playing covers and original songs from every known musical tradition, as well as the theatrical underscoring and comic punctuation that gives the circus its heartbeat. Rehearsals and train­ ing take place at the circus’s loft, which functions as studio, storage, office, construction and living space, while the band rehearses at the Brooklyn stu­ dio of the theater collective Great Small Works. The ring performers incorporate a mix of yoga and contact improvisa­ tion, breathing and relaxation, acrobatics, juggling, and stilting. At the same time, a broad, comic style calibrated to the distracted environment of urban parks serves in representing the slashing of the city budget by a mani­ acal, knife-throwing city planner, the Budget Butcher, or the distribution of wealth in American society by a juggling dance of flying folding chairs. Ideas for circus acts are generated through year-long discussion, then writ­ ten by Miller herself or in collaboration with outside writers. In 1996, for instance, veteran San Francisco Mime Troupe playwright Steve Friedman contributed Miller’s monologue, a meditation on the meaning of running amok—“Amok is when it gets to you! when your blood boils! when the last straw has snapped!”—for the opening charivari, a parade around the ring in which each performer introduces a character in a short ambulatory tableau. As acts are conceived, musical scores are drawn from a broad range of popular styles. The band may switch from Macedonian dance music to a klezmer medley to an original tango by composer Terry Dame. The brass band does a walking parade around the neighborhood before each perform­ ance, attracting an audience and arriving back at the stage with an explosive percussion piece for the entrance of the stilters. Miller’s first scream from atop a tall set of stilts is a wake-up call, to the audience as much as to the rest of the cast, her final ‘note’ to tell the company to perform with spirit and to say what needs to be said about the political ecology and economy of New York with a healthy mix of outrage, humor and love. It is also an embodied recognition that something will go wrong before this show is over. And Miller delights in those unexpected moments, when a stilt strap is tied too loosely or when the leather straps, buckles and padlocked chains on the straightjacket are a bit too tight and the Escape Act—a miniature allegory of bondage transformed to freedom, according to Miller—is a bit long for comfort. On the road with Circus Amok since 1989, Miller made a shift in 1993, when preparations began for the first free, outdoor summer circus. Previ­ ously, it had been an indoor affair, performed at New York’s avant-garde venues, situated in the context of Performance Art. Taking it outdoors was a risk, a move that meant rethinking the finances, the message, the live band and the role of gay imagery. How would the blurring of genres play across the city’s neighborhoods? How would the embodiment of family entertain­ ment by a corps of queer bodies play in a community garden in Harlem or a

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park in Staten Island? Would audiences across the city’s five boroughs read camp and drag aesthetics, not to mention clowns, jugglers, and acrobats playing across a range of gendered and racial identities, as a challenge or threat? How would a mostly white company (back in 1996) be received by New York’s public, in public space? How would notions of normality be thoroughly interrogated within the frame of the circus ring, a space tra­ ditionally inhabited by freaks and hyperbolic characters in the first place? From the 1996 circus Money Amok (spotlighting economic inequality) to 2014’s At the Crossroads (raising themes of climate change and big-box capitalism), the company has returned again and again to big, pressing themes, always asking: who are we to be performing for you? and, what unites all of us in this park today? A greater tension is magnified here: the relative safety of the avant-garde inhabiting its own turf—in 1990s New York, ‘downtown’—versus the dan­ ger of touring genre-blurring or explicitly political work to an audience that has not, necessarily, asked to see that work. The challenge was to learn— or relearn—how to perform for everyone, for a broader slice of the public sphere, and for kids and families. I am not suggesting that the culture of New York’s avant-garde is entirely segregated from ‘the public sphere.’ In a real sense the indoor spaces I have mentioned, and the audiences and tour­ ing networks they represent, were and are home territory for this group. Performing outdoors and for free, where the stage may at any moment cease to be the focus of an audience’s interest, required an especially flexible the­ atrical form mobilizing spectacle, music and tricks to draw attention to the performers in the ring. The answer was to trust the broadly familiar format and conventions of circus, bolstered by public references to a local news story or a slice of national politics. Herein is the safety in the circus form, and its risk. Based in the visual display of the trick or the crazy characterizations of clowns, enhanced by the joyful outness of the performers and smartly mixed with a healthy dose of political rage at the city’s Powers That Be, Circus Amok is instantly understood by people of all ages and cultural backgrounds. The troupe balances danger with laughter, slipping its critique between the pies in the face and the surreal, scary and sometimes gender-bent characters of the charivari. Protected by the magic of the ring, this circus performs the ancient function of running amok: a burst of chaos into the everyday sphere in which a possessed person or crowd flies into a murderous, though tem­ porary, frenzy. The issue of class and racial differences between inner-city audiences and the all-white company of the early years initiated a long discussion with Miller. “It feels shocking to perform as all whites for these audiences,” she says. And yet, “it represents a reality in the world.” Miller talks about her training in sideshow and dance. “When I grew up in circus, I barely saw people of color. It’s a fairly segregated world and a fairly segregated art

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scene.” That has changed, of course. The move outdoors was a step in the direction of confronting differences of race, class and sexuality in a public space on a hot summer day. Two decades on, Miller as an individual art­ ist, Circus Amok as a company, and the public itself have evolved. New characters have emerged as cast members have come and gone. Miller has given herself characters to express what she’s feeling in a given year. The circuses have become more narrative, with themes more tightly woven from act to act. The company has been more racially mixed for years. And yet, the political impulse keeps the appearance of Circus Amok in public parks what fellow performer and longtime fan George Emilio Sanchez once called a “culture clash.” Literally a culture clash: the band crashes out a series of percussion breaks scored for drums, gongs, struck metal and conch shell, with the occasional horn blast. The stilters make circles, switch directions, kick, jump and stop, facing the audience as the band resolves into a final ta-da. Gagne and Johnson peel off the sides and exit, leaving Miller alone down center. She begins to look slightly alarmed, looks left and right, then wob­ bles on the stilts, bowing and thanking the audience for their applause. The stilts give way under her. The thank-yous turn into another scream as she topples backward into the arms of a waiting roustabout (part stage­ hand, part trick-spotter), who softens her landing onto the stage surface (a portable floor of plywood, athletic mats and a canvas cover between the performers and New York playground asphalt). Horns and drums blast amok in the band as Miller begins to flail helplessly. A stilter on the ground is like a fish flopping in a net. Two roustabouts assist, tearing off the extralong costume and the stilt bindings. This takes some time and some work, only partially drawn out for comic effect. Miller smiles apologetically at the audience before executing as many pratfalls as she can possibly work in. Finally, she is up on her feet, microphone in hand, revealed as the show’s Ringmaster in a strapless blue satin evening gown, her wild hair and formidable beard and mustache truly visible for the first time. She welcomes the audience to the show, to their neighborhood and their park. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls …” pause, and then, a sly aside: “… and the rest of us!” This always gets a laugh, and the size of that laugh is often one gauge of that day’s audience. Who else in the crowd is identifying as different, as a member of a group not covered by the Ringmaster’s timehonored mode of address? This moment is different in Tompkins Square Park than in the South Bronx, a big laugh in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and maybe not as big a laugh in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx—though there is always somebody who acknowledges Miller’s split-second estrangementeffect that, along with the beard and the evening gown, says it’s okay to look, but don’t forget to listen and to think about the bodies you’re seeing in this ring and their agency as performers. What constitutes queer content here? The question comes as a comic jolt in the thick of things. Yet it persists

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as a puzzle. In its ontology, this circus presents bodies that crossdress and move in all kinds of same-sex combinations, though sexuality may rarely be the central issue. The effect is to naturalize the company’s drag personae, with the circus ring as a theatrical buffer, giving these performers permission to change the law of the ‘normal.’ She continues, warming up the audience, giving the ring of kids on the floor in the front rows a chance to answer back in chorus. “How are ya doing today?” “Fine,” they answer. “I can’t hear you!” “FINE!” Here Miller does her favorite thing and improvises. She gets comfortable and studies the crowd, as the company backstage prepares for the opening charivari. “But wait!” she cries. And then, a pause between each question, a crescendo cul­ minating in panic and fear: “Did you close the grate on the window before you left your apartment? Did you remember to turn off the stove? Is your house on fire?” The crowd catches on, by this point, and gasps in mock horror. Did your mother love you? Did your lover … leave you? Well these problems, they are small … for today is the day that the CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN! The company bursts through the curtain accompanied by the band’s French fanfare tune: Scotty Heron in a shocking red wig, high heels and garters, with makeup from an Edvard Munch painting, Rick Murray juggling balls in an evening dress with Karen Sherman standing on his shoulders, Sarah Johnson balancing an ax on her chin, Cathy Weis, waving a handkerchief, staggering under the weight of an aluminum backpack frame that suspends a steam iron inches in front of her nose. The company is introduced in this circular procession around the ring. After the charivari, the year’s theme is introduced. In 1995, it was ‘New York Ground Under,’ an alternative history of the city. In 1996, the theme was money and its distribution, or lack thereof. The acts themselves, when overtly political, make visible the everyday distinctions of class. One act critiquing the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s anti-panhandling advertis­ ing campaign takes verbatim dialogue (not to mention the very props them­ selves) from subway car placards that literally suspend thoughts, interior monologues primed inside cartoon bubbles, over the heads of seated subway riders, transforming them into silent, bourgeois subjects who take offense at the mere presence of a panhandler: Oh, please, don’t come stand in front of me! What do I do?

I’ll pretend I’m reading my book.

But, hey, it’s my money! And how do I know what you’re gonna spend

it on? Sorry, no money from me!

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Even for those who may agree with the sentiments expressed, the advertise­ ment is psychologically invasive. The act ends with the clowns tearing the cardboard placards to shreds to the audience’s cheers. An act written by Sarah Shulman and entitled simply ‘The Skit,’ features a small troupe of workers engaged in a mechanical dance suggesting an abstract assembly line while, standing on stools over them, Miller and Karen Sherman shout commands: Work harder to get ahead! Work harder to get ahead! Work harder to get ahead! Harder! Harder! Harder! To which the performers, running in place, reply We’re working! We’re working! We’re not getting ahead! They eventually protest, looking up meekly at Sherman, the towering authority figure: But he makes one hundred and seventy-nine times as much as we do! The skit ends on a questioning note that stops just short of agit-prop. Karen Sherman’s boss character should be asked to contribute his fair share to the common good. But, as she asks in the skit’s final line, “Who’s gonna make me?” The question hangs there, as the players exit, repeating the question to the audience as much as to themselves. “Who’s gonna make him? Who is gonna make him? Are you…?” In the 1996 ‘Adagio,’ a slow, trance-like act that fuses dance, lifting and acrobatics, three women (Sherman, Gagne and Johnson) perform lifts and combinations that recall the Barnum & Bailey ‘strongman,’ the muscly heavy lifter performing feats of strength. Here, the women lift each other in all kinds of difficult combinations. As they shift and sweat, with deadpan, focused expressions, they comment in low, calm voices, amplified by wire­ less microphones, on shifting tax policies for the rich, and the origins of the national debt. The act is quiet, sexy and political. The audience holds its breath and becomes silent at this point, taking in the complexity and beauty of the image along with the disembodied pieces of conversation. In subsequent years, the circus has tackled themes like the post-9/11 advent of a culture of Homeland Security, Stop-and-Frisk policing policies in New York, Colony Collapse Disorder among bee populations, and the sub-prime lending scandal and the subsequent economic crash—sixteen editions in all, since the first truck tour began visiting neighborhoods. It’s a queer circus, amok in New York. But the queerness is presented as the lens through which the audience considers the freakishness, comedy, and

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struggle implicit, for everyone, in the life of today’s city with its advanced forms of gentrification that both produce inequality and render it invisible. Everyday life is parodically assaulted from this ring, a space traditionally occupied by ‘freaks.’ Queer signifying is visible to some, invisible to oth­ ers, and for most of the audience, I suspect, just beneath the surface. Circus Amok presents two messages at once: an overt one, concerning the fairness of tax laws and the injustice of the removal of the urban social safety net; and a covert one, which shows (rather than tells) the range of genders and bodies that are possible despite and in the face of greater economic injus­ tices, no matter what geographic, ethnic, religious or gender neighborhood one happens to inhabit. In realistic drag performance, the object being cop­ ied, ‘man’ or ‘woman,’ is implicitly coded as stable. Circus Amok parodies the freaks of former times—the Double-Bodied Wonder, the Armless Girl, the Egyptian Giant, Barnum & Bailey’s ‘peerless prodigies of physical phe­ nomena’—by substituting the freakishly normal. In the ‘Safety Net’ act, an acrobatics display featuring a miniature tram­ poline, an airborne procession of characters representing various typical pro­ fessions—a doctor, a chef, a businesswoman—spring and fly, landing on a gigantic soft mat labeled ‘The Safety Net.’ Miller interrupts, as ‘budget cuts’ intervene. (The act is as relevant under twenty-first century austerity regimes as it was in the 1990s.) “I gotta show to run, here,” she yells, as the rousta­ bouts remove the mat, the next jumper (a costumed mannequin) is prepared to hit the pavement, and the act continues, this time without the net.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Jennifer Miller for her patience and generosity during the research for this chapter and Jenny Romaine for the invitation to play in the band.

References Circus Amok home page, www.circusamok.org (accessed May 1, 2015). Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library, New York University. “Money Amok,” Jennifer Miller, director, June 8, 1996 performance video, archived at http://hidvl. nyu.edu/video/000513557.html (accessed May 1, 2015). McNamara, Brooks (1992) “‘A Canvas City … Half as Old as Time’: The Carnival as Entertainment.” In exhibition catalogue The County Fair Carnival: Where the Midway Meets the Grange, edited by Rachel Maines, Elmira, New York: Chemung County Historical Society, pp. 9–19.

Race

Chapter 12

Celebrated, then implied but finally denied The erosion of Aboriginal identity in Australian circus, 1850s to 1950s Mark St Leon

Black performers were seen in British circus in the early nineteenth century and several were prominent as artists and managers. The so-named ‘Negro’ (or mulatto) rider, Joseph ‘Mungo’ Hillier, was a long-standing protégé of Ducrow.1 Another famous ‘Negro’ performer of this era was the equestrian William Darby, better known by his nom d’arene of Pablo Fanque.2 The ring, the essence of the circus experience, was primordial as a device for grouping an audience around a spectacle of human activity.3 On the other side of the world, Australia’s Aboriginal people employed the same device for ceremonies such as a corroboree, the earliest performance by Aborigines to be witnessed by Europeans.4 Entertainments of a circus nature were among the manifestations of contemporary British culture transplanted to the new Australian colonies. A ropewalker named George Croft, a former convict, performed on the stage of Sydney’s Theatre Royal in 1833.5 In April 1847, Croft opened a short-lived amphitheatre at Moreton Bay, the penal settlement where Bris­ bane now stands.6 The affair was closed down by the authorities after a few weeks owing to the lurid songs that were sung and the Aborigines who were admitted.7 In July 1841, the Italian gymnast Signor Luigi Dalle Case arrived in Sydney unannounced with a small troupe that included two, presumably black or mulatto girls, aged twelve and eight, that he had somehow pro­ cured (purchased? adopted? apprenticed?) from the Bahia region of Brazil. The girls exhibited feats of ‘strength, tumbling and tightrope dancing’.8 In Van Diemen’s Land [now Tasmania] in December 1847, the publican and equestrian Robert Avis Radford opened his Royal Circus in Launceston and entertained audiences there and in Hobart Town over the following two years.9 There is no evidence that Radford presented any Indigenous peo­ ple as performers during his two years of circus activity in Van Diemen’s Land, possibly because there was no ‘exploitable native [sic] labour’ in the colony.10 From 1850, the focus of colonial circus activity shifted to the main­ land with fixed location ‘amphitheatres’ opened in both Sydney and Adelaide later that year and in Melbourne the following year.11 Black, but

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non-Aboriginal, performers were strongly represented in the so-named ‘Astley’s Amphitheatre’ that was opened in Melbourne late in 1854 by the entrepreneur G.B.W. Lewis. Lewis’ elephantine company, imported from London, included three ropewalkers, all ‘men of colour’.12 They were Billy Banham, Harry Walker and George Christoff. Walker was Banham’s ‘great rival on the rope’.13 During this engagement and his subsequent ten-year sojourn in Australia, Banham deployed the nom d’arene of his famous uncle, Pablo Fanque.14 The advertising for this Melbourne version of Ast­ ley’s Amphitheatre touted Banham as the ‘first rope-dancer in the world’ and that he could ‘throw back and forward somersets [sic], feet to feet, on the tight rope, a feat which astonishes those in the profession much more than those who pay to visit the arena’.15 Despite the arrival of performers from England, the United States and elsewhere by the 1850s, distance deprived the colonial circus proprietor of immediate access to the large pools of professional talent available in cit­ ies such as London, Paris and New York. He constantly faced the twin challenges of maintaining his company’s strength and diversifying its pro­ gramme. In reviewing a performance of a visiting circus early in 1852, for example, a Goulburn critic highlighted the need for ‘two or three [more] performers [to] … prevent … delay between the parts and … diversify the entertainments’.16 As in England, an apprenticeship system was introduced in the early Australian amphitheatres to redress the colonial shortage of performers.17 The induction (or adoption) of children into circus ‘apprenticeships’, how­ ever spurious, remained an established practice in Australian circus as late as the 1920s, at least. Infants, juveniles and youths were typically pro­ cured from less-privileged backgrounds. They were often abandoned and/ or illegitimate.18 As apprentices, young people were inexpensive, physically and mentally adaptable, controllable, welcomed by audiences and commercially exploita­ ble over long periods. As for the apprenticeship of non-white (mostly Indig­ enous) children, contemporary accounts give no suggestion that any formal contractual arrangements were concluded. In any case, such contracts may not have had any substance since the status of Aborigines under British law had declined by 1850.19 Of the known ‘apprenticeships’ of white children, few arrangements were contractually documented.

Identity celebrated, circa 1851 to circa 1865 Novelty is the lifeblood of any entertainment form. However, the content of a programme is determined as much by what can be feasibly delivered to an audience as by what the public might demand. In this initial era of involvement in Australian circus, the Aboriginal performer served both the

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economic imperative facing circus entrepreneurs and the audience demand for novelty. Their presence in circus was celebrated in this formative era, an era when colonial society replaced what remained of its penal past with a modern, commodity-based economy. For want of an audience, the early circus troupes abandoned their amphi­ theatres by the early 1850s to follow the people onto the gold diggings along ill-formed roads. The first peripatetic circuses were organized and the early circus proprietors discovered a new source of children for ‘adoption’ or ‘apprenticeship’. These were the so-called ‘half-castes’, the result of unions, voluntary or forced, consummated between white men and Aboriginal women.20 Despite rampant interracial sex, a New South Wales Legislative Council Select Committee heard in 1845 that there was almost no inclination for white men to form permanent relations with their black concubines.21 Although commentary is by no means unequivocal, the overall picture obtained is that the ‘half-castes’ were the outcasts of both races. Among tribes in South Australia and Victoria, ‘half-castes’ were destroyed at birth. In Western Australia in 1873 children and ‘young persons of mixed blood’ could be frequently seen ‘utterly neglected and abandoned’ and left to a life of ‘ignorance … vice and depravity’.22 Early in 1851, the English circus man, Henry Burton, presented on his programme an ‘Indian’ [sic] rider in his circus erected outside Curran’s Glas­ gow Arms, a Parramatta inn. The presence of genuine Indian performers in Australian circus is rare indeed, Burton’s jugglers of 1862–3, Abdallah and Mahomet Cassim, among the very few that come to notice.23 We may there­ fore confidently conjecture that Burton’s ‘Indian’ of 1851 was in fact an Aborigine and most probably the first Aborigine presented in colonial cir­ cus, indeed in any genre of the European performing arts.24 The identity of Burton’s ‘Indian’ remains unknown. However, he may have metamorphosed into the ‘Little Nugget’ noted a few months later as detailed below. Why should Burton present a [presumed] Aborigine as an ‘Indian’ and not as an ‘Aborigine’? Would the presence of an Aborigine on his programme detract from the image of his company? Possibly, for although European atti­ tudes of superiority over Aborigines were initially cultural rather than racial, racist attitudes had emerged by 1850.25 Was the term ‘Indian’ an accept­ able contemporary descriptor for an Aborigine? Possibly, because some of the first settlers, conversant with the British colonial experience in North America, had described Australia’s Aborigines as ‘Indians’ in their journals.26 Would the term ‘Indian’ better connect with Burton’s colonial audience? Pos­ sibly, because for a time, the native-born of the colony of New South Wales were numerically stronger than the emigrants, free or otherwise and we may conjecture than a supposed representative of the jewel of the British Empire may have aroused more curiosity than an ‘Aborigine’, whether ‘half-caste’ or

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otherwise.27 After all this, in what manner, in any case, would a [presumed] ‘half-caste’ be genuinely presented in a circus? In this era, half-castes were not the cause for remark that they would be within a generation or two. Ethnographic interest remained focused on Aborigines as ‘relics of the Stone Age’. Although the Aboriginal blood of the ‘half-caste’ had been corrupted, the ‘half-caste’ could not be considered white.28 If Burton’s ‘Indian’ was the first Aborigine to appear in circus, he may have also been the first publicized example of Aboriginal identity ambivalence that, by the turn of the nine­ teenth century, bedevilled Australian society. Burton reached the Turon River diggings with his circus troupe in July 1851, after an overland trek of several weeks from Maitland.29 He remained with his circus in the vicinity of Bathurst, Sofala and the surrounding dig­ gings for over a year. At Bathurst in August 1851, a juvenile ‘half-caste’ per­ former named ‘Little Nugget’, made his appearance with Burton’s troupe. Was this the ‘Indian’ Burton had presented at Parramatta a few months earlier? We know not. About seven years of age, he was described as a ‘manly little fellow of exquisite proportions’, who leaped on and off his cream-coloured pony ‘with pleasure in all directions; sometimes running by his side when at full speed, and vaulting with surprising nimbleness on his back’.30 The record shows that the boy was born near Dubbo about 1844, the son of a labourer named William and an Aboriginal woman known only as Mary Ann.31 The following month, Burton’s star performer, the equestrian, acrobat and ropewalker, John Jones, opened his own circus at Sofala.32 Jones took with him several of Burton’s performers including ‘Little Nugget’ who was given, or took, the name of his new mentor and was henceforth known as ‘Billy’ Jones. Under other billings such as ‘Master Parello Frank’ and ‘Master Pablo’, as well as ‘Little Nugget’, the juvenile Billy’s splendid performances became a feature of Jones’ circus troupe in the years to follow. Billy’s performances on the goldfields were still the cause of remark more than 40 years later when a columnist of the Sydney magazine, The Bulletin, wrote: [Billy Jones] was ‘carried’ round by a rider standing up on a horse. The rider had tights, but Billy was dressed in trousers and shirt and was barefooted. The diggers of the Turon threw a large sum of money into the ring as a reward for his pluck. Later on, in Melbourne, £1,000 was offered [to John Jones] for the boy and pony by a speculator. [John Jones] replied: ‘No, we have not got to slavery out here yet’.33 Due to floods in the Bathurst arena, John Jones returned to Sydney in May 1852 with ‘his talented company and stud of horses’ as well as ‘his two aboriginals’ [sic], ‘Master Parello Frank’ [Billy Jones] and Master Bruce, all to appear in Malcom’s Amphitheatre in York Street.34 Jones and his troupe

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remained with Malcom for nearly four months and the two boys were una­ shamedly promoted to the Sydney public as ‘Aboriginal’.35 In September 1852, Jones and his troupe, including the two Aboriginal boys, travelled overland to Melbourne to take up an engagement ‘at the top of Bourke Street’ in the Olympic Circus of the American, John Sullivan Noble.36 Jones followed Noble to Geelong where they erected a circus of ‘canvas and wood’ in Ryrie Street.37 Billy continued to develop as a performer and, billed as Master Parello Frank, gave a ‘benefit’ performance at Geelong on 7 Febru­ ary 1853, when he performed on horseback, jumped through hoops and over garters and canvases, danced a Sailor’s Hornpipe and upon the tight­ rope, skills imparted to him by his mentor, John Jones.38 By late 1855, John Jones and his troupe had joined William Brown’s shortlived but grandly named ‘Royal Amphitheatre & Roman Coliseum’. One contemporary advertisement for this company mentions Master Othello, ‘the native Australian horseman and tumbler’, presumably Billy Jones.39 Another advertisement mentions ‘the aboriginal’ [sic] Master Bruce ‘on his ‘rampant courser’ at full speed, jumping garters and canvases 12 feet wide, and through a balloon of real fire’, the same who came to Sydney with John Jones’ eques­ trian troupe in 1852.40 In Jones’ Circus at Mudgee in 1858, Billy’s tightrope dancing was favourably compared to ‘the celebrated Pablo Fanque, whom he bids fair to rival’.41 Billy drew the attention of outback townspeople to his mentor’s circus each afternoon before a performance by walking a rope, purportedly 300 feet (90 metres) in length and up to 70 feet (21 metres) high, stretched from a tree stump to the centre-pole of the tent.42 As more circus troupes began to travel, the novelty of presenting juvenile Aborigines as circus performers spread. In 1853, Ashton inducted a young Aborigine from the Tamworth area. He gave the youth the name of Mas­ ter Mongo Mongo [sic] probably after the popular British black performer ‘Mungo’ Hillier. Ashton trained Mongo Mongo to perform ‘many and dar­ ing feats on horseback’ in less than two years.43 Mongo was one of a troupe of Aborigines that Ashton presented when he visited the Hanging Rock dig­ gings, near Uralla, in 1854.44 The following year, when Ashton took over the lease of Malcom’s Amphitheatre, Mongo gave his first appearances before Sydney audiences. A performance of the ‘Australian black’ was even depicted in the Illustrated Sydney News, the caption describing Mongo as ‘truly a wonder … [who] reminds one of other lands from the beauty of his riding’.45 Mongo might have continued his rise to colonial fame had it not been for his sudden death, apparently aged 20 years, from natural causes while travelling the Illawarra with Ashton’s troupe in 1856.46 ‘Ever willing to secure new performers at an apprentice’s wages’ and known to ‘knock a back somersault out of a black in three lessons’, Ashton regularly apprenticed juveniles as performers and ‘turned out several good “half-caste” performers’.47 Alexander Alkanna, ‘an Aboriginal boy from

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Moreton Bay’, performed in Ashton’s company in 1858.48 Throughout the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, Ashton presented at least one or two Aboriginals. Ashton’s Aboriginal ‘apprentices’ probably cost him little or nothing to employ apart from board and keep and, in the absence of protective legislation, were easily procured and retained. In New South Wales for example, where Ashton concentrated most of his touring activity, ‘baby­ selling’, informal adoptions and trafficking in Aboriginal children were not seriously addressed until the passage of the Child Welfare Act [NSW, 1923]. The Destitute Children Act [NSW, 1866] and other nineteenthcentury child welfare legislation failed to protect Aboriginal and ‘half­ caste’ children.49 Such legislation even failed to prevent the procurement of white children by circus proprietors. Of the few references uncovered to legally formalized adoptions and apprenticeships of children by colonial circus proprietors, none pertain to Aboriginal or ‘half-caste’ children. There was a pronounced decline in goldfield activity after 1854.50 With the growing diversification of entertainment available in the metropoles, the amphitheatres opened in Sydney and Melbourne in the early 1850s proved no longer viable, unable to economically deliver the novelties demanded by audiences. By 1856, each had been converted into a conven­ tional theatre.51 However, rather than signal the end of a colonial circus industry, these changes encouraged the industry to re-define itself as fully, not partly, peripatetic. We might even say ‘nomadic’, given the serendipi­ tous manner in which circus routes developed as explored new territory. The itinerant circus proprietor was largely unburdened of the need to con­ stantly generate novelty in artistic programming. As the entertainers who travelled early modern Europe and the American frontier had found, it was easier and cheaper to change audience than repertoire. As a result, such novelties as were delivered, such as Aboriginal equestrians, enjoyed a potentially longer lease of professional life than they would enjoy in a fixed location amphitheatre.52 Of whatever ‘degree of mixture’, Aboriginal performers initially enjoyed some status within a peripatetic circus industry. Far from concealing their employment, circus proprietors such as Ashton, Jones and several others actively celebrated their presence on their bills, if only one or two at a time. Why? A fundamental reason certainly lies in a continuation of the English circus custom of presenting a token black or mulatto performer on a circus programme. A second reason lies in the upsurge in free immi­ gration during and after the gold rush period which produced audiences for whom the sight of an Aborigine, even a ‘half-caste’, let alone one in performance, was an outright novelty, for a time at least. A third reason lies in the protective, paternalistic attitude early circus proprietors took to their young Aborigines who redressed to some extent the chronic shortage of performers.

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Identity implied, circa 1865 to circa 1900 While colonial circus proprietors continued to ‘apprentice’ and train young Aboriginal (as well as white) children as performers, they had to simultane­ ously accommodate and reflect emerging middle-class values while realizing their own pretensions to respectability and legitimacy. Furthermore, they had to address the lack of novelty in circus, a frequent cause of critical remark.53 The previously uninhibited presentation of Aborigines in circus, a polite novelty in the 1850s and the early 1860s, began to fall out of step with emerging bourgeoisie sensibilities. A defining point may have been reached in 1865 when, visiting Adelaide, Ashton presented his ‘half-caste’ perform­ ers, Master Callaghan and Combo Combo as ‘The Aboriginal Brothers’. A thorough review of colonial circus advertising shows that, thereafter, the words ‘Aboriginal’, ‘black’ or ‘half-caste’ were rarely employed for promo­ tional purposes.54 Instead, softer terms, such as ‘coloured’ or ‘Brazilian’, implied rather than confirmed the presence of Aborigines.55 The 1870s proved to be the last decade in which the presentation of Abo­ rigines in colonial circus was outwardly promoted. This section will explore how colonial circus proprietors negotiated the emerging gap between what an audience expected of a circus and what a circus could deliver now that the initial period of novelty had come to an end. One of the ‘Aboriginal Brothers’ of 1865 still travelled with Ashton as late as 1879. He performed a ‘back somersault over a nine-foot banner on a galloping horse’ at Wilcannia.56 The other ‘Aboriginal Brother’, Combo, after several years with Ashton, travelled Victoria with Barlow’s Circus in 1871 and toured Queensland with St Leon’s Royal Victoria Circus in 1876.57 That Combo was able to move between these circus troupes sug­ gests that either he was unfettered or that the services of talented Aboriginal performers were actively traded between circus proprietors, possibly for a consideration.58 Combo was long remembered as ‘one of the best riders and acrobats’ seen in the colonies.59 He was ‘taken’ from ‘the Gracemere run’ (a large pastoral station outside Rockhampton) when about 13 or 14 years old by Ashton. Did ‘taken’ mean ‘stolen’, ‘adopted’ or anything else? We know not. Combo’s end came in Brisbane in 1877 in ‘rather straitened cir­ cumstances’ when aged about 27 years.60 St Leon’s presented another Aborigine on its programme in 1876, Tony Hargreaves, better known as Master Antonio, later as ‘Tony Tony’. The St Leons promoted neither Combo nor Antonio as ‘Aboriginal’ although Anto­ nio was regularly billed as ‘The Coloured Infant Prodigy’.61 Nevertheless, inside the tent, the Aboriginality of these performers was as obvious as were their exceptional abilities. A Rockhampton journalist described Combo as ‘a coloured gentleman’.62 Described by an observer as ‘a black boy of the darkest dye’, Antonio was capable of warping and weaving his body or limbs into extraordinary shapes and forms.63

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A contemporary of Combo and Antonio was the young Aboriginal per­ former, Edward Campbell, whom Ashton presented as ‘Antonia, the Bra­ zilian [sic] horseman’ at Grafton, in 1874. ‘Antonia’ performed one of Ducrow’s most famous pieces of horsemanship, The English Fox Hunter, an act typically performed in traditional English riding costume of top hat and tails.64 The contradiction of an [apparently] swarthy ‘Brazilian’ per­ forming in traditional English riding costume does not appear to have con­ cerned outback audiences. Campbell was fatally injured while performing in Ashton’s Circus at Fernmount on the Bellinger River in 1881.65 A ‘clever and deserving young man’ who had been in Ashton’s employment for a decade, Campbell’s death cast ‘a gloom over his comrades’. He was aged 25 years.66 The most popular circus performers, like the most popular circus com­ panies, accumulated reputations over many years of performing before the public. The major Aboriginal identity in Australian circus in this era of ‘implied identity’ was unquestionably William ‘Billy’ Jones [circa 1844– 1906], the ‘Little Nugget’ of Burton’s Circus in 1851. During his lengthy colonial circus career, he appeared with almost every Australian circus of note, whether as an equestrian, juggler, acrobat, ropewalker or ringmaster. Visiting Hobart with Foley’s Californian Circus in 1866, Billy walked a rope stretched from the top of the circus pole to the Theatre Royal on the other side of Argyle Street, at a height of about 50 feet [15 metres] to the cheers of the people below.67 The performance left such an impression on specta­ tors that Billy was readily recognized by many when he next visited Hobart, in 1884, as the ringmaster of St Leon’s Circus.68 Such was his standing in circus that news of his death in Sydney in 1906 was reported as far away as New York.69 Billy Jones’ obvious Aboriginality was neither promoted nor concealed by his various employers but had been no barrier to his accept­ ance by, and popularity with, either public or profession.70 While Aboriginal performers continued to be presented in colonial cir­ cus, their presence or, more precisely, the acknowledgement of their pres­ ence, steadily diminished from the 1880s. After Edward Campbell’s death in 1881, we do not read of an Aboriginal performer in Ashton’s Circus again until 1888 when a contortionist, placed well down on the bill, toured Queensland with the company. Apart from the ubiquitous Billy Jones, the major colonial circus company in this decade, St Leon’s, did not carry any Aboriginal performers. Nor did its successor, Wirth Bros Circus, which held the position of Australia’s pre­ miere circus for half-a-dozen years until departing on a seven-year world tour in 1893. The apparently reduced reliance on Aboriginal performers during the 1880s is partly explained by the expansion of state containment, protection and control over Aboriginal people in New South Wales (the major touring area for circus in this decade); the creation in 1878 of the first Aboriginal

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reserves and missions in New South Wales; the appointment of a Protec­ tor of Aborigines in 1881; and the establishment, in 1883, of the Aborigi­ nes Protection Board by which the lives of some 9,000 Aboriginal people in New South Wales were increasingly regulated. Anecdotally at least, it would appear that most of the few Aborigines inducted into circus in the last dec­ ade before the turn of the nineteenth century were procured in Queensland. On the other hand, Australian circus was better supplied in this decade with quality international circus artists. Numbers of performers who had arrived with the large American circuses or with Japanese acrobatic troupes chose to stay behind and join local companies. Performers and troupes were increas­ ingly engaged by the large circus companies through agents dispatched over­ seas. Their engagement injected artistic novelties of their own into Australian circus and, in the case of the Japanese, cultural and ethnic novelties as well. Alick Orlandi was known in North Queensland by his native name, ‘Reka’. Probably in 1893 or 1894, he ‘left’ his tribe and joined Gus St Leon’s Palace Circus as it toured Queensland, just a few years in advance of the passage of the Aborigines Act [Queensland, 1897] which would have deprived him of his civil rights, including the freedom of movement and association.71 Aborigines at that time exhibited ‘an unhallowed desire to go into the show business wherever they could’.72 By the time the Gus St Leon circus opened in Tamworth in February 1896, Orlandi was billed as the ‘great African [sic] somersault turnover [who] throws double somersaults over 13 chairs clear­ ing 25 feet’.73 Orlandi ‘possessed a magnificent physique’ and executed this remarkable feat by launching himself from a solid block of wood. At Greta a few months later, he slipped and landed head first on the ground with a sickening thud.74 He died from his injuries soon afterwards.75

Identity denied, circa 1900 to circa 1960 We then reach a third perceived era, a period in which, although Aborigines continued to play an important and even decisive role in Australian circus, their ethnicity was to be neither outwardly celebrated nor even surrepti­ tiously implied. It was, in essence, to be denied, whether surrendered volun­ tarily or repressed by unrelenting social and market imperatives. Since we enter a period in which living memory has been accessed, we can reconstruct case studies of how and why Aborigines in circus expressed this denial.

Case study I: Ernie Gilbert Born about 1886, Ernie Gilbert was a popular Aboriginal performer in Australian circus in the early 1900s. He had grown up in the 1890s in the circus of the St Leon family with whom he served his ‘apprenticeship’. His quasi-Mediterranean complexion led to his billing as Ernie Cavour (after the

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Italian revolutionary hero) when he travelled with FitzGerald Bros Circus in 1900.76 From about 1911, Gilbert travelled with Eroni Bros Circus, con­ ducted by a branch of the Perry family, and worked for the Perry family and their cousins, the Soles, until his death in Melbourne in 1926. Interviewed in 1973, the senior circus lady, Mary Sole [1892–1975], remembering her days in Eroni Bros Circus early in the century, spoke of: an apprentice boy … a coloured [sic] boy called Ernie Gilbert.… Oh gee, he was a good performer. He was a colossal man, a good leaper, a good tumbler, a very good comedy man, and the greatest worker you could meet.… And he sort of loved circus and loved everybody around it.… We was used to having him around the show. When we were going to go to Africa, he wanted to come to Africa but you couldn’t take him in those days because they treated the coloured people terrible.… It would sort of humiliate him.… He never drank very heavily. He’d have a beer and that was about all.… He wasn’t very old [when he died].77 Although the Aborigine and the ‘half-caste’ were denied respectability in the new European world foisted upon them, they could at least find a niche among Australia’s community of free-spirited, wandering showpeople and enjoy the mutual sense of security and fraternity generated. In Sole Bros Circus in the 1920s, everyone ‘ate together and [Ernie] was like one of the family’.78 Despite official policies to concentrate Aboriginal people on sta­ tions, reserves and missions, many eventually drifted back to the lands of their birth.79 Despite a life in circus, Ernie Gilbert evidently felt the same imperative as ‘just before he died, he was talking about how he would like to find his people’.80

Case study II: Harry Cardella About 1887, the circus proprietor Dan FitzGerald ‘picked up’ a ‘little black boy’, Harry Dunn, at Ullo, on the bank of the Paroo River, near Roma.81 Did ‘picked up’ mean, as it had for Combo, ‘taken’ or did it mean ‘stolen’, ‘adopted’ or anything else? Again, we know not.82 We do know that the boy was the legitimate son of Henry Dunn, a stockman, and his wife Emily, formerly Scraggs. Harry was born at Coommilla Station in the Warrego district of Queensland in 1882.83 His father’s father, William Dunn, who arrived in New South Wales as a convict in 1818, was an African ‘Negro’. Harry’s mother’s mother was a Queensland Aboriginal woman, the concubine of a widowed white squatter, and simply known as ‘Caroline’. By 1889, Harry was performing as a bareback rider and presented in FitzGerald Bros Circus as ‘Harry Cardella’, a pseudonym that implied a Spanish ancestry but was actually the professional name

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of a famous American variety artist of the day.84 Cardella’s equestrian acts became ‘a solid feature of the gorgeous [FitzGerald] show of later years’. His Aboriginality was not actively promoted in circus advertising although it needs to be recognized that the FitzGeralds increasingly sup­ pressed even the ‘Australian-ness’ of local, non-Aboriginal performers. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the FitzGeralds catered for increasingly urbanized audiences that insisted on imported artists since ‘Australian performers were nothing, supposedly’.85 Far from home, in Rangoon in March 1906, while on tour with Tom FitzGerald’s circus, Cardella married ‘a juggler girl’ with the company, Sarah Burrell, a white Australian. Performing in circus as far afield as Algeria (Grand Cirque Nava, Algiers, January 1912) and India (Karlekar’s Circus, Jhansi, Janu­ ary 1915,) word of Cardella’s equestrian abilities reached even American vaudeville managers: [There] was only one Negro [sic] who had an equestrian act and he never played in America. He was an Australian aborigine [sic] by the name of Harry Cardello [sic], and they tell me he did a very good act.86 The Cardellas eventually returned to Australia and by 1916 Harry was working as a jockey. Sarah was disowned by many of her family for marry­ ing an Aborigine. As late as the 1960s, ‘mixed’ marriages were still frowned upon.87 The discovery of Cardella’s African strain was a surprise to his later progeny but was perhaps something of which even Cardella was unaware, having been ‘picked up’ at such a young age.88

Case study III: Bob West Robert Benjamin Sooby (circa 1848–1949) the son of a London cab pro­ prietor landed in Australia in the 1860s as a 14-year-old. According to family lore, a liaison with a ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal woman, possibly named Charlotte Smith, led to the birth of a son at Maitland, in or about 1881.89 Although Sooby raised the boy as his own, his Aboriginal son was no longer welcomed when Sooby sought to marry a white woman. At Gunnedah, in or about 1891, Sooby ‘apprenticed’ his son to West Bros Circus conducted by an Englishman, Adam West. From the Wests, the young Bob learned every­ thing about circus and became ‘a fairly good rider’.90 Just as Billy Jones had adopted his mentor’s surname, Bob adopted the name of West as his own.91 Although light-skinned, his mixed racial origins were obvious and, in the recollections of one old Australian circus man, he ‘had a bit of dark blood in him’.92 Bob West did not learn to read or write properly. Visiting Nar­ rabri with Foley’s Circus in 1906, he was described as ‘a most daring horse­ man’ who ‘delighted the audience’ with his bareback riding.93 By November

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1908, West had taken to the road with his own circus, also called West Bros Circus. There is no earlier example of a circus conducted by an Aboriginal person. At Wentworth that month, he claimed to have ‘the largest circular tent in Australia … brilliantly illuminated with gas jets’.94 Something of a ‘canvas Casanova’, Bob’s first marriage in 1903 to Lucy O’Neill, a costume maker in FitzGerald Bros Circus, produced two children, Rita, born in 1904, and Louise in 1914. His mentor, Adam West, was a wit­ ness to the marriage. This marriage ended in divorce in 1923. His second marriage to Mary Davenport, the daughter of a Melbourne boot maker, whom he married at Wilcannia in 1928, produced nine children.95 In the summer of 1934–5, Bob and Mary West and their children comprised the last circus to traverse the Nullarbor Plain by wagons, with horses, don­ keys and mules. The crossing from Ceduna to Norseman took three and a half weeks. The family spent about three years travelling Western Australia before returning to South Australia by the overland route. The circus gave its last performance at Martin’s Creek near Maitland in May 1939.96 The family settled at West Tamworth where Bob died in 1943.97 His younger children attended school ‘as soon as we settled down’ for, although illiterate, a good education was ‘the one thing Dad wanted us to have’. In the flavour of the times, West appeared to ‘resent’ his Aboriginality and concealed his true ethnicity from his children, telling them they had ‘Spanish blood’. Some of his younger children, none the wiser, only found out about the ‘Aboriginal thing’ from Bob’s widow Mary shortly before she died in 1988.98

Case study IV: Con Colleano Near the end of the nineteenth century, Cornelius ‘Con’ Sullivan was a boxer and an itinerant boxing troupe showman. He hired young boxers in the cities to stand on his line-up boards at country shows and take on any challengers. At Narrabri on 31 October 1894, Sullivan married 16-year-old Julia Vetreal Robertson [or ‘Robinson’].99 She was the daughter of William Robertson, a shearer and a native of the island of St Thomas in the West Indies (now one of the Virgin Islands) and his wife Julia, nee Saunders, a ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal woman and a native of Wee Waa.100 The marriage produced four boys (Bonar, Con, Maurice and Lindsay) and six girls (Winnie, Kate, May, Coral, Joyce and Victoria) As near as we can gather, the children were effec­ tively five-eighth white, one-quarter West Indian and one-eighth Aboriginal. Despite this relatively low strain of Aboriginality, there can be little doubt as to the family’s Aboriginal orientation given the wider family associations and the regular visitations to Narrabri on the one hand and the methodical concealment of their Aboriginality on the other. At Lismore in December 1899 the Sullivans’ third and most fame-destined child was born, known, like his father, as ‘Con’.101

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The family settled at Lightning Ridge, 1907–10, where the growing chil­ dren received some schooling and learnt basic circus skills. The children ‘didn’t have a marvellous education but they could all read and write and add up’.102 The preponderance of girls in the family nullified any plans that Con Sullivan had to continue in the boxing business: a circus could gain­ fully employ both genders but not a boxing troupe. Late in 1910, the family commenced travelling northern New South Wales with its circus.103 The professional name of ‘Collino’ (later spelt ‘Colleano’) was adopted, a pseu­ donym possibly inspired by an American troupe of acrobats, The Kellino [sic] Family, which visited Australia in 1897.104 While it was by no means unusual for Australian circus people to replace a prosaically common name with a seemingly exotic one, the Sullivans’ choice of this Latin sounding name was especially poignant as it capitalized on, and conveniently camou­ flaged, the swarthy appearance of the Sullivan children. By late 1912, the young Con Colleano, 13 years of age, and an older brother were performing as accomplished acrobats and ropewalkers.105 The Colleano family travelled with a large outback circus, Eroni Bros Circus (conducted by the Perry family during the years 1914–15) where the family members further refined their circus skills. When the Colleano boys were not performing in the circus ring, they boxed in their father’s sideshow out­ side the circus. Interviewed in 1987, George Perry [circa 1896 to circa 1989] recalled how ‘young Con’ was billed as ‘The Boy Wonder’ taking on allcomers up to 15 years of age.106

Figure 12.1 Con Colleano circa 1922–3 in Australia.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Mark St Leon from his personal collection.

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Sufficiently capitalized with circus skills and experience, the family re­ formed its own circus and started out from Winton in Central Queensland with ‘just a few wagons and horses’, probably in the spring of 1915.107 Members of the Matthews family, Aboriginal cousins of the Colleanos, also took roles in the circus. As was customary in Australian provincial cir­ cus, family members filled multiple roles in the ring performance to reduce the reliance on employed artists. This necessitated the artificial inflation of the size of the company through illusion: the circus advertising was pep­ pered with the various sub-pseudonyms under which the family members worked in the ring such as ‘The Royal Hawaiians’ (Bonar, Winnie, Con, Kate and Maurice Colleano) as acrobats, ‘Senorita Sanchez’ (Winnie Col­ leano) as a trapeze artist, Zeneto (Con Colleano) as a wirewalker, The ‘Marasetta Sisters’ (Winnie and Kate Colleano) as a double trapeze act and ‘Miss Katherine’ (Kate Colleano) as a rider.108 None of these names, of course, implied anything ‘Aboriginal’ and the illusion created of a cir­ cus replete with foreign exotica addressed to some extent the Australian public’s insatiable demand for the imported artists over the local product. A few years earlier, the Sydney magazine, The Theatre, had lamented the tendency of Australian audiences to pay ‘outsiders more for giving them less’ as well as the theatrical managers who grovelled ‘to cater to these un-Australian Australians’ instead of developing domestic talent.109 The billing of ‘The Royal Hawaiians’, which was consistently used in the Col­ leano circus advertising in the approximate period 1916–20, was borrowed from a genuine troupe of Hawaiian singers and dancers which had visited Australia a few years earlier.110 The appearance of so many Aboriginal girls in Colleano’s All-Star Circus, as it soon became known, was in itself striking. Of the Aborigines and half-castes known to have performed in Australian circus up until this time, none were female. The written and spoken records do not reveal why circus proprietors failed to ‘apprentice’ or ‘adopt’ Aboriginal girls or young Aboriginal women. Suitably proportioned females (whatever their ethnicity) were in such short supply in Australian circus that the more slender young male performers often dressed in drag to impersonate equestriennes and trapeziennes to satiate audience demand in this regard.111 While protective reserve managers and missionaries probably dissuaded girls from joining these morally dangerous institutions and save them for lives of domestic service, such measures would not explain the fate of abandoned ‘half-caste’ girls found beyond the reserves and missions. The show business trade magazines published in this era (such as The Theatre, Australian Variety, and The Hawklet as well as the country newspapers consistently praised the Colleano programme and the fam­ ily’s progress. In the growing esteem in which both public and profession held the Colleanos, any hint of the family’s Aboriginality was conveniently

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overlooked. The country people could not fail to be impressed by any cir­ cus which, from 1918, was conveyed by rail, carried a band of 14 musi­ cians, a steam traction engine and its own electric lighting plant.112 If any of Australia’s journalists knew of, or suspected, the family’s Aboriginal origins, and it is hard to imagine that they did not, these scribes remained silent on the matter. Within Australia’s community of circus people on the other hand, the family was unequivocally remembered as ‘Aboriginal’. As George Perry said ‘They was all good people … but people didn’t treat them as Aborigines’.113 The feet-to-feet forward somersault on a tightwire is one of the most difficult and dangerous feats in circus performance because, as he tucks his head and turns his forward somersault, the performer loses sight of the wire which his feet have to find sight unaided. The perfection of this supreme feat took Con Colleano about five years of experimentation. At practice in Sydney in 1919, he brought off his first forward somersault, possibly the first time the feat had ever been achieved on a wire (as distinct from a rope) and probably the first time by anyone since the renowned Billy Banham.114 But even Con’s (only somewhat easier) ‘back’ somersault on the wire was enough to cause the Governor of South Australia and his wife to rise from their seats in the circus audience one Friday evening in Adelaide in 1921. They rushed to ‘personally congratulate’ Con after his performance.115 Rising rail costs forced the closure of Colleano’s All-Star Circus early in 1923. The Fuller vaudeville circuit and then the rival Tivoli circuit soon engaged the family.116 Each circuit was comprised of vaudeville theatres in the major cities of Australia and New Zealand. As contemporary publicity shows, neither circuit actively promoted the Colleano family’s Aboriginality. Indeed, the Tivoli management presented the eight acrobats of the family in Arabian costume, implying that they were an imported act.117 Con Col­ leano, dressed in tails, was paid the extraordinary salary of £60 per week for his solo tightwire performance – in an era when the most capable local circus artists received only £5 per week.118 The magazine The Theatre made the following observation of Con Colleano’s act at Fuller’s Sydney theatre in May 1923: Colleano’s dancing on the slackwire at Fuller’s Theatre is the pretti­ est thing to watch. His small feet twinkle gracefully in pirouette and entrechat alighting always on the wire with an effortless sureness that disguises the difficulty of the act … Colleano’s dressing is admirable. His slim figure and almost Italian [sic] darkness of face and hair are fittingly set off by the white satin suite.… His forward somersault is his star act.119

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Late in 1923, the Colleano family (Figure 12.2) left Australia for vaudeville engagements in South Africa, England and the United States (Figure 12.3). In September 1924, Con Colleano made a successful American debut at the New York Hippodrome.120 In 1925, he secured an engagement with America’s largest circus, Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey’s Combined Shows. With a nod to the silent screen hit of Blood and Sand and its swarthy bullfighter hero, Rudolf Valentino, Colleano had by then incorporated the pseudo-Spanish bullfighting ambiance that remained the trade mark of his act for the rest of his career. While at first promoted to the American public as ‘the Australian wizard of the wire’, the novelty value of ‘Australian’ soon evaporated. By the early 1930s, he was heralded in the Ringling publicity as a ‘caballero … from a famous Spanish family of circus performers’, while his Aboriginal mother was ‘a Spanish dancer whose parents had come from Las Palmas’.121 With Ringling’s in 1933, Con Colleano drew a weekly sal­ ary of US$375 – about £150 – and other benefits, such as his own apart­ ment on the circus train, a remuneration package well in excess of any other performer in the circus.122 In Germany in the 1934, Colleano performed before enthusiastic audiences, Adolf Hitler among them, as the ‘Mexican [sic] tightwire wonder’.123 As the lucrative American and European circus, vaudeville and fair cir­ cuits kept the various members of the Colleano family in regular employ­ ment throughout the 1920s and 1930s, news of their activities receded from

Figure 12.2 Con Colleano, with his wife, formerly known as Winnie Trevail the vaudeville singer and dancer, circa 1930 in USA or Europe. Source: Photograph courtesy of Mark St Leon from his personal collection.

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Figure 12.3 Con Colleano, circa 1936 in USA or Europe.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Mark St Leon from his personal collection.

Australian trade magazines. Con Colleano gave the final performance of his career in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1960 and died in Miami, Florida, in 1973. Neither milestone came to the attention of the Australian press. The Colleanos did not openly espouse their Aboriginality and freely allowed the publicity machines of various American and European circuses and theatre circuits to promote them as ‘Spaniard’ or ‘Mexican’. While Con Colleano never privately referred to himself as a Spaniard, he never publicly referred to himself as an Aborigine, although he was certainly aware of the fact. Such misinformation permitted the Colleanos to enjoy privileges that otherwise might have been denied them. For example, Con Colleano was issued a Reichspass [passport] allowing him to freely enter and depart Nazi Germany.124 He was able to assume American citizenship in 1950 (calling himself ‘white’ on the citizenship document), although full citizenship rights were not extended to Aborigines at home until the passage of reforming Federal and State legislation in the 1960s.125 During an abortive attempt to retire to Australia in 1956–7, Con Colleano briefly held a publican’s license for a hotel at Forbes, although the sale of alcohol to Aborigines in New South Wales was not legalized until 1963.126

Summary While Aboriginal performers made a valuable contribution to Australian circus, both as performers and supernumeraries, they were not represented in large numbers. The number of known individual Aboriginal performers at any one time fluctuated between only two and six, before their num­ bers were materially boosted by the emergence of the Colleano and West

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families. As there were as many as 2,000 circus performers active over this period and at least several hundred active at any one time by the first decade of the twentieth century, the proportion of Aboriginal performers was by no means large, perhaps between 2 per cent and 5 per cent of all active per­ formers throughout Australia, and roughly consistent with the proportion of Aborigines in the total population.127 It must be conceded however that there were probably more Aboriginal performers who were not identified in any explicit way but concealed under misleading pseudonyms or not even identified in the circus advertising.

Others Other significant Aboriginal performers uncovered in the course of research include the acrobat, George MacKay, noted as early as 1897 with Eroni Bros Circus and as late as 1918 with Sole & Perry Bros Circus;128 the roughrider, Billy Jonas, noted with Martini’s Buckjumping Show in 1910; and the whip cracker, Billy Waite, also noted with Martini’s in the years 1902–6 and, from 1912, in American circus and vaudeville.129 Jonas and Waite were representatives of Aboriginal men who had worked in the pastoral industry and who then commercialized their skills with whip, horse and bullock by joining rodeos and carnivals.130

Boxing tents Boxing tent shows were not circus but they were an associated form of enter­ tainment, albeit a sport-based one. Broome perceives the boxing shows as ‘theatres of power’ where Aboriginal boxers, both victims and agents of pre­ vailing racial stereotypes, could generate and amplify ambivalent attitudes towards Aborigines among white audiences. By following ‘predetermined scripts’ in dramatic cross-cultural confrontations with non-Aborigines, the boxers positively contributed to the fashioning of Aboriginal self-esteem and identity.131 Could similar remarks be said of Aborigines in circus? Broome dates the rise of the boxing tent shows from about 1910 – my research suggests that they were active 20 years earlier – by which time the circus Aborigines had already entered an era of identity denial, as I have outlined above. In the boxing tent shows, denial of identity was neither visually possible nor commercially desirable, for the boxing show managers specifically hired ‘dark-skinned’ and ‘wild looking blokes’ in order to elicit stereotypical responses amongst whites and generate inter-racial contests.132 In circus, however, denial of Aboriginal identity was not only visually possi­ ble through illusion, fiction and ambiance, by the use of make-up, costumes, pseudonyms, lighting and billings but it was also commercially desirable (since ‘blacks’ in performance, even if tolerated, were no longer the novelty and cause for celebration they had once been).

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Sideshows To circus people, sideshows were a lesser and inferior form of entertain­ ment and more closely associated with the agricultural show circuit than specifically with circus. Although circus and sideshows were often found in each other’s company on the showgrounds, and some circus companies even sponsored their own sideshows, the two genres of entertainment were rarely managed to their mutual benefit. On American circus lots, on the other hand, America’s more entrepreneurially minded circus proprietors leased an elaborate ‘midway’ of sideshow ‘privileges’ to claim the attention of circus­ goers as they made their way to and from the main circus tent. One sideshow to be seen on American circus lots in 1884 was P.T. Barnum’s ‘Grand Ethnological Congress of Nations’ which included a highly publicized troupe of ‘Australian cannibal [sic] boomerang throwers’.133 These and other Australian Aborigines (as well as other ‘exotic’ examples of humanity) were procured and toured by promoters throughout the United States and Europe as sideshow curiosities in the late nineteenth century.134 To describe the Aborigines in these exhibitions as ‘circus performers’, as Broome has done, is misleading.135 However banal the nature of their exhibi­ tions, these troupes were essentially educating American and European audi­ ences in aspects of Aboriginal life and culture. As far as the record speaks, Aboriginal performers in circus in Australia in any era appeared and per­ formed as directed by their white masters and mentors and not as the exhi­ bitional relicts of Aboriginal life and culture. In any case, the commercial exhibition of Aboriginal life and culture in Australian theatre, circus or side­ show, was almost unknown. In an extensive listing of some 10,000 Austral­ ian show dates and locations over the period 1833–1969, the presentation of an ‘Aboriginal Corroboree’ at the Royal Polytechnic Bazaar in Hobart in 1862 is the only Aboriginal event of a theatrical nature listed.136 In Australia, sideshows were not systematically organized until the emer­ gence of the agricultural show circuit of the 1880s.137 By this time, as dis­ cussed earlier, Aborigines were segregated and relegated to reserves or the edges of country towns. The rationale for the agricultural shows was to diffuse farming knowledge. The ‘country gentry’, who now dominated the agricultural show societies, looked askance at sideshows and showpeople in general, and would not have tolerated sideshows that celebrated a down­ trodden people.

Circus hands The circus hands were the lowest in the hierarchy of any circus community. Nevertheless, they could include ‘men of family and education’ as well as ‘men of neither’.138 The working men of FitzGerald Bros Circus in 1905 were ‘the customary queer composite of races and classes’ and included

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Germans, Maoris, Japanese and Malays.139 Within the community of the circus however, stigma on the grounds of race was non-existent. There are a few recorded instances, and probably far many more unre­ corded, of Aborigines employed as useful hands in circus. Recalling his days as a boy in Gus St Leon’s United Circus, a large horse-drawn circus in the period 1915–20, the veteran circus man Mervyn King [1908–2003] spoke of the Aboriginal working men employed around the circus: [The] circus in those days didn’t employ many Aboriginal boys because they wasn’t allowed to move around so much was one reason. Another reason was that the average person would think you were only after cheap labour.… Later – with Wirth’s [Circus] – they’d come into town with about 20 Aboriginals [sic] in the show.… The difficulty with circus is that you are under observation 24 hours a day.140 The central thrust of the comprehensive Aborigines Protection Act [NSW, 1909] was to drive as many Aborigines as possible into the white commu­ nity. King’s statement that Aboriginal people ‘were not allowed to move around so much’ may have been based on the more restrictive situation that existed prior to the 1909 Act. He may also have been describing the situation as it existed at that time in Queensland (where, after New South Wales, the Gus St Leon circus mostly travelled, since the Aborigi­ nal Act [Queensland, 1897] controlled, inter alia, the Aborigines’ freedom of movement.141

Conclusion Although few in number, the Aborigine and the person of Aboriginal descent made meaningful contributions to professional circus activity in Australia from the earliest times, finding in circus an accommodation with the white man that could not be found elsewhere. Within this world, it was possible to find something approaching equality, security and esteem, and a medium through which to meaningfully engage with white society rather than remain relegated to its fringe. Yet, these benefits attracted a penalty as access was gained to a company of people who were also nomadic and marginalized and who, for centuries, had been ranked at the lower end of the social scale in stratified English society. In adopting the values and customs of these white, marginalized itinerant entertainers, the Aborigines in circus progressively fell in step with people who craved their own legitimacy in the face of new, emerging society norms, values and expectations. If white society progressively degraded Aboriginal identity, there was no point in trying to save and perpetuate that identity in circus.

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If time, travel and distance progressively opened the circus Aborigine’s eyes to the white man’s world, it progressively closed them to his own. Unintentionally, the Aborigine in circus contributed to the destruction of Aboriginal identity. Although the transition was by no means an even one, Burton’s ‘Lit­ tle Nugget’ of 1851 – the barefooted, half-caste outback urchin whose Aboriginality was celebrated had metamorphosed by 1925 into Ringling’s ‘Australian Wizard of the Wire’ – the handsome octoroon cosmopolitan whose Aboriginality was cunningly obscured to satisfy the cynical commer­ cial and political imperatives of international show business.

Notes 1 Arthur H. Saxon (1978), The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow and The Romantic Age of English Circus (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books), 147–48. 2 Saxon (1978), Andrew Ducrow, 332–33; John M. Turner (2003), ‘Pablo Fanque, Black Circus Proprietor’, in Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (ed.), Black Victorians, Black Victoriana (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 20. 3 John Ramsland and Mark St Leon (1993), Circus Children: The Australian Experience (Springwood, NSW: Butterfly Books), 6. 4 Richard Broome (1995), ‘Enduring Moments of Aboriginal Dominance: Aboriginal Performers, Boxers and Runners’, Labour History, 69 (November), 171.

5 Sydney Morning Herald, 16 December 1833.

6 Moreton Bay Courier, 1 May 1847.

7 Moreton Bay Courier, 29 May 1847.

8 Sydney Gazette, 21 August 1841; Sydney Herald, 26 January 1842.

9 Cornwall Chronicle, 29 December 1847.

10 R. Max Hartwell (1954), The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land, 1820–50 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press), 63. 11 Sydney Morning Herald, 15 October 1850; South Australian Register, 18 October 1850; Benalla Standard, 14 November 1879. 12 Sydney Sportsman, 8 January 1908. 13 Age, 2 January 1855. 14 Turner (2003) in Gerzina, Black Victorians, 99. 15 Age, 23 January 1855. In the vernacular of the day, the term ‘first’ meant ‘pre­ miere’ or ‘outstanding’. 16 Goulburn Herald, 3 January 1852. 17 Sydney Morning Herald, 30 November 1850; New York Times, 17 February 1881. 18 Mervyn King, unpublished transcript of interview by Mark St Leon for the Oral History and Folklore Program, National Library of Australia (Sydney, 1989). 19 Richard Broome (2001), Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance (Sydney: Allen & Unwin), 95.

20 Broome (2001), Aboriginal Australians, 59.

21 Henry Reynolds (2005), Nowhere People (Sydney: Penguin Books), 102–3.

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22 Michael Cannon (1973), Australia in the Victorian Age, Vol. II: Life in the Country (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia), 66; Reynolds (2005), Nowhere People, 106, 110–11. 23 Queanbeyan Age, 5 February 1863; Maitland Mercury, 31 March 1863. 24 Sydney Morning Herald, 25 February 1851. See also Note 48. 25 Broome (2001), Aboriginal Australians, 95. 26 Robert C. Petersen (2011), ‘Instructing the Indians at Botany Bay’, Aboriginal History, 24 (January): 132–40. 27 Wray Vamplew and Brian Stoddart (eds) (1994), Sport in Australia: A Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 10. 28 Reynolds (2005), Nowhere People, 110. 29 Salmon, ‘An Old-Time Circus’, Australian Town and Country Journal, 3 August 1904. 30 Bathurst Free Press, 6 August 1851. 31 Registrar-General, New South Wales, Deaths, 1906: #7920: William Jones; Mark Valentine St Leon (2005), Jones, Billy, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press), 207–8. 32 Bathurst Free Press, 25 October 1851. In 1865, Jones adopted the nom d’arena of ‘St Leon’. 33 Bulletin, 9 March 1895. 34 Sydney Morning Herald, 19 May 1852. The name ‘Parello Frank’ may have been derived from ‘Pablo Fanque’, the pseudonym of William Darby, a famous black British circus artist of the day. 35 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1852. 36 Argus, 11 October 1852. 37 Geelong Advertiser, 1 December 1852; Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 22 December 1877. 38 Geelong Advertiser, 7 February 1853. 39 Goulburn Herald, 20 October 1855. 40 Argus, 21 November 1855. 41 Mudgee Liberal, 6, 13 July 1858. 42 Adelong Mining Journal, 16 October 1858; Wagga Wagga Express, 9 July 1859. 43 Goulburn Herald, 12 November 1853; Illustrated Sydney News, 6 May 1854, 23 June 1855; Bathurst Free Press, 13 January 1855. See also: Sydney Morning Herald, 10 June 1852 for mention of a ‘Master Mungo’ [sic] performing in Noble’s Olympic Circus. 44 Illustrated Sydney News, 6 May 1854. 45 Illustrated Sydney News, 23 June 1855. 46 Illawarra Mercury, 7 July 1856; Registrar-General, New South Wales, Deaths, 1856: #3234, Mongo. 47 George Wirth (1925), Round the World with a Circus (Melbourne: Troedel and Cooper Pty Ltd), 9–10; George Wirth, ‘Under the Big Top’, Life, 15 June 1933; Bulletin, circa 1900. 48 Ararat and Pleasant Creek Advertiser, 23 January 1858; Albury Border Post, 20 May 1858. Further details of Alkanna were found after the original publi­ cation of this article in Aboriginal History. According to a report in the South Australian Register, 7 September 1852, the original name of ‘Alkanna’ was Tetaree. He was taken to Scotland about 1845 by a man named Oliphant and given the name of ‘James Alexander’, later abbreviated to ‘Alkanna’. Alkanna was ‘employed for some time as a performer in Franconi’s Circus in Edinburgh’

Celebrated, implied but finally denied

49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

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and returned to Moreton Bay in 1852. Therefore, Alkanna, not Burton’s ‘Indian’ or ‘Little Nugget’ of 1851, may have been the first Aboriginal performer seen in the European performing arts. Kristy Thinee and Tracy Bradford (1998), Connecting Kin: A Guide to Help People Separated from their Family Search for their Records (Sydney: Department of Community Services). Michael Cannon (1971), Australia in the Victorian Age, Vol. I: Who’s Master? Who’s Man? (South Melbourne: Currey O’Neil), 210–11. Eric Irvin (1985), Dictionary of the Australian Theatre, 1788–1914 (Sydney: Hale and Iremonger), 173, 277–80; Argus 14 April 1857. Peter Burke (1994), Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldgate: Ashgate Publishing), 97. Australian Town and Country Journal, 19 June 1875; Newcastle Morning Herald, 4 November 1878. Register, 27 March 1865. News [Shoalhaven, NSW], 3 July 1875; Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 7 July 1874. Wilcannia Times, 24 July 1879. Ovens and Murray Advertiser, 1 August 1871; Northern Argus, 25 April 1876; J. Grant Pattison (1939), ‘Battler’ Tales of Early Rockhampton (Melbourne: Fraser and Jenkenson), 89. According to a report in the Illawarra Mercury, 7 July 1856, Ashton allowed Mongo to travel to the Peel River to visit his parents after which Mongo volun­ tarily returned to Ashton’s service. Wirth (1925), Round the World with a Circus, 9–10. Daily Northern Argus, 10 October 1876; Uralla and Walcha Times, 21 July 1877. News [Shoalhaven, NSW], 3 July 1875. St Leon’s ‘Master Antonio’ was, pre­ sumably, a different identity to Ashton’s ‘Master Antonia’ of the same era. Northern Argus, 1 May 1876. Illawarra Mercury, 20 August 1875; Maryborough and Dunolly Advertiser, 10 February 1879. Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 7 July 1874. Frank Jones, letter to John D. Fitzerald filed in FitzGerald Papers, MLMSQ285, Mitchell Library. Registrar-General, New South Wales, Deaths, 1881: #8354, Edward Campbell; Bulletin, 23 July 1881; New South Wales Government Gazette, 1881/4, 5782. Mercury, 7 June 1866. Mercury, 14 February 1884. New York Clipper, 15 September 1906. Bulletin, 23 May 1896. Richard Broome with Alex Jackomos (1998), Sideshow Alley (Sydney: Allen & Unwin), 167–68. Bulletin, 10 October 1896. Tamworth News, 11 February 1896. Newcastle Morning Herald, 17 August 1896. Armidale Chronicle, 26 August 1896. Sydney Morning Herald, 8 September 1900. Mary Sole Lindsay in Mark St Leon (1984), Australian Circus Reminiscences (Sydney: The author), 119. Lindsay in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 119.

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79 John Mulvaney and Rex Harcourt (1988), Cricket Walkabout (South Melbourne: Macmillan), 156. 80 Lindsay in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 119. 81 Bulletin, 26 November 1892. 82 Wendy Holland (1999), ‘Reimagining Aboriginality in the Circus Space’, Journal of Popular Culture, 33(1) (Fall): 102. 83 Registrar-General, Queensland, Births, 1882: #4342, Henry Dunn. 84 The name was often spelt as ‘Cardello’ in circus advertising. 85 Madge Seymour, unpublished transcript of interview with Mark St Leon, Brisbane, 1988. 86 Joe Laurie Jr. (1953), Vaudeville: From the Honky Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt & Co), 160. In the United States and Europe, many vaude­ ville and theatre stages, unlike those in Australia, were sufficiently large and strong to support circus-style equestrian acts. 87 Holland (1999), ‘Reimagining Aboriginality’, 102.

88 Holland (1999), ‘Reimagining Aboriginality’, 94.

89 Philip West (2002), The Last Horse and Wagon Circus Family: The Australian

Traveller (Macksville, NSW: Bookbound Publishing), 1. 90 Lindsay in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 117. 91 Kitty West Gill, notes from telephone conversation with Mark St Leon, 25 May 2008. 92 Mervyn King in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 265. 93 Narrabri Age, 20 July 1906. West’s connection with Narrabri, as stated in this report, differs from the family recollection of a Maitland birthplace. Nevertheless, such a link could support the claim, as yet unverified, that West was a cousin to the Colleanos, the famous Aboriginal circus family which emerged from Narrabri in this period. 94 Federal Standard, 25 November 1908. 95 Registrar-General, New South Wales, Marriages, 1903: #564, Robert West Sooby and Lucinda O’Neil. 96 North Shore Times, 4 March 1987; West (2002), Last Horse and Wagon Circus Family, 147. 97 Registrar-General, New South Wales, Deaths, 1943: #13400, Robert West Sooby. 98 West (2002), Last Horse and Wagon Circus Family, 153; King in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 265. 99 Registrar-General, New South Wales, Births, 1878: #17526, Julia Robinson; Registrar-General, New South Wales, Marriages, 1894: #5188, Cornelius Sullivan and Julia Robinson. 100 The presence of a West Indian in the Australian backblocks intrigues. Robertson may have been a seaman who jumped ship and made his way into the obscurity of the outback. 101 Registrar-General, New South Wales, Births, 1900: #4386, Cornelius Sullivan. 102 Eric Trevail, unpublished transcript of interview with Mark St Leon, Sydney, 1987. 103 Warialda Standard, 28 November 1910. 104 Sydney Morning Herald, 24 December 1897. 105 Hillston Spectator, 14 December 1912. 106 George Perry [‘Eroni’], unpublished transcript of interview with Mark St Leon, Melbourne, 1987. 107 Gill in St Leon, Reminiscences, 100. 108 Western Star, 10 February 1917.

Celebrated, implied but finally denied 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141

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Theatre, 1 February 1909. Sydney Morning Herald, 3 April 1911. Pattison (1939),Early Rockhampton, 91. Western Star, 10 February 1917; Australian Variety, 11 October 1918. Perry, interview, 1987. Daily Mirror, 3 September 1979. Everyone’s, 4 January 1922. Everyone’s, 14, 21 March 1923. Theatre, 2 April 1923. Winifred Colleano in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 205. Theatre, 1 May 1923. Variety, 1 October 1924. Frances Beverley Kelley (1931), ‘The Land of Spangles and Sawdust’, National Geographic, 60(4), October. Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows: Payroll Manifest, 1933. Scala Theater, Program (Berlin: Scala Theater, December 1934), 10–11, 20; Colleano in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 213. Pix, 29 January 1938. Broome (2001), Aboriginal Australians, 182. Forbes Advocate, 6 July 1956. Wray Vamplew (ed.) (1987), Australians: Historical Statistics (Sydney: Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates), 4. Newcastle Morning Herald, 27 December 1897; Richmond River Herald, 27 June 1918; Everyone’s, 7 June 1922. Narracoorte Herald, 30 March 1906; Peoria Herald Tribune, 24 April 1912; New York Clipper, 4 May 1912; Variety, 4 August 1922, 25 November 1925. Broome (1995), ‘Enduring Moments of Aboriginal Dominance’, 173. Richard Broome (1996), ‘Theatres of Power: Tent Boxing Circa 1910–1970’, Aboriginal History, 20(2): 17. Broome (1995), ‘Enduring Moments’, 175; Broome (1996), ‘Theatres of Power’, 17. For earlier (but ambiguous) reports of ‘Aborigines’ in American circus, see New York Clipper, 14 April 1860 and 26 October 1872. For a comprehensive study of Aborigines exhibited in the sideshows of American circus and in Europe, see Roslyn Poignant (2004), Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (New Haven: Yale University Press). Mount Barker Courier, 23 February 1883. Broome (1995), ‘Enduring Moments’, 173. Mercury, 3 May 1862; Mark St Leon (2005a), Circus in Australia, Volume II: Index of Show Movements, 1833–1969 (Sydney: The Author). Broome with Jackomos (1998), Sideshow Alley, 22–3. Mervyn King, unpublished transcript of interview by Mark St Leon for the Oral History and Folklore Program, National Library of Australia (Sydney, 1988). ‘Te Whero’ [pseud.], ‘A Morning in a Circus Tent: Behind the Scenes at FitzGerald’s Show’, Sydney Mail, 26 April 1905, 1056. King in St Leon (1984), Reminiscences, 253, 277. Broome with Jackomos (1998), Sideshow Alley, 167–8.

Sideshows

Chapter 13

Freaks of culture Institutions, publics and the subjects of ethnographic knowledge Rachel Adams

Few visitors to the Bronx Zoo stop to look at the old Monkey House, which now stands dark and empty off to the side of the park’s main thoroughfare. A sign attached to the cages announces that their simian occupants have been moved to more contemporary, naturalistic habitats. It does not men­ tion that perhaps the most disturbing chapter in the zoo’s history took place on that very spot, an episode the New York Zoological Society would very much like to erase from memory. In September 1906, Ota Benga, a Batwa Pygmy from Central Africa, became the Bronx Zoo’s most sensational attraction when he was displayed in the Monkey House with an orangutan named Dohong. In contrast to the zoo’s dusty cages, so unrevealing about their unsavory history, the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of Califor­ nia, Berkeley, has been unable to repress the traces of similar events in its own past. A Yahi Indian from Northern California, known as Ishi, or “the last Stone Age man,” brought unprecedented crowds when he was exhib­ ited there from 1911 to 1915. The current museum staff hopes to put their limited space to other uses, but the Ishi exhibit remains so popular that they have been unable to retire it. The zoo and the anthropology museum—the former mute about its trans­ gressions, the latter openly self-critical—are unlikely spaces to begin a chap­ ter about freak shows, which we tend to associate with the most degraded zones of popular culture. Nonetheless, each briefly presented a living human specimen who, like the freaks found at sideshows, carnivals, and dime muse­ ums, drew crowds simply because he was the only one of his kind. Thus, for a short time the nation’s grand civilizing institutions unwittingly engaged with the sensational, profit-driven mode of the freak show. This writing looks at the debates over racial classification, institutional authority, and the politics of class resentment that converged around the African and the Native American when they were represented as ethnographic freaks. The controversies they aroused concerned not only questions of racial defini­ tion, but also the relationship of scientists, intellectuals, and showmen to

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the institutions and publics they claimed to serve. Two men who could hardly have been more culturally or geographically remote, their lives took strikingly parallel courses because each was the last known survivor of his people, brought into sudden contact with Western civilization through the violent consequences of progress. The great public institutions erected in America during the nineteenth century were conceived as monuments to the accomplishments and poten­ tial of a nation poised to become a global power. Defining themselves against the disorderly clutter of popular entertainment, institutions such as museums, parks, and zoos sought to enlighten their visitors through the strict organization of space and regulation of behavior. How the rise of these institutions, and the epistemological and disciplinary changes they introduced, impacted the exhibition of human specimens is a significant and largely unexamined episode in the history of the freak show. Cultural insti­ tutions are an important, if counterintuitive, place to inaugurate this study because the distinctions they encouraged set the stage for ongoing antago­ nisms between the professional and the amateur, education and amusement, high and low aesthetic forms that figured prominently in the representation of freaks throughout the twentieth century. Freak shows of the nineteenth century brought together a hybrid cast of performers that included the physically or mentally disabled, natives from non-Western countries, and persons with unusual talents. Knowledge about these varied curiosities, once indiscriminately categorized as freaks, would eventually condense into the fields of anthropology, medicine, and human biology. But the first freak shows, visited by patrons from across the class spectrum, benefited from an atmosphere in which elite and popular culture were less segregated, and academic knowledge less clearly partitioned into discrete disciplines. The subsequent emergence of an institutional culture in the United States had particularly wide-ranging consequences for the com­ mon practice of displaying people of color as freaks. The racial economy of these exhibitions, premised on the interchangeability of dark bodies, is aptly summarized in the 1936 memoir of press agent Dexter Fellows: “The Bor­ neo aborigines, the head-hunters, the Ubangis, and the Somalis were all clas­ sified as freaks. From the standpoint of the showman the fact that they were different put them in the category of human oddities.”1 While this statement attests to a colonial mentality that assumes the inferiority of all nonwhite people, it also bespeaks the showman’s disregard for the categorical subtle­ ties so important to the sciences of racial measurement and classification.2 As the scientific professional and the entertainer sought authority over the exhibition of ethnographic freaks, their divergent styles would increasingly come into conflict. The community leaders, scientists, and entertainers who claimed to speak on behalf of Ota Benga and Ishi clashed over who was best qualified to

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represent each stranger to the audiences clamoring to see him. The con­ vergences in these stories remind us that they flow from similar national fantasies. National fantasies, as Lauren Berlant describes them, are the imaginative counterparts to the juridical identity of the nation-state; var­ ied and particular, they are the symbolic narrative framework that invests official fictions of social and political unity with meaning.3 Ishi and Ota Benga are the products of such fantasies about “America” and its expanding global presence at the century’s turn. Exhibited in New York and San Fran­ cisco, these men were viewed by spectators whose heterogeneity reflected the growing ethic and class diversity of urban populations in the United States. Not only did crowds react to the visible spectacle of curious bodies on display, but to the largely invisible presence of professional experts who managed those encounters. As stranded survivors were transformed into freaks, experts and audiences alike were forced to confront the institutional processes that made such transformations possible.

Science and spectacle While individuals have been exhibited as freaks for hundreds of years, the orchestrated spectacle of the freak show was born in the mid-nineteenth cen­ tury of a conjunction between scientific investigation and mass entertain­ ment. This period saw the development of a widespread institutional culture, which required the more exacting management of space and time, and divi­ sion and specialization of professional expertise.4 Growing cities, shrinking work weeks, and new technologies driven by steam and electric power pro­ vided ideal conditions for the rise of commercialized forms of entertainment such as the circus, the amusement park, and the dance hall.5 While the goal of the cultural institution was to enlighten, civilize, and discipline its ben­ eficiaries, entertainers sought to thrill and amuse in order to turn a profit. While the former aimed to improve its audiences by offering instruction and moral guidance free of the marketplace, a consumer-oriented popular culture catered to their desires and pleasures.6 Yet education and entertain­ ment often merged in tense, if profitable, collaboration around the display of freaks. The history of the freak show’s efflorescence in the second half of the nineteenth century is thus punctuated by a contentious dialogue between the lofty discourses of the museum and the university and the promotional hype of the commercial entrepreneur. Accredited scholars attempted to distance themselves from the entertainment industry as they were pushed into com­ petition for its audiences, while showmen ridiculed the experts’ knowledge, yet sought legitimacy by appropriating the conventions and rhetoric of the life sciences. The heightened emphasis on professionalism changed what had been a long-standing collaboration between scientists and entertainers in the

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exhibition of freaks. Freak shows had always drawn on ethnographic and medical discourses to grant legitimacy to the fantastic narratives they wove around the bodies on display.7 The signatures and commentary of doctors, explorers, politicians, and royalty appended to promotional pam­ phlets provided confirmation of the freaks’ authenticity. Likewise, physi­ cians and natural scientists benefited from their affiliation with sideshows, which provided them with a reliable supply of rare corporeal anomalies for examination. Always on the lookout for new sensations, entertainment entrepreneurs capitalized on the public’s growing interest in exotic cultures by employing more nonwhite performers as savages, cannibals, and miss­ ing links, whom they added to the established menu of freaks with curi­ ous talents, physical and developmental disabilities. As freak show scouts traveled to remote areas of the globe in search of unique curiosities, their efforts overlapped with those of natural scientists, explorers, and mission­ aries. Framed in a pseudoethnographic language by showmen who called themselves “doctors” and “professors,” anthropological exhibits at the freak show often provided American audiences with their primary source of information about the non-Western world. The widening divergence of the scientific professions and the entertainment industry is related to the increasing size and influence of the middle class in America. At one end of the spectrum, the professional exerted author­ ity over the domain of the university and the arts, of disinterested social privilege and cultural authority; at the other, the entertainer dominated the realm of commerce and popular amusement. Yet the middle class, to which most Americans belonged, possessed of leisure time and discretionary income, relied simultaneously on the professional’s specialized knowledge and respectability and the pleasure and diversion of the amusement industry. Indeed, despite the apparently antithetical qualities of showman and scien­ tist, numerous venues required the interaction of erudition and commercial savvy. The importance of this niche was recognized by P.T. Barnum, the father of commercialized mass entertainment, who persistently straddled the divide between high and low culture by promoting his American museum and traveling shows as respectable venues for women, children, and fami­ lies.8 The spaces traversed by Ota Benga and Ishi—the museum, the theater, the world’s fair, the zoo—were also the lumpy terrain of the middle class, heterogeneous sites where the showman and the professional engaged in an ongoing and unresolved conflict for legitimacy and audience. As each of these spaces facilitates an encounter that authorizes one person to gaze at another, it borrows the formal features of the sideshow, and the body on display, transformed into a unique and curious object, becomes a freak. Freak shows combine the drama and costuming of the theater with the more sober conventions of the scientific exhibit. Freaks may pose in pas­ sive acknowledgment that the body itself is an object of sufficient interest or

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perform a sequence of activities designed to showcase their unique abilities. Despite the repetitive quality invited by this structure, the sideshow requires a direct confrontation between audience and performer, ensuring that each cycle involves slight but potentially consequential differences. Unlike media transmitted through mechanical reproduction, human exhibits provide opportunities for unanticipated exchanges between customers and freaks. Ota Benga and Ishi were displayed within institutional settings that prom­ ised to make racial, national, and species differences culturally intelligible. Instead they produced confusion and doubt. At a moment when Americans expressed a particular interest in the exotic and foreign, the prospect of con­ templating the representative of a remote culture at close range had wide­ spread appeal. But as they did so, the spectators came to question their own place within the hierarchy of human races and the narratives of progress on which that hierarchy relied. This chapter is particularly concerned with the presentation of human freaks in sites intended for animals or inanimate artifacts, a practice that confuses the established relationships among audiences, performers, and professionals, as well as the function of newly established institutional spaces. When the public could see a “genuine Wild Indian” at the University of California’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology, how could it be distin­ guished from Barnum’s American Museum, famed for the exhibition of such oddities as the Feegee Mermaid, Tom Thumb, and William Henry John­ son, the “What Is It?” When an African man was locked in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo, what made this spectacle different from the sav­ ages, cannibals, and missing links that frequented the sideshow platform? The unexpected placement of a human being in a university museum or a zoo necessarily shaped the meeting between specimen and spectator in particular ways, but also called into question the purpose of the institution and the professional men who orchestrated the encounter. Significantly, the exhibition of Ota Benga and Ishi provided occasions for viewers not only to consider their superiority to representatives of primitive cultures but to express resentment against the guardians of cultural authority who directed encounters between the races from offstage. These encounters assume an opposition between the whiteness (normal­ ity) of the audience and the deviance of the racial freak. In contrast to both the freak’s unique abnormality and the professional’s rarified expertise, “the public” is conceived as a featureless, uniform mass. Rosemarie Thomson has argued that part of the cultural work of the freak show was to reassure diverse audiences of their claim to citizenship: “[T]he figure of the freak is … the necessary cultural complement to the acquisitive and capable American who claims the normate position of masculine, white, nondisabled, sexu­ ally unambiguous, and middle class.”9 As Thomson explains, freak shows were often frequented by the populations that would be most likely to feel

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disenfranchised from the imagined community of US citizenship and there­ fore comforted by the sight of bodies more radically Other than their own. But the gesture of repudiation enscripted in the act of paying to look is often coupled with an equally intense identification, a dynamic magnified in the case of those spectators who are already aware of their own marginality. To be a member of the audience could also serve as a reminder of the injustices that turn some people into curious objects for the entertainment of others. The African and the Native American each produced strong responses of recognition: Ota Benga caused anguish in the African-Americans who saw the monstrosity of US racism embodied in the spectacle of a black man in a cage, whereas Ishi inspired the guilty regret of white men who viewed the Indian as a more noble survivor of their own imagined past. But as the fol­ lowing discussion will show, each recognition is in fact a misrecognition, in which the sympathetic onlooker reads himself into the body on display, obliterating its personhood as completely as the most exploitative exhibit.

Exhibit A: the African savage In September 1906, New York newspapers carried the story of a human exhibited in the Monkey House at the Bronx Zoo. The person was Ota Benga, a Central African Batwa who had been brought to the United States by explorer and sometime Presbyterian missionary Samuel Verner to be part of the Pygmy village at the 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair.10 Ota Benga chose to remain when the other participants returned to Africa, in part because he no longer had a home there. A victim of Belgian colonialism, he had returned from a hunt to find that his tribe (including his wife and children) had been slaughtered by tax collectors of King Leopold’s Force Publique, who sold him into the tribal slave market where he was purchased by Ver­ ner. After the Fair ended, Verner traveled the United States with his African companion until the impoverished explorer left him at the Bronx Zoo under the care of its director, William Hornaday. For a few weeks Ota Benga wan­ dered freely around the zoo in relative anonymity. Zookeepers encouraged him to spend more time in the Monkey House, where he had been sleeping since his arrival, until one day they locked him inside. Conflicts over the African’s place—literally where and how to house him, for the idea of his freedom seemed intolerable to all—immediately arose among the representatives of scientific and religious institutions, as well as the audiences who clamored to see him. These struggles over cultural author­ ity were amplified by their inseparability from questions about race. For African-American community leaders, Ota Benga represented, on the one hand, the tragedies of Western imperialism and the intolerable persistence of domestic racism; on the other, he provided them with clear evidence that Africans were inferior to American blacks. If freak show representations of

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Africans as savage wild men were unacceptable, so too was the equation of primitive African tribes with respectable black American citizens. The outrage of prominent African-Americans is not surprising, for zoo visitors found Ota Benga sharing a cage with Dohong, an orangutan trained to wear clothes, ride a bicycle, and eat at a table. In an era when Darwin­ ian theory regularly provided scientific justification for racial prejudice, the exhibit suggested an evolutionary proximity between Africans and apes. Moreover, a conjunction of props and performance associated Ota Benga with the primitive savagery of the freak show wild man: bones were scat­ tered around the floor of the cage, and he was encouraged to charge at the crowds while baring his teeth, which were filed to sharp points as is customary for the Batwa.11 As a finishing touch, a sign attached to the cage explained its contents: “The African Pygmy, ‘Ota Benga’, Age, 28 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches. Weight 103 pounds. Brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, South Central Africa, by Dr. Samuel P. Vemer, Exhib­ ited each afternoon during September.”12 This sign establishes the relation­ ship of the scientific professional to his object of study. Using the definite article, it proclaims Ota Benga a unique, rather than representative, speci­ men. His passivity contrasts with the purposive activity of the explorers and zoologists. Verner, hardly a “Dr” of any kind, is depicted as a disembodied abstraction, absent the fleshly details of age, height, weight, and region that describe his charge. Although there are no photographs of Ota Benga in the Monkey House, several images taken during the world’s fair attest to his visual status as a racial freak, a stranded anomaly caught between two worlds. A photograph reproduced in the Bradford and Blume biography, Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, shows him playing the molimo, a traditional, horn-shaped instru­ ment. The authors note that it was originally captioned by anthropologists, “A Savage’s Idea of Music.” However, they do not mention that their copy is cropped from an original panorama in which Ota Benga is surrounded by a group of male spectators.13 Together, the original and cropped versions illustrate the construction of the ethnographic subject by a team of experts who choreograph his movements then step back to watch the show, erasing all signs of the intervention. Up close, Ota Benga appears to stand alone in an open field, whereas the expanded perspective shows the context for such a “natural” setting, a semicircle of observers dressed in Western suits and hats, with the architecture of the world’s fair faintly visible on the horizon. Photographs were popular souvenirs at sideshows, world’s fairs, and dime museums, where they were available for visitors to purchase after seeing an attraction. Often appropriating the conventions of middle-class portraiture, cartes de visite of freak performers emphasized the subjects’ peculiarities by contrast with their ordinary posture and dress. A souvenir photograph of Ota Benga frames him in the frontal, three-quarter-length shot typical of contemporary portraiture (Figure 13.1).

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Figure 13.1 Souvenir portrait of Ota Benga at the Saint Louis Exposition.

Source: Photograph courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History.

The exoticism of his dark skin, bare chest, and broad grin is all the more striking because of the banality of his pose. Whereas the average sitter was supposed to wear a look of disinterested composure, we must assume that Ota Benga’s smile was demanded by the photographer to show off his sharply pointed teeth, the attribute that most distinguished him from an ordinary black person. According to the pseudoethnographic logic of the world’s fair, Ota Benga’s teeth were indisputable evidence of his cannibal­ ism, a practice that located him halfway between animal and human. Their importance in the sensationalism surrounding the Saint Louis Pygmy exhibit is evident in an article written by Verner himself, in which he proclaims: [H]ave you seen otabenga’s [sic] teeth! They’re worth the 5 cents he charges for showing them to visitors on anthropology hill out at the World’s Fair. Otabenga is a cannibal, the only genuine African cannibal in America today. He’s also the only human chattel. He belongs to the Exposition company. Step right up.14 Adopting the tone and posture of a sideshow spieler, Verner provides the written complement to the photographs of Ota Benga, exaggerating the odd­ ity of his freakish human specimen through the use of exclamation points and hyperbolic description. If Ota Benga is turned into a freak by a convergence of science and enter­ tainment, these were irreconcilable pursuits for Samuel Verner, who desired the excitement and financial rewards of a successful career in show business,

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as well as the social and educational legitimacy of the professional. Posing his questions in the name of science in his 1903 memoir, Pioneering in Cen­ tral Africa, Verner asked of the Pygmies: Who and what are they? Are they men, or the highest apes? Who and what were their ancestors? What are their ethnic relations to the other races of men? Have they degenerated from larger men, or are the larger men a development of Pygmy forefathers? These questions arise natu­ rally, and plunge the inquirer at once into the depths of the most heated scientific discussions of this generation.15 Verner’s attempt to insert himself into the era’s “most heated scientific dis­ cussions” bespeaks his own anxious relationship to the accredited experts who passed judgment about the value of the artifacts he brought back from his African travels.16 Alternately obsequious and resentful, Verner’s writings reveal a man who longed for acceptance within elite social and professional circles, yet remained perpetually on the margins, lacking the proper institu­ tional or familial connections.17 As an explorer, he experienced the subordi­ nation of the collector to the scholar that was characteristic of the scientific community at the turn of the century, which was divided between what Curtis Hinsley calls “gatherers on the one hand, theorizers on the other.”18 If Verner’s queries are evidence of his effort to insinuate himself within an academy that was closing ranks around an elite cadre of trained specialists, they also propel him into the popular domain of the freak show. His ques­ tions echo nearly verbatim those raised by P.T. Barnum’s famous exhibit, the What Is It?—a black man advertised as a hybrid of human and animal species.19 In fact, publicity materials for the What Is It? describe the creature as a fusion of African and orangutan, exactly the same mixture implied by the cohabitation of Ota Benga and Dohong: Is it a lower order of man? Or is it a higher order of monkey? None can tell! Perhaps it is a combination of both. It is beyond dispute the most marvelous creature living, it was captured in a savage state in Central Africa, is probably about 20 years old, 2 feet high, intelligent, docile, active, sportive, and playful as a kitten. It has a skull, limbs, and general anatomy of an orang outang and the countenance of a human being. Exhibited from the 1860s to 1924 in New York City and elsewhere, the What Is lt? may have been viewed by the same people who visited Ota Benga at the zoo, where they would have been provided with a strikingly similar account of what they saw. From his reference to Central Africa to his invocation of a species hierarchy in which some human races were

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indistinguishable from their simian ancestors, Verner’s account replicates the details of the Barnum poster. That Ota Benga’s confinement turned the Bronx Zoo into a freak show was an opinion voiced by more than one newspaper report. As the New York Tribune editorialized: The exhibition of a little wild man from Africa in a cage by the side of apes and other beasts is not an altogether agreeable episode, although doubtless no offense is meant by it, and it must be recalled that for many years it has been a common practice for ‘Circassian girls,’ ‘fat women,’ ‘living skeletons’ and other eccentric human beings voluntar­ ily to make ‘museum freaks’ of themselves, on exhibition by the side of baby elephants and educated pigs.20 Any doubts about Ota Benga’s co-operation were dispelled by comparing him with other human curiosities who were understood to be voluntary participants in their own commodification. The article’s implicit alignment of anomalous people with animals—a common strategy in the stage per­ sonae of sideshow performers—made the zoo the symbolic equivalent of the freak show. The more conventional distinction between humans and animals firmly established by the bars of a cage was reconfigured in terms of differences among humans based on race and national affiliation. Ota Benga’s presence in the Monkey House presented a generic confu­ sion as the respectable space of the zoo, informed by the organizational principles and educational goals of science, merged with the sensationalis­ tic format of the sideshow. Responding to accusations that confining a man in a cage was degrading and inhumane, zoo director William Hornaday hotly countered that the Monkey House was the most comfortable and convenient place for Ota Benga to meet the large crowds who wanted to see him. Unlike a circus or sideshow, the zoo had no space reserved for the exhibition of human subjects, he claimed. Hornaday’s assertion that the zoo was merely responding to public desires obscured the fact that those desires were produced by the advertisement of Ota Benga as a curiosity. For some time he had wandered the zoo’s grounds unnoticed, and it was only his incarceration in the Monkey House that turned him into a sensation. In answer to the protests of African-American community leaders, Hornaday denied that he had placed Ota Benga alongside the monkeys to suggest an evolutionary link: “I am a believer in Darwinian theory … but I hope my colored brethren will not take the absurd position that I am giving the exhibition to show the close analogy of the African savage to the apes.”21 Moreover, he announced the exhibit as a part of his larger mission to use pleasure and entertainment to encourage a wholesome public interest in scientific matters.

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This statement coincides with Hornaday’s more general goals as director of the zoo, a position that required him to remain solicitous of public desires despite his admitted disdain for many of his customers, whom he described as “low lived beasts who appreciate nothing and love filth and disorder.”22 The construction of the New York Zoological Park was one instance of a broader development of managed public spaces, such as museums, concert halls, and playgrounds, which aimed to provide both recreation and instruc­ tion in civic virtue.23 The park’s civilizing mission was echoed in its spatial layout and architectural design. A microcosm of America’s imperial aspira­ tions, the zoo boasted the biggest and most inclusive animal collection in the world.24 Inspired by the architecture of the world’s fairs, its model was not the hybrid clutter of the midway but the austere Halls of Science. Helen Horowitz explains: [T]he park was committed to exhibiting typical members of each spe­ cies, rather than some of the rarities of nature. It was to be no sideshow. Nor was it to encourage the breaking of natural laws by the develop­ ment of new hybrids among its specimens. Each species was to be kept separate in its own enclosure, a marked contrast to the city outside the park where such control could not be exercised over human beings.25 Its administrators insisted that the zoo’s combination of amusement and education was superior to the tawdry spectacles of sideshows, circuses, and dime museums. According to Bradford and Blume, “Director Hornaday liked to draw a sharp distinction between his institution and Coney Island, his highbrow elephants and the carny animals that belonged to circuses or amusement parks.26 The orderly display of animals, each representative of its kind, was one strategy for differentiating the zoo’s scientific mode of clas­ sification from the messy hybridity of the freak show or the midway. The impulse towards hierarchy and discrimination carried over in Hor­ naday’s ideas about the zoo’s occupants. Although some zoo animals were taught to wear costumes and perform tricks, Hornaday relied on a discourse of class to distinguish his select group from their counterparts in circuses and carnivals. Describing his favorite animal species as morally and intel­ lectually superior to many of the human races, Hornaday’s writings are the dark counterpoint to his public justification of Ota Benga’s confinement for reasons of convenience alone. They demonstrate that the allegations of African-American community leaders were well justified, for according to Hornaday’s personal hierarchy, “[i]t is a far cry from the highest to the low­ est of the human race; and we hold the highest animals intellectually are higher than the lowest man.”27 Dohong, Ota Benga’s companion in the Monkey House, proved that he was a fine specimen of the better animal species by learning to perform

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everyday human activities for the entertainment of zoo visitors. But if Hor­ naday claimed that his trained monkeys were one step from being citizens, he had a far different attitude towards the most degraded representatives of the human race: Some sensitive minds shrink from the idea that man has “descended” from the apes. I never for a moment shared that feeling. I would rather descend from a clean, capable and bright-minded genus of apes than from any unclean, ignorant, and repulsive race of the genus Homo.28 This claim locked the perverse logic of the Ota Benga exhibit into place, for it implied that the Pygmy was not only the lowest of human species, but beneath many animal species in intellect and cultural development. Even worse than the ministers’ complaint that the exhibit equated black men with apes, Hornaday’s reasoning suggested that the Pygmy was in fact inferior to his simian counterpart. African-American community leaders were at the forefront of the protest against Ota Benga’s confinement. Their comments emphasize the impor­ tance of their own social and professional respectability while revealing a deep ambivalence about the role of scientific knowledge in contemporary debates about race. Despite Verner’s conclusion that “my experience and observation completely convince me … that these Pygmies are human beings in every sense of the word,” African-Americans were not so sanguine about the effects of the exhibition on the eager crowds of zoo visitors.29 All too aware that they were confronting the same public who would have been drawn to the What Is It?, their responses betray a frustration that in the struggle for racial uplift, the African-American intellectual constantly had to prove his distance from demeaning popular representations of blackness.30 They were attuned to the frequency with which such representations were legitimated in the name of science.31 Registering their protest in New York newspapers, African-American religious leaders argued that the exhibit was an insult to their race, which already lacked the social and political opportunities available to other citi­ zens. Although they did not identify with the Pygmy themselves, they felt sure that zoo visitors would equate the caged African with American blacks. As Reverend Gordon, superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asy­ lum, put the matter, “[Y]ou people … are on top. We’ve got to rise. Why not let us, and not impede us? Why shut a boy up in a cage with chimpanzees to show that Negroes are akin to apes? Give us opportunities.”32 To display a black man at the zoo linked black men and apes, suggesting biological as well as social obstacles to racial betterment. “We are frank enough to say we do not like this exhibition of one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings with souls,” a second minister

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commented to reporters.33 While subsequent events illustrated the limits of the minister’s identification with Ota Benga, his use of the inclusive pronoun here acknowledges his awareness that African and black American would be aligned in the imagination of the zoo visitor. Not only was the exhibit an affront to African-Americans, but to human­ ity as a whole, an accusation the clergymen connected to the nation’s own shameful history of race relations. “Only prejudice against the negro race made such a thing possible in this country,” wrote Dr Gilbert, pastor of the Mount Olivet Baptist Church. “I have had occasion to travel abroad, and am confident that such a thing would not have been tolerated a day in any other civilized country.”34 In their condemnation of American racism, the ministers’ identification with the African transcended national borders; he was “one of us” by virtue of a skin color that made both African and black American the objects of discrimination.35 Ota Benga’s mistreatment at the hands of zoo authorities forced Gilbert to look abroad, and to conclude that far from being the most enlightened democracy, the United States was among the most retrograde in terms of its racial attitudes. This argument posed the greatest challenge to the freak-making aspects of the exhibit, as I have described them above, for it found savagery at the heart of the very institutions that claimed to uphold civilization itself. If the freak show relied on the divide between the aberrant body on display and the smug normality of the spectator, the ministers claimed that the practice itself threatened the humanity of all involved: confining an African visitor in a monkey’s cage made those responsible as uncivilized as any wild man. Science, rather than confirming the humanity of some against the freakishness of others, dehu­ manized the scientist and his audience, as well as his specimen. Instead of inspiring moral uplift, the nation’s great institutions were the stage for the most barbaric consequences of modernity. But the ministers’ argument did not end on that powerful note. Ironi­ cally, as they spoke on behalf of the black race, they revealed their own prejudices against Africans, and Pygmies in particular.36 Although the sign clearly indicated that he was nearly thirty, they called Ota Benga a “boy,” a patently insulting term in the mouths of African-American men who could easily have experienced a similar offense themselves. On the matter of Ota Benga’s feeble mental abilities and moral sensibility, they urged that his scant resources should be nurtured rather than neglected, and they advo­ cated civilizing him by introducing him to Christian virtues and teachings. Ota Benga became for them a microcosm of the American exceptionalism that undergirded contemporary missionary efforts in Africa, which sought to instill Western values through religious evangelism.37 These class and nativist biases became more pronounced following Ota Benga’s release into the care of African-American clergy. Newspaper accounts of his stay at the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum describe Ota

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Benga’s intractable mixture of a childlike intellect and mature vices, such as smoking and the incurable longing for human flesh. According to one article, the staff faced the difficult task of turning the Pygmy into a “gen­ tleman.” With predictable regularity, references to cannibalism crept into reports on his progress, for although “he [went] to Sunday school with the other inmates of the institution,” the heathen Ota Benga would: sing at the top of his voice in his own tongue the song which his people sang while gathered around some nicely cooked missionary who had been sizzling on the fire for several hours, and who was all ready to be eaten.38 Efforts to imbue the “inmate” with Christian virtues were overshadowed by the allure of jungle savagery, which endured like an indelible stain. In the end, religious authority proved no more capable of affirming the humanity of the visitor than the cold reason of science or the explosive fictions of the popular press. Ultimately, this living specimen, having passed through numerous identi­ ties from explorer’s faithful native informant to colorful midway inhabitant to ape-like savage to heathen cannibal, could no longer tolerate his sojourn among the civilized. In March 1916, Ota Benga, apparently distraught at the difficulties of returning to Africa, took his own life by shooting himself with a stolen revolver. The exact motive for his suicide remains veiled in the editorials that followed, which are far more revealing about the ongoing conflicts among the forces of scientific, religious, and popular authority that sought to determine the fate of ethnographic freaks. Hornaday, who pro­ claimed in his “Wild Animals Bill of Rights” the obligation of zoo animals to labor in exchange for care and feeding, commented dismissively on Ota Benga’s death: “[E]vidently … he felt that he would rather die than work for a living.”39 A more sympathetic reporter wrote that the episode at the zoo: contained the story of civilization in microcosm [for] … it was always so. For ages man has acted in just this way. We entice the backward race into our well secured back yard and tease it with straws or knives or laws. We become a nation of sociologists, look at the curious object’s teeth, feel his muscle, prick his skin.… And if he is peevish or irritable— if he is so lost to virtue as to show signs of anger—our indignation begins to move us, and belike is soon lashed into a fury. And if he lets fly an arrow, there’s an end of it. We say he has committed suicide, for we like euphemisms.40 Resentful at the creeping influence of professionalization, the author accused the United States of becoming “a nation of sociologists,” guided

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by unfeeling intellectual principles. He charged the experts with recycling the mistakes of the past, granted new legitimacy because they were couched within an inscrutable, specialized terminology. In this reporter’s eyes, the methods and procedures of science, which transformed the inhabitant of another country into a “curious object,” differed from the freak show only insofar as they wore the mantle of accredited professionalism. In some cases, to live as a freak means to be accepted into a community unified on the basis of shared marginality. To be another kind of freak, par­ ticularly a savage cannibal, however, means, by definition, exclusion from the community of civilized persons. Although his voice remains silent, Ota Benga’s final gesture speaks in a language that defies the hyperbole of the showman, the pieties of the minister, and the jargon of the scientist. His death tells us that to be a freak is to inhabit an intolerable space, regard­ less of whether one is literally confined in a cage, or in the imagined cages erected to barricade savagery from civilization, the impurity of popular cul­ ture from the enlightened pursuits of the mind. And what of Samuel Verner, the man responsible for bringing Ota Benga out of Africa, delivering him up to the world’s fair anthropologists, aban­ doning him at the Bronx Zoo and the Orphans’ Asylum? Having alternately exploited the Pygmies’ freak potential and vigorously defended their human­ ity, Verner lamented shortly after Ota Benga’s removal from the zoo: We were simply two friends, travelling together, until, for some inexpli­ cable reason, New York’s scientists and preachers began wrangling over him, and the peaceful tenor of our way was so ruthlessly disturbed.… If he survives scientific investigation, reportorial examination and elee­ mosynary education, perhaps he may rejoin me on our further travels, and be happy in the sunshine of the Kasailand.41 The same man who, a few months earlier, urged the world’s fair visitor to step right up to observe the savage human chattel subsequently expressed longing for the company of his dark friend. In this, Verner is guilty of what Renato Rosaldo calls the “imperialist nostalgia” that strikes when “someone deliberately alters a form of life, and then regrets that things have not remained as they were prior to the intervention.”42 Dreaming of a classless, biracial, masculine intimacy as old as the nation’s literary origins, Verner anticipated a time when he could travel unimpeded with his non­ white brother. Like the black ministers, his identification slipped back and forth opportunistically, at one moment branding Ota Benga as a barbar­ ian Other, acknowledging him as a peer and companion at another. His fantasy illustrates the extreme malleability of the freak’s identity, which bears, at best, only a tenuous attachment to the subject’s personal history or physical body.

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As we have seen, much of the meaning accorded to ethnographic freaks derives from prevailing stereotypes, which are disseminated as much by those who claim the status of experts as by the producers and consumers of popular culture. In the next section, the story of Ishi—also understood to be the last of his kind—will demonstrate how a different set of stereotypes than those used to describe the African governed understandings of the Native American. Any comparison of the two must be sensitive to the distinctive histories of these groups within the United States, their very different sig­ nificance to American anthropologists, and the various ways in which they were exploited by interested parties, from scientists to showmen and mass media. All told, these portraits of racial freaks may provide little informa­ tion about the subjects themselves, but they are revealing documents of the struggles over profit, authority, and professional turf that occurred behind the scenes of the institutions that took as their mission the production and dissemination of culture.

Exhibit B: the last wild Indian The passing of Ishi, whom I will describe as Ota Benga’s Native American counterpart, encouraged in his white male companions lyric passions akin to those expressed by Samuel Verner. Saxton Pope, Ishi’s doctor and friend at the University of California, wrote regretfully, “and so departed the last wild Indian of America. With him the neolithic period terminates. He closes a chapter in history.”43 In elegizing his patient, Pope articulates the many contradictions that characterized Ishi’s reception in modern San Francisco. For the crowds who greeted him with curiosity and affection he was the last survivor of a dying culture, an anachronistic relic of prehistoric times, and a representative of a more natural and wild America.44 For the anthropolo­ gists he was both a figure of inassimilable difference in need of protection from the contaminating influence of civilization and a brother welcomed into their intimate circle of men. As was the case with his African contemporary, the fragments of Ishi’s story provide less satisfying evidence about an individual life than about how racial freaks are made at the seams where institutions, professionals, and their publics inevitably meet. Ishi, like Ota Benga, was “the last of his tribe,” a Yahi Indian in his mid-fifties who was discovered in the corral of a slaughterhouse in Oroville, California, in September 1911. Dazed and emaciated from months of starvation, he was turned over to the sheriff, who for lack of a better solution, took him to the county jail. Soon the jail was besieged by reporters and citizens eager to catch a glimpse of the stranger they described as a genuine wild man. His story soon captured the interest of University of California anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, who dispatched his colleague T.T. Waterman to investigate. Waterman determined that the

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stranger was the sole surviving member of the Yahi, a Native American tribe believed to be extinct. Stilted attempts at communication between the two men revealed that he had spent the last three years hiding in complete isola­ tion after witnessing the murders of his friends and family. Despite living in proximity to miners and homesteaders, he had absolutely no knowledge of or contact with their culture. Kroeber enthusiastically declared the man to be the find of a lifetime, “the most uncivilized and uncontaminated man in the world today,”45 and named him “Ishi,” a generic word for man in Yana, his native language. Until his death from tuberculosis four years later, Ishi lived at the university’s Hearst Museum of Anthropology, where he edu­ cated audiences in the skill of arrowhead making, helped anthropologists to study his language and culture, and worked as a janitor.46 As news of the wild man at the university museum spread, the anthro­ pologists entrusted with his care were bombarded with requests from enter­ prising showmen eager to get their hands on a real-life “wild Indian.” The sensationalism surrounding Ishi’s initial “discovery” posed a problem for the anthropologists who sought to protect him against exploitation by reporters, theatrical managers, and sideshow scouts. As Theodora Kroeber writes, Ishi struck a chord with a public seeking the “illusion and fantasy” promised by “the voice of the barker, falsetto and arresting, which entices the listeners to pay to see what waits behind drawn curtains—be it freak, belly dancer, hypnotist, or wild man from Borneo, or better yet, from Mount Lassen.”47 Many were eager to exploit public desires for novelty and amuse­ ment. There was, for example, the vaudeville impresario who proposed that Ishi and Kroeber appear onstage at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theater. As we have seen, it was not uncommon for exotic human curiosities to be rep­ resented by men who called themselves “professors” and remarked with apparent erudition on the homeland, culture, and life history of the speci­ men on display. But Kroeber was not that kind of professor and Ishi, he believed, not that kind of curiosity.48 Crowds of visitors flocked to the university museum to shake hands and converse with the wild man from Oroville. Their responses bespeak the per­ plexity of a public seeking to reconcile the Indians they knew from freak shows, dime museums, Wild West pageants, and popular novels with the stranger they met, who did not fit easily into any of these prefabricated identities. Moreover, their reactions betray a certain confusion about the function of anthropologists and anthropology museums. This uncertainty is apparent in letters sent to the museum intended to assist the anthropolo­ gists in deciphering Ishi’s language and culture. These helpful hints are evi­ dence that their authors did not understand or respect the firm boundary between their own speculation and the ethnographer’s specialized knowl­ edge, acquired through years of training and scholarship. As was customary at the freak show, where audiences were invited to question the nature and

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authenticity of the human curiosities, visitors to the anthropology museum advanced their own hypotheses about the wild Indian. For example, one missive respectfully expressed doubts about Ishi’s identity: “I understand very well how enthusiastic you can be if you have discovered a stone age man in the middle of civilization. But is he such?” The question is followed by the writer’s own theory: “To me he looks like a Jewish student who wants to make a hit as [an] impersonator—the most striking point is his likeness with the notorious Dr. Cook the discoverer of Poles.”49 Another visitor confused by Ishi’s ethnicity drew upon her rudimentary knowledge of Japanese: “[I] am much interested in the aborigines of the continents. I believe in heredity and environment. Therefor [sic] I think the Japanese and Indian are the same. Many words alike etc.”50 Such were the voices of museum visitors who, having seen Ishi described by one reporter as “a human document, with the key to most of the hieroglyphics lost,” believed they had something to contribute to the task of interpretation.51 The still permeable boundaries between professional life scientist, ama­ teur collector, and showman generated a war of words, a struggle over who would define the nature and status of the last wild man in America. As in the case of Ota Benga, a rich fantasy life proliferated in the newspaper cover­ age during the months following Ishi’s emergence, topped by headlines such as “Primordial Man Blinks at Civilization’s Glare” and “Stone Age Indian Hauled from Forests’ Depths by Savants: Creature Found in the Wilds of Feather River a Link between Past and Present.” Claiming Ishi as a repre­ sentative of populations frozen in time since the prehistoric era, one article extols his usefulness to the present: And this man who epitomizes all these ages of primitive strife for life is now the chiefest treasure in the anthropological department of the uni­ versity. His stone arrow heads, buckskin thongs, fire sticks, and quaint traps for catching game are more precious to the scientists than their weight in gold.52 Quite predictably, the author voices the ethnocentric perception that primi­ tive cultures stand outside of history, frozen in place while civilization marches inexorably forward. Many popular accounts refer to Ishi as a lessevolved ancestor, speculating that, like the missing link exhibited at the freak show, he could provide evidence about the common origins of all humanity. However, this article also draws attention to the museum’s role in creating value by acknowledging the scientist’s ability to transform quaint artifacts into precious objects whose worth is determined outside the realm of the marketplace. With typical ambivalence, the reporter cited above simultane­ ously mystifies and denigrates the anthropologist’s expertise.

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The conflict of interest between popular and scientific modes of knowledge is best illustrated in an article by Grant Wallace, a journalist who invited Ishi to a vaudeville show in the hope of generating a good story. In October 1911, anthropologists and reporters took the wild Indian to the Orpheum theater.53 Filling the front page of the San Francisco Sunday Call, Wallace’s elaborate account ran alongside Kroeber’s more subdued explanation of the evening’s events. Their juxtaposition shows how efforts to explain the stranger’s responses to the new culture became entangled with the interests of their authors. According to Wallace: The university professors, who have added Ishi to their museum of antiquities and curiosities and who are conducting this series of sci­ entific experiments on him, justly regard him as a unique specimen of the genus homo, the like of which does not exist in all the world. They call him the “uncontaminated man,” the one man who (possibly from lack of opportunity to talk) has never told a lie; the one man with no redeeming vices and no upsetting sins. This conclusion was decided doubtless from the fact that Ishi had never been brought into contact with the contaminating influences of civilization; therefore to permit the barbarian to mingle with our unsettled civilization is to expose him to contamination.54 Classifying the museum’s contents as “antiquities and curiosities,” Wallace equates the work of university anthropologists with mass entertainment. He suggests the hypocrisy of the scientists’ desire to preserve Ishi as an untainted man of nature by sealing him away in a museum. The reporter’s scornful tone, use of the Latin phrase “genus homo,” and dubious references to the pedants’ disdain for “civilization” and its pleasures reveals his resentment towards the intellectual establishment the professors represent. Wallace conceives of his own social “experiment” as a counter to the experts’ scien­ tific methods, a way of demystifying the aura conferred on their objects and methods of study. It soon becomes apparent that exposing the allegedly untainted Ishi to “the contaminating influences of civilization” was the reporter’s express intention. He gleefully takes responsibility for having blemished the inno­ cence of “the primordial savage of the stone age” by “inveigling him into the tinseled ambush of the temple of music and folly,” where he deliber­ ately staged Ishi’s first encounter with “the silvery voiced and fascinating Orpheum headliner, Lily Lena of the London music halls.” As Lena sang directly to Ishi, Wallace observed: [T]he cold sweat was standing out on Ishi’s forehead. His face was drawn. His fingers, grasping the crimson hangings, trembled visibly and

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his first cigar, which he had been puffing with pretended sangfroid, now slowly grew cold and dropped from his teeth. Making a crude and obvious equation of Ishi’s virility with the suddenly extinguished cigar, Wallace enjoys the wild man’s discomfort at the sight of a white woman and explains that Ishi thought he was in heaven: Poor, simple-minded wild man! He could not know that the heaven of white people is never likely to be so crowded as their vaudeville houses, nor that so far there never has been half the scramble to get through the pearly gates that there is every night to get a front seat at the Orpheum’s top gallery. The wild man’s potentially threatening sexual desire is contained by his complete captivity to Lena’s charms. His awestruck ignorance becomes an occasion to celebrate the sophistication and urbanity of the modern audi­ ence and to insult the professional anthropologists’ stodgy intellectualism. The importance of this meeting is illustrated by a large graphic that domi­ nates the page, accompanied by a caption that reads: “Sketch of the Meeting of Ishi and Lily Lena. He is Shown in the Costume He Likes Best and She in the Costume the Audience Likes Best.” The man in the sketch looks nothing like Ishi but fits perfectly the stereotype of the freakish wild man of side­ shows and dime museums. The contrast between the two figures borrows one of the freak show’s favorite visual strategies, the juxtaposition of oppo­ sites. Their meeting mobilizes a predictable fantasy about the dark-skinned savage’s innate attraction to white women. Similar fantasies appeared in the stories of Ota Benga, who aroused concerns about his potential for sexual aggression. But in place of the African man’s irrepressible lust, the Indian wild man grows weak and docile when confronted by the white woman’s charms.55 Under the illustrator’s pen, the evening’s events are transformed into an allegory in which the man of the wilderness is enthralled by the pow­ erful, decadent allure of civilization, embodied in the figure of a woman who is white in both name and appearance. Reporters and anthropologists alike adopted the position of ethnographic observers to watch Ishi’s reception of the show and debate its significance. While Wallace emphasizes Ishi’s freakishness through a series of predictable binaries—savage/civilized, dark/light, childlike/complex, innocent/corrupt, natural/urbane—Kroeber’s response, printed on the same page, underscores the utter difference of Ishi’s cultural orientation. Merging his own distaste for Wallace’s scheme with a genuine effort to imagine the effects of the vaudeville spectacle on someone who had never before seen more than fifty people together in one place, the anthropologist insists that while Ishi was indeed awed by the size of the crowd, “the performance itself I am sure he

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did not appreciate.” Kroeber’s intention is not to criticize Ishi’s taste, but the newsman’s inaccurate assessment of Ishi’s experience of the evening. “The reporter got his story,” Kroeber wrote acerbically in a subsequent account, “but he got it out of his imagination.”56 What Wallace took to be delighted laughter at the antics onstage was, according to Kroeber, “simply the physi­ ological effect of the crowd upon him. His high unnatural giggle is like that of a young girl and does not necessarily signify that any appeal is made to his sense of humor.” If Wallace saw the rapidly extinguished cigar as a weak phallic symbol, Kroeber explains that Ishi’s laugh is like “a young girl” and not a full-grown man because it is the expression of hysterical symp­ toms resulting from exposure to the crowd. With the demeanor of a savage and the giggle of a young girl, Ishi is a freak indeed. However a few lines later Kroeber reconfirms Ishi’s manhood by asserting that “there is nothing undeveloped about him; he has the mind of a man and is a man in every sense. With the exception of the habits which he has acquired by his man­ ner of living he is thoroughly normal.”57 Deviating significantly from Wal­ lace’s description of Ishi’s effeminacy, these comments about the Indian’s manhood reinforce, by association, the manhood of the anthropologist who accompanied him in the face of stories that depicted the scientists as fussy, overcivilized pedants. Kroeber’s defensiveness must be understood as the by-product of his efforts to separate the goals and methods of anthropological study from popular forms of ethnographic inquiry. If the difference between the two was clear to the first generation of professional academics and curators, it was less so to the nonspecialized public confronted by many different sources of information about Native Americans, each represented as true and accurate. In his history of the Smithsonian, where ethnography first received institutional status, Curtis Hinsley observes that “anthropology presented an unusual opportunity for making a science, for drawing a clear line between speculative popularization or commercial humbuggery, and the sober search for truth.”58 The establishment of American anthropology in museums and universities necessitated a break with earlier modes of pre­ senting primitive people and artifacts as freakish curiosities. Anthropology museums sought to distinguish themselves from the Barnumesque mode by emphasizing didacticism over entertainment, replacing the jumble of the pri­ vate collection with organizational logic, and demanding new standards of decorum and seriousness from the visitor. Ishi appeared at a moment when the function and organization of the anthropology museum was in flux. The University of California had determined the need for both a museum and department of anthropology less than a decade before his arrival. Con­ ceived under the auspices of wealthy regent Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the museum was intended to house the vast personal collection of antiquities that she planned to donate to the university. The new museum, established in

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Parnassus Heights, San Francisco, opened to the public two months after Ishi took up his residence there in 1911.59 His presence at the opening reception, where he mingled shyly among benefactors, university regents, scientists, and academics, attested to a unique and contradictory relationship between the anthropology museum and the human subjects of ethnographic inquiry. Was he a guest or an artifact? Would he assimilate to the new environment or remain a freakish outsider? In the face of sensationalistic newspaper accounts, eager crowds, and a deluge of requests from showmen and entrepreneurs who wanted to exhibit Ishi as a human prodigy, anthropologists encouraged him to assimilate by learning English and working for a living. While popular interest in Ishi stemmed from his status as a “curiosity” on the order of a sideshow freak, anthropologists understood him as a unique source of knowledge about a dying culture. In keeping with the almost exclusive emphasis of US anthro­ pology on Native American cultures, Ishi was of far greater ethnographic interest than Ota Benga, whose treatment by scientists seemed only to con­ firm previously held racial biases about the Pygmies’ intractable savagery. The men charged with Ishi’s care belonged to a generation that represented significant new developments within the discipline of American anthropol­ ogy.60 Kroeber was a student of Franz Boas, an advocate of racial equality who was responsible for bringing the concept of cultural relativism to eth­ nographic inquiry. As Carl Degler explains, Boas overturned the reigning belief in social evolution, which “held that human groups, or races, passed through a series of stages: from savagery to barbarism and culminating in civilization.”61 Like his mentor, Kroeber rejected the distinctions between savagery and civilization made by European colonial anthropology and ech­ oed in American popular culture, insisting instead that Ishi was the mental and physical peer of his white counterparts. However, far from overturning popular fantasies with empirical fact, anthropologists created another version of Ishi that corresponded to their own desire for an “authentic” precontact native specimen and turned him into a freak of a different nature.62 If the popular belief in the Indian’s abso­ lute Otherness is encapsulated in the sketch of Ishi and Lena, the anthro­ pologist’s intense identification with his subject is captured in a photograph of Ishi and Kroeber. A visual representation of the intimacy between the two, this image also illustrates Kroeber’s attempt to prove Ishi’s “normal­ ity” through sartorial means. But the differences between these men belie the more immediate parallelism, for the pale, bearded anthropologist who stands tall with his suit and tie neatly in place clearly is not a double for the shorter, broader, barefoot Ishi, who appears disheveled and uncomfortable in his civilized garb. Ishi is no more “normal” dressed in a suit and tie than he is swathed in a caveman’s furs. Efforts to assimilate him often only fur­ ther emphasized how alien he was in the modern environment. Instead of

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showing his equivalence with American men, the photograph suggests the limits of his adaptability to the new culture. The image thus inadvertently mirrors a convention of freak photography in which the pairing of show­ man and native highlights the contrast between savagery and civilization. Its contradictions are evidence of Ishi’s freakish, indeterminate status as both friend and informant, visitor and captive of a world that had unwittingly cut him off from his own past. Anthropologists played an important role in shaping popular understand­ ings of Ishi as a perfect, but untutored natural man. Rather than dispelling the myth that Ishi was a “Stone Age” relic, Kroeber’s writing for main­ stream publications grants it legitimacy with the objective language of sci­ ence. Claiming that “in short [Ishi] has really lived in the stone age, as has so often been said,” Kroeber seems to associate cultural difference with tempo­ ral distance, positioning the native as a stranded outcast from history. Read in context, “stone age” refers to the Yahis’ rudimentary tools; however, Kroeber’s choice of words lends expert authority to the impression created by the newspaper coverage, which depicts Ishi as a relic of an earlier stage of human evolution. The anthropologist quickly warns against such popular misunderstanding by writing sternly: Ishi himself is no nearer the ‘missing link’ or any antecedent form of human life than we are; but in what his environment, his associates, and his puny native civilization have made him, he represents a stage through which our ancestors passed thousands of years ago.63 Disputing the misguided equation between Ishi and the fictitious missing links of freak shows and dime museums, Kroeber asserts Ishi’s fundamen­ tal equality with his Anglo-American contemporaries. This point reflects the evolution of Kroeber’s thinking during this time. Extending the work of Boas, Kroeber was just beginning to formulate one of his most impor­ tant contributions to the field of anthropology, the decoupling of culture from biology. By insisting that Ishi’s differences were social and historical, not physiological, he illustrates his conviction that human physiology was not the proper subject of anthropology.64 But by enforcing Ishi’s biological equality, Kroeber appears to dismiss his culture as a “puny native civiliza­ tion,” giving voice to the same theory of cultural evolution as the newspa­ pers by confirming that the Yahi represented a more primitive version of Western civilization. In a case that involved the complexities and idiosyncrasies of a living person, the anthropologist’s methods proved little better equipped than the showman’s to script the encounter between primitivism and modernity. Indeed, one consistent feature of freak making is the unexpected and often productive ways in which the relationship between the anomalous and the normal may break down. For example, Kroeber was dismayed when Ishi

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discovered that glue was an indispensable tool in making arrows, for the anthropologist believed that the authenticity of Yahi artifacts would be con­ taminated by the introduction of new resources. He was uncomfortable dis­ playing Ishi’s work in the museum because the purpose of museums, as he saw it, was to preserve artifacts of historically and geographically remote cultures. The modern could not, by definition, be eligible for inclusion within the museum’s collections, and, in turn, the subjects of ethnography had to remain permanently excluded from modernity. But in fact, the wild Indian knew nothing of authenticity. An alleged man of nature, Ishi loved dough­ nuts and flushing toilets. He was more impressed by a retractable window shade than skyscrapers and airplanes. Many Yahi artifacts reflect a creative melding of traditional methods to include materials discarded by settlers such as string, cloth, glass, and even a denim hat. The objects made by Ishi reveal the innovation and adaptability of a culture that was not trapped in the Stone Age, but living alongside that of the anthropologists. In the frag­ ments of his life that survive, Ishi is less a freakish relic to be deciphered by a scientist’s knowing gaze or the speechless primordial savage of popular accounts, than an active participant in the recreation of his own past. If Ishi seemed to provide anthropologists with a unique opportunity to study a vanishing culture, he represented an untainted physical specimen to a man devoted to the science of human biology. The writings of his doctor and friend Saxton Pope often seem inspired as much by his romantic views of the Indian as any empirical evidence, for Ishi was expected to embody a physical perfection unavailable to his more civilized male counterparts.65 Pope’s medical records enthuse, “[Ishi’s] stature is magnificent. Although he has lost the typical Indian litheness, there is grace and strength in every contour. For a year he was absolutely perfect.”66 Pope describes Ishi’s foot as “a beautiful example of what the human foot should be” and his fingers as “gracefully tapered, pleasing in shape, with fingernails olivoid [sic] in out­ line, perfect in texture.”67 Echoing Pope’s praise, Waterman adds that Ishi’s feet “were modeled in plaster by the Department of Pediatrics of the Medical School as examples of perfect and undeformed feet.”68 A dentist who stud­ ied at the university during Ishi’s stay there recalls that dental students “paid Ishi 50 cents to allow [them] to make a plaster cast of his mouth. In over 60 years of dental practice Ishi’s was the most perfect mouth I ever saw.”69 The word perfect appears in each of these descriptions of Ishi’s physique, lending weight to the idea that he was not a normal man but a freak, a rare, untarnished human specimen whose body became a cipher for contradic­ tory beliefs about the Indian. Although more often negative than positive, the meaning of freaks is always in excess of the body itself, which is treated as a sign requiring reading and interpretation. In this case, Ishi’s perfection hearkened back to a time when human society had a more harmonious con­ nection to nature; his fatal illness spoke of the costs of progress.

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In the same way that Verner longed to embark on further travels with his African friend, Saxton Pope would later recall his relationship with Ishi using the romanticized terms of the male bonding narrative: I learned to love Ishi as a brother, and he looked upon me as one of his people. He called me Ku Wi, or Medicine Man, more, perhaps, because I could perform little sleight of hand tricks, than because of my profession.70 In this nostalgic memory of masculine intimacy, social and racial differences vanish in the mutual love of the Indian and the white doctor.71 As Robyn Wiegman has argued, the idealistic interracial male bonding scenario erases racial difference, and the inequalities that accompany it, in favor of “the masculine same, a sameness unrelenting in its extrapolation of the white man’s heroic alienation, compassion, and guilt.”72 Despite the scientist’s claim to objectivity, literary convention shaped the contours of the interac­ tion with his informant. As I have argued, this fantasy of sameness coexisted alongside the fiction of the wild Indian’s irreconcilable difference. In the stories of both Ishi and Ota Benga, personal friendship was the palliative to the white man’s guilt and the native’s tragic encounter with civilization was met by regret and longing for a lost intimacy. But Pope points to the limits of this idealized brotherhood when he proposes that Ishi recognized his cura­ tive powers on the basis of magic tricks rather than academic credentials. Whereas the doctor believed Ishi had accepted him as one of his own, he also considered his friend incapable of understanding the nature of modern scientific training. In other words, Pope could become an Indian but Ishi, a primitive trapped in the past, could never grasp the sophisticated nuances of the doctor’s professional identity or specialized knowledge. Ishi confirmed his status as a vanishing Indian by his inability to withstand the debilitating effects of the modern city. Once held up as the embodiment of physical perfection, within four years he was dead of tuberculosis. The anthropologists themselves believed they had hastened his death by working him long hours in their eagerness to extract information before he reached this inevitable end. Popular accounts of his demise, like those of Ota Benga’s suicide, concurred, holding the cold, inhumane methods of science responsi­ ble for killing off its objects of study. The scant newspaper coverage of Ishi’s death, subdued in comparison to the explosion of stories surrounding his appearance, reveals a persistent resentment towards the university faculty.73 Rekindling the animosity between scientists and popular culture of previous accounts, the journalists charge the professors with sensationalism, while downplaying their own initial interest in the story. Science was to blame for turning the Indian into a curious object and then examining him to death. “He furnished amusement and study to the savants at the University of Cali­ fornia for a number of years, and doubtless much of Indian lore was learned

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from him,” one reporter reflects dubiously, “but we do not believe he was the marvel that the professors would have the public believe. He was just a starved-out Indian from the wilds of Deer Creek who, by hiding in its fastness, was able to long escape the white man’s pursuit.”74 Exaggerat­ ing the significance of their find, the anthropologists were little more than mountebanks who used their status as experts to swindle a gullible public and exploit their object of study. A second article reports suspiciously, “an alleged Stone Age man said to have been adopted by the University of Cali­ fornia as a valuable acquisition has just died. To be used by a high-brow institution as an anthropological acquisition is enough to kill any man.”75 Casting a dubious eye on Ishi’s status as a survivor of the Stone Age, this piece accuses the museum of hastening his death. No person could with­ stand the misery of being turned into a “valuable acquisition.” Ishi’s demise was a consequence not of the innate frailty of his race, but his treatment as a scientific specimen, an abuse to which anyone might succumb. In its antagonism towards professional elites and the institutions that promoted their activities, the popular press reconfigures Ishi from a freakish relic to a person with common human desires and weaknesses. In Ishi’s transformation from Stone Age wild man to anthropologists’ vic­ tim the process of making freaks is revealed. Freaks are produced not by their inherent differences from us, but by the way their particularities are figured as narratives of unique and intractable alterity. These fictions are not simply the sensationalistic products of exploitative showmen or crude public taste; they are equally the province of the erudite man of science. In the struggle to gain cultural authority and influence, newspapers, showmen, anthropologists, and doctors each sought to prove their ability to shape collective belief, confirming their own importance as the arbiters of public knowledge. What remains of Ishi is the result of these discursive conflicts, words that reveal more about the men who wrote them than about the man who could write only the name he was given by his white benefactors.76

Notes 1 Fellows, Dexter and Freeman, Andrew (1936), This Way to the Big Show, New York: Viking Press: 296. 2 For accounts of the development of racial science, see Degler, Carl N. (1991a), In Search of Human Nature, New York: Oxford University Press; Haller, J. S. (1971), Outcasts from Evolution, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press; Gilman, Sander L. (1985), Difference and Pathology, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Gould, Stephen Jay (1981), The Mismeasure of Man, New York: Norton; and Stepan, Nancy Leys (1986), “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” Isis, 77(2) (Jun., 1986): 261–77.” 3 See Lauren Berlant’s (1991), introduction to The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1–17.

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4 Bledstein, Burton J. (1976), The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 90. 5 Nasaw, David (1993), Going Out Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 6 DiMaggio, Paul (1991), “Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston: the creation of an organizational base for high culture in America,” in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (eds). Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 374–97. As Lawrence Levine (1988), has argued in Highbrow/ Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, during the nineteenth century the divide between high and low cultural spheres widened. The efforts of the first generation of accredited scientists to distinguish their work from that of amateur showmen, explorers, and armchair travelers are part of the process of defining the legitimacy of the high against the messy amateurism of the low. 7 See Bogdan, Robert (1988), Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, and (1986), “Circassian beauties: authentic sideshow fabrications,” Bandwagon, 30(3) (May/ June): 22–3; and Thomson, Rosemarie Garland (1996b), “Introduction: From Wonder to Error,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York and London: New York University Press, 1–19; and (1997), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. 8 Adams, Bluford (1997), E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman and the Making of U.S. Popular Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 30. On Barnum, see also Harris, Neil (1981), Humbug, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 9 Thomson (1997), Extraordinary Bodies, 64. 10 Bradford, Philips Verner and Blume, Harvey (1992), Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, New York: St Martin’s Press. On Verner’s career as a Presbyterian missionary, see Crawford, John R. (1982), “Pioneer African Missionary: Samuel Phillips Verner,” Journal of Presbyterian History (1962–1985), 60(1) (Spring 1982): 42–57. 11 Bradford and Blume (1992), 187. 12 Bradford and Blume (1992), 181. 13 The uncropped version is included, without analysis, in Bradford and Blume’s “Ota Benga and the Barnum Perplex.” 14 Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 255. 15 Verner, Samuel (1903), Pioneering in Central Africa, Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication, 276. 16 Crawford notes that Verner’s “language became more professional and anthro­ pological rather than evangelical, as he tried to use the knowledge acquired in his rich and frustrating years in the Congo.” “Pioneer African Missionary,” 55. 17 Verner’s reverence for the rich and powerful, and his propensity for name drop­ ping is evident in an unpublished manuscript, Verner, Samuel (n.d.), “Thomas F. Ryan as A Benefactor of a Carolina Boy. How the Great Financier Made the Dreams of an African Explorer Come True,” typescript courtesy of Phillips Verner Bradford. 18 Hinsley, Curtis (1981), Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 286. Bradford and Blume write of Verner’s

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25 26 27 28 29 30

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Rachel Adams frustrated efforts to dispense of the artifacts he had collected and turn his African adventures into a career. The unenthusiastic responses of professional curators, naturalists, and anthropologists “struck Verner hard. A note of resentment, an edge of bitterness creeps into his letters, despite the cordial, nearly obsequious language. Verner felt that his lack of academic credentials prevented him from getting the treatment that Professor Starr, for example, would receive.” Ota Benga (1992), 163–4. On the What Is It? exhibit, see Cook, Jr, James W. (1996), “Of men, missing links, and nondescripts: the strange career of P.T. Barnum’s ‘What Is It?’ exhi­ bition,” in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press, 139–57, and (2001), The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, and Lindfors, Bernth (1984), “P.T. Barnum and Africa,” Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 7: 18–27. Editorial, New York Tribune, 13 September 1906, Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, New York Zoological Park. “Negro Ministers Act to Free the Pygmy,” New York Times, 11 September 1906, quoted in Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 262. Cited in Horowitz, Helen (1975), “Animal and man in the New York Zoological Park,” New York History, 56: 445. Bledstein (1976), “Spaces and Words,” in The Culture of Professionalism, 46–79; and Levine (1988), “Order, Hierarchy, and Culture,” in Highbrow/Lowbrow, 169–242. Horowitz, “Animal and Man.” On the history of zoos and their relationship to other strategies of containing and preserving nature, see Wilson, Alexander (1992), The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Horowitz, “Animal and Man,” 451 (emphasis added). Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 171. Hornaday, William (1927), Minds and Manners of Wild Animals, New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 67. Hornaday (1927), Minds and Manners, 67. Verner (1903), Pioneering in Central Africa, 277. Benjamin Reiss (2001) writes of African-American intellectuals’ struggle against the insulting representations of blackness found at the freak show and similar sites of popular entertainment in The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. See also Reed, Christopher Robert (2000), “All the World Is Here!”: The Black Presence at White City, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. In their distaste for science, these religious men take a position opposite to that of African-American intellectuals like W.E.B. DuBois, who used the language and methods of scientific rationality to further the struggle against racism. “Bushman’s Champions Angry,” New York Tribune, 12 September 1906, Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, New York Zoological Park. Cited in Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 262. “Still Stirred about Benga,” New York Times, 23 September 1906, Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, New York Zoological Park. On the African-American identification with Africa at the turn of the cen­ tury, see Fierce, Milfred (1993), The Pan-African Idea in the United States, 1900–1919, New York: Garland; Gilroy, Paul (1993), The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Gruesser, John Cullen (2000), Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa, Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky;

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38 39 40 41 42 43 44

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Magubane, Bernard Makhosezwe (1987), The Ties That Bind: AfricanAmerican Consciousness of Africa, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press; McCarthy, Michael (1983), Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans, Westport, CT: Greenwood, and Williams, Vernon, Jr (1996), Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries, Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky. In All the World Is Here! Christopher Robert Reed (2000) describes a similar ambivalence among African-American intellectuals reluctant to be associated with racist images of Africa at the Chicago World’s Fair. On the involvement of African-Americans in missionary work in Africa, see Gruesser (2000), Black on Black; Jacobs, Sylvia M. (ed.) (1982), Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, New York: Greenwood Press, (espe­ cially Jacobs, “The Historical Role of Afro-Americans,” 5–32); and Williams, Walter L. (1982), “William Henry Sheppard, Afro-American Missionary in the Congo, 1890–1910,” in Jacobs, Black Americans. See also Williams, Walter L. (1982), Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. “Ota Benga Now a Real Colored Gentleman,” New York Daily Globe, 16 October 1906. Cited in Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 275. Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 220. “Civilization,” North American, 17 or 18 September 1906. Cited in Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 269. Bradford and Blume (1992), Ota Benga, 273–4. Rosaldo, Renato (1989), Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 70. Saxton Temple Pope (1923), Hunting with the Bow and Arrow (San Francisco: Jas. H. Barry) quoted in Eloesser, Leo (1973), “Saxton Temple Pope, M.D.,” Surgery, Gynecology, and Obstetrics, 137 (November), 849. On the pervasiveness of the “antimodern impulse” in the United States at the turn of the century, see Lears, T.J. Jackson (1981), No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, New York: Pantheon. In Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Gail Bederman (1995) explores the rhetoric of modernity’s enervating effects on manhood. Kinsley, Philip H. (1911), “Untainted life revealed by Aborigine,” San Francisco Examiner, 6 September 1911. Reprint, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 100. The most extended account of Ishi’s life is provided in the biography written by Theodora Kroeber (2011), Ishi in Two Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. See also Heizer, Robert F. and Kroeber, Theodora (eds) (1979), Ishi and the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kroeber (2011), Ishi in Two Worlds, 129. Kroeber (2011), Ishi in Two Worlds, 129. Letter to Professor Waterman, 6 September 1911, Lowie Museum archives, University of California, Berkeley. Kroeber (2011), Ishi in Two Worlds, 169. Miller, Mary Ashe (1911), “Indian enigma is study for scientists,” San Francisco Call, 6 September 1911. Reprint, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 97.

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52 “Stone Age Indian Hauled from Forests’ Depths by Savants,” San Francisco Evening Post, 5 September 1911, Lowie Museum archives, University of California, Berkeley. 53 After his release from the Bronx Zoo, Ota Benga attended the Hippodrome accompanied by Verner. There, the African’s response to the show was also observed and recorded by reporters (see Bradford and Blume 1992, Ota Benga, 273). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was not uncom­ mon to take non-Western people to theatrical performances for the purpose of observing and recording their reactions. Such excursions seem designed to gauge the distance between the visitors’ underdevelopment and the enlightenment of the Western audience, to study the capacity of the foreign onlookers to under­ stand the complexities of performative representation taking place on the stage with the assumption that they lacked the necessary sophistication to appreciate what they saw. 54 Wallace, Grant (1911), “Ishi, the last Aboriginal savage in America, finds enchantment in a Vaudeville show,” San Francisco Call, 8 October 1911. Reprint, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 108. 55 From the beginning, writing about Ishi expressed an interest in his sexual history. Ishi grew to maturity surrounded only by his immediate family. Was he a virgin? Or had he practiced incest in the interests of survival? Did abstinence result in the magnification of desire or its absence? Pope reflects briefly on Ishi’s undeveloped sexual knowledge. The subject receives greater speculation in Theodora Kroeber’s biography, where she comments on his reticent behavior towards women and its relation to “sex starvation (Kroeber 2011, 220–1). Recent accounts demonstrate an increasingly explicit preoccupation with the topic. The most extreme versions are Henry Beissel’s play, Under Coyote’s Eye, in which Ishi has an incestuous relationship with his sister, and the fictionalized encounter between Ishi and a prostitute in the HBO film, The Last of His Tribe (Harry Hook, 1992). 56 Kroeber, A. L. (1912), “Ishi, the Last Aborigine,” 121. 57 Kroeber, “It’s All Too Much for Ishi,” 111. 58 Hinsley (1981), Savages and Scientists, 35; Levine (1988), in Highbrow/ Lowbrow, makes a similar point about the Smithsonian’s early history (Levine 1988, 156–8). 59 Kroeber (2011), Ishi in Two Worlds, 121–3. 60 Karl Kroeber (1998) argues that the contribution of Boasian anthropology, which disputed the progress-oriented paradigm of its European counterparts, may be partially explained by the fact that many of its early practitioners, includ­ ing Boas himself, were immigrants. For a number of eminent anthropologists of this period, “the understanding and describing of native cultures was part of the process of naturalizing themselves as Americans—of finding themselves at home in an America created by dispossession of native cultures.” Kroeber (1998), Artistry in Native American Myths, 13. See also Degler, Carl N. (1991), “In the wake of Boas,” in Carl N. Degler (1991a), 84–104. 61 Degler, Carl N. (1991a), In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, New York: Oxford University Press: 62. 62 See Kuper, Adam (1988), The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion, London: Routledge, on the necessity of primitivism to the evolution of anthropology as a discipline. 63 Kroeber, “Ishi, the Last Aborigine,” 123.

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64 For a discussion of Kroeber’s influence on the anthropological study of human nature, see Degler (1991), “In the Wake of Boas,” in In Search of Human Nature, 84–104. 65 Of course there is an equally significant tradition of using anthropometry to confirm the inferiority of the Indian. See Gould (1981), The Mismeasure of Man, chapter 2. 66 Pope, Saxton (1998), “The medical history of Ishi”: 232. Reprint, as “The char­ acteristics of Ishi,” in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds), Ishi and the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 225–36. 67 Pope (1998), “The Medical History of Ishi,” 234. 68 Waterman, T.T. “The Yana Indians,” 157. Reprint, in Heizer and Kroeber (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi, 107–111. 69 Unpublished comments of Dr Elsaesser to Marshall Kuhn. Marshall Kuhn papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. This memory was recorded decades after Dr Elsaesser’s encounter with Ishi and may be shaped by fantasies about the wild Indian’s perfection. Interview with Elaine Dorfman, 1977–8. 70 Quoted in Eloesser, “Saxton Temple Pope, M.D.,” 848. 71 Leslie Fiedler (1955) was among the first to comment on this tradition in his clas­ sic essay, “Come Back to the Baft Ag’in Huck Honey” (in An End to Innocence: Essays on Culture and Politics, Boston: Beacon Press). For more contempo­ rary scholarship on the male bonding tradition in American literature and cul­ ture, see Bederman, Gail (1995), Manliness and Civilization; Leverentz, David (1989), Manhood and the American Renaissance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Nelson, Dana (1998), National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, Durham, NC: Duke University Press; and Wiegman, Robyn (1995), American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 72 Wiegman, Robyn (1995), American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 158. 73 By the time of his death, Ishi’s public appeal had greatly diminished. After four years in civilization, the wild man who lived at the university’s museum was hardly a breaking story, and the more he adapted to modern life, the less spec­ tacular he became. In fact, within a few years of his appearance, newspapers were breaking stories that Ishi was not the last of his tribe, with headlines such as “Ishi Is Not the Last of Lost Tribe Stockmen and Ranchers of Deer Creek Country Find Traces of Aborigines” and “Ishi’s Squaw Seen Hunting for Mate: Parties Searching Underbrush Near Oroville for Wife of Lone Survivor.” Lowie Museum archives, University of California, Berkeley. 74 Kroeber (1916), “Ishi’s Death—A Chico Commentary,” 242. 75 Editorial, Portland Oregon Telegram, 30 March 1916, Lowie Museum archives, University of California, Berkeley. 76 After his death in 1916, Ishi was largely forgotten until the post-World War II period when he was reintroduced by the publication of Theodora Kroeber’s best-selling Ishi in Two Worlds (2011). In that volume, Kroeber provides the most complete account of Ishi’s life. Kroeber is able to write Ishi’s experiences into a coherent narrative through considerable speculation, informed by more contemporary anthropological perspectives of the 1960s that supplement her late husband’s Victorian sensibilities. The Kroeber biography takes liberties similar to Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo by novelizing aspects of a life unavailable to an author who never knew Ishi and had relatively scant information at her disposal. The popularity of this engaging account and the surge of interest in

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Rachel Adams Native American cultures since the 1960s have brought renewed attention to Ishi’s story, resulting in a flood of representations that I call “Ishimania.” To name only selected examples of a long list, Ishi has been the subject of plays by Henry Beissel (Under Coyote’s Eye), Gerald Vizenor (Ishi and the Wood Ducks), Preston Arroweed and Gary Weimberg (Ishi, the Last Wild Indian); fic­ tional accounts by Kroeber herself (a children’s book called Ishi, the Last of his Tribe), Gerald Vizenor (Manifest Manners and Trickster of Liberty), Kathleen Allan Meyer (Ishi), Richard Burrill (Ishi: America’s Last Stoneage Indian), David Petersen (Ishi, the Last of His People), and Leanne Hinton (Ishi’s Tale of Lizard); works of art by Peter Voltos (Mr. Ishi), Frank Tuttle (What Wild Indian?), Jean La Mar, and Brian Tripp; and films by Harry Hook (The Last of His Tribe, 1992) and Jeff Riffe (Ishi, the Last Yahi, 1996); and a series of interviews by past Sierra Club president and activist Marshall Kuhn.

Chapter 14

The Jim Rose Circus Side Show Representing the postmodern body in pain Carrie Sandahl

Figure 14.1 Slug the Enigma in the Jim Rose Circus Side Show.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Alison Braun (photographer).

Our late-capitalist, postmodern society offers paradoxical representations of the fate of the body. On one hand, identity is fluid and mass-mediated images and technology offer endless possibilities for the reconfiguration of the body, and on the other, the body’s boundaries are regulated like never before in the face of the AIDS crises and “the war on drugs.” Despite the current fascination and intense debate over the body in popular culture and academia, the corporeality of the body is peculiarly absent in representation. In their essay “Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-Modern Con­ dition,” postmodern theorists Arthur and Marilouise Kroker adopt a cyni­ cal Baudrillardian view by claiming that the concern over the body today “emphasize[s] the fact that the (natural) body in the postmodern condi­ tion has already disappeared, and what we experience as the body is only a

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fantastic simulacra of body rhetorics.”1 Thus, the material body is unrepre­ sentable: it is no longer “real.” Although the mass media does increasingly mediate and mutate the body, I disagree with the Krokers’ notions that we are living under a “false sense of subjectivity” and that the body no longer exists.2 As theatre theorist Linda Hutcheon points out, these notions suggest that at one time a natural, unmediated body did exist untraced by language and free from ideology. Hutcheon critiques a Baudrillardian world view in her book, The Politics of Postmodernism.3 She explains that in The Precession of Simulacra (1984) Baudrillard argues that the media have neutralized reality by stages: first they reflected it; then they masked and perverted it; next they had to mask its absence; and finally they produced instead the simulacrum of the real, the destruction of meaning and of all relation to reality.4 She points out that Baudrillard has been criticized for “the metaphysical idealism of [his] view of the ‘real,’ for [his] nostalgia for pre-mass-media authenticity, and for [his] apocalyptic nihilism.”5 She contends that a com­ mon sense notion of reality has always been mediated, and that the real has always been known through its representations. Though I disagree with a Baudrillardian worldview’s paranoia, I believe that many people do perceive a sense of dislocation in regard to the “natural body.” Hutcheon claims that there has never been anything natural about the real.6 However, the body’s mutation into multiple reconfigurations in the media, and our sensory apparatuses’ improvement and externalization through technology, challenge our current common sense notion of the “real.” The desire to identify and possess an “authentic” bodily experience haunts those who feel dissatisfied with the glossy hyperreality of computer generated images, television, photography, and film. Consider the current popularity of the Jim Rose Circus Side Show as a signal of today’s audiences’ desire to elude the dizzying effects of Baudril­ lard’s hyperreality by seeking an experience of the “real.” The Jim Rose Cir­ cus Side Show, which began as an underground nightclub act in the Pacific Northwest, is a full-blown revival of the American freak show. During the summer of 1992, they toured the US with Lolapalooza, a popular alterna­ tive music concert, and have since found even wider success in Europe. I saw a performance in September 1992 at the Barrymore, a progressive theater in Madison, Wisconsin, and in October 1993 at Cabaret Metro in Chicago. Unlike the freakshows of the past, Jim Rose does not feature the presenta­ tion and performance of disability. Instead, Rose has appropriated the terms “freak” and “human marvels” to refer to his able-bodied group of five white male performers and one white female assistant who perform a combination of old sideshow novelty acts and daring acts of body mutilation.

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Jim Rose, a.k.a. Jimmy the Geek, the group’s charismatic ringleader, models the mise-en-scène and performance text closely after circus and car­ nival sideshows of the past. Rose updates several of the show’s features to appeal to its audience which includes mostly white middle-class college age students, the young, jaded, underground nightclub crowd, and “modern primitives” who are into body piercing and tattooing. The set is simple: a painted Victorian-looking backdrop featuring caricatures of the performers executing their trademark stunts, and on stage left, a collection of musi­ cal instruments and props. Loudspeakers alternately boom eerie synthesized carnival tunes and contemporary grunge music. Rose emcees the fast-paced performance as a reborn P.T. Barnum keeping up a high-energy slew of non­ stop verbiage which includes witticisms, puns, literary allusions, circus lore, anecdotes, and chants. Broken into two acts, the stunts build from relatively benign to particu­ larly gruesome, with Rose’s banter, or “geek relief,” in between. A sampling of the milder acts include: firebreathing, Houdini-like escapes from straight­ jackets and chains, chewing and swallowing a broken light bulb, climbing a ladder of razor-sharp swords, and slug, maggot, and worm eating. The grand finale of Rose’s “circus of the scars” is a toss-up between Matt “The Tube” Crowley’s bile beer routine and Mr Lifto’s lifting act. Crowley (otherwise known as “The Duke of Puke” or “The Earl of Hurl”) pours forty ounces of beer, ketchup, chocolate, and Maalox for good measure, into his stomach via a tube threaded through his nose. Then, he regurgitates the ungodly mixture with a stomach pump. Rose pours the liquid, now green from stomach bile, into cups and displays it to the spectators. The other cast members eagerly treat themselves to a sip of the concoction, and finally they invite spectators to sample the liquid from the same glasses—which they offer like commun­ ion cups. This act is rivaled only by Lifto’s hoisting of cinder blocks, irons, and other heavy objects from holes pierced in the most delicate regions of the human body: the nose, the middle of the tongue, the nipples, and his penis. The Jim Rose Circus Side Show’s representation of the body’s fluids, pains, and pleasures refuses panic simulacrum by forcing the audience to confront the body’s visceral presence. Its audience of mostly white, privileged youth are logical spectators of the performance. As theorist John Urry has noted, some people are more postmodern than others.7 Privileged youth who feel dissoci­ ated with a common sense notion of bodily reality flock to see the Side Show to experience something real. On the other hand, those who deal with the fate of the material body on a daily basis, or who are struggling for survival may not concern themselves with the disappearance of the body into postmodern simulacrum. The Side Show communicates the body’s palpability to this crowd through the presentation and representation of self-inflicted physical pain, the exhibition of invaded bodily boundaries, and the fluids such acts produce. In her recent article, “Focus on the Body: Pain, Praxis, and Pleasure in Feminist Performance,” theater theorist Jeannie Forte examines feminist performers’ representation of pleasure and pain to insist on the materiality

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of the female body. While the Circus Side Show does not offer a feminist message, their performance strategies mirror those used in the performances Forte analyzes. According to Forte, pleasure and pain offer circumstances in which the material body is undeniable, “when the body’s material presence is a condition of the circumstance.”8 Furthermore, pain and live perform­ ance are “two cases when the body must be acknowledged, when it becomes visible/palpable through inhabiting temporally a process that depends fun­ damentally on its presence.”9 Forte grounds her assertions by citing the work of Elaine Scarry who theorizes the discursive problematics regarding pain in her book, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Scarry describes the political consequences of pain’s inexpressibility in the structures of torture and war. She maintains that pain is resistant to language and is unsharable, making its existence that which cannot be confirmed or denied. Further­ more, “physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”10 Unlike any other state of consciousness, physical pain has no referential content: “It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than other phenomenon, resists objectification in language.”11 The Jim Rose Circus Side Show exploits pain’s resistance to language by representing an odd mixture of pleasure and pain. The presence of the live physical body in pain presents a challenge to the distancing effects of tech­ nology and creates the illusion that the pain is “real.” While The Side Show does not pretend to espouse any political or spiritual ideologies, it does promise an experience that is “real and dangerous.” Rose tells reviewers that he has “made atrocities palatable in a way that’s in your face,” and “it is my artistic vision to have a fast-paced, live, real, raw, dangerous human demolition spectacular.”12 Their painted backdrop reinforces their claims to authenticity with the words “REAL!,” “LIVE!,” and “IT’S SCIENCE!” prominently visible behind the performers. Each freak performs his pain differently. For example, The Torture King is calm, cool, and silent as he penetrates his unpierced cheeks, arms, eyelids, and voice box with long, gleaming meat skewers. Lifto, a tall, lanky, tattooed young man exhibits a wide-mouthed grimace as he stretches his chest and penis skin to the breaking point by hanging heavy objects from them, and then smiles blissfully at the completion of the stunt. Rose, the most lively of the bunch, grunts and contorts his face wildly during his most painful moments. Audiences and critics alike favor those feats which appear most painful and those which most strongly challenge the taboos concerning the bounda­ ries between the inside and outside of the body—boundaries which have been accentuated by the AIDS panic. Marilouise and Arthur Kroker point out that “we have reached a fateful turning-point in contemporary culture when human sexuality is a killing-zone.”13 They contend that the regulation

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of bodily fluids and the fascination with highly socially constructed notions of the body’s health and boundaries further removes us from the “natural body.” Like the presentation of pain, the Side Show’s live, flagrant viola­ tion of bodily boundaries reveals and flaunts body fluids in an age of “sex without secretions.” This exhibition serves as an insistent reclamation of the common sense notion of the “natural body” which is composed of actual flesh and blood. The result reported by several reviewers and audience mem­ bers alike is that the show is “sexy.” A young woman told The Times Maga­ zine reviewer, “Want to know what I think? It’s really horny.… Anything that pushes your boundaries, I just find really compelling and sexual.”14 The pre-show music anticipates the focus on bodily functions with songs punctuated by burps and flatulence. In nearly every act, the performers emphasize bodily fluids such as saliva, bile and blood. Sluggo’s gleeful inges­ tion of bugs and slimy creatures transgresses beliefs about what should enter the body. While Rose claims that “ninety percent of the time [the] show is completely bloodless,” blood oozes from his cheek and temple after putting his face in broken glass, and a few small streams of blood run down his back after lying on the bed of nails.15 When Timm Grimm (or The Torture King) removes the meat skewers from his body, red puffy wounds remain. Audi­ ence members make a game of pointing out the performers’ wounds, their signs of pain, to one another, proud to find the mark that authenticates the realness of the act. The Tube also contests taboos against coming into con­ tact with body fluids in several ways in his bile beer act. First, Rose displays the regurgitated stomach bile and beer, then the other cast members treat themselves to a sip of it, and finally they invite spectators to sample the liq­ uid from the same glasses. At the Chicago performance, spectators mobbed the stage, vying for the opportunity to taste the liquid. Lifto’s appearance and performance perhaps most highlights the link between the violation of bodily boundaries and sexual pleasure. Before his act, Rose exhibits Lifto’s body as a sign of this defiance by pointing out his numerous body piercings, tattoos, and intricate scarifications—each one supposedly handcrafted by a different lover. Lifto often appears in drag, wearing spike heels and tights, his face softened by make-up, and Rose pub­ licizes how he “discovered” Lifto staging his lifting routine in a Seattle gay bar. Lifto’s seeming sexual gratification from his performance foregrounds the pleasurable pain in rejecting the regulation of the body’s boundaries. The performance elicits strong visceral responses from the spectators, raising their awareness of the body’s material aspects. One reviewer claimed “there’s no question about [the show] being real or not. Also, it makes you question your own body, how your body would feel if you were to do those things to it.”16 Another reviewer wrote: We observe [the performers] with a mixture of dread and admiration; their abilities force us to confront our own bodies. Timm Grimm’s … exercise in self-skewering causes us first to concentrate on the flesh as

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flesh, and provokes the rather loathsome perception of ourselves as ani­ mated pieces of meat.17 As a reaction to the realization that we are “animated pieces of meat,” audi­ ence members have been known to gag, vomit, faint, screech, and laugh. In one place, “the management felt compelled to mention that stomachdistress bags were available at the bar:”18 A spectator not only encounters the performers’ corporality, but the mate­ riality of the other audience members as well. Some audience members make a lively show of spotting signs of sickness in their friends. Another strong visceral reaction to the performance is unrestrained laughter. Rose says, What we get all the time that no one writes about are the laughs. People laugh continually throughout the show. It’s the laugh of “I can’t believe this.” Initially, the reaction is like they’re cautious and in wonderment, then they relax and begin to see how outrageous it is and they laugh.19 Jim Rose encourages interaction between the spectators and the performers throughout the show which reinforces the credibility of the stunts. In both Madison and Chicago, audience members contested the authenticity of sev­ eral of the acts. Rose dares the doubting spectators to mount the stage and verify that the broken glass is real, that the maggots are real, and so on. Rose continually engages in a lively repartee with the audience. He often leaves the stage to speak with various spectators, flirt with the women, hurl insults at hecklers, make fun of the squeamish, and choose “volunteers” (of which there is never a shortage). After particularly daring feats, Rose leads the audience in chants of “it’s beeyotifullll,” and “oohs” and “ahhs.” Rose admits that some of the stunts are professionally crafted illusion, while others are actual acts of self-torture. Nevertheless, the performers utterly convince the majority of viewers that their pain is real. Audience members whom I interviewed after the Madison performance compare the Side Show to viewing a film—that they came to see the show because it is more real. The show is advertised this way, too. The Toronto Star’s review begins with the following: So you say slasher flicks are just a snore, the WWF (World Wrestling Foundation) a goofy bore? There was too much talking in The Silence of the Lambs and you still can’t believe they banned dwarf tossing? … Sounds like you’re a little tired, my friend. Tired of high-tech trickery and empty images that have numbed your Sense of Wonder.20 A tattooed female college-age student told me that she had seen the perform­ ance in Chicago and was back for a repeat. “I only saw the first act,” she said, “but it was real, you know, like you could tell that it was real. That

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sort of shocked me, but you sort of get used to it after a while. They’re like, oh people faint, and I never felt like I was going to. But there were people behind me that were getting pretty sick.” Her male counterpart told me, “I came cuz I’m a voyeur. I came cuz people told me about it. Just sounded interesting. Something out of the ordinary, better than a movie.” When I asked him why the show would be better than a movie, he added, “The difference is that supposedly these things are really happening. That these things are really going on.” His friend chimed in, “I’ll never get the chance to see something like this ever again. I’m a little bit scared about it, but I figure, it will get me going. It’ll make me feel alive.” Often reviewers make similar comparisons of the performance to film or other high tech medium. Rose himself told the LA Weekly, If you want to know why the people at these shows are going so crazy for us, it’s because there’s like this lost generation of kids who are so sick of stuff that’s clean, contrived and choreographed. I mean, a kid came up to me the other day and said, ‘It’s so real!’ …. it sure sound[s] like kids today have a real freedom problem.21 The Seattle Weekly’s reviewer quotes an “expert,” Katherine Dunn, Portland author of the acclaimed novel Geek Love, a bizarre fictional account of side­ show life. Dunn dubbed the side show performers ‘“avant-garage’ or ‘garage freaks’ because of their down-to-earth, low-tech credibility.” She expresses her sentiments against high-tech simulacrum when she tells the reviewer, It’s not like watching David Copperfield make a Greyhound bus disap­ pear. It’s a very high-tech world, and there’s nothing more low-tech than the human body. We live in this fragile and rather silly construct; people who do extreme things to their body are very interesting to us.22 The authorities perceive The Jim Rose Circus Side Show’s performances as more real or dangerous than other forms of representation as well. The show has been banned or censored in many cities including Cincinnati, Miami, and St Paul. During their recent tour in England, they were forced to change ven­ ues in several cities, and the British press was full of sensationalized articles calling for a ban. Even England’s Humane Society condemned the perform­ ances citing Sluggo’s ingestion of slimy creatures as cruelty to animals. Apparently, the shock value of the Jim Rose Circus Side Show’s perform­ ance is ephemeral. Nearly everyone I spoke with told me that at some point in their performance, they became immune to the acts. Though the shock value does wear thin, a second reaction is often reported. Seattle Weekly’s reviewer describes this reaction as follows: After the initial horror has worn off, we wonder what such an ability implies—perhaps the mind and body are more intimately linked than

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we ever would have thought, and the body is a miraculous and to some extent controllable part of the self rather than an awkward contraption of vulnerable flesh and bone. Being in proximity to near-death and neardismemberment reminds us graphically of our own mortality, and at the same time reassures us that we are not such fragile beings, after all.… [it] is not unlike that of dance or gymnastics—it expands our awareness of what the body can accomplish.23 This second reaction, the realization of the malleability of the human body, may not return us completely to a naive sense of the “natural body.” But for a moment, however, the flesh and blood existence of the human body brings the hyperreality of Baudrillard’s postmodern condition back down to earth.

Notes 1 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (1987), “Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-Modern Condition,” Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 22. 2 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (1987), 22.

3 Linda Hutcheon (1989), The Politics of Postmodernism (New York:

Routledge). 4 Linda Hutcheon (1989), 33. 5 Linda Hutcheon (1989), 33. 6 Linda Hutcheon (1989), 33. 7 John Urry (1990), The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications), 83–103. 8 Jeanie Forte (1992), “Focus on the body: Pain, Praxis, and Pleasure in Feminist Performance,” Critical Theory and Performance, eds. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (Anne Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 251. 9 Jeanie Forte (1992), 251. 10 Elaine Scarry (1985), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press). 11 Elaine Scarry (1985), 5. 12 Jerry Carroll (1992), “Return of the ‘Circus of the Scars,’” Chronicle (San Francisco), 15 July, D3. 13 Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (1987), “Panic Sex in America,” Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 15. 14 Simon Beckett (1993), “Roll Up for An Unnatural Act,” The Times Magazine, 13 March, 16–7. 15 A. J. Mell (1992), “It’s Geek Time,” Seattle Weekly, 12 February. 16 Inga Muscio (1993), “Katherine Dunn: Art Is a Verb,” The Stranger, 11–7 January 1993, 3. 17 Mell (1992). 18 Muscio (1993). 19 Lenny Stoute (1992), “Sideshow Gets Set to Freak Out Toronto,” Toronto Star, 9 April, H3. 20 Stoute (1992), H3. 21 David Pescovitz (1992), “Take it on an Empty Stomach,” LA Weekly, 19 August, 12. 22 Mell (1992). 23 Mell (1992).

Child performers

Chapter 15

Sensational imbalance The child acrobat and the mid-Victorians Brenda Assael

In contrast to their peers in the textile and mining industries, who were affected by the Factory Acts of the 1830s and 1840s, child performers remained untouched by legal controls. This gulf widened when the statutes were further extended in the next generation to include children in other industrial occupations, such as bleaching and dyeing, paper staining, and cartridge making.1 While the employment of children in the entertainment world was, relative to their employment in these other occupations, not extensive, it was highly visible since these “prodigies” were spectacularly displayed in theaters, music halls, and circuses.2 The impact that perform­ ing in these venues had on the minds and bodies of young children was the kernel of the controversy surrounding them. As anxiety about their public role mounted, so too did that surrounding their training for specific per­ formance trades such as acrobatics, which were considered to be physically taxing by definition. Despite their public role in the ring, the itinerant status of these children, who traveled with tenting companies or moved from one resident company to the next, obviously made them difficult to trace—a fact that only height­ ened public anxiety about their work. Much of what we know about the child acrobat was written by spectators, and by observers who, preoccupied by morality issues, watched spectators watching the displays. In order to dissect these contrasting “gazes,” it is useful to examine how spectators wrote about them within the context of periodicals and newspapers. Moral opinion, outraged by the public’s interest in child performers, was hotly articulated in the “waif story,” a term used by Anna Davin to describe a strand of writing within “Sunday school literature”; it is also a subcategory of what Margaret Nancy Cutt called “tract fiction.”3 As Davin has shown, these books, published largely but not exclusively by evangelical presses, appeared mainly from the mid-1860s and were influenced by discourses on ragged children, nineteenth-century didactic writing for children, sentimen­ tal fiction, and reports by social reformers.4 They center on poor boys and girls who, due to adult cruelty and neglect, become waifs.5 Morally lost and spiritually deprived, these children ultimately find salvation in Christ after

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traveling along a long road marred by brutality and sadness. Child acrobats provided a perfect subject for such literary treatment not only because of the physicality of their work but also because the reading audience, composed mainly of children, recognized them from the street, circus, and theater. A more sensational offshoot of this genre appeared decades later, in the 1880s, when the campaign to save children from neglect and abuse earned legal and institutional legitimacy. While it is impossible to draw a direct causal link between fiction and political opinion except in cases such as Ellen Barlee’s Pantomime Waifs; or, A Plea for Our City Children (1884), whose introduction was written by Lord Shaftesbury, it is clear that the two sets of discourses were synchronous during the mid-nineteenth century.6 To be sure, some parliamentarians were willing to face the challenge of saving the real-life counterparts of those fictional “prodigies.” A growing combina­ tion of social pressures provoked debate in Parliament over the legitimacy of controlling the acrobatic trade, leading to a heated response from the per­ formance community. The mid-nineteenth century has often been thought of as a period of equipoise; indeed, the historian W.L. Burn considered this age to draw to a close with the advent of the second reform act in 1867.7 At that time child acrobats remained unprotected, yet a decade later Parliament’s long arm had extended to them something of that protection that children in other areas of British life had long felt. In 1879 Parliament passed a statute that fined any parent or guardian who exposed any child less than fourteen years of age to “dangerous performances,” including acrobatics.8 The midVictorian period, if taken as extending to the early 1870s, was crucial for the escalation of moral panic surrounding child acrobats, which led eventually to legal discipline over them.9 The speed with which the state came to the rescue of performing children in 1879 would not have been possible without the head of steam generated by journalists, novelists, concerned politicians, and other social observers in the mid-Victorian period. Yet the fact of this reforming zeal implicitly challenges historiographical orthodoxy, which has characterized this period as, in Burn’s words, an “age of equipoise.”10 In a story first printed in All the Year Round in 1865 and republished in 1870 under the title The Unkind Word and Other Stories, the didac­ tic authoress Dinah Mulock (Mrs Craik) wrote of a Scottish doctor called Adam Black who recalls a visit to a local circus with his small nieces. They witnessed a trapeze display involving “a mere boy” called Signor Uberto. In anticipation of the boy’s appearance in the ring, his nieces asked Black if they might leave since they feared the performance would shock them and be dangerous to the performer. However, the doctor responded that: it was too late.… Besides, for myself, I did not wish to leave. That strange excitement which impels us often to stop and see the end of a thing, dreadful though it may be, or else some feeling for which I was utterly unable to account, kept me firm in my place.

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Quite apart from the attitudes expressed by his nieces, which might bear fur­ ther consideration if we were to examine the interesting question of children watching other children, Black’s observation is significant for its pathos: “I could not help putting myself into the place of the young man, and wonder­ ing whether he really did recognize any danger.” The “pleasing anguish” that he experienced as a result of entering into the same mental world as the performer kept him firmly in his seat for a reason for which, as he says, he was unable to account. In the performance the boy “mounted, agile as a deer, the high platform at the end of the circus, and swung himself off by the elastic ropes, clinging only with his hands, his feet extended, like one of the floating figures in pictures of saints or fairies.” When the other trapeze reached him, the “young man dropped lightly into it, hanging a moment between whiles, apparently as easily as if he had been born to fly.” He did this “turn” four times successfully. On the fifth, however, the boy suddenly fell, and Black’s “pleasing anguish” turned to horror. “It was so sudden … a crash on the mattressed platform … from which rolled off a helpless something.” As the surprised audience emitted screams, the doctor went to the scene to help the “poor young man.” In a moment of silent reflection he blames himself for patronizing the display. “I felt somehow as if I had murdered him, or helped to do it.”11 Real-life spectators also showed that they were never fully prepared for the worst. And in situations that produced fatal or near-fatal results the spectator’s “gaze” turned into the spectator’s “gasp,” as in the case of a display called the “Leap for Life” by Les Frères Trevannion at the Welling­ ton Circus and Music Hall in Cheltenham in 1869. In it, one of the boys slipped from his brother’s grasp and fell 35–40 feet “amidst the shrieks of men, women and children.”12 Such scenes became even more alarming when they involved not only young boys but also small children. Writing to the Royal Leamington Spa Courier in 1869, a doctor admitted to having taken his children to a circus at Leamington where they saw: a child advertised as only four years old [who] … suspended his frail body at a height of 60 feet from the trapeze. At this elevation, the child was straining his self in a pitiable manner, in going through the ‘fear­ fully dangerous’ tricks. The doctor went on to say that if the boy continued these performances, he would be met with “one of those terrible fatalities which are now becoming so common.” He recommended that Mr Henry Austin Bruce, of the Home Office, “take … steps as will prevent a repetition of scenes like this ‘which no government but an English one would ever dream of permitting for a single night’” (Figure 15.1).13 The point was given visual force in a rare photograph of a boy acrobat, El Nino Farini, in the 1860s.

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Figure 15.1 El Nino Farini, circa 1860s.

Source: Photograph © Victoria & Albert Museum Images.

That “these children” were engaged in a trade that was not legally pro­ tected and that was mortally dangerous prompted government response, particularly after officials such as Henry Austin Bruce received warnings of these displays, including an article that had appeared in the Daily News, reporting that a female performer “carried a child of tender years” strapped to her back as she tiptoed along a tightrope at the Holborn Amphitheatre in 1870.14 Bruce then contacted the proprietors of the establishment where the performance had taken place, and the child was removed from the exhi­ bition, although the female performer continued her display.15 However, beyond making these “suggestions,” Bruce had little authority in cases such as this. Sir Richard Mayne, the chief commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, concurred and raised this point before the 1866 Select Committee on Theatrical Licenses and Regulations.16 Concern was linked not only to sensational stories in the press and else­ where but also to the perception that the number of children involved in the acrobatic trade was rising. The question of scale is important since many of these children found encouragement for their work within the com­ mercially expanding leisure market.17 “Nothing fills a house better,” one observer noted, in 1872, “than juvenile acrobats.”18 As mentioned in the previous chapter, the Era Almanac estimated that there were sixty-six acro­ bat troupes in Britain in 1867–8, ninety in 1877, and ninety-eight in 1878.19 These numbers were considerably higher than those suggested by the acrobat

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Jean Battier in 1872, who estimated that “there are about 20 troupes now in England, varying from four to seven in number, and from six to four­ teen years of age.”20 Considering the number of acrobats who advertised in the work wanted pages and taking into account the fact that troupes often assumed different names and thereby appear to have inflated numbers in the trade papers, the truth of the figures may have been somewhere in between those in the Era Almanac and Battier’s estimations. What was important, however, was the perception that the trade was growing. Fueled by stories about performers and by the rise in the number of accidents to child acro­ bats, critics became more vocal. While the directive for this voice came from no single body, it is notable that evangelical writers of juvenile fiction were particularly keen observers and wove forceful morality tales that gripped the Victorian imagination. Put simply, the major problem acrobat children posed for evangelicals was that they strayed both from respectable codes of behavior and, more importantly, from religion. Evangelical writers found in them a ready subject for literary salvation, and they found presses such as the Religious Tract Society (RTS) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) willing to spread their message.21 These writers spun morality tales that combined evangelical concerns about children’s religious edu­ cation with high melodrama and mid-Victorian fantasy and anxiety.22 Despite the influence that sentimental fiction writers had on waif-story writers, the latter’s characterization of the child performer deviated from the former’s; for example, in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times the circus girls Madonna and Sissy Jupe, respec­ tively, embody “fancy,” “imagination,” “romance,” and “creativity,” not the moral impoverishment found in the waif story.23 That a discrete body of waif stories featured the child acrobat as a subject for rescue is signifi­ cant not only because many believed that the performer’s real-life coun­ terpart was in need of saving but also because the street, the stage, and especially the circus ring provided a provocative fictional venue where a nightmarish world beset by cruelty could be spectacularly witnessed by the reading public, which included middle-class and working-class chil­ dren.24 To be sure, these books were distributed to Sunday school chil­ dren as prizes in an effort to encourage and maintain good behavior and reward attendance; they were also on the shelves of “juvenile Theological libraries,” libraries in elementary schools, and reading rooms in wellserved parishes.25 The contrast between the rational recreation of reading and the irrationality of performing as it appeared in the waif story could not have been more stark. Evangelical concern for these child prodigies is pointedly expressed in The Little Acrobat and His Mother (1872). As the title implies, the child–parent relationship is given critical focus in order to explain the child’s descent into

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the performance underworld. Centered on a German acrobat boy—clearly an exercise in cultural displacement—“who is in the service of a troupe of travelling gymnasts,” it tells a story about “his adventures, hardships, and subsequent deliverance from an evil course of life.” The child, who suffers from physical neglect by his mother, is looked upon with pity and revulsion by a merchant and his friend, Mr Werner, the director of an asylum for “orphans and forsaken children,” both of whom have seen the boy per­ form: “How old do you suppose that boy is?” said Mr. Werner. “I should say about ten years old,” replied his friend. “I think he is more than that; children who lead that sort of life seldom grow. I should like to get him into my asylum.”26 The imagined effect that institutionalization would have on the boy’s body could only bring desirable ends from Mr Werner’s point of view. Both Mr Werner and his companion found the world to which the acrobat boy belonged deeply troubling. At the root of the boy’s problem was his mother, who “was so dirty and idle” and whose heart “was hardened by a long life of sin,” according to the narrator. Not only her physical but also her intellectual neglect had led to the child’s early decline. He was illiterate, not even knowing his real name when Mr Werner asked him: “‘What is your name?’ ‘Acrobat.’ ‘I know your profession is that of an acrobat, but what is your Christian name?’ ‘Acrobat.’” Physical and intellectual neglect translated into moral degeneracy: “How many sins this poor boy must have committed, and seen committed, without even knowing that they were sins,” Mr Werner laments.27 Upon being “rescued” by Werner and brought into the asylum, Acrobat is evangelized, which ultimately saves him, as literary convention would have it, from his strange ways. Acro­ bat, in turn, eventually attempts to “rescue” his mother from the darkness of her un-Christian existence, a resolution that clearly reflected the RTS’s moral agenda (Figure 15.2). Such waif stories were critical not only of the parents who neglected their children’s early education but also of the audiences that patronized the exhi­ bitions and thereby encouraged the performer’s steady, devilish descent. In The Mountebank’s Children (1866), published by the SPCK, the perform­ ances of the traveling circus are attended by “many idle country people,” whose “roars of laughter were heard till late at night.” They paid to see Master Frederick and his sister, Milly, a “delicate-looking little girl” and contortionist, whose mother “oils her joints all over everyday, because she is learning to turn her joints backwards.” The narrator observes with distress her “throwing her head and arms backwards until she could hold her feet in her hands, and putting her face between her arms, she formed a circle

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Figure 15.2 The Little Acrobat And His Mother, 1872.

Source: Image courtesy of The British Library.

with her body.”28 Interest in Milly heightens when Mossman, her manager, “rolled her over and over … with a stick in his hand.” Whereas her dis­ play sparks awe in the audience, it is meant to provoke pity in the reader. Like Acrobat, Milly is presented as a frail, poorly child whose pitifulness is enhanced by a performance that leaves her “exhausted and panting” at the end of it.29 Readers like those attracted to Mrs Walton’s A Peep behind the Scenes (1877) were likely large in number. Published by the RTS in 1877, it sold more than 2.5 million copies, popularizing that critical vision of fairground life, spectacle, and performance common in waif stories.30 Walton’s book tells the story of Jessie, a pretty but vain country girl who wants to run away with the circus. So enamored of the silver and gold costumes she sees in a circus procession in her town, she is easily led astray when the troupe’s manager approaches her and asks invitingly if “you would like to be dressed like that?”31 Jessie joins the troupe but finds her dream shattered by unkind treatment and eventually runs away. She finds shelter and comfort in the caravan of a fairground entertainer, Rosalie, whose recent evangelical con­ version, in response to her dying mother’s last words, makes her the moral guide and central figure of the story. She encourages the girl to believe in

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Christ, and like the biblical lost sheep, Jessie makes her way home to the mother she abandoned when she ran away. By coincidence, Rosalie’s aunt, the wife of a minister, lives in the same village, and Jessie finds work as her servant. Meanwhile, Rosalie decides to leave the world of the fairground and eventually appears on her aunt’s doorstep, hungry, tired, and bereaved, only to be greeted by Jessie. The circus and fairground serve as a metaphor for Vanity Fair and its ungodly souls, whom Jessie and Rosalie must encoun­ ter in their individual paths toward redemption.32 Here and elsewhere, the representation of the girl performer converged on Enlightenment assump­ tions that children were fundamentally innocent and Romantic sensibili­ ties relating to the contemporary “cult of childhood,” as well as reformist ideas on the subject of child labor.33 In these stories, children’s straying from their natural, virtuous paths was seen to be the result of corrupt influences beyond their control.34 Lord Buckhurst, who later agitated for legal change to protect child per­ formers, said that the public’s bad taste was to blame for the continuation of their displays (and accidents), which he said must be “demoralizing,” not only to the children who performed them but also to the people who wit­ nessed them.35 He believed that the crassness of the exhibition, in which the performer’s body was twisted and turned, necessarily resulted in his or her degradation and, by extension, that of the audience. In The Mountebank’s Children, Milly wears a tight bodice and bends into a hoop, showing the audience her frontal anatomy, which, according to the author, could only serve to demoralize her.36 A later novel, An Acrobat’s Girlhood (1889), by Hesba Stretton (author of Jessica’s First Prayer, which sold an impressive 390,000 copies), similarly presented a child acrobat, Trixy, bending herself “backward in a half circle in front of Mr. La Fosse [her manager] on [a] bicycle with her face upside down,” an image that horrifies her sister, who witnesses the display.37 “Yes, the people were shouting and clapping their hands while my poor little sister felt almost [like] dying,” she added.38 Seen from one perspective, the image of Trixy’s private rehearsal was worse than Milly’s public display if only because the former was beyond the public’s moral scrutiny. Like earlier evangelical writing for children, these stories were meant to “inflate the sordid” by sharply contrasting the grim realities that indus­ trial life produced, such as child labor and cruelty, on the one hand, and “an imaginary world where universal human values and natural justice ordered existence,” on the other.39 In the context of the waif story, the circus ring and its world “behind the scenes,” signifying danger and dis­ order, offered “a system of meaning” that exposed larger insecurities and doubts that underpinned the mid-Victorian age. Oddly, while the RTS and the SPCK struggled to gain public sympathy for the child acrobat (as well as for other waifs and strays), the skill with which the authors depicted

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mental and physical abuse added a spectacular dimension to their already sensational stories. What made their physicality more worrisome in both real life and the waif story was that these children were seen to be bound to their manag­ ers like slaves and made to rehearse and perform “degrading” tricks that exposed their visibly misshapen bodies.40 For example, Acrobat’s manager forces him “to fast when he was ordered, to twist his body and limbs into all sorts of strange shapes, and sometimes to remain for a long time in the same position, mostly a very fatiguing one.”41 For Shaftesbury, a noted advocate of children’s welfare since the creation of the Factory Acts, such static con­ finement was dangerous, cruel, and “appalling.” He recollected: the case of a child, about 14 or 15 years of age, who was in training for the acrobatic business … and [stood] on his head for a consid­ erable time, until from its continual practice it had become second nature to him. As a consequence, the development of the acrobat’s body became stunted by this training; a “number must become diseased or crippled under the process.” Investigating these stories involved “going his nightly rounds” and playing “eyewitness” to incidents of cruelty, as one of Shaftesbury’s friends had done. On one occasion: he heard shrieking and piercing cries, and on going up into the room from whence the sounds proceeded he found seven or eight children, with two or three women standing over them with sticks, beating them … because the children would be required in a few days to [per­ form] at an adjoining theatre.42 Like many other urban explorers interested in revealing the “frank brutali­ ties” of working-class life, Shaftesbury’s unnamed friend moved within an “unchecked” underworld, crafting sensational stories about urban dangers and obscenities that reinforced existing stereotypes about performing chil­ dren.43 These observations were well timed, coming at a moment when some politicians in the House of Lords believed that legal action had to be taken for the sake of the child acrobat. Those peers who supported state intervention faced formidable opposi­ tion. Initially, neither the growing number of circus troupes nor the public’s increasing awareness of acrobatic training and performance, inspired by Madame Blondin’s fall, seemed likely to motivate legal regulation.44 Indeed, the very lifeblood of the leisure market’s expansion was the laissez-faire climate of mid-Victorian Britain. For this reason, Lord Buckhurst, a Con­ servative peer and ally of Lord Shaftesbury’s, faced many dissenting voices

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in the House of Lords when he introduced a private bill designed to protect the lives and limbs of acrobat children in 1872. Some politicians, such as the Liberal peer, the Earl of Morley, said that while they “did not wish to defend the taste of those who took pleasure in witnessing dangerous exhibitions of this kind,” they “did not think bad taste was to be corrected by an Act of Parliament any more than drunkenness.” Buckhurst argued that the object of his legislation “was not to interfere with the indulgence of that taste where it was legitimate, but … merely to protect young children of tender years from being compelled to take part in acrobatic performances which were dangerous.”45 His view emerged from a widening belief that state intervention that helped those too weak to help themselves could be justi­ fied, as in the case of the child-labor provisions introduced in the 1860s and the compulsory vaccination of children by an act of Parliament in 1867.46 Buckhurst’s argument was, however, met with derision. In keeping with Morley’s Liberal opinion, the Marquis of Salisbury, a Conservative peer, suggested that the bill be applied to jockeys, who also “went through mus­ cular performances for gain [laughter].”47 The Lords were clearly amused by this problem; as one writer in Era noted caustically, they “have indulged in much laughter,” which, he lamented, “is not surprising.”48 Other peers simply believed that the wording of the measure was not precise enough and therefore moved that it be withdrawn.49 Another stumbling block was disagreement over the age group that the bill was meant to protect. Buckhurst’s interest in the Children’s Danger­ ous Performances Bill had extended beyond just helping children “of tender years.” In its initial form the bill had aimed to protect acrobats up to sixteen years old, indicating that the terms young persons and children were, for the purposes of the statute, conflated. When the bill was reintroduced in 1873, Buckhurst’s goals were more modest, and the bill called for protection of children under age twelve. By 1879, when it received the Royal Assent, the age restriction had been raised to fourteen.50 Significantly, in naming the statute in 1879, the term young persons was replaced by children. Legal protection of children aged fourteen years and younger had been applied roughly four decades earlier to child laborers in workshops and factories. The members of a royal commission advising the government in the thir­ ties said that at the beginning of the fourteenth year “the period of child­ hood … ceases and that of puberty is established, when the body becomes more capable of enduring protracted labour.”51 That the 1870s bill aimed to regulate sixteen-, twelve-, and then fourteen-year-olds arguably illustrates the extent to which those politicians supporting it viewed acrobats (at least initially) as different from other laboring children and were thus uncertain as to the age at which they no longer needed protection.52 When first introduced in 1872, the bill provoked resistance not only among some politicians but also among members of the acrobatic trade, serving

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to unite them in a common struggle. Their very livelihoods were at stake: “Should this Bill pass it will throw out [of] employment some hundreds of professionals who have no other means of living,” said J.H. Ricardo, of the Ricardo Troupe.53 Many in the trade agreed with him, arguing that because acrobat children often performed with their parents in troupes, the bill would adversely affect “professional” families.54 Implicit in such argu­ ments was that there was an important difference between legitimate acro­ bat families and those daredevils who gave the trade a bad name. Two years earlier, one gymnast who signed his name “Raslus” declared that it was common knowledge that recent stories about children falling from ropes had been about novices, not professionals like himself and their families or apprentices: I do not think it just that because a number of ambitious, untrained boys and girls are permitted to try their ‘prentice hands and feet with­ out the experience necessary for gymnastic performances, that we, who have devoted perhaps the better part of a lifetime, and overcome the difficulties, should have to suffer.55 As professionals, “Raslus” and others did not believe that their trade was dangerous. On the contrary, said the DeCastro Brothers in a letter to the editor of the Era, “we take every precaution against danger. On the stage, we have a thickly padded carpet and we are very careful of our boys during the performance.”56 In fact, it was because of their professional status that they took these precautions in order to achieve legitimacy with the public. Another argument overlooked by the peers was that the trade encouraged performers’ self-sufficiency: “[The peers] may have a feeling for the little ones,” said one acrobat on the eve of the bill’s passage, but the performers’ honest living “saves them from crime or the workhouse.” He added that as a consequence of his own training, which had begun at the age of three, and since leaving his last master to whom he was apprenticed, “I never knew what it was to want a pound.” Concerned about the likely impact of the acrobat’s bill, George Austin, of the Austin Troupe, portended that “it will be the means of throwing many a family who are now gaining liveli­ hoods … into poverty and want.”57 The trade was ill-prepared to cope with the problem on the eve of the bill’s passage due to a fundamental lack of organization. As a consequence, individuals such as the acrobat J. Grovini made pitiable attempts to reverse the tide of change; he offered to contrib­ ute his hard-earned one pound “for any expense necessary to suppress the movement,” which, he said, was “both unjust and radically ill advised.” In agreement with Grovini, George Austin said that he was “quite willing to put some money aside for the expense of a petition,” but one was never devised.58 However noble, such gestures were too little too late.

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Besides the short-term effects relating to income loss and popular per­ ception, the proposed law also had long-term consequences for the trade: “How can we have adult acrobats,” the DeCastros queried, “without first having the youthful learner?”59 Furthermore, warned Ricardo, “should this Bill become law, in a few years, there will be no great adult performers in Circuses, Theatres, Music Halls or other places of amusement.”60 This was exactly the effect that advocates of the bill wished the law to have. “If children were not allowed to perform in public,” argued the Conserva­ tive peer, the Earl of Malmesbury, “their parents would not think it worth while to train them.”61 Ricardo and others feared that without constant practice, those children in training would eventually lose their skills and therefore would not be able to perform in the coming years; their trade was a branch of athletics that required daily practice. Not everyone in Parlia­ ment believed, as Malmesbury did, that the law could deter parents from training their children. In a speech during the second debates on the bill in 1873, Shaftesbury argued that the bill, which only related to performance restrictions, would not affect the tortures that occurred in acrobatic training since they “were perpetuated at home and under the secretary of privacy.”62 Many believed, as he did, that parent-managers would find ways to continue their trade even if it meant forcing it underground. The circus manager George Sanger injected such a view into the debates. He warned that the bill: will not … stop the practice. [It] will merely drive it into another chan­ nel. We shall then depend on the Continental artists or men [who] will take children from here, teach them across the Channel and bring them back efficient artists after the time of restriction has passed.63 Sanger hit an important and fragile chord: the itinerant lifestyle of many of these performers made them unlikely candidates for legal control regard­ less of state intervention. For this reason, Shaftesbury sought the help of existing agencies in order to make these acrobat children answerable to an authority other than their parents. In particular, he enlisted the help of school boards in order to enforce “the compulsory powers” of the Educa­ tion Act of 1870 to compel acrobat children to attend schools.64 It was hoped that they, like other child workers, such as flower girls, matchbox makers, errand runners, and “little mothers” might be brought within the grasp of civil society, educated, and reformed.65 In assuming that the stat­ ute would bring acrobat children under the authority of the school system, however, Shaftesbury failed to consider that children who performed with troupes usually did not remain in any community long enough to war­ rant registration in a local school district. Even if they and/or their parenttrainers performed with a circus that was resident in a town (as many of

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them were), their engagements were typically no longer than several weeks or possibly a season lasting several months. The problem was discussed in Parliament decades later when George Smith introduced a bill, in both 1885 and 1894, erroneously conflating gypsies and circus performers into the category of “moveable dwellers.” Ultimately, the 1879 act did not prohibit training practices per se since the peers could not agree to regulate all levels of labor in the trade. There was such a thing as “overregulation,” it had been argued previously.66 In addition, there remained the practical difficulty of how to police private households in which the alleged cruel training took place. The surveillance of homes, if put into law, would intrude on the rights of freeborn English­ men to the privacy of their homes, a theme taken up in later debates, notably by Henry C. Stephens, of the Liberty and Property Defence League.67 And as some laissez-faire-minded contemporaries pondered, where would it stop? In its final form the law represented a compromise between the pro- and antiregulationists. It prevented children under fourteen from performing feats that were “dangerous to the life and limb of a child, in the opinion of a court of summary jurisdiction,” and further stated that any: parent or guardian, or any person having the custody, of such a child, who shall aid or abet the same, shall severally be guilty of an offence against this Act, and shall be … liable for each offence to a penalty not exceeding £10. In addition, the law stated that the court “shall have the power of awarding compensation not exceeding £20, to be paid by such employer [of the place of entertainment] to the child … for bodily harm so occasioned.”68 Of course, the debates over the Dangerous Performances Bill did not end with the passing of the statute. The child acrobat continued to draw the attention of the public and legislators alike, especially since, in the words of Shaftesbury in 1883, the provisions of the act were being “altogether ignored” and “at this time the evil prevailed to a greater extent than it ever did before.”69 Although inadequate from Shaftesbury’s point of view, the statute did open the door to further reform; the provisions relating to acrobats in the Acts for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in 1889 and 1894, brought forward by the Liberal Lord Herschell and the Conservative Wilson Noble, of Hastings, were testament to this fact.70 By the late 1880s, when the trade was inextricably tied, in the minds of many proregulation­ ists, to other dangerous ones, these anticruelty laws threatened the parent and/or guardian of the performing child with more punitive measures.71 They also protected other performing children, including pantomime girls, who became the subject of intense concern in this period.72 Thanks to Jesse Collings, a Liberal from Birmingham, and Conservative Secretary of State

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Matthew White Ridley, the door to reform widened further when in 1897 the amended Dangerous Performances Act raised the minimum age for participation in displays regarded as “dangerous to life and limb” from fourteen to eighteen for girls and from fourteen to sixteen for boys.73 Whether in the ring, in the waif story, or in Parliament, the child acrobat engaged the interests of the mid-Victorian public and in the process drew attention to tensions underpinning the social order. For patrons, the tension was between morbid curiosity and a desire to admire and stare awestruck at the “amazing” prodigy. For reformers, it was between their moral cause and the dominance of the consumer demand for this spectacle. The conten­ tious issues surrounding the acrobatic trade that were brought into focus by these two camps emerged in Parliament, where the conflicts between state interference and individual privacy and between market intervention and laissez-faire politics were played out. Yet, the prospect of legal interference in the affairs of child performers exposed public anxiety, not the peaceful equilibrium that Burn saw in mid-Victorian England. These “wretched” acrobats, powerless and threatened by the Dangerous Performances Bill, provoked a paradoxical reaction among contemporar­ ies: they became objects of revulsion on the one hand and pitiful subjects who might be saved on the other. While they were similar to other laboring children insofar as the conditions of their work were, in the 1870s, brought before politicians for reform, they were unlike their peers in one essential way: their world was viewed as foreign, gypsylike, and suspect even though the troupes with which they labored belonged to a commercial entertain­ ment market that was embedded in the fabric of Victorian society. Regard­ less, those stereotypes, supported by sensationalized stories, provided the seeds of discontent in the public mind and in Parliament. The parents and managers of these acrobats, unwilling to observe passively the dismantling of their trade by the legal system, challenged the arguments supporting the Dangerous Performances Bill and drew attention to larger issues about the relationship between the state and the individual. Their protests were, however, insufficient where matters of life and death were concerned, and the Dangerous Performances Act of 1879 was passed. Inadvertently, the mid-Victorian public’s desire to see acrobatic spectacles involving children created the conditions for moral panic to reach its sensational pitch. Such anxiety encouraged public debate and was ultimately responsible for creat­ ing legal change, which continued until the end of the century. It was a his­ torical paradox that the little acrobat, whose balancing performance relied on maintaining equilibrium, exposed deep cultural and political tensions, not equipoise, in mid-Victorian Britain. The tremors arising from them were to be felt for decades to come.

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Notes 1 Best, Geoffrey (1979), Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–70, London: Fontana, 136. 2 See Davis, Tracy C. (1986), “The employment of children in the Victorian theatre: training, exploitation and the movement for reform,” New Theatre Quarterly, 2(6): 117–35. 3 Davin, Anna (2001), “Waif stories in late nineteenth century England,” History Workshop Journal, 52 (Autumn): 67–98; Cutt, Margaret Nancy (1979), Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth Century Evangelical Writing for Children, Wormley, Hertfordshire: Five Owls. See Avery, Gillian (1975), Childhood’s Pattern: A Study of the Heroes and Heroines of Children’s Fiction, 1770–1950, London: Hodder & Stoughton; Bratton, J.S. (1981), The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction, London: Croom Helm, chapter 3; Davin, Anna (1996), Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London 1870– 1914, London: Rivers Oram, 91, 162; and Jan, Isabelle (1973), On Children’s Literature, translated by Catherine Storr, London: Allen Lane. 4 Davin (2001), “Waif Stories”; Bratton (1981), Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction, 84. This shift was especially noticeable after the repeal of the stamp tax in 1855 and the duty on paper in 1861 (see Lang (1980), “Children’s Champions”). 5 Davin (2001), “Waif Stories.” There are, however, earlier examples in children’s fiction of performing children who are waifs; see, e.g., Adams, Charlotte (1838), The Stolen Child; Or, Laura’s Adventures with the Travelling Showman and His Family, London: J. W. Parker. Discussions of adult cruelty toward children assumed greater importance in the waif novel of the 1880s, when the campaign to save children from neglect and abuse earned legal and institutional legitimacy (see Assael, Brenda (1997), “The circus and respectable society in Victorian Britain,” PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, chapter 5; and Bratton 1981, Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction, 94–5). 6 Lord Shaftesbury had a previous rapport with waif-fiction writers and their pub­ lishers (see Bratton 1981, Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction, 85). 7 Burn, W.L. (1964), An Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation, London: Unwin Books. 8 Public General Statutes, Children’s Dangerous Performances Act, 1879, 42 and 43 Vict., c. 34, sec. 3. 9 Burn (1964), Age of Equipoise, 8. My idea of “instability,” as compared with Burn’s notion of “equipoise,” is connected to discussions of “moral panics” in Cohen, Stanley (1972), Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers, London: MacGibbon & Kee; and Walkowitz, Judith R. (1992), City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 10 On the mid-Victorian mind and the plurality of ideas, see Kitson Clark, G. (1962), The Making of Victorian England, London: Methuen; Houghton, Walter E. (1957), The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, chapter 7; Hamilton Buckley, Jerome (1952), The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture, London: George Allen & Unwin; and Himmelfarb, Gertrude (1968), Victorian Minds, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. 11 “In the Ring,” All the Year Round, 28 January 1865, 20, 21. 12 “Alarming Trapeze Accident,” Era, 21 March 1869, 5. 13 Royal Leamington Spa Courier, 3 July 1869, 6.

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14 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 199 (1870), col. 1961; “The Exhibition at the Holborn Amphitheatre,” Era, 20 March 1870, 13. 15 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 199 (1870), col. 1961. On female acrobats, see Assael (2005), Circus and Victorian Society, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, chapter 5; Tracy C. Davis (1990), “Sex in Public Places”; and, from the perspective of the stage, Davis, Tracy C. ([1990] 1991), Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. 16 PP, Select Committee to inquire into the Working of Acts for Licensing and Regulating of Theatres and Places of Public Entertainment, 1866, vol. 16, p. 43, line 1054. See chapter 5, note 86, and the quotation preceding that note in the text. 17 For a more general discussion of the commercialized leisure market, see Bailey, Peter (1982), “Custom, capital and culture in the Victorian music hall”, in R.D. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth Century England, London: Croom Helm. 18 “Juvenile Acrobat Bill,” Era, 21 July 1872, 12. 19 Era Almanac, 1867, 69; 1877, 83; 1878, 84. 20 Letter to the editor, Era, 21 July 1872, 12. 21 Davin (2001), “Waif Stories”; Bratton (1981), Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction; Lang (1980), “Children’s Champions.” 22 On mid-Victorian narrative fantasy, see Cohen, Morten N. (1995), Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London: Macmillan; see also Knoepflmacher, U.C. (1983), “The balancing of child and adult: an approach to Victorian fantasies for chil­ dren,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37(4): 501. On melodrama, see “Sensational Novels,” Quarterly Review, 226(1863): 482–514; Brooks, Peter (1995), The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven and London: Yale University Press; Booth, Michael R. (1965), English Melodrama, London: Jenkins; and McWilliam, Rohan (2000), “Melodrama and the historians,” Radical History Review, 78 (Fall): 57–84. 23 Simpson, Margaret (1993), “Hard Times and circus times,” Dickens Quarterly, 10(3): 131–46, 131; Collins, Philip (1965), “Dickens and popular amuse­ ments,” Dickensian, 61: 7–19; Schlicke, Paul (1993), “Dickens in the circus,” Theatre Notebook, 67(1): 2–19; Schlicke, Paul (1985), Dickens and Popular Entertainment, London: George Allen & Unwin; Schlicke, Paul (1999), “Circus,” in Paul Schlicke (ed.), Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 24 Dickens and Collins deal with the subject of saving the circus girl in a different way from waif novelists. Dickens sees Jupe’s exit from Sleary’s troupe and into Gradgrind’s schoolroom as a descent into a cold, utilitarian Benthamite world; Collins treats Madonna’s release from Jubber’s circus in slightly more critical terms. In neither case, however, does the child performer have to deal with the poverty, spiritual decay, and irreligion found in waif novels. 25 Bratton (1981), Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction, 17–9. 26 Little Acrobat and His Mother (1872), synopsis in backmatter catalogue D, p. 3; text p. 20, London: Religious Tract Society. 27 Ibid., 6, 10, 22. 28 Mountebank’s Children (1866), London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 6, 7, 10, 17–8. 29 Ibid., 18. 30 Cited in Toole-Stott, Raymond (1958–71), Circus and Allied Arts, A World Bibliography 1500–1970, vols I–IV, Derby: Harpur & Sons. Vol. V in manuscript

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format, 2: 290. O.F. Walton’s book (1877), A Peep Behind the Scenes, London: Religious Tract Society, was translated into Spanish as Entre Bastidores O’hasta Hallarla in 1910. Walton (1877), Peep behind the Scenes, 112–13. The vanity that Jessie displays is similarly treated in Charlotte Adams’s (1838) Stolen Child, in which a young girl who dances publicly is abducted by a showman impressed by her gracefulness. The ending of this story is similar to that of Frances Stratton’s (1898) Nan, the Circus Girl, London: John F. Shaw, in which fourteen-year-old Nan finds salva­ tion after running away with Mr Johnson’s Travelling Circus. Coveney, Peter (1967), The Image of Childhood The Individual and Society: A Study of the Thee in English Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books; Pattison, Robert (1978), The Child Figure in Literature, Athens: University of Georgia Press. Mrs Walton’s emphasis was slightly different, as indicated, although the man who approaches Jessie and asks her to join the circus is represented as a corrupt­ ing agent who leads her into a life of sin. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 212 (1872), col. 619. Mountebank’s Children (1866), 18. Stretton, Hesba [Sara Smith] (1889), An Acrobat’s Girlhood, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 52; Demers, Patricia (1991), “Mrs. Sherwood and Hesba Stretton: the letter and the spirit of evangelical writing of and for children,” in James McGavran (ed.), Romanticism and Children’s Literature, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 129–49. Stretton (1889), Acrobat’s Girlhood, 52. Lang, Marjory (1980), “Children’s champions: mid-Victorian children’s periodi­ cals and the critics,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 23(1–2): 17–31. The idea that children were bound to their masters like slaves was later devel­ oped by Amye Reade in Ruby (1889, reprint, 1890), Ruby: Or, How Girls Are Trained for Circus Life, Founded on Fact, London: Trischler, and Slaves of the Sawdust (1892), London: F.V. White, although not in the waif-story genre. Rather, Reade’s work was more closely allied to W.T. Stead’s exposé on child prostitution in 1885. Little Acrobat and His Mother (1872), 8. For a discussion of “interiority” in connection with this story, see Steedman, Carolyn (1995), Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930. London: Virago, chapter 6, esp. 103–4. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 212 (1872), col. 622. In a different way, O.G. Rejlander depicted children belonging to the urban poor through photography in this period (see da Costa Nunes (1990), “O.G. Rejlander’s Photographs”). Madame Blondin was a female acrobat whose death resulted from a fall from a high wire during a performance at Aston Park, Birmingham in 1863. For the broader sig­ nificance of this story in terms of the circus’s relationship to moral reform and regu­ lation. See Assael, Brenda (2005), The Circus and Victorian Society, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, chapter 5. On mid-Victorian laissez-faire principles, see Burn (1964), An Age of Equipoise, 161–231; and Bailey, Peter (1982), “Custom, capital and culture in the Victorian music hall,” in R.D. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth Century England, London: Croom Helm. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 212 (1872), col. 620, 618. Harris, Jose (1953), Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 196; and also Hoppen, Theodore K. (1998), The MidVictorian Generation, Oxford: Clarendon, 96.

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47 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser, vol. 212 (1872), col. 1504, brackets in original; “Acrobat Bill,” Daily Telegraph, 22 July 1872, 2. 48 “A Plea for Acrobats,” Era, 14 July 1872, 4. 49 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 212 (1872), col. 1505; “Acrobat Bill,” Daily Telegraph, 22 July 1872, 2. 50 Public General Statutes, Children’s Dangerous Performances Act, 1879, 42 and 43 Vict., c. 34, sec. 3; see also Bills, Public, etc., “Acrobat Bill,” 1872, bill 173. 51 Quoted in Cunningham, Hugh (1995), Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, London: Longman Group, 140. 52 On the distinction between childhood and adolescence, see Gillis, John R. (1981), Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, New York: Academic Press. 53 “Infant Acrobats,” Era, 14 July 1872, 4. 54 Letter to the editor, Era, 21 July 1872, 12. 55 Ibid., 27 November 1870, 12. 56 “Infant Acrobats,” Era, 7 July 1872, 12. 57 “Children’s Dangerous Performances Bill,” Era, 20 July 1879, 4. 58 “Children’s Dangerous Performances Bill,” 6 July 1879, 4; 20 July 1879, 4. 59 “Infant Acrobats,” Era, 7 July 1872, 12. 60 “Infant Acrobats,” Era, 14 July 1872, 4. 61 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 216 (1873), col. 1244. 62 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 216 (1873), col. 1244. 63 “A Plea for Acrobats,” Era, 14 July 1872, 4. 64 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 216 (1873), col. 1244. 65 Best (1979), Mid-Victorian Britain, 178. The phrase “little mothers” is taken from Davin (1996), Growing Up Poor, esp. chapter 5. 66 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 212 (1872), col. 620. 67 See, e.g., “Moveable Dwellings Bill,” Era, 4 February 1893, 16; and Assael (1997), “Circus and Respectable Society,” 205–7. 68 Public General Statues, Children’s Dangerous Performances Act, 1879, 42 and 43 Vict, c. 34, sec. 3. 69 Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3d ser., vol. 282 (1883), col. 1462. 70 See Public General Statues, An Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, 1889, 52 and 53 Vict., c. 44, sec. 3, clause c. See also ibid., 1894, 57 and 58 Vict., c. 27. 71 Amye Reade’s Ruby (1889, reprint, 1890) and Slaves of the Sawdust (1892), mentioned earlier, provided fuel for this argument (see above, n. 40). 72 Cf. Tracy C. Davis (1986), “Employment of Children.” 73 An Act to Extend the Age under which the Employment of Young Persons in Dangerous Performances is Prohibited, 1897, 60 and 61 Vict., c. 52, sec. 1. For a fuller discussion, see Assael (2005), Circus and Victorian Society, chapter 5.

Spectators

Chapter 16

Ecstasy and visceral flesh in motion Peta Tait

I watch aerialists with attention that jumps and flickers, but which shatters and splinters in the attempt to describe them. How to describe the physical action of aerialists – their reception by spectators? This offers a brief outline of some theoretical ideas about spectators’ sensory perceptions of muscular bodies. It proposes that aerial bodies are received bodily, and viscerally. A spectator will ‘catch’ the aerial body with his or her senses in mimicry of flying, within a mesh of reversible-body­ to-body (or -bodies) phenomenology. In this visceral catching, motion and emotion converge. The premise is that ideas of the physicality, viscerality and tactility of bodies should not be misplaced as often happens when phi­ losophers and theorists consider corporeality and the embodied subject-self in relation to the politics of social change. I explore how cultural identity is delivered by a live performance genre such as an aerial act so that performing bodies communicate visually and physically. The seeing of aerialists often seems to induce reactions like those produced with tactile stimuli. Clearly performance reception involves sensory perception but this may not be fully explicable. At issue is the extent to which a spectator viscerally perceives the physicality of another body (or other bodies) in a process of oscillating identification and disidentification with its cultural identity. Helen Stoddart claims that live circus defies ‘literary embodiment’ (Stoddart 2000: 6). It is not only the immediacy of physical presence that is lost with other forms of representation, but the way bodies in movement demand reciprocating bodily awareness from spectators during live perform­ ance. But because literature and film infuse aerial action with a wider range of emotions, there are compensatory visceral intercurrents for spectators.

Delight or anxiety? The actions of aerialists can make spectators react with gasps, starts and averted looks. These are tangible, sensory reactions. Aerial action is a physi­ cal phenomenon for and of bodies and, like other circus performance, fos­ ters bodily tension and release. If the immediacy of such reactions suggests

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that they are involuntary, the ‘concreteness’ of having fun coexists with the ‘unruly perversities’ of the body (Ferguson 1990: 68). There is an assumption that aerial performance arouses less tangible responses of excitement, delight and even wonder. Descriptions of audi­ ence reactions to most performances are conjectural, and reviewers often describe spectators as all having the same reaction. In a nineteenth-century example, ‘The three sisters Martini are very clever on the flying trapeze, and their flying leap is witnessed with almost breathless attention.’1 Nineteenthcentury descriptions accord strong physical reactions to seeing perform­ ance and to watching female performers. The most common expression of embodied reception would seem to be the holding of breath. It typifies tension in a spectator’s body, but as a common phrase it might be summa­ rizing a range of bodily reactions. The sequencing of acts within circus and tricks within acts is structured to manipulate audience responses. A few knowledgeable circus writers help­ fully describe their individual reactions, which are subjective and conveyed after the event as memories of visceral responses. Antony Hippisley Coxe describes watching the prolonged preparation for a cannon act culminating in a performer in a white coat sliding into a cannon barrel. He compares it to his remembered bodily sensations before returning to school, and living during World War II. Coxe explains, ‘All this built up an almost unbearable feeling of tension. I experienced the same empty drag at the bottom of my stomach, the same constriction of the throat’ (Coxe 1980a: 107). These are bodily reactions of anxiety or dread from a very experienced circus-goer that connect the reception of circus to sensations accompanying escalating experiences of social violence. Coxe acknowledges sudden con­ strictions localized in his stomach and throat in response to seeing a body in potential peril. In this example, a performing body is received with bod­ ily sensations also linked to prior experiences combining physiological and psychological activity. Why would Coxe or any spectator willingly attend circus knowing the likelihood of experiencing such anxiety? Perhaps the immediacy of visceral reactions appeals irrespective of adverse ones. Coxe recalls disturbances experienced in conjunction with his own physical survival, so that visceral sensations become bodily reminders of the continuity of his aliveness. Here the spectator does not try to avoid anxiety by turning away. This raises a further complication unanswered here: in what ways, if at all, might a spec­ tator become bodily, viscerally, desensitized? Consideration of the significance and fluidity of spectators’ sensory per­ ception is most developed in cinema studies (Williams 1995; Gledhill and Williams 2000). Within psychoanalytic theory, this dimension might accord with the imaginary (pre-Oedipal) as unable to be represented in language (Russo 1994: 37). A contrary position is suggested by Steven Shaviro’s argu­ ment that viewing film is a ‘concrete’ surface visceral encounter without

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interiority or psychic structure (Shaviro 1993: 31, 43). Visceral understand­ ing, however, has been interpreted as sensitivity within the entrails that is a force like a psychic drive (Hillman 1996: 94 (Nietzsche)). Moreover, cinema’s extreme sensory responses are often induced by presenting abject bodies and bodily substances, particularly blood (unlike traditional circus). Like circus, film deliberately manipulates subjective visceralities as it enacts larger cultural patterns. Interestingly, while traditional circus denies bodily abjection, some new circus promotes it. Circus specialists make a distinction between aerial acts that require an appreciation of their artistry and those that cause more anxiety than enjoy­ ment. For example, Ruth Manning-Sanders comments about the De Riaz Trio at the 1948 Bertram Mills Circus who follow the trend of motorized aerial apparatus designed to look like planes and rockets after World War II, ‘the girl alternatively whirls round in an aeroplane and gets out of it to perform on a trapeze, whilst, at the other end of the revolving apparatus, the two men do breath-taking stunts’ (Manning-Sanders 1952: 249). She extrapolates that the absence of a net causes ‘such a strain of anxiety in the audience that all sense of artistry is lost’ (Manning-Sanders 1952: 249). In disagreement with her is Bernard Mills, who describes this as his favourite act because it seems without danger. After years of catering for audiences, he dismisses any suggestion that they are ghoulish, and explains that an ‘unscared audience’ likes to be thrilled but not ‘frightened’ (Mills 1954: 37). Clearly audience members react differently and gendered experience might partially explain these contrasting reactions, as would cultural identification or disidentification with a performer. Whether thrilled or frightened, a spec­ tator is reacting bodily and viscerally to the visual stimuli. But this visceral­ ity can be socially and psychically conditioned, and in the unruly turmoil of the carnivalesque (and circus), visceral body laughter triumphs over fear (Bakhtin 1968: 90). Bodily reactions might become differently qualified in subjective reflection and varied social experience. Thus, while it is possible to claim a spectrum of jolts, gasps, contractions, and sighs in the perception of circus bodies, the extent of their arousal and interpretative significance for an individual spectator remains open-ended. The larger point is that the immediacy of visceral experience contributes to the reception of aerial performance, and therefore also invariably accompa­ nies the perception of a body’s cultural identity.

Cinema’s aerial action The actions of circus bodies in live performance and in cinema create images of motion. Unsurprisingly, early cinema (1895–1917) utilized acrobatic action as a corollary to the invention of motion picture technol­ ogy, and Étienne-Jules Marey ([1891] 1995) investigated the progression of locomotion in evolution by photographing semi-dressed bodies leaping

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and jumping in order to document stages of motion. Athletes, acrobats, contortionists and dancers were used in Edison’s mid-1890s films because they ‘displayed intense physical motion’ (Backer 2000: 95). Acrobatic acts and films were programmed together until World War I; acrobat Pansy Chinery, formerly Alar the Human Arrow, worked in theatre shows that included short films. In disagreeing with the assertion that a train’s locomotion was metaphoric of the silent motion picture, Alison McMahan (2000) argues that aerody­ namics are more apt. Perhaps both locomotion and aerodynamics provide useful concepts to explain how a technologically induced live experience of moving in and through space is brought to imagery of motion, and vice versa. Acknowledging Gorky’s description of a train of shadows, Tom Gunning describes how the ‘force of the cinematic apparatus’ potentially induces excitement, thrills and terror through an ‘illusion of motion’ (Gunning 1989: 34–5). Regardless of arguments about anxiety or delight, spectators bring sensory memories to seeing images in immediate sensory encounters. Prior kinaesthetic experience also makes an image of motion meaningful. It is clearly an individual’s social experience of motion when, for example, a woman travelling alone might consider train travel unsafe for reasons to do with her gender, and a spectator’s economic position might determine the extent of his or her familiarity with train or air travel motion. Each spectator brings his or her accumulated personal and social histories of body movement and motion to live and cinematic action, and these become absorbed into further live experiences of motion. In considering early cinema as a disruptive ‘technology of modernity’, Mary Ann Doane points out that narratives of pain at least resist the rationalization of vision and its separation from body phenomena in the circumscribed avoid­ ance of the spectator’s body and its sensations (Doane 2002: 530, 534–5). In the structuring of film imagery for a gendered spectatorship, the domi­ nant white (masculine) body’s trauma is displaced onto either a superhuman body or a female spectacle (Doane 2002: 543). This expands on what Shaviro argues are the limits of theories about gendered identification that produce a phantasmic body rather than visceral affective ‘lines of flight’ (Shaviro 1993: 22 (Deleuze and Guattari)). Embodied visceral reactions need not be theoreti­ cally disconnected from other ways of understanding culturally constructed subjective responses (Williams 1995). A spectator’s viscerality and bodily thrill cannot be detached from his or her cognitive, emotional and uncon­ scious responses to culturally shaped artistic representation that is intended to stimulate them. In drawing on Foucault’s ideas of ‘knowledge-pleasure’ to consider por­ nography in early cinema, Linda Williams elaborates on Jean-Louis Comolli’s ‘machines of the visible’, whereby optical apparatuses mediated the seeing of events and bodies contributing to the ‘frenzy of the visible’ (Williams 1999: 35–6). A short film, The Trapeze Disrobing Act (1903), provides an

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early example of a female body in eroticized aerial action replayed in cin­ ematic motion imagery (Allen 1991: 267–70; Staiger 1995: 58–9). Cinema develops from ‘the desire to place the clocked and measured bodies pro­ duced by the first machines into narratives that naturalize their movements’ (Williams 1999: 36). The spectator will often respond to this culturally induced construction of natural movement from the ‘gut’ (Williams 1999: 5 (Kuhn)) because of a ‘visceral appeal’, but what appears to be an automatic response is mediated by images (Williams 1999: 5). In responses to cinema across genres, Williams writes that ‘viewers reincorporate a gaze that begins as an outward projection from their physical bodies and which returns to the body’ (Williams 1999: 292, italics in original). Drawing on the psy­ choanalytical ideas of Carol Glover, and Jonathan Crary’s ‘carnal density’, Williams finds that it is important to ‘reconnect the organs of the eyes to the flesh’ (Williams 1999: 292). Visual pleasure arises from a criss-crossing of visceral and sensory patterns within eroticized perception. A cinema spectator’s bodily reactions from tensing to screaming, laughing to crying, happen in relation to constructed languages that initially spanned ‘exhibitionism’, ‘surprise’ and ‘spectacle’ like circus, and subsequently included ‘voyeurism’, ‘suspense’ and ‘story’ (Bean and Negra 2002b: 6). With the advent of films such as Variety, Trapeze and The Greatest Show on Earth, kinetic aerial action is framed within potent, offstage emotional inter­ actions between characters that heighten tensions about risks and missed opportunities in story, suspense and voyeurism. The performing aerial body is transformed into a performer character with interiority embedded in a plot. Aerial action is powerfully replayed along with emotional struggle. While in live circus a socially recognized performing body is impersonal, in cinema and in theatre spectators are also responding to a fictional personali­ ty’s emotional responses. In the twentieth century’s dominant acting form of lifelike realism, emotional phenomena are socially embodied (second-hand), and gendered rather than culturally neutral and universally true (Shields 2002). Emotional languages unfold as and through embodied cultural spaces. An extension of these concepts about the social meaning of embodied emotions is that they are concurrently also related to sensory and visceral responses. While cinema contributes to the social habituation of bodily sensation, horror and porn are considered ‘bad taste’ fantasy because they ‘incise’ flesh (Shaviro 1993: 100). These engagements have a lower status because they are widely recognized as tangible visceral sensations, and in the cultural hierarchy of emotionally induced bodily responses, less tangible effects are more esteemed. Like circus, bodies in action stunts for sensory effect are ubiquitous in cinema’s imagery of motion, and more recently in game-based technologies, which often have unique motion aesthetics that can induce dizziness. Their reception presumes somatic knowledge as it generates it, and does so with progressive exaggeration. For example, the kinaesthetic understanding of

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driving a car using reflexive responses and spatial estimations in and out of conscious control is brought by most late twentieth-century spectators to watching images of car motion. Its social implications are found in, for example, a parent character driving or a male character driving rather than a female; its emotional effect might be derived from the moral significance of a car chase between good and bad characters. The social identity of bodies in action gives sensory motion imagery its meanings. Aaron Anderson refers to ‘muscular sympathy or empathy and ‘memory’ where movement evokes sensory responses including emotions (Anderson 1998: 10). Scenarios of motion are culturally produced bodily experiences for targeted audiences, although enjoyment can vary across identity groupings. A body’s kinetic action can also contribute to cultural identity. Towards the end of the twenti­ eth century, there was a technological shift away from replicating the tempo of lived experience as naturalized action, while reinforcing male identity in relation to heightened action. As Richard Dyer explains about spectators in 1990s cinema, they prefer heightened sensations of speed action, and invariably as ‘a masculine structure of feeling … in the body’s contact with the world’ (Dyer 2000: 18). Motion imagery is viewed in combination with physiological and psychological remembering and with fantasizing. Sensory responses to motion might be difficult to quantify, measure and explain, but cannot be ignored. The female aerialist in action has come to personify an attunement to love’s longing. This is superbly illustrated by Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire (1987), co-written with Peter Handke, in which a male angel, Damiel (Bruno Ganz), in an overcoat, loves a female aerialist who wears white (chicken) wings, and he chooses the metaphoric fall from grace into embodiment (Stoddart 2000: 181–7). Cesare Casarino writes that Wings of Desire represents a dying modernist circus with postmodern apocalyp­ tic angels listening to fragmented thoughts about everyday experience, and, together with historical and geographical legacies, spectators are accorded their ‘transcendental and omniscient vision’ (Casarino 1990: 179). The film articulates emotional longing through the male angel’s desire for union with the female aerialist although this denies a same-sex bond between male angels (Casarino 1990: 180). Wenders repeatedly uses a male driver in his other films to show charac­ ters’ movement as they unsuccessfully seek ‘a consummation of the spatial and emotional dynamics’ in his cinema’s visualization of the ‘interaction of motion and emotion’ (Kolker and Beicken 1993: 59, 67). Emotions as sensations become inseparable from images of motion. In progression, Wings of Desire offers redemption only through ‘a descent into physical­ ity’ (Kolker and Beicken 1993: 140). The film’s poetic and spiritual images belong to Western humanism but as an ‘inverse resurrection’ (Kolker and Beicken 1993: 152). The character Marion (Solveig Dommartin), the French aerialist, is an object of romantic passion, a cliché of male voyeurism

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(Kolker and Beicken 1993: 156). Perversely, then, the aerialist is a safe woman (Russo 1994: 29 (Modleski)). But the female aerialist has a more intriguing significance since the angel spectator first sees her on trapeze. The aerial action becomes inseparably also one of emotion in motion; it functions as an ‘action-image’ (Deleuze 1986) for the lover’s observing sensory body. The aerial body’s subsequent spinning on a web suggests an increasing momentum in the motion of the lover’s emotional experience. The angel lover longs for a visceral tactile (human) body to consummate the promise of aerial transcendence. Depiction by aerial action of emotional and spiritual transcendence remains the province of socially defined bodies. In Patricia Rozema’s film When Night is Falling (1995), twin female aerialists (Karyne and Sarah Steben) perform on trapeze interjected with imagery of two women charac­ ters making love and the doubling of the female aerialist functions as a motif for a lesbian union. A circus performer, Petra (Rachael Crawford), seduces Camille (Pascale Bussières) away from an impending marriage and her lec­ turing work in a religious college. Camille’s crisis of faith arising from her defence of homosexuality is set against an implied sexual freedom with life in a new circus. In turn, its arduous lifestyle makes a female manager lose faith with circus and depart. Imagery of aerialists and gliders metaphorically represent the bodily sensations of the two female lovers, and when Camille falls to the ground in the snow in the emotional crisis of their separation, she develops hypothermia or physiological stasis. A body’s heightened sen­ sory experience is like the motion imagery of aerial action. In these films, love’s action is accorded aerial imagery to suggest bodily sensations, and to enhance its visceral impact for spectators.

Catching body phenomenologies The performance history of aerialists over 150 years is one of imitating the physical actions of other aerialists, and repeatedly pushing beyond the established limits of aerial athleticism. This unfolds as a history in which bodies performing action contribute to changing perceptions of physicality. Physical and social spaces converge as bodies become reshaped along with subjective perceptions of them. As Jane Desmond points out about the study of dance, movement can illuminate thinking about embodiment, identity and self by melding ‘materiality and representation’ to interpret ‘kinesthetic subjectivity’ (Desmond 1997b: 2). A performer’s moved action is encoun­ tered kinaesthetically, as well as subjectively by a spectator. An aerialist imitates his or her previous (rehearsed) action as well as that of other seen bodies. Action is remembered as it is performed and a performer’s activation of somatic memory implicates this potential in a spectator. Spectators might be attracted to athletic movement that is physi­ cally familiar, whether it is sport or dance or aerial movement. Conversely, they might be bodily drawn to watch unfamiliar extremes. Comments by

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performers and spectators imply that a body in action can create sensory spaces that momentarily enter ‘opaque zones’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995: 148). These presume moments of wordless sensory exchange. Aerial performance produces bodies moving in and out of mindful reflective spaces. A spectator’s capacity to see aerial action might be finely tuned by his or her prior movement experience of moving and seeing other moving bodies. Merleau-Ponty gives the example of how a body learns to dance, exceeding the more basic movements of walking or running and necessarily accom­ plishing it physically rather than with an ‘intellectual synthesis’ (MerleauPonty 1996: 142). For much of the twentieth century, Eurocentric actor training focused on the physical retraining of an actor’s body to facilitate changeable external movement (Hodge 2000), and arguably thereby induc­ ing ‘kinesthetic subjectivity’ in the reception of meaning from texts. But the ways in which a spectator body sees theatre are contingent on ideological influences (Dolan 1988). The physiological and psychological perception of kinaesthetic motion is also a cultural transaction. The specificity of lived experience disrupts generalizations about a proc­ ess of phenomenological body-to-body (or -bodies) encounters. MerleauPonty presumes that ‘the gestures of the masculine body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1996: 156) are socially and sexually normative in unravelling his ideas of an originating bodily experience in lived worlds, and these are thoroughly criticized for their universalizing singularity (Grosz 1994: 106). The move­ ment and action of a lived body is socially structured as it is experienced within variable subjective habituation that encompasses representation. Reinterpretations of Laura Mulvey’s well-established theory of the gaze in cinema, and ideas of subject-object relations, confirm multiple fluid positions of cultural identification in relation to narrativized imagery and fetishistic visual spectacles (Neale 1983: 5 (Ellis); Williams 1995): Gilles Deleuze writes that while Merleau-Ponty made phenomenology and cin­ ema confrontational (Deleuze 1986: 57), he perceived ‘the spirit of the cin­ ema’ through finding a ‘sensory-motor link’ to behaviour (Deleuze 1986: 155). Deleuze draws on Merleau-Ponty to explain two aspects of his argu­ ment that a different order of subjectivity was arising around the time of early cinema, one in which the spaces of consciousness and movement in a ‘dynamic sublime’ pass into each other (Deleuze 1986: 53). Deleuze finds that matter is ‘movement-image’, and ‘image is movement’ that expands into ‘action-images, affection-images, perception-images’ through cinema (Deleuze 1986: 59–60, italics in original). ‘The action-image inspires a cin­ ema of behaviour (behaviourism), since behaviour is an action which passes from one situation to another’ (Deleuze 1986: 155). Deleuze expands on his idea of ‘affect-image’ as close-ups of the face (Deleuze 1986: 109), and points out that the film actor as a character is not stationary but active on a small scale (Deleuze 1986: 155).

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Vivian Sobchack draws on Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘experience by experi­ ence’ to explain fluid embodied subjective and intrasubjective consciousness within the sensuous and sensible perception of cinema (Sobchack 1992: 3). With regard to social behaviour, Nick Crossley (1994) re-evaluates MerleauPonty in relation to Foucault and delineates political phenomenology. More specifically, Stanton Garner writes on phenomenological intersubjectivity in theatre as a ‘phenomenal space, governed by the body’ (Garner 1994: 3), and Amelia Jones describes the open motion of a fleshed body-self in reception in the visual arts (Jones 1998: 11 (Merleau-Ponty and Butler)). Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas are applicable to the reception of cir­ cus performance, even when it is not representing a spectrum of emotional subjectivity through close-ups of faces and other modes; Instead, live circus offers ‘action-images’ of bodies through sensory visceral encounters within an unfolding orientation to kinaesthetic motion, with additional emotional effects from music. In his statement that the body catches movement (Merleau-Ponty 1996: 143), Merleau-Ponty outlines physical processes for acquiring movement that consist of imitation, reflexive responses, and spatial estimations which appear to be happening simultaneously in a body but not dominating its mental faculties. Catching provides a relevant concept to this discussion as a spectator sees a flyer caught or a soloist catch the trapeze bar as he or she drops. Merleau-Ponty’s idea of catching is not a literal touching but percep­ tual attunement and engagement of a whole body that is orientated to others through its pre-existing history of movement, its motility, and this catching is underpinned by sensory perception, by sight in particular. This suggests a consciousness capable of dispersal within, and outwards from, the body in motion. Irigaray’s understanding of touch to include sight is a useful corol­ lary for how the senses are not isolated processes but flow together (Grosz 1994: 104). Cultural anthropology that finds the senses are the ‘shapers’ and ‘bearers’ of culture questions the dominance of sight – brain imaging claims sight pre­ dominates. A clash of cultures might arise from a different ordering, with, for example, the dominance of taste over sight (Howes 1991: 17). As dancer, Cynthia Jean Cohen Bull writes, ‘I experience kinesthetic, visual, tactile, and auditory sensations and my sensible dance experience includes and implies intelligible choreographic and social meanings’ (Bull 1997: 269, italics in original). In linking sensory perception to bodies in movement, Bull distin­ guishes the primacy of seeing in ballet, touching in contemporary dancemaking, and hearing in Ghanaian dance, as perception combines cognitive, emotional and kinaesthetic knowledge (Bull 1997: 282). Moving bodies reproduce cultural kinetic sensory patterning rather than pure motion. Sensory catching might manifest as awareness of a bodily sensation, which can be generalized as holding the breath or be localized in the stomach or the throat. In this way, motion seen live might be absorbed into interior

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awareness, and continue to be dynamic even when it is not externally repro­ duced. The retention of movement in the imagination implicates circulat­ ing interconnections in kinaesthetic knowledge, dependent on other moving bodies and experience that need to be seen (or felt) in the first instance. A lived body in action moves in body schemata that are also culturally habituated by gender, ethnic and sexual identity and these impact on how it viscerally responds to other bodies. What is uncertain is where and how this embodied perception of a lived body’s action becomes limited by the social setting of inner and outer action and orientations. Using an example from aerial performance history, multiple somersaults were most feasible as backward movement, but there was a cultural identity block­ age by the mid-twentieth century, in that male bodies were expected to attempt this backward action. Historically, a female aerialist who imitated male action, and thereby also developed a muscular body, upset the accustomed cultural seeing of bodies. A resulting visceral disturbance of seen identity might be consid­ ered a disruption of an ideological process (Tait 2000b). In the nineteenth century seeing femininity made the aerial action more visible. Conversely, by the mid-twentieth century a feminized body that was not expected to do difficult tricks made its athleticism harder to see. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas raise a relatively unexplored precept that if the per­ ceptual world is constantly interpreted through a body-in-the-world, then counteracting its subjective kinaesthetic positioning might require body-to­ body (or -bodies) visceral interventions. To effect a change in patterns of social relationships between bodies might require unfolding bodily disrup­ tions of kinetic cultural orientations. Challenges to embodied dominance might need sensory and visceral as well as ideological reconfiguration. A visceral encounter with an ambiguous body identity bends pre-existing patterns of body-to-body (or -bodies) phenomenological exchanges and is at least potentially disruptive of hierarchical patterning. Thus, a lived body might momentarily catch a surprising cultural identity.

Pleasurable flesh, ecstatic motion Coxe describes the beauty of watching an aerial body in action that shows moving muscles, the ‘aesthetic pleasure’ of the ‘lithe grace’ (Coxe 1980a: 150–1). His pleasure is derived from the muscular action and he states that a stationary body is boring (Coxe 1980a: 65). This may or may not be inclusive of Freud’s idea of pleasure allied to sexual desire and release, but it almost certainly involves bodily tension, which may or may not implicate perversity. Coxe finds pleasure in action extremes. Modern circus was devel­ oping as notions of happiness and fun shifted more towards pleasure and excitement under early capitalism (Ferguson 1990; 137, 214). Fast bodies can be pleasurable to watch.

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In Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of fleshed worlds in which observing sensory bodies perceive the world through and as fleshed experience, primary vis­ ibility cannot happen without a secondary visibility of ‘lines of force and dimensions, the massive flesh without a rarefied flesh, the momentary body without a glorified body’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995: 148). In drawing on these ideas, an aerial body in action is seen through what can be termed the bod­ ily fleshing of ‘a glorified body’ and viscerally with ‘the momentary body’, but reversibly, so that the observing body becomes glorified momentarily in aerial motion. The visible is inhabited by the invisible, and experienced bod­ ily and expressly, and potentially operates in a ‘dialectic of love’ (MerleauPonty 1995: 149). From the nineteenth century the American three-ring circus presented a spectacle of numerous active bodies across a visual field. It required scopic responses that scanned multiple trajectories of fast action. As Janet Davis outlines, however, spectators became disorientated in an emotional response of ‘passive bedazzlement’ (Davis 2002: 25), through perceptual and sensory stimulus overload. A spectator may need a selective perspective within a visual field, such as the camera provides for filmed spectacle or selective identity habituation provides within social experience. Otherwise sensory responses may shift away from enjoyment and pleasure. The spectator’s sensory attunement needs to be caught by a muscular performing body in what Merleau-Ponty terms the ‘difficult point, that is, the bond between the flesh and the idea, between the visible and the interior armature’ (Merleau-Ponty 1995: 149). The flesh has visibility, but ellipti­ cally to thought and to the ‘aesthesiological’ body (Merleau-Ponty 1995: 152). Motion is fleshed through a sensory identity-catching. How is a performer’s experience implicated in this pleasurable sensory catching? Writing about Ernie and Charles Clarke and from his own flying experience, Irving Pond claims that ‘accomplishment of a rhythm in the three dimensions of space induce[s] a joy akin to ecstasy’ (Pond 1937: 135). Lisa Hofsess writes of the somatic enjoyment of feeling the air around her with a density like water, and seeking the motionlessness or ‘stillness’ at the height of the trapeze’s pendulum swing (Hofsess 1987–8: 45). This requires ‘kinesthetic perception’, timing that is compensated somatically rather than mentally, and time itself that seems to expand (Hofsess 1987–8: 45–6).2 These examples reveal an aerialist’s sensory enjoyment and raise the propo­ sition that something akin to visceral delight might be performable. The imperceptibility of an aerial performer’s pains and ‘muscle strains, however, confirm that bodily sensation is not easily communicated to others. A smile using the facial muscles can be understood, as can, conversely, a grimace. A performer’s enjoyment might not need spectators, unless an ecstatic feeling comes also from the presence of spectators (or recognition of their presence). Aerial performers repeatedly describe in the author’s research how they mentally focus their thoughts on instructions and/or imagine the

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physical action as they perform. An aerialist is focused on bodily doing and specifying the action. In analysing early twentieth-century dance, Susan Manning argues that a performer’s claim to depict ecstasy largely depends on how it is recognized within the wider culture in her examples, through association with the ico­ nography of religious ecstasy (Manning 1993: 62–8). Ecstasy is embodied in social languages and spectators might expect to find aerial action beautiful because it is widely known to represent a sublime (feminine) aesthetic within culture. But accounts of responses to the visible performance of heightened dynamism confirm a visceral effect to aerial aesthetics. They manifest social ideas of motion as do other types of extreme fast athletic action in arousing bodily sensations. Is an awareness that the performance is sublime action therefore induced by bodily viscera? Viewing pleasures or anxieties arise from the fleshed motion of flying action that evokes a body momentarily freed of everyday limitations, its muscular solidity carried away by invis­ ible ‘lines of force’. This suggests kinetic pleasure from a fleshed percep­ tual awareness that defies the weight of a lived body and the density of its habitual identity patterning. Bodies have culturally variable histories of muscular movement towards others (bodies) within unfolding patterns of visible and invisible fleshed motion. The immediacy and heightened effect of fleshed visceral reactions to performance functionally provides a reminder of the experiences of a lived body. Body-to-body (or -bodies) phenomenologies within live aerial action are metonymical of liveness that is culturally fleshed. Hence the pleasure of watching motion is in part always indicative of an awareness of the body’s unfolding dynamic liveness. Aerial motion and emotion produce sensory encounters; a spectator fle­ shes culturally identifiable motion, emotionally. The action of muscular power creates buoyant and light motion, which corresponds with reversible body phenomenologies in the exaltation and transcendence with and of sen­ sory experience. The aerial body mimics the sensory motion of and within lived bodies in performances of delight, joy, exhilaration and elation. Aerial bodies in action seem ecstatic in their fleshed liveness.

Notes 1 The Bristol Magpie, 26 January 1899: 8. 2 In her qualitative research on people attracted to performing aerial tricks, Hofsess finds that so-called ‘risk-takers’ are actually searching for mastery and control (Hofsess 1986: 16).

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References Anderson, Aaron. (1998) ‘Kinesthesia in martial arts films: Action in motion’, Jump Cut, (42): 1–11, 83. Allen, Robert C. (1991) Horrible Prettiness, Chapel Hill: University of North Caro­ lina Press. Backer, Noèmia. (2000) ‘Reconfiguring Annabella’s Serpentine and Butterfly dance films in early cinema’, in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds.), Visual Delights, Trowbridge: Flick Books: 93–104. Bean, Jennifer M. and Negra, Diane. (2002b) ‘Introduction’, in Bean, Jennifer M. and Negra, Diane. A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Durham: Duke University Press: 1–26. Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen. (1997) ‘Sense, Meaning, and Perception in Three Dance Cultures’, in Jane C. Desmond (ed.) (1997a): 269–87. Casarino, Cesare. (1990) ‘Fragments on Wings of Desire (or, fragmentary represen­ tation as historical necessity)’, Social Text (24): 167–81. Coxe, Antony Hippisley. (1980a) A Seat At The Circus, Hamden, Conn: Archon Books. Crossley, Nick. (1994) The Politics of Subjectivity, Aldershot: Avebury. Deleuze, Gilles. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tom­ linson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Desmond, Jane C. (1997b) ‘Introduction’, in Desmond, Jane (ed.) Meaning in Motion, Durham: Duke University Press: 1–25. Doane, Mary Ann. (2002) ‘Technology’s Body: Cinematic Vision in Modernity’, in Bean and Negra (2002a): 530–51. Dolan, Jill. (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press. Dyer, Richard. (2000) ‘Action’, in José Arroyo (ed.) Action/Spectacle Cinema, London: BFI Publishing. Ferguson, Harvie. (1990) The Science of Pleasure, London: Routledge. Garner, Stanton B. (1994) Bodied Spaces, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gledhill, Christine and Williams, Linda (eds.). (2000) Reinventing Film Studies, London: Arnold. Gunning, Tom. (1989) ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’, Art & Text 34 (Spring): 31–45. Grosz, Elizabeth. (1994) Volatile Bodies, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hillman, David Asaf. (1996) ‘Hamlet, Nietzsche, and Visceral Knowledge’, in Michael O’Donovan-Anderson (ed.), The Incorporated Self, Lanham Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 93–110. Hodge, Alison. (2000) Twentieth Century Actor Training, London: Routledge. Hofsess, Lisa. (1987–8) ‘A Somatic View of Flying’, Somatics Magazine. Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences, 6(3): 43–7. Howes, David (ed.). (1991) The Varieties of Sensory Experience, Toronto: Univer­ sity of Toronto Press. Jones, Amelia. (1998) Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kolker, Robert Phillip, and Beicken, Peter. (1993) The Films of Wim Wenders, Cam­ bridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Manning, Susan A. (1993) Ecstasy and the Demon, Berkeley: University of California Press. Manning-Sanders, Ruth. (1952) The English Circus, London: Werner Laurie. McMahan, Alison. (2000) ‘The quest for motion: moving pictures and flight’, Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds.), Visual Delights, Trowbridge: Flick Books: 181–93. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1995) The Visible and the Invisible, Evanston: North­ western University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1996) Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge. Mills, Bernard. (1954) ‘The Greatest Act I Ever Saw’, The Tatler and Bystander, 18 November: 37. Neale, Steve. (1983) ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’, Screen, Vol. 24, (No. 6. November– December): 2–16. Pond, Irving K. (1937) Big Top Rhythms, Chicago: Willett, Clark. Russo, Mary. (1994) The Female Grotesque, NY: Routledge. Shaviro, Steven. (1993) The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shields, Stephanie A. (2002) Speaking From the Heart: Gender and the Social Mean­ ing of Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. (1992) The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experi­ ence, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Staiger, Janet. (1995) Bad Women, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tait, Peta. (2000b) ‘Fleshed, muscular phenomenologies across sexed and queer cir­ cus bodies’, in Peta Tait (ed.), Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Perform­ ance, Amsterdam: Rodopi: 60–78. Williams, Linda (ed.). (1995) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, New Bruns­ wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Williams, Linda. (1999) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chapter 17

Marginal body The British acrobat in reference to sport Yoram S. Carmeli

While watching the performance of travelling circuses in Britain in the late 1970s, an outsider would have been struck by the similarity between circus acrobatics and performances within gymnastics’ halls. The circus trapeze performance bears great resemblance to gymnasts’ rings and trapeze exer­ cises. Likewise, the circus trampoline act is similar to the gymnast’s tram­ poline routines; wire walking in the circus (especially low wire walking) is similar to balancing on a beam; the circus spring board act is similar to gymnastics; and the tumbler’s tricks in the circus are similar to the gym­ nast’s ground exercises. Apparent as these similarities have seemed to an outsider’s eye, they were, however, entirely irrelevant to the local public seated in the circus tent. For them, circus and sport are worlds apart. Sport has long been a serious matter in Britain. Thousands of people take part as amateurs, and millions as spectators. Its part in the total consumer expenditure is constantly growing (Hargreaves 1986: 132), as is the amount of newspaper space and time on radio and television devoted to sports (Hargreaves 1986: chapters 7, 8; Mason 1988: 46–58). For many people, sport is ‘one of the central, if not the central source of identification, mean­ ing and gratification in their life’ (Dunning 1986: 205). Circus is different. The circus performance itself is confined to isolated, esoteric travellers, and is not regularly practiced by others. The circus is hardly presented in newspaper columns and only seldom on television pro­ grammes. A circus show will be attended perhaps once a year when it comes to town, and is watched in the already traditional television programme on Christmas morning. That a circus performance can sometimes be combined with elements of sport is known to the public from their acquaintance with Eastern European performances. ‘Russian’ athletes and acrobats visited London in 1979, and other Eastern European gymnastics on television also integrated some cir­ cus elements. However, these hybrids were considered ‘Russian’ and experi­ enced as alien. The circus’ prominence is indeed in childrens’ books and toys and is a subject of folklore as well as a metaphor in daily language.

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Circus is considered as irrelevant to sport not only by the public in the circus tent, but also by the circus travellers themselves. In the ‘Jimmy Brown Circus’ with which I travelled, sport was not considered a threat. The cir­ cus performers were sure that they were playing to a different public. In addition, there was not even one case of a circus losing a performer to sport and no sportsperson trying to join performing circus travellers in the late 1970s. Given the similarities between acrobatics and sport, what is it that makes circus acrobatics so distinct and apart from sport in the eyes of the British public, and what is it that differentiates the world of the acrobat from that of the gymnast? And, given the variability of circus framings (e.g. the Russian example), what are the wider contextual conditions in terms of which the separation of circus acrobatics from sport and from the rest of society in Britain can be understood? The first purpose of this chapter is to contribute to a long-ignored field of circus ethnography and the analysis of the significance of circus body presentation. I illustrate most of my argument through one acrobatic act presented in Jimmy Brown’s Circus in Britain during the late 1970s. Sport (the body engaged in gymnastics in particular) is suggested as a comparative reference due to similarities in performance. Beyond a description of the acrobating body and its uniqueness, this chapter alludes to body presenta­ tion as a perspective for its context, that is, the codes and processes by which its significances are reproduced. An attempt at approaching context through circus has been suggested by Stallybrass and White (1986). Drawing on Bouissac (1976, 1982) and on Bakhtin ([1965] 1984), circus is interpreted within Bakhtin’s concept of the world of the marketplace and the carnivalesque (and see also Featherstone 1992). However, a Bakhtinian perspective emphasizes a world of represen­ tations, an order punctuated by periodic anti-structural liminal moments, a framed rebellion and tension release. A Bakhtinian perspective applied to the British circus of the mid-1970s would fail to account for the transforma­ tions from pre-industrial to industrial forms of entertainment (Cunningham 1980), and for the post-industrial shifts in these forms’ significances. It would fail to describe the new social and epistemic conditions in which these body presentations are constituted. The performance of the late 1970s ‘traditional circus’ is considered in this chapter as a reconstruction of the circus, which emerged through the reality of modernity (characterized by fragmentation, the rise of fetishism, as well as the phenomenon of the spectacle [De Bord 1967; Benjamin 1968; Baudrillard 1983]). An analysis of circus in these historical contexts and with reference to sport will enhance a differential understanding of two seemingly similar body presentations, as well as the uses of bodies and ‘the manner in which that which is most material and vital in [them]’ (Foucault 1990: 152) became a vehicle for the reproduction of bourgeois hegemony.

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British circuses and the Capellis’ acrobatic act There were about 450 circus people in Britain in the second half of the 1970s. Except for three stationary circus shows performed in holiday and tourist resorts, all other shows were ‘tenting,’ that is, travelling productions. Circus travelling season lasted from March to October. The travelling itself was extremely expensive and demanding, due to the cost of labour, gasoline, rental of grounds, and publicity in every town. However, an alternative approach to marketing the shows (that is, reaching the public through staying in a town and investing in a new and different programme) was never applied by circus travellers. Circuses travelled through neighbouring towns. ‘Green fields’ (places not approached by circuses for a long time) were specially targeted on the circus’ route. Different circus companies tried to avoid each other, and some coor­ dination ensured different directions of travelling. A good deal of tension arose when two travelling companies performed in neighbouring locations, or when one company was to shortly follow another in the same town. In such cases, the second circus often tried to tear down the posters of the show that was to come first. When a circus was preceded by another one, it generally would not follow to the same town, but, would travel elsewhere instead, further afield from the original route. In the course of their travelling, circus performers had to deal with the local councils with whom they negotiated for performing grounds. By occa­ sionally labelling the circus a nuisance or accusing it of being a disturbance to the local order and property, councils and local police displayed tradi­ tional stereotypes and a patronizing attitude towards this form of popular entertainment. Paradoxically these confrontations provided publicity for the circus, and in some respects were dramatized by the circus performers themselves. This ambiguity was also invoked by the conspicuous presence of a circus in town. Covered with circus designs and icons, circus mobile homes and vehicles were part of the circus show and its attraction. At the same time, through this display of their lives off-stage, the circus people were exposed, and turned into an attraction themselves, thereby providing a target for abuse and seeming abuse. The conflict between the travellers and townsfolk took on a similar character at the town circus parade, in various publicity stunts, and through more random encounters in the local laundry and cafe, the fish and chip shop, and the bookmaker’s corner. The travellers’ pres­ ence and their off-stage daily lives were always flaunted and displayed while townsfolk both anticipated and were faced by a played human presence, all constituting the performance of a circus’ arrival to town. The circus act on which my analysis concentrates was a hand-balancing act that was performed in Jimmy Brown’s Circus – a mid-sized show in a tent of 1,500 seats. Like all British circuses. Brown’s circus contained only

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one ring. Acts were presented consecutively, with each act being announced separately by the ringmaster, accompanied by special music from the circus band, and including particular costuming. It was very important in the circus that there would be no time gap between consecutive acts in the ring, and this was closely watched by the ringmaster. A necessary time gap (for pre­ paring the prop) was filled by a cover-up aerial act or clowning. Unexpected gaps were covered by the clowns who would enter the ring with their gags to distract the crowd. The hand-balancing act was performed by the acrobat, Willy Capelli, assisted by his spouse Joanna, who joined the act as a presenter, punctuat­ ing and directing public applause. In order to support themselves in Brown’s Circus, Willy and Joanna had to take part in various chores, including sell­ ing tickets, and ushering the public to their seats. The Cappellis’ performance was preceded by a clowning act. The props of the act consisted of a table and seven chairs. These were positioned in the ring by the circus ring boys before the act started, under the cover-up of the clowns’ performance. Usually Willy himself was also among these ring boys, dressed in a ring boy gray gown underneath which his performing trousers could be observed. The performance started immediately as the clowns left the ring. The metal frames of the table and chairs were then illuminated by the spotlights, and were observed by the public for the first time. The ringmaster announced the acts in a familiar circus phrase: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Jimmy Brown’s Circus proudly presents – the amazing Capellis!’ Although the spectators didn’t know Joanna and Willy, they still expected circus performers to be presented by their real names. The drummer and organist, sitting on the bandstand behind the ring, accompanied the moment by strong chords and clashing cymbals. Joanna and Willy were then seen stepping from behind the curtain into the ring. Dressed in shining satin costumes made by Willy himself, they stepped separately, in opposite directions along the edge of the circus ring, smiles on their faces, waving and displaying themselves to the public. When Joanna and Willy reached the rear part of the ring oppo­ site the public’s centre tiers, where the props had been positioned, the band started to play the popular song ‘Yellow Ribbon’. A short scene of circus comedy was then performed in which Willy mimed a dandy who refused to get into the serious job (itself not yet clear to the public) and was called to order by Joanna who instructed him in the direction of the table. Willy eventually stepped onto the table and, still reluctant, was handed a chair by Joanna. He positioned the chair on the table and nonchalantly performed hand balancing by leaning one hand on the chair’s seat, the other on its back. On leaning back, Willy straightened himself up, waiting for acknowl­ edgement from the public. The spectators, well acquainted with these circus theatrics, knew that the ‘real’ act had then been launched.

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The act progressed as Willy, standing upright on the rung of the chair, was handed one more chair by Joanna, which he fixed on top and again per­ formed a balancing stunt. In many of his performances, already at this early stage of the act, Willy dramatized some difficulty while balancing on the chair on top of the table a loss of control and regaining control. However, the height was still limited and an element of staging was often perceived by the public. Willy’s shifts between danger and play were usually responded to with appreciation, but some comments of mockery existed as well. For some spectators, the acrobat’s feat was not considered really difficult, and others suspected him of false pretense. These suspicions were an expected part of circus, and themselves constituted part of the public’s participation in the late 1970s circus. However, when Willy leaned back, standing on the rung of the chair and claiming applause, he was then helped by Joanna pointing to him from below, and the public ratified this. In a pattern familiar to the public, one more chair was then handed to Willy who fixed it on top, thus creating an even higher balancing position. This was followed by yet another chair on top. The spectators could see how much more difficult it was for Joanna to reach Willy and she was helped by a long stick passed to her by a ring boy. Willy’s posing higher on the pyramid and fixing the additional chairs on top were perceived as increas­ ingly risky. Each time his balancing on the chair was dramatized as a more difficult, precarious and dangerous feat. At this stage of the act, the ‘Yellow Ribbon’ accompaniment had faded (sometimes during the second, sometimes during the third chair). Any perception of comedy had long disappeared. It was no longer giggling or suspicion (though some of it still remained), that characterized the specta­ tors’ part in the performance. Though acquainted with the staged element in circus routines, they did recognize the introduction of real danger. As the spectators themselves expected, the drama was now dominated by chal­ lenge and anxiety. The spectators applauded Willy’s success, but his suc­ cess depended on their perception of him as being in danger of failing. In the relatively small tent, close to the ring, the spectators’ perception of the performance and their claiming of this danger through their anticipations, dialectically evoked their own fears. One could observe, however, that the more critical the danger (that is, the higher the balancing), the more distant and removed the performer’s figure became in the public’s experience. Willy no longer referred to the public as he had earlier, when landing and claiming applause. The applause, as punctuated and directed by Joanna, were timed for the moments when balancing was accomplished, when Willy’s body was balanced straight and taut upside-down on top of the pyramid. Organ chords and drum rolling accompanied the accomplishments of the balanc­ ing feat. At these moments when the spectators were applauding, their eyes no longer suspected Willy and his performance. Rather, as they themselves anticipated, the acrobating body, up there, was perceived as an ephemeral image, as a transparent body, gazed at by the spectators.

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As Joanna was about to hand Willy the last chair, the spectators knew that the typical ‘final feat’ of a circus act had been reached. ‘Hardly’ reach­ ing Willy, Joanna was dramatically assisted by a tall ring boy who came to help. Willy, at the top, fixed the last chair on the pyramid. A rolling crescendo of drums gradually intensified and dramatized the moment when the acrobat was about to launch the familiar and always expected ‘most difficult’ and ‘most dangerous’ balancing. In terms of the spectators’ experi­ ence, not only top skills and utmost danger were involved. Their vicarious experience of their own selves through the circus performance depended on the next attempt. As the public was eager to witness the final handstand accomplished, Willy would sometimes prolong the moment even longer, dis­ playing concentration, hesitation, and fear. With the drums rolling in crescendo in the background, the pinnacle of the balancing routine was finally being reached. For a fraction of a second the drums stopped rolling. Joanna, close to the pyramid, looked upward with awe and froze her hands, as the public was mesmerized. In the fol­ lowing moment, Willy’s body was perceived as stabilized on top, and the spectators were faced by the evidence of its presence. Cymbal clashing and loud organ chords indicated and confirmed the accomplishment of the feat. As Joanna claimed acknowledgement with wide movements, the ringmaster also stepped forward and, pointing at the pyramid, announced ‘Ladies and Gentlemen – The Capellis!’ Judging by the loud applause, the final trick of the act was successful. Ending the performance is a delicate moment in all aerial acts. Once the final feat has been completed, the balancing scene and the performers them­ selves have to disappear. Willy rushed to dismantle the chair pyramid under­ neath him. Standing on a chair below, he hastily lowered the upper chair towards Joanna, often dropping it down to be caught by the tall ring boy. Two additional ring boys then assisted in taking the remaining chairs – the pyramid fragments – handing them to other ring boys waiting by the ring, who were quick to carry them behind the ring doors and curtain. Willy jumped off the table and, together with Joanna, stepped to the front, claim­ ing and acknowledging the public’s applause. The table and chairs having disappeared from the ring, Willy and Joanna stepped backwards and took a second bow. Then they turned their backs to the public and hastily disap­ peared at the ring exit, while the ringmaster was already announcing the following horse act. The performances of the balancing act typically lasted between eight to nine minutes. The following section will be devoted to an analysis of the hand balanc­ ing performance in Jimmy Brown’s circus, taking the paradigm of sport in general and a gymnast’s balancing in particular as a frame of reference. I will first approach some aspects of the framing of body presentation in cir­ cus and sport. I will then concentrate on the interaction between performer and public, on structures of the public’s perception, as well as the excite­ ment and gratification invoked in a late 1970s circus performance in Britain.

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An analysis of the spectators’ experience cannot be exhausted, however, by observing the eight-minute encounter alone. Approaching the question of the performance’s long-term efficacy, I further contextualize the analysis by making use of the circus ethnography presented earlier in the chapter. I also address the historical transformations of the significances of circus bodies over two centuries of circus history.

Framing a body presentation and the public’s illusion The categorical boundaries and the comparability of acrobatic acts Among the most familiar characteristics of modern sport are the application of strict rules, matching, and competition (e.g. Thomas 1976). In performing hand balancing as sport, gymnasts are categorically compared and matched by age and gender (e.g. ‘testing families,’ Kretchmer 1975). In addition, the particular details of their performances are expected to be strictly matched. For this purpose, they are working within ‘rules which distinguish and regu­ late the occurrence’ (Thomas 1976: 37), thereby specifying, bounding, and differentiating a performance of hand balancing from other types of per­ formance. Competition means that individuals will pit themselves against others, and will be judged and graded by their performance accordingly. The sport paradigm places the particular performance within a time frame – rules and matching are designed for comparing the results obtained on a certain occasion with those achieved by other gymnasts on similar occasions over time. These comparisons are highly significant for the public attending a particular gymnastic event. My analysis of Willy’s act in Brown’s circus will begin by examining its framing in reference to its counterpart in sport. All circus shows in Britain during the 1970s included some components of acrobatics, as well as clown­ ing and animal acts. The spectators were familiar with these categories and expected their token appearance in each show. However, looking at perform­ ances of acrobatics, we noticed that some acrobatic acts were intertwined within clowning or animal acts in a variety of combinations: an acrobat opening his act with some clowning comedy or dancing on a horse. Willy and Joanna’s short mimetic piece at the beginning of the act is an illustration of such combinations. The variety of these categorical combinations (i.e. the circus play of its own categories) was one of the reasons why acrobatic acts, unlike gymnasts’ performances, did not suggest themselves for comparison in the public’s experience. Incomparability of acrobatic acts was also a result of a deliberate effort to present variability within each circus category and within the circus show as a whole. It was the public’s expectation that each act in a circus show would be experienced as the only one of its kind. The owner and performers knew that any similarity between acts must be avoided. Different acrobats

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had to display different bodily practices, different uses of space (e.g. aerial acts, ground acts), different props (e.g. trapeze, wire), and different music and costumes. Thus, a necessary condition for the inclusion of Willy’s act in the programme was Brown’s assumption that the hand balancing would be experienced by the public as significantly different from other acrobatic acts in the show. In the realm of the British circus, the uniqueness of Willy’s act was not exhausted in being one of its kind within the show. Circus performances were not even compared with other performances that had been witnessed by the public in earlier seasons and in other circus shows. This was so not because there were no similar acts in other shows, but in spite of the fact that there were some. Yet, the traditional rhetoric of British circuses seem­ ingly contradicted this observation. It was common within the general tradi­ tion of the British circus that it would beckon its public to ‘wait for the big show’ where they would witness the ‘only one,’ ‘the most daring feat’ – as if acts were remembered and discerned, as if performances were compared to each other in terms of the skill and risk they entailed. It was again part of this tradition that townsfolk expected every circus and every act to be proclaimed as ‘the only one,’ and ‘the really impossible’. However, rather than be compared, these acts’ particularities, once observed, were lost and effaced. With time, circus acts were forgotten. In the British world of family circuses, a family show would hardly change its programme at all. It would come back to the same town over a three-year span, attracting the pub­ lic by introducing the very same show as ‘never seen before’. When asked about the introduction of change to his balancing act, Willy answered ‘Why bother? They [the public] are not interested and he [Brown] wouldn’t pay.’ Willy’s hand balancing act was thus repeatedly presented to circus audiences in Britain for over 20 years without being remembered and without being compared to itself, and Brown knew that he could still hire Willy in 1975 to perform the very same hand balancing. Some of the distinctiveness of the spectators’ expectations and percep­ tions of the body in circus vis-à-vis their perceptions of the body in sport can already be outlined. A handstand framed within the paradigm of sport implies that the performance is regulated by rules; the performer is matched and competes with other like performers. She/he is situated in the public’s experience within a social realm, potentially an object of public identifica­ tion. The gymnast simulates the bourgeois order. The performing body itself becomes an embodiment of that order. The public’s perception of the body was different when the hand balancing was framed within the paradigm of circus. In this performance, where cate­ gories were expected to be played, matching was expected to be deliberately avoided, and the particularity of the act itself was defaced – the handstand was thus experienced as an act of dissociation. Rather than grouping Willy with some people in a ‘testing family,’ involving him in patterns of relations

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and hierarchies and within a social time, Willy himself was expected to be perceived as dissociated. I would argue that the isolation of the performer in this tradition was one of the facets of dramatizing a unique ontological status of the circus performer. This significance of circus performance, and its distinctiveness from sport, can be further demonstrated when one takes a closer look at the performer’s appearance and the manipulation of body in the ring. The confrontation between performer and public One recalls that the hand balancing feats were preceded by a short comedy routine that followed the performers’ entrance into the ring. The mimetic, which was introduced by the enactment of a narrative and accompanied by a familiar romantic song, established the human (i.e. playing) nature of the performers. However, a shift in the public’s experience took place the moment Willy started his hand balancing on the chair. It was a moment typi­ cal of the British circus, in which a mimetic debut was breached. The mimetic was there not in order to interpret, but to perform a surprise, to commu­ nicate discommunication and a break in the sense. Joanna, who performed the ‘presenter’ by standing below Willy, serving the props, and directing the public’s applause, binded the performance and focused the public’s atten­ tion on Willy, rendering the act more imposing. No less than interpreting, she also performed and emphasized that act’s need for interpretation, thus creating her own place within the act. As for Willy, his motions and pos­ tures dramatized and explicated the ambiguity and shifts already invoked by the performers’ entrance and self-display. In the public’s experience of British circuses, these shifts were not unique to the hand balancing act; they were repeatedly invoked in all the acrobatic acts. Rather than a display of intentionality (as in sport), the performances were experienced as a play of intentionality and human nature. The circus performer was perceived as a subject in control (like in sport) while also being controlled and objectified, that is, playing and being played by his/her own doing. The performer on the wire was perceived as shifting between balance and loss of balance; the performer on the trampoline, who constantly initiated the momentum, was perceived as an object of his own doing; the trapeze performer who, hung up there by her neck, started a motion of spinning, was later perceived as objectified by the momentum she herself had created (Carmeli, 1990). Willy’s balancing was also perceived as a scene of shifting – Willy was perceived as a subject intentionally sustaining a posture that he himself had initiated, and yet at the same time was ruled by. The spectators expected to be challenged by these shifts and, through their reactions in the circus, chal­ lenged Willy to challenge them. They directed him in their giggling, their resentment, and their anxieties. If Willy’s dramatization of an excessive loss of control had been totally played out, the drama of the act would have

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turned into a failure. If ‘objectness’ had been perceived as completely taking over, the public’s oscillations between frames would have been eliminated (because, as they say in the circus, ‘anyone can fall’). However, an excessive shift by Willy towards ‘control’ would have again resolved the act in the public’s experience (as something ‘anyone can do’). It is in this context that the significance of staging danger in Willy’s per­ formance can be understood. Danger was a prerequisite in all aerial per­ formances in the British circus. An accident was always expected, and indeed sometimes minor accidents were even planned ahead between own­ ers and performers, who were paid extra. Unlike the identification with a human sportsperson in play and control (sometimes losing control), Willy the human performer of circus, perceptually torn from his ordinariness and subjectivity, was about to be staged as stripped of human ‘being’ itself, as metaphorized by ‘being’s’ strongest metaphor – life. Typical for all circus acts, the drama was perceived by the public as progressing towards more and more danger, towards a growing tension between control and loss of control, and towards more difficult and ‘impos­ sible’ feats. While the ‘impossible’ could not repeat itself (and become pos­ sible) it was only through inclusion of previous ‘impossibles’ that a new feat could clearly surmount previous ones. The epistemological and ontological discomfort with which the spectators were faced intensified and widened to invoke an experience of a more encompassing play. Hence, the spectators’ experience of their relation with the performer developed into confronta­ tion. Perceiving the acrobat’s loss of subjectness, the spectators experienced their own loss of concept, a loss of the symbolic, that is, a loss of self (Mead 1934; Lacan 1977). Danger as metaphor crystallized their circus experience; a real fall could resolve it. As Willy put it: ‘they are after my blood’. Transparency and authenticity Resentment, anxiety, rejection, and occasional laughter (when control and play temporarily take over) were all elements of the experience and drama the public looked for in an acrobatic performance in the late 1970s. These elements did not, however, exhaust spectators’ anticipations. In accordance with the early stages of the act, these experiences themselves were aimed at invoking the spectators’ sense of ‘real’ selves, conjured through the spectacle of a derealized transparent body. A certain facet of the experience was alluded to in Willy’s own views on circus spectators versus sports spectators. ‘In sport,’ Willy says, ‘the public knows, they understand … they appreciate what you are doing,’ but ‘in the [British] circus they don’t understand … they are not with you … sometimes someone is doing nothing in the ring and they give him loud applause, but you can stand on one finger and they don’t appreciate it. They know nothing.’

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One source of the acrobat’s frustration in mid-1970s Britain was his sense of the transformations that the circus was undergoing, which resulted in specta­ tors’ loss of interest (discussed later). Another source of frustration appeared to lie at the core of the expectations of the British public with regard to the ‘traditional circus’. As expected by British spectators, an acrobatic act was not supposed to suggest itself for the public’s ‘knowing,’ ‘understanding,’ or ‘appreciating’ what the performer was doing. Complexity or technical and artistic criteria were apparently not that important for the spectators. Rather, it was when communication itself was being played, when through their per­ ception of the performed act, their own ‘knowing’ and ability to know were played, that circus happened – that the spectators could really witness and be witnessed by the circus. In order to further examine the structuring and the appeal of this experi­ ence of circus, I return to the hand balancing act. One notes that this act was not perceived by the public as a continuous confrontation and shifting between frames. Rather, the drama in the tent was created by separating the act into units, each of which was perceived by the public as having a beginning (when Willy was perceived as concentrat­ ing on the upcoming feat) and an end (when the handstand was perceived as stabilized on the latest addition to the pyramid, with Joanna down below claiming applause). The more difficult and dangerous the hand balanc­ ing, and the deeper the epistemic break and the public’s anxiety, the more demanding were Joanna’s claims for applause. The public, familiar with and expecting the act’s progression, ratified it with louder applause. This pattern of applause can itself be understood once one realizes that the moments of applause were no longer moments of confrontation; rather, they followed the confrontation signifying its temporary elimination. These were moments when Willy, the circus performer whom the spectators experientially con­ fronted, was perceived as having succeeded and prevailed. Yet at the same time, what he proved and successfully accomplished, in some sense gratified the public who then applauded. The spectators’ experience evolved within a familiar design of the act. The act did not develop towards resolution of the epistemic rupture as play or display, the performer as subject or object, with the spectators regaining their own ordinary selves. Instead, the introduction of ‘more impossible’ routines and the staging of more danger into the act was designed to bring the metaphor of life at risk closer to its referent, enforcing and dramatizing the erosion of the acrobat’s subjectness, rendering the spectators’ loss of their ‘ordinary’ selves more encompassing, with no play frame and no role of ‘spectators’ left to shelter them. As anticipated by the spectators, this experience, which was intensified (and applauded) at the completion of every trick, was fully realized in the ‘final’ trick, towards which the act was constantly advancing. This ‘final­ ity’ itself was crucial. Through ‘finality’ (indicated by the last chair on top,

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and the dramatizations performed by Willy and Joanna, the band, and the ringmaster), the public could retrospectively create the significance of the previous tricks of the act. Without the ‘final’ trick, the progress of the act towards a deeper epistemic rupture could become redundant and irrelevant. Through a notion of ‘finality,’ the spectators could experientially accomplish a complete perceptual shift, a visualization of a full break of relations, an approval of the playful transformation of the performer, and could thereby accomplish the expected experience of their selves transformed. In spite of the apparent similarity between the public’s applause in circus and sport, acknowledging Willy’s success clearly contrasted with applaud­ ing the sportsperson. Unlike the celebration of achievement and identifica­ tion with the performer in sport, in Willy’s act the spectators applauded a performance of dissociation and derealization, that is, a dramatic accom­ plishment, a visual shock (Benjamin 1968), a proof of their loss and tran­ scendence of ordinary selves through invoking illusionary ‘real’ selves. As the spectators in Willy’s performance anticipated their own transfor­ mation, they did not challenge Willy in the final trick. Like that ‘magical’ moment in a juggler’s act, in which the movement of the balls in the air is perceived as creating a form that the balls seem to follow, like the moment in which a trapeze performer – hanging by her teeth – is perceived as rolled by the movement she herself creates, so was Willy’s body perceived as postur­ ing a perfect balance up there on top of the chairs. The endangered playing person was perceptually constituted as engulfed in a self-referential move­ ment, a movement perceived by the spectators as created by the perform­ ing subject and enacted by the rules of (his own) body that he displayed. In the visualization and appearance of this balanced body, the spectators witnessed an illusion of the impossible unity of play and display. Play and display became experientially overlapping, as if tied together within the selfreferential ‘infinite’ motion, which perceptually constituted the posture. I note that this experience was not constituted by a fixed form external to the eye (see Krauss 1988). Rather, it was repetitively performed in the circus through the spectators’ own self-referential movement between playing and being played. As the spectators themselves expected, their eyes conjured in the circus a body devoid of intentionality and subjectivity, a body through which play and display are transcended, and the symbolic is lost; a body visualized through a total epistemic rupture, and through which seeing leads into a disintegration of seeing. It was a body to be gazed at, experienced by the spectators through their being faced (and defaced) by it (Carmeli 1994). In Willy’s balancing act, the acrobat’s body was dramatized as an embodiment of external presence, and its ontology was both created and validated through the spectators’ experience of their own ‘real’ selves, their being faced by the body spectacle. (…) This visual appearance was not experienced through ‘knowing’ and ‘appreciation,’ as Willy put it. It is also typical, as already pointed out, that

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the details and particularities of Willy’s act were not retained in the pub­ lic’s memory. This is so because through the framing and the performance of the acrobat’s act, the public reduced itself to its mirror image (Lacan 1977). It was towards this predicted moment, this circus discovery of their own ‘real’ selves, that the spectators were pushing through the process of the act, and which they recalled and celebrated in their applause. Willy’s pyramid was hastily disassembled. In Brown’s tent, disappearance of the trick, the act, and the performer were necessary parts of the appear­ ance. If the ‘impossible’ had taken real time and place, it would have col­ lapsed. The whole circus was about to disappear soon. ‘The show must go on,’ as it was here ‘for a few days only’. There still remains a fundamental question that needs to be tackled in any analysis: What was left of the encounter after Willy and the circus had hast­ ily left town? What remained of the spectators’ play, beyond the no-time appearance of the body at the top of the pyramid? The analysis of the problem at hand necessitates not only a further reference to Willy’s individual act, but also to the structure of the circus show as a whole, and to the ecology and semiotic of circus nomadism, as well as a further reference to sport. These extensions of my argument will be outlined below.

Expanding the circus dream Many sports matches are geared towards breaking records, those ‘objec­ tive summaries of what a man … can do’ (Weiss 1973: 12). Few sports events, however, end with actual record breaking. Yet, even with poor clo­ sure, even as a failure in this respect, a sports event may be highly signifi­ cant and relevant for its public. This is so as matches and competitions are made to involve social identities and representations, and because through the temporal interrelations between particular events, these identities are reproduced and conferred with time – cyclical time as implied through the relation between match and rematch, as well as between seasonal leagues, and progressive time as constructed by the mutual reference of sports events according to the record (‘far from the record,’ ‘approaching the record’). Through this latter dimension, which elicits incompleteness and open-ended progress, the sporting body is subjected to quantifiable and cumulative structures, and the order is bestowed with the bourgeois concept of time as irreversible and impersonal. The spectators’ experience of their selves and the order was different in their partaking of circus acts like Willy’s. As described, each act in the circus was isolated, closed through a ‘final trick,’ fading away with the dis­ appearance of the performer. Unlike sport, then, accumulation and linear time were neither constituents nor a context for the particular appearance of ‘circus’.

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Willy’s act and other acts performed in Brown’s were isolated and their particularities were effaced (as was the whole circus performance). This iso­ lation itself was expected by the public and was highly structured. Each act in Brown’s developed through the disintegration of ordinary significances; each act culminated in a ‘final’ moment of dissociations. Whenever an act ended (i.e. when the performer disappeared), the spectators experientially shifted, touching upon their ordinary, playing selves, just to start the process that would again turn them into being experientially faced by a circus body. Circus performers in Brown’s endeavoured to execute these shifts and oscil­ lations as uninterruptedly as possible through a constant flow of performers in and out of the ring. (In the circus ‘ring door’ [behind the curtain], one could observe how sustaining this constancy required great effort: perform­ ers had to be there three acts ahead of time together with their props and animals. The flow and rhythm themselves imposed certain time restrictions on the acts, wearing away performer pride.) I argue that while the long-term significance of a particular sports per­ formance is constituted through intra- and inter-relations between events, in the circus show, the order of performance, in which one should look for the long-term significance of particular acts and events, is apparently in the constant movement in and out of the ring. In fact, this movement has already been encapsulated within the public’s perception of the particular acrobatic act. As explained, the spectators’ anticipated self-transcendence and subjectification were constituted through their shifting between play­ ing and being played, through a pulse-effect constituted (and constituting) by their perception of the acrobat. I now add that this movement was not lost with the final trick and necessary disappearance of a particular acrobat. Rather, in the late 1970s circus, the same pulse (though in wider temporal sequence) was strenuously sustained on the higher order of performance by the relations between acts within the show. By relating disrelated acts along time, the performers levelled the acts, disintegrating not only similar­ ity (implied in a matching of acts) but also particularity (implied in putting them together). The anticipating spectators, subjectified through their selfreference in each act, were experientially captured by a wider movement, by wider shifts between playing and being played. Their performed, illusion­ ary ‘real’ selves were thereby further realized, as if invested with real time. As each act invoked a pulse of a higher order, the whole show resonated in its particular production. Thus, in each circus act, the spectators not only witnessed, but revalidated the unity and contours of their circus-performed ‘real’ selves.

References Bakhtin, Michael ([1965] 1984) Rabelais and His World, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baudrillard, Jean (1983) Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e).

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Benjamin, Walter (1968) Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books. Bouissac, Paul (1976) Circus and Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bouissac, Paul (1982) The profanation of the sacred clown performance, in Sym­ posium on Theater and Ritual, unpublished manuscript. Toronto: Wenner Gren Foundation. Carmeli, Yoram S. (1990) Performing the real and impossible in the British travelling circus, Semiotica, 80(3/4): 193–220. Carmeli, Yoram S. (1994) Text, traces and the reification of totality: the case of popular circus literature, New Literary History, 25(1): 175–205. Cunningham, Hugh (1980) Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, New York: St. Martin’s Press. De Bord, Guy (1967) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Red and Black. Dunning, Eric (1986) The dynamics of modern sport: notes on achievement-striving and the social significance of sport, in Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning (eds), Quest for Excitement, Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 205–23. Featherstone, Mike (1992) Postmodernism and the aesthetization of everyday life, in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (eds), Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell: 265–90. Foucault, Michel (1990) The History of Sexuality, New York: Pantheon Books. Hargreaves, John (1986) Sport, Power and Culture, London: Polity Press. Krauss, Rosalind (1988) The impulse to see, in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visual­ ity, Seattle: Bay Press: 57–78. Kretchmer, R. Scott (1975) ‘From test to contest.’ An analysis of two kinds of coun­ terpoints in sport, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 23–30. Lacan, Jacque (1977) Écrits, A Selection, London: Routledge. Mason, Tony (1988) Sport in Britain, London: Faber and Faber. Mead, George Herbert (1934) Mind. Self and Society, Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press. Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Thomas, Duane (1976) Sport: the conceptual enigma, Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 3: 35–41. Weiss, P. (1973) Records and the man, in Robert G. Osterhoundt (ed.), The Philoso­ phy of Sport, Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas Publishers: 12.

Part II

Precedents

Origins

Chapter 18

The circus and nature in late Georgian England Marius Kwint

You at command make brutes obey, Walk, work, or dance, with movement gay. Your horses far excel report, Whose minuet might grace a Court; Their hornpipe quick to music true, They seem as if each step they knew, But all the art and skill’s with you. The monkey, though of race despis’d Unequall’d must by all be priz’d His excellence excites surprise; For e’en with man for fame he vies. The dancing dogs, where Lady Flaunt In chariot plac’d to take a jaunt With flirting airs so perfect seen, She seems to move a fairy queen. The hunting, where the taylors chace, A fox with mirth o’er spreads each face. lines … addressed to Mr. Astley by a Lady, on seeing his performances (1785)1 The modern circus has a rather different form and content from the char­ iot races of its ancient Roman namesake because it is the product of more recent times. It was invented chiefly around London during the 1760s and 1770s by a new breed of plebeian equestrian who possessed extraordinary skills of gymnastic trick riding.2 Several of them had learned their techniques while training as cavalrymen in the British army during the Seven Years War (1756–63), which left Britain with a vastly expanded empire. Once demo­ bilized, they sought to turn their skills to profit by performing stunts (such as headstands in the saddle or bestriding three cantering horses at once) at pleasure gardens and fairgrounds across Britain, continental Europe and sometimes further afield. Calling themselves “riding masters,” they also

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offered riding lessons and set up arenas for the purpose. This was a time not only of unprecedented expansion and prosperity in leisure markets, but also of increasing reaction to them in the form of the Movement for the Reformation of Manners. Concerns about the limits of acceptable play have of course been perennial. But the years of the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution saw a new level of concerted efforts by Parliament and local magistrates to purge popular amusements of the most disorderly elements— the petty crime, vice and frequent cruelty towards animals—that had long attended the gathering of crowds.3 In this context a particularly talented and enterprising riding master, an ex-sergeant major from the light dragoons named Philip Astley, thought to intersperse his arduous feats on horseback with the more traditional fairground and interlude elements of tumbling and clowning.4 He opened his own “riding school” in a field in Lambeth, on the southern fringes of London, in April 1768. It proved popular with a broad social range of audi­ ences, but was forced to weather the jealousy of West End theater-managers and harassment from local magistrates before it won general recognition as a respectable form of family entertainment.5 It was, however, by no means exclusively family-oriented. Partly because it was based in the common appreciation of the horse, the show transcended the normal differences of class and cultural outlook, and enjoyed the custom of prosperous work­ ing classes and aristocracy alike, although in segregated accommodation. Making a reported 40 guineas a day, Astley was within the next 20 years able to build permanent covered “amphitheaters” in Paris and Dublin as well as Lambeth. He then used these as headquarters from which to tour smaller towns in winter. Competition mounted, not least from the “Royal Circus,” which opened near to Lambeth in 1782.6 The Royal Circus not only coined a name for the genre, but also erected a fine stage next to the ring, bringing circus close to the world of drama for much of the next century. Astley’s and the Royal Circus began to emulate each other in producing swashbuckling horse-borne melodramas known as “hippodramas.”7 Based on recent news of imperial exploits or Gothic legends, they were set with lavish scenery in exotic locations, and usually ended in massed battle scenes in front of burn­ ing castles complete with crashing timbers. Then the “scenes in the circle” would begin (Figure 18.1). Astley died in 1814 but his company in London went on to survive the Royal Circus, the introduction of the big top tent to Europe by a visiting American company in 1842, and the proliferation of many smaller touring companies without stages. Astley’s Amphitheatre became a cherished institution of Victorian Britain and a standard brand for the circus business. However, after being immortalized in the writings of Dickens and Thackeray and lampooned in the pages of the satirical maga­ zine Punch, it began to suffer from a decline in the taste for hippodrama and increasing competition from the music halls.8 The Amphitheatre was finally demolished in 1893.

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Figure 18.1 Astley’s Amphitheatre, 1807. Aquatint by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson published by Rudolph Ackerman of London in his Microcosm of London, 1808. Source: Courtesy of Dominique Jando from the Dominique Jando Collection.

This chapter concentrates upon the founding example of Astley’s in order to analyze the attitudes to the environment that the circus inherited, and with which it played. The circus is, after all, basically about nature, testing its limits by dwelling on spectacular and exceptional things. Most of these performances are obviously gained through training and cultivation, but some are presented as natural anomalies. My method is borrowed from structural anthropologists, notably Claude Lévi-Strauss and Edmund Leach, who have studied the way that humans tend to order the world into fun­ damental categories, regardless of place or time.9 These categories fall into a sequence as one moves from the familiar realm of the self and the home, through the ambiguous zone of “vermin” and “game,” to the threatening domain of “the other,” the exotic, and the wild. Corresponding sequences apply to all phenomena: thus humans may be (and frequently are) subjected to the same criteria of domesticity, wildness or ambiguity as other animals. Indeed the chief lesson of this approach is that statements about the differ­ ences between species actually reflect our perceptions of difference within our own, and our evaluations of them.

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It may seem inappropriate to use such an avowedly anti-historical doc­ trine as structuralism as a tool of historical analysis. But I see no reason why the foundations of human thought cannot be shown in their relation­ ship to the more superstructural, ideological elements of belief and practice that changed over time. Indeed a more chronologically inflected application of structuralist thinking can be seen in the work of the famous Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who saw revolutionary potential in the grotesque symbol­ ism employed by the French sixteenth-century writer Rabelais, especially in his story of the gluttonous and incontinent giants Gargantua and Pantagruel.10 These literary idioms stemmed, Bakhtin argued, from an ancient and perva­ sive culture of the carnival that, ironically, reached its peak in the repressive and religious world of the late Middle Ages and early Reformation. Humans tend to punctuate periods of normalization and restraint (in this case Lent) with outbursts of misrule, when the social lid is lifted off and the world seems temporarily to be turned upside down. Night becomes festive day, women dominate men, boys are dressed up as bishops and swing censers filled with human excrement, animals dress up as humans and vice versa. Authority is lampooned; hierarchies and taboos are suspended in a phase of Dionysiac excess. The lofty realm of the mind is temporarily subverted by the base physical interests of the genitals and the guts—the “lower bodily stratum,” as Bakhtin called it. Much of this symbolism is of course traceable in the modern circus, most particularly in the nonsensical trickster-figure of the clown, but in a com­ paratively etiolated form. There is no spilling over into the mass participa­ tion that characterizes the carnival proper. This is partly because the circus is a reformed form, shaped by the moral and political campaigns of late Georgian and Victorian Britain. The circus packaged up the vestiges of car­ nival within an orderly commercial space, and added feats of human disci­ pline and demonstrations of how animals should be cared for and cultivated. By these means it helped to rescue certain popular traditions from a world that had begun to look unacceptably rough, disorderly, and cruel to many opinion-formers. This remained the rationale of the circus, even though its precepts were deeply archetypal, and even arcane. How the circus negotiated these tensions provides much of the substance of the following account. As far as we know, the robust figure of Philip Astley rarely intellectual­ ized his art, except in his early “Prologue on the Death of the Horse” of June 1768. His steed would play dead in the ring while Astley announced that this was to show, “how brutes by heaven were design’d / To be in full subjection to mankind.” Then, referring to a famous general in the recent Seven Years War with the French, Astley bellowed: “Rise, young Bill, & be a little Handy / To serve that warlike Hero, [the Marquis of] Granby.”11 Whereupon the horse would of course briskly stand up. Circuses went on frequently to stage the death of the horse in order to elicit astonishment at the ability of riding masters to train their animals. Equestrian performers

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had, after all, founded the circus, and remained its hub. So the relation­ ship between human and horse is likely to be the first key to the logic of the genre. It is widely accepted that the natural world is fundamental to human iden­ tity by allowing awareness of ourselves as a species. Animals in the human environment provide instruments for categorical thought: they are, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, “things to think with.”12 Onto them we project our visions of human difference and moral character, and hence our emotions. It is nonetheless surprising that an influential genre of mass urban entertain­ ment should be sustained by an equestrian cult that lacked the appeal of competition or gambling. Some circus historians have suggested that the ubiquity of the horse in pre-automotive society had the effect of heightening the audience’s astonishment at what the riding masters could do.13 This may have been true, but was hardly a new factor by the time that the modern circus was founded in the 1760s. Other circumstances must have helped to make the dramatic potential of the horse so apparent. In his splendid book Realizations, the cultural historian Martin Meisel attributes the circus firmly to an emerging Gothic and Romantic sensibility that captured the imaginations of elite intellectuals and popular pleasureseekers alike.14 Meisel takes Astley’s famous hippodrama Mazeppa; Or, The Wild Horse of Tartary (first performed in 1833) as an example. The play was based upon Lord Byron’s poem of the same title, in which a low-born Polish youth who dares to love the daughter of the king is lashed naked to the back of a “fiery untamed steed” and sent galloping off across the Steppe. He survives to raise an army, avenge his punishment and win both the king­ dom and his love. Meisel, noting the prevalence of fiery horses in parallel mid-nineteenth-century imagery, notably the paintings of Rosa Bonheur and Eugene Delacroix, rightly perceives that the “image of the horse apparently spoke to this age with a special eloquence.” He goes on to claim that “[b]oth the mastery of embodied passion and energy, and the pure passion and energy itself, ready to shake off or run away with the presumptuous human will, were part of the fascination with the horse and its drama.”15 The steed, in other words, was a metaphor for the restless forces of history that had been unleashed by revolution, and a true embodiment of the sublime. The language used to describe and promote equestrian spectacles certainly took on clear political overtones: in 1827, for example, the great performer and manager of Astley’s Andrew Ducrow staged a gladiatorial combat of “Ferret Horses” in the ring, who seized and flung each other “as when in a Wild Ungovernable State of Nature.”16 This was, of course, a time when the radicals and conservatives were battling to present their preferred forms of government—republican on the one hand or monarchic on the other—as the most “natural,” virtuous, and correct. By the 1830s the craze for the display of nature red in tooth and claw was sweeping even the august stage of the major London theaters, arousing much controversy from the critical

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guardians of serious drama. As well as horses, these formulaic melodramas began to feature wild exotica including elephants, camels, zebras, and big cats, with the plot usually hinging on their apparently miraculous “taming” on stage. Fairly plainly, the oriental settings of such spectacles as Hyder Ali; Or, The Lions of Mysore, shown at Drury Lane in 1831, switched the focus of anxieties about domination and control away from post-Napoleonic Europe and towards the colonial frontier. The Romantic fondness for the wild or barely controlled horse was a deliberate attempt to subvert the animal’s traditional meaning as a sign of gentility and property: a meaning that had been acquired and given a rich patina during many centuries of husbandry. As living proof of the power of nurture over nature, of reason over passion, the horseman—not bound and naked but poised and armed—normally served as an emblem of con­ quest and indeed of civilization itself. Since the Renaissance it had, after all, been standard practice throughout Europe for rulers to commemorate themselves with an equestrian statue at the heart of their city. Moreover, even during the Industrial Revolution the horse still served as the most spectacular source of muscular power for the building of commercial soci­ ety. Like the painter George Stubbs, who depicted on the one hand shiny hunters and thoroughbreds standing with their masters in English pastoral idylls, and on the other Arab stallions wide-eyed and rippling with fear and arousal in the wilderness, the circus traversed the full range of interpreta­ tions of the horse during its time.17 In the early days, however, the conserv­ ative and genteel message predominated, partly because that was simply the way things were in ancien régime society, and partly thanks to Astley’s own military background, personal disposition, and desire to prove the social usefulness and cultural legitimacy of the circus in the face of doubts about its legal status. By demonstrating that his horse would volunteer its life for its master and country, Astley was making a fairly straightforward ideological point about the need for loyalty to the crown in a time of fre­ quent war and apparent sedition.18 Nevertheless, during Astley’s time several new and important complexities were emerging in the prevailing world view. As Keith Thomas has shown in his book Man and Natural World, orthodox accounts of human supremacy over the brute creation were no longer taken for granted by the latter half of the eighteenth century.19 By the later 1780s, scientists and sentimental observers alike were beginning to credit the beasts with sympathetic intel­ ligences of their own, no longer simply regarding them as benchmarks of human beings’ comparative greatness, as God-given exemplars of certain moral characteristics from which people should learn (as in the medieval bestiary book), or as mere objects to be exploited. Astley’s and his col­ leagues’ achievements seem to have contributed a little to the shift in per­ ceptions during this decade. Conventions of horse-breaking had themselves been modified by humanitarianism since the later seventeenth century, and

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Astley strongly advocated the newer wisdom. Choose a horse, he advised in his best-selling riding manual The Modern Riding-Master of 1775, “with Eyes bright, lively, resolute and impudent; that will look at an Object with a Kind of Disdain. We may discover by the Eye his Inclination, Passion, Malice, Health and Indisposition; the Eye is the most tender Part of the Frame.” Any obedience was to be valued, “therefore if somewhat tractable the first Morning, take him into the Stable, and caress him; for observe this as a golden Rule, mad Men and mad Horses never will agree together.”20 The calm of a good horse reflected well upon its owner, although those ani­ mals that rebelled against this contract and their supposedly docile natures became all the more liable to savage punishment. Even before the advent of the sublime aesthetic in the circus arena dur­ ing the 1800s, there were moments when the apparently intractable horse was to be welcomed. One of the most enduring clowning routines from the early circus was The Taylor to Brentford. This was a parody of a fop­ pish and jumped-up tailor who had, according to urban legend, failed to persuade his horse to carry him to vote for the radical John Wilkes in the Middlesex election in 1768. Ending with the horse chasing the tailor round the ring, it became a standard in circuses until the late nineteenth century, being adapted to various national and topical contexts.21 The Taylor was also adopted more widely as a figure of speech about the supposed rela­ tions between master and servant. One memoirist of English high politics in the reign of George III, for example, explained that he knew from the start that the joint ministry of the radical Charles James Fox and Lord North would never last, “for he was court when Mr Fox kissed hands, he observed George III turn back his ears just like the horse at Astley’s when the tailor he had determined to throw was getting on him.”22 The satirical point, of course, was that radicals were morally and intellectually inferior to the beasts and, as such, would be sniffed out by the latter in the provingground of the circus, where the natural order of things was to be tested and reestablished. As Edmund Leach has stressed, the invidious compari­ son of humans with animals has always provided the basis for insult and derogation.23 Speciesist jokes abounded in the circus. During the age of hippodrama, press commentators often contrasted the histrionic talents of the “quadruped” actors with their “biped” counterparts, taking a swipe at the taste of the audience in the process. “People do not care much about fine acting at Astley’s,” wrote the author of one guide to London in 1827, “the horses are esteemed to be the principal performers, and if they do their parts well, the whole house—‘pit, boxes and gallery, egad’—is content.”24 As Andrew Ducrow famously said, audiences were usually eager to “[C]ut the cackle and get to the ’osses.”25 The words pertaining to horses were usually printed in the largest font on circus posters, and accompanied by bold woodcut images of the creatures rearing or galloping, often with fiery manes, wild eyes and dilating nostrils

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in the manner of Delacroix.26 One poster from 1829 effectively presented a manifesto for the entire cult of the circus horse: [D]emonstrations of HORSEMANSHIP and HORSE-TUITION … afford contribution towards the Amusement and Instruction of Holiday Folks and Juveniles to a degree ever-remembered after a first visit, as the vivid emotions of surprise and delight arising from their exhibition … inculcate a love for that noble Animal, the Horse, and a kindly feeling for his welfare, which we are taught to interest ourselves in next to our own on account of his sagacity, usefulness, strength & beauty. The Art of Tutoring and Managing him is here converted to the object of recrea­ tion, & proves a … source of pleasurable contemplation, as it is one of powerful & undiminished attraction.27 A few years earlier, shortly before the first animal protection act was passed by Parliament in 1822, Astley’s took a sentimental look at the plight of horses in its hit pantomime The Life, Death and Restoration of the HighMettled Racer. This catalogued the decline of a celebrated thoroughbred, which ended its days as a dray at the Elephant and Castle in London and was eventually dispatched on a knacker’s cart, only to find heavenly reward in a “Grand Palace of the HHOUYNMS” [sic].28 In order to conclude that horses were a nobler species than the supposedly civilized humans who debased them, the last scene drew upon Jonathan Swift’s satirical fantasy novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where a nation of horse-like creatures called Houyhnhnms stands out as the most rational and sympathetic of all the strange societies that Gulliver visits. Similar points were raised in much anti-slavery rhetoric and in the related myth of the “noble savage.” Evidence of audience responses to these shows, although heavily medi­ ated by graphic artists and fiction-writers, suggests that the “emotions of surprise and delight” were indeed “vivid.” Charles Dickens fondly recalled taking his seat at Astley’s as a part of childhood Christmas ritual, the “vague smell of horses suggestive of coming wonders.”29 He later elaborated in The Old Curiosity Shop on the way that one working-class matriarch in the gallery wore out the tip of her umbrella after hammering it on the floor in her excitement at the hippodrama. Throughout the classes, behavior at the theatre was generally more casual than it is today, allowing plenty of oppor­ tunity for socializing, eating, drinking, and showing off, including wise­ cracks and collective banter with certain star performers.30 However, the equestrian routines appear to have been moments for comparative rapture. Much of the wonder seems to have stemmed from the transfigured quality of the horses, which escaped their typical roles as beasts of burden and labor, becoming ethereal and, as many critics commented, appearing almost to fly along with their riders in acts of gleeful freedom and transcendence. “One of his horses—a short tailed bay,” wrote one commentator of Ducrow, “is a

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beautiful creature—‘a beast for Perseus; he is pure air and fire; and the dull elements of the earth and water never appear in him’.” (Figure 18.2)31 As in all circus turns, whether such thrilling effects were the result of nature or nurture was deliberately left ambiguous, since it is a fundamen­ tal technique of spectacle to obscure the historical origins of what one dis­ plays. Conjuring—or, in Astley’s words, “Natural Magic”—was, after all, a central part of the circus repertoire.32 This was all the more the case in a culture that was coming to terms with curiosity as something of both commercial and intellectual value, and spent much time toying with the distinctions between “natural” and “artificial” phenomena.33 Much literate commentary indicates that Astley’s captivated many of the cognoscenti as well as the populace, demonstrating feats of cultivation that were widely thought to be a credit to the present age of intense scientific and technologi­ cal experiment. However, circus performers remained coy about their tech­ niques and disclosed them only in calculated fragments. Some newspaper readers were informed that Astley’s horses were the product of at least six months and sometimes two or three years’ painstaking work, but ultimately it did not matter whether the effects were known to be natural or artificial. Humankind was so powerful as to make the artificial seem natural. In a similar spirit, but with added ideological irony, equestrian culture congratulated itself on its achievements in training and selective breeding while treating those differences as divinely ordained. This vagueness about

Figure 18.2 Andrew Ducrow, Royal Amphitheatre, 1823. Source: Etching by Theodore Lane courtesy of The Harvard Theatre Collection, The Houghton Library, Harvard University, TS 930.10F.

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the origins of hierarchy was useful for representing the human class sys­ tem, as circuses purported to give lessons on social deference and duty. The supreme arbiter of equestrian culture was the gentleman on horseback, so the riding master (originally his servant) served as teacher of stewardship and duty. His sensitive work contrasted the vicious attacks sometimes made by proletarians on the prized horses of the rich, as he strove to educate the people in the importance of physical fitness and martial skills.34 “When mounted on his beautiful grey, in the centre [of the ring],” eulogized the Morning Post in 1807: the veteran ASTLEY, apparently in the flower of his age, still conserves the extraordinary management of the horse.… What a noble example to the heads of families, civil and military, and to the rising generation in general, is to be witnessed every evening!35 And as with cars today, there was a horse for almost every status and occupa­ tion, and the circus displayed a full range, from “high-bred racers,” through sturdier Hunters, horses “for Ladies,” “Forest Racers” for children (“only 39 ins high”), to the broad-backed Hanoverian Creams used in the ring.36 Although the performing arts have often served as an avenue of social opportunity, equestrianism also helped to reinforce the norms of class, race, and gender. The essential horse required the quintessential man: in the early years circus horsemanship was headlined as “manly” (and hence English) in reaction to the worrying influence of French foppishness. Astley’s own “System of Equestrian Education,” on which he published a highly successful manual in the early nineteenth century, was presented as a plain and sensi­ ble home-grown rival to the previously dominant and supposedly simpering French and Neapolitan schools of horse-riding.37 Horsemanship was the ulti­ mate test of integrity, so for the early riding master Dingley in 1766, the feats of a female rider were proof that “The fair sex were by no means inferior to the male, either in Courage or Ability.”38 Despite the fact that horsemanship was held to be a “science” and therefore problematic for women, feats by them, including the spouses of Philip Astley and his rival Charles Hughes, were presented without particular qualification in the early 1770s. While the spotlight was on masculinity, exceptional women could use such activities to break free of tradition: there were swordswomen, female pugilists, and occasional jockeys into the Napoleonic period. During the nineteenth cen­ tury, however, the need to define masculinity seems to have given way to a greater anxiety about the display of femininity, with commentaries on female performers usually stressing their prettiness, elegance and desirability to men. In 1818, a handbill for circus riding lessons (now segregated by sex) assured readers that “The most timid Lady need not be under the least Apprehension in Learning this most useful and necessary Art.”39

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For ethnographic demonstrations, one could look at an increasing range of imported styles of riding during the nineteenth century; not only the clas­ sical Haute Ecole and Viennese, but also more stirring choices: “The kind of companionship and attachment between Greeks, Arabs, and their Horses,” claimed a bill for Ducrow during the period of Ottoman war in 1826, “furnish[es] full scope for the managed Horses.”40 On the stage, a horse con­ ferred worthiness on a foreign character, whether Cossack ally or Saracen foe, whereas the irredeemable savage always fought on foot. The horse as a mirror of humanity could also be reflected back upon certain grades of human, as well as other species: apart from the rope-dancer described as “a beautiful young female” in 1789, a play of 1785, for example, was about a cobbler’s attempt “to bring his Wife to Proper Submission.”41 Not only did the different uses of the horse serve as metaphors for the vicissitudes of class, gender and ethnicity, but the equestrian setting also made for a brisk narrative. “The spectacle,” in the words of one Astley’s poster, “embodies Life as it Gallops.”42 The species was the ultimate parameter of judgment in the circus: as one newspaper wrote in 1785, Astley’s “endeavours” had been “to procure … various … phenomena both from the human and animal species.”43 However, the definition of species remained unclear, and the term was often confused in fairground rhetoric with such other categories as class, race, and nation: menagerie posters, for example, frequently talked of different “races” of animals. The resulting anxieties about the boundaries of the human spe­ cies were seen most clearly in the presentation of human and animal oddi­ ties, or what twentieth-century American carnivals called freaks. Since the Renaissance they had been viewed as curiosities—clues to the grand puzzle of the cosmos—and as such could be legitimately displayed as both enter­ taining and of serious scientific interest. Errant or playful nature produces, said a fairground advertisement for a hermaphrodite in 1818, “a Magnet of Irresistible and Universal Attraction.”44 According to a modified Aristotelian view, such phenomena were misassembled from components from different species, indicating the units by which nature worked. Freaks, sometimes described as “creatures” to enhance their strangeness, thus threatened the orthodox divide between humans and the brute creation on the one hand, while at the same time often reassuring viewers of their relative normality on the other. As Robert Bogdan has argued, there have, as a result, been two alternative modes for presenting freaks, either normal and domesticated or alien and wild.45 Wybrand Lolkes, “The Friesland Dwarf” was successfully exhibited at Astley’s in the former manner in 1790, with souvenir publicity presenting the unremarkable bourgeois lifestyle that he sustained despite his unusual stature. However, such shows were already becoming controversial in polite circles and therefore tended to be avoided by the respectable circus unless they were comparatively tasteful.

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More typically, the circus displayed artificial anomalies. Sufficient training could not only counteract the natural order, but also apparently reverse it. In what became a staple circus act, Astley’s “Little Learned Military Horse” would simply fire “a pistol at the word of command.”46 By firing the pistol itself, not just withstanding one being fired nearby, this horse went against common knowledge about the nervousness of its species. Astley later gained a royal patent for his method of habituating horses to the sound of gun­ fire.47 During the mid-1780s a wave of pigs, dogs, and monkeys momentarily upstaged Billy’s equine conjuring and other tricks, with a more sensational impact upon the perceived gap between humankind and animals. The Learned Pig, the only really new admission to the ranks of the sapient, enchanted the salons of a credulous London between 1784 and 1788 with his apparent ability to speak with the aid of letter cards, as well as mind-reading and card tricks.48 Writing in 1788, the year after Astley had shown his own version, the children’s moralist Sarah Trimmer credited the act with real influence in the gradual dethronement of humankind: “I have,” said a lady who was present, “been for a long time accus­ tomed to consider animals as mere machines, actuated by the unerring hand of Providence, to do those things which are necessary for the pres­ ervation of themselves and their offspring; but the sight of the Learned Pig, which has lately been shown in London, has deranged these ideas and I know not what to think.”49 Even a trainer, writing in 1805, claimed to be amazed by the animal’s abili­ ties. One could, he said, eventually abandon the subtle cueing signals, “for the animal is so sagacious, that he will appear to read your thoughts.”50 The pig, hitherto a byword for the bestial, touched a raw nerve in human– animal relations, sparking concerns and controversy about training meth­ ods, and becoming a satirical emblem for Romantics including Wordsworth and Burns. Animal acts therefore sought to imply that the creatures had human­ like motivations and reasoning: in 1770, the Little Learned Military Horse behaved “as if he understood” his instructions “word for word,” and by 1799 Astley had developed the “LITTLE SPEAKING HORSE.”51 Astley’s horse Billy was the progenitor of the now standard circus “Liberty Act,” such a notion of freedom having been, of course, a definitively human aspi­ ration. The significance of Astley’s “really clever” dancing horses was that dance—an extension of manners—was seen as another crucially human attribute.52 The Morning Herald in 1785 was not alone in saying that “The encrease of learned animals of the brute species, as horses, dogs, pigs, &c. must touch the feelings of every humane heart, when it is known that the tricks they perform are taught by the most excruciating torture.”53 Trainers

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warned the public that results were to be obtained by encouragement only, but it became known that Dancing Dogs at Astley’s were kept hungry, and stormed a miniature castle on stage with such alacrity only because food was placed on the other side.54 The acts played upon, as well as contributed to, an emerging bourgeois sensitivity towards the brute creation.55 The restora­ tion of a prelapsarian harmony within the animal kingdom was a powerful subtext for animal acts throughout the history of the circus. Clothing became a basic tool of manipulation in these often anthropo­ morphic spectacles. The rope-dancing monkey General Jackoo, miming his own little interlude, needed only “the gift of speech” to make his appear­ ance complete and, “while he is so laughably brandishing his sword, cry— ‘Who’s afraid?’”56 In a genteel precedent to the chimps’ tea party, Jackoo took an elaborate public breakfast with a canine Mme de Pompadour, which included a glimpse of a world truly upside down when they were waited on by humans. In similarly topsy-turvy and grotesque fashion in 1829, two ponies would sit down to eat at the table, dressed as Darby and Joan. Such acts provided comic antidotes to the adoration of the horse as an object of beauty. As well as animals stepping into human shoes (and sometimes vice versa), there were more complex exchanges between spe­ cies. In 1785, Astley travestied the horse with a “large” and “richly capari­ soned” dog, ridden by General Jackoo in a ‘Triumphal Entry” of 1785.57 In 1788 he used “a surprising Real Gigantic Spanish Pig, Measuring from head to tail 12 feet, and 12 hands high, weighing 12 cwt. Which,” again, was “rode by a MONKEY.”58 Anthropomorphism tended to suppress the usual differences between species, choosing instead to stress their common abilities as actors. In the Dancing Dogs, for instance, dogs and monkeys played humans together in the same scenes: mongrels carried monkeys to masquerades in sedan chairs, and simian executioners dispatched canine deserters. Illustrations made it hard to distinguish them. Other categories of human figured in the formula too: the child jockeys of the 1795 pony races at Astley’s were, by 1848, supplanted by “5 Highly-Trained Monkeys.”59 In the circus, the category of the species became so important that actual species frequently was not. What always mattered, however, was the mental map of the natural world, which defined the roles that animals could take. Animals (including people) were generally categorized by their apparent closeness to, or distance from, the gentlemanly norm. Horses or dogs, for example, qualified for the virtu­ ally human class by merit of their domesticity, while monkeys obviously did so on the basis of their anthropoid appearance. With its naked, pink skin, the pig conformed to some extent on both counts. The closest animals were given the most versatile roles: familiarity (as well as actual easiness to train) bred apparent complexity of character. Indeed the whole spectrum— from domestic to wild—could he encapsulated within a single species in the

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case of horses and dogs. Horses, most of all could be “devils” or heroes, actors who could portray emotions from “distorted fury” to “calm obedi­ ence.”60 By contrast unfamiliar animals—“the beautiful zebra,” the “ele­ gant” camel—tended to be typecast as aesthetic objects or irredeemable, if beautiful, monsters.61 Here the logical structures have been separated out for the purpose of analysis but in reality they followed each other in quick succession, with interpretations adjusted to political fashion and perceived audience taste. The circus was the sequential version of the same fairground aesthetic that struck William Wordsworth, in his famous passage on “Bartholomew Fair” in The Prelude of 1816. To him the fair revealed the perceptual disorder at the heart of industrial modernity (“The Horse of Knowledge, and the learned Pig … All jumbled up together, to compose, / A Parliament of Monsters). These were “All,” he said, the products of a single “Promethean” impetus; a panoply of infinite technological and political possibilities for the selfrecreation of humankind and its environment.62 Wordsworth seems not to have been the first to notice this. “What cannot man,” demanded a press doggerel-writer after Astley’s tour to Dublin in 1790: … the wonder of whose hand,

The well-earned plaudits of this night command?

When brutes the works of reason seem to find

Glow into thought, and nearly change their kind;

When the fleet courser proves obedient skill,

And moves conformant to the master’s will?

Thus from instruction can perfection flow,

And ev’ry grace of polished pleasure show,

Admiring circles ever justly draw,

And raise e’vn brutes beyond the brutal law.63

Hackneyed and deeply traditional circus acts were, at this revolutionary moment, reinterpreted in a semi-serious way. They became optimistic signs that modern human beings could transcend, by secular and enlightened dis­ cipline, the fallen state that had always appeared natural.

Notes 1 Hand-dated press cutting (hereafter ct.), June 19, 1785: British Library (hereafter BL), Th. Cts. 35 (“Astley’s Cuttings from Newspapers”), item 673. 2 This chapter is based on a section of my 1995 Oxford University D.Phil. thesis, “Astley’s Amphitheatre and the Early Circus in England, 1768–1830,” forthcom­ ing as a book with Oxford University Press. For an accessible factual introduc­ tion to the field, see George Speaight (1980b), A History of the Circus (London; Tantivy Press); for a cultural-historical survey that quotes several of my findings,

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5 6 7 8

9

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see Helen Stoddart (2000), Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press). For a useful summary of these events and some of the debates they have gener­ ated, see Susan Easton et al. (1988), Disorder and Discipline: Popular Culture from 1550 to the Present (Aldershot: Temple Smith); on the general growth of leisure consumption, especially in more elite circles, see John Brewer (1997), The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins). See Marius Kwint (2004), “Philip Astley (1742–1814),” New Dictionary of National Biography [electronic version] (Oxford: Oxford University Press); for detailed coverage of the early years also Kwint (1994), “Astley’s Amphitheatre,” chapter 1. See Marius Kwint (2002b), “The Legitimization of the Circus in Late Georgian England,” Past and Present: A Journal of Historical Studies (February); and for further information Kwint (1994), “Astley’s Amphitheatre,” chapters 2 and 3. See George Palliser Tuttle (1972), “The History of the Royal Circus, Equestrian and Philharmonic Academy, 1782–1816, St. George’s Fields, Surrey, England” (PhD thesis, Tufts University). See Arthur H. Saxon (1968), Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). See, for example, Charles Dickens, “Astley’s,” Sketches by “Boz,” vol. 1 (London, 1836); Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop (London, 1841), chapter 34; William Makepeace Thackeray (1854), The Newcombes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family (London), chapter 16; for further literary and journalistic references see Raymond Toole-Stott (1958–71), Circus and Allied Arts: A World Bibliography, 4 vols (Derby: Harpur and Sons); Paul Schlicke (1985), Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London: George Allen & Unwin); Stoddart (2000), Rings of Desire, chapter 6; also Jacqueline Bratton and Jane Traies (1980), Astley’s Amphitheatre (London: Chadwyck-Healey), pp. 15, 60 See, in particular, Edmund Leach (1964), “Anthropological Aspects of Language: Animal Categories and Verbal Abuse,” in E.H. Lennenberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), pp. 23–63; Edmund Leach (1972), Humanity and Animality, 54th Conway Memorial Lecture (London: South Place Ethical Society); Claude Lévi-Strauss (1968), Structural Anthropology, 2 vols (London: Allen Lane/Penguin). Mikhail Bakhtin (1968), Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press); for applications of his theories to other phenom­ ena see Terry Castle (1986), Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Fiction (London: Methuen); Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986), The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen). Transcript of advertisement, Gazetteer, June 11, 1768: BL, Th. Cts. 35, item 14. Quoted in Edmund Leach (1985), Lévi-Strauss (London: Fontana), p. 43. Bratton and Traies (1980), Astley’s Amphitheatre, p. 11. Martin Meisel (1983), Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Meisel (1983), Realizations, p. 216; on Mazeppa, see Saxon (1968), Enter Foot and Horse, chapter 7; see also Whitney Chadwick (1993), “The Fine Art of Gentling: Horses, Women and Rosa Bonheur in Victorian England,” in Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 89–107.

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16 Astley’s playbill, July 27, 1829: Astley’s file, Theatre Museum, Covent Garden, London (hereafter TM); for an erudite biography of Ducrow in his context see Arthur H. Saxon (1978), The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow and the Romantic Age of the English Circus (Hamden, CT: Archon,). 17 For a culturally insightful discussion of Stubbs see Stephen Deuchar (1988), Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History (New Haven CT: Yale University Press). 18 For this context see, especially, Linda Colley (1994), Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico); also Gillian Russell (1995), Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press); Kwint (2002b), “Legitimization of the Circus.” 19 Keith Thomas (1984), Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin). 20 Philip Astley (1775), The Modern Riding Master; Or, A Key to the Knowledge of the Horse and Horsemanship, with Several Necessary Rules for Young Horsemen (London), introduction. 21 The stereotyping of tailors seems to have had varied origins, some perhaps because they were perceived as slippery purveyors of social identities as well as being prominent radical agitators. See George Speaight (1978), “Some Comic Circus Entrées,” Theatre Notebook 32, pp. 24–7; John Towsen (1976b), “The Clown to the Ring: The Evolution of the Circus Clown, 1770–1975” (Ph.D. thesis, New York University, pp. 1–26. 22 George Townshend, c.1802, source untraced, quoted in Joanna Innes, letter to the author (November 30, 1999). 23 Leach (1964), “Anthropological Aspects of Language”, p. 29. 24 William Clarke (1827), The Every Night Book; Or, Life After Dark (London), pp. 22–3; see also Saxon (1968), Enter Foot and Horse, p. 8. 25 Saxon (1978), Life and Art of Ducrow, p. 179. 26 On the graphic rendition of the horse see Kwint (1994), “Astley’s Amphitheatre”, pp. 169–90. 27 Astley’s playbill, June 8, 1829: TM. 28 Astley’s playbill, April 10, 1820: TM; see also Saxon (1968), Enter Foot and Horse, pp. 73–6. 29 Dickens (1841), Old Curiosity Shop, chapter 34, quoted in Bratton and Traies (1980), Astley’s Amphitheatre, p. 60; see also Dickens (1836), Sketches by “Boz,” p. 301. 30 See Kwint (1994), “Astley’s Amphitheatre,” p. 244. 31 Clarke (1827), Every Night Book, p. 24; for a discussion of the symbolism of flight and lightness in the circus, which some have argued betrays shamanis­ tic archetypes, see Kwint (1994), “Astley’s Amphitheatre,” pp. 268–72; also Stoddart (2000), Rings of Desire, chapter 8. 32 See Astley’s conjuring manual: Philip Astley (1785), Natural Magic; Or, Physical Amusements Revealed (London). 33 See, for instance, Barbara M. Benedict (2001), Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Enquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), esp. chapter 5. 34 See Thomas (1984), Man and the Natural World, p. 184. 35 Ct., Morning Post, 1807: BL, C. 103.k.11 (Lysons Collection), vol. 5, fo. 64. 36 Ct., September 15, 1791: BL, Th. Cts. 36, item 56 D; ct., April 10, 1770: BL, Th. Cts. 35, item 27; ct., Morning Post, November 27, 1810: BL, C. 103.k.11, vol. 5, fo. 64.

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37 See Philip Astley (1801), Astley’s System of Equestrian Education, Exhibiting the Beauties and Defects of the Horse; With Serious and Important Observations on his General Excellence, Preserving it in Health, Grooming, etc. (London). 38 Quoted in Maurice Willson Disher ([1937] 1969), Greatest Show on Earth: Astley’s (Afterwards Sanger’s) Royal Amphitheatre of Arts (London: G. Bell), 13. 39 Ct., November 2, 1818: BL, Th. Cts. 37, item 738. 40 Astley’s playbill, April 10, 1826: TM. 41 Astley’s playbill, November 25, 1844, for W.T. Moncrieff’s The Royal Fox Hunt and the Race Horse, and Life’s Course of Man and Steed!: Bodleian Library (hereafter Bod. Lib.,) John Johnson Collection, “Theatres–C” portfolio. 42 BL, Th. Cts. 35, item 1112 (June 10, 1789), 692 (October 1, 1785). 43 Ct., October 20, 1785: BL, Th. Cts. 35, item 698. 44 Advertisement for Mlle Lefort, with a beard, h.d. 1818: BL, C. 103.k.11 vol. 1, fo. 75. During the eighteenth century scientific orthodoxy moved from the theory of “sports of nature” (lusus naturae) induced by God for our puzzlement and edi­ fication, to a more secular view of natural error. See, for example, Joseph Levine (1977), Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), chapter 1. 45 Robert Bogdan (1988), Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 206, chapter 4, passim. 46 Astley’s playbill, 1770: BL, 1879 c. 13 (“Miscellanea Collection”). 47 See Public Records Office, London, Patent Rolls, IND: 16806. 48 See Gerald Stanley Eames (1980), “The Freaks of Learning: Learned Pigs, Musical Hares, and the Romantics,” transcript of lecture, Toronto Public Library, February 4: Bod. Lib., John Johnson Collection, “Animals on Show,” box 2; also Ricky Jay (1986), Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (London: Robert Hale, 1986), pp. 8–21; Richard Altick (1978), The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap); Stallybrass and White (1986), Transgression, chapter 1. 49 Sarah Trimmer (1788), Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting their Treatment of Animals, 3rd edn, p. 71, quoted in Thomas (1984), Man and the Natural World, p. 92. 50 William Pinchbeck (1805), The Expositor; or Many Mysteries Unravelled … comprising The Learned Pig … Invisible Lady [etc.] (Boston, MA, 1805), p. 26, quoted in Eames, “The Freaks of Learning”, p. 14. 51 Astley’s playbill, 1770: BL, 1879 c. 13; ct., May 2, 1799: BL, Th. Cts. 36, item 176 C. 52 Ct., August 9, 1768: BL, Th. Cts. 35, item 863; see also Thomas (1984), Man and the Natural World, p. 37. 53 Morning Herald, September 5, 1785, Morning Post, April 17, 1785: BL, C. 103.k.11, vol. 2, fo. 127. 54 Astley (1785), Natural Magic, pp. 27, 36; for later evidence of Astley’s alleged training methods see Report from the Select Committee on Performing Animals, Together with the Proceedings of the Committee and Minutes of Evidence (London: HMSO, 1921), p. 22, min. 641. 55 On this issue see Harriet Ritvo (1990), The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin), p. 27, chapters 2 and 3; Thomas (1984), Man and the Natural World, chapter 4; Brian Harrison (1982), Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chapter 2. 56 Ct., April 16, 1785: BL, Th. Cts. 35, item 648. 57 October 6, 1785: BL, Th. Cts. 35, item 750.

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58 Advertisement, quoted in Thomas Frost (1875), Circus Life and Circus Celebrities (London), p. 33. 59 Astley’s playbill, January 10, 1848: Bod. Lib., John Johnson Collection, “Theatres A–C” portfolio. 60 Saxon (1968), Enter Foot and Horse, p. 212; Astley’s playbills, September 14, 1829, “Third Week! … Oscar & Malvina,” 1812: TM. 61 Ct., November 24, 1780; playbill September 25, 1822: both TM. 62 William Wordsworth (1805), The Prelude, “Book Seventh, Residence in London” (Bartholomew Fair), lines 708; 715–18, in M.H. Abrams et al. (eds) (1993), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn, vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton), p. 253. 63 Dublin Morning Post, March 15, 1788: BL, C. 103.k.11, vol. 4, fo. 30.

Chapter 19

The American circus Don B.Wilmeth

Historical summary George Speaight, the author of the history of the circus and a notable English historian of popular entertainment, devotes almost half of his History of the Circus to the circus in America. He is quite correct in stating that the circus is an international art, with a steady flow of “artistes” criss-crossing the Atlantic and the Pacific. In a very unselfish comment, Speaight, who gives great detail to the birth of the modern circus in England, states une­ quivocably that it was the United States that was ultimately preeminent in “the quantity and quality of the performers it supplied to English circuses.” Although Englishmen had brought the circus to these shores, “the debt was repaid with interest.”1 Indeed, despite the rich and fascinating history of European circuses, the United States’ traditions and contributions to the circus are unique and notable. Before an overview is possible, however, some explanation is in order. In 1968 Marcello Truzzi, in “The Decline of the American Circus,” defined the circus as “a traveling and organized display of animals and skilled per­ formances within one or more circular stages known as ‘rings’ before an audience encircling these activities.”2 This definition, which provides a workable framework for a study of the circus, includes the traditional cir­ cus and the Wild West exhibition under the general category of a circus. It clearly excludes, as it should, the carnival, which is socially a very distinct organization and depends, as does the amusement park, on its audience’s active participation. On the other hand, the circus demands and, if it is successful, receives a high degree of emotional empathy and passive involve­ ment. The circus, therefore, is more closely related to traditional theater, whereas the carnival and its kin have evolved from the medieval fair tradi­ tion. Despite Truzzi’s inclusion of the Wild West show as a form of circus, during its heyday its evolution and form were quite distinctive and thus will be dealt with as a separate and distinctive entertainment. In its various forms, the circus is one of the oldest and richest of popular entertainments and thus a thorough historical survey is impossible in this

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brief overview. Only highlights can be touched upon here, providing a sense of the circus’s evolution, with the focus on America’s own circus tradition. Historians have rather unsuccessfully attempted to trace individual cir­ cus acts to antiquity, but the modern circus’s connection with Rome’s Circus Maximus or the Flavian Amphitheatre or even earlier traditions is tenuous at best and misleading at worse. Certainly the origins of the American circus must be found elsewhere. Historians of the circus have been altogether too easily misled by the ancient use of the word “circus,” which comes from the Latin word for circle (but then there is no require­ ment that a circus must be presented in a ring, despite its practicality for equestrian acts, which are a rather modern innovation). The American circus as we know it today dates, in fact, from the eques­ trian training circle of the eighteenth century. By the middle of that century English riding masters offered exhibitions combining skills of horsemanship with other acrobatic skills. Although a number of these equestrians might be given credit for being the father of the modern circus, it is Philip Astley who emerges as the most obvious progenitor. Between 1768 and 1773, Astley developed what amounted to a one-ring circus in London, featuring horsemanship acts, and ultimately developed not only the modern circus, but also a form of theatre called “hippodrama” or “equestrian drama.” European circuses stayed close to Astley’s original form, often in fixed loca­ tions, although adding in time clowns, acrobats, jugglers, trapeze artists, trained animals, and other common circus acts. In contrast, in American circus the early trend was toward size and movement. In the course of the circus’s history, there have been in America, Mexico, and Canada since 1771 over 1,100 circuses and menageries (an even earlier tradition and one of the definite predecessors of the circus in England and America). The peak period of the American circus was in 1903, with approximately ninety-eight circuses and menageries in existence. Since 1903 the number of circuses has steadily declined. The early American circus, then, was virtually transported from England, although elements of the circus were present in the form of itinerant enter­ tainments some years prior to the establishment of a “circus” proper. A troupe of rope dancers was performing in Philadelphia in 1724; a per­ former was juggling and balancing on the slack wire and the tightrope in New York in 1753; tumblers and rope dancers were in Boston in 1792; and animals were being exhibited in the Colonies as early as 1716. And, in the English tradition, trick riding might have been seen as early as 1770. Certainly a Mr Faulks was performing feats of horsemanship in Philadelphia in 1771, and others followed. Shows and exhibitions of all varieties were formally forbidden by an Act of Congress in 1774, so the evolution of the circus had to wait until the conclusion of the Revolutionary War and the repeal of the ban in 1780. One of the first circus amusements to be offered after the war was a large menagerie of birds, reptiles, and quadrupeds.

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The man who finally brought the previously disparate elements together in Philadelphia in 1793 was John Bill Ricketts, a Scotsman (or possibly, as some recent research suggests, an Englishman) who arrived in America in 1792. In his permanent building in Philadelphia, Ricketts presented trick riding, a tightrope walker, and a clown. Ricketts had been a pupil of Charles Hughes, whose Royal Circus at Blackfriar’s Bridge in London had been rival to Astley’s since 1782 (Hughes also claimed that he had visited America in 1770). Subsequently, between 1792 and 1799, Ricketts’s circus made appearances in New York, Boston, and Albany, as well as other cities in the United States and Canada, and was even seen by George Washington. The American circus, then, began with single acts. The amalgamation of elements developed slowly. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 afforded the increasing number of American circuses greater freedom in travel. At the same time, the number of traveling animal menageries continued to parallel the growing number of circuses. By the end of the first quarter of the nine­ teenth century, efforts were made to merge the menagerie and the circus. The elephant, which was to have a key role in the American circus, was first exhibited in 1796 by a Mr Owen, and his elephant continued to be seen for fifteen years up and down the eastern seaboard. The second and the most famous early elephant in the new country, Old Bet, was shown by Hackaliah Bailey with great success until 1816, although the first elephant that was part of any circus was seen in New York in 1812. Hackaliah Bailey, however, was so fond of Old Bet that he built the Elephant Hotel in his hometown of Somers, New York, and erected a monument to Old Bet. The area around Somers is still called the “Cradle of the American Circus.” Most early pio­ neers of the American circus came from this area, where animals were bred and trained, acts were rehearsed, and tents and wagons were constructed. Somers remained the center of the American circus until 1927, when the Ringlings moved their winter quarters from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Sarasota, Florida. Unfortunately, Old Bet has mistakenly been associ­ ated by historians with Nathan Howe’s circus. Howe and his partner Aaron Turner also have been incorrectly credited with the introduction of the circus tent around 1824. Recent research indicates, however, that the tent was probably not introduced in the American circus until 1825 or 1826 by J. Purdy Brown in Wilmington, Delaware. During the first half of the nineteenth century, distinctive characteristics of the American circus began to evolve. Although menageries on display began to be associated with the circus, the horses remained the top perform­ ers; they also provided the means for moving the show from one location to another. Beginning in 1837, when a short-lived circus marched through the streets of Albany, the horse made possible one of the American circus’ most distinctive features, the circus parade. The circus and its horse-drawn wagons most frequently traveled by night, pausing on the outskirts of the

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next show town in order to make a triumphal entry for the early morning citizens. As the circus parade developed, elaborately decorated specially made wagons with magnificent wood carvings were added. A beautiful band wagon led the procession, while a calliope or steam fiddle (invented in 1856), the most popular of circus musical instruments, provided a loud and raucous conclusion to the spectacle. By the early nineteenth century, land as far west as Illinois had been incor­ porated into the union. With poor or nonexistent roads or trails available, other means of transportation were necessary, so enterprising showmen turned to water travel via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Competition between the various circuses became more intense; the Somer’s group cre­ ated a merger of several animal companies and in 1835 formed the first circus trust, which was to become the Zoological Institute. In quick succes­ sion, many circus firsts occurred: in 1838 the circus first used rail travel as transportation (from Forsythe to Macon, Georgia); the first recorded boat circus (under Gilbert Spalding and Charles Rogers), an early example of the showboat, appeared in 1852; Richard Sands, who developed his own circus in 1842 and took the first American circus to England in 1843, invented a new kind of poster—the first printed in color from wood-blocks on rag paper and intended for reuse. The migration of the Mormons to Utah beginning in 1847 established the Mormon Trail, and the California Trail expanded travel westward from Salt Lake City to San Francisco. With the 1849 gold rush, the circus, like other forms of popular entertainment, almost immediately moved west. Indeed, Joseph Andrew Rowe established the Olympic Circus in San Francisco in 1849. Although circuses continued to travel over land during the last half of the nineteenth century, and many wagon shows continued well into the twen­ tieth century, the trend was toward greater use of the railroad. With useful trackage available that allowed for longer trips to major cities and more profit, circuses took to the rails. Den Stone was an early pioneer on the rails in 1854; Dan Castello’s Circus and Menagerie was far enough west when the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 to complete the season on the Pacific Coast. By 1885 fifty or more circuses were on the road; the 1890s and early years of the twentieth century saw many small railroad circuses traveling across the country. In time, motorized transportation and the rail­ road displaced mule power and horse power. The circus of Tom Mix made the first motorized transcontinental tour of the United States in 1936. Among the major changes in the pattern of the American circus, in addi­ tion to mobility, was the introduction of multiple rings, in contrast to the typical European one-ring arrangement. Around 1873 Andrew Haight’s Great Eastern Circus and Menagerie announced that it would present its show in two rings; at the same time William Cameron Coup added a second

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ring to the circus utilizing the name of P.T. Barnum; in 1881, James A. Bailey negotiated the merger of several great circus operations, including Barnum’s circus, and opened with a three-ring show. By 1885, in fact, when Barnum was briefly merged with Adam Forepaugh, their circus had four rings plus two stages placed between them for acrobats. By the 1890s, how­ ever, virtually all American circuses had adopted the three rings. An impor­ tant philosophy of the American circus was to give the spectator more than he could possibly see at one time, on the basis of bigger is better. The circus now incorporated the menagerie, the concert, the sideshow (a term for any auxiliary show), and the street parade as integral ingredients. The period between 1830 and 1870 saw the emergence of numerous prominent circuses in the history of the American circus, each with color­ ful and important histories: the George F. Bailey Circus; circuses utilizing the name of the “Lion King” (Isaac Van Amburgh); the several circuses of Seth B. Howes; the Mabie Brothers Circus; the Yankee (Fayette Ludovic) Robinson Circus; the John Robinson Circus (a name used longer than any other in circus titles); the Spalding and Rogers Circus; the Dan Castello Circus; the Dan Rice Circus (capitalizing on the name of the early American clown); and the W.W. Cole Circus. The so-called golden age of the American circus—which lasted until about 1917—began in 1871, when W.C. Coup persuaded P.T. Barnum, the show­ man and museum entrepreneur, to become a partner in a circus enterprise. The circus with Barnum’s name attached to it opened in Brooklyn with the largest tent and the greatest number of men and horses in the history of the circus. Barnum, always the master publicist, billed the 1873 three-ring circus “P.T. Barnum’s Great Traveling World’s Fair Consisting of Museum, Menagerie, Caravan, Hippodrome, Gallery of Statuary and Fine Arts, Polytechnic Institute, Zoological Garden and 100,000 Curiosities, com­ bined with Dan Castello’s, Sig. Sebastian’s and Mr. D’Atelie’s Grand Triple Equestrian and Hippodramatic Exposition.” Barnum, it should be noted, lent his name to other shows in addition to Coup’s, which ultimately caused a split with Coup in 1875. In 1880 Barnum joined James A. Bailey and James L. Hutchinson in a new operation. This lucrative partnership lasted until 1885 when Barnum refused to deal further with Bailey, and Bailey sold his interest to James Cooper and W.W. Cole. In 1887, after Barnum had experi­ enced a number of setbacks, including the loss of a Madison Square Garden contract to the rival Adam Forepaugh Circus, Barnum gave Bailey full con­ trol of the circus and added his name to the new “Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth.” During this golden age, a number of the older circuses con­ tinued to compete or operate in their own regional circuits, and other new prominent circuses came into their own, including the Sells Brothers Circus, the Great Wallace Circus, and the Lemen Brothers Circus. The Ringlings, the name most frequently associated with the circus today, were late arrivals on the circus scene. None of the five brothers was involved

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until 1882. After seeing a traveling circus in their hometown of Baraboo, Wisconsin, they began to do a variety show around Wisconsin. In 1895, after adding more circus acts and animals to their menageries, they made their first tour outside the Midwest and entered Barnum & Bailey’s territory in New England. A year after Bailey’s death in 1907, the Ringlings bought the Barnum & Bailey Circus; they finally merged as one in 1918, becom­ ing “Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows.” Various competitors tried to shut out the Ringlings, but the circus had become big business, and their efforts were fruitless. After 1910, circuses declined in number and in extravagance. In 1905 Barnum & Bailey eliminated their free parade, a victim of an unsustainable cost escalation that had begun to steal their profits. Many circus parades had become such good shows in themselves that patrons stayed away from the tent shows. In many ways the parade had been the epitome of the circus, demonstrating to the public the gigantic scale of the circus. The costs of the ever more spectacular wagons sky-rocketed. In 1896 Barnum & Bailey’s “Two Hemisphere” wagon cost $40,000 to build and required a team of forty horses to pull the vehicle. The elimination of the menagerie was not far behind the demise of the parade; and even the big top would practi­ cally disappear (Ringling Brothers last performed under canvas in 1956). Mechanization deprived the circus of much of its uniqueness and flair; indi­ vidual initiative became dampened as well. Today only a dozen or so circuses travel in the United States, and they are only a faint reminder of the glories of the traveling tent circus of the turn of the century. During the 1940s and 1950s, the larger circuses—the Clyde Beatty, the King Brothers, and the Ringling shows—experienced a series of disasters and setbacks. When “The Greatest Show on Earth” was forced to put away its big top and perform only in permanent facilities, the major circus in the United States was deprived of one of its greatest attractions. But the circus is far from being a totally endangered species. In 1967 Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey was purchased by Irvin Feld for $8 million. Two years later it was placed on the New York Stock Exchange; in 1971 it was purchased by Mattel for $47 million. Feld, as David Hammarstrom in Behind the Big Top so aptly puts it, is “an incur­ able ballyhoo man who would like to carve his initials next to those of P.T. Barnum”3 and he has been amazingly successful in selling his circus. With two large units on the road each season, Feld has found a formula that makes it possible to convince the patrons that the circus is bigger and better than ever, which is clearly not so. Hammarstrom explains Feld’s very slick and carefully rehearsed approach as “a big splash of color with less heads, more feathers, and a strong solo star around which to build each show.” And, ironically, despite the diminution of the number of circuses, the total audience continues to grow (thanks in part to television and film) and the

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revenue to swell. Feld clearly represents the “big business” thrust of the modern circus; fortunately, a few showmen of the old tradition are still try­ ing to return the circus to the way it once was, most notably Cliff Vargas and his Circus Vargas. Regardless of the best way to do it, the modern circus must make adjustments to modern demands while at the same time retain­ ing its age-old appeal. The circus has survived because it touches something central in its audience, something without an age barrier; there is a closeness to nature beneath its showy facade and an ability to transcend natural laws. But Robert C. Toll perhaps is correct when he concludes in On with the Show that the circus is largely a relic, “a nostalgic re-creation of the naturebased rituals of an earlier day.”4 To counter some of the voices of doom that have emerged recently announcing the death of the circus, the Canadian-based Cirque du Soleil (founded in 1984) has evolved into a major force in the entertainment world, even though to many circus purists the novel product of Cirque (at the time of writing there are more than 20 resident productions world-wide) is not a circus at all. Regardless, the enormous success of Cirque has led many competing circuses to redefine what a circus is—or might be—helping find new strategies to attract audiences in such shows as the Big Apple Circus and Pickle Family Circus, and even leading to the retooling of the Ringling circuses.

Survey of sources The literature on the circus is vast. Of all forms of American popular amuse­ ment it has received the greatest attention. On an international level, no form of entertainment has been written about as frequently or on such a continuing basis with the possible exception of magic. Still, a great deal of primary material remains in private collections, and many of the published sources are by amateur historians and devoted circus fans whose materials, until recently, have avoided careful documentation. As a result, a compre­ hensive, reliably researched and documented history of the American circus has yet to be written, although a number of notable efforts in that direction have recently appeared. In the meantime, students of the circus must refer to those published sources that are most reliable and search for information in circus collections and in the pages of various periodicals and serials. The most comprehensive guide to circus sources and an indispensable ref­ erence for anyone researching the circus is Raymond Toole-Stott’s (1958–71) four-volume Circus and Allied Arts, A World Bibliography and his more selective list in A Bibliography of the Books on the Circus in English from 1773 to 1964 (Toole-Stott 1964). Toole-Stott’s major bibliographi­ cal volumes contain over fifteen thousand entries drawn from works in thirteen languages. It should be noted, however that this guide is far more

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useful on foreign antecedents than it is on the American circus. A fifth vol­ ume is in manuscript form. Volume 1, which includes sections on William Cody, Adah Menken, P.T. Barnum, and Philip Astley, has a foreword by M. Willson Disher; Volume 2 is especially strong on pantomime and equestrian drama (foreword by D.L. Murray); Volume 3, with a section on periodicals and a list of compiler’s one hundred best circus books, has a foreword by Antony D. Hippisley Coxe; Volume 4’s foreword is by A.H. Saxon. Robert Sokan’s (1975) A Descriptive and Bibliographic Catalog of the Circus and Related Arts Collection at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois con­ tains details on 1,373 items and is a useful guide as well. Don B. Wilmeth’s (1980) American and English Popular Entertainment annotates 254 sources on the circus and 120 items on the Wild West exhibition and William Cody. For the American circus, one would be well served to review Richard Flint’s (1973) “A Selected Guide to Source Material on the American Circus” for his discussion of types of circusiana. There are numerous general histories and surveys of the circus. George L. Chindahl’s (1959) History of the Circus in America is especially good on the nineteenth century (it also covers the circus in Canada and Mexico and the Wild West exhibition); John and Alice Durant’s (1957) Pictorial History of the American Circus is sumptuously illustrated and contains a useful list of American circuses; C.P. Fox and Tom Parkinson’s (1969) Circus in America is one of the better overviews of the circus in its heyday. Isaac J. Greenwood’s (1898) The Circus: Its Origin and Growth Prior to 1835 remains a useful early history, as do R.W.G. Vail’s “The Early Circus in America” and This Way to the Big Top,5 and John J. Jennings’s (1882) Theatrical and Circus Life; or, Secrets of the Stage, Greenroom and Sawdust Arena. Of all the available surveys, Earl Chapin May’s (1963) The Circus from Rome to Ringling (not to be confused with the less definitive Circus! From Rome to Ringling by Marian Murray 1956) remains a good starting place and is considered by many circus authorities the best single-volume history of the earlier efforts. For the uninitiated, Mildred S. and Wolcott Fenners’ (1970) The Circus: Lure and Legend covers the entire gamut of cir­ cus literature. Joe McKennon’s (1975) Horse Dung Trail: Saga of American Circus, although a partially fictionalized history of American circus from Yankee Robinson (1856) to the end of the horse drawn circus (1940), is essentially factual and generally reliable. A good historical summary is Marcello Truzzi’s “Circus and Side Shows.” Among the more recent world histories, Rupert Croft-Cooke and Peter Cotes’ (1976) Circus: A World History and Peter Verney’s (1978) Here Comes the Circus offer generally reliable but undocumented accounts that place the American circus in inter­ national perspective, as does Rolf Lehmann’s (1979) Circus (in German), most notable for its 205 color photographs. Monica Renevey’s (1977) Le Grand Livre Du Cirque (two volumes), although in French, contains

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essays on all aspects of world circus, including a section on the American circus by A.H. Saxon. Dominique Jando’s (1977) Histoire Mondiale Du Cirque, also in French, is generally trustworthy although undocumented (it is based largely on essays in the journal Le Cirque dans l’Univers). It does, however, cover all aspects of the circus on an international scale. Henry Thétard’s La Marveilleuse Histoire du Cirque (1947, two volumes) remains an authoritative French text. George Speaight’s (1980) A History of the Circus, unlike most circus histories, does contain some documentation and gives excellent coverage to the American circus. Felix Sutton’s (1971) The Big Show: A History of the Circus is adequate but not notable, and Charles Bayly Jr.’s “The Circus” (1931) provides a brief historical survey. The English prototypes and antecedents of the early American circus are covered with scholarly exactitude in A.H. Saxon’s (1968) Enter Foot and Horse and (1978) The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow and The Romantic Age of the English Circus. Indeed, Saxon’s work in general is indicative of the type of scholarship possible in the field of circus history. Less reliable and less thorough but still recommended are: Thomas Frost’s ([1975] 1881) Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, a classic study of the early English cir­ cus; and M. Willson Disher’s Greatest Show on Earth ([1937] 1969), which provides an informative and amusing history of Astley’s amphitheatre. Two suggested doctoral dissertations are Paul Alexander Daum’s (1973) “The Royal Circus 1782–1809: An Analysis of Equestrian Entertainments” and George Palliser Tuttle’s “The History of the Royal Circus, Equestrian and Philharmonic Academy, 1782–1816, St. George’s Fields, Surrey, England” (Tuttle 1972). Also useful are Antony D. Hippisley Coxe’s “The LesserKnown Circuses of London” and “Historical Research and the Circus,” and Jacob Decastro’s (1824) The Memoirs of the Life of J. Decastro, Comedian (fifty pages deal with “The History of the Royal Circus”). The early period of the American circus has recently begun to receive more serious attention. Stuart Thayer’s (1976) Annals of the American Circus 1793– 1829 is a careful and documented account; a second volume Annals of the American Circus 1830–1847 was published in 1986. Also useful are: James S. Moy’s (1978) “Entertainment at John B. Rickett’s Circus, 1793–1800,” “A Checklist of Circus Buildings Constructed by John B. Ricketts,” and “The Greenwich Street Theatre 1797–99” (each based in part on his doctoral disser­ tation (1977), “John B. Ricketts’s Circus 1793–1800”); C.H. Amidon’s “Inside Ricketts’ Circus with John Durang”; William W. Clapp Jr.’s ([1853] 1968) A Record of the Boston Stage; Joseph Cowell’s [1844] 1979) Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America; John Durang’s (1966) The Memoirs of John Durang, edited by Alan S. Downer; and Chang Reynolds’ (1966) Pioneer Circuses of the West. Since 1990 circus studies have grown more sophisticated, reliable, and with noteworthy documentation, beginning that year with John Culhane’s

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The American Circus: An Illustrated History and LaVahn G. Hoh’s and William H. Rough’s Step Right Up! By 2000 there was an explosion of important additions to literature on circus in America, including the semi­ nal study by Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (2002); David Carlyon’s biography of the pioneer clown Dan Rice (Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of, 2001); Gregory J. Renoff’s The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820–1930 (2008); and, finally, The American Circus, edited by Susan Weber, Kenneth I. Ames, and Matthew Wittmann (2012). This last source illustrated what is possible with studies of the American circus and provides a successful model for future efforts.

Notes 1 Speaight, George (1980b), A History of the Circus, London: Tantivy Press, 103. 2 Truzzi, M. (1968), “The Decline of the American Circus,” in Truzzi, Marcello (ed.) Sociology of Everyday Life, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 314–21. 3 Hammerstrom, David (1980), Behind the Big Top, South Brunswick, NJ and NY: A. S. Barnes and Co., (unknown page number). 4 Toll, Robert C. (1976), On with the Show, NY: New York University Press, 51. 5 Vail, R.W.G. (1956), “The Early Circus in America” in Vail, R.W.G. (ed.), Random Notes on the History of the American Circus, reprinted from the “Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society,” Worcester, MA., April, 1933; Vail, R.W.G. (1953), This Way to the Big Top! New York: New York Historical Society.

Chapter 20

P.T. Barnum The legend and the man1 A.H. Saxon

The cause of Barnum’s coming out of “retirement” was a proposition he had received from a young circus manager named William C. Coup, who, together with his partner Dan Castello, wished Barnum to join them in an ambitious enterprise. Coup, born in 1837, had commenced his own career in show business at the age of fourteen by signing on with Barnum’s Asiatic Caravan. After working on several other shows, he had teamed up with Castello—a sometime manager, equestrian director, and clown—to found a circus and “Egyptian Caravan” that toured the Great Lakes region during the summer of 1870.2 The first season of this venture was barely over when the two men decided to approach the veteran showman. They could hardly have caught him at a more propitious moment. Bored by his relative inactivity, and knowing Coup to be “a capital showman and a man of good judgment, integrity, and excellent executive ability,” Barnum eagerly snatched at their offer—over the strong objections of his family and friends, Coup later recalled—and on October 8 agreed to join them. Already he was thinking of what might be included in the expanded show. Admiral Dot would be “well trained” by the spring, he wrote, and several “tip-top museum curiosities” and all of the animals could be had from Wood’s estab­ lishment. “We can make a stunning museum department,” he emphasized. “You can have a Cardiff Giant that won’t crack, also a moving figure— Sleeping Beauty or Dying Zouave—a big gymnastic figure like that in Wood’s museum, and lots of other good things—only you need time to look them up and prepare wagons &c. &c.” The Siamese Twins might also “pay.”3 Barnum’s connection with the American circus has been notoriously mis­ represented by past writers on the subject, some of whom have taken a perverse delight in pointing out what he did not do in this field, almost as though they were attacking a personal enemy.4 To some degree attribut­ able to his reputation for “humbug”—to an almost automatic willingness to condemn the showman’s version of a story whenever some other inter­ pretation, however specious, presents itself—the origin of this pervasive attitude may be traced to his own era, when a number of calculated tales

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were set going by his own press agents and business associates. At the time of Barnum’s death in 1891, so great was the worry that his demise would adversely affect the receipts of his show that a campaign was immediately launched to belittle his contributions to “The Greatest Show on Earth,” while simultaneously puffing those of his surviving partner James A. Bailey. Thenceforth, aside from having furnished his name and money and (natu­ rally) evidenced an avid interest in returns, it was as if he had never set foot inside his own tents. To be sure, other showmen did covet his name and financial backing, and Barnum made no bones about expecting a premium for the former. It was a name that had been before the public for more than thirty years—a guarantee, in many people’s minds, of the biggest and the best, the strang­ est and most exciting, and possibly something outrageous as well. In his letter to Coup, he suggested calling the museum department his museum, in return for the same percentage Wood “allowed” him. Later partners paid him a bonus of upwards of $10,000 per season for the use of his name and bitterly complained when he insisted on his right to attach it to other enterprises. In a field in which circus titles, even those of shows that have been extinct for generations, are still bought and sold, his name to this day is jealously guarded.5 Barnum’s contract with Coup appears to be lost; but from extant agree­ ments between him and later partners, letters, newspaper articles, and pub­ lished accounts by the two men themselves, one may arrive at a fair estimate of its terms. The senior partner owned two-thirds of the show, with Coup and Castello dividing the other third. Coup was designated general man­ ager; Castello was in charge of the circus department. One may reasonably assume that Barnum, in addition to visiting the show whenever he could (in later contracts he was sometimes obligated to do so at least twelve times per season), pledged to exert himself in publicizing the enterprise and insisted on being consulted in regard to all major decisions. The great traveling exhibition that took shape over the winter of 1870–1 was hardly the typical circus of Barnum’s or anyone’s day. The arenic enter­ tainments were to form but one part of the show, which also embraced an extensive menagerie of exotic animals and—a feature Barnum boasted of having introduced to the circus—a museum containing “an infinite vari­ ety of Living and Representative Curiosities from the realms of nature and art,” including wax figures, automatons, Indian and Eskimo artifacts, an Egyptian mummy, Hiram Power’s titillating statue The Greek Slave, Wood’s “facsimile” of the Cardiff Giant, and, predictably, a large contin­ gent of human abnormalities. It was as if the American Museum had been revived and set on wheels, with Castello’s “Mammoth Circus” replacing the Lecture Room. For months in advance, to the horror of “Manager Coup,” Barnum writes, he spent money “like water” in his determination to get the best of everything.6 Since this was to be an itinerating show,

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it was necessary to have tents to house all the attractions and up to an estimated 10,000 spectators. To transport and further advertise the show in the traditional street parade, a fleet of vans, cage wagons, carriages, and ornately carved chariots was also required. Meanwhile, the showman was firing off letters to Kimball inquiring where he could get a mummy or group of living seals.7 During 1871 and later years he was also actively in pursuit of sea lions, giraffes, hippos, and other rare animals and was constantly in touch with dealers in America and abroad. Barnum was obviously well qualified to advise in the museum and menag­ erie departments; nor was he so ignorant of circus matters as is sometimes claimed. He had spent some time traveling with Aaron Turner’s circus in the 1830s, and a circus company had been attached to his Asiatic Caravan. He was personally acquainted with, and a shrewd judge of, nearly all the managers in the business (it was a mystery among veteran showmen how he had come to choose the young and relatively unknown Coup as his part­ ner, yet Barnum writes he had been favorably impressed by him for “some years” before) and a frequent spectator at circuses in America and Europe. When necessary, he would “scout” and negotiate for stellar attractions himself, as he did in the case of the sensational human cannonball Zazel.8 While attending his own show, he would often make notes on how an act or something else might be improved and pass along his suggestions at the end of the performance. And always, of course, he was on the lookout for the slightest indiscretion, the faintest hint of indecency that might give offense to the “moral community.” The lack of riotous conduct and the decorum that prevailed everywhere in his show, he was pleased to report at the end of the 1872 season, were due to a single fact—namely, “that my employees are teetotalers and of gentlemanly behavior.”9 Apparently not all his employees fit this glowing description, however, for Coup tells an uproarious story of one whiskey-loving superintendent in the equestrian department whom his fellow workers had ironically taken to calling “Barnum.” One day while the real Barnum was walking around the tents and his namesake was sleep­ ing off his latest bout on a pile of hay, someone came rushing up to wake the befuddled superintendent and began bawling “Barnum!” at the top of his voice. The enraged showman, who sized up the situation in an instant, stormed into Coup’s office and demanded to know if he had no respect for him and his reason for calling “that drunken, illiterate brute by my name.” Coup tried to pacify him with some unconvincing tale about circus employ­ ees’ fondness for “nicknames.” Orders were given that this particular one was not to be used again.10 The responsibility for overseeing the day-to-day operation of this colos­ sal enterprise—which involved hundreds of workers, performers, draft and show animals, not to mention the logistics connected with feeding and housing all of them and the problems of transporting, setting up, and tak­ ing down the show itself—fell to Coup and his eventual successors. Where

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Barnum made his greatest contribution was in publicizing the show, to effect which he resorted to a number of time-honored methods and invented a few new ones. He seems to have been the first to think of the circus “cou­ rier,” for example, in effect a tabloid newspaper containing the show’s pro­ gram, descriptions and illustrations of its acts and novelties, endorsements by prominent individuals, etc., printed in editions of hundreds of thousands and distributed to all the households in a town in advance of the show’s arrival. Less than two months after agreeing to join Coup, he was already at work on the first of these annual publications, soliciting “characteristic let­ ters” from well-known persons and begging them not to “mention my paper at present in any public way, lest my brother showmen may steal my thun­ der.”11 His autobiography offered another excellent means of advertising the show, and from early 1872 on, almost as regularly as clockwork, there now appeared the annual “editions” with their appendices and additional chapters that ticked off the triumphal progress of his circus during preced­ ing seasons. Many of the glowing reviews reprinted in these supplements were actually the work of Barnum or his press agents. Newspaper owners and their editors, who stood to benefit considerably from his paid advertise­ ments, were always happy to oblige the great “P.T.”12 His easy familiarity with the nation’s press and his proven ability to “work” it effectively were themselves of inestimable value to the show. And as hundreds of extant letters dating from this and the next decade testify, he was never content to resign this part of the business entirely to his press corps. Nor is it likely there has ever been another showman who could count so many of the world’s famous and powerful among his friends and acquaintances. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher may have argued against the circus as a demoralizing influence in his Lectures to Young Men, but he saw no contradiction in adding his name to the list of distinguished clergy­ men and denominational publications that unqualifiedly endorsed Barnum’s “Great Moral and Instructive Exhibition.”13 If there were any doubts about the genuineness of Captain Djordji Costentenus, the “noble Greek” who had been tattooed from head to foot with over seven million blood-producing punctures during his captivity in “Chinese Tartary,” one need only read the certificate of authenticity, signed by Oliver Wendell Holmes and other emi­ nent members of the Boston medical fraternity, that appeared in Barnum’s courier for 1877.14 When David Kalakaua, Hawaii’s “Merry Monarch,” paid a visit to New York and accepted Barnum’s invitation to join him at his Hippodrome, he, too, was pressed into service to help publicize the show. Halfway through the performance someone set the audience to shouting for “The King!” and “Barnum!” and at that moment the showman’s open carriage drove invitingly into the arena. King Kalakaua, who was consid­ erably more enlightened than the Indians Barnum had similarly tricked at his American Museum, accepted it all with surprisingly good humor. As the two men made their royal progress in front of the cheering spectators,

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he philosophically remarked to his smiling host, “We are all actors.” No one but Barnum, one New York paper observed, would have the temerity to exhibit a living monarch.15 He was himself among the show’s greatest curiosities, as eagerly looked for as was any performer, which was one reason his partners were so anx­ ious to have him among the audience—an obligation he cheerfully accepted, arranging his lecture tours and other business so that he might “hit” the show as many times in a season as he could. Occasionally, when these inter­ ests coincided, he would travel with the company for a week or two. The triumphal drive round the arena was often repeated, with the showman, now unaccompanied, stopping the carriage every few moments to address his ecstatic patrons (“You came to see Barnum? Well, I’m Barnum”). And always there was his intuitive grasp of what would capture and hold the public’s attention, his almost uncanny ability to exploit situations that, however potentially disastrous at the outset, might further enhance his own and the show’s “notoriety”: his well-publicized clashes with Henry Bergh, for example, and the latter’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Barnum’s relations with Henry Bergh extended back to the fall of 1866, the year in which the SPCA was chartered by the New York State legislature and the quixotic crusader for the humane treatment of animals was designated its first president. Acting on a complaint from someone who had witnessed the feeding of live rabbits to the boa constrictor at the second American Museum, Bergh had gone there to protest this practice and had later written to Barnum and his managers to threaten them with legal action. The outspoken pres­ ident—whose proverbial lack of tact on such occasions was exceeded only by his ignorance of natural history—did not hesitate to characterize anyone condoning such an “atrocity” as “semi-barbarian”; and if it was argued that such reptiles would take only living food, he was of the opinion that one should “then let them starve, for it is contrary to the merciful providence of God that wrong should be committed in order to accomplish a supposed right.”16 Barnum personally answered Bergh a few weeks later, enclosing a letter he had received in the meantime from Harvard’s famed naturalist, Louis Agassiz, who confirmed that such snakes required living food. The American Museum, Barnum defiantly added, would continue to feed all its animals “in accordance with the laws of nature,” and if the president of the SPCA did not write a letter for publication withdrawing his former objections, he would take it upon himself to publish Bergh’s original letter in conjunction with that of Professor Agassiz.17 Meanwhile, the Museum—whose advertisements around this time did indeed promise visitors they would be able to witness such things—had taken the precaution of sending its snakes to New Jersey to be fed, prompting Bergh to begin agitating for the establishment of an SPCA in that state.18

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Bergh sarcastically replied to Barnum’s letter on March 7, daring the showman to publish their correspondence if he thought any “business capital” could be realized from it and parenthetically throwing in several rather severe remarks on “that delectable volume,” the showman’s auto­ biography. But this latest exercise in “humbug,” he warned, might turn out otherwise than as planned, causing “parents and other guardians of the morals of the rising generation to discontinue conducting them to a miscalled museum, where the amusement chiefly consists in contemplating the prolonged torture of innocent, unresisting, dumb creatures.” Stung by this reply, Barnum made good on his threat and published all their cor­ respondence to date, adding to it another letter of his own that he clearly hoped would put an end to his antagonist’s career. In it he ridiculed the sentimental account by the witness who had lodged the original complaint; emphasized his own long-standing concern for the humane treatment of animals; then settled down to a long disquisition on the SPCA president himself, whom he accused of ungentlemanly conduct, “low breeding and a surplus of self-conceit,” and an insufferable dictatorial air in his futile attempts to overturn the laws of nature: In attempting to prevent the abuse of beasts your influence will not be increased by your abuse of men. As you seem to court the pillory by ask­ ing for the publication of your last letter, I bow to your request, won­ dering at your temerity.… The public all have an interest in the proper management of a society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and have a right to know whether its chief officer is fit for his position. While the “public” and presumably the society’s board of directors were making up their minds on this matter, there would be no more “tomfoolery” such as sending his snakes out of state to be fed. If Bergh wished to com­ mence his threatened legal action to shut down this part of the Museum’s operations, he was free to try.19 Bergh valiantly struggled on in his campaign to convince Barnum and other managers to give up feeding their snakes living food, but there was no gain-saying nature or the authority of Professor Agassiz.20 Eventually a compromise of sorts was reached—with the Museum agreeing to feed its snakes at night after the public had departed—but for years Barnum could not resist taunting Bergh on the subject, especially whenever his ten­ derhearted opponent sounded off on other matters of which he had little firsthand knowledge. It happened again at the start of the 1880 season, when the highly trained steed “Salamander,” imported from Germany’s Circus Renz, was billed to gallop through a door panel surrounded by exploding fireworks, then jump through several blazing hoops. Unfortunately, on the evening the act was first presented an attendant let slip one of the hoops, and the animal was seen to run off with its mane and tail apparently on fire.

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This brought forth Bergh and his officers, who ordered that the number be immediately discontinued. In vain did Barnum and his managers insist that the horse had not even been singed, that it was well sprayed with water before every performance, that the flames themselves, far from being real fire, were “purely scenic” and produced by “harmless chemical liquids.”21 It was “simply abominable,” Bergh wrote to Barnum, “that the public cannot be provided with amusement by your show without inflicting tor­ ture upon an animal”—a sweeping charge that elicited the usual rejoinder about the SPCA president’s rushing to extremes and abusing his power like a “despot.” On the following Monday, the showman proclaimed, the act would be repeated despite Henry Bergh’s order, and he himself would address the audience. Bergh was invited to attend and make any response he liked.22 True to his word, on the day in question the seventy-year-old showman entered the arena and delivered a ringing challenge to the president of the SPCA. The circus was packed with spectators and members of the New York press eager to witness the denouement of the well-publicized dispute, and a strong body of police and SPCA officers was stationed menacingly around the ring. “Either Mr. Bergh or I must run this show,” Barnum declared, “and I don’t think it will be Mr. Bergh.” If his opponent dared to order his arrest, he would put a “hoop of fire” around him that would warm him more than he had ever been in the past, and probably more than he would ever be in the future. After discoursing at length on his past history with Bergh—not omitting the oft-told tale of the snakes, and another concerning Bergh’s once insisting that a rhinoceros be given a tank of water to swim in—he proceeded to demonstrate the safety of the act. While the horse stood waiting in the ring, the hoops were ignited and the showman, followed by the show’s company of clowns, ran his hand through the flames, then stepped, hat in hand, through one of the blazing hoops. The writer for the New York Evening Post, who next day ironically described how Barnum and the “other clowns” went through the same act as “Salamander,” reported that the showman himself “vaulted about with admired agility.” After this, the SPCA superintendent who was present (Bergh had wisely decided to absent himself from these antics) was invited to try the same experiment and, find­ ing nothing of danger, was forced to concede there was no cause for his interference and that his superior had evidently made a mistake.23 It was another stunning triumph for Barnum, of course, which brought the show reams of publicity and caused Henry Bergh no little embarrassment. When the exasperated SPCA president protested the story in the Evening Post and what its reporter was pleased to describe as Barnum’s “rattling victory,” the showman, in a letter to the same paper, gave his antagonist a final drubbing. The public’s guffaws over Bergh’s “late humiliating defeat,” he crowed, would never have occurred if Bergh had only taken the trouble

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to ascertain the truth of the original complaint before writing him an insult­ ing letter and libeling him in the press. But instead of doing so, he: peremptorily ordered me, under pain of immediate arrest and imprison­ ment, to stop doing what I never had done, and when I persisted in con­ tinuing to not do it, and to manage my show in my own way, the irate “President” Bergh dispatched a file of officers of his “Society,” backed, as he boasts, “by a large section of the police force, headed by the reso­ lute Captain Gunner,” to thrust me into prison. I forgot to be frightened at such a display of tinsel and bombast, so I announced that the show would proceed as usual; and as we were not in Spain or Russia, I hoped the army with banners would dare to arrest an American citizen for law­ fully attending to his own business. When it was discovered that my fireproof horse rather liked the fun of going through flames which gave no heat, and that “law and humanity” were my guiding stars, the valiant armies, “headed by the resolute Captain Gunner,” ignobly sneaked away, reminding us of Bombastes Furioso, and that great king who marched so many men up the hill and then marched them down again. Yet despite all their differences, the showman generously concluded, there could be no question that Bergh’s intentions were good, even if he did dis­ play, from time to time, a lamentable ignorance of both animal and human nature: We should remember that no man is perfect, and that, with all his faults and shortcomings, Henry Bergh, President of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, is to be honored and respected for his unselfish devotion to such an excellent cause.24 As one may gather from the above, there had been some improvement in relations between the two men since the day Barnum had publicly questioned Bergh’s fitness for his position. For all their clamorous disputes in the press, they really had the same interests at heart; and Bergh, who belatedly came to recognize this, was soon counting Barnum among his staunchest allies. Only a few weeks before the “Salamander” fracas, in fact, when a former agent of his was organizing a local SPCA in Bridgeport, he had unreservedly recom­ mended that Barnum, as one known to him for his “generous and sympa­ thetic instincts towards the lower animals,” be included on its board.25 The showman, who not only helped found the Bridgeport society but served for many years as one of its vice-presidents, was thereafter fond of referring to himself as the “Bergh of Bridgeport.” By 1885 he was also an active member of the New York society and later defended Bergh’s nephew and successor. Henry Bergh Jr., when he was forced to resign in the midst of an acrimonious dispute with his board of directors.26 Most wondrous of all, the respect the

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two former enemies came to feel for each other eventually ripened into genu­ ine friendship, with the showman inviting Bergh to clambakes at Waldemere and Bergh now eagerly ordering copies of “that delectable volume” for the society’s library.27 On March 22, 1884, signing himself “your friend and admirer,” Bergh wrote to Barnum to pay tribute to “the vast amount of pleasure and instruction you have afforded the human family” and to ask that he remember in his will the “poor dumb animals” that had helped him to his fortune. The showman was happy to comply with the request and bequeathed generous sums to both the SPCA and the Connecticut Humane Society. He also left $1,000 to the City of Bridgeport toward the erection of a statue honoring his friend Henry Bergh.28 On April 10, 1871 “P.T. Barnum’s Museum; Menagerie and Circus” opened under canvas in Brooklyn. After exhibiting there for a week, the show began its first seasonal tour, traveling north through New England and into Maine, then across Vermont and New York State as far west as Buffalo before returning to New York City via towns along the Hudson. “Never since Jenny Lind was there such a pronounced success,” Barnum boasted in a letter to one editor.29 Although his tents, covering a total of three acres, could hold as many as 10,000 spectators at each performance, it was common throughout the season for thousands to be turned away. At Waterville, Maine, so many people drove in from the countryside or arrived on excursion trains, that Coup, after some perplexity, decided to give continuous performances in the circus department from early morning until 9 o’clock at night.30 Rather than immediately “winter” the exhibition at the end of the tour, it was decided to continue for a few weeks longer at the Empire Rink in New York City, where operations commenced on November 13. By this date the show, with the kind of arithmetical legerdemain common to all such entertainments, was being touted as “7 Superior Exhibitions in One!”—consisting of the Museum, Menagerie, Grand International Zoological Garden, Polytechnic Institute, Caravan, Hippodrome, and Dan Castello’s Mammoth Circus—and all for the single admission fee of fifty cents.31 Throughout the winter of 1871–2 Barnum busied himself with plans to improve the show, adding to it many exotic animals (among them an Italian goat named “Alexis” that had been taught to leap through hoops while rid­ ing round the ring on the back of a galloping horse) and what he assured readers of the latest edition of his autobiography was a group of “four wild Fiji Cannibals!” As in the case of his Circassian beauties, there were some doubting Thomases who insisted they were of less distant origin; but Barnum swore they had been ransomed by one of his agents from an enemy chieftain who was about to kill, and perhaps eat, them. One of the four, a “half-civilized” woman who had been converted by missionaries, regularly read to the others from a Bible printed in the Fijian language, as the result of which “they earnestly declare their convictions that eating human flesh is wrong, and faithfully promise never again to attempt it.” Consequently,

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there was no cause for young ladies to fear they might be gobbled up while observing these curiosities, whose “characteristic war dances and rude marches, as well as their representations of Cannibal manners and customs, are peculiarly interesting and instructive.”32 One of the greatest and most far-reaching improvements during the 1872 season resulted from the decision to move the show exclusively by rail. There was nothing startlingly novel in the idea itself, for a number of smaller American circuses had used this mode of transportation in the past and Barnum’s own show had taken advantage of railroads along its route while traveling west of the Hudson in 1871.33 But the decision to put so large an establishment on the rails; on cars that, in time, were entirely owned by the show itself, built to its specifications, and sufficient to make up several trains; and to co-ordinate all this with a bold, new strategy of marketing was certainly a daring and imaginative experiment, on a scale few managers other than Barnum could have conceived or afforded. Yet in the past any credit for this innovation has generally been denied him, primarily because Coup, in his posthumously published memoirs, claimed to have thought up the whole thing himself and to have forced it through over his “partner’s opposition.”34 Which “partner” he does not specify—by the 1872 season there were four of them, Barnum having let in his recently divorced son-in­ law Hurd for a share of the show—but the implication is clear enough. There is another, more plausible version of how the railroad show came about, however, which Barnum himself related in considerable detail in the “Conclusion” to the first appendix of the autobiography—an account that was sent to the printer in March 1872 while Coup and Hurd were both active partners in the firm and that could easily have been deleted or modi­ fied had either of them objected to its contents. Instead, it continued to be included in the annual editions of the autobiography over the next several years, but was then dropped, and forgotten, when the book was abridged in 1876.35 While the show was being readied for the 1872 season, Barnum writes, Coup was constantly “in great agony” over the large sums of money he was spending on new animals and other items. No country could pos­ sibly support or make such an expensive show pay, he protested, an opinion that was shared by Barnum’s son-in-law Hurd after he joined the partner­ ship and became the show’s treasurer. One morning in February, Barnum continues, Coup, Hurd, and a number of their assistants, looking solemn and a little ominous, called at his house and insisted on laying out the fig­ ures before him. By their calculations the expenses of the show, with all the additions he had been making to it, would average around $4,000 per day for a total of at least $720,000 over the entire 1872 season; yet they had also computed, after looking over the list of towns they planned on visiting, that total receipts could not exceed $350,000. When Barnum questioned these estimates, Coup exclaimed “Figures never lie,” pulled a map from his pocket, and earnestly proceeded to demonstrate how the show, dragging

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its heavy wagonloads an average of twenty miles a day, would be com­ pelled to make no less than seventy-one stands “where there are not people enough within five miles to give us an average of $1000 per day.”36 And this was before making any allowances for storms, accidents, and other risks. The unanimous conclusion of those calling on Barnum, therefore, was that the season would prove ruinous unless he agreed to sell off more than half the curiosities, horses, and wagons the firm had accumulated, or at least to divide them into two, possibly three, separate shows. After patiently listening to these arguments, Barnum replied that, far from reducing the show by “a single hair or feather,” he intended to add five or six hundred dollars to its daily expense. The others rolled their eyes in astonish­ ment, and Hurd, with a look of despair, asked, “Father, are you crazy?” Then the wily showman revealed what he had been thinking all along. During the previous season he had been impressed by the popularity of excursion trains, which had brought spectators from as far away as a hundred miles; and he now proposed to put the show itself on railroad cars, “taking leaps of a hun­ dred miles or more in a single night when necessary, so as to hit good-sized towns every day in the season. If I can do this with sixty or seventy freight cars, six passenger cars and three engines, within such a figure as I think it ought to be done for, I will do it.” Five days later, after telegraphing the vari­ ous railroad companies and receiving their replies, he was able to report to his associates that the plan was indeed feasible, “and we, then and there, resolved to transport the entire Museum, Menagerie and Hippodrome, all of the com­ ing season, by rail, enlisting a power which, if expended on traversing com­ mon wagon roads, would be equivalent to two thousand men and horses.”37 Admittedly, the above was written to help publicize the show and con­ tains some element of exaggeration. But its wealth of detail, Barnum’s rather patronizing depiction of Coup and Hurd (repeated elsewhere in the show­ man’s writings), and the fact that it was written not from hindsight but in advance of the show’s first setting out by rail lend an unmistakable air of authenticity to the whole. At the time of Barnum’s death in 1891, Coup himself confirmed his former partner’s apparent recklessness, and his own caution, in money matters. “As far as the technical details of the show were concerned,” he wrote: Mr. Barnum was absolutely ignorant, but in its place he possessed an amount of commercial daring and business sagacity which amply atoned for his other shortcomings. He was the most daring manager that ever lived, and would pay almost any price for an attraction. He was easily duped, and had to be almost constantly watched to pre­ vent unnecessary expenditure. Possibly this very fearlessness in money matters was the secret of his success, although without a doubt such lavish and apparently wasteful expenditure, if applied to commercial undertakings, would prove eminently disastrous.38

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The “fearlessness” paid off during 1872. Despite expenses of around $780,000 plus “wear and tear” on the establishment, at the end of the sixmonth season Hurd was able to report receipts of over one million dollars, some $600,000 above what the show had grossed the previous year and more than Barnum or any of his partners had anticipated.39 After opening in New York and making its way into New Jersey, the entire show had first entrained at New Brunswick, originally on some sixty-five cars, most of them leased, including Pullmans and converted sleepers for the perform­ ers and laborers. Coup recalled that because his men were new at the job, it took them twelve hours to load the train the first time, and that for the next seven days he was so busy teaching them “the art of loading and unloading, giving attention to the moving of all the wagons, chariots, horses, camels, elephants, etc.” that he never once removed the clothes from his back.40 But the operation, especially after the partners purchased their own flatcars of uniform construction, soon became a model of efficiency, enabling the show to travel up to a hundred miles in a single night, parade through a town early the next day while the tents were being raised, give three complete performances in the morning, afternoon, and evening, then pack up and move on to the next stop in time to begin all over the following day. It was exhausting work for everyone concerned, with the only respites coming on Sundays, when the longest hauls were customarily scheduled and employees had the day largely to themselves. But at least once aboard the trains each night, they were spared the sleepless drives atop jolting vans and chariots, the battles with the elements and country thugs, that were a traditional part of life on wagon shows. Of course, rail travel had its unique dangers, too. The show, indeed, rolled with the times, taking full advantage of the nation’s railroad network that had been aggressively expanding in the after­ math of the Civil War. No longer limited to the distances teams of horses could draw in a night, it now penetrated deep into the Midwest and Plains states, overleaping less profitable stands whose inhabitants were nevertheless given the opportunity to attend. For as Barnum had foreseen and accurately predicted, the success of so vast an enterprise depended not so much on getting the show to the people as it did on getting the people to the show— in some underpopulated regions from distances of up to a hundred miles away—via the same modern mode of transport, which railroad companies were happy to provide at cheap “excursion” rates. The main tent this 1872 season seated 12,000 spectators and was so much larger than any building in the West, he writes, that he offered free use of it, at hours when the show was not playing, for political rallies during the Presidential campaign. The fact that many of those attending such meetings were tempted to remain a few additional hours had obviously not escaped his reckoning.41 The exhibition had officially been renamed “P.T. Barnum’s Great Traveling Exposition and World’s Fair” in preparation for the 1872 season, and for the first time was also being billed by its most enduring title: “The Greatest

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Show on Earth.” Castello’s “chaste and refined circus” continued to figure at the bottom of the bills (no need to frighten unnecessarily country parsons and their flocks), yet was certainly dominant in this and later seasons, as is evident from the layout of the show itself. After paying a single admission fee, spectators were directed through a series of five medium-sized tents— housing the museum menagerie, freaks, etc.—then entered directly into the “big top,” where performances commenced an hour after the other depart­ ments opened. And although Barnum, oddly enough, does not boast about it in his autobiography, there was something revolutionary to be seen here as well—namely, the addition of a second ring, in which performances were given simultaneously with those in the first. The continuing development of the American circus, from the time Barnum set out with Aaron Turner’s pitifully small wagon show in the 1830s to the period when the great three-ring establishments proudly roamed the rails at the end of the century, is a complex, tortuous story itself, mirroring the nation’s own changing mores and beclouded by numerous conflicting claims of “firsts.”42 More than any other nineteenth-century entertainment, the circus paralleled the country’s growth, ceaselessly struggling to become more grandiose and inventive, to capture for itself all segments of the expanding population to outboast and crush lesser rivals with an imperial disdain that was worthy of any robber baron or unrestrained monopolist. In terms of the evolving “architecture” of such shows, the small circular tents originally used by Turner and his fellow showmen were greatly enlarged— not so much by increasing the diameter of the round top, however, as by splitting this in half and lacing between what now became the rounded ends of the tent an ever-increasing number of canvas midsections. The circus big top thus took on its characteristic shape, which also permitted the installa­ tion of an oval “hippodrome” track, running around the periphery of the arena directly in front of the spectators’ seats. On this track spectacular processions, “walkarounds” by the clowns, and races between charioteers, male and female jockeys on individual mounts, ostriches ridden by mon­ keys (the latter often stuffed, however), elephants and other animals were given—the inference being that there was something “Greek” or “Roman” in all this, and hence constituting a separate “classical” entertainment. In Europe there had been several attempts to revive these ancient “games” earlier in the century, and in 1853 a company of French artists, headed by a member of the distinguished Franconi circus family, had arrived in New York to present such performances in an elegant, specially designed hippodrome building in the vicinity of Madison Square and 23rd Street.43 Barnum had doubtless witnessed some of these entertainments and was about to launch a similar experiment of his own. But while the hippodrome track added an exciting new dimension to the expanded big top, the circus ring itself was now in danger of being over­ whelmed. By tradition its diameter had nearly always been thirteen meters

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or a little under forty-three feet—an international standard that arose during the age when equestrianism predominated in the circus and horses, schooled to perform in circles of that diameter, traveled widely with their riders and could not be expected to be retrained at each circus engaging them. With little possibility of increasing the ring size, therefore, it was inevitable that spectators should become dissatisfied as they found themselves seated far­ ther and farther away from the action at the center of the tent; and Coup himself indicates that during the 1871 season it was impossible to keep those most distant from standing up or rushing to the front, thereby interfering with the view of others. The new arrangement, however, served to keep audiences in their seats and so hit the “popular fancy,” he recalled, that “within a few months smaller showmen all over the country began to give two-ring performances. Indeed, from that time it seemed to me that the old one-ring show was entirely forgotten.”44 He might have added that the tworing show was itself soon a distant memory, as the American circus, ever augmenting its catalogue of wonders, finally attained its most distinctive— and bewildering—format. The 1872 season concluded in Detroit, after which the show was divided and part of it sent south. It was always a problem what to do over the winter months. Most human employees could loaf or work at other jobs, but the animals, in particular, required looking after the year round and were sure to “eat their heads off” whether they were earning money or not. The few weeks spent at the Empire Rink the previous winter had seemed to offer a way out of this dilemma. This year, in what was planned to be a far more ambitious venture, the greater part of the circus, museum, and menagerie moved into the Hippotheatron on New York’s 14th Street—a flimsy struc­ ture Barnum had purchased from the circus proprietor Lewis B. Lent with the object of turning it into a “permanent” establishment. The renovated building had been open barely five weeks when Barnum, who had gone to New Orleans to visit the southern show, received a telegram from Hurd announcing it had burned down during the early morning of December 24. The destruction, as at his two American Museums, was virtually complete, taking a large part of the neighborhood—Grace Chapel included—with it. Nearly all the performers and musicians lost their valuable wardrobes and instruments; Admiral Dot’s miniature carriage went up in flames as well. Most sickening of all, as usual, were the terrible sufferings of the animals, which the SPCA, in its publication the Animal Kingdom, bitterly denounced the following month. The heavy cages containing the more ferocious beasts were not set on wheels. Consequently, firemen could not move them to the street and, fearing the results if the animals were released, could only pour water on them until they were forced to retreat. Even less dangerous animals were saved with difficulty. Despite heroic efforts by Barnum’s employees to rescue them, four beautiful giraffes were so paralyzed by fear that they refused to be led from the burning building. When it was all over, only two elephants and a camel had escaped.45

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Publicly, at least, the showman took the news with his usual imperturb­ ability. By the end of the same day he had cabled his European agents to replace all his losses and was promising a “new and more attractive travel­ ling show than ever early next April.” Upon arriving back in New York on the final day of the year, he found Hurd and Coup almost in despair. Hurd, wringing his hands over the $50,000 they might have cleared had they been able to perform through the holiday season, did not see how they could field a new show before July at the earliest. Coup was so overwhelmed by their loss that he thought they should “lie still” the entire season. But all their tents, chariots, wagons, and draft animals had been spared the blaze, the showman gamely argued, and only “energy, pluck, courage, and a liberal outlay of money” were needed to get the show on the road again. Before their meeting was over he received a cable from his London agent, Robert Fillingham Jr., announcing he had already succeeded in purchas­ ing two giraffes and a large number of other animals, and that French and Swiss craftsmen were rushing to completion automatons and other novelties for the burned-out museum department. “Doesn’t that electricity beat the world?” Coup exclaimed, his spirits suddenly reviving. “Just put a little of it into your blood,” Barnum answered, “and we will beat the world.”46 The show opened in early spring, as promised.

Notes 1 See closest references for source of a quotation in this chapter without a direct note, and see original book publication for more information on notes. 2 Information on Coup’s life may be found in Richard E. Conover’s (1967b) “William Cameron Coup of Delavan,” a chapter in the same author’s The Circus, pp. 20–4; and in Coup’s own ([1901] 1961) Sawdust and Spangles. The latter work, one of the more fascinating accounts of the American circus, is disjointed and often short on dates and names, presumably because it was dictated by Coup at odd moments snatched from work and the manager never found time to revise and set these “notes” in proper order. Following Coup’s death in 1895, this task was undertaken by one Forrest Crissey, who in the book’s Foreword claimed to have done his best to preserve the narrative’s “original quality.” Castello’s name, incidentally, is frequently spelled “Costello” in various histories of the circus and by Barnum himself, and it would appear his real name was John Costello. In contemporary bills and circus letterheads, however, the spelling here given is consistently followed. 3 P.T. Barnum to W.C. Coup, October 8, 1870, SL, pp. 162–3. On Barnum’s pre­ vious acquaintance with Coup, see Barnum (1872), Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years’ of Recollections of P.T. Barnum, Buffalo, NY: Warren, Johnson & Co., p. 856 (App. I). 4 The statement cited in the original publication on p. 1 above, which appears in a work that professes to be an objective history of the circus, may be taken as a typical example. 5 And not only his name, it may here be added. In the 1960s the Barnum Festival Society of Bridgeport was threatened with a lawsuit by Ringling Bros, and Barnum & Bailey Shows, the legal owner of the Barnum show titles, when that

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6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

organization discovered the Festival had been using “Greatest Show on Earth” in its publicity materials. This indiscretion cost the Society $10,000 in an out­ of-court settlement. A major circus in Germany today goes by the curious name of “Barum.” For Barnum’s account of the formation of the show and its first season on the road, see Barnum (1872), pp. 856–64 (App. I). P.T. Barnum to Kimball, November 22, 1870 and February 18, 1871, Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum (SL), pp. 163 and 165.

See original publication, p. 291 and note.

Barnum (1872), p. 872 (App. II).

Coup, William (1901), Sawdust and Spangles, Washington DC: Paul Ruddell, reprint, pp. 225–6. See, e.g. P.T. Barnum to Mark Twain, December 17, 1870, SL, p. 164. The cir­ culation of his courier during the 1872 season, he later wrote to Whitelaw Reid, was “considerably over 500,000 copies,” and he anticipated the same number for the 1873 season—P.T. Barnum to Whitelaw Reid, January 18, 1873 (NYPL). To cite but one example of this continuing practice (and see original publica­ tion, pp. 74–5), the very first extract in the first appendix to the autobiography (1872 ed., pp. 858–9), “from a two-column article in the Boston Journal,” seems almost certainly to have originated in this manner. In a letter dated April 21, 1871 to an editor named Smith, Barnum expressed the wish that one of his writ­ ers would “tell what immense success I get & deserve—but not yet, for my agt. will see the Journal next week & probably have all said that is needful for the present” (Pennsylvania Historical Society, Gratz Collection). See, e.g. Barnum (1872), pp. 350–1. For a joking letter from Barnum, dated June 19, 1876, thanking Holmes for endorsing the Captain’s “genuineness” earlier on the same date, see SL, pp. 200 and 201 for a reproduction of the pertinent page from the following year’s cou­ rier, misdated in the legend as being from 1879. “The certificate is all right,” Holmes wrote to someone who had questioned its authenticity after seeing it in Barnum’s courier. He had written it “after a personal examination of Captain Costentenus, whom I was asked to look at by Mr. Barnum”—O.W. Holmes to “Dear Sir,” July 24, 1877 Bridgeport Public Library (BPL). Barnum (1872), pp. 305–6. Bergh to the managers of the American Museum, December 11, 1866. The entire Bergh–Barnum correspondence on this subject, together with the letter from Agassiz, may be read in the New York World of March 19, 1867. Transcripts of all this cor­ respondence are also in the Archives of the ASPCA; the original of Bergh’s first letter on the topic is in the New York Historical Society, while that of March 7, 1867 is at Tufts. Here it should perhaps be pointed out that the “American” in the ASPCA’s present title had not yet been added in Bergh and Barnum’s day. P.T. Barnum to Bergh, March 4, 1867; Agassiz to P.T. Barnum, February 28, 1867. Bergh to Archibald Russell, January 7, 1867 (transcript in ASPCA Archives). P.T. Barnum to Bergh, March 11, 1867. On March 20, 1867, e.g. Bergh wrote privately to Manton Marble, the editor of the World, objecting to that paper’s apparent siding with Barnum and its publication of their correspondence. He was concerned about Barnum’s pro­ nouncing him unfit for his job and appealed for “the moral support of gentlemen so able, intelligent, and influential as yourself.” In his reply to Bergh four days later, Marble candidly told him he considered his position on the feeding of snakes “untenable” and suggested that in future he direct his energies to “those

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21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

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inhumanities to animals which everybody recognizes to be inhumanities with­ out excuse of any sort.” The SPCA president had earlier become involved in an equally ludicrous dispute over the most humane way of transporting turtles if destined for the table (transcripts of these letters in the ASPCA Archives). See, e.g. the New York Herald, April 15, 1880. Bergh to P.T. Barnum, April 13, 1880; P.T. Barnum to Bergh, April 16, 1880 (transcripts in ASPCA Archives). New York Evening Post, April 20, 1880; Barnum (1872), pp. 322–3. New York Evening Post, April 24, 1880. Bergh’s letter that triggered this reac­ tion had been published in the same paper on the preceding day. Bergh to Edgar S. Nichols, March 1, 1880 (Collection of Bob Mathiesen). And see, on the society’s founding, the Bridgeport Standard of March 3, 1880. See, e.g. the New York Tribune for March 13 and 14, 1889. The junior Bergh, who seems to have possessed much the same sort of disposition as his uncle, had offended several board members by campaigning against the docking of horses’ tails and August Belmont’s rabbit-baiting at the Hempstead Coursing Club. P.T. Barnum to Bergh, August 15, 1885; Bergh to P.T. Barnum, August 17, 1885 (transcripts in ASPCA Archives). Bergh to P.T. Barnum (BPL). The statue of Bergh was never erected, but a “Bergh Memorial Fountain,” with basins of various heights and surmounted by the statue of a horse (the animal whose preservation launched Bergh on his lifelong career), stands at the Main Street entrance to Seaside Park. P.T. Barnum to Mr Smith, April 21, 1871 (Pennsylvania Historical Society, Gratz Collection). Barnum (1872), pp. 857, 860 (App. I). Bill for November 13, 1871 (BPL; Illinois State University). “Conclusion” to App. I (1872 ed.), pp. 866–7. The cannibals continued with Barnum for several years and, from correspondence between the showman and Joseph Henry, Secretary of, the Smithsonian, appear to have been genuine. Barnum (1872), p. 860 (App. I). For a comprehensive study of early railroad cir­ cuses, including Barnum’s, see the four-part article by Fred Dahlinger Jr. (1983–4), “The Development of the Railroad Circus.” Sawdust and Spangles (1901), pp. 61–9. See Barnum, “Conclusion” to App. I (1872 ed.), pp. 868–70. And cf. what little remains of the account in the 1889 edition, pp. 283–4. Quotation from the Conclusion of the first appendix in Barnum (1872). Quotation from the Conclusion of the first appendix in Barnum (1872). “How Barnum Circus Was Started,” New York Clipper, May 16, 1891. Barnum (1872), p. 872 (App. II). Sawdust and Spangles (1901), pp. 62–5. Barnum (1872), p. 873 (App. II). Of the many works available on the history of the American circus, the continuing “annals” of Stuart Thayer, privately published in limited editions, may be cited as particularly valuable to scholars and others in search of reliable information. To date these include Annals of the American Circus, 1793–1829, Manchester, MI: Rymack Printing Co., (1976) and Annals of the American Circus 1830– 1847, Seattle, WA: Peanut Butter Publishing, (1986). A third volume by the same author, continuing the story to around 1870, is in preparation. Still of consider­ able value to those researching the early years of the subject is R.W.G. Vail’s (1956) Random Notes on the History of the Early American Circus, Barre, MA: Barre Gazette, which contains chapters not only on the circus and the performers who appeared in it but also on animals and early menageries, freaks, and Indians.

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43 44 45 46

The present author has himself summarized the topic in a chapter entitled “Le Cirque Américain” in Le Grand Livre du cirque, ed. Monica J. Renevey, Le Grand Livre du Cirque, 2 vols, Geneva: Edito-Service, I, 347–85 (Vail 1977). For what are primarily pictorial treatments, see John and Alice Durant (1957), Pictorial History of the American Circus, South Brunswick, NJ: A. S. Barnes, and Charles Philip Fox and Tom Parkinson (1969), The Circus in America, Waukesha, WI: Country Beautiful. See, e.g. A. H. Saxon (1975), “A Franconi in America: The New York Hippodrome of 1853,” Bandwagon, 5 (Sept–Oct), pp. 13–17. Sawdust and Spangles, p. 63. See, e.g. the New York Weekly Tribune, January 1, 1873; Strong, Diary, IV, 464 (entry for December 24, 1872); Barnum (1872), pp. 876–7 (App. II). Barnum (1872), pp. 878–80 (App. II).

Chapter 21

Notes on the Mexican–American circus Nicolás Kanellos

Today, Mexicans are represented substantially in circuses around the United States of America. The development of Mexican circus culture goes as far back as the conquest and colonization of Mexico by Spain. Hernán Cortez’s chronicler, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, recognized in his History of the Conquest ([1568] 1800) the circus-like diversions at the court of Montezuma, emperor of the Aztecs. From then on, various types of acrobatics and other spec­ tacles of the American Indians, and those of the Spaniards, were blended to give a distinct character to Mexican circus as it developed in Mexico, and later in the United States Southwest. On this early base of mestizo cir­ cus culture, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries added layers of Italian, English and Anglo-American influences to Mexican/Mexican–American cir­ cuses some of which performed well into the 1960s. But after World War II, many Mexican–American circuses ceased to exist, and Mexicanos were assimilated into large American circus companies, or they left the circus life completely. The indigenous roots of acts that predate the Mexican–American circus can be identified in the entertainments by dwarfs, buffoons and a type of clown that Bernal Díaz documented as existing in pre-Columbian Mexico. There also existed an acrobatic religious ritual that involved flyers called vol­ adores descending like birds from a high revolving platform, while another acrobat danced atop the tiny platform and played a flute and small drum. As the American Indian religions were supplanted by Christianity, this ritual became a secular circus act that persists to this day. The early mestizo cir­ cus was called compañía de voladores, compañía de volantines or simply, la maroma. this last term is arguably derived from the rope tied to the fly­ ers.1 Thus the acrobats also came to be known as maromeros. The European popular performance traditions began in the New World with the Spaniards’ introduction of roving minstrels, saltimbanquis and jug­ glers during the colonization period. By 1670, maromeros were noted as performing at bullfights in Mexico City, and by 1769, a clown known as el loco de los toros had already evolved.2 This figure is arguably an early

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predecessor of the ubiquitous rodeo clown of today. By 1785, the first com­ pañía de volantines was documented as having performed at a theatre in Mexico City, with their performance followed by the performance of musi­ cal and dramatic pieces by the regular actors of the theatre.3 This mixture of circus and theatrical spectacles was to characterize the Mexican circus from then on (as it did all circus in Europe) and, well into the nineteenth century, Mexican circuses would stage their performances at theatres and at bullrings. In 1833, Carlos E. Green’s circus, touring to Mexico from the northeastern United States, was the first to feature pantomimes, such as the one entitled ‘Don Quijote & Sancho Panza.’4 Also at this time, the payoso or gracioso of the Spanish theatrical tradition was featured singing popular songs in the circus. The most famous of these payasos, José Soledad Aycardo, appeared in the Mexican circus in 1852 and was to dominate it for the next five dec­ ades. ‘El Chole’ Aycardo’s diverse talents included horsemanship, acrobat­ ics, gymnastics, maroma, acting, composing and reciting poetry on topical themes.5 In fact, his is the most important contribution to the evolution of the Mexican clown as a poet and satirist. Aycardo organized all of his circus acts, and also directed and acted in operettas, shepherd’s plays and five-act melodramas. Aycardo combined European-type circus with maroma and theatre. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Mexican circus received important Italian, English and Anglo-American influences, most importantly the introduction of the English-type clown by the Chiarini Circus in 1867.6 The clown wore baggy pants, a face made-up with flour and a red wig with three lumps of curls on the forehead. Chiarini was also important for having integrated Mexican acts into the show. In 1869 he introduced the Bell Family from England.7 Five-year-old Ricardo Bell was to become the most famous clown in Mexican history, and was to become the patriarch of a large and very famous circus family. Although Ricardo Bell was born in England, he grew up in Mexico, he and his children inter­ married with Mexicans, and for all intents and purposes he and his family became Mexican. In 1873, Chiarini introduced the Orrin Family, which had also originated in England and the northeastern United States.8 The Orrins also founded a circus dynasty in Mexico which later merged with the Bells, with Ricardo Bell becoming the impressario. The Orrins’ popularity virtually drove the more traditional Mexican circuses from the capital. Only when the Orrins went on tour did companies such as Ortiz (later to reappear in the United States Southwest), directed by Jesús Ortiz, perform in Mexico City. At this time the Rivas Brothers were also appearing with Chiarini and Bell. After the turn of the century, the Rivas Brothers would tour their own circus in the United States Southwest. Although there were Hispanic circuses in New Orleans as early as the 1830s, according to La Abeja newspaper, 28 May 1830, many of the

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circuses that made it up into what became the American southwest after the war with Mexico (1846–8) were modest tent shows that in Mexico played to audiences in poorer, outlying neighbourhoods and the provinces. They would set up a small tent or carpa to house the performances. The term carpa is ancient Quechua for an awning made of interwoven branches.9 In Spanish it signifies a canvas cover or tent. These circus-theatres all came to be known as carpas. As the railroads were built northward at the end of the nineteenth century, more and more of these shows appeared in the United States Southwest. During the Mexican Revolution of 1910, actors and clowns from the more established Mexican theatres and circuses made their way north, often taking refuge in the carpas where the pantomimes originated by Ricardo Bell, and the satire of Aycardo, fermented to bring about the creation of the satirical, often political, review which starred the character that today is recognized as the Mexican national clown, the pelado or naked one, the penniless underdog. Somewhat reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin, and best exemplified by Cantinflas, the peladito improvises a dia­ log which: brings to the scene the fine humour of the people, their critical spirit, their complaints and desires; and the people, in turn, upon seeing their own existence portrayed on the stage, cooperate directly with the com­ ics, conversing with them, proposing problems for their inventive spirit to solve, rewarding and punishing them, with crude sincerity.10 The themes of these improvised comic routines were the high cost of living, political scandals, and the treachery of political leaders. ‘The true voice of the people is heard in the carpas, and what no newspaper dare print is said with open frankness by these traveling comics.’11 The carpas thus functioned as popular tribunals. Even before the coming of the railroad, from the 1850s on, there is con­ siderable documentation of touring compañías de volantines and maro­ mas throughout the Southwest. The earliest note comes from Monterey, California, in 1846, concerning maromas.12 Gipson mentions a Mexican circus of acrobats, clowns, ropewalkers, and the stock characters of devils and skeletons, in Tucson from 1853 to 1854, and attests that, by the 1870s, the Mexican circus was the most popular and frequent type of entertain­ ment in Tucson.13 In California during the 1850s, a Circo de Los Angeles appears with the Spanish clown Nicolás Martínez.14 Also both Chiarini and Orrin made their way to San Francisco in the 1860s, by steamship, and were already performing with Hispanic acts. The Real Circo Italiano de Chiarini in 1858 included the following acts: Belén and Teodoro Cuba (the Cubas were called Ethiopians, but they were probably black Cubans), Teófilo Domínquez riding Indio Comanche, the equestrian dwarf Vicente Torres,

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equestrians Señoritas Ruiz and Martínez, and M.M. Silvestre climbing the spiral mountain.15 The earliest reference to the Mexican circus in Texas is the following com­ ment from the San Antonio Ledger, 8 November 1852: ‘The Mexican circus is with us. We knew in our hearts the season for fun and jollity was about to commence.’ The comment seems to indicate that the San Antonio public was familiar with the Mexican circus and we can probably assume that these circuses had performed in San Antonio prior to this date. From this time until the 1950s, San Antonio seems to have been an important show town for Mexican circuses as well as a home base for some of them. During the period of the Mexican Revolution many circuses began tour­ ing north of the border and chose places like San Antonio and Los Angeles for their home bases. After the hostilities ceased some returned to Mexico but others remained in the United States where they had established lucra­ tive circuits. A fruitful avenue for many Mexican circus performers was the Mexican vaudeville circuit in the United States. Some of the performers even made their way into the American and Canadian vaudeville circuits during the 1920s and 1930s. The Bell Family after relocating to the United States Southwest, for instance as early as 1906 when it bought the Orrin Circus (El Clarín del Norte, 25 August 1906: 6), not only toured the vaudeville circuits but also bought a theatre in Los Angeles to house its own perform­ ances and those of other touring companies. Even the great Escalante Circus at times booked some of its family members into vaudeville houses to raise some extra funds. Other circuses that moved north were the Gran Circo Codona-Abreu, Ortiz Brothers and the Rivas Brothers. Of all of them, the Escalante Circus seems to have had the greatest popularity and longevity in the Southwest, performing from the 1900s well into the 1950s. But the type of Mexican circus that survived the longest in the United States was the small, family-based carpa that performed along the Mexican American border. For the most part, the carpas survived the Depression, Repatriation and the other economic and social forces that put many other Mexican and Hispanic entertainments out of business during the 1930s and 1940s. Some carpas continued to perform along the border into the 1960s and even followed the migrant labour stream northward into the Midwest. Today there is still an occasional carpa that visits the towns of the Rio Grande Valley and even Houston. Probably because of their small size, bare bones style and organization around a family unit, the carpas could manage themselves better than the larger circuses. Furthermore, they were able to cultivate the smaller audiences in the most remote areas. The carpas became an important Mexican–American popular culture institution in the Southwest. Their comic routines became a sounding board for the culture conflict that Mexican–Americans felt in language usage, assimilation to American tastes and lifestyles, discrimination in the United

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States, and pocho-status in Mexico. Out of these types of conflicts arose the stereotype of the Pachuco, a typically Mexican–American figure in popular entertainment. The carpa also preserved the format of the Mexican vaude­ ville review (revista) that in the late sixties would find new life in Chicano theatre. El Teatro Campesino, for instance, not only resuscitated the carpa in La gran carpa de la familia rascuachi but also built its action around a peladito, Jesús Pelado. In fact, San Antonio’s 1979 Chicano theatre festival was dedicated to La Carpa García, and some of the local circus’ comic rou­ tines were revived. Finally, the carpas were a refuge for theatrical and circus people of all types. These artists could ride out the Depression, Repatriation and World War II with steady although meagre employment, doing some­ thing akin to their regular acts. More importantly, these cultural arts were preserved by the carpas for the post-War generation that was to forge a new relationship to the larger American culture. The Carpa García retired its tents around 1948. The following is a partial inventory of Mexican circuses performing pri­ marily around California and Texas prior to World War II:16 Gran Circo Escalante Hermanos. Founded sometime around 1917 and lasting well into the 1950s, with Los Angeles as its base, the Escalante circus was probably the most widely known of the Mexican circuses, performing throughout the Southwest in its own tents. The Escalantes were originally acrobats but their tents housed a great variety of acts including dramatic pieces. Among the featured groups was El Troupe Piña in 1920, formerly with Orrin. The circus’ impresario was Mariano Escalante (1881–1961) and its clowns were Cara Sucia, Tony and Chamaco. In 1934, probably affected by the Depression and Repatriation, the company announced that it was going to Mexico although they later returned to the United States and in 1950 Billboard brought down the final curtain for Yolanda Escalante (b. 1928) and in 1961 for Mariano. Los Hermanos Bell. During the Mexican Revolution the Bell family moved to the United States where for many years it toured the vaudeville circuits adapting its music, dance, pantomime and dramatic talents, its feats of strength, magic and other spectacles to the stage. Among the sketches that were salvaged from the circus show were ‘El Espejo Roto’ (The Broken Mirror), ‘La Princesa del Hawaii’ (The Hawaiian Princess), ‘Gabinete Dental’ (The Dentist’s Office) and ‘Barbería Filharmonica’ and many oth­ ers. A typical programme such as would be performed at Los Angeles’ Teatro Novel in 1920 was Nelly Bell (dancer), Jorge Bell (ventriloquist), Ricardo Bell, Jr. (violinist), Oscar Bell (impressionist, especially of Charlie Chaplin). All of the nine Bells acted, sang and played diverse musical instru­ ments together. In 1925 when they played San Antonio’s Teatro Nacional, they also featured clown acts. In 1927 Ricardo Bell, Jr., bought the Capitol Theater in Los Angeles and hired such acts as their long-time associates, the

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Areu Brothers (dancers) and Beatriz Noloesca (San Antonio-native, inter­ nationally renowned singer, dancer, actress). In fact, the Bells had at one time formed a partnership with the Areus and toured as the Compañía de Novedades Modernas Bell-Areu, which also included the famous magician Justiniani. The importance of the Bells was that they passed on many of their father’s routines to Mexican–American popular culture. They contin­ ued to tour into the 1930s. Esqueda Brothers Show. Active in California and Arizona throughout the 1920s, the Esqueda Show was basically an acrobatic, equestrian and vaudeville company that included the clowns Pipo, Paquito and Toni. In 1929, under impressario Juan Esqueda, the Circo Esqueda suffered a ter­ rible accident in Nogales in which their tent’s centre pole fell and injured various spectators.17 Circo Rivas Brothers. Probably from interior Mexico and associated there with Chiarini, the Rivas Brothers are documented as having performed in the Southwest under impressario L.P. Rivas, at least from 1917 to 1921. Their acts included the clown El Segundo Robledillo (Manuel Macías), the clown Ferrín (Amador Fierro), María Rivas on the trapeze and various pony, monkey, vaudeville and pantomime routines. P. Pérez Show Circo y Variedades. Documented as having performed in Los Angeles in 1923, the circus included the Pérez Sisters with song and dance, and clowns Cristobalito, Rivanito and Tamborini. Circo Azteca de los Hermanos Olvera. The only documentation that has been uncovered regarding this show is a note of its performances from 1918 to 1922 in Los Angeles, Agua Prieta and Douglas. Circo Carnival ‘Iris Show.’ Documented as having appeared in Los Angeles in 1923, the Iris Show included the following: María Refugio Fuentes, song and dance; Santos Fuentes (a young girl), flyer and contortionist; Abundio Fuentes, ‘fuerte de altura’; Daniel Rodríguez, magician; Eliseo Carrillo, ‘mandibulista’; and Juan Soto, actor, singer, director, impressario. Teatro Carpa Hermanos Rósete Aranda. Documented as having appeared in Los Angeles in 1925, its impressarios were Carlos V. Espinel and Hijos. La Compañía Hermanos Ortiz. Active from the 1920s to the late 1930s in Texas and New Mexico. In its May, 1936 performance in San Antonio it featured twelve acts, including magic and the clowns Tamborín and Rubine. Its impressario was Emeliano Ortiz. Teatro Carpa Independencia, also known as Carpa Guzmán. The Guzmán is one of the companies that used San Antonio as its home base. Its activity has been partially documented for the years 1917 and 1918. San Antonio’s La Prensa identified some of the troupe members who were long-time San Antonio residents: María del Carmen Guzmani, María P. de Sampers, Amelia Solsona, Manuel Sampers, Aurelio Díaz.18 The 18 August 1917 show fea­ tured A. Guzmani transforming himself into five different characters in an act

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called ‘Castillos en el Aire,’ Sr Flores on the high bar; the gymnast Mr Salas; the comic duet Carmencita y Tiburcio; the Hermanos Olvera Guatemalan marimba quartet; singer Carmen G. de Guzmani and a pantomime entitled ‘Un Baile de Carnaval.’ Compañía de Vaudeville Mantecón, also known as Circo Mantecón. Documented as performing in San Antonio, Floresville, Beeville, Corpus Christi and Del Rio in 1921, their San Antonio vaudeville performance was at the Teatro Nacional on the same bill with the magician Justiniani. Also a family-based circus, the Mantecón company included twenty-eight mem­ bers, many of whom belonged to the immediate family. In Del Rio, July 1921, they donated 50 per cent of their income for the construction of a Mexican school. Cuban Show (also known as Carpa Cubana, Circo Cubano). Based in San Antonio, but also travelling as far west as California, the Cuban show existed in the 1920s and 1930s under the directorship of Virgilio Abreu, the patriarch who led the Gran Circo Codona-Abreu along the border at the turn of the century. The circus included trapeze artists, rope walkers, jugglers, clowns, dancers and its own ten-piece band. According to San Antonio’s La Prensa the circus was advertising pantomimes on Mexican national themes for its Kingsville and Lyford, Texas performances.19 The various Abreu brothers – José, Virgilio, Cleo and Domingo – had broad experience with such circuses as Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Brothers, Robinson and Sells-Floto. Gran Circo Codona-Abreu. Performing along the border before the Mexican Revolution, its acts included gymnasts, ropewalkers, dancers and clowns.20 Carpa García. The best known of the San Antonio-based Mexican cir­ cuses, the Carpa García was founded in 1914 by Manuel V. García, a native of Saltillo, Mexico. It originally was called the Carpa Progresista, later the Argentina Show. Manuel, an orphan who joined the circus at age fifteen, became a trapeze artist, dancer and everything else that it took to run a small circus. Featured in the show was the famed Charro on the tight rope act. One of the comic actors of the Carpa, Pedro González González (‘Ramirín’) later had a successful career in Hollywood westerns. The Carpa also fea­ tured the comic hoboes Don Suave and Don Fito as well as a Pachuco type called Don Slica (slick) (Figure 21.1). Miscellaneous shows. Other tent shows that have been briefly documented in Texas newspapers were the Texas Show, serving the ranches around Los Ebanos, 1929; the Circo del Pacífico, in Los Angeles in 1856; the Circo Hidalguense, noted as performing in Charlotte, Texas, in 1921; the Circo Internacional, performing in Las Crucas in 1891; the Carpa Metropolitana in San Antonio in 1919; the Gran Circo Oriental, performing in Mesilla with numerous animal acts in 1879; the Gran Havanna Circus Company

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Figure 21.1 The García Sisters chorus line from the Carpa García. Source: Photograph courtesy of Nikolas Kannelos from his personal collection.

in San Antonio, 1869; the Maroma Pájaro Azul, 1920s to 1930s, around Del Rio; the Carpa Modelo in Laredo during the 1930s, also mentioned by Consuelo García of the Carpa García in an interview.21

Notes 1 Armando de María y Campos (1939), Los payasos, poetas del pueblo (Mexico City: Ediciones Botas) p. 11. 2 María y Campos (1939), pp. 77–8. 3 María y Campos (1939), p. 18. 4 María y Campos (1939), p. 24. 5 María y Campos (1939), p. 24. 6 María y Campos (1939), p. 150. 7 María y Campos (1939), p. 165. 8 María y Campos (1939), p. 168. 9 ‘La Carpa: El teatro popular de México’, Norte: Revista Continental (May, 1945), p. 22 (author’s own translation). 10 ‘La Carpa: El teatro popular de México’, Norte: Revista Continental (May, 1945), p. 22. 11 ‘La Carpa: El teatro popular de México’, Norte: Revista Continental (May, 1945), p. 22.

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12 John Steven McGroaty (1921), Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea, Vol. I (Chicago and New York: The American Historical Society), p. 79. 13 Rosemary Gipson (1972), ‘The Mexican Performers: Pioneer Theatre Artists in Tucson’, Journal of Arizona History, 13(4): 235–52. 14 El Clamor Público, 6 February 1858. 15 El Clamor Público, 6 February 1858. 16 This information is consolidated from more than fifty newspaper articles trans­ lated by the author. 17 La Prensa, 24 August 1929: 2. 18 La Prensa, 28 April 1918: 3. 19 La Prensa, 16 July 1921: 5. 20 Clarín del Norte, 13 October 1906. 21 ‘La Carpa García’ Caracol (July, 1978), pp. 5–7.

Chapter 22

The circus and modernity A commitment to ‘the newer’ and ‘the newest’ Gillian Arrighi

In 1901 the largest Australasian circus of the era, the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus, constructed a colossal permanent building for its productions in Melbourne, a city that had lately become the capital of the newly feder­ ated nation of Australia. Rather than promoting their impressive perform­ ing animals, or the international performers they had recently engaged in Europe, the FitzGeralds instead advertised the technological array of their new 6000-seat building. Despite the imminent appearances of Adelina Antonio, the solo trapeze star from Rumania, Guillaume Jandaschewsky and his family of musical clowns from France, Mlle Rhodesia the crossdressing juggler, and the Flying Dunbars, a team of aerialists from the UK, the FitzGeralds decided to focus promotion of their new show on the elec­ tricity and gas installations that would light the building’s interior.1 The quality of the recently employed circus performers was undisputed; but if the FitzGeralds’ summer advertising campaign of 1901 is anything to go by, the circus management judged their latest technological additions would provide an equally powerful attraction to their audiences. In their newspa­ per and billboard advertising, the FitzGeralds promoted their new building ‘Olympia’ and its modern facilities alone as well worth the entrance fee. Electricity and gas illuminated the arena, bringing performers’ faces into clearer view and their detailed costumes to life. The high, wide roof expanse showed the increasing number of aerial acts to greater advantage; the instal­ lations of trapeze apparatus were more technically refined than in the past; and beneath the movable floor of the ring was a large, deep tank for water pantomimes and other aquatic acts such as ‘The Diving Horses’, recently in vogue at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris (Figure 22.1).2 This example from the history of the principal Australasian circus of the era is typical of the ways that prominent circuses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia showcased technological innovation, staging what Fredric Jameson has referred to as ‘the teleology of the modernist aesthetic as it proceeded on triumphalistically from the newer to the newest’ (Jameson 2002: 1).3 When the leading circuses of this period demonstrated their possession of,

Figure 22.1 FitzGerald Brothers’ new continental shows circus and menagerie, 1900. Source: Image courtesy of The National Library of Australia.4

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and familiarity with, the latest technology, they aligned their operations with aspirational values such as stability, reliability, wealth, and innovation, thus contradicting perceptions of the circus as ephemeral, unstable, transitory, dangerous and socially marginal.5 This chapter accepts that the circus – or, to be more precise, the large circuses – of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected a number of the ideas associated with modernity. Beyond functioning as a conduit for ideas about what it was to be modern, the demonstration of modernity by these entertainment organizations was one of the reasons for their popularity. But it is proposed here that this modernity was completely international, encompassing Australia, where new technology and the latest trends in entertainment practices were enthusiastically embraced by lead­ ing entrepreneurs. A deliberate orientation to the ‘newer’ and the ‘newest’ (Jameson 2002: 1) was a prominent feature of the production and market­ ing strategies of the leading circuses of the era; the nineteenth-century circus historian, Thomas Frost, captured this imperative when he wrote the first historical account of the circus in the British Isles 1875.6 This chapter will draw on a theoretical interpretation of modernity by Jameson (2002) and the delineation of historical eras by Marshall Berman (1982). Their analy­ ses provide the key points of departure for a discussion that begins with a reflection upon Frost’s work of narrating – and therefore organizing – the history of the circus, thus demonstrating a circusian ‘consciousness of his­ tory and of being historical’ (Jameson 2002: 25), considers the early circus and the forces of modernity that were intrinsic to it, and brings forward the significance of materialism and individuality to the popular reception of the nineteenth-century circus.

The circus and swiftly industrializing societies In the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, the prevalence of circus performance achieved a critical mass during the period 1870–1920, although the saturation of circus performance in each discrete geographical region occurred at different times.7 The high-profile circus organizations of this period were a product of Western industrializing societies undergoing transformation as a result of what Berman has termed ‘socioeconomic mod­ ernization’. According to Berman, transforming social processes resulted from scientific discoveries that led to the industrialization of production, an increased tempo of life, rapid urban growth, large movements of peo­ ple nationally and internationally, bureaucracy, corporate power and class struggle, all driven by the expanding and fluctuating capitalist world mar­ ket (Berman 1982: 16). Berman approaches the past 500 years or so of Western modern culture with a periodizing logic that breaks it into three phases (Berman 1982: 16–7). The second of these phases is relevant to this discussion about the emergence of the circus form within the context of

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modernity. By Berman’s analysis, the second phase began with the revolu­ tions in Europe during the 1790s and extended throughout the nineteenth century. This phase corresponds temporally to the cycle in which the circus emerged as a new, discrete style of entertainment, spread internationally, and became the object of widespread patronage by all classes of people in the Western industrialized world. Berman’s observation that ‘a great mod­ ern public abruptly and dramatically comes to life’ (Berman 1982: 17) dur­ ing the revolutionary years at the end of the eighteenth century refers to the masses who patronized and thus provided continuance to those popular entertainments, in London and Paris, that constituted the earliest stirrings of the institutionalized circus form (and I will return to this very early period of circus history shortly). To the term ‘modernity’, Berman ascribes the historical experience that mediates the economic processes of modernization and the cultural visions and aesthetic forms of modernism. Development is, for Berman, an essen­ tial element of modernity. It includes both the economic development that was transforming society and the development of the individual: the ability for individuals to move beyond traditional social hierarchies and gain some control over their lives became possible under the dramatic influence of eco­ nomic development, all of which led to ‘a heightening of human powers and a widening of human experience’ (Anderson 1992: 26). The publicity strategy of the FitzGerald Brothers’ Australian Circus described above indicates a proclivity for technology and its display. Moving at a tempo much faster than normal life, circus companies such as the FitzGeralds’, Sanger’s Circus in the UK, and the leading railroad com­ panies in North America, traversed continents, seemingly incessantly, using the fastest available means of transport to cater to the public craving for demonstrations of the newer and the newest. Capitalism and capitalism’s globalizing impetus seemed to be exemplified in their operations. Exploiting the latest systems of global communication, these circus producers stimu­ lated a brisk international trade in performers and exotic animals, and their striving after an encyclopaedic display of races, creatures, human skill and mastery meant that these vast entertainment organizations were at the van­ guard of popular knowledge transmission (Arrighi 2008: 613). It was not only the new technologies of a swiftly industrializing society that circuses such as that run by the FitzGerald Brothers were keen to acquire and exhibit. By the latter decades of the nineteenth century, prominent cir­ cuses were also incorporating popular science (Goodall 2002), revised gen­ der representations (Tait 2005; Arrighi 2015), new concepts of the modern body as influenced by recent advances in medicine, and new ideas about health and physical culture (Budd 1997; Segel 1998).8 In fact, nineteenthcentury circuses were preoccupied with the body as a site of transformation and improvement long before physical culture was embraced by normal­ ized Western culture. Heading up these circuses with eminently public

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profiles were men who became celebrities. Circus entrepreneurs such as George Sanger in England, P.T. Barnum, Adam Forepaugh and James Bailey in the United States, and Dan and Tom FitzGerald in Australia became icons of individualistic possibility in the capitalist market economy.

Thomas Frost, the circus, and ‘the consciousness of history and of being historical’ Jameson has observed that ‘romanticism and its modernity came into being … only after history itself, or rather historicity, the consciousness of history and of being historical has appeared’ (Jameson 2002: 25). Here, Jameson distinguishes between the past (history itself – that is, everything that has already happened) and historicity, arising from an inclination to be histori­ cal and to select, organize, and narrate events of the past. The difference between ‘the past’ (everything that has already happened everywhere) and ‘being historical’ (narratives we construct out of selected elements of ‘the past’) has been acknowledged elsewhere by other historians (Jenkins 2003: 6–7; White 1990). Within the context of this enquiry about the relationship of the circus to the conditions of modernity, Jameson’s observation raises the question of when the circus became an object of historical study. Frost’s Circus Life and Circus Celebrities is the first attempt to investigate, select, and organize past events for a narrative about the history of the circus in the British Isles. Frost notes that with the exception of the 1860 autobiography of W.F. Wallett (1813–92), an English clown who performed for over 40 years on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and a few passages in the memoirs of the comedian R.W. Elliston (1774–1810) that were published in 1844, ‘the circus has hitherto been without any exponent whatever’ (Preface to Frost 1875: n.p.). For Frost, that is, his study was the first diachronic history of the circus in Britain and he was its first scholar. His work is not an autobiographi­ cal account by a circus insider, sharing occasional notes about his life as a performer (as is the case with the memoirs of Wallett and Elliston), but the product of systematic retrieval of archival sources such as Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577–87), Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes (1801), and illuminated medieval manuscripts from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that illustrate itinerant jugglers, acrobats, and trained animal acts such as danc­ ing bears and a horse on a tightrope. In addition, performance bills held in the British Library, a close study of newspaper advertisements, interviews with contemporary circus performers, and memories of performances he had witnessed from childhood to the time of writing, collectively provided the archival, anecdotal, and personal observations constituting the material for Frost’s history. Written just a century or so after the establishment of the modern circus, the title of the book, Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, identifies two qualities germane to the first century of circus production:

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that circus performers lived a life different and apart from the mainstream of contemporary existence (making their otherness an object of curiosity to Frost’s potential readers), and that star performers were prevalent in the circus genre and fundamental to its processes. Whether as aerialists, equestrians, jugglers, animal trainers or clowns, these performers, by virtue of their unique skill sets and their attractiveness to audiences, had become celebrities. Frost’s history of the emergence and development of the circus also became the source of many subsequent circus histories.

Narratives of modernity and the early circus As recounted by Frost and all subsequent authors of circus history, a new sort of public entertainment emerged in London during the latter decades of the eighteenth century that eventually gave rise to the institutionalized circus form. Although not initially called ‘circus’, these entertainments exemplified a drive to develop new skills and capitalize on the public’s curiosity and willingness to be amazed. As the origins of the modern circus have been detailed in most of the primary and secondary literature about the circus since the late nineteenth century, I will only briefly rehearse the key points. My purpose here is to demonstrate that the capitalist market drives and nar­ ratives of innovation associated with modernity were embedded within the earliest productions of the circus and were, moreover, an intrinsic feature of the performance genre that came to be known as ‘circus’.9 Jameson has argued that modernity is a ‘trope or narrative category’ (Jameson 2002: 34, 40, 57), a temporal structure that ‘seems to concentrate a promise within a present of time and to offer a way of possessing the future more immediately within that present itself’ (Jameson 2002: 34–5). Thus modernity ‘envelops a dimension of future temporality … closely related to that other chronolog­ ical or historicizing, narrative, trope of “for the first time”’ (Jameson 2002: 35). As we shall see, the imperative to produce acts never seen before, and claims to demonstrate the newest achievements of human capability, were central to the narratives the circus promulgated about itself. Frost, and all historians of the circus who followed him, trace the origins of the circus to the entrepreneurial and performance initiatives of Philip Astley (1742–1814) in London, Paris, Dublin and the rural regions of both France and England during the latter decades of the eighteenth century. In 1768, Astley enclosed a circle of ground in Lambeth on the south side of the Thames, where he gave exhibitions of trick riding with his wife who was also a skilled rider (Frost 1875, chapter 1). Quite apart from evolving skilled equestrian performance and raising it to the status of a popular spec­ tator experience for London theatregoers (by 1811, the popular success of the new equestrian drama extended to London’s patent theatres when the ‘quadruped plays’10 Blue-Beard and Timour the Tartar were performed at Drury Lane with the stud of Astley’s Amphitheatre) (Bratton 2007; Gamer

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2006; Moody 2000), Astley brought together, in a single performance space, the many ancient acts of physical skill that had been performed at fairs for centuries by itinerant performers. Trained animal acts, acrobatic demon­ strations, gymnastic acts of strength and balance, and walking or dancing on ropes stretched above the heads of the audience were incorporated into a single programme by Astley. Ombres chinoises, or Chinese Shadow shows, were also introduced – made possible by the latest advances in lighting tech­ nology and the addition of a roof to the amphitheatre which thus enabled the control of the amount of light let into the performance space (Altick 1978: 119). In a sense, the circus form is Janus-like, in that Astley drew on acts of physical skill that were already ancient, but also collected these acts together, presented them in the equestrian’s circular ring alongside extraor­ dinary demonstrations of trick horse-riding, and successfully marketed his programmes as a new sort of cultural production. When the licensed London theatre season closed each year Astley sought markets outside of England, travelling with his company of performers to Paris or Dublin or on rural tours throughout England and France. The pro­ totypical Astleyan performance proved popular and emulators soon assem­ bled more travelling troupes of performers. Thomas Frost’s observation that London could only support one major circus during the licensed perform­ ance season provides one explanation why the many smaller circus troupes confined their activities to the rural regions beyond London, over time giving rise to yet another new performance culture – that of the tenting circus.11 During the early years of the nineteenth century, Astley’s Amphitheatre and the nearby Royal Circus presented programmes in a hybrid perform­ ance space that was a completely new theatrical configuration that had not been seen in Western culture before. Both houses included a circular ring (primarily for equestrian performance) and a raised theatre stage (for pan­ tomime and burletta), conjoined by ramps that were large enough for the resident stud of horses to be ridden upon during performances. This new style of performance area provided an easy flow of personnel and animals between stage and ring and in turn made new forms of performance pos­ sible; narrative spectacles that enacted recent battles in the ongoing wars between England and France, and romantic action stories performed by actors and horses, consequently became a feature of London’s seasonal the­ atrical fare. Equestrianized melodrama (variously called hippodrama and quadruped drama) persisted for over 40 years (Saxon 1968). While hippodrama was an outgrowth of the style of performance pioneered by Astley, it also nourished the development of the circus throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. The performance and entrepreneurial initiatives of Astley, and the organiz­ ers of circus performance who followed after him, operated within and prom­ ulgated a cultural logic that strived for innovation and novelty. Producers of circus entertainments recognized, furthermore, that the financial survival of

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their venues – and thus the continuance of their companies – depended upon the presentation of acts that were newer, harder, cleverer, more extreme, more gorgeous, and more technically complex than the previous year’s programmes, or the programmes presented by competing managements. Narratives of ‘new-ness’ and ‘for the first time’ were intrinsic to the promotional utterances of circuses of the long nineteenth century. Even if acts by humans and animals were not innovative, were copied from another performer, or did not signify as ‘for the first time’ in any sense, the circus still relied linguistically upon declamations of novelty, of being better than past or former performances, of establishing new outer limits of human achievement. From the 1860s onwards, the various stylistic divisions of full-blown circus were in place. The equestrian’s circular ring and the eclectic combination of performances of skill formerly seen at fairgrounds were well established as the key components of circus performance. Clowns had evolved out of the stage functionaries who, from the early days of ring performance, had taken care of the funambulist’s ropes or set the props for the next act. The ‘clown to the ring’ and the ‘clown to the rope’ had become the interlocutors between stage and audience – eventually earning, by the late-nineteenth century, their own discrete act: the clown entrée (Disher [1925] 1968; Towsen 1976b). Lions, tigers, elephants and other non-native animals began to enter the cir­ cus of the British Isles from the travelling menageries that followed the fair routes;12 they would become increasingly essential items in high-profile cir­ cuses during the latter decades of the nineteenth century in the UK, the USA, Australia, South Africa, and the circuses that toured the East (Arrighi 2008: 610). By 1860, aerialism had also made its entry onto circus programmes, introducing audiences to the body on display: a modern body stripped to its barest essentials, wearing only a leotard – the performance skin named for Jules Leotard, the first aerial flyer.13 Flying return acts emerged in England in the 1870s and were subsequently embellished over time by competitive athletes who gradually introduced the double somersault, and eventually the triple somersault, mid-flight to a catcher. Quite apart from the split-second timing, daring and strength of the gymnasts on the trapeze, this sort of aerial action was crucially dependent upon equipment that was scientifically pre­ cise (Tait 2005). Sport and physical culture were enthusiastically embraced by Western societies from the 1890s onwards. Indeed, Christopher Wilk has characterized the modernist concern for health as a metaphor for a bright, utopian future and as an ideology of social engineering (Wilk 2006: 250). However, the nineteenth-century circus had been showcasing elite physical culture and the outer limits of physical mastery long before the precept of a healthy mind in a healthy body became a fashionable pursuit in Western societies (Segel 1998: 5).14 Thomas Frost recorded these developments in his first history of the circus and thus propagated knowledge of the circus’s imperative to provide sights and sensations that audiences had not witnessed or experienced before.

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Frost wrote his first history of the circus in the midst of ‘high’ modernity, at a time when the earliest stirrings of aesthetic modernism were occurring in France if not in England. Writing with self-consciousness about creating the first cogent historiographical account of the circus genre in Britain, Frost employed narrative devices that described the circus in terms of a rupture with the past, and ascribed newness to the form and content of the cir­ cus. Begging to differ with ‘the saying of the wise monarch of Israel, [that] there is no new thing under the sun’, he argues that the circus genre origi­ nated with the appearance of the equine amphitheatre at the close of the eighteenth century and is therefore a new form of cultural production. ‘The bills of Astley’s, the advertisements of the Royal Circus and the Olympic Pavilion, the traditions of travelling circuses, present us with the originals of almost every feat that the acrobats and posturers of the present day have ever attempted’ (Frost 1875: chapter 2, n.p.). Frost’s account of the early circus, and its striving for modes of production that were aesthetically and mate­ rialistically innovative, chimes with one of Jameson’s observations about modernity: that the conditions for modernity are signalled by ‘a break’ with the past. Jameson’s break is a disruptive moment ‘in which the continuities of an older social and cultural logic come to an incomprehensible end and find themselves displaced by a logic and a form of causality not active in the older system’ (Jameson 2002: 27). The rupture or break that Frost alleges in Circus Life and Circus Celebrities relates to the culture of fairs, which, in the past, provided the sites for individual performances of physical skill. ‘[T]he palmy days of the fairs’ have gone, he records, ‘the race of moun­ tebanks’ has become extinct (Frost 1875: chapter 3, n.p.), and fairs ‘have become things of the past within twelve or fifteen miles of the metropolis’ (Frost 1875: Preface, n.p.). The acts of physical skill customarily seen at the fairs had been gathered into the commercial enterprise of the circus and the emergence of this original performance institution necessarily implies (after Jameson) new cultural products and new modes of production that were not operating in the older cultural system. Newness and novelty appear as recurrent descriptors in Frost’s account – either in verbatim text that he has extracted from newspaper advertisements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, or in the form of adjec­ tival phrases for performances he has witnessed. Descriptions of acts that ‘never were before attempted’, acts that were ‘new feats of activity’ or were performed ‘in a manner different from all others’ are legion amongst the advertisements for Philip Astley’s shows discussed by Frost (1875: chapter 1, n.p.). If the circus performer was female, claims of originality were inevitably attributed to the woman in question being ‘the only one of her sex that ever…’ (Frost 1875: chapter 1, n.p.). The hunger for novelty demonstrated in Astley’s advertisements also extended to geographical newness. When all other forms of newness paled in comparison, claims to geographic novelty such as ‘never before performed in Europe’ or ‘never seen in England’ would have been hard indeed to challenge and also difficult for curious audiences to ignore.

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Although Frost lamented the passing of the fairs, or at least their diminu­ tion and relegation to spaces beyond the cities, his historiographical project celebrated the innovations of the circus and its leading personalities. The cir­ cus was going from strength to strength on the back of an increasingly indus­ trialized nation, flourishing in the metropolis of London, in the industrial towns, and on the (by now) well-established rural tenting routes. Mirroring the increasingly complex and technological society it was playing to, the circus’s acts were also developing abreast of new advances in apparatus and human development. The complexity of circus skills was accelerating as a result of innovative new equipment (Tait 2005: 26) and progress within human physicality (Tait 2005: 33). As an example of this, gymnasts follow­ ing in the wake of Jules Leotard had, by the 1870s, developed routines far more complex than Leotard’s original ‘flying’ act and Frost appreciatively opined that aerial acts were of a different order from the hippodramatic feat of turning somersaults over horses from a springboard.15

The circus and expectations of materialism Amongst Frost’s depictions of events in the careers of numerous circus celeb­ rities, he recorded that William Batty (1801–68), the prominent English cir­ cus manager of the mid-nineteenth century, had recently died, leaving an estate with an estimated value of half a million pounds sterling (approxi­ mately equivalent to £360 million today).16 Batty had therefore become very wealthy operating his circus business according to the goals and processes of market capitalism. Frost also recorded that by the mid-1870s, audiences expected high-profile circuses to display an enormous amount of mate­ rial wealth. Referring to the circus of ‘Lord’ George Sanger (1827–1907), whose circus empire had emerged by this time as the largest and wealthiest in England, Frost observed that: the public do not believe in a tenting circus, unless its resources are put forth in a parade, for which purpose a large number of horses are required, with a handsome band-carriage, an elephant, and a couple of camels. The cost of maintaining such an establishment is so great that the system can­ not be successfully pursued without a large capital, and the most complete and efficient organization. Without both these requisites a bad season will ruin the proprietor, as many have found by sad experience. (Frost 1875: chapter 10, n.p.) In 1872, Sanger purchased the first English ‘home’ of circus entertainment, Astley’s Amphitheatre, from Batty’s widow; he remained the lessee at Astley’s for 20 years, eight years longer than any of its past operators. During the few years prior to his purchase of Astley’s, Sanger produced his spectacular shows at the Agricultural Hall, Islington, where audience numbers topped 37,000 people in a single day (Frost 1875: chapter 12, n.p.). Sanger’s empire included

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circuses in Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen, Bath, Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth (Sanger 1927: 211); for 11 consecutive years, he toured his huge shows to the continent (Sanger 1927: 217–19); ran a zoo at Margate (Sanger 1927: 221); and kept a menagerie at Astley’s which, he later recalled, ‘was considered the largest and best in England’ (Sanger 1927: 210). In the passage quoted above, Frost describes the tenting circus of Sanger in terms that reflect the industrializing and modernizing age: it is a ‘system’ requiring ‘large capital’, it must display its ‘resources’ overtly, while its man­ agers need to sustain their industry in order to achieve ‘complete and effi­ cient organization’ at all times. In Frost’s analysis, therefore, material wealth, machine-like efficiency, and the public display of all these qualities are essen­ tial to the successful running of the circus and – somewhat significantly – to its acceptance by the public. Without acceptance and patronage by the public (that is, the market), the circus – or, more particularly, a leading circus such as Sanger’s – simply will not survive. Thus, according to Frost, the circus operates within a closed cultural system: it is the imaginative product of a society which demands that the circus must display its assets and conform to a particular set of procedures if it is to be popular with consumers and consequently sustained. Like the large railroad circuses that were traversing the United States during the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and the Australian circus of the FitzGerald Brothers which was, by the 1890s, oper­ ating along similar lines if not on the scale of the American circuses, Sanger’s circus (and Sanger’s business trajectory) was a metonym for the modernizing processes at work transforming late nineteenth-century society.

The circus and individualism Frost also notes that individualism, derived from the ability to do something ‘which has never been done before’, is a key quality leading to success in the circus. Innovation was a central concept in Astley’s productions and adver­ tising during the late eighteenth century; referring to circus performers he has observed a century later, Frost judged that: [i]t is only by doing something which has never been done before, or by performing some feat in a very superior style to that of previous exhibi­ tors, that a circus artiste can emerge from the ruck, whether he [sic] is a rider, a tumbler, a juggler, or a gymnast… it is the first performer that gets the greatest fame and the highest salary.(Frost 1875: chapter 10, n.p.) Individualism and performance uniqueness were valued by the managers of high-profile circus companies who traded on the star status and exceptional achievements of their principal performers. The reputations of the leading nineteenth-century circus companies were likewise inextricably linked to the public profiles of the men who operated them. Circus entrepreneurs such

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as Sanger in England, P.T. Barnum, James A. Bailey, and Adam Forepaugh (among others) in the United States, and Dan and Tom FitzGerald in Australia, became celebrities within their own societies – champions of what could be achieved through hard work and imagination. Like Philip Astley, their antecedent in the circus ring, these circus entrepreneurs mar­ keted themselves as self-made individuals with careers that conformed to the ‘rags to riches’ trope. Whether their origins were as poor as they later stated, they nevertheless used their wits, industry, and a certain flair for predicting and directing the taste of popular audiences to establish and maintain their positions as the leading circus entrepreneurs of their age.17 It is useful to place Frost’s first historical account of the circus alongside ‘Lord’ George Sanger’s autobiography, Seventy Years a Showman, published in 1910, just one year before his death. Born in 1827 into an itinerant fam­ ily of show folk who owned a peepshow and followed the fair cycle, Sanger retired from show business in 1905, the most successful circus owner ever in England. The 70 years of the book’s title refers to a period of intense cultural and social change during which England shifted from a largely pre-industrial society to a highly industrialized, expansionist empire. Many of those changes are reflected in the movements occurring during Sanger’s life spent entertaining the public, first with his father’s peepshow, then with his own trained bird act, with performances of conjuring and sleight of hand, and eventually as the owner of a vast entertainment empire. In con­ trast to the wistfulness expressed by Frost for old ways, Sanger the circus entrepreneur declares that the past (that is, the early decades of his life when prejudicial and traditional law systems disregarded the life, limb and property of itinerant show people who followed the fairs) was far inferior to the social circumstances of the early twentieth century when ‘the once despised mummer and the showman win not merely appreciation from a kindly public to whose entertainment they devote their lives, but high honour and position in the State’ (Sanger 1927: 91). Acknowledging the personal anxieties that accompany his drive to do bigger and better things, Sanger also reveals himself as an individual driven by the possibilities of the modernizing age: ‘Season after season was now a record of success with us, and the establishment grew steadily, but I was ambitious and anxious to show that if I had the opportunity I could do yet bigger things’ (Sanger 1927: 208). Sanger’s expansionist energies reflect the entrepreneurial strat­ egies employed by other, contemporary leading circus proprietors in North America and Australia. As observed above, Berman’s analysis of the historical experience of modernity holds that capitalism enabled a new sort of individualism. Removing social immobility, it created an environment for limitless selfdevelopment and emancipation from social status. The processes and productions of the nineteenth-century circus overtly dramatized the possibility of the modern individual. Through its various acts of extreme

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human physical achievement, its iteration of social mobility across both geographical and class boundaries,18 and its reification of the individual (both performers and producers), the high-profile circuses of the long nineteenth century presented their vast audiences with multiple images of individual emancipation and potential.

Circus historiography and nostalgia Frost’s first historiographical account of the emergence of the circus set the tone, and to a certain extent laid the foundations, for the substance of many subsequent circus histories. Writing at a time when society was transforming at a rapid rate, Frost narrated a break with a former cultural logic; that is to say, he observed that the social conditions for the great fair cycles were gone and that the itinerant performances of skill customarily seen at the great fairs had been swept up in a commercial enterprise named ‘circus’. However, Frost also chose to impose a tone of nostalgia upon his history of the circus. In a manner not atypical of the nineteenth century, he viewed the present through the prism of the past, thus revealing that atti­ tudes of modernity competed with pre-modern attitudes sedimented within modern subjects. Frost’s recollections of circus showmen and circus shows of his past are infused with a sense of longing for the past of his childhood. There is a contradiction here, in that Frost was also recording the very latest developments of a performance institution which, since the condi­ tions of its coming into being, was steadfastly committed to innovation, a break with tradition, and a striving after the new outer limits of physical possibility. In order to establish, build and maintain its markets, the very terms through which the circus described and promoted itself were tied to innovation, invention, and novelty (and, of course, the curiosity, won­ der and amazement these qualities sought to stimulate in its audiences). Yet, somewhat paradoxically, while ‘writing to the record’ that the circus has broken with the traditions of a past cultural logic, Frost also infused his first history of the circus with his own nostalgia for the past. Despite his valorization of the circus and his narrative construction of its history, Frost reveals himself to be a nineteenth-century person who can, as Berman has pointed out, ‘remember what it is like to live, materially and spiritually, in worlds that are not modern at all’ (Berman 1982: 17). Jameson provides another lens through which to read Frost’s assertion of the modernity of the circus and consequential experience of nostalgia. Far from engendering a sense of the uselessness or ridiculousness of the past, the subject’s affirma­ tion of the break in the continuities of an older cultural system generates an intensification of the present (‘a kind of electrical charge’) which renders the past an exotic arena of fascination (Jameson 2002: 35).

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Conclusion The historiographical project that Frost undertook is not really any different from the task facing circus historians today. Traces of the past are fragmentary and at times inconclusive, open to interpretation and, ultimately, dependent upon the cultural position of the historian/narrator. Archival traces reveal, and circus historians confirm, that the circus was at its most popular during the latter decades of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; but the question of why this unique cultural form attracted so much patronage dur­ ing this period of Western history remains open to conjecture. Quite apart from the conditions of their spectatorship, such as the expansive fixed build­ ing, gas and electricity lighting, and the latest staging technology explained in the publicity efforts described above, circus audiences of the late nine­ teenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed modernity in action when they attended Sanger’s circuses in England, or the FitzGerald Brothers’ Circuses in Australia, or the productions of the huge railroad circuses in North America. The processes that enabled these circuses to grow and develop their unique cultural productions were processes intrinsic to modernization driven by the capitalist world market. At a time when the forces of modernity were chang­ ing the world, but ‘only a small part of the world was truly modern’ (Berman 1982: 26), the productions of these circuses provided glimpses of a possible future; or, to use Jameson’s words, they ‘enveloped a dimension of future temporality’ (Jameson 2002: 35). And the circus routinely lured its audiences with promises of ‘the newer’ and ‘the newest’, operating as a metonym for the modernizing processes that were steadily transforming Western culture. When audiences sat in their vast tents or amphitheatres and witnessed the dazzling demonstrations of human mastery and skill, they were participating in a sense of modernity that did not exist in their daily lives. Indeed, perhaps the gradual decline in popularity of the circus throughout the early decades of the twentieth century was due, in no small part, to the population’s increas­ ing participation in the processes and products of modernity.

Notes 1 The Argus, 9 November 1901: 20. A survey of newspaper advertisements and reviews from throughout the season reveals the other acts on the programme included animal acts developed originally by Carl Hagenbeck in Germany, numerous equestrian acts, bicycle acts, and several aerial acts in addition to the Flying Dunbars. 2 The Bulletin, 26 October 1901; The Argus, 19 October 1901. See also Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, MS Q284 pp. 213–15, undated let­ ter from John FitzGerald to Dan FitzGerald. 3 Janet Davis explains that circuses in the United States were first illuminated with electricity in 1879 (the circuses of Cooper and Bailey and W.W. Cole), but on account of the unwieldy dimensions of the electrical system and the problems it posed to transport this system of lighting was soon abandoned. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show used electricity to power spotlights in 1896; Barnum & Bailey

400

4

5

6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13

14

Gillian Arrighi began using electricity to illuminate its big top circa 1905; and in 1909 Ringling Bros. also began using electricity (Davis 2002: 251 n. 43; see also Stoddart 2000: 34–5). Both Davis’s and Stoddart’s notes about the use of electricity to illumi­ nate circus shows indicate that the use of electricity at the FitzGeralds’ 1901–2 Melbourne season was indeed a technological novelty. The image from the Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser 29 September 1900 shows clockwise from the left: The Flying Dunbars, G.W. Dunbar, W.J. Karl, and C.L. MacDonald (the ‘woman’ in the middle is a cross-dressed male aerialist); acrobatic trio of company members, Joe Morris bottom left, the other two men are unidentified; The Wingate Sisters, Gertie and May; Joe Morris as the Dummy Clown; Rosie Aquinaldo the contortionist; The Jandaschewsky Family; Guillaume and Aouguste (Jandaschewsky) with their dog ‘Black’ in the Bullfight Clown Entrée; equestrians Daisy Shand and Harry Cardello standing on the back of a pony (Daisy Shand was in fact Ernie Shand in drag); and three images of Mlle Rhodesia (Florrie Pinder), the cross-dressing juggler. Referring to major US circuses of the early twentieth century, Janet Davis observes that ‘simultaneous’ and ‘contradictory impulses of normative representation and subversion of established social hierarchies made the circus an appropriate emblem of an age of transition’ (Davis 2002: 228). Similar tendencies within the Australasian circus of the same period are explored in Arrighi (2015). Because of the scarcity of copies, I have worked from an online transcript of the revised edition of 1881 published by the Circus Historical Society, which, while recognizing Frost’s original organization into chapters, is not divided into pages. This phenomenon has been examined within the national contexts of perform­ ance in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. See for example Assael (2005), Davis (2002), St Leon (1983, 2005a). Although Budd (1997) and Segel (1998) have very little to say about circus per­ formers, their studies examine the modernist preoccupation with physical culture and touch on the influence that strength performers such as Eugen Sandow exerted upon social behaviour. Circus acts by male and female strength performers and by wrestlers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the mod­ ernist physical culture movement that is the focus of these two scholarly studies. Secondary and tertiary literature about the early circus is extensive. See for exam­ ple Disher ([1937] 1969) and May (1932). Scholarly studies of Philip Astley include Kwint (1994) and Burke (2006). The term ‘quadruped drama’ is used by Moody (2000). Frost dates the appearance of tenting circuses to 1807 (Frost 1875: chapter 2, n.p.). First-hand accounts of the early travelling menageries in England can be found in Bostock (1927) and Sanger (1927). The French gymnast Jules Leotard is credited with the invention of flying trapeze action at the Cirque Napoleon in Paris in 1859. Leotard swung by the hands from one trapeze apparatus, then let go and propelled himself through the air with forward muscular velocity to catch the handle of another trapeze, so achiev­ ing the appearance of flight. He had practiced this skill at his father’s gymnasium in Lyons. In his study examining the modernist movement and its enthusiastic embrace of physical culture and sport, Howard B. Segel has proposed three sources for the ‘spectacular enthusiasm for physical culture’ observable in Western societies at the turn of the twentieth century. He cites the ‘high visibility’ of muscle show­ men such as Eugen Sandow and his American counterpart, Bernarr MacFadden, a heightened public focus on sports which reached a climax with the first modern Olympics in 1896, and the phenomenon of mass physical culture movements

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15 16

17

18

401

in Europe and the United States which, having gained momentum throughout the nineteenth century, achieved ‘maximum impact’ in the early years of the twentieth century (Segel 1998: 204). Haley (1978: 3) observes that ‘No topic more occupied the Victorian mind than Health – not religion, or politics, or Improvement, or Darwinism’. Frost singles out, for example, the double somersaults performed by the per­ former Niblo (Thomas Clarke) and the triple somersaults to the net below per­ formed by Lulu (Frost 1875, chapter 8, n.p.). Frost 1875, chapter 8, n.p. Wallett also notes that Batty made ‘a princely fortune at Astley’s’ (Wallett 1860: 71). The contemporary economic equivalence was made using the per capita GDP calculator available at: www.measuringworth. com/ukcompare/ (accessed 26 January 2012). There are numerous autobiographies by circus entrepreneurs, most of which con­ form to the ‘rags to riches’ trope. See for example Barnum (1883), Hagenbeck (1909), Wirth (1925), Bostock (1927) and Sanger (1927). The biography of Dan and Tom FitzGerald, written by their brother, John D. FitzGerald, is held in the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, in manuscript form (MS Q284 and MS Q285). Recent scholarship of the circus in Victorian England (Assael 2005), late nineteenth and early twentieth-century North America (Davis 2002), and Australia (St Leon 1983, 2005; Arrighi 2015) has revealed the appeal of the circus across class lines.

References Altick, Richard. 1978. The Shows of London, Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Anderson, Perry. 1992. A Zone of Engagement, London, New York: Verso. Arrighi, Gillian. 2008. Political animals: Engagements with imperial and gender dis­ courses in late-colonial Australian circuses, Theatre Journal, 60(4): 609–29. Arrighi, Gillian. 2015. The FitzGerald Brothers Circus: Spectacle, Identity and Nationhood at the Australian Circus, Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publish­ ing. Assael, Brenda. 2005. The Circus and Victorian Society, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Barnum, P.T. 1883. Struggles and Triumphs; or, Forty Years’ Recollections of P.T. Barnum, Buffalo, NY: The Courier Company. Berman, Marshall. 1982. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Moder­ nity, London: Verso. Bostock, E.H. 1927. Menageries, Circuses and Theatres, New York: Benjamin Blom. Bratton, Jacky. 2007. What is a play? Drama and the Victorian circus In The Per­ forming Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, edited by Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland, 250–62. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Budd, Michael Anton. 1997. The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Burke, Helen. 2006. Jacobin revolutionary theatre and the early circus: Astley’s Dublin Amphitheatre in the 1790s, Theatre Research International, 31(1): 1–16. Davis, Janet. 2002. The Circus Age: Culture and Society Under the American Big Top, Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press.

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Disher, M. Willson. [1925] 1968. Clowns and Pantomimes, New York: B. Blom. Disher, M. Willson. [1937] 1969. The Greatest Show on Earth. London: G. Bell and Sons. Frost, Thomas. [1875] 1881. Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, London: Chatto and Windus. Gamer, Michael. 2006. A matter of turf: Romanticism, hippodrama, and legitimate satire, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 28(4): 305–34. Goodall, Jane. 2002. Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, London: Routledge. Hagenbeck, Carl. 1909. Beasts and Men: Being Carl Hagenbeck’s Experiences for Half a Century Among Wild Animals, translated by Hugh S.R. Elliot and A.G. Thacker. London: Longmans, Green. Haley, Bruce. 1978. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London and New York: Verso. Jenkins, Keith. 2003. Re-thinking History, London and New York: Routledge. Kwint, Marius. 1994. Astley’s Amphitheatre and the early circus in England, 1768–1830. PhD dissertation, Oxford University. May, Earl Chapin. 1932. The Circus from Rome to Ringling, New York: Duffield and Green. Moody, Jane. 2000. Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840, Cambridge: Cam­ bridge 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 and Associates. Sanger, George. 1927. Seventy Years a Showman, London: J.M. Dent and Sons. Saxon, A.H. 1968. Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Segel, Howard B. 1998. Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stoddart, Helen. 2000. Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation, Man­ chester: Manchester University Press. Tait, Peta. 2005. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, London: Routledge. Towsen, John. 1976b. The Clown to the Ring: The Evolution of the Circus Clown (1770–1775), New York: New York University. Wallett, W.F. 1860. The Public Life of W.F. Wallett, the Queen’s Jester: An Autobi­ ography, London: Bemrose and Sons. White, Hayden. 1990. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilk, Christopher. 2006. Modernism: Designing a New World, London: V&A Pub­ lications. Wirth, George. 1925. Round the World with a Circus: Memories of Trials, Tri­ umphs and Tribulations, Melbourne: Troedel and Cooper.

Politics

Chapter 23

Bending the body for China The uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War Tracy Ying Zhang

Introduction China is currently the United States’ second largest trading partner. By the end of 2013, the size of bilateral trade had reached 50.7 billion dollars.1 However, this was not always so. Soon after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the United States withdrew all US dip­ lomats from Beijing, cut off trade with Chinese companies, and prohibited US citizens from visiting. The Sino-US relationship became especially tense during the Korean War (1950–3) and the first and second Taiwan Strait Crises (1954 and 1958) (Chen 2001).2 With conflicted ideological principles and political-economic agendas, the US and PRC governments directly or indirectly fought against each other. In addition, each government launched propaganda wars to demonize the other. In Chinese media, US soldiers were represented as imperialists. Similarly, the US campaigns character­ ized the Chinese communists as war-makers and enemies of freedom-loving Americans (Hendershot 2003). However, in the later phases of the Cold War, several political factors fostered the mutual interests of the US and PRC, such as the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, China’s admission to the United Nations in 1971, and the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. The leaders of both countries confronted domestic and foreign challenges, and each felt the need to collaborate in order to consolidate their political leadership as well as to attain a balance of power in East and South-East Asia (Chen 2001; Goh 2005; MacMillan 2007; Torelli 2012). Since the US and PRC governments had been mutually hostile for nearly two decades, what kind of communication strategy would be appropri­ ate for each government to employ without damaging their relationships with other political allies, for example the US-Taiwan relationship and the China-North Korea relationship? Several studies focus on the successful exchange of the US and Chinese table tennis teams in the springs of 1971 and 1972 (Hong and Sun 2000; Wang 2003; Xu 2008; Itoh 2011).3 Media and academic researchers portray these diplomatic events as initiating the

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Sino-US rapprochement, thus helping to set the stage for political commu­ nications between Beijing and the White House in the 1970s. This chapter further examines such early cultural exchange between socialist China and the United States. Specifically, I explore the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy in the early 1970s. Shortly after the Chinese table tennis team visited the United States, a state-run Chinese acrobatic troupe, the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe (hereaf­ ter Shenyang), embarked on a four-month long journey to America. From 17 November 1972 to 12 March 1973, the troupe toured Canada, the United States, Chile, Peru, and Mexico attracting in total 240,000 spectators (Wang et al. 1997: 406). The US segment of the tour was more significant than the others because the US government was the only host country that had not officially recognized the PRC and still supported the Republic of China in Taiwan (Beijing Review 1973: 19). Compared to the previous Chinese table tennis team, Shenyang was a much larger ensemble consisting of seventy-eight members, including forty performers, twelve musicians, two doctors, five stage workers, eight officialmanagers, four interpreters, and a media crew. After spending the first few weeks in Canada,4 the troupe flew on 16 December to Chicago. In the follow­ ing four weeks, Shenyang also visited Indianapolis, New York City, and on 13 January 1973, concluded the tour at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. The troupe presented to US audiences a total of eighteen performances. In Washington, a video recording of the show was produced and in April 1973 was televised nationwide by the American Broadcasting Company. This chapter investigates how acrobats’ bodies and repertories are imbued with cultural meanings through the practices of nation-state building and international diplomacy. Specifically, I examine the following questions: (1) why did the Chinese government choose acrobatics as a tool of diplomacy? (2) What were the political-social and physiological conditions under which the Chinese acrobats prepared for their American tour? (3) To what extent was the Chinese understanding of traditional art translated into an ‘oriental performance’ that helped the US audience identify with socialist China? (4) What are the implications of this cultural diplomacy for the governments as well as for the acrobats? Although there is a growing literature on the cultural Cold War (Prevots 1998; Saunders 2000; Griffith 2001), studies on performing arts and diplo­ macy pay most attention to the worldwide influence of US cultural exports as part of psychological warfare between the ‘communist East’ and the ‘free West’. This case study of non-US cultural production aims to expose the alternative political logics underlying the circulation of acrobatics in the Sino-US cultural exchange. As important, the analysis of acrobats’ engagement with Cold War politics evades state-centric narratives and contributes to an understanding of international diplomacy from a bottom-up perspective (Youngs 2000).

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I employed two main data collection strategies to acquire the empirical material used in this chapter. One approach consists of oral history interviews with retired acrobats in China who participated in diplomatic missions in the 1950s and 1970s.5 During my fieldwork, some research participants also offered me access to their private collections, including photos, newspaper clippings, and newsletters published by local acrobatic associations. Second, I reviewed primary and secondary materials in several archives, including the Shanghai Public Archive, the East Asian Collection at the University of Chicago, the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, and the New York City Performing Arts Archive.6 The historical literature was used to contex­ tualize the interview data.7 In the following sections, I first explain my main framework for analyz­ ing the relationship between international politics and performance under Chinese socialism. Subsequently, I describe governmental efforts from the 1950s to the early 1960s in China aimed at modernizing acrobatics. The history of these policy practices, which entailed both institutional and aes­ thetic dimensions, can be roughly divided into three phases. The first phase started in early 1950 and ended in the mid-1960s, and marked the estab­ lishment of a national acrobatics sector. The second phase was the Cultural Revolution, during which the whole arts and cultural sector was stagnant. Between 1966 and 1970, many acrobatic troupes were shut down. The third phase started in 1971. Acrobats experienced a cultural revival when Beijing resumed its foreign policy to build relations with Western countries. I demonstrate that the acrobatic diplomacy presented challenges for indi­ vidual performers but also offered them career opportunities in a volatile political environment. The last section examines the US media reception of Shenyang’s performances. In the United States, the operation of China’s acrobatic diplomacy relied on collaboration between the Chinese acrobats and local participants, including journalists, spectators, and host organiza­ tions. This section does not intend to examine the roles played by the local sponsoring organizations. Instead, my analysis focuses on what kind of media discourse on China was attached to the acrobats’ embodied practices on and off stage.

The meanings and politics of the acrobatic body under socialism The incorporation of performing arts into diplomatic strategies emerged after World War I, as some governments started sponsoring arts and cultural activities to influence how their countries were perceived abroad (Berghahn 2001; Waller 2009; Park 2011). This trend became more widespread in the 1950s (Barghoorn 1960; Saunders 2000). Ballerinas, for example, were regarded as popular ambassadors. Onstage, ballerinas’ dancing bodies were believed to transcend language and ideological barriers and thus represent

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national cultures positively in a diplomatic context (Prevots 1998; Nicholas 2001; Croft 2009; Hamm 2009; Geduld 2010; Mazurok 2013). On the one hand, choreographies help audiences identify with foreign countries in a theater environment. Cross-cultural communications between dancers and audiences draw upon shared understandings of ballet aesthetics, nation, gender, and race. On the other hand, dancers’ bodily movements, back­ ground music, costumes, and stage design offer audiences delightful visual experiences. The combination of human actors and artifacts could produce an impression of coherence, while obscuring the complexity of the sociopo­ litical systems that produce such disciplined bodies. Building on this literature, I develop a framework to examine the uses of acrobatics in reviving Sino-US relations as a form of ‘people-to-people exchange’ during the early 1970s (Zhou 1952, 1957, 1971). Acrobatics is a context-specific cultural institution (Davis 2013). In pre-socialist China, the production and dissemination of acrobatics relied on local business and logistical arrangements. After 1949, acrobatics families were incorporated into state-run troupes. The socialist cultural policy guided the making of acrobatic shows within a centralized political-economic system. Amid the institutional reforms, acrobats’ performance style and repertories also transformed accordingly to meet the state agenda of creating a modern national culture. The newly founded PRC strengthened its political legitimacy at home and abroad through various strategies, including the mobilization of the nationalist-socialist discourses in the arts and international diplomacy. The relationship between politics and acrobatics was largely articulated through Chinese collectivistic nationalism (Greenfeld 1992), which intends to make the idea of the ‘Chinese nation’ synonymous with ‘the Chinese people’. Like dance, acrobatics is a physical art composed of prescribed moves set to music. Performing to extremes of speed, strength, and accuracy, acrobats use their trained bodies to convey cultural ideals to an audience as well as induce a spectator’s emotional responses (Tait 2005). My research shows that in Cold War China, acrobatics was identified as ‘proletariat performing arts’ and used to envisage the abstract notions of socialist culture. Onstage, acrobats’ coordinated movements aimed to create a collective sense of Chinese national identity and to demonstrate the efficiency of a socialist production system. Meanwhile, the Chinese diplomats advocated the prin­ ciple of ‘uniting the peoples’ to facilitate Beijing’s varied engagements with the superpowers, socialist allies, as well as non-allied countries, and they recognized that acrobatics’ entertaining and folk qualities could appeal to a wide range of spectators in a diplomatic context. With this framework, I discuss how acrobatics evolved as both an insti­ tution and an artistic medium to accommodate the PRC leaders’ agenda of building a socialist nation-state. Also, I examine how acrobatics acquired

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new meanings, helped construct an image of ‘the Chinese people’, and in turn facilitated the promotion of a new China around the world. Next, I begin with a brief account of the formation of a national acrobatic sector and the development of new aesthetic approaches to acrobatics under socialism.

From commercial entertainment to proletariat art Acrobatics were initially staged for emperors and nobility, only making inroads into popular culture in the tenth century (Fu and Fu [2004] 2005; Jacob 2008). Since then, private troupes had played major roles in popular­ izing acrobatics. Most acrobats formed troupes on the basis of kin relations. They performed at village festivals, market fairs, birthday parties of wealthy families, and celebrations for deities. In the first half of the twentieth century, Chinese industrialization gave rise to population growth in major cities. Parallel to this development, urban entertainment venues became widespread and offered new incomegenerating opportunities for street performers (Lou 2008). For example, between 1912 and 1936, Shanghai was home to eleven amusement parks and shopping malls, which hosted several dozen acrobatic troupes (Wang et al. 1997: 18). Navigating within various urban cultural complexes, itin­ erant performers built familial or family-like social networks that facili­ tated competition as well as collaboration among troupes. The literature and my interviews with retired acrobats reveal that the acrobatic trade in pre-socialist China was never regarded as an artistic form but a lowbrow form of entertainment.8 Nonetheless, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recog­ nized early on that acrobatics could be useful in promoting the party’s repu­ tation among the poor and illiterate. The first party-sponsored acrobatic troupe was established in the communist base, Yan’an (Wang 1981: 7; Li 1988; Wang et al. 1997: 23), during the Sino-Japanese war. In the spring of 1941, Zhang Jinkui, an army cook with a family background in acrobatics, was chosen by the CCP to train child soldiers to perform. This acrobatic troupe aimed to develop folk performance as a revolutionary propaganda tool as well as popular entertainment, facilitating communications between the CCP and local communities (Wang 1981: 7, Li 1988: 374). Support for the troupe came directly from high-level officials, including Mao Zedong, head of the CCP, who claimed, ‘Acrobatics … (is) “revolutionary art,”’ and ‘proletariat performing art’ (Wang et al. 1997: 24). The founding of the Yan’an Acrobatic Troupe was part of a CCP-led arts and cultural movement (Li 1988), dedicated to spreading communist and patriotic ideas (Holm 1991; Kraus 2004: 151). The troupe’s mandate and Mao’s comments gave acrobatics new cultural meaning and political values.

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The association between ‘revolution’ and acrobatics was first created in this context. Further, the Yan’an cultural initiative, after 1949, turned into an official guideline for regulating the production of acrobatics in China.

Modernizing acrobatics Between 1949 and 1965, institutional reform was gradually carried out in policies and campaigns. Throughout the 1950s, the most significant pol­ icy was establishing a network of state-run acrobatic troupes across the country. The first state-run troupe was the Beijing-based China National Acrobatic Troupe (CNAT) founded in October 1950 after a three-month long recruitment effort by artist-officials who assembled acrobats from cities and regions known for acrobatic excellence. Between the 1950s and early 1960s, government units at various levels started to create their own regional acrobatic troupes. The official record suggests that sixty-three government troupes were established in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin; twenty-four provincial cities and major townships; and three autonomous regions, including Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, and Xinjiang (Wang et al. 1997: 430–4). Each troupe had its own production budget and plans, recruited and trained its own performers, and operated within specific geographical territories.9 This socialist cultural planning also entailed an organizational hierarchy, which allocated more resources to troupes associ­ ated with central, provincial, or major municipal cultural bureaus (Clark 2008: 13). The Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe and the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe were both formed in 1951 through subsidies from the municipal cultural bureaus (Wang et al. 1991). Their founding members were mostly self-employed street performers and members of private troupes. To create a student base, small children from either poor families or local orphanages were recruited. Within the nationwide hierarchy of acrobatic troupes, Shenyang and Shang­ hai occupied important positions: they are located in the hubs of industriali­ zation. In the early 1970s, both troupes played important roles in China’s acrobatic diplomacy. In February 1972, the Shanghai troupe first received then-US President Richard Nixon, while Shenyang toured North and South America to promote Sino-American friendship. Institutional reforms, which involved several thousand acrobats, allowed performers to obtain new professional identity and status. This profession­ alism was associated with privileges as well as responsibilities. As employ­ ees of state-run troupes, acrobats gave low-cost or free performances in villages, factories, army bases, and even at the front-line during the Korea War. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, the troupes also participated in diplomatic missions in East and North Europe, Asia, as well as newly inde­ pendent countries in Africa (Jin 2012). For example, before their US tour, Shenyang acrobats had toured countries including North Korea, Pakistan,

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Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, and Denmark (Sun et al. 2011). The troupes provided their performers with regular wages, gov­ ernment housing, and free healthcare (Farrell 2007). A workplace hierarchy was also established in this new environment on the basis of performers’ sen­ iority, skills, and, as well, their allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party. Institutional reforms can be concluded to have contributed to the forma­ tion of a national acrobatics sector. In this process, state agencies could exert influence over the production and management of acrobatics and in turn the performers’ life and work trajectories. In parallel to the politicaleconomic reorganization, great effort was made to foster aesthetic inno­ vation. The artistic reform corresponded to a nationalist-socialist arts and cultural movement. The tenet of these activities in the 1950s was ‘innovat­ ing through the old to create the new and borrowing from the foreign to cre­ ate a Chinese national art’ (洋为中用, 古为今用) (Galikowski 1998; Clark 2008; Mittler 2010). Five identifiable patterns emerged from the archival materials, including photos, posters, news articles, and film footage, all of which provide visual evidence of this period’s artistic invention. First, the new repertories excluded performances such as fire-eating and sword-swallowing, perceived to be associated with cruelty and superstition. The revised acts emphasized graceful movements thus reducing the thrilling effects of bodily actions. On stage, acrobats wore martial arts costumes, athletic outfits, peasant clothing, and sometimes soldiers’ uniforms. They also employed as props ordinary objects like tables, bicycles, and ceramic plates that people used in their every-day lives. The body movements, cos­ tumes, and props diminished the psychological distance between performers and audience thus creating an impression of equality between audience and acrobats on the stage. Second, folk dance, ballet steps, and the modern sport of gymnastics were incorporated into acrobatic acts. For example, in Figure 23.1, a woman acrobat is performing a juggling feat. She waves long red silk ribbon to imitate the ‘rice sprout song’ dance. This dance, called yangge, a folk dance popular in northern China, was an important cultural activity in Yan’an (Holm 1991). Third, there was a clear gendered division in the performance. Typi­ cally, the Strap, Chinese Pole, Hoop Diving, and Tumbling, all of which emphasize upper body strength and power, were men’s acts. Women mostly specialized in acts that highlighted flexibility and agility of the limbs and waist. Women dominated, for example, Plate Spinning, Contortion, Foot Juggling, and Bicycle acts. Fourth, group acts were preferred over solos. The Human Pyramid, Chinese Pole, Hoop Diving, Plate-Spinning, and Bicycle acts, which were performed by two or three acrobats in open-air markets, were modified to allow a large number of people onstage. The creation of group acts reflects a tendency in socialist arts to display the togetherness of people to glorify the collective and collaborative spirit of the proletariat (Figure 23.2).

Figure 23.1 A woman juggler performs yangge, 1965.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Wuhan Acrobatic Troupe.

Figure 23.2 Four men perform the single bar act, 1964. Source: Photograph courtesy of Wuhan Acrobatic Troupe.

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Finally, in order to give acrobatics greater professional standing, the pro­ duction of theatre-style performance was developed. Such acrobatic shows entailed specially designed lighting, stage sets, handheld props, costumes, and live music (usually employing folk melodies and Chinese traditional instruments). An evening gala was composed of a series of acrobatic acts; between acts, an announcer introduced the name and content of what was to follow. Each act was created and performed by a group. This acrobatic gala model was advanced throughout the 1960s. The modernization of acrobatics was carried out as part of the govern­ ment effort to build a national arts and cultural sector. Acrobats became salaried government employees, or ‘socialist cultural workers’. Meanwhile, acrobatics was rendered with new political significance: the agile acrobatic body was used to display socialist China’s ideal citizen subjects and national character. The collective bodies of acrobats served as a metaphor for the Chinese populist democracy. Nonetheless, state endeavors to reform acrobatics were also shaped by Chinese officials’ and artists’ mixed feelings towards ‘modernity’ (Clark 2008: 5). On the one hand, the new leaders were eager to make China wealthy and modern. Inventing a ‘socialist proletariat culture’ was part of fostering a national identity and projecting a new Chinese nation-state that would reflect the country’s political-economic position in the post-war world order. On the other hand, such ambition was intertwined with uncer­ tainties about the value and function of folk and cultural heritage such as acrobatics. Following the victory of the CCP, the various policies aimed at transforming acrobatics to demonstrate a response to a twofold question: (1) to what extent could acrobatics be modernized yet remain appealing to ordinary people, and (2) how could the acrobatic body be used to glorify the revolutionaries and represent ‘the Chinese people’? In the following sec­ tion, I further elaborate on the ambivalent attitudes in this socialist cultural production as well as the injustice inflicted on acrobats in the struggle to create a national culture.

Cultural Revolution 1966–71 From the 1950s to the early 1960s, under the influence of the Hundred Flowers Campaign,10 a national acrobatics sector was gradually taking shape, giving rise to innovative performance styles. However, such artistic experiments were halted by the arrival of the Cultural Revolution. Between 1966 and 1971, acrobatics’ political value and propaganda function were disputed. At first, some troupes still attempted to create repertoires that could accommodate sweeping radicalism. For example, in 1967, the Shang­ hai Acrobatic troupe produced an acrobatic play, called ‘Long Live the Cul­ tural Revolution of the Proletariat’, to ‘give acrobatics a new life’ (Wang et al. 1997: 80). Figure 23.3 captures some of the spirit and theatrical aspects

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Figure 23.3 A revolutionary acrobatic play, Shanghai, 1967.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Zhu Xingbao.

of such revolutionary acrobatics: acrobats wore army (or Red Guards) uni­ forms and held large political posters, spears, and flags. Their assertive and militant postures projected a monumental aesthetic often used in socialist realism art to glorify the proletariat (Chiu and Zheng 2008). However, an acrobat from the Shenyang Troupe revealed to me how challenging it was for acrobats to perform amidst this political-cultural climate in which the acrobatic body was loaded with political messages. If performers made technical mistakes during a ‘revolutionary’ show, then the performance failures were considered not random technical problems but signs of political subversion. As a result, the performers would be punished by the revolutionary committee. At one point, Shenyang had to close down for a few weeks after an acrobat fell during a public perform­ ance, as radicals regarded this performer’s technical error as an anti-CCP political statement. Despite earlier efforts, in 1968, the radicals in power criticized acrobat­ ics as pleasing the privileged classes and poisoning the minds of the pro­ letariat (Wang et al. 1997: 77). As a result, from Shanghai to Shenyang, acrobats were sent to the countryside to do farm work. To understand the sociocultural and physiological conditions under which these acrobats lived, I interviewed several retired Shenyang and Shanghai acrobats. One of them is Sun Xiaoqing, who subsequently played a leading role in Shenyang’s American tour.

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Sun Xiaoqing, born into a poor family, joined the Shenyang Acrobatic troupe in 1952 when she was only eight years old. In the early 1960s, her exceptional talent enabled her to rise from student ranks to become the troupe’s top woman acrobat. However, as the troupe became increasingly engulfed by radical politics, Sun was turned into a target of political struggle. During our interview, she told me that her troupe was discontinued around 1966. Two years later, she and several other performers were ordered to work in a textile factory. During this time, she gave birth to her first child. However, after one year, another government order arrived; this time her destination was a village. Accompanied by her child, husband, and mother­ in-law, she was relocated to the countryside and believed that she would never return to Shenyang or perform acrobatics again. Unexpectedly, in late February 1972, the troupe’s leaders sent Sun a message urging her return to work. She said: They wanted me to accomplish an important mission. Between 1966 and 1972, I did not practice at all and I gave birth to two children. [The second child was born in the village]. I was already twenty-nine. They wanted me to join a performance in Dalian [a major costal city in Liaoning Province] in April. I only had two months to prepare for this performance. This was for Premier Zhou [Enlai] and Cambodia king [Norodom] Sihanouk. The leaders said I had to perform successfully. I thought since the leaders wanted me to do it, I must not complain, but must find ways to overcome the difficulties. I kept on practicing when other performers were having meals. In addition to regular training ses­ sions, I got up very early every morning to practice. Like Sun, other acrobats from the Shenyang troupe had, since 1966, spent most of their time doing farm work and participating in political work­ shops. In Sun’s memory, everyone knew the Dalian trip involved a very important mission; they must work hard to succeed. At that time, Sun Xiaoqing and her co-performers did not fully realize the political force that enabled them to return to the stage. The sudden policy change was indeed associated with the beginning of the Sino-US rap­ prochement, in particular US President Richard Nixon’s China trip from 17 February to 28 February 1972. During his visit, Nixon and his associates were taken to two performances. One was the revolutionary ballet, The Red Detachment of Women (performed on 22 February in Beijing), the other a Chinese acrobatics show performed in Shanghai the night before the US diplomats flew back to the United States. Zhou Liangtie, one of the acrobats who performed for the Nixon team, shared his stories with me. He recalled that the Revolutionary Committee of Shanghai decided to entertain the US visitors with ‘traditional acrobatics’

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because the committee believed foreigners would not be able to under stand Chinese revolutionary operas or other performances. What Zhou Liangtie meant by ‘traditional acrobatics’ was actually the repertoires developed in the 1950s and early 1960s. In this context, Zhou used this term to distinguish 1950s’ modernized acrobatic acts from the ‘cultural revolution acrobatics’. Meanwhile, Shenyang received an order from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to produce a show for the Cambodian king-in-exile Norodom Sihanouk in Dalian. In the early 1970s, most acrobatic troupes across the country still dressed their performers in army uniforms. According to Sun and her colleagues, Shenyang’s director received clear instructions from upper-level officials: their performance should not include any radical state­ ments. Thus Shenyang borrowed ideas from the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe and prepared a programme that adopted folk melodies and dance steps. New costumes and props were made especially for this show. Sun Xiaoqing and her co-performers remembered that the responses from King Sihanouk were very encouraging. Later, the troupe stayed in Dalian to welcome thenSri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who was accompanied by Premier Zhou Enlai. After this performance, Zhou Enlai hinted that the troupe might have an opportunity to visit the United States.11 The relationship between acrobatics and international diplomacy must be examined through the lens of domestic cultural politics. Between 1966 and 1970, political radicalism gave rise to the so-called ‘revolutionary diplomatic line’ (Keith 1989: 155). During these years, spreading communist ideologies overseas was prioritized over ‘the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence’.12 Tensions between China and the international community were heightened, as many Chinese embassies were turned into ‘the great red school of Mao Zedong Thought’ (Keith 1989: 170). Embroiled in internal political debates, Zhou Enlai downplayed his ‘united front’ approach (Keith 1989). Not until China’s admission to the United Nations in 1971 could Chinese diplomats obtain the strength to resist political pressure from the Cultural Revolution. Among these diplomats, Zhou Enlai was instrumental in formulating strate­ gies for building a relationship with the West. The Chinese language literature suggests that Zhou Enlai, a skilled diplo­ mat in charge of the Foreign Ministry, understood the power of acrobatics very well. In Yan’an, Zhou promoted the use of acrobatics to entertain com­ munist sympathizers from abroad (Li 1988: 375). Later he also played a key role in establishing the first national acrobatic troupe (Jin 2006: 77). While the arts and cultural field in the late 1960s was dominated by revolutioninspired themes, Zhou Enlai famously stated: ‘The acrobatic art is differ­ ent from Model Works (revolutionary operas) and other folk operas. The Left, Middle, and Right can all appreciate [acrobatics]’ (Wang et al. 1997: 85). Zhou’s comments activated a new policy discourse, shifting the focus

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of artistic production from spreading revolutionary messages to reviving national culture. Inviting Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, and US President Richard Nixon to the acrobatic shows in Dalian and Shanghai manifested this new orien­ tation. Such cultural policy would enable Beijing to export acrobatics as Chinese heritage and, at the same time, fulfil its new political objectives in the Cold War.

Preparing for the American tour In mid-August, Shenyang’s acrobats all temporarily moved to Beijing. They first participated in a conference organized by the central cultural bureau and the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. At this conference, six major state-run acrobatic troupes13 presented their recent works, including both ‘cultural revolution acrobatics’ as well as the reformed ‘traditional’ repertories. In the end, Shenyang’s performance won general applause from the officials, who finalized the decision to send Shen­ yang to America.14 In the following three months, Shenyang collaborated with another local troupe15 to create a programme of sixteen different acts. There were two child performers (one was twelve and the other thirteen), seventeen junior acrobats (between 17 and 25 years old), and twenty-one senior acrobats (between 26 and 41 years old). As one of the senior perform­ ers, Sun Xiaoqing played leading roles in the Plate Spinning, Diabolo Play (Chinese yo-yo), and Flower Sticks, and also participated as a supporting performer in other group acts. During the course of their training, the acrobats received English lessons and political workshops that informed them about the United States. Sun Xiaoqing remembered that these educational activities emphasized friend­ ship between US and Chinese peoples. Their guideline was: ‘neither over­ bearing nor servile, being respectful, and acting for our host’s convenience’. Also, safety issues were frequently mentioned: the performers were told not to do anything alone, to act collectively, and always report to their leaders. Sun’s co-performer, Chen Huan, said, ‘[The officials told us] even if people threw [bad] things at our stage, we must continue our performance.’ Her comments implicitly referred to the incident in which some US-based proTaiwan groups harassed the Chinese table tennis team during their spring tour (Xu 2008: 157). In addition, each performer received stipends to buy clothing for the trip. Government tailors made special Western-style suits, which the per­ formers were required to wear for banquets and/or party functions during the tour. The idea was that wearing the same-style, same-colour outfits would give foreigners the impression of a closely united troupe. The gov­ ernment also provided performers special nutrition supplements, such as

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chocolate and candies, both of which were scarce in China. Postcards and friendship pins to be passed onto the foreigners were made and distributed among the acrobats. Such preparations indicate that the acrobatic body was an important site of governmental investment and a politically signifi­ cant cultural export. Before the troupe embarked on the journey, Zhou Enlai watched the final production. He also made a speech to the performers stressing their roles as representatives of Chairman Mao and the new China, thus they were to use their performances to demonstrate Chinese people’s positive characters and spirits (Sun 2011: 53). Sun Xiaoqing said that the diplomatic mission of the US tour was especially highlighted and everyone felt a great deal of pressure while performing in the United States. The decision to send an acrobatic troupe overseas reflected Chinese leaders’ ideas about how to communicate ‘Chinese-ness’ to the US audience through the acrobatic body. Shenyang’s souvenir programme’s playbills, and photos from the media suggest that the features of 1950s’ acrobatics were present in performances for US audiences. The modernized version of ‘traditional acrobatics’ had no clear narrative-structure, placed emphasis on body tech­ niques, and adapted foreign artistic elements to the local production. From the perspective of Chinese diplomats, this ‘traditional acrobatics’ was an ideal cultural tool to invite the US audience to appreciate China’s heritage as well as modern physical culture. However, in the next section, I demonstrate that in a cross-cultural context, new meanings of the acrobatic body could emerge from interactions between performers, audiences, journalists, host organizations, and other local participants. The Chinese national ideology only partially shaped the US reception of Chinese acrobatics.

US media reception: encountering American orientalism In both Chinese and US media, Shenyang’s American tour was portrayed as ‘people’s diplomacy’. The troupe’s US sponsors were two non-governmen­ tal, nonprofit organizations: one was New York’s City Center (the organiza­ tion was formally known as City Center of Music and Drama Inc.) and the other the National Committee on United States-China Relations. B. Preston Schoyer, then executive director of the National Committee, explained that a representative from Beijing’s United Nation mission in New York City approached his organization in October 1972 to discuss the possibility of bringing a cultural troupe to the United States. Schoyer told journalists, ‘We especially didn’t want this to be a money-making proposition. The Peo­ ple’s Republic wants these to be people-to-people exchanges’ (Gent 1972). Schoyer’s explanation suggests that there was a deliberate effort to down­ play US government involvement in hosting Shenyang.

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The troupe’s US tour did not begin without challenges. On the second night of Shenyang’s Chicago visit, a gas bomb exploded in the theater. Sun Xiaoqing recalled that she was getting ready for her performance, when she suddenly heard a loud noise. She saw a protective partition immediately descend, creating a barrier between the stage and the audience. She said: It was very chaotic. Our doctor told us to use a wet towel to cover our faces. We all stayed in one room for about a half hour. The audience did not leave. They wanted to see our show. There was a small group of people that had their own agenda. We thought [US and Chinese] people were still friends. We must continue to perform and complete the show. In addition, the Chinese acrobats were informed that a similar incident hap­ pened not long ago when a ballet troupe from the Soviet Union was per­ forming in Chicago. As a result, the Russians left immediately. However, the troupe leaders decided not to follow suit but to continue their diplomatic journey. According to Sun, the members of Shenyang used the discourse of people’s friendship to justify their stay. The tear gas, created by the bomb, did not dissipate easily. Sun and her colleagues resumed their performance despite their tearing eyes and pain. The audience who had seats on the third floor, all came down to the first floor and sat in the aisles to watch the show. In Sun’s and her colleagues’ recollections, the audience reception was passionate. At the end of this show, acrobats returned to the stage eight times for curtain calls and to greet the audience. Sun Xiaoqing told me proudly, ‘The audience all stood up and kept on clapping for a long time.’ Many came backstage, wanting to meet the acrobats. The archival data confirmed Sun’s impression. One reporter described the closing scene in one of the Chicago shows: The Chinese performers made graphically certain their mission was understood. Their finale was entitled ‘Flower of Friendship’ and reached its crescendo when Liu Chung, an impressively dexterous magician, pulled from his sleeve what appeared at first to be a silk scarf, but turned out to be a huge orange banner, which members of the troupe stretched clear across the vast opera stage. It proclaimed: ‘Long live the friendship between the Chinese and American peoples!’ As it was unfurled, the audience began to read the words, and the noise of their applause rose in volume until they were standing and roaring with delight. (King 1972) At this moment, the theater space was transformed into a site of diplomacy where the Chinese performers and US audiences participated in building an

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emotional bond, on the basis of their understandings of the Sino-US rap­ prochement. After Shenyang completed their first part of the US mission, the tour progressed smoothly. While the theatre was a central site of cross-cultural diplomacy, the media constituted another important cultural space that produced and circulated the meanings of the acrobatic body. Despite the minimal US government presence during Shenyang’s tour, commentators often drew a connection between the first cultural exports from socialist China and the normaliza­ tion of Sino-US relations. In other words, this cultural space provided the US public with a lens through which to make sense of the new engagement between Beijing and the White House and to translate this understanding into their own terms. Journalists played important roles in interpreting acrobatics to the US public and influencing readers’ understandings of the PRC. Overall, Shen­ yang’s breathtaking performances were met with acclaim from theater and dance critics. Focusing on acrobats’ embodied practices on and off stage, the media produced a set of discourses on China. Here, my analysis focuses on the media representations, which oscillated between two cultural imagi­ naries: the first is Oriental China – the cultural other of the Americans; the second, Communist China – the political other of the United States. First, stage sets, background music, and performers’ costumes were cited in the media as examples of Oriental aesthetics, characterized as simple and pleasant. US journalists frequently used words, such as ‘exotic’, ‘unbeliev­ able’, ‘surrealistic’ and ‘enchanting’ to depict the movements and abilities of acrobatic bodies onstage. Such descriptions reveal spectators’ psychologi­ cal and bodily responses to the acrobatic show. For example, the title of a review article – ‘East Hypnotized West and No One Complained’ very well captured a spectator’s excitement as well as bewilderment (D’Arcy and Gal­ lagher 1973). Moreover, acrobatic bodies were often represented as feminine and child-like. Even though more than half of the acrobats were older than twenty-five, news reports, for example, portrayed them as ‘grinning, vividlycostumed and doll-like young Chinese’ (Watt 1973). Women acrobats drew more attention than did men. They were always described as ‘girls’, such as ‘red and white pajama-clad girls’, ‘young pigtailed girls’ or ‘graceful platespinning girls’. Men’s performances were associated with Asian masculin­ ity characterized by their bodies’ lightness, agility, balancing acumen, and reserved strength. In this light, the US media construed the acrobatic body through an Orientalist lens (Said [1978] 1995): non-Western culture was seen as carrying mystical, juvenile, and feminine qualities, while the Euro– American civilization was seen as advanced and masculine. These perceived differences contributed to reinforcing a hierarchy of cultures, facilitating inequalities in Sino-US cultural exchanges. Within the Cold War context,

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the media representation of a feminized oriental China also diminished the image of the communist threat to the ‘free West’. Second, off-stage, the acrobatic bodies were interpreted as the embodi­ ment of Chinese socialism. Journalists commented on the troupe mem­ bers’ blue and grey colour Mao suits, identifying these outfits as signs of Chinese socialist reforms. Attention was also paid to what acrobats ate, where they went sightseeing, and how they interacted with ordinary US citi­ zens. For example, acrobats were said to develop a taste for chocolate milk; they drank local black tea; but they disliked American-style Chinese food (Kisselgoff 1973). One article mentioned, ‘hot-dog vendor and a police ser­ geant seemed to arouse particular enthusiasm from the group with a keen eye for the working man at work’ (Kisselgoff 1973). Some reporters also included in their articles information on China’s political-social conditions. One journalist wrote: Like other Chinese entertainers, they [acrobats] spend two months a year in the countryside, learning ‘how to incorporate the thoughts and feelings of the people in the craft of acrobatics’. Since 1949, the art has been both rehabilitated and politicized. In Shenyang, the members of the troupe live together in dormitories and in special housing for mar­ ried couples. All members perform not only as acrobats but also serve as scene designers, stagehands, and even technicians. (Chairman Mao obviously hasn’t heard about craft unions.) Talented youngsters like Shao Liu begin performing publicly at 10 or 11 and continue until their late 30s or early 40s. Retirees often remain with the troupe as coaches, managers, and teachers, thus keeping the tradition alive. (Beaufort 1973) In this paragraph, the US journalist represented Chinese acrobatics as a dis­ tinct, efficient cultural institution, safeguarding cultural heritage, training talented performers, and creating popular entertainment. It seemed that the general climate of the Cold War had little influence on journalists’ political analysis of Shenyang. Most commentaries avoided any overt criticisms of China’s political system and policies. From time to time, journalists drew connections between Chinese acrobats and US culture. Two points of iden­ tification appeared frequently in the media. One was the Chinese acrobats’ devotion to their trade, which resonated with US ideas of professionalism. The other was the presence of classical ballet techniques and certain acro­ batic tricks (e.g. baton tricks) that resembled those popular in American cir­ cuses. Critics seemed pleased that Chinese people shared with them similar understandings of dance aesthetics and entertainment. In summary, acrobatic diplomacy used modernized ‘traditional’ reperto­ ries to showcase ‘the diligence, valour, wisdom and optimism of the Chinese

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people’ (Canadian Concerts & Artists Inc. 1972). On the one hand, this representational strategy, which mixed folk and foreign cultural elements, challenged Eurocentric notions of performing arts. Thus, many art reviewers found it difficult to categorize acrobatics as ‘dance’, ‘circus’ or ‘theatre’. They struggled to find adequate vocabulary for analyzing the performance. On the other hand, the emphasis on superb body technique in ‘traditional acrobat­ ics’ neutralized the political origin of this cultural production and concealed the harsh sociocultural conditions under which Beijing chose acrobats for accomplishing their diplomatic mission. Sun Xiaoqing’s and her colleagues’ personal stories were overshadowed by the people-to-people diplomacy. Further, I argue that China’s acrobatic diplomacy offered an opportunity for the US public to invest in a hegemonic cultural space, or what Christina Klein called ‘Cold War Orientalism’ (Klein 2003). According to Klein, the emergence of this cultural space coincided with the US expansion of military and economic powers into East and South-East Asia since the beginning of the Cold War. Increased opportunities for ordinary US citizens to travel across the Asia-Pacific region gave rise to the production of Asia-related plays, musicals, novels, and films for popular consumption. Such cultural formation allowed US citizens to cultivate a cosmopolitan identity and invest their emotional and intellectual energies into forging relationships with Asian peoples. Thus, the US reception of Chinese acrobatics depended on the extent to which the US public was able to translate the new alliance between China and the US into personal terms and use these terms to build emotional relationships that ‘Americans could inhabit imaginatively in their everyday lives’ (Klein 2003: 8). As US news articles suggest, the Chinese acrobatics successfully activated this cultural mechanism. The affective power of the acrobatic body created an uncanny resemblance between acrobatics and American circus. Acrobats’ exceptional body skills powerfully induced spectators’ emotional responses and convinced audiences to identify with ‘the Chinese people’ while disregard­ ing issues of difference, power, and state repression. The US audiences were delighted to see no intimidating propaganda in these first cultural exports from socialist China. Perhaps, this was also the main motivation for putting Shen­ yang’s performance on a video programme (produced by the American Broad­ casting Company), as the acrobatics could be further circulated to nurture the United States’ Asian fantasy as well as to generate advertising dollars.

Concluding remarks This chapter discusses how acrobatics was attached to different meanings through the practices of nation-state building as well as international diplo­ macy during the Cold War era. I demonstrate how the relationship between acrobatics and the ideas of Chinese ‘revolution’ was established (during the Yan’an period), strengthened (in the 1950s), disrupted (during the Cultural

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Revolution), and finally re-modified to facilitate China’s relations with the West. In particular, when the Cultural Revolution transformed most artistic productions into a tool for internal propaganda, Chinese diplomats had very few options for cultural export. Under these circumstances, the government issued a new policy highlighting the political neutrality of bodytechnique, portraying acrobatics as Chinese heritage as well as an example of modernity, and in turn transforming the acrobatic body into a diplomatic tool. However, in a cross-cultural environment, a communication discrep­ ancy emerged from the interactions between Chinese performers and US audiences. While the acrobats attempted to use their well-trained bodies to convey a positive image of the Chinese people, the US media represented the performances through an Orientalist lens. In this sense, the acrobatic diplomacy produced some unanticipated results. In China, the government’s decisions to bring acrobatics back to the stage posed challenges for the performers, but also offered opportunities. Sun Xiaoqing told me that after her American trip, the leaders rewarded her by moving her husband and children back to the city to unite her family. In the early 1970s, acrobats could resume their artistic careers, whereas thousands of artists, writers, singers, dancers, and opera performers were still laboring in the countryside or in factories. Most art and cultural professionals would not be able to fully resume their careers until the late 1970s. Meanwhile, Shenyang indeed helped solicit public support for the collab­ oration of the Chinese and US governments by projecting a ‘friendly’ China at a delicate moment in the Cold War. This articulation of socialist China and capitalist US allowed the two countries to revise their foreign policies, including lifting the trade embargo and the ban on US citizens’ travel to China. However, the Chinese diplomats were cautious about the effects of this new alliance. Immediately after Shenyang returned to China, the acro­ bats received a new mission of promoting friendship between the Chinese and North Korean peoples. As a result, they toured in North Korean towns for several weeks. More importantly, China’s acrobatic diplomacy prepared the groundwork for the acrobatic body to become a major cultural export in the following dec­ ades and marked the beginning of an export-oriented cultural production. As a cultural export, Americans and other overseas participants started to invest in the Chinese acrobatic body and to assign it meanings and value through their own cultural lenses. Since the early 1990s, the Chinese acrobatic sector has become one of the key suppliers of skilled performers and acrobatic coaches for the Euro-American entertainment industries (Zhang Forthcoming). Forty years after Shenyang’s US tour, I visited this legendary cultural organization, which has recently been developed into a commercial cultural enterprise. At the Shenyang Troupe, I was informed that the troupe’s main clients are entertainment companies from Japan, West Europe, the United States, and

424 Tracy Ying Zhang

several South American countries, including Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. The content of the shows is specially designed to meet the cultural tastes and preferences of overseas audiences. Although Shenyang and many other Chinese acrobatic companies still rely on their performers’ first-class body skills to draw audiences, their acrobatic shows since 2000 have adopted the style of the Cirque du Soleil, the leading Canadian company, known for creating theatrical content for their animal-free circus shows.16 The uses of multimedia effects, fantastic costumes, and marketing techniques in today’s Chinese acrobatics raise important questions about the relationship between performing arts and cultural diplomacy amidst a new form of cultural glo­ balization and neo-liberal economic trends.

Acknowledgements I thank Norma Rantisi, Jacob Eyferth, Kevin Gould and Lee Gould for providing me with valuable comments. I thank this chapter’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful advice. Special thanks for Chen Huan, Jiang Zhengping, Sun Xiaoqing, Zhang Xundiao, Zhang Yeqing, Zhou Liangtie, and Zhu Xingbao, who shared with me their incredible stories. Also, I want to thank Jacob Eyferth for helping me access the East Asian Collection at the University of Chicago. None of these people are responsible for anything I have written. This research is funded through a postdoctoral fellowship of Québec fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (2012–14).

Notes 1 The US Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis, December 2013. 2 The exceptional case was a US youth delegation that attended the 1957 International Youth Festival in Moscow. Despite the warnings of the US govern­ ment, they accepted an invitation from the All China Youth Federation to visit China for a few weeks between August and September (Frankel 1957). 3 One of the main diplomatic principles advocated by then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was ‘uniting people worldwide’ (Zhou 1952). During his meetings with the US youth delegation in 1957 and the US table tennis players in 1971, Zhou stressed the importance of developing relationships between the Chinese and American peoples and proposed to create more opportunities for direct interac­ tions between peoples from both countries (Zhou 1957, 1971). Thus, the term ‘people-to-people’ exchange used in this paper to some extent reflects Zhou’s approach to international relations and his theory of projecting an image of a socialist Chinese nation. 4 In Canada, Shenyang performed in Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, and Toronto. The local sponsor was the Canadian Concerts & Artists Inc. 5 I used the snowball technique to recruit my research participants. This turned out to be a very effective method because the acrobats in China have a tight-knit community.

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6 Currently, the PRC Department of Foreign Affairs Archive only allows the public to search government files issued between 1949 and the early 1960s. To under­ stand the logic of the decision-making process at the highest level, I consulted a few published essays by Zhou Enlai on international diplomacy in the 1960s and the 1970s. 7 As I was revising this chapter, I also started to interview the staff members of the National Committee on United States-China relations, the local sponsor of Shenyang’s 1972 US tour. Although I did not incorporate these interviews into this chapter, some sections in this chapter are informed by the new interview data. 8 Several famous acrobats have published memoirs in the past ten years. For example, Jin Yeqin, a bike acrobat, published his autobiography, titled I walked out of the old Tianqiao: Nurhachi’s fifth generation grandson – Eighty Years of Wind and Rain (2006). Also, Xia Juhua, a contortionist and then-President of the Chinese Acrobatic Association, was featured in a book, titled the Legend of the Acrobatics Queen – Xia Juhua (Zhao and Fang 2004). In their memoirs, acrobats in pre-socialist China were generally street performers and had low social-economic status. 9 In the 1950s and 1960s, touring shows were still popular. Several Shenyang acrobats told me that they performed in Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Hangzhou in these decades. 10 The Hundred Flowers Campaign was a policy initiative that emerged in 1956 and aimed to give greater freedom of expression in the fields of arts, culture, and sci­ ence. There is a large body of literature analyzing the origins, development, and influences of this campaign in various sectors (e.g. MacFarquhar 1966; Goldman 1981; Perry 1994). 11 Shortly before the Dalian performance, Shenyang acrobats also presented a show to a US delegation in Anshan (an industrial city in Liaoning Province). 12 China’s five principles of ‘peaceful coexistence’ emerged from the Sino-Indian treaty of 1954 (Fifield 1958). These principals are ‘mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, mutual non-interfer­ ence in each other’s internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence’. Later, Zhou affirmed these principles in several important interna­ tional conferences, including the Bandung Conference in 1955 (Keith 1989). 13 The six troupes were the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe, the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, the Wuhan Acrobatic Troupe, the Solider Acrobatic Troupe, the Beijing Acrobatic Troupe (the China National Acrobatic Troupe was combined with the Tianjin Acrobatic Troupe), and the Shaanxi Acrobatic Troupe. 14 At the same time, the officials also decided to send the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe to East Europe, and the Beijing Acrobatic Troupe to Africa. 15 Some performers were members of the Shenyang Military Acrobatic Troupe. 16 The Cirque du Soleil is a Canadian entertainment company based in Montreal, Quebec. Throughout the Cirque’s history, the company has been associated with both Quebec and Canadian nationalist cultural projects. A few articles have discussed this relationship between the Cirque and the ideas of ‘national per­ formance’ (Hurley and Harvie 1999) and national cultural industries (Leslie and Rantisi 2011).

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References Barghoorn, Frederick Charles, 1960. The Soviet Cultural Offensive: The Role of Cultural Diplomacy in Soviet Foreign Policy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Beaufort, John, 1973. A boy from Shenyang, The Christian Science Monitor, 6 Janu­ ary, a Saturday column. Beijing Review, 1973. Shenyang acrobatic troupe in the USA. 19 January, 19. Berghahn, Volker, 2001. America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Canadian Concerts & Artists Inc, 1972. Shenyang acrobatic art troupe of China; Théâtre d’art acrobatique de Chine (Souvenir Programme). Chen, Jian, 2001. Mao’s China and the Cold War, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Chiu, Melissa and Zheng, Sheng Tian, 2008. Art and China’s Revolution, New York: Asia Society; New Haven: Yale University Press. Clark, Paul, 2008. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: a History, New York: Cam­ bridge University Press. Croft, Clare, 2009. Ballet nations: the New York City ballet’s 1962 US state depart­ ment-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union, Theatre Journal, 61: 421–42. D’Arcy, Jim and Gallagher, Jim, 1973. East hypnotized West and no one complained, The News Tribute, 5 January, 10. Davis, Janet, 2013. The circus Americanized, in Susan Weber, Kenneth L. Ames and Matthew Wittmann (eds), The American Circus, New York: Bard Graduate Center; New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 23–53. Farrell, Rosemary, 2007. Sweat from the Bones: Politics, Chinese Acrobatics and Australia. PhD dissertation. La Trobe University. Fifield, Russell H., 1958. The five principles of peaceful co-existence, The American Journal of International Law, 52(3): 504–10. Frankel, Max, 1957. 41 defy warning, set off for China, Americans in Moscow insist on their ‘right to travel’, New York Times, 14 August. Fu, Qifeng and Fu, Tenglong, [2004] 2005. The History of Chinese Acrobatics (2nd edn), Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House. Galikowski, Maria, 1998. Art and Politics in China, 1949–1984, Hong Kong: Chi­ nese University Press. Geduld, Victoria Phillips, 2010. Dancing diplomacy: Martha Graham and the strange commodity of cold-war cultural exchange in Asia, 1955 and 1974, Dance Chronicle, 33: 44–81. Gent, George, 1972. Chinese acrobat troupe will come to US Dec. 16, New York Times, 13 November, 46. Goh, Evelyn, 2005. Nixon, Kissinger, and the ‘soviet cards’ in the US opening to China, 1971–1974, Diplomatic History, 29(3): 475–502. Goldman, Merle, 1981. China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenfeld, Liah, 1992. Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Griffith, Robert, 2001. The cultural turn in Cold War studies, Reviews in American History, 29(1): 150–7. Hamm, Kristen Elizabeth, 2009. ‘The Friendship of Peoples’: Soviet Ballet, Nation­ alities Policy, and the Artistic Media, 1953–1968. Thesis (MA). University of Illi­ nois at Urbana-Champaign. Hendershot, Cyndy, 2003. Anti-communism and Popular Culture in Mid-century America, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Holm, David, 1991. Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China, New York: Oxford University Press. Hong, Zhaohui and Sun, Yi, 2000. The butterfly effect and the making of ping-pong diplomacy, Journal of Contemporary China, 9(25): 429–48. Hurley, Erin and Harvie, Jennifer, 1999. States of play: locating Québec in the per­ formances of Robert Lepage, ex machina and the cirque du soleil, Theatre Journal, 51: 299–315. Itoh, Mayumi, 2011. The Origin of Ping-pong Diplomacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Jacob, Pascal, 2008. La souplesse du dragon [The flexibility of the dragon], Paris: Magellan and Co. Jin, Yeqin, 2006. I Walked Out of the Old Tianqiao: Nurhachi’s Fifth Generation Grandson – Eighty Years of Wind and Rain, Beijing: China Nationalities Photog­ raphy Art Press. Jin, Yeqin, 2012. Acrobatic whirlwind in New China’s cultural diplomacy – the early foreign cultural exchange in Jin Yeqin’s memory, in Shaohua Zhao (ed.), Golden Memories: the Oral Accounts of Early Cultural Exchange Activities in New China, Beijing: Writers Press, 18–33. Keith, Ronald C., 1989. The Diplomacy of Zhou Enlai, New York: St. Martin’s Press. King, Seth S., 1972. Chinese acrobats delight Chicagoans, The New York Times, 20 December, 52. Kisselgoff, Anna, 1973. City unfold own ‘ballet’ for Chinese acrobats, The New York Times, 4 January, 39 and 61. Klein, Christina, 2003. Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945– 1961, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kraus, Richard Curt, 2004. The Party and the Arty in China: the New Politics of Culture, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Leslie, Deborah and Rantisi, Norma, 2011. Creativity and place in the evolution of a cultural industry: the case of Cirque du Solei, Urban Studies, 48(9): 1771–87. Li, Zhijuan, 1988. The history of acrobatics art in Yan’an era, in Di Zhi, Lu Jing, Ke Lan, Huang Zengjiu, Zhao Zhendong and Tan Weihe (eds), Yan’ an Literature and Art Series – Dance, Folk Opera, Acrobatics, vol. 14, Hunan: Hunan Culture and Art Publishing House, 365–402. Lou, Jiaxun, 2008. Shanghai Urban Entertainment Studies, 1930–1939, Shanghai: Wenhui Publishing House. MacFarquhar, Roderick, 1966. The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, New York: Praeger. MacMillan, Margaret, 2007. Nixon and Mao: the Week that Changed the World, New York: Random House LLC.

428 Tracy Ying Zhang Mazurok, Katherine, 2013. Pointes, politics, and meanings: re-reading ballerinas as embodied translations of modernity-inspired nationalisms, Tusaaji: a Translation Review, 2(2): 1–15. Mittler, Barbara, 2010. Eight stage works for 800 million people: the great cultural revolution in music – a view from revolutionary opera, The Opera Quarterly, 26(2–3): 377–401. Nicholas, Larraine, 2001. Fellow travellers: dance and British Cold War politics in the early 1950s. Dance Research: the Journal of the Society for Dance Research, 19(2): 83–105. Park, Sang Mi, 2011. The takarazuka girls’ revue in the West: public–private rela­ tions in the cultural diplomacy of wartime Japan, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 17(1): 18–38. Perry, E.J., 1994. Shanghai’s strike wave of 1957, The China Quarterly 137 (Mar), 1–27. Prevots, Naima, 1998. Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Said, Edward, [1978] 1995. Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books. Saunders, Frances Stonor, 2000. The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: New Press. Sun, Li, 2011. Precious chocolate candies, in Sun Li, Zhang Yeqin, Lin Rennan and Ren Li (eds), The 60th Anniversary of Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe, Shenyang: Shenyang Acrobatic Performing Arts Group, 53. Sun, Li, Yeqin, Zhang, Rennan, Lin and Li, Ren (eds), 2011. The 60th Anniversary of Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe [internal circulation], Shenyang: Shenyang Acro­ batic Performing Arts Group. Tait, Peta, 2005. Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, New York: Routledge. Torelli, Angela, 2012. The costs of realism: the Nixon administration, the people’s republic of China, and the United Nations, Journal of American–East Asian Rela­ tions, 19(2): 157–82. Waller, Michael J. (ed.) 2009. Strategic Influence: Public Diplomacy, Counterpropa­ ganda, and Political Warfare, Washington, DC: Institute of World Politics Press. Wang, Dizi, 1981. Remembering the Yan’an acrobatic troupe. Acrobatics and Magic, 1(1): 7–8. Wang, Feng, Fu, Qifeng, Fu, Tenglong, Li, Zhijuan and Huang, Jienong, 1997. The Contemporary Chinese Acrobatics, Beijing: The Contemporary China Publishing House. Wang, Feng, Zhengwen, Zong, Shixi, Zhou, Qiufan, Zhou and Shucheng, Dai, 1991. The History of Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, 1951–1990, Shanghai: The Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. Wang, Guanhua, 2003. ‘Friendship first’: China’s sports diplomacy during the cold war. Journal of American–East Asian Relations, 12(3–4): 133–53. Watt, Douglas, 1973. Like a Chinese Ed Sullivan Show, Daily News, 3 January, 96. Xu, Guoqi, 2008. Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895–2008, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Youngs, Gillian, 2000. Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspec­ tives, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Zhang, Tracy Y. (Forthcoming). China’s connections to the Quebec circus art, in Patrick Louis and Charles Batson (eds), Cirque Global: Quebec’s Expanding Cir­ cus Boundaries, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Zhao, Ruitai and Fang, Yuefang, 2004. The Legend of the Acrobatics Queen – Xia Juhua, Wuhan: Hupei People’s Press. Zhou, Enlai, [30 April 1952] 1990. Our foreign diplomacy guidelines and responsi­ bilities, in the People’s Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chi­ nese Communist Party Central Archival Research Unit (eds), Zhou Enlai’s essays on foreign affairs, Beijing: The Central Archival Publishing House, 49–57. Zhou, Enlai, [7 September 1957] 1990. The conversations with the US youth delega­ tion, in the People’s Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Communist Party Central Archival Research Unit (eds), Zhou Enlai’s essays on foreign affairs. Beijing: The Central Archival Publishing House, 239–52. Zhou, Enlai, [14 April 1971] 1990. The conversations with the US table tennis team, in the People’s Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Chinese Communist Party Central Archival Research Unit (eds), Zhou Enlai’s essays on foreign affairs. Beijing: The Central Archival Publishing House, 469–75.

Chapter 24

When pigs could fly and bears could dance A peculiar institution Miriam Neirick

The story of the circus in the Soviet Union is, in some ways, a familiar one. It comes as no surprise that the Soviet circus, like circuses everywhere, was an indeterminate, flexible, and polyvalent form of art that satisfied the diverse demands of the Soviet people who consumed it. It also comes as no surprise that the Soviet circus, like most every Soviet cultural product, propagated political messages, ideological lessons, and legitimating myths to the con­ sistent satisfaction of the succeeding regimes that produced it. What is sur­ prising, though, is that the circus in the Soviet Union satisfied the diverse demands of both state and society by remaining an indeterminate, flexible, and polyvalent form of art that consistently propagated political messages, ideological lessons, and legitimating myths. The circus was already an anomaly among the revolutionary cultural prod­ ucts created after 1917, when “political and aesthetic revolutionaries tried to suppress the allegedly dangerous old world of commercial popular culture.”1 After the revolution, Soviet cultural officials preferred to give “the people what they thought was good for them and not what they wanted.”2 Both Bolshevik and non-Bolshevik revolutionary intellectuals favored cultural policy that condemned “what would now be called urban popular culture … as ‘vulgar,’ ‘trivial’, and ‘petty-bourgeois.’”3 There certainly were some among the makers of Soviet revolutionary culture who objected to the inclu­ sion of the circus for those very reasons, but they failed to convince those officials, including Lenin himself, who chose to produce the circus largely because it was what the Soviet people wanted. It was precisely the popularity of the entertainment among workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers that, according to the Bolsheviks, justified their incorporation of an old-world commercial entertainment into the Soviet cultural administration. The circus was hardly the only prerevolutionary popular entertainment that the Soviet government continued to produce, and yet even among those, the circus remained exceptional. Like other “popular forms once con­ signed to the periphery of Russian culture,” such as festivals, folk songs and dances, wood carvings, and fairground diversions, the circus was “moved

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to the center” after the Bolshevik Revolution, and “given new responsibili­ ties.”4 Throughout its history in the Soviet Union, the circus was “infused” with “revolutionary content” just like everything else was.5 It did propa­ gate political messages, it did help to establish legitimating myths, and it did offer proof that the Soviet people were eager to receive them both. Yet unlike other forms of popular culture, such as Bolshevik festivals, which were subjected to “structural changes” so that they might meet these new responsibilities, the circus retained, throughout much of its history, the “ele­ ment of play that had been the essence of popular culture.”6 It was precisely this play element—its indeterminacy, flexibility, and openness to subjective interpretation—that enabled the circus to tell so many different stories to the consistent satisfaction of its successive state producers. The polyvalence of the show also provided for its popularity among diverse viewers who all appeared to conform to a mythic ideal, even as the circus remained a fun, enchanting, spectacularly amazing entertainment that never lost its appeal to viewers who might not have been so eager to consume any of those stories. The history of the Soviet circus offers unexpected evidence that a popular cultural medium that refused to convey any unambiguous message, narrate any single story, or construct one consistent myth was no less suitable a site for asserting the legitimacy of the Soviet state than were the much less ambiguous forms of culture that are better known by Soviet historians and students of the political uses of popular culture. By virtue of the political functions that circus productions and the rhetoric surrounding them consistently performed, the entertainment even remained a rarity among the few other forms of popular culture that also managed to escape significant structural change during the Soviet period. For example, Soviet fans consumed spectator sports much like they might have consumed the circus: “in very different, far more playful ways than the state had in mind.”7 Some spectators saw sports not as a demonstration of the benefits of physical fitness that instilled “values of honesty, obedience, discipline, culture, sexual equality and selflessness,” as they were meant to, but rather as “an opportunity for pleasure and fun, an arena of unabashedly male bonding, a chance to exhibit the joking cynicism and irony of all sports fans, and a place to idolize heroes of their own, rather than the state’s choosing.”8 In this way, “Soviet spectator sports fostered norms of behavior that can be called destabilizing, even counter-hegemonic.”9 Yet unlike spectator sports, whose unruly consumption ultimately served to “undermine the govern­ ment’s quest to obtain the consent of the governed,”10 the circus potentially both stabilized and destabilized the Soviet government by simultaneously meeting its own demands for ideologically instructive cultural products while also satisfying viewers who demanded cultural products that could be consumed in ways that contradicted the official prescription.

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In this sense, the history of the Soviet circus most closely resembles that of mass celebrations in the Stalinist period, which were also characterized by “the multiplicity of meanings” that they made available to their various participants.11 Soviet and Party leaders organized physical culture parades, celebrations of arctic explorers, and New Year’s pageants to establish their authority, assert their legitimacy, and encourage political consent. Yet in doing so, they introduced ideas that “could also be employed to express alternative, unofficial, and subversive viewpoints” as, for example, “when an official harvest festival turned into a drunken, violent melee.”12 Both Soviet circuses and mass celebrations were surprisingly typical of popular and particularly carnivalesque forms of culture in other contexts, in that they did not function exclusively as modes of resistance to domi­ nant ideologies, nor did they only enforce political compliance and social conformity. Instead, they might have been so vital, enduring, and culturally functional precisely because they always kept these two possibilities in play. The “ideological valency” of the Soviet circus, like Stalin-era celebrations, was one of ambivalence, and in this way both resembled pictorial repre­ sentations of the circus in nineteenth-century France, in which “carnival was made to serve a variety of political and artistic ends.… Its significance was open to debate. That was precisely what made it compelling: it had to be molded to this or that program … its signs had to be won over.”13 The Soviet circus did articulate official ideologies, promote political con­ sent, and encourage social cohesion. Yet its significance remained open to debate, which meant that it could attract even those viewers who might have seen it as an escape from dominant ideologies, an expression of political discontent, or a source of social disorder. This ambivalence is what makes the history of the Soviet circus so surprising, given the plethora of Soviet cultural products that either served the interests of the Soviet state or, alter­ natively, subverted them.

Notes 1 Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 5. Stites also observes that the revolution was “the main agent of destruction” of Russian popular culture. See also Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 21. 2 Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 41. 3 Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 5. Fitzpatrick later observes that “all Marxist intellectuals agreed, without even thinking about it, that proletarian culture had little or nothing to do with observable popular lower-class habits and cultural tastes. ‘Vulgar,’ ‘tasteless,’ or ‘trivial’ culture was obviously not proletarian; and if workers liked it, obviously they had been infected with petty-bourgeois atti­ tudes” (21). Here she cites Jeffrey Brooks, who writes, “the popularity of the pre-revolutionary popular culture was a feature of the market economy, and

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7 8 9 10 11 12 13

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in this respect it was something Soviet leaders were not able or willing to repli­ cate.” Jeffrey Brooks, “Competing Modes of Popular Discourse, Individualism and Class Consciousness in the Russian Print Media, 1880–1928,” in Culture et Révolution, edited by Marc Ferro and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1989), 72. James Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–20 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 133. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 39. Von Geldern explains that the new responsibilities given to popular entertain­ ments and objects “could be met only at the price of structural changes. The play element that had been the essence of popular culture could not always bear the messages thrust on it by the Revolution.” Von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–21, 133. Robert Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17.

Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, 6.

Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, 15.

Edelman, Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR, 245. Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 20. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin, 2–3, 9. Marcus Verhagen, “Whipstrokes,” Representations 58 (1997): 118.

Chapter 25

A contemporary history of circus arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina The post-dictatorial resurgence and revaluation of circus as a popular art Julieta Infantino

Introduction Until recently in Argentina it was common to think of Circus with nostal­ gia, as a popular art sporadically found in the suburbs, or in the margins of society. However, a resurgence of the circus arts took place during the postdictatorial 1980s and has intensified in the decades since. In this chapter I bring forward some aspects of a more extensive research project that, through the case of circus arts, focuses on the process of resurgence and redefinition of popular practices that developed in Buenos Aires from the post-dictatorial years up to the present.1 One of the questions guiding this writing is: how has circus, historically devalued as a ‘minor’ and ‘popular’ art, begun to be recov­ ered by young artists to the point where it now occupies spaces of greater artistic legitimacy? I will analyse the trajectories of some central characters in this history and provide information about the contemporary field of an art form that has long been undervalued. It should be noted that my research has focused on artists who were not born into ‘family’ circuses and therefore did not come from the circus tradition. They were young men and women who learned circus arts in schools, Cultural Centres offering a range of artistic workshops, or in the various educational settings that had appeared by the latter years of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). Theoretically, I approached these young artists as a ‘cultural formation,’ a concept used by Raymond Williams to analyse how, in different contexts, artists gather for the common pursuit of specific artistic goals. Williams highlights the methodological difficulties in the study of cultural formations as they are often characterised by low formality, small numbers of people, by the short duration of the organisation, and by complexities of internal splits and mergers. However, this concept enables the studying of organisa­ tional modes, shared experiences, points of conjunction, and fractions and disputes both within the groups and in relation to external agencies.2 To study how these artists reconfigured the artistic genre, I have used the concept of traditionalisation, understood as a selection process in which subjects appropriate a significant fragment of the past to legitimise their

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contemporary practice.3 At each performance or enactment, previous per­ formances are updated but are also recreated and adapted to new con­ texts. The notion of an emergent quality in every performance refers to the dynamic tension between the socially given, the conventionalised, the past, and the emergent. It enables the problematisation of how subjects recover certain elements of the past to give sense to the present activity, to legitimise their practices and challenge their recognition. While the temporal focus of this research is on the recent past, when speaking of revaluation of circus it is essential to refer to a larger historical process. In the development of the circus, there have been periods when it was promoted as an emblem of national art (during the late nineteenth cen­ tury for example), and times when this transitional legitimacy was rejected and circus was instead devalued as a minor art. Historically, the hierarchi­ cal rating of art in Argentina responded to the preponderance of a classic aesthetic canon; circus, from its origins as an art form, was positioned as the opposite of the classical ideal, appealing to a grotesque aesthetic charac­ terised by bodies of exaggerated dimensions on stilts, freaks, bearded ladies, prominent noses, and exaggerated smiles. Circus has historically highlighted what modern people should control: passion, enjoyment, laughter, and imagination. It is from the hegemonic rating of art that circus came to be considered as an inferior art form, as a curiosity, or as a minor art.4 I will first present some historical data that will enable an understanding of the transitional legitimacy given to circus in the late nineteenth century and I will introduce the social processes that led circus into an epoch of con­ traction. Then I will focus on the social actors who recovered these artistic languages in the post-dictatorship period. This will lead us to the analysis of a new democratic spirit during the 1980s, and the consequent develop­ ment of popular performances and new and street circus in the 1990s. I will examine the sociopolitical formations of the 1980s and 1990s that were mainly characterised by a blend of innovative practices and the recovery of past traditions. Selecting from events in each of these decades, some aspects of the sociopolitical and economic context will be analysed so as to gain an insight into the artistic choices made by young artists at this time, the social actors in the resurgence of circus in Buenos Aires.

Circus in the nineteenth century: the history of a transitional legitimacy Nomadic acrobats in the mid-eighteenth century and then the big circus touring companies in the nineteenth century initiated the beginning of circus activities in Argentina. Over the years, many touring circus families estab­ lished themselves in the country.5 It was not until the late nineteenth century however, that circus began to be regarded as a legitimate art form within

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the local cultural scene. This coincides precisely with the presentation, first as a pantomime (1884) and then as spoken drama (1886) of the play Juan Moreira (see Figure 25.1), a story originally written by Eduardo Gutiérrez and translated into a theatre piece by José Podesta, a recognised circus per­ former at the time. Juan Moreira is arguably the main character of Popular Criollismo, a cultural and literary movement that developed between 1880 and 1910. Using a realist style to portray the scenes, language, customs and manners of the countryside, especially those of the lower and peasant classes, Criollismo led to an original literature, mostly epic and foundational, drawn from rural life. Its subject matter was strongly influenced by the wars of independence from Spain; centring on the figure of the man on horseback, this literature reinforced the character of a stereotypical and righteous rebel gaucho, wandering freely in the vastness of the Argentinean Pampa.6 It is considered that from the premiere of the play Juan Moreira, an origi­ nal variant of the circus genre was born: the so-called Circo Criollo. This sub-genre was composed of two parts; a first part, with typical circus skills and humour, and a second part, representing the plays of Argentinean Popu­ lar Criollismo.7 Thus, a popular show, which bridged the popular narrative tradition and the staging of circus performance, was forged. The expressive resources used in the proceedings of this popular art form involved a strong commitment to the realism of the scenes. Both the argument of the unfor­ tunate gaucho, an innocent victim of abuse who is pushed to rise against injustice and modernisation, and the expressive resources that reinforced the realism of performances attracted the support of the public. The emergence of Circo Criollo as a local variant of the circus genre was established as a distinctive mark of the Argentinean circus in the face of European and American models. The distinction was based on the show format of a first and second part in which a slip between the circus and theatrical practices was generated. During the performances of the Criollo Circuses, actors in the first part demonstrated their skills as trapeze artists, acrobats and comedians, while in the second part of the show they inter­ preted their roles as dramatic actors. With energetic stage action, authentic costuming, pictorial settings representing landscapes typical of the Argen­ tine countryside, gauchos on horseback, and folk music and dances devel­ oped into a finale, the plays included in the second part were more akin to theatrical melodrama than to plays of the eminently literary dramatic tradition valued by the Argentinian artistic elite. The mixture of comedy and circus skills alongside popular drama inspired by the works of Pop­ ular Criollismo, is what distinguished Criollo Circus as a unique form, a circus model that, despite local variants, also characterised the circustheatre of Brazil.8 As a literary and artistic movement, the Popular Criollismo (amplified by the transpositions made by the Circo Criollo) became a tool for the

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construction and consolidation of national identity, and circus arts thus became an emblem of national art in the late nineteenth century. The causes of this transitional valorisation must be analysed taking into account the context of the time. The ruling classes in the middle of the century had opted to populate Argentina with immigrant workers in order to increase exports considered to be synonymous with economic development. After the near extermination of the indigenous population, and with their former land released, it was expected that the newly opened territory would be popu­ lated with a skilled labour force. There was an expectation that the desired immigrants (from Central and North Europe) would have particular virtues that would in turn bring economic prosperity, political stability, cultural development and modernisation. Meanwhile, local residents (Criollos) were depicted as lazy, ignorant and without the desire for progress. However, the immigrants who arrived in Argentina were not the desired ones. They came from the poorest sectors of Europe, and the land claimed from indig­ enous people was soon monopolised by the local aristocracy. This meant that immigrants settled in coastal cities, mainly in Buenos Aires, working in services and trades and not, as originally planned, in agriculture. Over the years, however, these immigrants began to experience social mobility, forging a new immigrant middle class that threatened the hegemony of the local aristocracy.9 In this social context, nationalism flourished. The cultural impact of immigration and the possible destruction of vernacular values worried the leading sectors and eventually there emerged a new image of immigrants as unscrupulous, materialistic, and devoid of aristocratic European culture. Meanwhile, through Popular Criollismo, the gaucho was exalted as coura­ geous, sober, a lover of freedom, a rebel, a patriot, and a fighter against social injustice. As the gaucho was disappearing from rural society due to new approaches to land use, he reappeared as a symbol, as an archetype of nationality. Adolfo Prieto (1988) develops in detail the ambiguous position held by the local elite, who, between 1880 and 1900, moved between fascination with and rejection of the advance of the new literary and artistic genre.10 According to Prieto, Criollismo meant asserting legitimacy to dominant sec­ tors, and as a way of rejecting the growing power that immigrants were achieving. Some figures of these sectors showed a remarkable fascination with Criollo drama due to the catharsis it generated through the fate of its gauchos subjected to injustice. In addition, the icons of the peasant cultural landscape – the music, dance, and songs that were integrated into the per­ formances of these dramas – were evaluated as the communicative codes of a new artistic genre that inspired nationalists’ wishes to have an ‘authentic national theatre’. This new genre of performance, the Criollo Circus, was defended because it was popular and less elitist than the Europeanised cul­ tural manifestations that dominated the legitimate art circles of the time.

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Figure 25.1 Family Videla in ‘Juan Moreira’.

Source: Photography courtesy of the Videla Brothers from the Videla Brothers Collection.

If the fascination that caused the Criollismo was based on the hope of establishing national authenticity in the arts, its rejection came from intel­ lectuals who argued that the Argentine art should be a child of European civilisation. The oscillation between approval and rejection of the elites against the consolidation of Criollismo began to lean toward disapproval by the turn of the twentieth century. Fearful of the social conflicts that had begun to take hold in urban concentrations, and facing the potential danger of social disintegration, the ruling class started to evaluate as risky the devel­ opment of a literature and an art whose central figure was a rebel gaucho. Thus, a cultural policy programme aimed at containing the spread of Popu­ lar Criollismo was launched.11 By the mid-1920s, Argentinean arts would face a renewal inspired by the European avant-garde. Circus from this period enters a space of deprecia­ tion. Against the Europeanised hegemonic conception of classical art, circus was measured as a comparatively minor art. However, Circo Criollo, as the birthplace of the national theatre, would remain as a yardstick up to the present day. This ‘minor art’ that, with the coming of the new century, had to compete with the growth of the theatres and the weight of Europeanised arts – and later with cinema, radio and television – continued to have wide accept­ ance with audiences during the first half of the twentieth century. Criollo circuses were updating their repertoire with theatre pieces by Argentine authors covering all genres, from Criollismo to farce, comedy and drama. In the 1950s, throughout the height of the radio-theatre era, many Circo

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Criollo artists participated in the new artistic form, which inherited the itinerant performance patterns of the circus. In fact, at times of peak activ­ ity, the capacity of small theatres was not enough for the large audiences, and radio-theatre companies joined circuses to present the second part in circus tents.12 By the mid-1960s, a period of decline in the popularity of circus began, related to the impossibility of maintaining its excessive business costs. While many circuses continued travelling long distances in the country, economic challenges led to the consequent decline in the number of circuses and the quality of the shows (fewer sets, costumes, and facilities). They had to aban­ don the second part theatre play, they faced legislative prohibitions that prevented the assembly of circus tents and the presence of animals in urban centres, they had to decrease the price of their tickets, and they faced a lower demand from the public. This process was not only experienced by national circuses in Argentina but also mirrored the international context for cir­ cuses. Primarily it meant that during the 1970s and until the mid-1980s, circus contracted and was poorly regarded in the field of performing arts.

The 1980s – the democratic opening: the recovery of popular performance languages and the development of street arts During the early post-dictatorial years, Buenos Aires was full of a diverse range of street art initiatives that fused different popular artistic expressions related to local history. The ‘murgas’ (a Río de la Plata style of carnival dance and music), the tango, the typical dramas from Circo Criollo, and circus tech­ niques – among other popular performance languages – were taken up by art­ ists who wanted to move away from commercial or high art, young performers eager to experiment with practices and spaces that had been forbidden during the dictatorial period. Even though the protagonists of these groups intersect, I will highlight some trends that developed in divergent lines at this time, and these can be taken into account as background when analysing new art initia­ tives of the 1980s and the resurgence of circus arts in the city. First, in the mid-1980s the Movement of Popular Theatre (MO.TE.PO) was formed, consisting of various artistic groups, among which were the theatre groups Catalinas Sur, Calandracas, the Grupo Teatral Dorrego and Teatro de la Libertad. These groups were characterised by activities that recovered artistic languages and characters of the vernacular tradition. Tak­ ing performance to the streets arose from an artistic impulse inspired by a certain conception of the popular, and a critical review of the injustices and atrocities of the recent military dictatorship. Young artists were committed to publicly denouncing the ousted regime and reaching a potential audience that normally would not come to theatres. In the words of one of the most distinguished groups of the time:

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We came from suffering the bloodiest dictatorship … we were not accus­ tomed to using public place [sic].… We were neighbourhood residents and … from 1983, found in the theatre, a way to communicate with other neighbours. We worked in the neighbourhood and we recognize [sic] ourselves as followers of the traditional art forms of this place that has been the birthplace of popular arts: the operetta and zarzuela (brought by Italian and Spanish); the Sainete (that mixture of Criollos and immigrants in the yard of the tenement); the Circus (where our national theatre was born); the murga and candombe.13 As Jorge Dubatti (2002) has proposed, the post-dictatorship period was a time characterised by a ‘canon of multiplicity,’ when artists were committed to freely seeking diverse materials from all instances of the past, even at the intersection with other art systems: There is a turn to the past in various ways: for a rereading of different encoded traditions … or to start new traditions from the revision or reorganisation of the materials of the past.14

Figure 25.2 Circo Social del Sur, circa mid-1990s.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Alejandro Jandry (photographer) and Circo Social del Sur.

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New performance groups recovered circus as well as other local traditions and presented them in the public space, aiming to perform popular enter­ tainment in the context of freedom in opposition to the previous period of dictatorship. To recover the style and scenic language of old Circo Criollo and pieces such as Juan Moreira meant to denounce in the public square the atrocities committed in the recent past of state terrorism. To occupy public space, therefore, meant exercising freedoms of which citizens had been deprived. Second, as a background to the reemergence of circus practices in the city, I will highlight some particular characters who were pioneers of this resurgence and who were studying at the School of Mime, Pantomime and Cultural Expression of Angel Elizondo. The links between this school, the protagonists of Parakultural,15 the Argentinean clown style and Cris­ tina Moreira,16 street circus and its precursor Chacovachi17 and Gerardo Hochman,18 can be read as integrated links that over time would separate and open different paths of artistic activity. During these years Elizondo’s School and the Parakultural experimental performance space nurtured these young students who were testing new possibilities to innovate in the arts. Humour, laughter, improvisation, collective creation, and the prominence of an active body on stage were expressive elements for artistic renewal chosen by these artists, whilst their collective and alternative ways of life repudiated the rigidity of the dictatorial period from which Argentina had recently emerged.

Figure 25.3 Chacovachi in Circo Vachi.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Julieta Infantino (photographer).

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One of the central elements present in the narratives of artists of the time is related to the value of open learning spaces. In various narratives that I have discussed elsewhere,19 artists describe their experience of the period as a ‘discovery of new worlds’. Access to information through courses and workshops, and to performances by visiting international companies intro­ duced local artists to new trends. Within the social climate of this epoch that valued freedom and participation in the public sphere, circus techniques emerged as the dominant vehicle for taking art into the streets, a choice associated with the idea of democratising the arts, with the recovery of ver­ nacular traditions, and with the aim of reaching diverse audiences – particu­ larly non-theatre going audiences. In some aspects, the Argentinean experience in the 1980s mirrored the fortunes of circus internationally, where renovation of the form was not instigated by performers from the traditional circus sector, but arose from the politically and socially engaged renewal of the performing arts occur­ ring in the UK, the US, Canada and Ireland from the late 1960s onwards.20 The ideals of popular arts that were politically and socially engaged found a strong connection to the local history of circus in Argentina. To use physical skills, action, and parody typical of circus in a performance of Juan Moreira was a committed way of thinking about the social role of art and its ability to connect with virtually all social classes in the public square. Thus, the mixture of innovation, tradition, local and international practices was a dis­ tinctive aspect of circus renewal in Argentina. While internationally there was little participation of the traditional family circus sector in the re-imagining of circus that occurred in the 1970s–1980s, in the Argentinean case there is a centrality of circus tradition through the foundation of the Circo Criollo School. Created and directed by the Videla brothers – artists from a third generation circus family who decided in 1982 to begin teaching circus disciplines – this was the first circus school in the country.21 Oscar Videla remembered the early 1980s as follows: We started to see that circuses had no more artists. The one who was lucky [sic] had gone abroad, to Europe or the US. That is why we decided to open the school to incorporate new blood.22 During the 1980s, the school could not find a fixed space. The Videlas worked in different places until, in the early 1990s, they settled in the Mon­ serrat neighbourhood (in the centre of Buenos Aires) where they continue to work today. Even with these twists and turns, the school was ‘a success … it was like throwing a stone in the water and expanding our dream. Peo­ ple were eager to learn the techniques of circus, and nobody knew how to teach them,’ remembered Oscar Videla. Thus, the Videla brothers became the undisputed forerunners of an artistic movement that redefined the circus

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arts, gaining them the prestigious recognition of being ‘the grandparents’ of a new generation of artists. They are recognised as the ones who trans­ gressed family and cultural mandates by encouraging innovative modes of transmission and reproduction of the circus arts. While the Circo Criollo School was intended to maintain local circus traditions, we will see that it played a central role in the generation of a particular street circus style typical of the 1990s to be discussed in the next section. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, many of the artists who had appropri­ ated public spaces for various forms of street arts took other directions, or specialised in particular trends. MO.TE.PO groups defined the now-called Community Theatre;23 some of the performers of the Parakultural are cur­ rently recognised as actors in commercial settings and on television. The Videla Brothers and the Clown Chacovachi (see Figure 25.3) assumed impor­ tant roles during the 1990s, defining a particular style of street circus per­ formance that became the mark of the period. Before examining the resurgence of circus arts during the 1990s when dif­ ferent circus styles were defined, we need to take into account some important facts about the post-dictatorial epoch, so as to enable an understanding of a complex time that was full of the expectation and fears that remained after the end of the dictatorship. As was stated by one of the artists of the time: Believing that in the ’80s the arrival of democracy was enough to instantly erase the stiffness and daily oppression of Argentine society would be to fall into childish simplifications. Corpses were still walking between us and the air was full of fear.24 While the 1980s were a time in which high expectations for sociopolitical change were debated with the restoration of democracy, this period cannot be analysed without acknowledging the marks left in society by Argentina’s military dictatorship. Hence the emergence of new practices, relationships and meanings in theatre, circus, and street performance needs to be consid­ ered in the light of the specific context of ‘fear’ and ‘expectations’. In this sense, the protagonists of the arts renewal were identified with an era in which values such as freedom, participation and transgression became real challenges. As I have argued elsewhere,25 the dictatorship had not only instilled fear and had removed spaces for experimentation and freedom, it had also virtually erased certain popular traditions due to their critical and subversive character. Therefore, the challenge seemed to be their recovery. In this retrieval of past practices, we can see that there was a manipulation of the traditional art form, as some aspects of the past became mixed with new trends. The notion that tradition is a selective process in which social actors have agency to choose and reconstruct the past is a useful tool for analysing

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legitimisation processes that are not only a matter for formal institutions but also of cultural formations.26 Williams deviates from the conception of domination as a unidirectional process; institutions are not an ‘organic hegemony’, rather the hegemonic process is full of conflicts and contradic­ tions. Therefore, hegemony is not reducible to the activities of ‘a state ideo­ logical apparatus’ but rather a process of negotiations between institutions and formations. Within the context of the immediate post-dictatorship period, the climate of freedom was undeniable, yet power circuits were still characterised by authoritarianism. To some extent cultural policies encouraged public par­ ticipation and appreciation of popular forms that had been silenced and devalued during the military dictatorship, but young artists still faced strong opposition, fears, and limitations. Not without opposition, the Videla broth­ ers, representatives of the circus family tradition, broke with those tradi­ tional forms of artistic production that had characterised the circus, and opened the field by inviting ‘new blood’ to learn what, until that moment, were ‘circus secrets’. Not without difficulty, young artists of the time recov­ ered an art that was formerly disparaged as ‘low’ and devalued by hegem­ onic standards of legitimacy. Not without opposition, art occupied public spaces, thus challenging the circuits of ‘high’ and commercial arts. Recu­ peration and innovation were mixed together in a context of possibilities as well as limitations.

The 1990s – The resurgence of circus arts in the city: ‘new’ styles and the expanding of teaching spaces The early years of the 1990s saw the genesis of several styles or methods of doing circus: New Circus,27 Street Circus, and Social Circus. There is a general consensus that Gerardo Hochman is an important local reference for the development of New Circus in Argentina. In the early 1990s he joined a group of artists that were already developing circus languages in Buenos Aires and created La Trup. After a considerable amount of training and experimentation, they released Emociones simples, the first Argentinean circus performance developed in a theatre with a troupe composed of artists who had learned circus techniques outside of family circus traditions. This event was an important precedent for the development of the New Circus style in Buenos Aires, alongside the opening of La Arena School in 1994, also directed by Hochman. However, during these years there was also a strong presence of what I have called Street Circus, a local way of doing circus characterised by the recovery of popular performance traditions dat­ ing back to the minstrels, the travelling comedians, and the fair and carnival artists. The use of these kinds of artistic languages, considered ‘popular’ in the Bakhtinian sense, refers to those traditions.28

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Artists often consider public space as an area that allows for greater public participation than is usual in conventional theatre. In a public square, art­ ists recreate an environment in which the public do not pay an entrance fee and are permitted to play, shout and clap, while artists are allowed to criti­ cise and laugh at the establishment. Argentinian Street Circus is threaded through with the notion that art is linked to transgression, liberation, and opposition to hegemonic cultural forms. Moreover, the artists themselves consider their performance to be a committed way of thinking about the role of art and the artist in society through the democratisation of access to the arts.29 Therefore, Street Circus should be thought of as a performance style deeply engrained with the particular conception of the arts with which these artists of the 1990s identified – art as a tool for social participation and transformation. The process of artistic renewal, begun in the 1980s by the Videla brothers, was expanded during the 1990s. In the first half of the decade, new teach­ ing spaces in the city of Buenos Aires were opened; earlier in this writing I mentioned the opening of La Arena School in 1994, directed by Gerardo Hochman and now recognised as a school of the utmost artistic profession­ alism. During those years, the Integral Circus Workshops of Centro Cul­ tural Ricardo Rojas also began. This teaching space is now remembered as a place of cultural links between circus family traditions and new circus styles, as well as a meeting place for many artists involved in the renewal of circus through street arts in Buenos Aires.30 In addition, Cultural Centres belonging to the City Government of Buenos Aires sporadically offered cir­ cus workshops and by the end of the decade were offering a broader and more sustained supply of such workshops. This was also a period of discovery and experimentation with pedagogy, influenced by a significant commitment to creativity and the ability to bring material from other countries. An example of this is the formation of Los Malabaristas del Apokalipsis in 1994, a successful group of street jugglers, who, returning from a tour across various European countries, started per­ forming in a central square of Buenos Aires city called Plaza Francia, with juggling sticks and monocycles brought from Europe. ‘A trio of jugglers as never seen in Buenos Aires streets. It was a success,’ remembered Riki Ra, one of its members. Soon, they rented a house in the outskirts which became a meeting and artistic production location. The Forte Garrizone along with Los Malabaristas del Apokalipsis were responsible for a sort of explosion of jugglers in the second half of the 1990s and the entrenchment of a style with a local flavour.31 In artistic terms, they promulgated a renewal of circus arts with its own distinctive characteristics. With a critical stance to the ‘old circus’ but also going against the grain of New Circus, some of the Street Circus artists of the 1990s identified with critical and transgressive speech at the artistic level, which merged with the concept of democratisation of art

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in the public space. Moreover, they proposed to turn art into their way of life and also their profession, fighting against the limited job opportunities offered to youth in the period. The rejection of ‘old circus’ or New Circus was not a uniform trend in the field. The production of a circus show, Tracción a cuerda in 1995 that com­ bined in a particular way the traditional circus with New Circus is remem­ bered by artists as a landmark. Under the direction of Gabriela Ricardes and Mario Perez Ortaney, this important circus production was performed for several years, a show that brought together professional artists from the circus tradition with young artists formed in circus schools and cultural centres. Another milestone for circus in the period occurred in 1996 when the clown Chacovachi, together with several artists recognised by this time as ‘re-energising’ the circus genre, organised the first Argentinean Circus Con­ vention. Conducted annually since 1996 up to the present, these meetings involve a camp of 4–6 days’ duration with over 1,000 circus artists from around the country and the world. The significance of these occasions has been analysed in other articles,32 but it is essential to mention here that they developed as a very important teaching space, and a place where experi­ mentation, knowledge sharing, and gathering together helped to develop the circus arts.33 The events I have described here gave birth to a particular Street Circus style that possesses an Argentinean inflection yet in certain ways mirrors European versions of Street Circus. Local Street Circus performances share a similar structure, divided into the following parts: the call, when the artists develop various strategies to draw public attention; the development of the show with all kinds of circus skills, often involving a section with audience participation; the hat, when the audience is invited to pay for the show; and the closing, usually the performance of the best number. Within this structure, the hat is the part with a particularly local ‘brand’ – it is managed differently to the European style of Street Circus, where a hat or bag is placed for viewers to give money as they consider appropriate. Instead, in the Argentinean style, this part of the performance is a key section of the show where artists make jokes with double meanings and try to edu­ cate the public to value street art as much as the mainstream art. Through­ out most of the 1990s street art was considered a minor art, discredited and devalued, leading many artists to take advantage of this moment of the show to fight for its value. Another feature of the Argentinean Street Circus style is direct address to the audience in a critical or provocative style. The clown Chacovachi often described this feature with a personal anecdote: In Spain my jokes are political about this relationship we have between the Third World and the First one. For example, I say, ‘Bring joy, take out the brash, take out the South American Indian you have inside …

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the South American Indian you ate 500 years ago and return it to me.’ Or as I say at the beginning of the show: ‘Spaniards, Spanish, Franco died [referring to the former Spanish dictator]’. Direct communication with the public and comical critiques consolidated into the central elements of the Argentinean Street Circus style, thus identi­ fying its artists as cultural workers struggling to revalue a discredited art and install alternative modes of social participation, working and living. In Latin America, the concept and practice of Social Circus refers to the use of circus teaching as an intervention tool for working with vulnerable members of the population. With a strong background in Brazil and ideolog­ ical links to popular conceptions of education, Social Circus is considered an effective strategy for promoting artistic and socio-productive opportunities with youth. It is also thought to enable autonomous and creative develop­ ment of students, strengthen critical thinking, and open more equal oppor­ tunities for access to training and artistic production. In Argentina, the first Social Circus initiatives occurred long before their methodological or pedagogical forms which have in more recent times been spread around the globe through the actions of Cirque du Monde (the phil­ anthropic arm of Cirque du Soleil). By 1991, Mariana Rúfolo, a Street Cir­ cus artist, had started her first stilts workshop with children from a poor neighbourhood of the southern area of Buenos Aires. The results were very interesting and, together with several others, she opened new workshops in other neighbourhoods. By the mid-1990s, she and Pablo Holgado had established sustained teaching initiatives in community circus workshops for children and youth of socially disadvantaged neighbourhoods (slums) in Buenos Aires (see Figure 25.2). In 2002 they became an NGO and since then, together with professionals of other social and artistic disciplines, they have generated a significant growth in Social Circus activity, seen in the number of teaching spaces they have opened and in their teaching method­ ology. Together with members of the FIC (Ibero-American Federation of Circus), they have benchmarked these strategies for social transformation through art in Latin America.34 It is no coincidence that strategies for social transformation through Social Circus emerged almost simultaneously during the 1990s in different Latin American countries.35 It was the neo-liberal decade par excellence, it was the post ‘Washington Consensus’ period in which various international agencies were meeting the need to reduce state functions, transferring state obligations to the private sector or to civil society. Moreover, it was the dec­ ade that socially punished the most neglected sectors, such as the younger generations. We can think on the causes of the emergence of this kind of arts transformation by returning to Williams’ notion of hegemony as a proc­ ess which must be continually renewed, recreated, defended and modified,

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but which is also continually resisted, limited, altered and challenged.36 ‘It was a time when you faced so much inequality that you felt something had to be done. And I had my stilts and my traps. So I started my first work­ shops wanting to change something from what I knew,’ remembers Mariana Rúfolo of her beginnings in Social Circus practice. Many young artists active in the renewal of the circus genre found in Social Circus an innovative way to combine their artistic interests with their desire to transform inequalities and social problems affecting different social sectors, especially disadvantaged children and young people. As Circo Social del Sur argues: We intend to confront the problem of exclusion of certain sectors of society that are often pushed to a relegated cultural life. We bet even more: not only we intend to guarantee access to cultural goods and services but also to the right to produce art in social sectors that oth­ erwise would not have access to it, on an equal standard of opportuni­ ties. In this sense, we do not appeal to youth as beneficiaries of social assistance, but rather as producers and actors in artistic events, as crea­ tive subjects.37 This focus on transforming unequal access to opportunities for artistic crea­ tion is exemplified by the production process for a show by young students of Circo Social del Sur (Figure 25.4). In group chats undertaken as part of the creative process, young people discussed the way in which they are

Figure 25.4 Circo Social del Sur, Graduation Show, 2015.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Alejandro Jandry (photographer) and Circo Social del Sur.

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represented disparagingly as poor and slum youth. They argued that the shantytown is usually viewed as something dark, grey, synonymous with danger, whereas they saw it as a landscape full of lights, which connoted its thousands of inhabitants that deviated from these stigmatising stereotypes. Eventually, this idea was reflected in the production with a poem by Edu­ ardo Galeano that tells how a man could go to heaven and observe human life from above, seeing lots of people, a sea of little fires where each person shines among all the others. According to these young artists, the oppor­ tunity to express this ‘other’ view of young people from the slums was an artistic way to transform the view that society has of part of itself. The commitment to social transformation, criticism and resistance through these sorts of artistic initiatives has typified local circus practices. By the end of the 1990s there was an opening of new possibilities for artistic and labour development as circus artists began to work on different projects such as business events, companies’ promotions, and parties. This expanded demand for the circus arts in the city and consequently changed their valorisation, ushering in what I characterise as the contemporary period when circus has a relatively important presence in legitimate art circuits.38

Conclusion In this chapter I have presented a synopsis of key aspects of the history of the resurgence of circus arts in Buenos Aires. Beginning with analysis of the wider past in which these arts had an ephemeral valorisation before con­ tracting and becoming devalued, I have examined the way these arts were recovered by young artists in the post-dictatorial period of the 1980s when the country was experiencing a democratic opening after one of the most heinous times in Argentina’s history. Surveying some key events and key characters in the recovery of these arts, I have analysed the 1980s as charac­ terised by experimentation, freedom and limits. The decade functioned as an important precedent for the revival of circus arts in Buenos Aires during the 1990s. Democratisation of the arts through the recovery of a devalued prac­ tice, its enactment in street space, and proposals of art as social transforma­ tion took place in the context of a neo-liberal era in which artistic practice was promoted to ‘the youth of the 1990s’ as an alternative way of life. This chapter shows moreover how valorisations of the arts are con­ structed and modified according to diverse epochs and interests. Similar to what I proposed for the historical period of ephemeral valorisation of Circo Criollo in the late-nineteenth century, I have discussed how a popular art form that was in a process of contraction was recovered and redefined by new social actors. My analysis demonstrates the utility of an approach to studying artistic genres as manipulable areas. In this sense, I have argued the importance of working with these social processes from the concept of

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traditionalisation.39 From this perspective, tradition is not an inert histori­ cal segment, anchored in the past; it is rather an active selection process. It is from the present that the past is actively constructed by selecting certain meanings and practices while others are excluded.40 These theoretical pro­ posals allow analysis of the changing valuations of arts emerging from dif­ ferent historical contexts.

Notes 1 In 1999 I began to investigate circus arts in the city of Buenos Aires. Throughout nearly 15 years of anthropological research I conducted interviews with leading figures from the local circus and undertook field observations in various places such as at meetings, festivals, shows, and teaching areas. I also collaborated with different groups of artists in the promotion of circus arts in the country. The his­ tory presented here in summary was developed in my PhD thesis in Anthropology entitled ‘Cultura, Jóvenes y Políticas en disputa. Prácticas circenses en la ciudad de Buenos Aires,’ PhD dissertation, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2012. It was later adapted as a book and published as Circo en Buenos Aires. Cultura, Jóvenes y Políticas en disputa in 2014 (Buenos Aires: Inteatro). Also available as open access in: www.inteatro.gov.ar/editorial/librosPDF/circo-en-buenos-aires.pdf. I am immensely grateful to each one of the artists who shared their trajectories, which I have knitted together to tell this history. 2 Raymond Williams (1981), Cultura: Sociología de la comunicación y el arte (Buenos Aires: Paidós). 3 Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (1996), ‘Género, Intertextualidad y Poder Social,’ Revista de Investigaciones Folklóricas 11: 78–108. 4 Julieta Infantino (2013), ‘El circo de Buenos Aires y sus prácticas: definiciones en disputa,’ ILHA. Revista de Antropología): 277–309. 5 Raúl Castagnino (1969), El Circo Criollo (Buenos Aires: Ed. Lajouane). 6 Adolfo Prieto (1988), El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina mod­ erna (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana). 7 Beatriz Seibel (1993), Historia del Circo, Biblioteca de Cultura Popular 18 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol). 8 To delve deeper into the specifics of Brazilian circus-theater see Erminia Silva (2007), Circo-teatro. Benjamin de Oliveira e a teatralidade circense no Brasil (Sao Paulo: Altana). 9 Marta Blache (1991), ‘Folklore y nacionalismo en la Argentina. Su vinculación de origen y su desvinculación actual,’ en Runa. Archivos para las Ciencias del Hombre, vol XX (Buenos Aires: FFyL, UBA). 10 Adolfo Prieto (1988), El discurso criollista. 11 Adolfo Prieto (1988), El discurso criollista. 12 Beatriz Seibel (1994), ‘El circo-teatro. Un discurso teatral no integrado en la his­ toria del teatro latinoamericano,’ paper presented at IV Encuentro Internacional del IITCTL, México. 13 ‘Grupo de Teatro Catalina Sur’ accessed 18 February, 2013: www.catalinasur. com.ar. 14 Dubatti, Jorge ([1983] 2001), ‘Micropoéticas. Teatro y subjetividad en la escena de Buenos Aires. Introducción’, in El nuevo teatro de Buenos Aires en la post­ dictadura (1983–2001). Micropoéticas I, 3–72. Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de la Cooperación (2002), 30.

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15 It is considered one of the main references of the so-called ‘under’ theatre of the 1980s, a space for cultural experimentation through which different recognised artists and groups passed. 16 Many of the local artists consider Cristina Moreira to be the mother of contem­ porary Argentinean clowning. ‘The courses delivered since 1983, based on the teaching method of the French Jacques Lecoq and Philippe Gaulier, operated as a fertile hotbed of comedic actors and would eventually become, over the years, a nearly mythical founding scene of Argentinean clown.’ Javier Flores and Jerónimo Ledesma (2006), ‘La Moreira,’ in Bondiola. Clown Argentino contem­ poráneo 1983–2003 (2006), accessed 10 October 2009 from www.clownargen­ tinocontemporaneo.blogspot.com. 17 Chacovachi, the Third World Clown as he calls himself, is a renowned street clown who began working through street arts in Buenos Aires in the early 1980s and became an undisputed reference for Street Circus, a style that came to the fore during the 1990s. 18 Gerardo Hochman is an artist who began experimenting with circus languages in the 1980s when he was a young student in Elizondo’s school. At the end of the decade he completed his training at the National School of Circus of Cuba. Today he is considered not only a leader of the renewal of circus arts in the coun­ try but also a great teacher. 19 Julieta Infantino and Hernán Morel (2014), ‘De milongueros, cirqueros y mur­ gueros. Los ‘precursores’ del resurgimiento actual en Buenos Aires’, paper pre­ sented at 29ª Reunión Brasilefia de Antropología, ABA, Natal/RN, Brasil, 3–6 August. 20 Gillian Arrighi (2014), ‘Towards a cultural history of community circus in Australia’, Australasian Drama Studies, 64 (April): 199–222. 21 Until that moment circus arts were an exclusive field of knowledge reserved, according to tradition, for the members of the family circus groups. 22 Interview with Oscar Videla, 9 December 2008. 23 A theatre created by neighbours – amateur actors – who make plays that retrieve historically devalued popular practices, often disputing the official version of the history of Argentina. For more information see Marcela Bidegain (2007), Teatro comunitario: resistencia y transformación social (Buenos Aires: Atuel); Edith Scher (2010), Teatro de vecinos de la comunidad para la comunidad (Buenos Aires: Argentores). 24 Alejandro Urdapilleta (2001), ‘Prologue,’ in María José Gabin, Las indepilables del Parakultural. Biografía no autorizada de Gambas al Ajillo (Buenos Aires: Ed Libros del Rojas). 25 Julieta Infantino and Hernán Morel (2014), ‘De milongueros, cirqueros y murgueros’. 26 Raymond Williams (1977), Marxismo y Literatura (Barcelona: Península). 27 Generic style or historical variant that emerged at the international level in the 1970s–1980s, the main exponent is Cirque du Soleil of Canada. New Circus abandons certain characteristic elements of the traditional circus such as live animals and the presenter or ringmaster. Using body language almost exclusively it merges with other arts and often incorporates a general argument throughout the show. 28 Here I refer to Mikhail Bakhtin’s approach to popular culture as a culture of subversion and opposition to ‘official culture’, typified by medieval carnivals and performances of popular shows. Mijail Bakhtin (1985), La cultura popular en la Edad Media y en el Renacimiento. El contexto de Francois Rabelais (Madrid: Alianza).

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29 Julieta Infantino (2013), ‘El circo de Buenos Aires y sus prácticas: definiciones en disputa,’ ILHA. Revista de Antropología: 277–309. 30 Los Talleres Integrales del Rojas were teaching workshops of different cir­ cus techniques (clown, aerial disciplines, acrobatics, juggling) conducted by Chacovachi and Mariana Sanchez, both protagonists of Street Circus, and Mario Perez Ortaney and Pablitín (Paul Rutkus), artists from many family generations of circus artists. 31 Diego Altabás (2003), ‘Variedades y circo portefio’, Revista Picadero, 3(9): 44–7, accessed 14 February, 2011, www.inteatro.gov.ar/editorial/picadero09.php. 32 Julieta Infantino (2007), ‘Convención Argentina de Malabares, Circo y Espectáculos Callejeros: Performance Cultural, Tradicionalización e Identidad,’ in Patrimonio, Políticas Culturales y Participación Ciudadana, eds Carolina Crespo, Flora Losada and Alicia Martín (Buenos Aires: Antropofagia, 2007), 177–97. 33 For more information about the Convención Argentina de Circo, Payasos y Espectáculos Callejeros see: www.convencionargentina.com, accessed 10 February, 2014. 34 The FIC consists of the following organisations: Social Circo del Sur (Argentina), Carampa School (Spain), Circolombia (Colombia), Crecer e Viver (Brazil), La Tarumba (Peru), Circo del Mundo (Chile), Chapito (Portugal). For more infor­ mation on Circo Social del Sur see: www.circosocialdelsur.org.ar/. 35 The beginnings of Social Circus in Latin America are usually linked to the activi­ ties of Se Essa Rua Fosse Minha, an organisation that started to work with youth living in the streets of Rio de Janeiro in 1991. This experience was a model for the creation of Cirque du Monde (the social arm of Cirque du Soleil) that by 1995 adopted the concept of Social Circus and expanded its activities around the world. See www.seessarua.org.br/circo_social.php, accessed 10 December, 2014. However, there are simultaneous beginnings in Argentina, Peru, Colombia, and Chile. Some of these social circus activities shared connections while others emerged in the context of social inequalities characterising the region. 36 Williams (1977), Marxismo y Literatura. 37 Marina Rúfolo, Pablo Holgado, Natalia Lázzaro and Vanesa Zambrano (2013), ‘Circo Social del Sur. Arte, Educación y Transformación Social. Carpeta Institucional, 2013,’ internal document created by Circo del Sur. 38 On the contemporaneity of circus in Buenos Aires see: Julieta Infantino (2015) ‘Procesos de organización colectiva y disputa política en el arte circense en la ciudad de Buenos Aires,’ in La política cultural en debate. Diversidad, perform­ ance y patrimonio cultural, eds Carolina Crespo, Hernán Morel and Margarita Ondelj (Buenos Aires: Fundación CICCUS). 39 Richard Bauman and Charles Briggs (1996), ‘Género, Intertextualidad y Poder Social’. 40 Williams (1977), Marxismo y Literatura.

Physical exceptionalism

Chapter 26

To reach the clouds My high-wire walk between the Twin Towers1 Philippe Petit

One more thing: Philippe, you are not a coward—so what I want to hear from you is the ecstatic truth about the twin towers. (Werner Herzog, personal communication with author)

Wild cat Back on the upper roof, I am standing precariously on the turntable of the window-washer, about to pick up the balancing pole, when Jean-François offers me the water bottle. Ignoring my friend, I turn my back to the wire to create the sense that I am backstage and, trembling with thirst, bring the liq­ uid to my lips but stop. I’d better wash my hands and face. In an instant, the precious liquid is gone, and my face is still dirty. I lick it with my paws like a cat. A wild cat, Jean-François spits in a rag and wipes the grease off my hair. I turn, face the wire, and look down at the balancing pole. I dry the sweat on my palms against the sides of my pants. With joy and fear, I whisper to Jean-François, as if we were both going to step on the cable, “Let’s do it. Let’s go!” For him, it is the password to victory. I am not aware that he is waving his helmet in a dance of happiness. I am concentrating on bending down so my fingers can reach the pole.

The first step All of a sudden, the density of the air is no longer the same. Jean-François ceases to exist. The facing tower is empty. The wheel of the elevator no longer turns. The horizon is suspended from east to west. New York no longer spreads its infinity. The murmur of the city dissolves into a squall whose chill and power I no longer feel. I lift the balancing pole. I jounce it, maneuver it between my fingers to find its center, to accustom my arms to its weight, as I do before each of my performances. I approach the edge. I step over the beam. I place my left foot on the steel rope.

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Figure 26.1a Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, 1974. Source: Photograph courtesy of Philippe Petit, Jean-Louis Blondeau (photographer) and Polaris Images.

The weight of my body rests on my right leg, anchored to the flank of the building. I still belong to the material world. Should I ever so slightly shift the weight of my body to the left, my right leg will be unburdened, my right foot will freely meet the wire. On one side, the mass of a mountain. A life I know. On the other, the universe of the clouds, so full of unknown that it seems empty to us. Too much space. Between the two, a thin line on which my being hesitates to distribute whatever strength it has left. Around me, no thoughts. Too much space. At my feet, a wire. Nothing else. My eyes catch what rises in front of me: the top of the north tower. 60 meters of wire-rope. The path is drawn. It’s a straight line. Which rolls on itself. Which sways. Which sags. Which vibrates. Which is ice. Which is three tons tight. Ready to explode. To dissolve. To dissolve me. To choke me. To swallow me. To throw me silently across the void jammed between the towers. The wire waits. The unknown, the infinite, the joyous reaper stretches out its arms and hides its face. Its arms of thousands, tens of thousands, of tons of concrete,

To reach the clouds

457

Figure 26.1b Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, 1974. Source: Photograph courtesy of Philippe Petit, Jean-Louis Blondeau (photographer) and Polaris Images.

glass, steel, and threat. A gaping mouth 110 stories deep, more than 400

meters tall.

An inner howl assails me, the wild longing to flee.

But it is too late. The wire is ready. My heart is so forcibly pressed against that wire, each beat echoes, echoes and casts each approaching thought into the netherworld. Decisively, my other foot sets itself onto the cable.

Meeting the gods Inundated with astonishment, with sudden and extreme fear, yes; with great joy and pride, I hold myself in balance on the high wire. With ease. A not-yet-recognizable taste seizes my tongue—the longing to soar. I commence my walk, but my body remains motionless. Is this fear? The gods in me. Determination! Tenacity! Now is the moment. The moment is given unto your hands—hold on to this balancing pole. The moment is given unto your feet—hold on to that steel cable. Are they telling you, “Give up”? As in a dream, with immense effort I manage to displace myself through space.

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Figure 26.1c Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, 1974. Source: Photograph courtesy of Philippe Petit, Jean-Louis Blondeau (photographer) and Polaris Images.

Is this courage? The gods in the balancing pole. Keep blowing life into those artificial arms. Bring them, bring it to life. Keep it heavy, solid. Keep it horizontal. You are no device, no instrument. You are an extension of my arms, of me. Keep breathing. Keep oscillating. You are life, my life. Say I, “Carry it! Carry my life across.” The wire detaches itself from the tower behind me. Together we under­ take our aerial journey, making a hole in the sky watching us. The gods in my feet. They are so knowledgeable, so talented. If they allowed the soles of the feet to land flat on the cable, they would color the walk with inelegance and danger. Instead they ask the sole—and the sole complies—to land delicately on the steel, toes first. And to slide down an alert sole, not a dormant one, so that the sole feels the cable is not a flat sur­ face but a curve. And the sole asks its flesh to find as much of that cylindrical cable as possible, to embrace it, to hang on to it. It is a safe embrace. The gods in my feet know how not to hit the cable, how not to make it move when each foot lands. How do they know? They worked that out dur­ ing their endless days of rehearsals. They know the slightest addition to the vivacious dance of the catenary curve would mean peril for the wirewalker. They ask the feet to land on the steel rope in such a way that the impact

To reach the clouds

459

Figure 26.1d Philippe Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, 1974. Source: Photograph courtesy of Philippe Petit, Jean-Louis Blondeau (photographer) and Polaris Images.

of each step absorbs the swaying of the cable, its vertical oscillations, and its twisting along the axis of the walk; the feet answer by being gentle and understanding, by conversing with the wire-rope, by enticing the huffing and puffing living entity above them to let go of his rage to control. Wirewalker, trust your feet!

Let them lead you; they know the way.

This is the first crossing. Wire and I together, we voluptuously penetrate the cloudy layer that melts as we approach, as we pass between the twin

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towers of New York City’s World Trade Center. I walk on air that softens under each step. I glide each foot. I cut through the whitish lump of breeze with the knife of my balancing pole. I walk on the air like a funambulist. The gods in the wire-rope. Werner, mad movie director, we have not met at the time of this walk. You have not read my treatise On the High Wire; it’s still to be published. But somehow I hear your comments on my writing, the comments you will share with me a few years from now. You salute the cable I walk on, the cable I transcend, the cable I celebrate. You say: “Be respectful. Be gentle. His soul is soft do not hurt him.” You tell of wire-ropes aching with tension, about to break. You say, “Their inner threads glow red in anger.” And you know what you are talking about, because you pulled a ship over a mountain. My eyes weld to the metal of the arrival column, still far away, yet coming toward me. I approach the dreaded middle of the crossing, where gravity is at its most barbaric, exposure at its fiercest. Terror tints my blood. Space no longer contains itself. The sky swallows me. What a handsome death! What a glorious delirium, to steal in that way the secrets of weight­ lessness! The cable feigns he does not know me. My arms that hold the long pole… The soles of my feet that press the morn­ ing vapor … The cable that absorbs the dew… I pass the middle point. Am I going to remember? To whom could I relate? Did I see? Or was it only air? Does one escape victorious from a dream forged at such height? The gods of the void, of space: are howling. Chanting. Screaming. All at once and in unison! I hear you. The wind passes behind me. I allow myself one breath. One pause. I let my face harbor a smile, the way humans do. I nail the cable down. I force him to tremble no longer. I abandon him there and walk away a few steps, supported by the atmosphere agglutinating against the huge wall I’m approaching. The second cavaletti being a stride away, I feel safe to perform my kneel­ ing salute: the balancing pole rests on the right thigh as the right hand takes off in a fluttering of fingers, something pure. Among the crowd 1,350 feet below, someone shouts, “He’s saluting! He’s saluting!” It’s Annie. The gods in my friends who are watching from the street. Below, so far below. Each has his or her own. Each kneels, prays. Do gods pray? “Be care­ ful! Of course you are! Fragile Philippe, you look so fragile, so strong!” Each with hands up to support me, to implore my success. Each with hands down to receive me if I fail. But for the Crowd, what I just did will remain invisible. Barely will it distinguish a human being up there, strolling upon a thread… I rise to my feet, beg the wire not to betray me, beg the cavaletti plate not to break open as I carefully step over it, and continue the crossing, finally free, finally alone.

Chapter 27

Thus Spoke Zarathustra Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R.J. Hollingdale

3 When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest of the towns lying against the for­ est, he found in that very place many people assembled in the market square: for it had been announced that a tight-rope walker would be appearing. And Zarathustra spoke thus to the people: I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves and do you want to be the ebb of this great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man? What is the ape to men? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape. But he who is the wisest among you, he also is only a discord and hybrid of plant and of ghost. But do I bid you become ghosts or plants? Behold, I teach you the Superman. The Superman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: The Super­ man shall be the meaning of the earth! I entreat you, my brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not. They are despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men, of whom the earth is weary: so let them be gone! Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy, but God died, and thereupon these blasphemers died too. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence, and to esteem the bowels of the Inscrutable more highly than the meaning of the earth.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R.J. Hollingdale

Once the soul looked contemptuously upon the body: and then this con­ tempt was the supreme good – the soul wanted the body lean, monstrous, famished. So the soul thought to escape from the body and from the earth. Oh, this soul was itself lean, monstrous, and famished: and cruelty was the delight of this soul! But tell me, my brothers: What does your body say about your soul? Is your soul not poverty and dirt and a miserable ease? In truth, man is a polluted river. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted river and not be defiled. Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this sea, in him your great con­ tempt can go under. What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness grows loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue also. The hour when you say: ‘What good is my happiness? It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease. But my happiness should justify existence itself!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my reason? Does it long for knowl­ edge as the lion for its food? It is poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my virtue? It has not yet driven me mad! How tired I am of my good and my evil! It is all poverty and dirt and a miserable ease!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my justice? I do not see that I am fire and hot coals. But the just man is fire and hot coals!’ The hour when you say: ‘What good is my pity? Is not pity the cross upon which he who loves man is nailed? But my pity is no crucifixion!’ Have you ever spoken thus? Have you ever cried thus? Ah, that I had heard you crying thus! It is not your sin, but your moderation that cries to heaven, your very meanness in sinning cries to heaven! Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the madness, with which you should be cleansed? Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is this lightning, he is this mad­ ness! When Zarathustra had spoken thus, one of the people cried: ‘Now we have heard enough of the tight-rope walker; let us see him, too!’ And all the people laughed at Zarathustra. But the tight-rope walker, who thought that the words applied to him, set to work.

4 But Zarathustra looked at the people and marvelled. Then he spoke thus: Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman – a rope over an abyss.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra 463

A dangerous going-across, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous lookingback, a dangerous shuddering and staying-still. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what can be loved in man is that he is a going-across and a down-going. I love those who do not know how to live except their lives be a downgoing, for they are those who are going across. I love the great despisers, for they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other bank. I love those who do not first seek beyond the stars for reasons to go down and to be sacrifices: but who sacrifice themselves to the earth, that the earth may one day belong to the Superman. I love him who lives for knowledge and who wants knowledge that one day the Superman may live. And thus he wills his own downfall. I love him who works and invents that he may build a house for the Superman and prepare earth, animals, and plants for him: for thus he wills his own downfall. I love him who loves his virtue: for virtue is will to downfall and an arrow of longing. I love him who keeps back no drop of spirit for himself, but wants to be the spirit of his virtue entirely: thus he steps as spirit over the bridge. I love him who makes a predilection and a fate of his virtue: thus for his virtue’s sake he will live or not live. I love him who does not want too many virtues. One virtue is more virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for fate to cling to. I love him whose soul is lavish, who neither wants nor returns thanks: for he always gives and will not preserve himself. I love him who is ashamed when the dice fall in his favour and who then asks: Am I then a cheat? – for he wants to perish. I love him who throws golden words in advance of his deeds and always performs more than he promised: for he wills his own downfall. I love him who justifies the men of the future and redeems the men of the past: for he wants to perish by the men of the present. I love him who chastises his God because he loves his God: for he must perish by the anger of his God. I love him whose soul is deep even in its ability to be wounded, and whom even a little thing can destroy: thus he is glad to go over the bridge. I love him whose soul is overfull, so that he forgets himself and all things are in him: thus all things become his downfall. I love him who is of a free spirit and a free heart: thus his head is only the bowels of his heart, but his heart drives him to his downfall. I love all those who are like heavy drops falling singly from the dark cloud that hangs over mankind: they prophesy the coming of the lightning and as prophets they perish.

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Behold, I am a prophet of the lightning and a heavy drop from the cloud: but this lightning is called Superman.

5 When Zarathustra had spoken these words he looked again at the people and fell silent. There they stand (he said to his heart), there they laugh: they do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears. Must one first shatter their ears to teach them to hear with their eyes? Must one rumble like drums and Lenten preachers? Or do they believe only those who stammer? They have something of which they are proud. What is it called that makes them proud? They call it culture, it distinguishes them from the goatherds. Therefore they dislike hearing the word ‘contempt’ spoken of them. So I shall speak to their pride. So I shall speak to them of the most contemptible man: and that is the Ultimate Man. And thus spoke Zarathustra to the people: It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the seed of his highest hope. His soil is still rich enough for it. But this soil will one day be poor and weak; no longer will a high tree be able to grow from it. Alas! The time is coming when man will no more shoot the arrow of his longing out over mankind, and the string of his bow will have forgotten how to twang! I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you. Alas! The time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars. Alas! The time of the most contemptible man is coming, the man who can no longer despise himself. Behold! I shall show you the Ultimate Man. ‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the Ultimate Man and blinks. The earth has become small, and upon it hops the Ultimate Man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea; the Ulti­ mate Man lives longest. ‘We have discovered happiness’, say the Ultimate Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbour and rubs oneself against him: for one needs warmth. Sickness and mistrust count as sins with them: one should go about warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or over men!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra 465

A little poison now and then: that produces pleasant dreams. And a lot of poison at last, for a pleasant death. They still work, for work is entertainment. But they take care the enter­ tainment does not exhaust them. Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both are too much of a burden. No herdsman and one herd. Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same: whoever thinks otherwise goes voluntarily into the madhouse. ‘Formerly all the world was mad’, say the most acute of them and blink. They are clever and know everything that has ever happened: so there is no end to their mockery. They still quarrel, but they soon make up – other­ wise indigestion would result. They have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night: but they respect health. ‘We have discovered happiness’, say the Ultimate Men and blink. And here ended Zarathustra’s first discourse, which is also called ‘The Prologue’: for at this point the shouting and mirth of the crowd interrupted him. ‘Give us this Ultimate Man, O Zarathustra’ – so they cried – ‘make us into this Ultimate Man! You can have the Superman!’ And all the people laughed and shouted. But Zarathustra grew sad and said to his heart: They do not understand me: I am not the mouth for these ears. Perhaps I lived too long in the mountains, listened too much to the trees and the streams: now I speak to them as to goatherds. Unmoved is my soul and bright as the mountains in the morning. But they think me cold and a mocker with fearful jokes. And now they look at me and laugh: and laughing, they still hate me. There is ice in their laughter.

6 But then something happened that silenced every mouth and fixed every eye. In the meantime, of course, the tight-rope walker had begun his work: he had emerged from a little door and was proceeding across the rope, which was stretched between two towers and thus hung over the people and the market square. Just as he had reached the middle of his course the little door opened again and a brightly-dressed fellow like a buffoon sprang out and followed the former with rapid steps. ‘Forward, lame-foot!’ cried his fearsome voice, ‘forward sluggard, intruder, pallid-face! Lest I tickle you with my heels! What are you doing here between towers? You belong in the tower, you should be locked up, you are blocking the way of a better man than you!’ And with each word he came nearer and nearer to him: but when he was only a single pace behind him, there occurred the dreadful thing that silenced every mouth and fixed every eye: he emitted a cry like a devil and

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sprang over the man standing in his path. But the latter, when he saw his rival thus triumph, lost his head and the rope; he threw away his pole and fell, faster even than it, like a vortex of legs and arms. The market square and the people were like a sea in a storm: they flew apart in disorder, espe­ cially where the body would come crashing down. But Zarathustra remained still and the body fell quite close to him, badly injured and broken but not yet dead. After a while, consciousness returned to the shattered man and he saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked at length. ‘I’ve known for a long time that the Devil would trip me up. Now he’s dragging me to Hell: are you trying to prevent him?’ ‘On my honour, friend’, answered Zarathustra, ‘all you have spoken of does not exist: there is no Devil and no Hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: therefore fear nothing any more!’ The man looked up mistrustfully. ‘If you are speaking the truth’, he said then, ‘I leave nothing when I leave life. I am not much more than an animal which has been taught to dance by blows and starvation.’ ‘Not so’, said Zarathustra. ‘You have made danger your calling, there is nothing in that to despise. Now you perish through your calling: so I will bury you with my own hands.’ When Zarathustra had said this the dying man replied no more; but he motioned with his hand, as if he sought Zarathustra’s hand to thank him.

7 In the meanwhile, evening had come and the market square was hidden in darkness: then the people dispersed, for even curiosity and terror grow tired. But Zarathustra sat on the ground beside the dead man and was sunk in thought: thus he forgot the time. But at length it became night and a cold wind blew over the solitary figure. Then Zarathustra arose and said to his heart: Truly, Zarathustra has had a handsome catch today! He caught no man, but he did catch a corpse. Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning: a buffoon can be fatal to it. I want to teach men the meaning of their existence: which is the Super­ man, the lightning from the dark cloud man. But I am still distant from them, and my meaning does not speak to their minds. To men, I am still a cross between a fool and a corpse. Dark is the night, dark are Zarathustra’s ways. Come, cold and stiff com­ panion! I am going to carry you to the place where I shall bury you with my own hands.

Animal performers

Chapter 28

Why circuses are unsuited to elephants Lori Alward

A cursory Internet search quickly demonstrates how hotly contested the use of elephants in circuses has become. Organizations1 devoted to the promo­ tion of animal welfare and the protection of animal rights argue that the use of elephants in circuses should be banned for various reasons. They contend that the elephants are caused egregious psychological and physical harm that no amount of reform can eliminate; that elephants’ life spans are short­ ened if they are forced to live under the conditions circuses necessitate; and that circuses have contributed to the endangerment of elephant species and the destruction of elephant families. Pro-circus organizations2 argue that ele­ phants live longer in the circus than in the wild because they have excellent veterinary care and are not in danger from poachers or from encroachment on their habitat; that elephants are happy in the circus because they love to travel and to perform; and that although elephants were sometimes treated abusively in the past, contemporary circuses are careful to promote their elephants’ physical and psychological well-being. Moreover, they argue, a circus without elephants is not a circus: people love to see the elephants and tradition demands that circuses continue to use elephants. In addition, far from contributing to the extinction of the species, these advocates hold that circuses help to preserve the species by breeding elephants, by providing habitat for elephants, and by educating humans about elephants, so that we will be motivated to work for preservation of the species. One thing is immediately apparent when one surveys the popular argu­ ments: no one, on either side, assumes that elephants are not owed some moral consideration. By responding to animal rights activists in the way that they do, by saying defensively that captive elephants are not beaten, do not die at a younger age than wild elephants, do not suffer in large numbers from tuberculosis or foot infections, and so on, pro-circus organizations and their representatives are saying that it matters that we do not beat elephants and that we do not knowingly or intentionally endanger their lives or cause them to suffer unnecessarily. In short, pro-circus folks admit that elephants are what philosophers call “morally considerable,” which means that we

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cannot treat elephants as mere things that are owed no moral consideration, that we have some moral responsibility toward them, at least if we are in a position to affect their well-being through our actions. Thus, I too shall sim­ ply assume that elephants are morally considerable. So, rather than defend­ ing the claim that elephants are morally considerable, I shall explore what the theoretical basis of that considerability is and whether elephants’ moral considerability entails that elephants should not be used in circuses. First, I examine the two moral theories most commonly used by animal rights activists, modern utilitarianism (specifically, its animal liberation ele­ ments), and animal rights theory, as well as a relative newcomer to animal rights activism, natural law theory. I argue that none of these theories pro­ vides an adequate basis for the moral considerability of nonhuman animals. Then I consider the question of elephants in circuses in light of an alterna­ tive, called the capabilities approach. Capabilities approach was formulated in the context of international development and so affords a solid basis for development of public policy relating to this issue (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000). But as one of its principal architects, Martha Nussbaum, has shown (Sunstein and Nussbaum 2004; Nussbaum 2006a, 2006b), and as I explore here, the capabilities approach can provide a basis for the moral considerability of nonhuman animals, while avoiding some of the problems faced by utilitarianism, rights theory, and natural law theory. Finally, I discuss how capabilities approach can be applied to elephants. A happy consequence of the adoption of a capabilities approach is that we can sidestep some of the most hotly contested questions, such as whether elephants die young if kept in circuses. Furthermore, I contend, capabilities approach as applied to elephants entails that circuses should not use elephants, that circuses are unsuited to elephants. It is a separate, and perhaps more difficult question, whether we have a duty to go out of our way to promote the well-being or protect the rights of elephants by more active means, for example, by work­ ing to preserve elephant habitat. I will not address this question here because my primary concern is with elephants in circuses and clearly, if elephants are kept in circuses, their treatment and living conditions have a direct effect on the well-being of the elephants kept there.

Animal liberation, animal rights, and natural law Utilitarianism is the moral theory that most commonly grounds arguments about our moral responsibilities to animals, as is exemplified by the argu­ ments about the use of elephants in circuses. In part, this is because many debates about public policy are framed as utilitarian arguments, but prob­ ably more important, with respect to debates about how we ought to treat nonhuman animals, is the success and influence of Peter Singer’s Animal Lib­ eration (Singer 1975), which grounds a defense of the moral considerability

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of other animals in classic utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory, which means that no action or policy is considered right or wrong in itself. Instead, actions or policies are right or wrong because they have good or bad consequences. The consequences that matter are the consequences to all moral agents or patients affected by the action or policy. In some clas­ sic theories, such as the utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill ([1861] 2001), one is required to consider the effect that one’s actions would have on any human being affected by one’s action or by the adoption of a particular rule. Following a suggestion of nineteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham (one of Mill’s mentors), Singer argues that we ought to expand the scope of the class of morally considerable beings to include all sentient beings because classic utilitarianism prescribes that we act to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering, and it is arbitrary to exclude from the scope of our moral concern animals who are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain but are not human, if our only reason for excluding them is that they are not human (Singer 1975). This seems clearly correct, and so utilitarianism is a very good candidate for grounding moral duties to nonhuman animals. Of course, not all animals will be captured within the scope of this theory. Protozoans and most mollusks will probably be left out. Clearly elephants will fall within its scope, and so will we, which brings up the first of two primary and somewhat standard objections to animal liberation’s version of utilitarianism (also see Regan 1983). Utilitarianism requires that we con­ sider not just the consequences to elephants of using elephants in circuses, but the consequences to all sentient beings affected by the practice, some of whom are spectators at the circus; people who own or otherwise profit from the circus; people who are outraged by the use of elephants by circuses; peo­ ple who are concerned with the survival of elephants in the wild; people who write articles about elephants in circuses, and so on. In other words, accord­ ing to this counterargument, no matter how much harm might be done to elephants in circuses, if that harm is counterbalanced by humans’ pleasure, then using elephants in circuses is morally permissible. If humans’ pleasure significantly outweighs elephant suffering, then utilitarianism would not merely permit the use of elephants in circuses but would actually require that the practice be continued because the practice maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain. This consequence of the theory should clarify why rights theorists, such as Tom Regan, have a problem with utilitarianism (Regan 1983). Rights theorists believe that some actions are not morally permissible, regardless of how much pleasure we may derive from them. They argue that we need a theory of rights that states unequivocally that certain actions are forbidden because they violate someone’s rights, regardless of what benefit someone might derive if the action is performed. Therefore, for example, our right to life is protected by laws forbidding murder, and while there are acceptable

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legal defenses against charges of murder, such as self-defense, these accept­ able defenses do not include the contention that the overall balance of utility has required that John Doe be killed. The second objection to utilitarianism that I wish to consider is the objec­ tion that utilitarianism assigns moral value to the wrong things. What has intrinsic value and is therefore the proper object of moral deliberation is a particular type of experience, rather than the individual having the experi­ ence. Rights theorists believe that this is precisely backward: what has the highest moral value is the experiencing subject, not the experiences that the subject has. A moment’s reflection will reveal that these two objections are closely related: The reason utilitarianism does not allow that there are some actions that are categorically forbidden or required is that what has the greatest moral importance according to the theory is not the experi­ encing subject but the subject’s experience of pleasure or pain. Therefore, some individuals’ experiences of pleasure, if sufficiently great in quality or quantity, can override the pain suffered by other individuals. This is a con­ sequence of the utilitarian view that rights theorists find repugnant because it would seem to justify or even require morally reprehensible practices and actions, such as slavery, apartheid, and torture, in those cases where the overall balance of utility favors continuing the practice or performing the action (see Rawls 1971). These classic objections to utilitarianism seem to me sufficient theoreti­ cal reason to search for a better moral theory to ground our moral obliga­ tions to elephants. In addition, there is a pragmatic reason. In calculating the overall utility of a particular practice, such as transporting elephants in closed train cars, human beings are all too likely to underestimate the pain suffered by elephants and overestimate the pleasure experienced by humans who benefit from this practice. Although it is true that human beings can distort any moral theory to justify an immoral action, it is wise, in trying to develop a theory to ground public policy, to adopt something less liable to this sort of distortion, if possible. Utilitarians claim, of course, that pre­ cise measurements of aggregate utility and disutility are possible, but this has never been persuasively demonstrated, and many moral theories offer standards which are more easily applied and whose violation is more clearly demonstrated than utilitarianism. Although possession of such standards is not a sufficient reason to adopt a moral theory, other things being equal, it is a reason to prefer one theory to another. Animal rights theorists argue that it is a bizarre feature of animal libera­ tion that, while it includes all sentient beings within the scope of its theory, it includes them only because those are the only beings capable of experiencing pleasure and pain and therefore of having interests, and those categories— pain, pleasure, and interest—are the morally important ones. The sentient beings themselves, it would seem, are not very significant, except insofar

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as they experience the morally relevant sensations. Rights theorists believe we ought to value sentient beings more highly than their sensual experi­ ences, so that any pleasure that human beings might experience in watching an elephant perform in a circus cannot outweigh any wrongs done to the elephants kept in the circus. That is because, according to animal rights theory, the elephant has an intrinsic value that grounds the elephant’s right to certain types of treatment and that right cannot be disregarded simply because to do so gives others pleasure. Different rights theorists may ground the elephants’ rights differently: some may say that the elephant is a person or is person-like, while others, such as Tom Regan, might argue that the elephant is the subject-of-a-life (Regan 1983). I will focus on the latter as it is the most influential within the animal rights movement itself. The concept of a subject-of-a-life is broader in scope than that of a person, so a greater number of nonhuman animals will be included in the theory, which makes it a better theory, in the view of most activists, than other animal rights theories. Although animal rights theory is appealing because it does value individual animals in a way that utilitarianism does not and it gives stronger grounds for forbidding certain kinds of harm to animals than utilitarianism, there are problems with the theory nonetheless. I will examine two primary criti­ cisms. The first arises out of ecofeminist theory, which tends to be opposed to any theory deemed to be either anthropocentric or androcentric (focused on men). Animal rights theory is anthropocentric, according to ecofeminist Deborah Slicer, because it values animals and claims that they are morally considerable only insofar as they share with us certain morally salient char­ acteristics, such as rationality or subjectivity (Slicer 1996). This is a good criticism of animal rights theory only if, by concentrating on features some animals share with us, animal rights theory neglects other animals possess­ ing some—but not those—morally salient characteristics. In other words, the criticism is valid if some animals that ought to be accorded rights are not because we have been blinded to their intrinsic moral worth by our exclusive focus on human characteristics. Slicer’s objection does seem legiti­ mate because many animals possessing some morally salient characteristics would nevertheless be left out of the scope of animal rights theory’s concept of personhood or even of its much broader concept of the subject-of-a-life. Here is how Regan defines the latter concept: To be the subject-of-a-life … involves more than merely being alive and more than merely being conscious … [I]ndividuals are subjects-of-a-life if they have beliefs and desires; perception, memory, and a sense of the future, including their own future; an emotional life together with feel­ ings of pleasure and pain; preference- and welfare-interests; the ability to initiate action in pursuit of their desires and goals; a psychophysical

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identity over time; and an individual welfare in the sense that their expe­ riential life fares well or ill for them, logically independently of their being the object of anyone else’s interests. Those who satisfy the subject­ of-a-life criterion themselves have a distinctive kind of value—inherent value—and are not to be viewed or treated as mere receptacles. (Regan 1983: 243) If any nonhuman animals fit these criteria, elephants are certainly among them. Nonetheless, I would still argue against using animal rights theory to ground public policy, including for elephants, because as Slicer’s criticism highlights, animal rights theory’s exclusion of many animal species renders it too narrow in scope. This part utilitarianism gets right: If an animal is conscious and capable of experiencing pain, we have an obligation to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on that animal. This is a broader principle than would be justified by the subject-of-a-life criterion, which is the broadest of all the criteria that ground various rights theories. Thus, there could be many animals that are morally considerable but are not recognized as such by animal rights theory. This is a serious theoretical flaw and is sufficient reason to seek a different theory. In addition, because we are trying not only to discover the correct moral theory to ground our moral obligations to nonhuman animals but also to develop a workable theory to ground public policy regarding elephants, it matters that not everyone will agree on which animals are persons or sub­ jects-of-a-life. This disagreement is unavoidable, it seems, because the cen­ tral moral categories of personhood and subject-of-a-life rely on subjective characteristics that are knowable, ultimately, only by the subject and that can at best only be inferred by individuals belonging to a different species. With respect to some animals, such as elephants, we feel fairly secure in our inferences, but with respect to many other species, we are less certain—and less likely to agree about—whether the members of the species are subjects­ of-a-life. An animal rights theorist might argue that we should always err on the side of caution, a sentiment I agree with but which might not persuade many people. Because we are trying to establish a basis for public policy, we want a theory with broad appeal. A possible alternative theory is natural law theory. This theory has not been widely used by animal rights activists but is nonetheless worth con­ sidering for several reasons. First, natural law theory is the moral theory endorsed by Matthew Scully in his 2002 book, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. This book gener­ ated a stir in the animal rights community, and so natural law theory may become more influential among individuals working to promote the interests of elephants. Second, natural law theory would not necessarily base other animals’ moral considerability on characteristics that they share with us but

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would consider the nature of each species separately and derive the good for each type of animal from the nature of its species. Third, many legal sys­ tems, including in the United States, are grounded, at least in part, in natural law tradition. To ground our moral responsibility toward other animals on natural law might seem a promising basis for public policy. Nonetheless, I argue that Scully’s version of natural law theory is problematic because it requires a teleological, or purpose-driven, view of nature and therefore ought to be rejected. This is how Scully characterizes the key insight of natural law theory: All moral truth arises from the nature of things, true in themselves and in crucial respects accessible to reason. Every being has a nature, and that nature defines the ends and ultimate good for which it exists. In discern­ ing these purposes we perceive what that being is, what it can do, what it must do to find its completion and fulfillment, and therefore what its moral interests are and how they may be advanced or hindered.… That which advances a being onward to its natural fulfillment is good. That which frustrates or perverts its natural development is bad. (Scully 2002: 299–300) This is a view of nature most scientists will not find congenial. Scully might think that this is irrelevant but, of course, it is not. A moral theory should not fly in the face of current scientific theory. A moral theory that is incompatible with what our best scientific theory tells us is true is a highly suspect theory. Of course, scientists sometimes use teleological language, especially biolo­ gists or environmental scientists. It sometimes makes sense to talk about the purpose of an organ, for example, or the goal of an organism, or how well a system is functioning. Such uses of teleological language are often una­ voidable and are generally regarded as benign, provided one keeps in mind that one is not assuming that nature is, or has, a Designer that sets ends for individual beings, based on some sort of essential nature that classes of individuals are supposed to have. But Scully’s teleology is not so benign. He tells us that natural law “asserts what philosophers call a teleological view of the moral universe with a detectable structure, direction, and broad design beyond our power to alter or escape” (Scully 2002: 301). Hence, the universe has a purpose and so does everything in it. We can discover how we ought to treat individuals by discovering their ends, which will tell us what is good for those individuals and what will contribute to their flourishing. This is true of human beings and other beings as well. So we do not set our own ends; they are set for us, by a power that is independent of us. This is an old-fashioned conception of teleology, to say the least; yet Scully believes it is the only moral game in town. He claims that natural law “provides the only rational grounds I know of for claiming any one

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thing better than another, without reliance on religious belief or intuition or the constructs of theory” (Scully 2002: 301). It is understandable that Scully does not want to base his moral theory on any particular religious belief because he avowedly wishes to establish a convincing ground for pub­ lic policy, and it is admirable that he does not wish to base his argument on intuition alone. Yet, it is not clear what is wrong with consulting “the constructs of theory” because natural law is a theory, or so I have always supposed. Scully disagrees, however: “Natural law is just that, a law and not a theory. If anything, it serves as a kind of anti-theory” (Scully 2002: 301). But of course, this is nonsense, as we can point to a variety of natu­ ral law theories, written over the course of several centuries. The problem with Scully’s version of natural law (theory) is that he has chosen one that is incompatible with contemporary science, which is unfortunate, given that natural law theory wants to derive values from nature and so ought to rely on the findings of contemporary scientists, rather than dismissing them as irrelevant. In conclusion, we must reject Scully’s version of natural law theory, while recognizing that the theory has several virtues. Five in particular are espe­ cially apt for any theory that could effectively ground public policy regard­ ing our treatment of elephants and other animals. First, natural law theory is not anthropocentric in the sense that Slicer worries about because our moral responsibilities to members of different species would be based on the morally salient characteristics shared by all or most members of a spe­ cies. These characteristics might or might not be shared with human beings. Hence, a second virtue: All animals could be included within the scope of natural law theory. A third virtue is that the morally salient characteristics that would ground our duties to other animals would be discovered through empirical investigation and so would be verifiable by the most recent scien­ tific research regarding various animal species. Grounding the chosen theory in science would, we can hope, forestall objections regarding subjectivity of the moral criteria and, in addition, provide a basis for widespread agree­ ment with the empirical foundation of the theory’s moral recommendations. Moreover, because our moral responsibilities to particular animals would be based on whatever morally salient characteristics are shared by members of the animals’ species, our responsibilities would vary depending on the species. For example, animals that are more complex might require more freedom of movement and action, larger animals may require a larger habi­ tat, and so on. Finally, a fifth important virtue of natural law theory, shared by animal rights theory, is that the theory requires us to respect individual animals and to regard them as ends in their own right. Ideally, we need a theory that has all of these virtues but none of the vices of the sort of natural law theory endorsed by Matthew Scully. That ideal can be met with the capabilities approach.

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The capabilities approach Economist Amartya Sen and philosopher Martha Nussbaum have both relied on the capabilities approach to discuss a number of ethical dilemmas in the field of international development. One of its best articulations is in Nussbaum’s Women and Human Development (Nussbaum 2000), and in the following discussion, I refer primarily to that work.3 After describing the main features of the approach, I then apply it to animals in general and elephants in particular. Central to the capabilities approach is the concept of what it means to live a fully human life, a life worthy of a human being. Nussbaum’s notion of a fully human life is similar to Karl Marx’s: it grounds human dignity in invio­ lability of the individual person and recognizes that the exercise of auton­ omy requires certain material conditions, enumerated in Nussbaum’s list of the ten central human functional capabilities (Nussbaum 2000: 78–80). The particular items on Nussbaum’s capabilities list will be enumerated in the next section, when I discuss how I have applied the capabilities approach to elephants. As Nussbaum explains, she compiled this list over many years, based on extensive empirical investigation, and several times modified it in light of what individuals in various cultures claimed was necessary to living a fully human life. The resulting list is, therefore, not sacrosanct, not the necessary result of an a priori deduction from a particular view of human nature (Nussbaum 2000: 76). From this brief description, we can see some similarities between a capa­ bilities approach and natural law theory: the conception of human beings is teleological and the method of investigation is empirical. But more impor­ tant than these similarities are the welcome ways in which Nussbaum’s capabilities approach differs from Scully’s natural law theory. For example, the telos (ultimate purpose or goal) of human beings is not set by something independent of us, but instead is determined by us. In short, we are not being asked to swallow a teleological conception of nature that is incompat­ ible with contemporary science. In fact, Nussbaum’s capabilities approach does not presuppose any particular metaphysical conception of the world, and Nussbaum contends that the approach is compatible with a variety of conceptions (Nussbaum 2000: 76). Another difference from natural law theory is that the capabilities approach does not presuppose that human beings have only one overriding end but instead asserts a multiplicity of ends, determined by the individual, that are not reducible to one overarch­ ing end. Hence, the list of capabilities is an irreducible plurality. A third difference is that while natural law theory is concerned largely with what individuals do, the capabilities approach is concerned with what individu­ als are capable of doing. In other words, natural law theory claims that we ought to act in accordance with a telos determined by something external

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to us, and to the extent that we do not, we are, in some sense, defective. In contrast, the capabilities approach asks what abilities we are capable of exercising or developing, and to the extent that we are not capable of exer­ cising or developing particular capabilities, finds some defect in the material conditions that would otherwise make such exercise or development pos­ sible. I conclude that Nussbaum’s capabilities approach is a more congenial moral theory than the sort of natural law theory espoused by Scully because Nussbaum’s approach does not make the extravagant metaphysical assump­ tions that Scully’s makes, and Nussbaum’s approach is therefore compatible with contemporary science in a way that Scully’s is not. If we apply the capabilities approach to nonhuman animals, we will be required to do a great deal of investigation to discover the central capabili­ ties of any particular species. Thus, the capabilities approach is not merely compatible with contemporary science, but it will indeed rely on the findings of scientists in the development of the moral theory. In addition, to discover the central functional capabilities of any particular type of animal, we will want to rely on data gathered by studying animals in their natural habitat. Such information will always be considered more reliable than information discovered about the behavior of members of a particular species held in zoos, laboratories, or circuses, if there is a conflict between what the former and the latter sources tell us. In other words, we can assume that animals may adapt to conditions of captivity in ways that distort their capabilities and preferences, and so I contend that we must always defer to data gath­ ered from field studies. The list of nonhuman animal capabilities that we develop will not be sacrosanct, any more than Nussbaum’s list of human capabilities is, but can be modified in light of additional scientific discoveries. Each species will need its own list because the capabilities of various species are often distinct. There may be some overlap among the lists we develop for each species, including our own species, but clearly there will be many differences. An animal rights or animal liberation theorist might object that a capabilities approach will be cumbersome, that a simpler theory is preferable. Although it is true that simplicity is a theoretical virtue, simplicity does not trump a theory being correct. Further, although animal rights theory and utilitarian­ ism might look simpler in the statement of the theory, they are every bit as complicated in their application. If we think about what the rights of an octopus might be or how to maximize utility for alligators and the creatures with which they share their environment, we can see that both of the two most popular theories regarding our responsibilities toward other animals could be quite complicated in their application. We are in a position now to see why the capabilities approach retains all of the virtues of a more traditional natural law approach, while avoiding the latter’s unfortunate metaphysics. I suggested at the end of this chapter’s

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first section that natural law theory has five virtues. All five are shared by Nussbaum’s capabilities approach, including when we apply it to nonhu­ man animals. First, because each species (or genus, or family, and so on) will require its own list of capabilities, we can expect a great deal of variability among our conclusions about what we owe animals belonging to different species. Thus, the capabilities approach will not be anthropocentric in the way some ecofeminist theorists have worried that animal rights and animal liberation theories may be. Second, all animals can be included in the scope of the approach, exactly because it is constructed by looking at scientific data regarding the capabilities of different animals in order to build different lists of capabilities for different species. Indeed, one philosopher suggests it would be possible to construct lists of capabilities for plant species, as well, and so a capabilities approach might serve as the basis of a nearly complete environmental ethics. This is an intriguing suggestion, which is, of course, beyond the scope of this chapter (H. Douglas, personal communication). The third virtue the capabilities approach shares with natural law theory is that its conclusion about how we ought to treat nonhuman animals is based on extensive empirical research. It seems that Nussbaum’s approach surpasses Scully’s in this respect. We would have to struggle—and, I believe, ultimately fail—to make Scully’s theory compatible with what scientists tell us about the abilities of various animals, whereas Nussbaum’s approach requires that we amend lists of capabilities if a list turns out to be incom­ patible with what our best scientific research tells us about what animals can do. A fourth virtue of the capabilities approach, and, indeed, a requi­ site flexibility it shares with all the theories we have considered herein, is that the duties we have toward nonhuman animals would vary according to the species and particular situation of the animals. The final virtue that the capabilities approach shares with natural law theory and also with animal rights theory is that it requires respect for individual animals as ends in their own right. Although I have not given a full defense of the capabilities approach, I have shown, I think, that the capabilities approach can be applied to non­ human animals, including entire animal species, that the results of doing so would yield a fruitful and compelling theory of our duties to other animals, and that a capabilities approach is able to avoid some of the more obvious problems of animal rights theory, utilitarian theory, and traditional natural law theory. Therefore, it will be worth our while to see what a capabilities approach might say about our duties to elephants.

Why circuses are unsuited to elephants Nussbaum says that the main question the capabilities approach would ask about an individual is not whether she is satisfied, nor how many resources

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she is able to command, but “What is this person able to do and to be?” (Nussbaum 2000: 71). The capabilities approach’s main goal is to ensure that human beings are capable of living fully human lives and that capac­ ity is defined by Nussbaum’s list of central human capabilities. Thus, if we apply the capabilities approach to elephants, we will not mainly be con­ cerned with how satisfied individual elephants are or what resources are available to them. It is not that these things do not matter—in fact, having certain resources may be a necessary condition of exercising certain ele­ phant capabilities—but it is not sufficient to show that, say, an elephant has enough to eat and is free of disease to show that we have fulfilled our responsibilities to elephants. So, instead, we will ask what individual ele­ phants in a given situation are able to do and to be, whether they are able to live fully elephantine lives, a capacity that the capabilities approach— applied to elephants—would define by developing a list of central elephant functional capabilities. The ten items on the human capabilities list are (1) life, (2) bodily health, (3) bodily integrity, (4) senses, imagination, and thought, (5) emotions, (6) practical reason, (7) affiliation, (8) other species, (9) play, and (10) control over one’s environment, which is divided into two types of control, political and material (see Nussbaum 2000: 78–80). The elephant capabilities list will share some features with this human capabilities list. In fact, some human capabilities are shared by animals of all species, especially the first three: (1) life, which includes not dying prematurely; (2) bodily health, which includes reproductive health and being adequately nourished and adequately shel­ tered; and (3) bodily integrity, which includes being free from assault and abuse and having opportunities for sexual satisfaction and choice in matters of reproduction. The precise form of these capabilities varies from species to species, but I imagine some version of these three would show up on most lists. In any case, they would certainly be on the list of elephant capa­ bilities. Clearly, some modification of what bodily integrity means might be necessary. It probably does not make sense to talk about elephants mak­ ing choices in matters of reproduction, although it does make sense to talk about elephants choosing with whom to mate. This capability might rule out the sort of artificial insemination of elephants practiced by Ringling Bros., Disney, and some zoos, but not, perhaps, the use of contraception in some African wildlife reserves. In contrast to the capabilities that are pertinent, some clearly would be inappropriate for inclusion in a list of elephant capabilities. The most obvi­ ously inappropriate capabilities are the capacity for practical reason, which Nussbaum defines as “Being able to form a conception of the good and to engage in critical reflection about the planning of one’s life,” and the capac­ ity for political control over one’s environment (Nussbaum 2000: 71). At the same time, one might want to include in the list of elephant capabilities the capacity to materially control one’s environment, although the meaning

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of the concept would be quite different from what Nussbaum assigns to the analogous human capability, which includes the right to own real property, the right to equal employment opportunities, and freedom from unwar­ ranted search and seizure. In contrast, the elephant’s capability to control her environment might include the ability to seek out sources of food, to search or dig for water, to construct shelter, to herd with other elephants, and so on. Interestingly, how these capacities are realized will vary depend­ ing on the environment in which the elephants live, just as it does for human beings. For example, African elephants may require much more space in which to exercise this capability than Asian elephants, largely because of the different habitats in which they live. I have delineated a preliminary list of nine elephant capabilities, based on Nussbaum’s list of human capabilities, but modified where appropriate. I refer to the list as “preliminary” because I expect the list will be revised as other people who work with elephants comment on and discuss it. Some items may be modified and others may be added. In other words, I welcome comments on the list and suggestions for improvements because if the list is to serve as a basis for public policy regarding our treatment of elephants, then elephants’ central capabilities should be described as accurately as possible.

Central elephant functional capabilities In this list, I have retained some of the original wording used by Nussbaum, as the reader will notice when my list is compared with Nussbaum’s list (2000: 78–80). 1 Life. Being able to live to the end of an elephant life of normal length. Not dying prematurely. 2 Bodily Health. Being able to have good health, including reproductive health; to be adequately nourished; to live in an environment conducive to bodily health. 3 Bodily Integrity. Being able to move freely from place to place; having one’s bodily boundaries treated as sovereign, that is, being free from assault; having opportunities for self-directed sexual satisfaction and for choice in nutriment, shelter, and other requirements for normal growth and well-being. 4 Senses, Thought, and Imagination. Being able to use the senses, to imagine, and to think in a “truly elephantine” way. This will include being able to communicate over long distances, using infrasonic com­ munication, living in an environment to which elephants have naturally adapted, and so on. By “naturally adapted,” I mean something like what evolutionary biologists mean when they talk about adaptation of species. I do not refer to what might be considered a sort of “artificial

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adaptation,” such as adaptation to conditions in zoos or circuses. Because elephants are highly intelligent animals, they can, of course, learn to adapt to many different environments, some of which could be considered highly artificial, but this adaptation to artificial environ­ ments should be considered analogous to what Nussbaum (2000) calls “adaptive preferences.” Emotions. Being able to have attachments to other animals, and perhaps to places and things; to be able to love friends and family members and to be able to grieve their absence. Not having one’s emotional develop­ ment blighted by overwhelming fear and anxiety or by traumatic events of abuse and neglect. Affiliation. Being able to live with and have social relations with others, to recognize and show concern for other elephants, to engage in various forms of normal social interaction. Other Species. Being able to live with concern for and in relation to other animals, plants, and the world of nature. Play. Being able to play. Control over the Physical Environment. Being able to seek and obtain food, water, and places to rest. This control must be shared with other species, of course, including our own.

The consequences for circuses Although the preliminary list may be subject to revision, I shall assume that it is largely correct in order to see what consequences these capabilities of ele­ phants would have for circuses. Guaranteeing the first two capabilities might entail that elephants cannot be used in circuses, if animal rights activists are correct in their assertion that elephants’ lives are shortened and their health impaired by being held captive in circuses. As I have mentioned before, how­ ever, spokespersons for circuses disagree with these claims, and some assert that elephants are healthier and live longer when they live in circuses than when they live in the wild. It is difficult either to verify or to disprove either side’s claims because to date we possess insufficient empirical data to do so (R. Kagen, personal communication). Still, it is at least logically possible that the health and longevity of elephants could be protected better in captiv­ ity than in the wild, so let us grant the pro-circus spokespersons this point. However, this point will turn out to be irrelevant because it pertains to only two out of nine elephant capabilities, and some of the other capabilities will necessarily be thwarted when elephants are used in circuses. We are on firmer ground with respect to the third capability, bodily integ­ rity. For example, ensuring that elephants in circuses were able to move freely from place to place would mean that elephants could not be chained or con­ fined to small stalls or to train cars. In short, elephants could not travel by

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motorized means. Even if elephants were kept in one place, it is unlikely that circuses could provide sufficient space for elephants to exercise this capacity. Moreover, even if a circus could provide sufficient space for elephants and remain in business while remaining in one place, the elephants must be made to perform on a regular schedule. Their training and their performance con­ stitute an interference with elephants’ abilities to move freely from place to place and so thwart the exercise of the capacity for bodily integrity. In addition, some circuses are very proud that they now breed elephants using artificial insemination (see Alexander 2000). But this seems to violate bodily integrity, in a way that contraception may not. This is, to be sure, a highly controversial point. Some might argue that contraception is also a violation of bodily integrity because an elephant cannot choose contracep­ tion. In response, one might argue that if an elephant could choose, it would choose contraception, so that births were further apart, since the alternatives to contraception are claimed to be (1) sterilization, which would preclude reproduction altogether; (2) reduced health for the entire herd because too many births put a strain on resources available to the group; and (3) culling, which (in my opinion) is a violation of capabilities 1, 3, 5, and 6. In other words, we may need to adopt a “reasonable elephant standard,” similar to the reasonable person standard commonly used by jurists. The reader will no doubt notice that much of what I say in this paragraph also applies to most zoos, which would mean that zoos are not suitable to elephants, either. Perhaps a handful of zoos would be capable of providing sufficient habitat to ensure that elephants have bodily integrity, but most zoos simply do not have sufficient space or resources. The fourth capability also suggests that circuses cannot provide an envi­ ronment in which elephants can exercise their capabilities. The more we learn about elephants’ abilities, such as their infrasonic communication and their greeting displays, the more it becomes clear that for elephants to live a fully elephantine life, they must live among other elephants, in the wild, with as large a range as possible (regarding elephant vocalizations, see the website for the Savanna Elephant Vocalization Project, www.elephantvoices. org; see also Payne [1988] 1998). It might be contended that there are other abilities, ones we have ample evidence that elephants possess, such as the abilities to paint or to play music (see MacPherson 2001; Scigliano 2002), which require elephants to exercise their senses, imagination, and capacity for thought, and which could be developed only in captivity. Thus, the capa­ bilities approach might permit, or even recommend, keeping some elephants in captivity because it is only in captivity that elephants can exercise their creativity in these ways. This contention does not stand, however, because elephants are not thereby exercising their abilities in what I have called a “truly elephantine” way. If there is a conflict between scientific field research data and data gathered by scientists observing animal behavior in a laboratory,

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the capabilities approach will defer to the conclusions of the scientists doing field research. In the same way, the capabilities approach will deem the abil­ ities exercised by elephants in the wild truer expressions of an elephant’s nature than abilities exercised by elephants in captivity. In other words, in deciding what conditions are necessary for elephants to exercise their abili­ ties for sensation, thought, and imagination in a truly elephantine way, we should take into consideration what elephants do when left to their own devices, with as little interference by us as possible, rather than focusing on what elephants do when manipulated by humans for profit or for entertain­ ment or simply to exercise our dominance. Therefore, even though there are certain abilities elephants can exercise in circuses and that some elephant handlers claim elephants enjoy performing in the circus, the capabilities approach will conclude that circuses cannot provide the appropriate envi­ ronment for elephants to exercise their abilities to use the senses, to imagine, and to think in a truly elephantine way. The fifth capability, emotions, requires keeping family groups intact, as much as possible, and to inflict on elephants as little trauma as possible. Thus, certain practices seem to be ruled out; Hunting and culling elephants would be forbidden. In fact, this capability gives us another argument for preferring contraception to culling where elephant populations must be con­ trolled. Spacing births through the use of contraception allows elephants to exercise their emotional capabilities in a truly elephantine way, by living within family groups, throughout their lives if female and until adulthood if male, and not suffer the trauma of being separated from family members or witnessing the slaughter of family members (for an anecdotal example regarding culling and trauma, see MacPherson 2001). Circuses, of course, cannot accommodate such large family groups of elephants and commonly engage in the practice of separating families, even separating baby elephants from their mothers at one or two years of age. Because circuses must make a profit if they are to stay in business, it seems unlikely they could ever pro­ vide the conditions necessary for elephants to exercise this capability; they simply could not keep a sufficient number of elephants nor provide them with sufficient space. The sixth capability, affiliation, is clearly thwarted by circuses, for rea­ sons already discussed. Circuses separate family groups and interfere with normal elephant interactions by separating elephants and keeping them confined. The sort of rich social relationships that elephants develop in the wild (see Moss 1988) are impossible in the circus. Therefore, circuses are incapable of providing the necessary conditions for flourishing of elephants’ capabilities for affiliation. Defenders of the use of elephants by circuses might claim that circuses allow elephants to interact with other species, most notably with humans, and therefore furnish the material conditions necessary for elephants to

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exercise the seventh capability. Although elephants do interact with humans in circuses, I would argue that interspecific interaction in the circus is rela­ tively impoverished compared with interspecific interaction in the wild, that it is not truly elephantine interaction. Moreover, this capability also requires that elephants have contact with plant species and with the world of nature. Of course, it is possible for circuses to attempt to provide all of these things, although whether they could do so in an acceptable way seems unlikely. Nonetheless, we could grant that circuses are capable of providing the nec­ essary conditions for elephants’ exercise of their capacity to live with other species and still not conclude that circuses are suitable to elephants because they remain incapable of ensuring so many other elephant capabilities. Circus spokespersons might think they are on fairly firm ground when it comes to the eighth capability, play. Surely, they would say, one cannot argue that elephants do not get to play in the circus because the entirety of their performances constitutes a form of play. I have no doubt some people are sincere in offering this argument, that they genuinely believe elephants are happy performing in the circus, that the elephants would choose to per­ form, if given a choice, and that their performance constitutes a type of play. Still, even if we were willing to grant that performance in a circus constituted a kind of play, it is an extremely impoverished sort of play com­ pared with elephant behavior observed in the wild (on elephant play, see Denis-Huot and Denis-Huot 2003, especially the chapters “The Young,” and “Drinking”). Furthermore, calling elephants’ performances “play” is somewhat disingenuous. People who say this sincerely are no doubt drawing an analogy between human artists and elephant performers. After all, whose life’s work is more like play than the musician or actor? What incredible freedom, compared to the work that most human beings perform! Although this may be true of human performers, the analogy to elephants is flawed. Elephants are incapable of making the choice to perform in the circus, of which they could have no concept unless forced into the circus. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that if an elephant could be made to understand the choice between living out a full life span in the wild with her family group and liv­ ing separated from her family to perform every night in the circus so that her human captors could make a profit, she would choose the circus. The element of force involved in making elephants into circus performers entails that their performances are work, not play. And it is work of the worst sort: it is drudgery, slavery. Play is, of necessity, free. That some elephants might manage to enjoy some of what they do is no argument against this point. A happy slave is still a slave. Thus, circuses are incapable of providing the necessary conditions for elephants to exercise the capacity for play, which is a capability essential to elephant flourishing. Finally, the ninth capability is control over the physical environment. How this capability is exercised in the wild depends on where elephants

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live, whether they must dig wells to obtain water, as some African elephants must, whether they create “rooms” in which to rest by making clearings in the forest, as some Asian elephants do, whether they must roam long dis­ tances to obtain sufficient food, or whether they can live in a comparatively small area. However particular groups of elephants at particular times exer­ cise this capability in the wild, a moment’s reflection makes it clear that no elephant can exercise this capability in the circus. To keep elephants captive in the way that circuses do, the elephants’ environment must be controlled by their captors. A circus cannot allow its elephants to control their envi­ ronment. Thus, this capability, too, must be thwarted if elephants are held captive in circuses. I conclude that the capabilities approach demonstrates that circuses are unsuited to elephants and, furthermore, that circuses cannot be made suit­ able for this species. Even if elephants can exercise some of their abilities if held captive in the circus, they will not be able to exercise most of them. Therefore, without worrying about whether elephants are rights-bearers or about how to maximize elephant utility, we can conclude that elephants ought not be held captive in circuses. We know that elephants have capabilities, and we know that, in many cases, elephants need a great deal of physical freedom to exercise them. Whether any zoo is capable of providing a degree of freedom sufficient for elephants to exercise their capabilities is a matter of contention, but there is no doubt that circuses are not so capable. Natural habitat zoos might be able to allow elephants to roam freely and to interact freely with other elephants and other species, but because circuses require elephants to per­ form, they cannot allow this and so cannot provide a proper environment for elephants. It is interesting that most of the arguments about whether elephants should be used by circuses are disputes over whether elephants are healthy, whether they have a normal life span, and in general, whether they suffer unnecessar­ ily. The capabilities approach as applied to elephants, while also concerned about these issues, focuses much of its argument on elephants’ freedom. This is perhaps not surprising because Nussbaum’s approach makes human autonomy a central value of the capabilities approach as applied to human being. Because circuses can keep elephants only by depriving them of free­ dom, they can never be suited to elephants.

Notes 1 A web search using the key words “elephants in circuses” will get thousands of hits, with information about elephant welfare, survival of elephants, legislation regarding elephants in captivity, and so on. Some of the English-language websites oriented to defending the interests of animals and stopping or reforming the use of elephants in circuses include: American Society for the Prevention of

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Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA; www.aspca.org); Animals in Print (www.all-crea­ tures.org/aip); Humane Society Legislative Fund (www.fund.org); In Defense of Animals (www.idausa.org); Animal Defense League (www.animaldefense.com); People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (www.circuses.com and www.cir­ cuswatch.com); Performing Animal Welfare Society (www.pawsweb.org); The Elephant Sanctuary (www.elephants.com); Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals—RSPCA. (www.rspca.org); Humane Society of the United States (www.hsus.org); Born Free Foundation (www.bornfree.org); Save the Elephants (www.savetheelephants.com); Captive Animals’ Protection Society (www.captiveanimals.org/elephants); and Coalette’s Connection for Action (www.ccforaction.com/circuses.htm). 2 My web searches turned up fewer organizations that include among their activi­ ties the defense of the use of elephants in circuses, but they are quite profes­ sional and state their positions clearly. Most devote some effort to answering the charges of animal rights and animal welfare organizations, as well as to argu­ ing against certain types of legislation written in opposition to the use of cap­ tive elephants for purposes of entertainment, among other things. Among the English-language organizations are Elephant Managers Association (www.ele­ phant-managets.com); National Animal Interest Alliance (www.naiaonline.org); Outdoor Amusement Business Association (www.oaba.org); and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation (www.elephant­ center.com). 3 Although her claims develop in some different directions from the position I take here, readers may also be interested to know that Nussbaum has applied the capabilities approach to nonhuman animals in various circumstances, even commenting to some extent on treatment of circus animals. Please see Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, a volume co-edited by Sunstein and Nussbaum (2004), and Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Nussbaum 2006a).

References Alexander, S. 2000. The Astonishing Elephant, New York: Random House. Denis-Huot, C., and Denis-Huot, M. 2003. The Art of being an Elephant, New York: Barnes & Noble. MacPherson, M. 2001. The Cowboy and his Elephant: the Story of a Remarkable Friendship, New York St. Martin’s Griffin. Mill, John Stuart. [1861] 2001. Utilitarianism, G. Sher (ed.). Indianapolis: Hackett. Moss, C. 1988. Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Fam­ ily, New York: Fawcett Columbine. Nussbaum, M. 2000. Women and Human Development: the Capabilities Approach, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. 2006a Frontiers of justice: Disability, nationality, species mem­ bership. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nussbaum, M. C. 2006b. The moral status of animals. The Chronicle of Higher Education. February 3. Available at http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=yd hw2skrrxq8xk3ll356hld63d5wv47s (accessed date not known). Payne, K. [1988] 1998. Silent Thunder: in the Presence of Elephants, New York: Penguin Books.

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Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Regan, T. 1983. The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley: University of California Press. Scigliano, E. 2002, Love, War, and Circuses: The Age-old Relationship between Elephants and Humans, Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Scully, M. 2002. Dominion: the Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Sen, A. 1999. Development as Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Singer, P. 1975. Animal Liberation: a New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals, New York: Avon Books. Slicer, D. 1996. Your daughter or your dog? A feminist assessment of the animal research issue, in K. Warren (ed.). Ecological Feminist Philosophies: 97–113, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sunstein, C. and Nussbaum, M. 2004. Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions, New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 29

View from the big top Why elephants belong in North American circuses Dennis Schmitt

The human/elephant relationship began at least 3,000 years ago. Elephants have been our partners in agriculture, industry, religion, war, and entertain­ ment. People are drawn to elephants, and elephants have seemed to thrive in captive environments that provide social interaction and physical and men­ tal stimulation. The assumption that elephants have been and will continue to be cared for in captivity is central to a discussion of the human-elephant relationship in the twenty-first century and beyond. Today while Asian elephant habitats and populations have been declining in their range states, the human population has been increasing and humanelephant conflicts have been escalating (Lair 1997). As a result, the utopian goal of returning significant numbers of elephants from Western countries to the wild is not currently realistic. The loss of rangeland habitat, combined with rapidly decreasing numbers of free-ranging elephant populations, indicates a need to establish a diversified strategy for elephant conservation, consisting of two main components: protection in the wild and propagation in captivity. Captive propagation is essential for establishing a metapopulation, for the promotion of in situ conservation efforts, for research, and for education. A circus brought the first Asian elephant to North America (Keele and Dimeo-Ediger 2000). Circuses in North America have been caring for and managing elephants since the late 1880s. Since then, and especially in the past twenty years, understanding of elephants and their unique character­ istics and needs has advanced tremendously. My own experience with cir­ cuses in North America as a veterinarian and research scientist is limited to the last seventeen years; this chapter draws heavily on that experience. Mod­ ern researchers, elephant managers, and trainers have now developed con­ siderable understanding of elephant physiology and well-being, especially in studies supported by institutions in North America, including circuses. Elephant well-being in North America continues to improve daily as a result of communication among groups responsible for elephant care. In addition to providing entertainment to large numbers of people annu­ ally, circuses in North America have been active in promoting conservation

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initiatives for research and education about elephants. Today circuses continue to improve elephants’ well-being by adopting standards of care appropriate for elephants in circuses and traveling exhibitions (Outdoor Amusement Business Association [OABA] 2002). The continued improve­ ment of captive elephant care is dependent on the adoption of standards by the elephant industry, including circuses and private individuals using elephants for traveling exhibitions. The activities of the Circus Unit of the OABA provide one example of the industry adopting animal care and train­ ing guidelines for performing and exhibited animals (OABA 2002).

Elephant care and husbandry under the big top Circuses care for elephants throughout their lifespan, from birth through adulthood and retirement. Zoos and circuses in North America produced fifty-two viable Asian elephant offspring from 1991 to 2002 (Keele and Lewis 2003). One of these institutions, African Lion Safari, could be classified as both a zoo and a circus institution as some of the elephants have occasion­ ally been used in circuses when the safari park is closed during the winter. Eight viable calves were born at African Lion Safari during 1991–2002. If these calves are not counted in the tally, then twenty-six calves were born to circus institutions and nineteen in zoos between 1991 and 2002. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Center for Elephant Conservation (Ringling Bros. CEC) had five calves born from April 2001 to May 2002, exempli­ fying the potential for reproductive success for other elephant-breeding institutions. A number of factors contributed to the Ringling Bros. CEC’s success. The staff closely monitored the females’ reproductive cycles; used multiple, healthy bulls as studs; and attended to the physiological and social needs of the females. Contributing to this success was that a number of the dams were not first-time mothers and therefore were competent and expe­ rienced at giving birth and raising calves. Two of these births represented the fifth calf for their mothers. The remaining three births were the second, third, and fourth calves for their respective mothers. The robustness of the future Asian elephant population of North America depends on the co-operation of all elephant holding institutions to maintain a viable captive population. Only thirty-five to forty elephant cows are cur­ rently producing calves in North America. This gives a sense of urgency to all who are committed to a sustainable Asian elephant population on this continent. Whether they are held by circuses or zoos, management of Asian elephants for breeding should be a co-operative effort to maximize the diversity of possible matings in North America. The zoo community’s decision to work separately from the circus community is the single biggest impediment to captive reproduction of Asian elephants in North America. Managed separately, the number of experienced breeding elephants in a

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single pool and, hence, of possible pairings would be greatly reduced. Cir­ cuses and private institutions currently hold at least twelve male Asian ele­ phants, which can contribute in significant ways to understanding semen physiology and genetic diversity of the captive population. Elephants are well cared for by most circuses in North America. I am very familiar with two large circuses that have cared for over 100 elephants throughout those elephants’ lifetimes. Carson and Barnes Circus and Ringling Bros. Circus have large modern elephant facilities with outstanding, knowledgeable pro­ fessional staff providing for the elephants’ care. A studbook is a chronologi­ cal database of individuals of a specific species or subspecies held in animal collections in a specific geographic region over a particular time period. The book contains information on sex, birth and death dates, pedigrees and institutional transfers. An examination of the 2000 North American Asian elephant studbook reveals that the oldest Asian elephants in recent years have been circus elephants (Keele and Dimeo-Ediger 2000). The old­ est Asian male was Tommy (estimated birth 1944) and the oldest female was Suzy (estimated birth 1925; Keele and Dimeo-Ediger 2000). Elephants retire from circus life and live out their lives at zoos, retirement centers, and sanctuaries (Feld 2002). Some have found new homes as companions for individually housed elephants in other institutions. These well-traveled retirees make excellent companions, as they are socially adept and integrate easily and quickly to new elephants, caretakers, and facilities. The physical fitness and mental health of circus elephants is enhanced by the physical activity of rehearsal and performing, as well as by the novel environments encountered as they travel throughout North America. Physi­ cal fitness is difficult to evaluate in elephants. However, as I observe cir­ cus elephants in the course of my veterinary duties, few appear obese and most appear to have benefited from the physical exercise of performance, which provides the opportunity to develop muscle tone and to use the entire body. The mental health of elephants is enhanced during performances that require timing, co-ordination with other elephants and performers, and adjustments to novel environments. In my estimation, these activities enrich the elephants’ lives and prevent boredom, a significant concern of elephant managers who maintain animals in static enclosed environments. As a veterinarian, I am often asked to examine elephants in circuses, zoos, and sanctuaries throughout North America. Most elephant holding institu­ tions carry out a daily routine of elephant care, including several behavioral components. I find most circus elephants are in general more accommodat­ ing of complete veterinary exams than most zoo elephants because their handlers spend more time interacting with them than most elephant keepers in zoos. From my observations, circus elephant handlers spend more time with their elephants than do zookeepers. In addition to training, they concentrate

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on improving elephant care and well-being by frequent grooming and foot­ pad inspections and continuous observation of their elephants. Circuses are active participants in several research projects benefiting captive as well as free-ranging elephants. When circus elephants need medication, veterinari­ ans can give them injections easily, and if oral medication is indicated, circus elephants are often more compliant than most zoo elephants. Perhaps this results from the variation of their diets when they travel. In my experience, circus elephants generally do not view novel food items and environmental changes with as much suspicion as do elephants kept in zoos.

Elephant performances and training Elephant performances in the circus are a series of behaviors derived from natural abilities. For instance, playful elephants in the wild sometimes stand on their heads or sit when they wallow in mud. They might roll a log over to a tree to step on so they can reach a branch with their trunk. In training ele­ phants for performances, natural behavior is modified and these modifica­ tions are then reinforced through repetition, reward, and praise. An elephant presentation is a well-choreographed and rehearsed performance involving great co-ordination among elephants, trainers, human performers, and sup­ port staff, including stagehands and elephant handlers (Figure 29.1). The patience, time, and dedication that go into training elephants result in trust­ ing relationships between the elephants and trainers. These relationships,

Figure 29.1 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey elephants. Source: Photograph courtesy of Feld Entertainment Inc., Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey® and The Greatest Show on Earth® by permission of Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc.

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formed over a long period of time, forge the bonds of respect that elephants and their human caretakers have for one another. An example of this involves Mark Oliver Gebel with Ringling Bros. Mark grew up with the elephants he now trains and spent his life learning from his father, Gunther Gebel-Williams, who worked with some of those same elephants for more than thirty years. The often overlooked reality is that animals weighing over 4,000 kilograms don’t do anything they don’t want to do. They perform because of the strong bonds of trust between them­ selves and their trainers. Circuses are pioneers in developing and adopting advanced new training methods for elephants as well as other animals. Circuses participate actively in the continuous development of the body of knowledge regarding elephant behavior and training. Just as veterinarians are gaining more knowledge of elephant physiology, circuses are incorporating new training methods— ones that assimilate such new scientific knowledge—into training protocols and husbandry techniques for elephants. The consequence is continually improving elephant well-being.

Standards of animal care for traveling animal exhibitions Adoption of standards for elephant care and well-being is one benchmark of advances in elephant management. Today’s circuses and private indi­ viduals using elephants for traveling exhibitions have adopted standards of care. In 2002, the Circus Unit of the OABA adopted recommended stand­ ards that have formalized animal care standards in the circus industry and other performance-based operations (OABA 2002). In addition, some large circuses have their own very strict animal care standards. For example, the animal care standards Ringling Bros. has instituted (see FAQ: about Animals and Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey at www.feldentertain­ ment.com/pr/pressroom.asp) meet or exceed those contained in the United States Department of Agriculture Animal Welfare Act and Animal Care Regulations (see US Code 2006a Title 7; and US Code 2006b Title 9) as well as the elephant care standards incorporated into the Accreditation Standards of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA—formerly, the American Zoo and Aquarium Association; see AZA 2003). Ringling Bros. has a full-time veterinary staff, veterinary technicians who travel with the animals, and on-call veterinarians in every city they visit. Ringling Bros. continually builds on its experience of over 136 years of working with elephants to do what is best for the elephants in their care. The experience of those who live with and care for their elephants twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year is a priceless asset for the elephants in their care and for the elephant community.

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Education and the big top The connection between a live elephant and the public is undeniable. People remember the first time they visited a circus and saw a live elephant. How many people remember and talk about the first time they read about an elephant in a book or saw an elephant on TV? By traveling to locations throughout North America, circuses allow the public, especially those who do not live near a zoo, to discover the unique characteristics of elephants and to interact with elephants in a positive fam­ ily environment. Elephants make special appearances as ambassadors for their circus, in local media events, public ‘open houses’, and other special activities that celebrate the circus’s arrival. These activities also build aware­ ness of all the other elephants in the world. Elephant rides provide direct elephant-human contact while exercising the elephants. Some circuses use public engagement with elephants to educate the public about elephant physiology and elephant conservation. As an example, in 2006, the Ringling Bros.’ Blue Unit (one of its three traveling circus units) focused throughout the show on the education of the public regarding Asian elephants as an endangered species and on elephant conservation as a priority.

Contributions of circuses to elephant research and conservation In addition to providing entertainment to large numbers of people annually, circuses in North America have been active in promoting elephant conser­ vation and research. For example, research into the parameters necessary for safe, ethical elephant travel has improved conditions of elephants as they travel from venue to venue. Ted Friend of Texas A&M University, a respected scholar of domestic horse transportation welfare issues, has inves­ tigated the responses of elephants during transport, with funding from the US Department of Agriculture (Toschano et al. 2001). Friend’s study was performed in co-operation with circuses interested in documenting the well­ being of their elephants, and the information has been instrumental for eval­ uating physiological responses of elephants during transportation in summer and winter temperature extremes. The study revealed that elephants respond to extremes in environmental temperatures during transport by using their own internal mechanisms to maintain their body temperatures within nor­ mal limits. In North America’s large circuses, elephants consistently travel in well-designed and well-maintained semitrailers or railcars. Income generated from circus elephants is being used for the benefit of all elephants. For example, the contributions of circuses have been instru­ mental in developing successful artificial insemination techniques for Asian elephants. In 1997, George Carden Circus International provided me with ultrasound equipment that was used to evaluate the reproductive tracts

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of captive elephants in North America and Europe. In 2002, Carson and Barnes Circus, through the Endangered Ark Foundation, provided match­ ing funds for the purchase of portable ultrasound equipment that has been used in field conditions for captive elephants all over the world. In 2003, elephant veterinarians from throughout India used this equipment in work­ shops about using ultrasound to evaluate elephant health and reproduction. These workshops were funded by the International Elephant Foundation (IEF), through a grant to the India-based Project Elephant. Three US cir­ cuses are active supporters of the IEF, along with several zoos and private elephant holding institutions. The IEF funded a study I carried out, which focused on optimizing freez­ ing-thawing protocols for African elephant semen. The results of that Afri­ can elephant project are currently being used for the artificial insemination of some African elephants in North America. More recently, the Ringling Bros. CEC funded my two-year investigation to develop methods of freezing Asian elephant semen. All pregnancies achieved from artificial insemination in elephants, to date, have resulted from fresh-cooled semen. The efficiency and convenience of Asian elephant artificial insemination could be greatly improved with the availability of frozen-thawed semen. These projects have yielded valuable information that could help optimize the success of artifi­ cial insemination in Asian elephants. The projects provide terrific examples of how research with elephants in the care of humans can advance efforts to increase genetic diversity among all captive elephants worldwide and per­ haps in the future among some isolated free-ranging populations. Both in situ and ex situ research projects benefit the well-being of cap­ tive and free-ranging elephants—even when, as happens in range country situations, the demarcation between captive and free-ranging elephants is sometimes difficult to delineate. Member circuses have supported several IEF projects that have focused on both in situ and ex situ Asian and Afri­ can elephants. These projects have provided new understanding regarding behavior, physiology, and conservation strategies. The IEF has partnered on in situ projects in India, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, and twenty-nine African countries. By 2006, IEF had distributed more than $870,000 for elephant conservation and research programs (J. Lehhhardt, personal communica­ tion). Some IEF funding derived from donations from circus patrons. From 2001 to 2004, for example, circus patrons attending dress rehearsals of Rin­ gling Bros. had the opportunity to earmark their admission fee as a gift to the IEF, directly providing conservation and research dollars for elephants. Members of the OABA have donated directly to the IEF and some OABA members provide educational materials about elephants, and a pamphlet about the IEF, to circus fans attending their shows. Through these kinds of collaborations and partnerships, elephant welfare and conservation will continue to evolve.

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Central to any discussion of the ethics of human-elephant relationships in the twenty-first century and beyond is the assumption that elephants have been and will continue to be cared for in captivity. One place they will con­ tinue to receive this care is in circuses. In addition to providing entertainment to many people, circuses in North America have become more active in pro­ moting conservation of and research and education about elephants. Several circuses are directly and indirectly supporting research projects to benefit both captive elephants and free-ranging elephants, and major circuses have adopted stringent standards of elephant care. The physical and mental health of North American circus elephants is enhanced by the physical activity of rehearsal and performing as well as by the novel environments encountered as they travel throughout the continent. Circus elephants provide a handson, one-on-one experience that cannot be replaced by interaction through television, Internet, or movies.

References Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA). 2003. Standards for elephant manage­ ment and care, adopted 21 March 2001, updated 5 May 2003. Silver Spring, MD: AZA. Feld, K. 2002. Address to the AZA. Journal of the Elephant Managers Association, 13: 137–43. Keele, M.N. and Dimeo-Ediger, N. 2000. Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) North American Regional Studbook, Portland: Oregon Zoo and American Zoo and Aquarium Association. Keele, M., and Lewis, K. 2003. Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) North American Regional Studbook Update. Portland: Oregon Zoo. Lair, R.C. 1997. Gone Astray: The Care and Management of the Asian Elephant in Domesticity, Bangkok: United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific. Outdoor Amusement Business Association. 2002. Animal Welfare and Education Resource Materials, Winter Park, FL: OABA (Circus Unit). Toschano, M.J., Friend, T.H., and Nevill, C.H. 2001. Environmental conditions and body temperature of circus elephants transported during relatively high and low temperature conditions, Journal of the Elephant Managers Association, 12: 115–49. US Code. 2006a. Animal Welfare Act of 1966. Title 7—Agriculture, Chapter 54, transportation, sale, and handling of certain animals, sections 2131–59. Available at www.access.gpo.gov/uscode/title7/chapter54_.html (access date unknown). US Code. 2006b. Animal Welfare Act of 1966. Title 9—Animals and Animal Products, Chapter 1—Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Department of Agriculture, Part 2—Regulations. Available at www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/ waisidx_06/9cfr2_06.html (access date unknown).

Part III

Presents

Chapter 30

Female circus performers and art The shift to creative art forms and its implications Magali Sizorn

This chapter considers the roles and performances of circus women as good examples of aesthetic, axiological and social transformations that are occur­ ring in the present multifaceted ‘world’ (Becker 1982) of the circus. Our intention is not to identify a social process of women’s emancipation, nor is it to target the changes in status – especially in the professional realm – due to the shift from family-run circuses to circus companies, for example. Although these social elements played a major role in the transformation of the circus into an art form, I will rather emphasize the performance activity of women, both in the ring and on stage. Yet this analysis will not be an aesthetic one (Tait 2005), but rather an ethnosociological one, and will be centred on the transformations of repre­ sented identity (both for women and artists). This research is based on sev­ eral field studies conducted first in 2001 and 2002 in France, with women clowns, and then between 2002 and 2006 with male and female trapeze artists (Sizorn 2013). In these field studies, I combine ethnographic obser­ vations and interviews with artists. The analysis is thus based on empirical findings, with a ‘pragmatic’ point of view. Artists taking part in this research are quoted here by their first names. Two types of circuses are recognized today: ‘traditional’ and ‘contem­ porary’. The distinction is not always clear: the borders between them are porous and permeable. But first I am going to address this distinction by focusing on the ‘aesthetic divorce’ (Guy 1998) that can be observed. I will do this by using the sexual and gender identities that are expressed on stage as indicators. However, although there is today a sharp awareness of the boundaries, we need to understand that they often overlap.

The classical circus and sexual difference Ever since the middle of the twentieth century, the traditional circus has been a place for displaying technical expertise in performances described in a clearly identified classic rhetoric. Sylvestre Barré-Meinzer (2004) ana­ lysed the discourse of performers in what she called the ‘circus of nostalgia’.

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She observed that traditional circus performers are very much aware of the well-defined social codes, pertaining to its image. The imagery of circus is thereby perpetuated and presented as ‘authentic.’ Among the codes are the rituals for staging sexual identities. If we take the example of trapeze artists, we see clearly that working today in the traditional circus implies the adoption of specific stenography and aesthetic codes. These codes impose a framework (the act), and an ordering of the expected figures in such a way that, for example, the expec­ tation of seeing new heights of risk-taking and feats of virtuosity is instilled. Beauty (plastic and gestural) is well defined, and the distribution of roles is sex-based to accentuate the differentiation of men and women, and exhibit sexual and gender binarism. In the traditional circus, therefore, the creation of productions depends on the sex of the artist and generally heightens the differences between men and women (except for clowns). Although the technical work of male and female trapeze artists should attenuate any differences (all trapeze performers have great balance and the strength to lift their own weight), costumes and the way of moving tend to reinforce them. Features with sexual connotations are added to the costumes, over-codifying as feminine a physique that may appear to be too ambiguous and insufficiently conforming to the canons of femininity, for example, smiles and other feminine attributes, such as flex­ ibility, slenderness, light weight, and so on. They conform to the image and the ‘rules’ of womanhood. Clara explains: The costumes I use hide my muscles. We’re not supposed to show them. It’s not the aim…. The performance must flow and give the impression of being fluid, it has to look easy. So, my shoulders are never uncovered. It would be too shocking, because we are extremely muscular.1 So the ambiguity of the body and its muscles must be artificially hidden, either by clothes or by movements that suggest ease, simplicity, and light­ ness. This identity is thus embodied by the artists’ costumes and codified appearance, suggesting that the women are objects of desire (fishnet stock­ ings, spike heels, and bodysuits) as seen in cabarets. This codified eroticism is displayed today in such a way that it is suitable for the whole family. The use of gender (feminine for women) reflects the traditional division in male/female roles and the respective attributes, in the same way that women are presented in advertisements as analysed by Erving Goffman (Goffman, 1976); these artists merely conventionalize our social conven­ tions, the conventions that we sometimes enact outside in the real life, and the conventions that compose the set of signs that traditional circus audi­ ences expect to see.

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The relationships between men and women and their respective identities are defined by an over-differentiation and ‘hyper-sexualization’ of the body, whose characteristics (buttocks, breasts, curved spines for women and mus­ cles for men) are given prime importance. Roles are distributed in a binary organization and according to a strict sex/gender convention imposed both on the trapeze artists and spectators alike. The artists, in turn, perpetuate these by ‘performing’ the roles night after night.

Contemporary productions With the development of ‘new’ and ‘contemporary’ circus forms, some art­ ists have rethought the gender-based codes and aesthetics of traditional acts and have proposed other images of men and women. We have thus seen a diversification in the staging of the body from the hyper-ritualization of fem­ ininity to a certain lack of distinctive features between male and female. This occurs first by an undifferentiated investment in techniques (even though some techniques remain traditionally masculine or feminine, such as juggling for men and contortion for women) and roles (some women today are catchers or porters, others are now clowns). It also occurs in a body presentation that is devoid of any traditional codes. Céline explained, for example, how she wanted to break away from the image of the smiling and ‘graceful’ trapeze artist: ‘There’s a side to the traditional circus that I see as a lie. And it’s all about this smiling, yet at the same time they’re doing things that really, really hurt.’2 To come back to the example of aerial work, it imposes a systematic involve­ ment in traditional values with masculine and feminine connotations (solid/ fragile, strong/weak, heavy/light, stiff/flexible) by its internal logic, whether it be conscious or sub conscious. The de facto presence of a set of gender based values can be troubling and this allows female trapeze artists who want to distance themselves from identity clichés, according to which men are mascu­ line and powerful catchers and women are light and fragile, to display a far broader palette of identities. The images of the female trapeze artist’s body – for example, a very muscular body – can thus introduce a troubling element. In this sense, the difficulty of the trapezist’s practice in terms of the strength and the pain itself becomes meaningful: for example spectators can hear laboured breathing and spectators can see the intensity of the effort in the show ‘I look up, I look down…’ by the Moglice-Von Verx Company. From the top of their structure, the two artists grip each other or the wall, hang on, climb and drop against a background of sounds that amplifies the breathless­ ness and fatigue of falling bodies, bodies that could be women or men. By letting audiences see the fundamental relationship with the aerial apparatus that develops during the apprenticeship period, these artists do not systematically conform to traditional binarism, but instead they explore the possibilities of playing with the gender values that are inherent in trapeze work.

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Marc, of the French group named Collectif AOC illustrates this idea so that in approaching trapeze work as the deployment of motor skills, as opposed to a traditionally defined form, artists can go beyond the male/ female split that was constructed in traditional acts: ‘I think that we always approach the trapeze work as a technique which is exclusively considered as something physical’. He adds: ‘We don’t approach it, really, from that point of view, by thinking of men and women’.3 The dangling bodies of the trapeze duo in the Collectif AOC show ‘Ques­ tion de directions’ are described as possessing a certain indistinction, with the male partner as being ‘partly a man, partly a woman, partly an angel’. The image of an angel, used in another show ‘La Synkope du 7’ is interesting because, despite the persistence of a sex-based role distribution (Marc, the male, catches his female partner), it opens up the gender scope (masculine and feminine) through words. It shows a use of technique that goes beyond traditionally and sexually defined aesthetics. To return to Erving Goffman’s ‘gender displays’ (Goffman 1979), those productions break with the traditional model and in fact propose a diver­ sification in rituals. By rendering the different techniques and the approach of the trapezists more complex, new relationships between the sexes and between individuals are proposed in the ‘contemporary’ circus.

The promotion of the circus as an art form In marking the distinction between traditional and contemporary circus, it is also important to notice how this distinction was established. This is important for today’s circus and especially for the French circus. In France, it started in the late 1970s, when cultural institutions recognized the con­ temporary circus as a distinct art form. In the 1980s, a debate started as to what a circus should be, with clashing arguments on how to define the circus as an art form. The role of women in the ring or on stage is a part of this process in the sense that sexual identities express values and reflect aestheti­ cal and ethical transformations. In the context of the utopian thinking of the 1970s, several artistic practices developed (Lachaud, 1999), including the ‘new’ circus with its other values, other aesthetics, and other ethical sensitivity. For some this meant a return to ‘authentic’ popular performances, for others it meant a renewal of the theatre by getting closer to the audience. Yet for others it also meant revisit­ ing the imagery of the circus by giving up, for example, the animal shows and the endless search for ever greater feats of daring. Simultaneously, the role of women changed. We even saw the creation of circus exclusively com­ posed of women: Barbara Vieille’s Cirque de Barbarie. More generally, the emergence of a circus first qualified as ‘new’, and later as ‘contemporary’, is part of the trend of ‘artification’, or ‘the shift from non-art to art’ (Shapiro, 2012). From the 1970s onward, the French circus has undergone a profound transformation with many upheavals, articulated

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around a struggle for the circus to be considered as art form. This struggle apparently has never been explicitly formulated. Two simultaneous events were fundamental from the 1970s onward: the opening of schools for the circus arts and the emergence of a ‘new’ circus expressing other values and aesthetics, close to theatre and contemporary dance. The recognition of contemporary circus was based on several elements: new aesthetics through other relationships with techniques, virtuosity, expressions of physicality; new media and the Arts de la Piste journal, founded in 1996; a ‘new’, less family-oriented audience closer to that of the theatre and contemporary dance and the willingness to use ‘new’ spaces for the circus arts such as stages and theatres; and finally, a new status for circus performers, who are now considered as recognized creators or what is termed authors thanks to a French decree passed in 1985. And we can see today a marked increase in the attention given to ‘circus writing’ as it pertains to performances labelled ‘contemporary’. The signs of what I call artification are in fact a shift from circus to circus arts, the use of the word ‘contemporary’, as well as legal, institutional, spatial, and embodied dimensions. Recent circus history is thus marked by a progressive distinction of genres. This situation has led to new conven­ tions in the way circus arts are defined. The circus performer today can be thought of not only as virtuoso, but also as a creative artist, an author of the act, of the spectacle, of an artistic world.

Labeling and artistic recognition Two aesthetic genres have been identified and labeled by their performers and institutions: the traditional circus and the contemporary circus. Only the contemporary circus has truly been viewed as artistic in France, to the same extent as theatre and dance. However, although we have seen that the contemporary circus arts trans­ gress the rules and break with conventions, it is important to note that the arts labelled contemporary are in fact extremely varied. Some are clearly based in the present, whereas others show a strong tendency toward hybrid­ ization and striving to move beyond the existing norms. From this artistic palette, the productions of the various artistic genres range from classic (tra­ ditional circus) to contemporary, and the boundaries and floating definitions of these categories prompt us to think in terms of a continuum of styles. Traditional circus has a relatively well identified ‘classic style’ and appears as a kind of conservatory for forms and techniques. It is based on the repeti­ tion of acts or on creation of works that recall the images of the circus of yesteryear, in harmony with the expectations of an audience that has come to see a patrimonial spectacle. Working in the traditional circus thus means conforming to its codes for the stage and aesthetics, which is what Elsa, who works in both traditional circus and the new forms, does. ‘The company is

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really important’, she says, ‘but I still love to get away from it. Doing other things elsewhere, the traditional stuff, covered in sequins – I love it!’4 The other styles to a great extent play off these codes and conventions. The ‘nostalgic style’ is used by artists that are either traditional or contem­ porary, depending on the labeling. In these spectacles, like ‘Les plus vieux trapézistes du monde’ (‘The Oldest Trapeze Artists in the World’) by the Cirque du Docteur Paradi, traditional codes are taken up in a production coloured by the past: the succession of acts, and the distribution of male/ female roles (notably a woman trapeze artist in a wig and fishnet stockings). The ‘re-appropriation style’ is a redefinition of circus aesthetics (by aban­ doning, for example, the over-differentiation of sexes), without necessarily rejecting all reference to classic forms and their techniques. The ‘distinction style’ has fundamentally broken with the traditional repertory and its clas­ sic style. This break is seen in the redefinition of identities, the values com­ municated in the ring, and the techniques. This last style, which does not exhibit codes but rather diverts them or goes beyond them, corresponds to the definition of a contemporary ‘art’. For the artists preferring contemporary forms, the physically beautiful vir­ tuoso and brilliant technique no longer describe the sum total of the work: art is expressed in other ways. We see a discursive and ethical distancing, in a process of surpassing of the traditional criteria of evaluation. Mélissa Von Vépy and Chloé Moglia (Moglice-Von-Verx Company), for example, use this distancing from the character catalogued as ‘the’ trapeze artist as a means for reflection, a stimulus for their process of creation, as seen in ‘Un certain endroit du ventre’, and they display other corporealities. They focus far less on the art­ ist’s silhouette and shape and more on the movement and the risk of falling. Women clowns also reflect this distancing from the traditional image of women in the ring. The work of Marie-Aude Jauze and her clown char­ acter, Angelina, is a good example of appropriating trapeze acts from the traditional conventions. It is important to recall that clown work has long been a part of an essentially masculine universe, and this is still true today. In fact, the first women clowns like Annie Fratellini conformed to a model of ‘neither man nor woman’. Whether white-face or Auguste, they drew their costuming from the conventional panoply (red nose and oversized shoes for the Auguste, white face and bag for the White Clown) to play with the ambiguity of the clown, just like the men. The androgyny is nevertheless sexually coloured: the Auguste is fragile but remains a character that looks like a man, and the White Clown, despite appearing feminine because of his costume, is traditionally embodied by a man who calls the Auguste to order. But ‘contemporary’ clowns have revisited these identities, especially without the red nose and bags. Marie-Aude Jauze as Angelina works in traditional rings, street spectacles and the contemporary circus, and she deliberately presents another image of the clown and especially of women. She tells of the pleasure of playing with conventions:

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Acting like those nosy, loudmouth women but doing it on the trapeze, I have a ball playing an idiot. So somebody can say ‘yeah right, the image of women!’ But I could not care less about the image I give of women. I say ‘yeah, I like to play stupid women!’ Angelina she’s that stupid, busy­ body woman; like the bearded lady in ‘Douze balles dans la peau’, she’s a truly awful type and I only do truly awful women or idiots!5 This treatment of femininity makes people laugh because of the gap between the expected smiling graceful trapeze artist (‘feminine’) and the reality that we see, which is somewhere between a stereotyped femininity and masculin­ ity: deep voice, gracelessness, sequins and chignon: I do the exact opposite of what most trapeze artists do…. Keeping a gorgeous smile plastered on their faces that helps everyone to forget the scabs and bruises and that says ‘see, it’s marvelous, it’s so easy and it’s so beautiful’. And Angelina, she says it hurts.6 Angelina defiles the traditional association woman/beauty/femininity, the conventional image of female trapeze artists and really of all women in the ring. Following the example of the Carnival described by Mikhail Bakhtin (1968), clown acts often express an invitation to transgression and some­ times to violence. At times, these acts even impose transgression. In the tra­ ditional ring, the transgression is contained, whereas on the contemporary stage, norms and codes are constantly flouted. We are witnessing a change in a world, within the worlds of art (Becker, 1982). Women in the contemporary ring work in terms of a double dis­ tinction: distinction regarding traditional circus aesthetics and distinction regarding the social norms that fix the place and image of women. Playing with these conventions gives rise to a further convention, not concerned with the shape of the production but rather with maintaining an attitude of questioning and constantly challenging the codes in force. This occurs particularly in the display of multiple identities. I do not present here a history or a sociology of the status of women in the circus, for example analyzing how they are paid, their financial stabil­ ity, their access to professional careers and so on. But I propose to identify several steps that can be associated with the process of gender equality. Each successive step does not affect the preceding step, and there are several coexisting types. The first step is sex-based differentiation, inside and outside of the ring. Certainly women have always been invited into the ring and at times they have performed in acts that encourage them to appropriate the masculine gender (in acts of strength for example). However, role distribution remains essentially determined by sex. This is often justified on essentialist grounds. ‘Girls, they’re just more aesthetic, more beautiful’, according to Kevin (from a traditional circus family).

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The second step is the appropriation by women of all the roles formerly given to men such as technicians, clowns, and so on. This step, which affirms the equality between men and women, is accompanied by other transforma­ tions, notably legal: female ring workers are today recognized by their own names, and not just as spouses. In the third and last step, which is related to the creativity of the contem­ porary circus, an ideal indifference to the sex of a performer is achieved, so that ‘the person’ is most important, especially the person as creator. Differences of course persist between men and women: professionalizing circus work and opening schools for circus training tend to favour men, as in the case of other artistic professions (Salamero, 2009). Maternity also has a different impact on the careers of circus artists, whether men or women, as ‘body workers’. But the ideal of no differentiation – and a given world functions on the basis of its myths and ‘common understanding’ – marks the passage to the individualization of contemporary circus creation. This ideal does not mean a negation of sexual identity. To give an example, for the artists I have met, the staging of an androgynous body, whether carried out or described as aspiration, remains problematic. The use of technique, degree of risk-taking and creativity are all highly individual, and circus people consider their work as artists to be profoundly related to who they are as people. From this standpoint, although a lessening of sexual identities is possible in order to simply display the body in movement, some artists also explore the fuzzy distinctions between author, artist and per­ former in the performance by colouring the body and the technical aspects of performance with the sexual and gender identity of the artists and their problems, inner lives, and uniqueness. Chloé Moglia and Mélissa Von Vépy underline the difference between their work as ‘trapeze artists’ and what they experience as dancers, while still insisting that male artists can interpret their duo act: ‘This is not about putting bodies on stage, like the FattoumiLamoureux dance company, where they really work on bodies, on physical matter. For us, it’s more about humans than about bodies. It’s not really about characters, more like types.’7 These artists also play with gender codes by exploring possibilities (an obvious woman, but muscular, strong, falling, and fragile). They explore contemporary aesthetic codes close to those of contemporary dance by challenging and transgressing norms. The transgres­ sions target the classic style, with the expected images of female trapeze performers and all ‘women’, by exhibiting ordinary – almost – bodies that are an unsettling mix of masculine and feminine. The ‘purified corporeali­ ties,’ stripped of all embellishment become a modernist ideal in the words of the acrobat, Marie-Anne Michel (who works on the Chinese pole), by allowing ‘access to the core’ of the ‘human being’ in his or her fullness, with all strengths and weaknesses.8 In the contemporary circus, other corporealities are developed, ranging from the relatively traditional staging of the feminine body (I’m thinking of the contortionist of the Cirque Plume, for example) to the hermaphroditic

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bodies of the bearded ladies, with all the figures that soften the distinction between men and women in between, lessening without necessarily deny­ ing or refuting the difference. By redefining the identity of the artist, the set of norms that affects the identities in the ring of men and women alike is thrown into question. Most important is always the quest for originality, for the truly remarkable. The creative renaissance of the circus occurred through the ‘author-isation’ of those who produce circus. It is therefore not surprising that in the discourses and ideals that bind this new ‘world’, sexual identity does not trump the identity of the person-artist-creator.

Notes 1 From an interview with the author during research conducted with trapeze artists 2002–6. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 From an interview with the author during research conducted with trapeze art­ ists, 2002–6. 5 From an interview with the author during research conducted with clowns, 2001–2. 6 From an interview with the author during research conducted with trapeze art­ ists, 2002–6.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. (1968) Rabelais and His World, translated by Helene Iswolsky, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Barré-Meinzer, Sylvestre. (2004) Le cirque classique, un spectacle actuel, Paris, France: L’Harmattan. Becker, Howard Saul. (1982) Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Goffman, Erving. (1976) ‘Gender advertisements’, Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 3(2): 69–154. Goffman, Erving. (1979) Gender Advertisements, London: Macmillan. Guy, Jean-Michel. (1998) ‘La transfiguration du cirque’, Théâtre Aujourd’hui n° 7, ‘Le cirque contemporain, la piste et la scène’, Paris: CNDP/MNERT/Ministère de la culture et de la communication: 26–51. Salamero, Emilie. (2009) ‘Devenir artiste de cirque aujourd’hui: espace des écoles et socialisation professionnelle’, Doctoral Thesis, Université Toulouse III. Shapiro, R. (2012) ‘Avant-Propos’, in R. Shapiro and N. Heinich (eds), De l’artification. Enquêtes sur le passage à l’art, Paris: EHESS: 20–1. Sizorn, Magali. (2013) Trapézistes, Rennes: Presse Universitaire de Rennes. Tait, Peta. (2005) Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, London: Routledge.

Chapter 31

The resilient body in social circus Father Jesus Silva, Boris Cyrulnik and Peter A. Levine Katie Lavers

It’s the excitedly shining bright eyes, the experience of success. Every time they learn something they are smiling from ear to ear. It’s a pleas­ ure to watch. It’s good to see. (Outreach Youth Worker talking about social circus, cited in Kinnunen and Lidman 2013: 55)

Introduction Social circus takes the notion of circus for everybody, the tenet of new cir­ cus, and applies it to a radical agenda – using circus as a tool to promote social transformation. One of the uses of social circus is to promote heal­ ing and recovery from trauma, and usually, but not always, social circus is undertaken with young people, often youth in perilous situations. One of the earliest examples of social circus would seem to be the work of a young Spanish Jesuit priest in the 1950s named Father Jesus Silva who founded a community for orphans and young people living on the streets in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. Looking for ways to fund this community that he called City of Boys, he drew on his family heritage of circus and created a circus school that later led to the formation of a circus company, El Circo de Los Muchachos. This company featured circus acts performed by the young people living in City of Boys, and it went on to great success, touring widely. This chapter explores the concept of social circus and how and why it is effective. It brings together the work of two thinkers on trauma, and the application of their ideas as a way of explaining how the physicality of learn­ ing circus skills assists young people affected by trauma. The ideas of French psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik are referred to in the manual for Cirque du Monde instructors entitled The Phoenix: Building the Concept of Resilience into Cirque Du Monde Practices (Morelli and Lafortune 2003). However in this writing I have brought Cyrulnik’s thinking about recovery from trauma together with the ideas of American psychologist Peter A. Levine to create the

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notion of the resilient body as a principle that can be seen to start to explain the successes of social circus. The chapter goes on to outline a number of dif­ ferent examples of social circus as a global movement.

Towards a definition of social circus In 2002, delegates from twelve different countries met together in La Seynesur-Mer in France to take part in a round table meeting. These delegates all shared a strong commitment to the idea that circus can act as an effec­ tive way to help young people in perilous situations. One of their major objectives was to select a name for the work and practice with which they were involved, that is, the bringing together of circus and social work to assist young people at risk. They initially had some difficulties in coming to agreement, some delegates preferring the name ‘community circus’ and some ‘circus and social work,’ but eventually they all agreed on the name ‘social circus’ (Bolton 2004: 168). The document they produced, which they entitled ‘The Charter of the Creation of the United Nations of Social Circus,’ states: We, individuals and institutions representing twelve countries (Australia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Spain, France, Guinea, Ireland, Morocco, Holland) united on the occasion of the ‘First Inter­ national Round Table of Circus and Social Work’ held at La Seyne-surMer from 28–31 January 2002, are committed to unanimity and to a confederation of social circus. (cited in Bolton 2004: xxiv) The document proclaimed that the members of the group were ‘dedicated to cooperating to produce social transformations using circus arts as a tool [… and as] an educational instrument of emancipation and economic develop­ ment […] which clearly demonstrates its potential for social change’ (Bolton 2004: xxiv). The charter was signed by some of the most long-standing and dedicated companies working in the field, including Belfast Community Circus School, Chile Women’s Circus, Circo Baobab, Circo Social del Sur, Cirque du Monde, Cirque Pour Tous, Clowns without Borders, El Circo del Mundo, Elleboog-Holland, La Fabrik, Los Muchachos, Payasos Sin Fronteras, Les Sal­ timbanques de l’Impossible, Suitcase Circus and Shems’y (Bolton 2004: xxiv). It is interesting to consider where the initial impulse for social circus may have originated. There has been little written about social circus to date, and the few articles or sections of books in which it is discussed usually point to Reg Bolton as the initiator and founder of social circus. For example, Duncan Wall, in his book The Ordinary Acrobat (Wall 2013), observes that the ‘concept [of social circus] dates from the seventies. Reg Bolton, an Australian educator and clown, is largely considered the father of the move­ ment’ (Wall 2013: 176).

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Bolton created Suitcase Circus in 1975 in Edinburgh to give circus work­ shops to young people at risk, especially those living in the housing estates. After undertaking workshops at a circus school, Bolton said, ‘I was not cut out to be a great circus star … my orangutan arms would never straighten into an elegant handstand.’ He decided to teach his own form of circus in which ‘elegance and perfection would not be the only criteria’ (Glover 2006: n.p.). When he migrated to Australia with his family, he worked with thousands of young people, especially in remote and rural Western Aus­ tralia, and was a pioneer carrying out groundbreaking social circus work for many years. In 1983, Bolton wrote a book called Circus in a Suitcase, a guide to running community circus workshops that is still in use today. However, although Bolton was one of the earliest practitioners in social circus, another lineage can be uncovered dating back two decades earlier, to the 1950s, through one of the signatories of this charter, Los Muchachos or, as it translates in English, The Boys. In fact Bolton in his doctoral thesis on circus (Bolton 2004: 168) himself acknowledges the groundbreaking work of Jesus Silva in setting up Los Muchachos.

Los Muchachos and Father Jesus Silva Writing about the Spanish civil war (1936–9), the historian Paul Preston (2011) observes that, behind the lines during the Spanish Civil War, nearly 200,000 men and women were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process. They were killed as a result of the military coup of 17–18 July 1936 against the Second Republic. For the same reason perhaps as many as 200,000 men died at the battlefronts. Unknown numbers of men and women and children were killed in bombing attacks and in the exoduses that followed the occupation of territory by Franco’s military forces. In all of Spain after the final victory of the rebels at the end of March 1938, approximately 20,000 Republicans were executed. Many more died of disease and malnutrition in overcrowded, unhygienic prisons and con­ centration camps. Others died in the slave-labour conditions of work battalions. More than half a million refugees were forced into exile and many were to die of disease in French concentration camps. (Preston 2011: 1) As a direct result of this huge loss of life in the Spanish Civil War, orphans and abandoned children were still living in large numbers on the streets in Spain for many years after the civil war ended. In 1956, Jesus Cesar Silva Mendez, a young Spanish man of twenty-three about to be ordained as a Jesuit priest, was so moved by the plight of the children living on the street in his home town

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of Orense in Spain, that he offered lodgings in his mother’s house to fifteen boys. His bishop disapproved of his actions, and to signify his displeasure, threatened to cut Silva’s stipend off. Nevertheless, Silva went on to convert his mother’s house into accommodation for the boys, creating dormitories, class­ rooms, workshops and even a gym. There they all stayed until his brother Jose Manuel, a lawyer, bought thirty acres of land outside the town and presented it to Silva. It was on this land that Silva created his City of Boys. Father Silva has said that he was initially inspired to create his City of Boys by a movie, the 1938 Spencer Tracey film, Boys’ Town, which had been based on the story of Father Edward Flanagan, an Irish priest who founded an orphanage for boys called Boys’ Town, in Nebraska in 1917. Silva’s obit­ uary in CathNews states that he was also inspired by a distinctly Marxist interpretation of the Gospels (CathNews 2011). Silva himself, speaking to the newspaper Diario de Navarra in 2009, emphasized that his motivation was the idea of change saying, ‘change was the fundamental element of our teaching.… The idea was to change a world that we were dissatisfied with. We said another world is possible’ (cited in Grimes 2011: n.p.). Silva established La Ciudad de los Muchachos (The City of Boys) at Benposta, near Orense in Galicia, in 1956. The City of Boys was created in order to give boys from deprived backgrounds, aged from around four to twenty, a home. Silva later set up a second centre in a sixteenth-century monastery at Celanova, about twenty miles away, and this housed another 300 children. The City of Boys ran as a republic inside fascist Spain. The boys elected a mayor from amongst themselves. Other boys took on different duties, with the City of Boys having its own police force, its own public health officials, financial advisers and guardians of public morals. Racial and social distinc­ tions were not recognized and, surprisingly, attendance at Mass was not obligatory. The building materials for the city were concrete blocks and these were used to build dormitories, classrooms and dining halls: There was a bakery, petrol station, pottery factory, souvenir shop, supermarket, printing press and shoemaker. The city even had its own currency, into which visitors had to change whatever money they were carrying (even Spanish pesetas) in order to make purchases. (Sooke 2010: n.p.) The City of Boys received donations to keep it running, however there was never enough money. Jesus Silva had extended family connections to cir­ cus via his great-uncle, Manuel Feijoo, a celebrated circus impresario, ‘who combined with the Castilla family to create Madrid’s Circo Price and the touring Circo Americano’ (Sooke 2010: n.p.). Drawing on this heritage, Silva introduced circus classes and eventually created an International Circus

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School at Benposta in 1963. El Circo de Los Muchachos, the company, first went on tour in 1965, touring Spain and Portugal for more than four years. Then in 1970, the circus went on tour to France, taking more than one hundred young people as artists. These tours were billed as ‘circus for kids performed by kids’ (Grimes 2011: n.p.). After initial logistical problems, they arrived in Paris and enjoyed a massive success at the Grand Palais. Los Muchachos later successfully toured to more than eighty coun­ tries including America, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, Russia, Mexico and Venezuela, ‘The highlight of every performance was the Harlequin Tower, a human pyramid with a moral message: the stronger supported the weaker, with a small child elevated to the top position’ (Grimes 2011: n.p.). With their performances in Paris over the Christmas period of 1970−1, this pioneering, inspirational work by Father Jesus Silva was seen in Paris at a seminal time in a climate of emerging interest in circus. In the flurry of political activism and excitement emerging from the student protests and widespread political and social unrest of Paris 1968, there was renewed interest in popular forms of performance ‘typified by the growth of street performance, and particularly the enthusiasm for skills such as juggling, uni-cycling and fire-breathing’ (Mullett 2005: 9). Artists from different dis­ ciplines, such as radical theatre and dance, started to enter circus and this led to the emergence of what is termed ‘new circus,’ which was a radical upheaval in circus occurring in the 1970s in which ‘the entire sector was brutally and brusquely shaken’ (Jacob 2008: 11). In traditional modern circus, circus skills were (and still are) closely guarded secrets usually only taught to the members of a circus family. Mem­ bers of a circus family specialized in a particular set of skills and became renowned for their expertise in that field. For example, the Italian Cristianis, whose history in circus dates back to the mid-nineteenth century, are famous for their horse-riding skills and acrobatics. In a similar way the Wallenda Family or The Flying Wallendas are renowned for their high wire walking. In his introduction to his book Walking the Straight and Narrow: Lessons in Faith from the High Wire, Tino Wallenda writes of his family: My name is Tino Wallenda and I come from one of the most famous circus families in history.… I was born into a family that has enjoyed a worldwide reputation for centuries: the Wallendas.… I try my best to give honor to the Wallenda name … I’m steeped in circus tradition and heritage because it comes from both my father’s side and my mother’s side. In Italy, on my father’s side we had the first tented circus in 1842. On the Wallenda side, of course, people are a little more familiar with our accomplishments. (Wallenda 2005: xiii)

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This strong sense of family tradition became an inherent part of traditional circus with particular circus skills handed down through the family and usu­ ally taught to only family members. Particular circus families came to have a monopoly on certain skills, with children learning the circus skills specific to their family from a very early age. The creation of Jesus Silva’s circus school and resultant circus company Los Muchachos offered a different vision of circus. In this radical alterna­ tive, circus operated as a form of social intervention providing access to a wide range of circus skills which were freely taught to youth in perilous situ­ ations offering them the opportunity to perform, work in a team, develop trust in others, and gain self-confidence. The process also pointed towards a new path for potential financial independence for participants, through becoming professional circus performers.

The resilient body As Dirce Morelli and Michel Lafortune point out, social circus programmes often engage with young people who have experienced major trauma in their lives, with wide-ranging causes for the trauma which may include war, physical or psychological abuse, the loss of a parent, or the effects of divorce within the family (Morelli and Lafortune 2003: 3). Two pre-eminent theo­ rists and practitioners in the field of trauma treatment are the French psychi­ atrist and author, Boris Cyrulnik, and the American psychologist and writer, Peter A. Levine. I have brought together Cyrulnik and Levine’s theories to describe an approach to the treatment of trauma, which I have termed the resilient body. This notion of the resilient body begins to provide a cogent theoretical underpinning for some of the remarkable successes achieved in social circus, initially with pioneers such as Silva and Bolton and now in social circus projects that span the globe. Cyrulnik is responsible for developing and popularizing the theory of resilience through his writings. Although well known in France for many years, Cyrulnik’s writings on resilience have only recently been translated into English (Cyrulnik 2009). Cyrulnik writes that when the term resilience began to be used in the social sciences its meaning extended to ‘the ability to succeed, to live and to develop in a positive and socially acceptable way, despite the stress or adversity that would normally involve the real possibil­ ity of a negative outcome’ (Dinesen, cited in Cyrulnik 2009: 5). Cyrulnik’s own experiences as a child led to his desire to help young peo­ ple suffering from trauma. Boris Cyrulnik was only seven years old when both his parents were taken to Auschwitz, where they subsequently died. The family that his mother had asked to take care of him, betrayed him to authorities and he was captured. He escaped by hiding in the ceiling of a toilet block, and then managed to avoid capture by finding work on farms

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and acting as a runner for the Resistance. This all happened before he was taken into care at the age of ten. After the war, whenever Cyrulnik talked about his past, his story was received with disbelief: Nine out of ten Jewish children were killed. You didn’t talk about it. It was difficult to say these things – it made me feel like a monster. People didn’t believe me. It cut me in half. One part of my personality had friends and played football. The other half was silently suffering. (Cyrulnik, cited in Groskop 2009: n.p.) Later, studying medicine at the University of Paris, Cyrulnik realized he wanted to use his own experiences, as a survivor of a traumatic childhood, to help others going through similar experiences, and he decided to become a psychiatrist. In Resilience (Cyrulnik 2009), Cyrulnik’s most important point is that it is essential to challenge the way society characterizes each person who has suffered trauma. As he puts it: ‘A person should never be reduced to his or her trauma’ (cited in Groskop 2009: n.p.). He argues that the caring professions, and society generally, ‘have subscribed to a kind of psychologi­ cal determinism in predicting the outcome for traumatized children: trauma equals suffering equals damage… The trauma victim’s fate is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy’ (Forna 2009: n.p.). This is an important issue, and one that can skew the view of social workers or the people in the caring professions as, naturally, their focus tends to be on the percentage of children who continue to have problems, rather than the ones who man­ age to adapt, change and integrate back into society. In this way, trauma becomes pathologized. World War II marked a revolution in terms of psychoanalytic direct observation of children. Cyrulnik notes that psychoanalyst Anna Freud through direct observation of young survivors at the Hampstead War Nurs­ eries, which she set up as an evacuation centre for victims of the London bombings (Midgley 2007: 939), noticed that they often recovered from their trauma: ‘Anna Freud noticed that some children who were very damaged when she took them into Hampstead Nursery grew up to be adults who appeared to flourish’ (Cyrulnik 2009: 8). The idea of resilience which Cyrul­ nik promulgates, emphasizes each individual’s capacity to recover and that ‘suffering, however appalling, can be the making of somebody rather than their destruction – and that even children who appear to be beyond help can be saved’ (Groskop 2009: n.p.). Sociologist George Fischer elaborates on this point: any extreme situation, as a life-destroying process, paradoxically contains the potential for life, at the exact point where life had broken … the

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invisible spring … makes it possible to bounce back into the trial, turning the obstacle into a springboard, turning fragility into richness, weakness into strength, and impossibilities into a set of possibilities. (Fischer, cited in Cyrulnik 2009: 273) Cyrulnik describes the resilience of survivors as paradoxical: ‘The pain is real, it hurts and it never stops, but it provokes defiance and not groans’ (Cyrulnik 2009: 67). Children who have suffered trauma often show extraordinary resilience. It was in the 1990s that the truth emerged about the children in Romania’s orphanages who had often been subjected to ter­ rible neglect. These children were mute and would often spend hours just rocking themselves on their beds. Applications flooded in from England to adopt them. Then when brain scans showed shrinkage of the cortex and ventricles of the brain, ‘Many of the children were felt to be beyond hope. The applications to adopt all but dried up. But, when placed with the right foster families, the cortex and ventricles of the brain swelled back to normal size’ (Forna 2009: n.p.). Cyrulnik’s position is that the greatest hindrance to the children’s recov­ ery is the discourse that condemns them to victimhood: ‘The narrative or context given for suffering is what determines survival, the feeling of self­ hood is shaped by the gaze of others’ (Forna 2009: n.p.). Cyrulnik insists that it is of paramount importance that we understand that resilience is not a character trait; people are not born more or less resilient. He repeatedly uses the metaphor of knitting to suggest the way in which survivors can heal themselves. Resilience is a mesh, not a substance. We are forced to knit ourselves, using the people and things we meet in our emotional and social envi­ ronments. When it is all over and we can look back at our lives from heaven, we say to ourselves: ‘The things I’ve been through. I’ve come one hell of a long way. It wasn’t always an easy journey.’ (Cyrulnik 2009: 51) Cyrulnik has now taken his work on resilience all over the world, and has worked with orphans in Romania, with children traumatized by genocide in Rwanda, and with child soldiers in Colombia. Interest and research in this area continue to grow with the first international conference on resilience held in Paris in June 2012. The other figure at the forefront of new thinking about the treatment of trauma, whose work gained widespread public attention at the beginning of the 1990s, is the American psychologist and therapist, Peter A. Levine. As Levine points out, the study of trauma was a field that had yet to be identi­ fied when he first examined stress during his doctorate at Berkeley. He has

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now been writing about stress and the treatment of trauma for nearly fortyfive years. Levine’s key contribution to theories of trauma is to locate stress and trauma in the body, in the very fibre and tissue of the body itself. His research is of enormous importance in building an understanding of why social circus has been so effective in helping to build resilience and aid recovery in traumatized young people. By locating trauma in the material­ ity of the body, his research focuses on the problem of embodied stress. His 1976 doctoral dissertation proposes that ‘the response to stress is defined as occurring sequentially in two phases, charge and discharge: When the charg­ ing (sympathetic phase) is followed by a parasympathetic discharge of equal magnitude, then pre-activation homeostasis is reestablished and the stress is said to be resolved’ (Levine 1976: 1). If the charge phase is blocked, ‘the stress becomes incorporated within the organism, as a diminished adapta­ tional capacity’. He observes that a wide range of stress diseases, ‘with var­ ied symptoms and obscure aetiologies are the final–pathologic–expression of this loss in resiliency’ (Levine 1976: 1). In his book Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences (Levine 1997) Levine describes how an impala cornered by a cheetah will run until it knows that it can­ not escape, and then freeze and drop to the ground immobile waiting for the cheetah to kill it. He says that similar stress reactions occur in humans. Traumatic symptoms are not caused by the triggering event itself. They stem from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved and dis­ charged. This frozen residue of energy remains trapped in the body, in the nervous system, where it can damage bodies and cause the alarming and often bizarre symptoms of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) to develop. Describing the effect that this instinctual physiological reaction can have on people, he writes: Let’s cut to the chase. This energy in our young impala’s nervous system as it flees from a pursuing cheetah is charged at seventy miles an hour. The moment the cheetah takes its final lunge, the impala collapses. From the outside it looks motionless and appears to be dead, but inside, its nervous system is still charged at seventy miles an hour. (Levine 1997: 20) He likens the effect on the impala’s body to an individual in a car who simultaneously hits the brake and the accelerator: The difference between the inner racing of the nervous system (engine) and the outer immobility (brake) creates a forceful turbulence within the body similar to a tornado. This tornado of energy forms the symp­ toms of stress that the threatened human (or impala) must discharge to avoid becoming a victim of trauma. (Levine 1997: 20)

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The residual energy does not simply evaporate. It remains in the body, often causing the formation of a wide variety of symptoms, for example anxiety, depression, and psychosomatic and behavioural problems: ‘These symp­ toms are the organism’s way of containing (or corralling) the undischarged residual energy’ (Levine 1997: 20). Levine’s theory firmly locates trauma or stress as a physiological residue left in the fabric of the body, and, in order for the body to be able to move on, the individual has to move into, through, and out of this trapped residue of energy in the body to return to a state of dynamic equilibrium. In a recent interview for psychotherapy.net Levine takes these ideas further, recounting the story of a patient who was fundamental in helping him develop these ideas. At the time of her trauma, she felt that she could not defend herself and had lost all her power. The energy produced by the traumatic event was locked inside her body and efforts to encourage the patient to talk about her feelings only exacerbated the condition. Levine points to Bessell van der Koll’s work, a researcher into trauma who uses MRI scans. These scans show that when people are in a trauma state the front parts of their brain, in particular the area in the left cortex called Broca’s area which is responsible for speech, shut down. When the person is in a traumatic state, these brain regions are literally shut down, they’re literally taken offline. When the therapist encourages the client to talk about their trauma, asking questions such as, ‘Okay, so this is what happened to you. Now let’s talk about it,’ or ‘What are you feeling about that?’ the client tries to talk about it. And if they try to talk about it they become more activated. Their brainstem and limbic area go into a hyper-aroused state, which in turn shuts down Broca’s area, so they really can’t express in words what’s going on and frustra­ tion ensues. Sometimes the therapist is pushing them more and more into the frustration. (Levine, cited in Yalom and Yalom: n.d.) When asked what is the hardest thing for traditional therapists to learn when dealing with trauma patients, Peter Levine replies that the most alien is to be able to work with body sensations, and that the hardest thing to understand is that the trauma needs to be released by working with the body. Levine says: the golden route is to be able to help people have experiences in the body that contradict those of overwhelming helplessness … many thera­ pists for example will recommend that their clients do things like yoga or martial arts … when therapists are helping patients get mastery of their sensations, of their power in their body, then they are truly helping

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them to gain an authentic autonomy … I know of no more direct and effective way of doing this than through the body. (Levine, cited in Yalom and Yalom n.d.) Social circus is a field in which Cyrulnik’s and Levine’s ideas on the treat­ ment of trauma can work together and combine to form an approach to the treatment of trauma that I have termed the resilient body. In this approach social circus, as with yoga and martial arts, removes the need for partici­ pants to vocalize their histories and problems. Instead social circus offers participants the opportunity to take part in a period of working with their bodies to release embodied trauma, and in the process gain new physical skills and a sense of control and power over their own bodies. Social circus also offers the opportunity for participants to sidestep a nar­ rative of victimhood and, through a process of re-shaping their sense of self, present themselves to others in a new light, and in this way find a path to resilience. Participants in social circus projects can not only show new circus skills they have learnt, but are also often encouraged to have creative input into the development of performances and develop a sense of control over the new context in which they present themselves to their communities. So in social circus, the two approaches to the treatment of trauma, Cyrulnik’s and Levine’s, combine to create the resilient body through the combination of: • •

working with the body to release embodied stress, gaining a new sense of power and control over the body, and overcoming feelings of help­ lessness, challenging a narrative of victimhood by knitting a new sense of self, and changing the gaze of others through presenting oneself in a new way to the community.

Moreover, importantly, social circus also starts to offer opportunities to build life-skills and a sense of connectedness with others. In an act such as pyramid-building for example, participants have to physically trust each other for the pyramid to take shape and, when learning triple trapeze, an act that involves three aerialists working together on a single trapeze, partici­ pants also have to learn to work effectively as a team. Through the process of working together and building a mutual sense of trust through diverse circus acts such as these, a sense of community also begins to develop. The resilient body and the potential for developing a sense of trust in oth­ ers, combine with the potential for a new and emerging sense of community to create the core, foundational elements which would appear to underlie the remarkable success that social circus is having worldwide in assisting recovery from trauma.

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Social circus in action Many different forms of social circus projects have now developed. Most of them offer a range of activities from juggling, clowning, unicycling and theatre games similar to those developed by Augusto Boal, to tumbling, pyramid building and aerials, working on aerial equipment such as lyra, trapeze and silks. One early project in Rio de Janeiro (1991) was set up by an NGO, called Se Essa Rua Fosse Minha, which worked with youth who were mainly liv­ ing on the street. Fosse Minha decided to try introducing the young people to some creative activities, and initially offered workshops in drama, sports, crafts, capoeira, as well as circus arts but the young people were most inter­ ested in the circus workshops, and the circus troupe, Intrepide, was invited to organize a performance on the beach. [The] performance on the beach at Copacabana proved to be the turn­ ing point for Se Essa Rua Fosse Minha. The street kids were seen in an entirely different light. As the applause rang out, youngsters experienced the rare delight of approval. That performance validated the hunch that circus workshops could help street kids renew their self-esteem. (Dagenais, Mercier and Rivard, cited in Bolton 2004: 162) This social circus project is an example of the power of social circus. The young people ‘learnt to trust their body in circus skills, and to trust other people, through learning circus skills and working with each other [which started] to change the way people saw them and also … increase their self esteem’ (Bolton 2004: 162). One notable and influential social circus pioneer was Pierrot Bidon, the founder of the nomadic, new circus company Cirque Bidon in 1975, and then later founder of the anarchic, punk circus Archaos in 1985. In 1996, in Brazil, he ran a series of workshops that had been initiated as a cultural exchange between Brazil and France, and these formed part of a social circus programme for young people living in the favelas or shantytowns. Out of these workshops, Bidon created Circo da Madrugada, a circus company that gave the participants a platform to perform and to show what they had learnt. Bidon re-united them again in 2001 to create a street circus show called Tom­ bés du Ciel, based on a Brazilian legend which stated that, every five hundred years, angels descended from the skies to taste earthly pleasures. Bidon was an innovator who was able to break down barriers and he succeeded in bring­ ing his group of French and Brazilian circus performers together to create an unforgettable project that gave them a remarkable experience of performing internationally all over the world. Circo da Madrugada have toured the work to date to France, Belgium, Portugal, Luxembourg, Morocco, Spain, Poland,

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Greece, Sardinia, Estonia, England, Denmark and Columbia and a perform­ ance was presented for the closing of the Festival Bonjour India organized by the French Cultural Institute in New Delhi in 2013. Felicity Simpson and her Columbian artistic partner Hector Fabio Cobo Plata have shaped another model of social circus. Originally circus perform­ ers, they created a tango out of the unusual pairing of a stilt-walking act with a unicycle act. Together they toured around Europe, and then to Aus­ tralia in 1988 with Archaos. They eventually set up Circo para Todos, or Circus for All, in Cali, Colombia, which is sometimes referred to as the most dangerous city in the world. They started giving workshops to young people from some of the shantytowns, such as Agua Blanca, with participants cho­ sen for the workshops on the basis of perceived need rather than talent. In an interview in 2010 Simpson said that: what we do is change the representation of these kids. The circus works as a social tool because when somebody who before maybe sniffed glue or begged on a corner is suddenly doing a double somersault, you’re not looking any more at a poor, illiterate delinquent, but you’re saying, ‘Wow, that’s a double somersault.’ (cited in Sooke 2010: n.p.) Simpson argues that the circus channels the young people’s initial aggressive energy instead building up ‘values such as co-operation, solidarity, trust, confidence in yourself, and confidence in other people. Learning those val­ ues, trusting in them, helps build a base for how they go out into life’ (cited in Sooke 2010: n.p.). With the help of a government grant for $400,000, Simpson and Cobo Plata set up a professional circus school, the National Circus School of Circo Para Todos which Simpson describes as the first professional circus school for street kids. By 2010 they had over eighty-three graduates, some of whom have performed with the National Circus School Circus Company, which is called CircoColombia, travelling overseas and performing at the RoundHouse in London in 2010 and again more recently in 2015. Of these gradu­ ates 24 per cent ‘are in the best circuses in the world. They’re in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. They’re on the top cruise ships. 15 of the 83 have bought their own houses in Colombia. So the school works’ (Simpson, cited in Sooke 2010: n.p.). When CircoColombia performed the show Urban in Australia it was awarded Best Circus Show of Adelaide Fringe. Urban had sell-out shows in London, New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Sydney, and Buenos Aires and then was performed as part of the Brisbane Festival in September, 2013. In Australia, Donna Jackson started the Women’s Circus in Melbourne in 1991 inspired by the 1979 Wimmin’s Circus. It ‘works to teach circus skills to women who suffered domestic or sexual abuse, empowering them

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by helping them connect with … their bodies in a non competitive environ­ ment’ (Wall 2013: 177). The Women’s Circus works with a range of com­ munities in Melbourne, and in 2013 worked with refugee children helping them absorb English, while they tumbled and juggled. Their work Soar, that premiered in December 2013, combined circus and physical perform­ ance and featured an all-women cast of twenty performers. Their model of practice has been adopted by several other circus companies in Australia including Vulcana’s Women’s Circus (founded in Brisbane in 1995) and POW, Performing Older Women’s Circus, founded in 1995 in Footscray, Melbourne. Zip Zap Circus, a social circus company based in Cape Town South Africa, gives free circus workshops to young people wishing to learn circus skills including young people from the surrounding townships. Founded in 1992 by two trapeze artists, Brent van Rensburg and Laurence Estève, Zip Zap was set up with the vision of building towards peaceful co-existence in South Africa. The founders see social circus as a ‘powerful tool of social transformation’ (Zip Zap Circus n.d.). Zip Zap Circus has toured all around South Africa and has undertaken twenty-seven international tours to date (Figure 31.1). Another major success story, which in some senses is pivotal to the wide­ spread success of social circus, is Cirque du Monde. In the early 1990s, Cirque du Soleil decided to put one per cent of its profits into developing global citizenship activities, in particular to develop a not-for-profit organi­ zation to promote social circus through a partnership between Cirque du Soleil and Jeunesse du Monde, a Quebec based organization working with

Figure 31.1 Zip Zap Circus School, Cape Town, South Africa.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Gregor Rohrig and Zip Zap Circus School.

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youth at risk. This led to the setting up of Cirque du Monde in 1995. In 1998, Michel LaFortune, at that time Social Circus Director of Cirque du Soleil gave an interview in which he said: For us, social circus not only allows young people to acquire circus skills, but also to develop their self-esteem and express their personali­ ties, be more creative, change their habits as well as their status from that of victim to that of protagonist, from the role of onlooker to that of artist. (Lafortune and Bouchard 2011: 16) Following on from five years of social circus work with Cirque du Monde, in 2000 Cirque du Soleil, in association with circus schools and interested partners, set up a training programme for social circus instructors. The formative idea was to introduce social circus teachers and community work­ ers to their ‘participative and innovative pedagogical method, to link the learning content to the community’s reality and to encourage and advo­ cate circus arts as a tool of individual development’ (Cirque du Soleil n.d.). This programme has trained more than 2,000 participants from twenty-five countries in social circus instructor training programmes. (In Cirque du Monde parlance, the instructors are teachers, and the trainers are teacher trainers [Burtt 2013].) Cirque du Soleil has recently also been actively involved in developing the Instructor in Circus Arts training programme at the National Circus School in Montreal and this includes a sixty-hour course component on the teaching of social circus (Cirque du Soleil n.d.). Cirque du Monde has an extensive reach.1 As well as training social circus instructors and trainers, it is involved in social circus projects running in over eighty communities in twenty-five countries worldwide, from North America, to Africa, to South America, to the Mongolian Steppes (Cirque du Soleil n.d.) (see Figure 31.2). One of Cirque du Monde’s major focuses is attracting partners such as government bodies and NGOs in order to enable social circus to take place as continuing programmes rather than simply one-off projects. One of these programmes is in the far north of Quebec, in Nunavik, working with Inuit youth at risk in remote communities. The programme, called Cirqiniq, is now ongoing and is run by the Katavik Regional Government in partner­ ship with Cirque du Soleil. Cirqiniq brings in Cirque du Monde trained instructors and trainers several times a year to work with young people in small, isolated Inuit communities, some of which have a total of only a few hundred inhabitants. In June each year around sixty of these young peo­ ple come together for a central summer workshop usually held in the main town, Kuujjuaq. This is a major event for these young people who are flown by small aircraft in from their remote communities, many of which are not

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connected by road and are often cut off completely by ice and snow, to meet young people from other isolated communities across Nunavik (Figure 31.3). These young people camp and sleep in the local school gym and the atmos­ phere and the excitement is like an extended sleepover, an important experience for these young people who live in such small and isolated com­ munities. They work on circus skills everyday and at the end of the period they put on a show. A circus parade through the town culminates with a show complete with stage lights and full make-up, with costumes supplied by Cirque du Soleil. The show is usually attended by over five hundred local people, which is roughly 20 per cent of the population of Kuujjuaq. These performances offer a chance for the young people to present themselves in a positive light to the community, through working together as a team and achieving extraordinary things. The aim is to train some of the older Inuit youth to take over the teaching and instructing in the periods when the Cirque du Monde instructors are not present, and this is starting to be realized in a number of communities. The young Inuit instructors have also recently formed a small circus company, which has performed in several local festivals (Burtt 2013). There is not one perfect model for a social circus project since projects vary enormously in response to the needs of the participants. Courses are also to a large extent shaped by the interests and skills of the instructors running them, with some social circuses now including performance text,

Figure 31.2 Machincuepa, Mexico.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Cirque du Monde and Cirque du Soleil.

Notes: Since 1999, Machincuepa Circo Social has been working with youth-at-risk in Mexico

City in an ongoing partnership with Cirque du Soleil. Photographer: Lyne Charlebois.

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parkour, dance, video filming and editing, and the development of sound scores and/or music for the performances. While some projects may result in large and clearly successful performance outcomes, others, that may be low-key and not have such a high profile, or such visible outcomes, still demonstrate enormous long-term social benefits for participants in terms of building resilience and self-confidence, and developing the ability to work in a team and to trust others (Figure 31.3). Now, at any one time, there are literally hundreds of social circus projects operating across six continents. An online map developed by Cirque du Soleil is beginning to chart the scope of the social circus projects occurring across the world. This can be accessed online at www.cirquedusoleil.com/ social-circus-map. One of the most startling recent take-ups of social circus has occurred in Ecuador. In 2011, the Vice President of Ecuador attended a Cirque du Soleil performance in Montreal. When he learnt of the Cirque du Monde social circus programme he decided to implement ‘a nation-wide social circus programme, organized and funded through his vice-presidency office. This flagship programme is what he dubbed ‘Sonrie Ecuador’ (Smile Ecuador)’

Figure 31.3 Cirqiniq, Nunavik, Québec. Source: Photograph courtesy of Cirque du Monde and Cirque du Soleil. Note: Cirqiniq is a social circus programme working with youth-at-risk in Inuit communities run by the Katavik Regional Government in an ongoing partnership with Cirque du Soleil. Photographer: Sarah Bédard-Dubé.

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(Spiegel et al. 2014: 1). This government-sponsored programme reaches almost 25,000 people annually with the aim of promoting social inclusion. Programmes are currently offered to children in marginalized communities, to adults with disabilities and to young street people. Millions of dollars have been invested on the physical infrastructure and the delivery of the programme (Spiegel et al. 2014: 5). Since the program began, the Ecuadorean government has committed to building fully equipped big tents in the Andes (Quito, Cuenca, Loja), along the coast (Guayaquil and Manta) and in the Amazon (Tena), and has already launched programs that have reached tens of thousands of people. The sheer numbers involved – 24,699 participants in a one-year period – 9,700 at day-long ‘Open Circus’ events and over 1000 par­ ticipants who completed full-scale social circus programs – make this certainly one of the world’s largest social circus programs. (Spiegel et al. 2014: 2) Social circus is also starting to emerge as a burgeoning area of academic research. It forms a strand of the new five-year, multi-university research partnership investigating social arts that is based out of the International Centre for Art for Social Change (ICASC) at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, which has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (ICASC n.d.). The social circus strand of this research has the aim of assessing how ‘social circus projects with youth at risk propose new ways of working that build self-esteem, material skills and ethical and aesthetic sensibilities’ (ICASC n.d.). The continuing growth of interest in social circus is indicative of its abil­ ity to act as a uniquely empowering agent of social intervention and trans­ formation, and is strong testament to the power of the resilient body, the concept introduced in this writing. My research shows that this growing network of social circus activity around the globe can be traced back to the confluence of social conscience and family circus heritage that came together in one person, the remarkable Father Jesus Silva.

Acknowledgements This chapter emerged out of a conversation with the late Maggi Phillips (1944–2015) about Father Jesus Silva. Her memories of meeting Jesus Silva when she was a young circus performer, and her visit to the City of Boys sparked this research journey.

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Note 1 In the summer of 2015, Cirque du Soleil was sold for 1.5 billion, with US based TPG Capital taking control of 60 per cent of the company, Chinese partner Fosun 20 per cent, and the remaining shares being divided between Guy Laliberté and the Quebec pension fund Caisse de Depot. Following directly on from the sale of Cirque du Soleil, Cirque du Monde was restructured in late 2015 and the number of staff greatly reduced. It still remains to be seen what effect this will have on Cirque du Monde’s activities (AAP 2015).

References AAP (2015). ‘Canada approves Cirque du Soleil Sale.’ SkyNews 1 July. Accessed on 28 November 2015 from www.skynews.com.au/culture/showbiz/arts/2015/07/01/ canada-approves-cirque-du-soleil-sale.html. Bolton, Reg (2004). ‘Why Circus Works: How the Values and Structures of Circus Make It a Significant Developmental Experience for Young People.’ PhD Thesis, Murdoch University. Accessed on 17 October 2011 from http://researchreposi­ tory.murdoch.edu.au/401/. Burtt, Jon (2013). Personal Communication to Author. CathNews (2011). ‘Spanish Boys Town Founder Jesus Silva.’ CathNews: A Service of Church Resources. Accessed on 16 October 2012 from www.cathnews.com/ article.aspx?aeid=28205. Cyrulnik, Boris (2009). Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past, translated by Macey, David. London: Penguin. Forna, Aminatta (2009). ‘Resilience by Boris Cyrulnik: Review.’ Telegraph, 24 May. Accessed on 12 June 2012 from www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookre­ views/5361000/Resilience-by-Boris-Cyrulnik-review. Glover, Tina (2006). ‘Reg Bolton: Clowning Showman Who Took New Circus around the World.’ Guardian. Accessed on 7 July 2010 from www.guardian. co.uk/news/2006/jul/26/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries1. Grimes, William (2011). ‘Jesus Silva, Priest Who Founded Spanish Boys Town Dies at 78’, New York Times, 16 September, sec. Obituaries. Accessed on 16 October 2012 from www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/world/europe/jesus-silva-priest­ whofounded-a-boys-town-dies-at-78.html?_r=0. Groskop, Viv (2009). ‘Escape from the Past.’ Guardian, 18 April, sec. Life & Style. Accessed on 12 June 2012 from www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/apr/18/ boris-cyrulnik-children-trauma. International Centre for Arts for Social Change (ICASC) (n.d.) Homepage. Accessed on 10 August 2014 from http://ghrp.ubc.ca/research/current-research-projects/art­ for-social-changecanada/. Jacob, Pascal (2008). ‘The Circus Artist Today: Analysis of the Key Competences.’ FEDEC: European Federation of Professional Circus Schools 2008. Accessed on 5 June 2010 from www.europeancircus.info/ECA/images/bestanden/education/ TheCircusArti stTodayEN.pdf. Kinnunen, Ritta and Jukka Lidman (2013). ‘Wellbeing Effects from Social Circus.’ Effective Circus. University of Tampere, Finland. Accessed on 2 February 2014 from www.uta.fi/cmt/index/wellbeing-effects-from-social-circus.pdf.

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Lafortune, Michel and Anne Bouchard (2011). Community Worker’s Guide: When Circus Lessons Become Life Lessons, Montreal: Cirque du Soleil. Levine, Peter A. (1976). ‘Accumulated Stress, Reserve Capacity and Disease.’ Medical Biophysics PhD Thesis. University of California at Berkeley. Accessed on 7 September 2011 from http://somaticexperiencing.com/images/stories/Peter_A_ Levine-Thesis.pdf. Levine, Peter A. (1997). Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experiences, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Midgley, Nick (2007). ‘Anna Freud: The Hampstead War Nurseries and the Role of the Direct Observation of Children for Psychoanalysis.’ International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 88: 939–59. Morelli, Dirce and Michael Lafortune (2003). The Phoenix: Building the Concept of Resilience into Cirque Du Monde Practices, Montreal, Quebec: Cirque du Monde. Mullett, Jane (2005). ‘Circus Alternatives: The Rise of New Circus in Australia, the United States, Canada and France.’ PhD Thesis, LaTrobe University. Preston, Paul (2011). The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain, New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Sooke, Alistair (2010). ‘Circolombia: From Street Urchins to Stars.’ Telegraph, 13 April, sec. Culture Critics. Accessed on 12 August 2012 from www.telegraph. co.uk/culture/culturecritics/7586608/Circolombia-From-street-urchins-to-circus­ stars.html. Spiegel, Jennifer Beth et al. (2014). ‘Social Circus and Health Equity: Exploring the National Social Circus Program in Ecuador.’ Arts and Health: An International Journal for Research, Policy and Practice, 3 July. Accessed on 7 August 2014 from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17533015.2014.932292. Wall, Duncan (2013). The Ordinary Acrobat: A Journey into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present, New York: Knopf. Wallenda, Tino (2005). Walking the Straight and Narrow: Lessons in Faith from the High Wire, Gainesville, Florida: Bridge-Logos. Women’s Circus Homepage (n.d.). Accessed on 1 September 2014 from http://womenscircus.org.au. Yalom, Victor and Marie-Helene Yalom (n.d.). ‘Peter Levine on Somatic Experienc­ ing.’ psychotherapy.net. Accessed on 3 March 2012 from www.psychotherapy. net/interview/interview-peter-levine. Zip Zap Circus Homepage (n.d.). Accessed on 2 September 2013 from www.zip-zap.co.za.

Chapter 32

Risk, danger and other paradoxes in circus and in Circus Oz parody Peta Tait

Circus is the art form that exemplifies risk-taking with its presentation of extreme physical action; circus performs danger. This chapter explores the paradoxes of the circus form, in relation to perceptions of risk-taking and the performance of danger, and by contrasting examples of flying trapeze acts and Circus Oz aerial acts. Contrary to public perception of daring and the way in which the circus promotes itself, circus artists are necessarily focused on mastery and judgement about the safe execution of action. Circus is also a per­ formance of safety. This particularly paradoxical dimension to the circus form offers an insightful context for exploring the social perception of risk and cor­ porate preoccupation about the likelihood and consequence of risk hazards. But circus itself complicates ideas of working safely while presenting danger­ ous thrill-seeking action. Circus Oz, a leading contemporary circus company based in Melbourne, Australia, repeatedly and overtly parodies ideas of danger and risk inherent in the circus form, and ultimately reveals how social identity is part of the perception of circus risk. The act that goes wrong and descends into comic chaos, often due to the actions of a nonconforming character, has been emblematic of Circus Oz shows for nearly four decades. Circus Oz and its unique comedy has proved surprisingly durable, possibly because of its capac­ ity to engage with physical, social and political concepts of risk. In a complex sociological exploration of what he terms ‘the global risk society’, Ulrich Beck analyses the tendency in developed countries to risk minimization by the early 1990s and subsequent risk redistribution (Beck 1989; 1999; 2006). This coincides with the expansion of contemporary cir­ cus so that the context for a renewed public interest in circus can be found in the rise of socially ambivalent ideas towards riskiness. As a cultural space of risk-taking, circus seems to be the antithesis of the effort to lessen risk. Dur­ ing the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the ideological politics of a global risk society (Beck 2009) intensified and began to overshadow artistic endeavour so that even circus risks seem to have become individualized and circus performance diversionary, the combination of parody and political commentary in Circus Oz shows continues to point out ideological dangers.

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In their artistry, circus performers heighten the impression of danger. But this is not the same as performers taking risks. The belief that circus perform­ ance is dangerous – or more dangerous than high-impact sports – highlights the effectiveness of the theatrical performance of risk. Circus is metaphoric in this regard, and even social circus engages with these metaphoric ideas. The way that danger is emphasized in the pacing which builds suspense in performance evokes the corresponding perception of risk in audience recep­ tion. The actual physical risks are usually not apparent. Although circus signifies large social concepts such as freedom, marginal­ ity, and human exceptionalism, the conceptual focus here is on how circus performance is perceived as dangerous in visual as well as metaphoric ways. Circus is a body-based artistic and acrobatic visual performance using spe­ cialized equipment and is usually accompanied by music. The interpretation of live circus, however, needs to be specific to a particular performance and its artists, so that generalization about circus emerges from evaluating pat­ terns across productions.1 Circus aerial acts are discussed here to unravel some of the paradoxical implications of perceived and actual risk. Trapeze acts after the 1860s reveal that while equipment or apparatus created the act and its artistry, it also increased the risk for artists. Circus Oz parodies the performance of danger in its comic acts and in one ensemble act, flyers fall from the trapeze and the rigging collapses in comic mayhem.2

Public perception of risk The idea of circus is synonymous with physical danger (Stoddart 2000: 4), and the word ‘circus’ is commonly used to describe social disorder and chaos. But those familiar with circus practices know that impressions of danger and clowning disruption are created by trained and accomplished performers with a high degree of skill and mastery. This reveals a further discrepancy whereby the circus spectacle performs an illusion of danger and risk while the actual risks remain largely unseen by spectators. Therefore what are the physical risks for circus performers versus the public percep­ tion of risk? The public perception of circus is that performers take risks – an impres­ sion heightened for audiences by the promotion, staging, music, ring person’s delivery, and costumed identities of performers. These cumulative elements, and action that fakes failure on occasion, theatrically generate an impres­ sion of danger in performance and confirm the possibility of failure which enhances the contradictory tension for audiences between holding the expec­ tation of an accident and wishing to avoid witnessing one. In this way circus contributes to broader cultural perceptions of acceptable risk. Perceptions of risk, however, change over time and in relation to social values. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky theorize that: ‘The perception

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of risk is a social process’ (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982: 6). Further it is also argued that social position intersects with an individual’s understanding of the perception of risk and risk has become synonymous with danger (Lupton and Tulloch 2002 (Douglas)). Therefore ‘risk and acceptability’ are shared socially determined judgements: ‘To alter risk selection and risk perception, then, would depend on changing the social organization’ and beliefs (Doug­ las and Wildavsky 1982: 8). Individuals respond ‘emotively and aesthetically to risk as members of cultural subgroups’ and risk levels can be ‘taken-for­ granted’ (Lupton and Tulloch 2002: 319 (Lash)). Nonetheless Deborah Lupton and John Tulloch (2002) find that the social behaviour of individu­ als involves evaluating the relativism of risk-taking, and accepting what they perceive as selective risk-taking as part of their lives. It is evident that every risk also carries with it an opportunity and that risk is central to professional practice (Alaszewski and Alaszewski 1998: 123). Traditional circus provides a social example of how beliefs and judge­ ments about risk-taking vary historically and between cultures. Apparatus invention led to incremental developments in circus artistry, and in particu­ lar aerial performance as it changed from rope-walking to wire-walking, and began to include trapeze and other aerial apparatus. Similarly attitudes to working safely change over time. In one twentieth-century example, it became more acceptable during the 1980s for static trapeze performers in North America, England and Australia to use a safety line attached to a waist belt, a practice previously accepted in Russian circus but not elsewhere. Its non-use is still evident in some countries and touring regions today. Beck explains that late twentieth-century capitalism involves ‘the social production of risk’ alongside the production of wealth (Beck 1989: 86). As well as analyzing risks in relation to nature, Beck calls the developed world, a ‘risk-society’, with its capitalist-driven reduction of individual security through labour market uncertainty juxtaposed with ‘risk, danger, side-effects, insurability, individualization and globalization’, that reflect inequitable economic gains and irresponsible global organizations (Beck 1996: 1; Beck 1999: 6). The corporate management and shifting of risk through restructure, deregulation and contracting from the 1990s and yet increased government management to offset litigious liabilities led to restric­ tions on an individual’s right to choose to take risks, and accordingly make judgements. Risk is broadly defined as some occurrence or someone that could impact on behaviour and/or the environment, which is reasonably controllable, and this intervention poses a physical and/or social danger. Prevention and risk minimization involves the effort to foresee an unfamil­ iar element or interruption in the environment that might disrupt the con­ trolled equilibrium. If maintaining the familiar safe pattern relies on tested practices and protocols, then preventing the unfamiliar, which is disruptive, also relies on the effectiveness of prior practices. Risk management is none­

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theless tapping individual judgement about forestalling what is unpredict­ able and/or unknown (uncertain). But as Beck explains, what individuals are prepared to accept as a risk does not necessarily match the diagnosis of possible danger, because the latter is inseparable from perception (Beck 1996: 4 (Douglas and Wildavsky)). There may be disproportional responses between perceptions of what carries greatest risk.3 An increasing trend to regulatory risk aversion in developed countries by the 1990s coincides with the consolidation of the contemporary animal-free circus movement as a major entertainment. Australia’s Circus Oz is nearly forty years old and Canada’s Cirque du Soleil is over thirty years old and while the aesthetic effects of their respective productions remain distinctive, both companies span the artistic shift to creative art outside the traditional circus form in the 1980s. Yet each company retains a myriad of qualities that are distinctive so that the productions of each company convey differ­ ent conceptual messages about risk. While Cirque du Soleil continues the circus tradition of exciting and beautiful acts that uphold the paradox of risk, Circus Oz expressly draws attention to inherent ideas of danger in cir­ cus through clowning misadventure and disasters created by nonconformist characters who resist even the rules of the circus act itself. It should be appreciated that national flagship companies like Canada’s Cirque du Soleil and Australia’s Circus Oz exist within a larger artistic milieu of numerous smaller companies and groups and artistic exchanges that influence productions in each country.4 By the early 1990s, circus arts were being featured extensively in national and international arts festivals. Was it a coincidence that there was a flowering of circus arts and renewed public interest and attention as the risk society intensified? Probably not. The symbolic legacy of how traditional circus signifies danger in Western culture and its continuing resonances in our current world mean that it con­ tinues to stand against reductionist ideas of risk aversion – in its offstage practice, contemporary circus needs to conform to regulatory and insurance requirements. Circus seems an ideal art form for societies forestalling risk and increasingly orientated to managing the public risk profile of individuals and groups. All circus acts are intended to hold an audience’s attention but some acts are viewed as having more risk and therefore being more dangerous than others. In particular, flying trapeze acts in which an aerial flyer leaves one swinging trapeze bar and leaps across aerial space to a catcher hanging upside-down are perceived as particularly dangerous, and the dimensions of the rig and the difficulty in the flyer’s action increase the degree of actual risk, although audience members may not identify an act’s fast movement clearly (Tait 2005). Flying acts vary and those acts in which flyers do com­ plex turns and multiple somersaults in widely spaced, high rigging require considerable training and practice. Such acts are the legacy of individual

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pioneering artists who invented apparatus and developed artistic and physi­ cal skills. Performers in the traditional circus endeavoured to perform diffi­ cult feats to competitively outdo each other and to boost the status of an act and, where possible, to set an athletic record. While their feats are described as exciting and daring, dazzling and death-defying, paradoxically, they can be pleasurable and at the same time anxiety-provoking for spectators to view because of perceptions of risk. It is the exceptional circumstances of a fatal accident that periodically bring aerial acts to wider public attention in the media; circus histories pro­ vide information on significant accidents (Speaight 1980b; Culhane 1990). Certainly accidents do happen, but circus annals rarely acknowledge more common recoverable injuries of the type evident in other physical activities such as sport and dance. The need to forestall time out from the act by pre­ venting injury is a professional preoccupation (Tait 2000; 2004; 2011). Aerial performance has come to exemplify circus risk-taking. Since the degree of risk also creates a hierarchy of acts in the circus, the social percep­ tion of danger has artistic and economic consequences.

Actual risk Contrary to common expectation, serious accidents are more likely to be caused by problems with the rigged equipment, than due to performer error (Tait 2011). This discussion is not intended to downplay in any way what could happen to performers, and the possibility of a serious accident increases over a twenty-five-to thirty-year career. Instead it is pointing out that the spectator perceives the illusions of circus performance rather than the reality of precise movement focused on the safe execution of the action. The history of the flying trapeze act is also a history of safety. The action of flying or leaping along a line of solo trapeze bars was invented by Jules Léotard in 1859 when he adapted gymnastic equipment and wore the first (safer) body-fitting costume. He was required to place mattresses below his swinging trapeze bars for safety, and he worked in theatre spaces at a com­ paratively low height. Intense competition between his imitators meant that the height, and distances between bars soon increased. At the same time, however, the element of skill was also developing in relation to risk. Trapeze performers took precautions to minimize the risk associated with perform­ ing the act but touring brought the major problem of working in a range of different venues. The unfamiliarity of a performance space increased the element of unpredictability and therefore actual risk for an act and even an inadvertent change of a couple of inches in the positioning of equipment could create problems in acts that required exacting precision. The invention of the trapeze action brought about the invention of its safety equipment. The Hanlon Brothers who pioneered flying between two

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trapezes in the USA in 1861 also invented and used safety nets by 1869 (McKinven 1998: 28). One of the six Hanlon brothers, Thomas, did have a serious accident in 1865. It does seem that given the smaller number of performers, the early 1860s was an era of proportionally more serious aer­ ial accidents than in subsequent decades. Of the five aerial act accidents recorded in the New York Clipper during the first half of 1861 including rope-walking accidents, there is one clear record of the equipment as the problem when a slack rope broke. Four accounts record that the performer fell without further explanation and two of these were fatal.5 It should be pointed out that several serious accidents were reported in theatres with dancers suspended on wires playing fairies in pantomimes, and there were accidents in equestrian and acrobatic acts. The year of Thomas Hanlon’s accident in 1865, there are records of a total of five aerial act accidents and in one account the traverse bar broke and in another the top piece of the trapeze apparatus came away.6 One of the five was fatal. When Thomas was undertaking the ‘Leap for Life’, as he leapt out from a roof ladder apparatus across to a rope, he missed his catch of the rope and fell onto the footlights. This could have been performer error but the rope could have been inadvertently rigged slightly differently in a new venue. Even though the number of aerialists had probably more than doubled by 1880, there were only five aerial accidents with serious injuries recorded that year,7 and only one in 1881 when stay wires broke.8 There was also one fatality with a human projectile (cannon) act in 1881, but these acts have always been considered particularly dangerous within the circus because the performer who is propelled into the air by the equipment has limited control.9 These acts became rare in the twentieth century. By 1880 female trapeze performers were the most highly paid performers, in part because they accentuated ideas of danger in a society where women were thought weaker and therefore inherently more at risk of falling. The social perception of risk in the circus was also linked to the social identity of the performer. In a twenty-year career, the famous Leona Dare had one major accident working with a male partner who was holding a trapeze bar suspended from an iron jaw apparatus held from above in Dare’s mouth, as she hung upside-down from a second trapeze. In 1884 in Madrid her male partner fell and died. Dare subsequently worked solo. As well as trapeze acts, trained wild animals and elephants could be routinely added to the programme in the circus ring during the 1890s, and big cat performers per­ formed both ferocity and docility as part of the act, adding to impressions of danger in circus. In the paradox of danger, the safety net for the flying trapeze act appears to make the action seem comparatively safe to the audience since the per­ former who falls seems protected. If the safety net is a visible component in the act, the safety line is usually only visible when it is used in the final

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descent. As performers concede, however, there is a risk of injury falling into the net the wrong way, and landing in the net requires practice. The safety net below the aerial apparatus might be perceived by spectators to offset risk and offer protection should an aerial flyer and the catcher miss the wrist forearm connection of a catch, but it has limitations, and aerialists travel­ ling at high speed across the space are always at risk of falling out of the net from a missed catch. In 1928 working to a female catcher, Wilma Stilz of the Flying Lamars died in Melbourne when the pair missed the catch, and while Wilma fell into the safety net, tragically she bounced out and fell into the seating (Fogarty 2000: 78). Still the safety net is a visual cue of the effort to minimize actual risk. In a number of major aerial accidents, the key issue of equipment fail­ ure remains paramount. For example, in 1973 Australian Mary Gill was seriously injured and suffered brain damage when a support pole collapsed (Tait 2005: 103). In 1982 Marguerite Vazquez fell and broke her neck when a wire failed (Culhane 1990: 318–19). In 1991 Anni Davey broke her neck and wrists in an accident in the Circus Oz performance in Edinburgh when the stitching of a foot loop broke.10 Working in Ringling Brothers and Bar­ num & Bailey Circus in 2004, Dessi Espana’s tissu fabric apparatus came away and she fell onto a concrete floor and died.11 In 2006 Vitaly Khrapavit­ ski died in Ireland when a line snapped.12 In 2013, Sarah Guyard-Guillot working in Cirque du Soleil’s Ka, fell and died when a wire rope came out of a pulley and was severed, and ambiguously this was attributed to her ascent being too rapid.13 Equipment use and its management emerge as a major risk factor of injury and serious injury in qualitative research interviewing twenty-two traditional and contemporary aerial performers (Tait 2000; 2004). This research also estimates that equipment rigging problems and/or failure might account for three-quarters of accidents by skilled professionals – accidents by novices were not considered in this research. In addition performers reveal that they compensate for the short-term and long-term impact of recoverable physi­ cal injuries. Aerial action relies on the repetitive practice of technique and therefore performer error is the factor that can be controlled and minimized as far as possible since the action can be made familiar through practice. The degree of actual physical risk may vary and the use of safety equipment varies between countries, but problems with equipment remain the constant biggest risk.

Circus Oz parodies danger Between 2003 and 2005, Circus Oz shows presented a flying trapeze act that starts predictably and seems to become unsafe as it goes comically wrong.14 The performers were costumed as birds – as Australian cockatoos in white outfits with yellow feathers on their heads (Figure 32.1). The act started out

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as a conventional low flying trapeze act with each performer leaving the aerial stand holding a trapeze bar and flying across to the catcher hanging upside-down on another bar. As the human cockatoos flew across, they were accompanied by raucous squawking in imitation of the loud calls of a group of native birds in trees. Characterized like naughty children, the human performers as clumsy, garrulous birds defy the silence of graceful and light-bodied aerial movement. Unorthodox aerial moves were framed as narrative struggles over cracker biscuits, with one performer clambering over others mid-air or being pushed from the aerial stand. A large egg fell down and hatched a baby bird and the baby character then climbed and fell repeatedly. As the act built, the calm order in the act disintegrated to gro­ tesque comedy as the flyers fell onto a ground mat. The whole rig collapsed in front of the audience with the performers remaining in character in the performance chaos. This Circus Oz act does not replicate more long-standing comic aerial action; for example, a clown accidently ends up on the trapeze bar, his limbs flailing wildly, and the catcher tries to grab him and instead pulls off his trousers. The Circus Oz act parodies equipment failure as well as the risk of falling. The rigging was collapsed during the act while the performers were in character rather than being pulled down in a conventional changeover between acts. This gently satirical act pokes fun at the more serious tone of trapeze acts even in its own shows, and their positioning as lead act in traditional circus. Performers costumed as human birds implicitly mock the human aspiration to fly like a bird, the aesthetics of aerial acts, and perfected physique in circus. The act indirectly comments on species pretensions.

Figure 32.1 Circus Oz, the flying trapeze cockatoo act, 2005.

Source: Photograph © Ponch Hawkes (photographer) and courtesy of Circus Oz.

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The internationally acclaimed Circus Oz presents circus cabaret in a themed show, usually with nine circus performers and three musicians, and com­ pany members have to be multiskilled, performing in multiple acts. The company spends two-thirds of its touring season outside of Australia. Each annual production, usually created with a director, has a theme and strong visual aesthetic in the set and costumes, although acts continue from year to year, contingent on the performers remaining with the company. When Circus Oz began in 1978, the founding members chose the circus form to convey a political message and reach audiences who did not go to theatre. They were influenced by radical political, social and anti-capitalist imper­ atives of the 1970s and attracted to the revitalization of the circus form because it was working-class popular entertainment. Successive generations of performers were attracted instead to the idea of identity transgression in the circus in combination with a travelling lifestyle. References to life outside conventional society manifest as a central image in Circus Oz shows with tramp clown characters in the 1980s, sadomasochistic whip-wielding deviants in black leather during the 1990s, and sideshow contortionists and tattooed strong women and men in the 2000s. Over nearly four decades annual productions contain implicit and explicit political messages in this comic one-ring show that are highly irreverent towards established author­ ity and the circus form. Circus Oz parody extends to Australian national identity and associated hubris about the promotion of competitive physi­ cal prowess in sports – achievements by Australian circus performers also reflect this aspect of national identity. There is both acrobatic and verbal delivery to make a point; direct address to the audience is indicative of older nineteenth-century circus clowning. This is circus theatre with strong char­ acterization, live music and distinctive Circus Oz aesthetics that are edgy and gothic, and intriguing performance identities that reflect socially sub­ versive subcultures. The trademark Circus Oz act is one that goes wrong because one or more of the performers will not do what is expected. This disobedient figure rebel­ ling against the group and authority can be male or female in Circus Oz and is scorned by other performers in frustration – this figure is called a ‘larrikin’ in Australian culture and is usually male. The Circus Oz larrikin character became iconic. There is usually a larger point to this anarchic nonconform­ ity as each annual production overlays topical political commentary with its celebratory acrobatic displays and Circus Oz also questions the meaning of circus and its human–animal relations. The cockatoos are matched in comic disturbance by a long-standing act with outrageous human kangaroos in crimson costumes. Importantly, sociopolitical meanings in Circus Oz shows can be drawn from both the overt spoken content and the nonverbal physical and visual action. The latter reaffirms the ubiquitous influence of circus physicality on culture.

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The actual risks of aerial acts have been somewhat offset in contem­ porary circuses like Circus Oz by less emphasis on record-breaking ath­ leticism and more emphasis on the theatrical dimension. This shift from athletic to aesthetic strengths actually reinforces the other dimensions of danger in circus through a reorientation to social risk. The acts in Circus Oz ironically expose the metaphoric idea of circus whereby discipline and well-rehearsed, ordered routines are co-opted to represent notions of dis­ ruption, disorder and the absence of control. This reversal is the substance of much circus clowning. Between 2003 and 2005 the flying cockatoos appeared in programmes with other acrobatic acts of strength and balance – performers working solo, in pairs or in the whole ensemble – using a large (German) wheel, poles and static trapeze. The 2003 show included significant long-standing acts such as: contortionist and bounce juggler, Sosina Wogayehu’s acts; Matt Wilson’s cannonball act; Scott Hone’s BMX bike act; and Tim Coldwell’s roof walking act which has been part of Circus Oz over decades. Coldwell’s verbal repartee included claims of alcohol drinking before the performance as he dresses and tries to drink from a glass hanging upside down. In a posthuman touch, it also included a talking dog, Eric, the robot. An act with acrobats in everyday male suits is added in 2004, and using a soundscape of parliamentary verbal exchanges to frame the acrobatic action, comments directly on intractable argumentative politicians being called to order. The 2005 programme included acts with references to other popular culture forms. Circus Oz appeals in sensory and cognitive ways because it plays with the conflation of circus and sideshow as an enticing site of extreme carnivalesque and grotesque identity (Russo 1994). Although maintaining its distinctive style of irreverence, changes to the aesthetics, programming and skill levels of company members over nearly four decades reveal ongo­ ing processes of renewal, and these potentially explain the company’s lon­ gevity – as indicated, shows over decades can be viewed online (Carlin and Kennedy 2015). The meaning of circus arises from feats that are socially as well as physi­ cally precarious. The Circus Oz performance presents the disintegration of social order as dangerous. It has always been deliberately and contentiously critical of conservative right wing values, thereby exposing how political risk-taking can be inseparable from physical risk. Circus Oz highlights the risks of rebellion against the prevailing codes of social behaviour.

Risks with identity Circus Oz characters engage directly with the other crucial area of social risk-taking in the circus form, namely the transgression of identity. It should be noted that it is company practice to prefigure positive representations of

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gender, racial, ethnic difference and queer identity in performance. Part of the appeal over decades can be found in the capacity of Circus Oz to engage with the radicalism of identity politics in theatrical ways. Like other contemporary circus, Circus Oz shows highlight the underly­ ing social risk in the traditional circus performance of strong women and graceful men. Circus presents an unstable performative gender identity that visually and physically defies the demarcation of masculine and feminine (Tait 2005). It can be argued that while physical action in the traditional circus was shown to exceed social norms, its transgression of gender and race norms was covertly masked in performance by gesture, bodily stance, movement, careful costuming and nomenclature. The physical performance of gender identity difference was choreographed into the aerial act at the beginning and end of each feat. Contemporary circus, however, exposes the transgender dimension of muscular bodies in overt ways and through the costuming of queer identity. Shows deliberately engage with the risk of social rejection for transgressing identity codes. With its muscular athletic women and graceful light-bodied men, the transient traditional touring circus in a tent often seemed dangerous to even attend, and of course the crowd itself would harbour socially undesirable elements to make spectators uneasy. The way that performers lived in a selfcontained world on the margins of conventional society no doubt enhanced the excitement of the performance, and therefore the overall impression of danger. Risks with social identity underscored danger. Historically, after the 1860s the gender identity of the performer shaped impressions of heightened danger in a stunt or aerial act. Nineteenthcentury social campaigns sought to place restrictions on female performers as well as age limits for children, especially girls. The campaigns for legal limits on what were deemed physically dangerous aerial acts in the history of circus reinforces the association of social identity with risk. For example, the minimum age of an aerial performer was sequentially raised in England to sixteen, and then to eighteen. Although the industry argued against rais­ ing the age to eighteen for both males and females, the changes to the British Children’s Dangerous Performance Act in 1897 also made an employer lia­ ble to pay compensation of up to £20 for defiance. A journalist comments: ‘The difficulty lies in the exact definition of a dangerous performance. There must of necessity, be an element of danger in all public performances of an acrobatic or startling nature.’15 If the sensationalized reporting of accidents influenced public perceptions of danger, social campaigns reinforced the risk and rejection of ambiguous gender identity. The appeal of circus came from physical displays that were surprising and astounding while performance identities remained just within the bounds of social acceptability to audiences. As explained elsewhere, danger and excite­ ment implicate phenomenological sensory body reception. The thrill of the physical action induces involuntary bodily sensations, so that the spectator’s

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perception of social identity happens along with visceral physical responses to the circus.

Individual mastery and judgement In her qualitative research into performer attitudes to training on trapeze, Lisa Hofsess finds that contrary to the popular view that aerial perform­ ers are risk-takers, trapeze performers seek mastery and control (Hofsess 1986: 16; Hofsess 1987–8). Performers spend time mastering the physical skills required to work on the specialized apparatus from complex rigging to simple props. Although Hofsess’s research relies on self-reporting, these are professional attitudes about individual effort. Mastery involves minimizing actual risk. The mastery of circus skills has always involved knowledgeable precision by individuals working in groups, and the early twentieth-century travelling circus developed into an influential social model of efficient organization. Work practices included the refinement of equipment design, construction, use and maintenance, and these processes remained within the circus until the advent of tertiary education training in circus skills and arts. Circus performers in (family) troupes managed safety strategies well before formal occupational health and safety became standard operating practices in other work places. Circus contributes a relevant history to the broader field of risk management. Despite this capacity for self-control and regulation, traditional circus performers had a vested interest in maintaining an illusion of danger, and concealing the ordered artistic practice and regulated behaviour behind the scenes. Strict discipline and constant practice allows the artist to work safely but these aspects are not theatrically enticing. Hence circus overlays a theatrical dimension of danger over mastery. Circus Oz therefore parodies the core idea of mastery in the circus form when it theatrically exaggerates the capacity for circus acts to go wrong. Paradoxically, this is achieved with acrobatic mastery – although not all the performers in the flying cockatoo act were skilled aerialists. A character might seem inept, or another character intervenes and wrecks the action, or the characters overturn the protocol of an act. An ironic stance – a know­ ing look in the direction of the audience – is part of the clowning appeal. It assumes that the audience members are familiar with traditional circus; even the unpredictable becomes familiar in the Circus Oz show. There is mastery behind the way characters fail in Circus Oz shows but there are also actual risks. For example, Matt Wilson’s risky acts in which he would free fall from a height on to a large mat below or was projected from a cannon in a parody of a human projectile act. On 8 August 1991 in the Circus Oz performance in Edinburgh, the aerial duo, Anni Davey and Lisa Small were performing on a vertical pole when the loop around the

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upper pole holding Anni’s foot and whole body in place, broke. Both per­ formers fell five metres to the ground. Small fortunately landed on her feet but Davey who was hanging upside-down landed on her wrists, head and neck. The stitching on the two-year-old foot loop had worn out and broken under a dynamic load. Davey was very seriously injured and in hospital for over two months and did not return to performance for two years. Even though Circus Oz implemented changes in maintenance and quicker equip­ ment replacement as a result of Davey’s accident, equipment remains an unpredictable risk in relation to the mastery of skills. Circus performers master safe practice by making judgements of actual risk. The imposition of risk management strategies from the wider soci­ ety, however, has positive and negative implications for circus profession­ als. In some countries such as in Australia, regulations involve three levels of government with state and federal laws and policies to create structures and procedures to minimize risk and limit liability, often in response to the insurance industry’s minimization of obligation.16 Beyond the professional ethos of mastery, professional touring by smaller circus groups must often use valuable resources in response to how hiring programmes and venues are concerned with the structures of risk management if not actual risk. The managerial risk-averse society developed in conjunction with the rise of neo­ liberalist politics and employment strategies (Harvey 2014). In Australia, professional groups and the subsidized sector of women’s circuses and youth circuses and other non-professional community groups working with profes­ sionals had to comply with official risk regulation and this imposes additional administrative work.17 Further, the late twentieth-century trend to devolving socio-economic risk reversed the reform movements of the first half of the twentieth century, which campaigned for the provision of adequate social benefits for workers and for governments to counteract how the risks of industry were unfairly borne by workers (Moss 2002). The neo-liberalist policies that created employment insecurity from the 1980s redistributed the economic risks to workers. During the 1990s–2000s, the coalition of groups trying to obtain insurance cover in its risk-averse industry had interesting parallels to the social movement of friendly societies for trades or guilds in the nineteenth century (Gilbert 1965; O’Malley 2002). This was also the heyday of traditional circus when safety was family business, and safety tech­ niques were developed and passed on inside performance groups. The rigging of aerial equipment is specialized work and while performers in traditional circus routinely check the rigging prior to performance, these functions are often professionalized in contemporary circus. Professional circus riggers can be ex-performers and can have work histories in associ­ ated industries with high rigging. In Australia, a circus rigger with a compul­ sory rigger’s qualification is hired for a production through a group’s direct knowledge of a rigger’s expertise. If this process seems largely effective to date in maintaining safety regimes, it is often due to the mastery of individu­ als who are identified within informal networks, in keeping with processes

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in traditional circus. Risk management can vary greatly and there are differ­ ences between countries in the same way that the provision of social welfare – a type of safety net for economic risk – varies greatly. Henry Rothstein et al. (2006) have pointed out how a risk colonization has evolved from risk governance over the work place in a constraining regulatory environment. In his research on the ‘risk management of everything’, Michael Power writes that agencies that professionalized the management of risk seem to be ‘handing risk back as part of their own risk management’ (Power 2004: 10). He means back to the lowly worker and, this instance, back to the circus professional. Even so, Power claims that what is being lost is ‘professional judgement’ within the risk management creation of a ‘defendable process’ (Power 2004: 11). This is not the case in circus. Contemporary circus mitigates against the risk management that has spread into all public activity in recent decades in ways that curtail behav­ iour and fragment judgement and with parallels to what Mary Douglas dis­ cerns are ‘political uses of danger’ in the ‘politicization of risk’ (Douglas 1992: 10). Circus practices also provide an antidote to the paradox of struc­ tural management versus judgement of actual risk in social worlds. While the scenarios of Circus Oz shows reveal the combination of physi­ cal and social risks, these are connected to a third layer of engagement with risk in the shows: political belief as a risk in society. The political asides of characters and dialogues over decades in Circus Oz shows make direct men­ tion of globalized threats arising from, for example, armed conflict, refugee containment and other policies of the nation state. A Circus Oz show does not reproduce a self-contained circus world and instead the performer’s com­ ments, costuming and action repeatedly refer back to current sociopolitical concerns. As individual characters challenge restrictive practices – rejecting the act’s routine – the circus context also refers to a larger political world of risk and calamity. This delineation of large risks arising from political belief means that this circus continues to be highly relevant to audiences. Ulrick Beck explains about the ‘world risk society’ that ‘ecological, eco­ nomic and terrorist interdependency crises share one essential feature: they cannot be construed as external environmental crises but must be conceived as culturally manufactured actions, effects and insecurities’ (Beck 2006: 23). He argues that the effort to explain the causes as external factors anticipates new conflicts and global allegiances but reveals the limits of the nation state and its capacity to respond effectively. Beck also writes of how the ‘universalization of dread’ has had a global economic impact and restricts freedom and creates ‘self-imprisonment’ (Beck 2006: 153). He writes: ‘It is not only the catastrophic act but the danger as transmitted by the mass media that heightens terror into terrorism.… The goal is to perfect a kind of “judo politics” on a global scale with the instruments of terror’ (Beck 2006: 152–3, italics in original). Beck is arguing that military attack and defence might be counterproductive and he posits challenging the perception of political risk in other ways.

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It is the political dimension to Circus Oz shows that remains vital as it responds to the type of ideological risk evident in the 2010s. Circus comedy that also mimics a precarious world in which destruction can be wrought by individuals seems to be responding to anxiety in contemporary society. The risk that induces fear and dread becomes inverted in grotesque comedy in Circus Oz. The response to ideological risk can be direct in a Circus Oz act or indirect in the wider context of the performance; it can be participatory through audience involvement and selection of touring routes. For example, Circus Oz seeks out subsidies for tickets to make sure that audiences come from all sectors of society, including Australian Islamic communities. By assuming that there is an ideological component to the physicality of circus performance, Circus Oz continues to engage meaningfully with its society. Physical comedy about political risk and danger offers a strategy to counter­ act the threats of the global risk society.

Conclusion The performance of danger in the circus involves a performance of safety. The illusions of contemporary circus mitigate against approaches to risk management in all kinds of social activities over the last three decades as circus appears polarized against the cultural preoccupation with risk aver­ sion through the performance of physical risk-taking. It offers an arena of resistance to physical and social constraint by presenting a controlled sphere of activity. Above all, it relies on and demonstrates individual mastery and judgement of actual risk. The quantifiable physical risk involved with creating contemporary cir­ cus might have somewhat lessened but the policies of neo-liberalism have reinstated values that echo how individuals once carried the risks in nine­ teenth-century society. In addition, some circus even overtly points to how the economic and social uncertainties create an underclass. Paradoxically, despite its dependence on safe practice, circus sits at the nexus of cultural attitudes to risk and it is this capacity to confront physical, social and politi­ cal risk that makes circus ideologically significant. In Circus Oz shows, the parodic performance of danger accompanied with political commentary potentially confronts the fear evoked with ideological risk.

Notes 1 The author’s commentary on Circus Oz in this chapter and other publications is based on viewing live performances over many years and on access to filmed footage. 2 See: Archive.circusoz.com. The Circus Oz Living Archive presents filmed produc­ tions for Internet viewing. The development of this living archive was made pos­ sible by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant ‘Circus Oz Living Archive’, 2010–14, and involved a team of researchers including the author that

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3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

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was led by Dr David Carlin at RMIT University. The digitization of over 900 ver­ sions of annual shows undertaken by Dr Kim Baston was part of the ARC LIEF AusStage project in 2010–11, coordinated by Flinders University. Although risk-averse management was developing at a time when climate change was being predicted as a global risk (Beck 1999), localized physical and social risks in the workplace, the home, and public space, became more prominent in social risk strategies. Cirque du Soleil might dominate new circus internationally but importantly smaller companies contribute to the innovative progression of contemporary circus in Canada, including Les sept doigts de la main and Cirque Éloize. In Australia, other established companies working internationally include: Stalker, Circa, Strange Fruit, Legs on the Wall, and ‘acrobat’. In most years in Australia there would be at least forty physical theatre and circus groups, albeit of varying sizes from a couple of performers to an ensemble. The New York Clipper, 9 February 1861, 344; 19 January 1861, 319; 6 April 1861, 407; 20 April 1861, 3. The New York Clipper, 18 February 1865, 359; 15 July 1865, 111; 26 August 1865, 158; 16 September 1865, 182; 13 December 1865, 215. The New York Clipper, 17 July 1880, 135; 21 August, 171, 174; 9 October, 228; 16 October, 234.

The New York Clipper, 4 June 1881, 178.

The New York Clipper, 11 June 1881, 194.

Anni Davey interview with the author, 15 April, 2015. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-05-23-circus-death_x.htm. Accessed 7 April 2015. ‘Circus Crowd Sees Trapeze Artist Plunge to His Death’, The Times, 30 August 2006, 11. www.billboard.com/articles/news/6327792/cirque-du-soleil-scene-returns-after­ acrobats-death. Accessed 7 April 2015. It is unclear here how this ascent was motorized. The Circus Oz performers with the skills needed for this act over this time included: Antonella Casella, Anni Davey, Matt Wilson, Mel Fyfe, Michael Ling and Felicia O’Brien. The Music Hall and Theatre Review No. 693, Vol. XXVII, 30 May 1902: 345. See www.finance.gov.au. AS/NZS IS31000: 2009, ‘Risk Management: Principles and Guidelines’. Definition of risk includes: ‘the effect of uncertainty on objec­ tives’. This replaces ‘the chance of something happening that will have an impact on objectives’. The assessment of risk involves evaluating the probability in ratio to the consequences. The national sector represented by Australian Circus and Physical Theatre Association (ACAPTA) (500+ members) extends from the fully professional com­ panies (over forty traditional circuses, new circuses/physical theatres in any given year either receiving arts subsidies or operating as fully commercial undertak­ ings) to the not-for-profit community subsidized sector. There is an associated, circus-in-education sector also encompassing school curricula. Key examples include the Melbourne-based Women’s Circus with a focus on empowering women with histories of domestic violence and eating disorders, and Brisbane’s Vulcana women’s circus.

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References Alaszewski, Helen and Alaszewski, Andy (1998) ‘Professionals and Practice: Deci­ sion Making and Risk’, in Risk, Health and Welfare, edited by Andy Alaszewski, Larry Harrison and Jill Manthorpe, Buckingham: Open University: 104–24. Beck, Ulrich (1989) ‘On the Way to the Industrial Risk-Society? Outline of an Argu­ ment’, Thesis Eleven, No. 23: 86–103. Beck, Ulrich (1996) ‘World Risk Society as Cosmopolitan Society?’ Theory, Culture & Society, 13(4): 1–32. Beck, Ulrich (1999) World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity. Beck, Ulrich (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich (2009) World at Risk, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Pol­ ity. Carlin, David and Kennedy, Laurene (eds) (2015) Performing Digital, Aldershot: Ashgate. Culhane, John (1990) The American Circus: An Illustrated History, NY: Henry Holt. Douglas, Mary (1992) Risk and Blame, London: Routledge. Douglas, Mary and Wildavsky, Aaron (1982) Risk and Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. Fogarty, Jim (2000) The Wonder of Wirths, Sydney: JB Books. Gilbert, Bentley B. (1965) ‘The Decay of Nineteenth-Century Provident Institutions and the Coming of Old Age Pensions in Great Britain’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 17(3): 551–63. Harvey, Jen (2014) Fair Play: Art, Performance, Neoliberalism, London: Palgrave. Hofsess, Lisa (1986) ‘Those Daring Young Men (and Women) on the Flying Tra­ peze: Impetuous Folly or Calculated Mastery?’ The Association for the Anthropo­ logical Study of Play Newsletter, 12(2): 14–17. Hofsess, Lisa (1987–8) ‘A Somatic View of Flying’, Somatics Magazine. Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences, 6(3): 43–7. Lupton, Deborah, and Tulloch, John (2002) ‘Risk is Part of Your Life’, Sociology, 36(2): 317–34. McKinven, John A. (1998) The Hanlon Brothers, Glenwood IL: David Meyer Magic Books. Moss, David A. (2002) When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. O’Malley, Pat (2002) ‘Imagining Insurance: Risk, Thrift, and Life Insurance in Britain’, in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibil­ ity, edited by Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, Chicago: University of Chicago: 97–115. Power, Michael (2004) The Risk Management of Everything, London: Demos. Rothstein, Henry, Huber, Michael and Gaskell, George (2006) ‘A theory of risk colonization: the spiraling regulatory logics of societal and institutional risk’, Economy and Society, 35(1): 91–112. Russo, Mary (1994) The Female Grotesque, New York: Routledge. Speaight, George (1980b) A History of the Circus, London: The Tantivy Press.

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Stoddart, Helen (2000) Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tait, Peta (2000) Research conducted by interview with women aerialists, held in Aerial Archive, La Trobe University. Tait, Peta (2004) Research conducted by interview with male aerialists, held in Aerial Archive, La Trobe University. Tait, Peta (2005) Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, London: Routledge. Tait, Peta (2011) ‘Risk and Danger in Trapeze Performance’, Bandwagon, 54(6) (November–December): 77–80.

Chapter 33

The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas An American strip-tease1 Louis Patrick Leroux

The idea of a Québec-based entertainment corporation specialized in spectacular extravaganzas taking the city of kitsch by storm is already an extraordinary one in itself. That it would do so five times (later up to eight simultaneous productions) and maintain a buzz for fifteen years is astounding. For it to do so with the help of respected art-driven directors René-Richard Cyr, Dominique Champagne, Robert Lepage, Serge Denon­ court and various designers, artisans, and actors from Québec’s ‘legitimate’ theatre scene is quite simply unfathomable. The Cirque built its reputation on a dreamspace, an ‘imagi-nation’, as Jennifer Harvie and Erin Hurley put it,2 where one can transcend traditional national parameters, where sexless bodies contort before us, and artists from across the world unite to tell the nonverbal tale of infinite human potential. This ‘imagi-nation’ is one where the Cirque can embody its own ideological topography – this nation is, of course, both creative and corporate. For decades, the Cirque’s aesthetic, especially with Franco Dragone directing its shows,3 was one of scenic poetry extolling all things ethereal, clean, and delicate, as Nathalie Petrowski put it in her column in La Presse. She added, slyly, that ‘by banning animals from its circus…, the Cirque du Soleil also banished animal instinct with all of its brutal, dark, and fleshy implications’ (Petrowski 2003: C5). And yet, after having been an essential partner in Steve Wynn’s Walt-Disneyfication of Vegas, the Cirque has worked very hard to break its squeaky clean image with more recent shows like Zumanity and the forthcoming Criss Angel show at Luxor. With Zumanity, the Cirque strayed away from traditional circus and put forth the smell of polymorphous sexual humans: in brutal, somber, flesh-driven and fetishistic images. Zumanity is the Cirque’s third show to take on Vegas. It originally was intended to renew, if not radicalize, the Cirque du Soleil’s ‘family entertain­ ment’ image, by creating a resolutely adult, erotic cabaret. Interestingly, their first two shows, Mystère and the improbably aquatic themed show O, widely contributed to giving a new family-friendly sheen to

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Las Vegas with their artistically driven, yet accessible, spectacles. Ten years after arriving in Vegas with their first show,4 the Cirque du Soleil needed to prove that it could play big and that it was willing to take business and artistic risks alike.5

Americanization of the Cirque and its newfound fascination with narrative The Cirque’s occasional gaudiness and usual excesses might point to an Americanization of its shows, yet one can’t help but notice the gradual impo­ sition of a narrative-based, indeed almost a literary, sensibility in the Vegas productions. One can discern an interest in narrative devices (action and plot) as well as the gradual integration of speech in the Cirque’s otherwise nonlinguistic tradition.6 We’re still quite far away from circus-theatre or even extensive playwriting being applied to the circus, but one does sense a grow­ ing concern and, indeed, a desire in the Cirque artists to build a story which goes beyond the Cirque’s own proverbial and well-worn ‘collective transfor­ mation’ trope. The fact that the Cirque has been integrating theatre-folk such as Dominique Champagne, René-Richard Cyr, Robert Lepage, and Serge Denoncourt probably has something to do with the progressive move from its funfair (‘théâtre forain’) and circus origins to its current theatre-driven spectacles which weave circus acts into a basic, sustained, narrative. The arrival of theatre artists at the helm of the Cirque’s most recent shows coincided with Franco Dragone’s departure. While Dragone was a theatre director as well, his experience with European ‘artistic’ circuses and his own experiences in collective theatre forever marked the baroque, and sometimes rococo, aesthetic of the Cirque du Soleil. Dragone’s shoes were very large ones to fill and the Cirque opened up to as many directors as there were shows in development, each director bringing his own artistic baggage while sharing the same Québec cultural origins: part American, part European. The opening of the Cirque to so many directors was enabled by its exponen­ tial and hyperactive growth in Las Vegas’ surreal and excessive entertain­ ment market – an ever-expanding entertainment market defying the usual commercial laws of supply and demand. It seems as though the more the Cirque supplies, the more demand there is. This unexpected elasticity has allowed for many artists to join the Cirque’s ranks and to develop projects they would have never even dreamed of elsewhere. The boundless possibilities of producing greater and greater Vegas extrav­ aganzas (Steve Wynn reportedly said that there were no limits to how much money they could spend developing O, also, KÀ is reported to be the most expensive theatrical production anywhere in the world, estimated at $200 million in production costs) point to an inescapable movement towards bacchanalian spectacles of excess.

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Figure 33.1 Cirque du Soleil, the storm scene in KÀ. Source: Photograph courtesy of Cirque du Soleil. Notes: Costumes: Marie-Chantale Vaillancourt. Photographer: Eric Jamison © Groupe Cirque du Soleil.

While the shows bear the Cirque du Soleil ‘brand’ (clowns as curtain-rais­ ers, acrobats, androgynous costumes and makeup, live musical soundscapes, oversized sets, and an impressive number of performers), they all reference their originating art form. For instance, Mystère remains the synthesis of the early Dragone years at the Cirque; it highlights and emphasizes the very aesthetic and dazzling effects that would make the Cirque du Soleil’s repu­ tation. O, by resurrecting a long-forgotten nineteenth-century tradition of aquatic circus, renews the circus vocabulary and exploits it and is quite simply, in my opinion, the pinnacle of the artistic, economic collaboration and sheer gutsy folly that defined the working relationship between Cirque du Soleil, Franco Dragone, and Steve Wynn (Figure 33.2). Zumanity, the Cirque’s erotic cabaret, allows the corporation to show its audacious and ‘adult’ side by integrating theatre artists referencing German decadent cabaret. KÀ, directed by the ubiquitous and multi-talented Robert Lepage is many things at once: dramatic ballet for its argument, epic play for its plot, cinematic for its visuals and channeling of Asian films (Figure 33.1). Love, a joint venture with the fabled Beatles is the most easily accessible of all of their shows with its carnavalesque quality, pop dance sequences, and some of the most popular songs ever recorded. Thus three tendencies are apparent in the Cirque’s Vegas shows: a first, European-inspired pole, which includes Mystère and O, is aesthetically

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Figure 33.2 Cirque du Soleil, the boat scene in O.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Cirque du Soleil.

Notes: Costumes: Dominique Lemieux.

baroque and referentially metatheatrical. One feels the collective process, the pulse of the ensemble at work in these first shows. These shows are the result of an inspired and instinctive assimilation of counter-culture iconogra­ phy from the 1970s. The other pole is resolutely American with forthcoming shows on Elvis at City Center and another at the Luxor with Criss Angel, an edgy magician who is known for his A&E show Mindfreak and frequent forays into pop culture through television, inventive guerrilla phone market­ ing and the web.7 The passage from one pole to another is ensured by Zumanity and Love which are both European in reference (the cabaret and The Beatles) while succumbing to an American pop aesthetic and fetishization of individuality. Interestingly, the Cirque du Soleil, a Québec cultural institution lauded by provincial governments of all political persuasions, is feeding this hyperactive producer of American content in the US. After decades of shunning speech, the Cirque has finally admitted written text in its shows, most notably Zuman­ ity. Who speaks? A transvestite ‘Mistress of Seduction’ played by Joey Arias, plucked from New York’s Bar d’O to entertain tourists in Nevada. The Cirque’s first speaking part is American: he/she speaks in contrived sexual innuendo. This from the writer and director of Cité interdite and Cabarets neiges noires, two politically driven Québec plays. This from the then artistic director of Québec’s only institutional theatre exclusively devoted to new Québec drama.

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With Zumanity, the Cirque du Soleil has abandoned the pretense of pro­ ducing ‘circus’ and rather toys with a very American fantasy of the 1930s’ German cabaret, not the intellectual, polemical variety, but the declining, bawdy, sexualized one. Interestingly, the set and backdrop are fuelled by the audience’s presence and awkwardness before the spectacle of uninhibited sexuality in the city of sin (Figure 33.3). By calling upon theatre directors such as Dominique Champagne and René-Richard Cyr, the Cirque du Soleil has clearly established that it will, once again, deviate from strictly circus-centred projects. It is primarily inter­ ested in spectacle, risk-taking, and renewing its creative pool. Zumanity’s discourse remains surprisingly metatheatrical in the sense that the show reveals the Cirque’s fundamental desire to bare its ambitions and attributes without shame. The spectacle, promoted as ‘The sensual side’ of the Cirque du Soleil, is billed as an examination of intimacy: sexual intimacy, revealing and embracing everyone’s desires, perversions, and preferences. In reality, it is the Cirque’s own striptease we are attending, not that of a performer, not even that of a group, but rather of a cultural corporation which ultimately exhibits its deepest desires: that of being fundamentally American – to be seen by and with those who count for something, the popular crowd, the edgy crowd. The Cirque’s seeking and bowing to peer-pressure is curiously transformed into an audacious act, both commercially and artistically. The audacity – the gall – of the Cirque is to dream the American Dream without

Figure 33.3 Cirque du Soleil, the extravaganza tableau in Zumanity.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Cirque du Soleil.

Notes: Costumes: Thierry Mugler. Photographer: Pierre Manning © Groupe Cirque du Soleil.

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irony and to actually achieve it while remaining fundamentally Québécois in its ambitions, cultural and territorial ties, and in its quiet but constant pro­ motion of Québécois artists in the US. The Cirque has outdone the Americans in their dreams and accomplishments. It has become an intrinsic part of the American cultural landscape by becoming more American, more spectacu­ lar, more significant than the traditional purveyors of circus. One shouldn’t be surprised by the forthcoming production with Criss Angel and the fol­ lowing one referencing Elvis. They fit in perfectly in the symbiotic tango between the Cirque and American culture in the same way Céline Dion sang a duet at Caesars’ Palace with images of the late Frank Sinatra bask­ ing in her presence from beyond. What is more American than to be from elsewhere and to make it big in America, in spite of one’s origins, through a combination of ambition, talent, and audacity?

Notes 1 This chapter was originally presented as a paper at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, McGill University, Montreal, February 2008. Its title was ‘The Cirque du Soleil’s American Dream’, and it was given as part of the ‘Québec in Vegas’ panel at the ‘Are We American? Canadian Culture in North America’ Conference. Elements of the chapter have been taken from my article (2009) ‘Zumanity: la spectacularisation de l’intime, ou le pari impossible d’authenticité au Cirque du Soleil’ published in L’Annuaire théâtral, no. 45, Spring. 2 Hurley, Erin and Harvie, Jennifer in ‘States of Play: Locating Québec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil’, 1999, p. 309 explain to what extent the Cirque du Soleil has served Québec govern­ ments, of every political allegiance, in their cultural ‘paradiplomacy’ efforts. In spite of its status as a transnational ‘imagi-nation’, the Cirque du Soleil remains a Québec-driven corporation (and brand) in the sense that the company originated in Québec and that its principal creators and designers tend to be Québécois. The Cirque has retained its headquarters in Montreal, in spite of the fact that its rev­ enues are mostly from its permanent shows in the US and from its international tours. 3 Franco Dragone, a Belgian director of Italian descent directed most Cirque du Soleil productions from 1989 onwards, including Le Cirque réinventé, Nouvelle experience, Saltimbanco, Alegria, Quidam, La Nouba and the Las Vegas produc­ tions of Mystère and O. He has also directed the Steve Wynn produced Rêves as a rival aquatic circus production to the Cirque’s and his own O as well as Céline Dion’s A New Day concert/spectacle which ran at Caesars’ Palace for five years. 4 The Cirque’s first Vegas show was Nouvelle Expérience in 1992–3 followed, the next year, by Mystère which would become their first permanent show at Treasure Island Hotel Casino. 5 Zumanity was a beacon, attracting the Hollywood A-list and serious commen­ tary alike. 60 Minutes did a feature on the show as did Entertainement Tonight. In August 2005, two years after the opening and after a series of cast changes, Zumanity was re-launched in a sense with an aggressive campaign featuring appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a ten page pictorial of the

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performers in the iconic Playboy magazine in addition to an extensive interview with Cirque du Soleil founder and ‘Guide’ Guy Laliberté. 6 Julie Boudreault (1996) and Ame Wilson (2002) have both written on the Cirque’s communication strategies which, until Zumanity, had relied on non­ sensical language or on recognizable nonverbal tropes and conventions. Ame Wilson writes: ‘(i)n the case of the Cirque du Soleil, the cultural language being exchanged between members of a society, in this case an audience who may not share another common language relies upon the instant recognition of a vocabu­ lary of historical sources’ (Wilson 2002: 127). Although, since Zumanity’s mas­ ter/mistress of ceremony’s explicit and understandable speech (see my article in L’Annuaire théâtral, 2008), the Cirque has continued using speech in its shows with a recorded prologue for the Robert Lepage-directed KÀ, the smooth-talking pick-pocket in Kooza and sung tales by Jim Corcoran in Wintuk. 7 The Goth magician’s web site features intertwined American and Greek flags, a list of his recent appearances on CSI and Oprah, manifold sensual pictures of his muscular pecs and washboard stomach while the heavy metal theme of Mindfreak plays on and on. The casual browser is discouraged and must instead, in an overt action reminiscent of teen culture, join the ‘Loyal Freaks’ to find out more. A dis­ creet countdown to the show at Luxor (no mention of the Cirque) titillates fans’ anticipation for the big day: months, days, hours, minutes, seconds... .

References Boudreault, Julie. 1996. Le Cirque du Soleil. La création d’un spectacle: Saltimbanco (Québec: Nuit blanche éditeur, Les cahiers du Centre de recherche en littérature québécoise de l’Université Laval: Études). Hurley, Erin and Harvie, Jennifer. 1999. ‘States of Play: Locating Québec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil’, Theatre Journal, 51(3): 299–315. Leroux, Louis Patrick. 2009. ‘Zumanity: la spectacularisation de l’intime, ou le pari impossible d’authenticité au Cirque du Soleil’, L’Annuaire théâtral, 45: 69–91. Petrowski, Nathalie. 2003. ‘Sex and the … Cirque’. La Presse daily newspaper. Monday 9 June 2003. ‘Arts et spectacles’ section, p. C5. Wilson, Ame. 2002. Cirque du Soleil Reimagines the Circus: The Evolution of an Aesthetic. PhD thesis, University of Oregon.

Chapter 34

Contemporary Nordic circus Introduction to the art form Tomi Purovaara

The current state of diversification and hybridization in the performing arts means that it can be difficult to quantify and classify the content of perform­ ance as circus. Despite this complexity, attempts have been made to collate some of the leading works, for example in France, where between 250 and 300 contemporary circus performances are created annually.1 From the 1970s new circus expanded the options for the direction of its performance using venues that included theatres and other spaces which provide a front-facing seating arrangement. Since new circus had been using a tent less and less for artistic and financial reasons, returning to perform­ ing in a tent or circular space once again has become a powerful artistic, aesthetic and even political statement. Using tents instead of conventional theatres enables circus shows to be performed in places where there are no buildings, and enables people to enter a less intimidating space that gener­ ates excitement.2 There is an artistic effect as performances that are held in tents generally borrow their imagery from a more nostalgic circus tradition.3 The most important exception to this rule is the work of Johann le Guillerm, in which the archaic power of circular circus is combined with new creative research, and an aesthetic which engages with visual art. Contemporary circus performances can also be classified according to their content and structure and can contain dramatic stories and narratives. These are not necessarily linear narratives. The drama may be fragmented and the stories can be extremely changeable. The comic quality of shows is varied, stretching from innocent comedy to burlesque to grotesque clown­ ing. Another area of interest in contemporary trends is the performance’s aesthetic effect that ranges from minimalism or austerity to visual abun­ dance. Importantly circus can also be socially and politically oriented.4

The globalization of circus Increasing artistic diversity is also seen among the different countries that have contemporary circus. There is no one international or national stand­ ard. Some artists have emphasized national features. Interesting new artistic

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initiatives have come from different parts of Europe, Canada, and Australia, and contemporary circus projects have started recently in countries in Asia, Africa, and South America. The discourse between knowledgeable critics and artists in different countries is vital to enriching the art form. One con­ cern that underlies much exploration, however, is the problem of financial constraint. The amount of state aid available for the circus arts globally varies greatly. In what way is the globalization of contemporary circus progressing? When speaking of training, France, Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, Sweden, and Spain are among the countries that suggest a positive stage of develop­ ment. Cultural institutions in these countries seem to be flexible enough to recognize the appeal and the needs of this new art field. The status of artists varies greatly from country to country. The French sys­ tem embodies one extreme, in which an unemployed artist gets income com­ pensation according to his or her level of education. The United States has an entirely opposite way of treating artists, as recognition and public funding for circus and the framework of the cultural infrastructure have developed differently and are reliant on commercial and philanthropic funding. The strong tradition of circus and variety in Germany and Italy has not necessarily helped in the establishment of new forms of circus. New circus has had a foothold in Great Britain and Ireland since the 1980s, but it is still fighting regularly for public funding and recognition. Contemporary circus in Spain, particularly in Catalonia, has existed almost as long as it has in France.5 The largest difference with France is the lack of public funding, but artistically speaking, the interest in the field is very pronounced. The contemporary circus community has penetrated Eastern European countries in recent years, and ventures into grass roots performance activity and dialogue about new forms of circus have occurred in Croatia, the Czech Republic and Hungary for example. It is important for the cultural admin­ istration of the countries that possess active contemporary arts to have an increasing awareness of the possibilities for expansion through financial support. The recognition of circus arts has been a slow process, but, fortu­ nately, there are marked examples of success. In Sweden, as in many other countries, the early 1980s was the starting point of new forms of circus arts. The change came from theatre’s new vari­ ety shows with street theatre and circus skills. The influences came from vis­ iting groups from France as well as Cirque du Soleil and the important role model of Archaos visiting Sweden in 1990–1. A young theatre maker, Tilde Björfors, gathered together a group of performers in 1994 for a production, and this developed into the first major Swedish new circus company, Cir­ cus Cirkör. The following twenty years saw wide-ranging developments in Swedish circus. From the beginning the need for formal education was one of the main priorities, and the process started in 1996 organized by Circus Cirkör and a short circus education course, Cirkuspiloterna, was started in

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1997 and spread circus courses through different cities in Sweden. In 2005, the Stockholm University of Dance opened a circus programme and invited Tilde Björfors to be the first guest professor. The newly named University of Dance and Circus underlined the recognition of circus as a major art form in Sweden in 2010. Subtopia has been the central headquarters of Swedish new circus in Stockholm’s neighbouring municipality Botkyrka since 2000. Subtopia has given birth and shelter to several circus companies, festivals such as Subörb and Subcase, networks (Manegen) and a wide range of international pro­ ductions and initiatives.

Circus integrates into the art field What, then, has happened to the freedom of living and working on the mar­ gins of society that has always characterized circus? How high a price has circus paid for rising to become a part of the arts community? And is this model of developed circus countries one that should be followed by others? As far as I can see, it is possible nowadays to define circus as an art.6 My research has shown that professional training is a fine example of how the art has been institutionalized. The development of training over the pre­ ceding decades has produced networks and collaboration models within and among countries. In place of the earlier ways of informal training that remained detached from institutions, art academies have been put in place that are governed by an educational administration. These agencies have ardently pushed innumerable objectives, training plans and qualifications. Institutional development has led to new kinds of challenges. The rapid growth in the number of artists, companies and performances is leading to a saturated market. This phenomenon has been caused by the growth in the amount of professional training. Integrating newer generations of artists into the professional field while financial resources stay the same or diminish is problematic.7 Despite the challenges, it is worth outlining my proposal for an ideal future for the development of contemporary circus. A good starting point would be a centralized public culture administration similar to what exists in the Nordic countries. In this model, the institutionalization of the circus field affects the whole production chain. Highly trained circus artists would be able to apply for and receive support for their work, even if unemployed. Production support for companies, residence and collaboration networks would make it possible to build interesting, progressive performances. The network of performance venues available for contemporary circus is being constantly developed and the art field’s markets and the number of artists are developing at a fast rate. Circus would become recognized as an art field by ‘high culture’ experts and promoters and would be an important, pro­ ductive and innovative part of culture and society.

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In many European countries, the features discussed above seem very unlikely. Moreover, different kinds of cultural traditions call for different kinds of solutions. It is important to notice the drawbacks. For instance, there can be a downside to the increasing number of venues and perform­ ing opportunities as this may lead to artistic standardization rather than innovation. In addition, circus’s own special features may be overshadowed when performance venues are predominantly theatre spaces. Nevertheless, it is certainly a good thing that the number of festivals focusing on contem­ porary circus has been growing. As this has been happening, contemporary circus has also been spreading through artistic productions in the fields of theatre, dance and visual art.

Networking circus Particularly positive signs for the whole contemporary circus field are the increase and consolidation of different kinds of cooperative networks in the field. One of the first, Circostrada, was formed in 2003 in France by HorsLesMurs, the information centre for French street arts and circus. Circostrada acts as the European street and circus arts network focusing on research, collecting information and communication, and has representatives in most European countries. The network’s task is to produce information relevant to the field and its development, as well as to promote networking and the exchange of information. Circostrada arranges meetings and seminars and conducts studies to guide its decisions on how to engage across Europe. Circostrada and HorsLesMurs maintain a wide European database that provides information on central actors in the field.8 Stradda, the Franco­ phone monthly magazine, published by HorsLesMurs, functions as a key medium of information about new street and circus art. In recent years some editions of the magazine have been produced in English. The Circos­ trada network receives financial support for its activities from the European Union’s Culture Programme. Jeunes Talents Cirque Europe, a French initiative that began at the start of the twenty-first century, is the first European project that has been created to support young circus artists’ own productions. Since 2009, it has created a network that covers the whole continent. Approximately ten companies with innovative artistic concepts are selected through an evaluation process, and are supported with residencies, training events, production support and performance tours. Regional contemporary circus networks are integral to creating distinct areas of art activity. France’s HorsLesMurs information centre for circus and street art, Great Britain’s Circus Development Agency network, the Nordic countries’ New Nordic Circus Network and a number of centres and information-gathering associations continue the new international insti­ tutional development of the circus field.

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The field of education has also formed a network, The European Federa­ tion of Professional Circus Schools (FEDEC) was founded in 1998. Its goal is to improve the quality of circus education by organizing a professional programme that includes education for children and teenagers as well as for artists and professional instructors. To achieve this, FEDEC develops con­ tacts with national institutions and formulates European projects intended to fund pedagogical and artistic training workshops. It also ensures that security and health regulations are met in all member schools. Research into circus phenomena over the years has been broad, although academic research into contemporary circus is still in its infancy. France has the longest tradition of analyzing contemporary circus, especially dur­ ing ‘The Year of Circus’, supported by the Ministry of Culture in 2001 and 2002, which produced a wealth of new books and research. Recently, research into contemporary circus has become prevalent in more and more countries. Some of the newest examples are the theatre research education programmes at Stockholm University and the University of Helsinki, where circus research study modules were introduced in 2008 and 2009. The objective is to create pragmatic models for the observation and research of the newest forms of performing arts.

Pioneers of Finnish contemporary circus New traditions have been developing in Finnish circus training since the 1970s. New institutions and an increasing commitment to the state and municipalities have shaped a safety net and springboard for the new genera­ tion of artists – and provided new things to rebel against. Circus artists born in the 1970s have had the opportunity to experience and develop a love of circus through: youth circus and camps; Circus Finlandia; small touring circuses; and Christmas circus on national television. Although circus in France and the US began to change artistically and institutionally at the beginning of the 1970s, it was not until a couple of decades later that Finland followed suit. The state of Finnish culture in the 1980s and 1990s was interesting, as punk and other alternative movements introduced new kinds of lifestyles and opportunities for making radical art. The fragmentation of the stage arts was evident in experimental perform­ ance art.9 Postmodern dance rejected narrativity and found its subject mat­ ter in everyday places and situations.10 In the beginning of the 1990s, new forms of circus began to appear in Fin­ land for the first time. Metal Clown by Archaos was performed in Helsinki in 1992. Artists could also find images of American and French new circus in videos, circus magazines and on the Internet. The art world seemed to be shrinking, something that was also reflected in Finland’s membership of the European Union in 1995. This was the context in which Finnish pioneers in contemporary circus found themselves.

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In 1996, Circo Aereo was initiated by 20-year-old jugglers Maksim Komaro, Jani Nuutinen and Ville Walo. At the same time, magician Tatu Tyni began to question the traditions of his art. Their objective was the same; they wanted to make circus into an art form that had never before been seen in Finland or anywhere else. They wanted to get rid of the old style where one act followed another and got their inspiration from Michael Moschen, Air Jazz, Jérôme Thomas, but also from film and contemporary dance. But the introduction of the new genre was not as easy as it might have seemed. The questioning attitude of the contemporary circus generation caused astonishment among earlier generations of circus artists despite their shared objectives. They agreed that circus should enjoy a status on a par with other art fields but whereas the earlier generation’s strategy had been to advance through youth work and education, the contemporary circus generation wanted to enter into equal dialogue with other art fields. There has been considerable development over the past ten years. Contem­ porary circus has become its own art field at the same time as the arrival of international contemporary circus. Also, in recent years, Finnish contempo­ rary circus has started to attract increasing international attention.

The birth of new institutions By the end of the 1990s, juggling had become a hugely popular circus dis­ cipline, and this led to Maksim Komaro and Ville Walo offering a meeting place for the international juggling community. They established the 5–3–1 New and Experimental Juggling Festival in 1998. Over the years, this has grown to become one of the most important international gatherings in the field. The constructions of contemporary circus’ own institutions began when Cirko – Center for New Circus was established in 2002 in Helsinki. This was a development project started by circus artists and producers, aimed at improving the position of new forms of circus art in all possible ways. There was an ambition to advance the status of contemporary circus in the art field, the media and in the government; thus, to carry on the work that previous circus generations had begun. The project realized its goals. Since its establishment, Cirko has presented over 80 different Finnish and foreign contemporary circus productions to Helsinki audiences, published four books, sometimes in collaboration with the Circus Information Center, arranged lectures and discussion series, as well as promoted a strong work­ ing environment for contemporary circus. One of the more recent Cirko projects was the opening of Finland’s national circus development centre in the Spring of 2011. It offers rehearsal spaces, artist residencies and per­ formance spaces. Several contemporary circus companies’ offices and the

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resource centre of the Finnish Circus Information Center are also located in the national Cirko centre. It represents a significant achievement for the individuals and artists who worked to gain recognition for circus as an art form over the previous two decades.

Notes 1 For example, Jean-Michel Guy and Julien Rosemberg assembled a DVD that was released in France in Autumn 2007. The 40 performance files chosen by JeanMichel Guy and Julien Rosemberg were released in the form of the HorsLesMurs’ Cirque contemporaine DVD in the Autumn of 2007. See Esthetiques du cirque contemporain, 2007 [DVD] Assembled by Jean-Michel Guy and Julien Rosemberg, Paris; HorsLesMurs. 2 Memorandum of Fresh Circus: Proceedings of the European Seminar for the Development of Contemporary Circus, Paris, 25–6 September 2008. Edited by T.B. Costa, et al. Paris: Circostrada network/HorsLesMurs: 35. 3 Esthetiques du cirque contemporain (2007) [DVD] Assembled by Jean-Michel Guy and Julien Rosemberg. Paris: HorsLesMurs.

4 See Guy (2008): 257–8.

5 Jané and Minguet (2006): 276–84.

6 Memorandum of Fresh Circus (2008): 35.

7 Memorandum of Fresh Circus (2008): 4–8.

8 Memorandum of Fresh Circus (2008): 19–21.

9 Houni and Paavolainen (1999): 20.

10 Ojala and Takala (2007): 34.

References Guy, Jean-Michel (2008). ‘Tutkijan ja Taiteilijan Puheenvuoro’ (The Researcher and An Artist’s Statement’), in Tomi Purovaara (ed.), translated by Don McCracken, Ihmeen väkeä. Suomalaisen sirkuksen sankaritarinoita (Miracle people: Finnish Circus Hero Stories), Helsinki, Finland: Like. Houni, Pia and Paavolainen, Pentti (1999). Taide, kertomus ja identiteetti (Art, Narrative and Identity), Acta Scenica 3, Helsinki: Teatterikorkeakoulu. Jané, Jordi and Minguet, Joan Maria (2006). L’art del Risc: Circ Contemporani Català, Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya & Triangle Postals. Memorandum of Fresh Circus: Proceedings of the European Seminar for the Development of Contemporary Circus (2008), Paris: Circostrada network/ HorsLesMurs. Ojala, Raija and Takala, Kimmo (2007). Zodiak – uuden tanssin tähden (Zodiak – For the Sake of New Dance), Helsinki: Like.

Chapter 35

Contemporary circus research in Québec Building and negotiating an emerging interdisciplinary field1 Louis Patrick Leroux

Describing an emerging field of research, one that is fundamentally inter­ disciplinary and heuristic in its phenomenological approach, can be over­ whelming. In one sense, everything has yet to be done, but to state even this would be to negate precursory forays into the study of contemporary circus as practiced in Québec and disseminated throughout the world from an unexpected new circus capital. In this short chapter I give a first-hand account of the creation of the Montreal Working Group on Circus Research, its rapid growth and integration into Montreal’s vibrant cosmopolitan cir­ cus scene. The Working Group and its ongoing collaboration with National Circus School of Montreal have served as a nexus for developing research strategies and a vocabulary for the new field of contemporary circus studies in North America. In thirty short years, circus—in its contemporary narrative-driven, ani­ mal-free form—has blossomed in Québec to the extent that it has become a potent cultural and economic symbol of the successful marriage of creativity and entrepreneurship. Circus is both performing art and business, funda­ mentally global and multinational in its traditions and the provenance of its artists and, in the case of Québec, very much presented as a distinctive hybrid model for creativity emerging from a distinct society. The impact of Québec circus on the Montreal economy is well over one billion dollars in direct revenue, not counting the trickle-down effect and impact on secondary and tertiary industries, which rely on circus activity locally and abroad. Cirque du Soleil’s annual gross revenues have been, alone, roughly one billion dollars, with over 85 percent coming from the US, through its touring shows, product sales, and—mostly—its eight permanent Las Vegas productions, with the remainder from its ten touring productions throughout the world.2 Its administrative and creative headquarters are situated in Montreal, as are its costumes, properties, sets, and multimedia workshops, production and touring offices, and many of its creative partners such as Sid Lee Marketing (with whom Cirque has created the joint venture Sid Lee Entertainment), and Geodézik. Before the recent wave of job cuts

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(30 in Fall 2012, 400 in Winter 2013, and depending on sources, another couple of hundred over the past year),3 Québec-based expenses accounted for roughly 85 percent of its expenses on a one billion dollar operating budget. Cirque’s impact, locally, is phenomenal. The next category of Montreal-based circus companies, Cirque Éloize (in which Cirque du Soleil reportedly has a 50 percent stake) and the independently-run 7 doigts de la main (known in the US as 7 Fingers) and their subsidiary companies report­ edly have operating budgets of around 10–12 million dollars each.4 Most of their revenue comes from international touring. Another forty smaller circus companies make up for roughly a million dollars of direct economic activity. I’m not including the five circus for social change organizations, the National Circus School of Montreal (the only government-funded elitelevel school in North America), the twenty “feeder schools” and studios, Montréal Complètement Cirque, Montreal’s annual international circus festival, or la TOHU, North America’s only permanent theatre in the round devoted to contemporary circus which offers a complete subscrip­ tion season. Québec schools now regularly offer circus activities as part of their physical education curriculum or as part of extra-curricular activities. Finally, the province of Québec, since 2001, has recognized circus as a legitimate art form and has ensured steady provincial funding for its more experimental productions through a program exclusively devoted to cir­ cus arts.5 Contemporary circus with its combination of artistic activity and sports ethos has permeated Québec society in ways that cannot be ignored by the academy. Following Cirque du Soleil’s quick and phenomenal success worldwide, its spectacular success in the US and effective infiltration into American pop culture (Cirque presence twice at the Oscars, twice at the Super Bowl, and filtered through musical stars such as Madonna and Pink as they integrate circus in their acts), with the resulting economic consequences, the very term “cirque” has come to differentiate the high value artistic brand from the tra­ ditional family-oriented circus. Cirque has become a buzzword to the point where many American companies and circuses have sought to distinguish themselves from traditional circus—and perhaps share some of Soleil’s lexi­ cal magic—by integrating the French term into their names.6

Planet circus French circus scholar Pascal Jacob, in a keynote address at “The State of Circus Research in Québec,” a workshop session held at Concordia, McGill, and the National Circus School in September 2012, spoke of Québec’s place in the circus nations. He felt that there had been six ‘circus eras,’ which could be associated with countries. England, with its equestrian and mili­ tary culture reintroduced the circus in its modern form (1768–1830); while

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France had its first heyday in refining equestrian acrobatics and introduc­ ing the clown (1830–80). The following period (1880–1930) was polar­ ized between Germany with its introduction of exotic animals and extreme acrobatics and the United States, with its freak shows and dime museums, and especially its three-ringed extravaganzas. The Soviet Union (1930–80) introduced elite training and focused on artistic expression; France pursued this artistic project and sought to give social significance to circus from the 1970s to the 2000s with its nouveau cirque. Now Québec, on the coat-tails of Cirque du Soleil’s globalized success and 7 doigts de la main’s circus of individualized ethos has become the Western circus nation to emulate or to react against. Québec’s brand of theatrical, mostly animal-free contemporary circus7 born out of French nouveau cirque, Soviet-inspired elite acrobatic training, and American entrepreneurship and showmanship, has emerged from a burgeoning nation preoccupied with its own singularity and distinctive­ ness. Paradoxically, however, its circus sometimes comes across as blandly “global” and audiences find themselves before assumed cultural neutral­ ity or, as Karen Fricker put it, a “purposeful cultural blankness” (Fricker 2008: 130). In spite of this domination of the circus world—and perhaps because of the triumphalist recuperation by the local media and the State (see Harvie and Hurley 1999; Lavoie 2009a, 2009b; Leroux 2009, 2010, 2012; Hurley 2011)—scholarship on circus in Québec has been slow to develop, save for a smattering of articles and a handful of theses and dissertations—usually descriptive appreciations of the world-beat aesthetic and ‘reinvention’ of circus by Cirque du Soleil—and written very much from a safe distance from the scene they were describing. A few pioneering exceptions include Julie Boudreault’s MA and PhD theses (1996 and 1999) as well as Isabelle Mahy’s PhD dissertation and later book (2008) in the sense that their authors did research from within the structures they were investigating. Recently, how­ ever there has been a gradual legitimizing of circus research with the crea­ tion of a research center and the funding of an Industrial Research Chair at the National Circus School of Montreal, and a few scholarly issues devoted to contemporary circus in Québec in L’Annuaire théâtral (2002 and 2009), Spirale (Lavoie 2009a, 2009b), and in Québec Studies (Leroux 2014b). In addition there has been an incremental understanding by circus companies and artists of the nature, limits, and advantages of research on their own practices, recently allowing for more extensive experiential research and providing students and researchers new access to their objects of study. Theatre and dance have traditionally allowed student observers without incident, yet circus had resisted academic scrutiny for cultural and economic reasons. Circus culture has traditionally relied on hard-earned apprentice­ ship and oral transmission of its trade secrets. What has tended to dis­ tinguish (and to position for marketability) one artist over another isn’t

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general aptitude, but rather the specificity of their trade—their ‘trick,’ very rarely described or broken down to outsiders. Add to this the very secretive nature of a highly successful commercial environment known for poach­ ing audience-drawing acts and you have the makings of a rather protective milieu, bent on developing its own research and development capabilities, independent of academic outsiders. For years, researchers came through with their preconceptions, gathering data, occasionally misreading signs, and pursued their route elsewhere, to work on other topics. Only recently has the contemporary circus world in Québec produced emerging scholars who have an intimate knowledge of that world’s training, practices, and culture and who also possess the analytical tools and broader understanding of research needs and practices.8 When I first started working on circus, I had to address concerns about my goals as a researcher. Before anyone talked, before I was allowed ‘in,’ they needed to know whether I was coming in as a tourist or making a long-term commitment. Though concerned with objectivity and appropriate scholarly distance, I quickly understood that I had to truly engage with the milieu, to be present. But to offer an honest non-complacent reading of it, I first needed to experience it up close, through ongoing discussion, through panel-discussions, open forums involving practitioners, scholars, and policymakers on topics that were of vital interest to the community and, inter­ estingly, which hadn’t yet fully appeared in scholars’ areas of inquiry. These topics included “contractual ethics” (Achard et al. 2013), “international recruitment of Chinese Artists at Cirque du Soleil” (Zhang 2011), “manag­ ing pain in training and in performance” (Leclerc, Holmes, and Aubertin 2013), “archiving circus production” (Barlati and Zummo 2014), “circus as community-building” (Wall 2014). Only then was I able to gain the practi­ tioners’ respect and confidence and draw them into a discussion of scholarly concerns. A number of research projects have bridged academic pursuits, pedagogical concerns, and circus’ growing interest in understanding its own processes and impact. These include in-depth exploration of decision train­ ing in a high performance setting (Lafortune, Burtt, and Aubertin 2012), “evaluating the socio-cultural impact of social circus” (Spiegel 2012, 2014), “physical literacy and high performance training” (Kriellaars 2013), “think­ ing and writing about contemporary circus” (Fricker et al. 2013), “creativity and urban regeneration” (Leslie and Rantisi 2010), the “political body— embodied protest in contemporary circus” (Lavers, 2012a), to name but a few recent talks at Montreal’s Working Group on Circus Research. My own research into circus dramaturgy (Leroux 2013), which combines a study of the vocabulary of circus disciplines with the aesthetic choices made through the narrativization of contemporary productions, emerges from ongoing concerns with nonverbal theatrical dramaturgy but connects with the National Circus School’s preoccupation with developing a coher­ ent vocabulary and eventual program in circus directing, and its ongoing

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Figure 35.1 7 doigts de la main, Fibonacci Project.

Source: Photograph courtesy of Marion Bellin (photographer) and 7 doigts de la main.

Note: Directed by Samuel Tétrault, 7 doigts de la main.

commitment to pursue research into new interactive and immersive tech­ nologies in the circus arts.

Montreal Working Group on Circus Research The Working Group began in 2010 as an informal gathering of academics interested in the aesthetics, economics, and ethics of Cirque du Soleil as both a force in renewing circus arts in Québec and as a major cultural force promoting Québécois creativity and commercial innovation. Erin Hurley, Karen Fricker, and I, after having worked on a special issue on “Le Québec à Las Vegas” for the scholarly journal L’Annuaire théâtral (2009), combined forces with economic geographers Norma Rantisi and Deborah Leslie who were already engaged in Cirque-related research. We soon invited colleagues such as Patrice Aubertin and Anna-Karyna Barlati from the National Circus School to participate in the ongoing discussion and it was the most impor­ tant decision we would make. The first year’s activities focused around a

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model of seminar presentations of ongoing research where colleagues openly discussed issues, challenges, and outcomes. By the end of the first year, and into the second year, the Working Group began to widen its scope onto circus practices in Québec and abroad. Both Concordia University and National Circus School, through the Working Group, formed a research partnership with three objectives: (1) develop­ ing specialized knowledge retention in circus arts training and practice for performers and pedagogues; (2) disseminating of circus-related knowledge through academic and industry channels; (3) widening the scope and encour­ aging dynamic academic approaches to studying the circus arts (through research-creation, experiential practices, economic geography, sociology, and other complementary disciplines). To fulfill these objectives, the Working Group initially focused on three thematic axes that correspond to its ongoing work and anticipated fields of investigation: (1) circus pedagogy; (2) historical traditions and current stakes of circus practices, including discourse, aesthetics, ethics, and eco­ nomics; (3) circus dramaturgy, including a series of hands-on experiential explorations between academics and circus artists. From five or six scholars sharing emerging research at ad hoc meetings at Concordia University to an active list of over one hundred scholars, stu­ dents, practitioners, pedagogues, and industry players, the Working Group has grown into something of an essential hub for critical thinking on con­ temporary circus and cultural discourse, branding, and issues of training and pedagogy in both high performance programs and applied creativity. Our meetings, held at Concordia University, the National Circus School of Montreal, and occasionally at McGill, now regularly attract between twenty and forty people every six to eight weeks. These meetings and the research emerging from them have also prompted invitations to American univer­ sities and by the American circus community, Circus Now, to share our insights and research methods.

An emerging field in an interdisciplinary research landscape The ad hoc discussion group has grown very quickly, and unexpectedly, into a community of scholars and practitioners building a field that departs from theatre and performance studies, as well as existing American studies into circus history or European heuristic studies of nouveau and contem­ porary circus. This new field, North American contemporary circus stud­ ies, is arising from the initial impetus of studying and understanding the contemporary circus emerging from Québec, a hybrid form of European circus aesthetic and ethos and American commercial and industrial creativ­ ity and practices. In parallel with the Working Group’s emergence from sideshow to partner, the National Circus School in Montreal has structured

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its own research activities under a new research center, establishing univer­ sity and industry collaborations. It has applied for, and obtained, a five-year SSHRC-managed (but NSRC-funded) Canada Industrial Research Chair for Colleges in Circus Arts.9 Circus research demands an unusual level of interdisciplinarity often requiring ongoing open discussion across a variety of disciplines and theo­ retical frameworks. One can always anchor research within the disciplinary confines of a particular analysis or reading, but Québec circus—as a global phenomenon, as a billion-dollar industry, as emblematic representation of national know-how and innovation—remains steeped in many converging fields: aesthetics, dramaturgy and creative process, cultural politics, discourse of nationhood and paradiplomacy, circus training and pedagogy (from high performance training to physical literacy), ethics, philanthropy, social circus, engineering (massive structures, complex rigging), sports medicine, brand­ ing and commerce, urbanism and social spaces, and hands-on research and development stemming from individual companies and through the newly developed research and pedagogy nexus at the National Circus School. Looking ahead, the Working Group and other circus researchers face a number of challenges. These include a concern for: (1) time and resources for extensive immersive research allowing a multidirectional flow of knowl­ edge (knowledge which can be both published in peer-reviewed journals and made useful, in concrete terms, for the studied milieu); (2) building a sense of legitimacy from colleagues in disciplinary fields baffled by the study of circus, but also maintaining an interdisciplinary spirit or collaboration; (3) working towards a clearly defined inter-institutional research center through the incredible amount of research emerging from our individual and collective projects which can be funneled and made available to other researchers and students.10 The scope of the field is so large that it cannot be contained by a single Chair, a single institution, or a single working group, for that matter. We’ll need to start thinking in terms of a multiplication of relatively specialized research poles and methods that can nevertheless share research, resources, and a commitment to a growing and complex field. Finally, (4) negotiating the complexities associated with the challenge of doing research within a multi-layered commercial, artistic, and pedagogical context brings a fascinating convergence of ethics issues and non-disclosure agreements, all of which underline the materiality and significance of the process and its understanding. A portrait of current research into Québec circus must be more than a list of research projects, papers, and publications.11 It must be the ongoing tale of an emerging field, pulled in every direction by disciplinary and profes­ sional concerns, yet brought together by a fundamental engagement in the interdisciplinary nature of a commercially successful performing art, which resonates deeply with Québec’s aspirations and its ever-present sense of its own becoming.

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Figure 35.2 Marion Guyez in “Inacheveux”. Source: Photograph courtesy of Photolosa (photographer), Marion Guyez and Cie d’Elles. Notes: Directed by Marion Guyez and Yaelle Antoine, production Cie d’Elles.

Notes 1 An updated and expanded version of this chapter is appearing in Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, McGill-Queen’s University Press, (forth­ coming). My circus-based research has been made possible thanks to the funding of the Québec Fonds de recherche Société et culture, the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Conference and Workshop funding, for a new project on social circus, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council-funded Canada Industrial Research Chair for Colleges in Circus Arts with which I am affiliated as an active collaborator. Much of the research would not have been possible without the support of the National Circus School and Concordia University. 2 Precise operation budgets have always been contentious and complicated when reporting Cirque du Soleil’s activities, mostly privately held, so one has to filter through whatever information one can get from their public relations. The num­ bers have been rather consistent whether given in a crisis situation (as in January 2013) or in public relations exercises. Some interesting coverage in English about the 2013 crisis can be found in Nestruck (2013) and Marotte and Barber (2013). For some of the more recent information, where Cirque du Soleil public relations have proven refreshingly frank and open about numbers, new orientations, and challenges, see the recent dossier in Le Devoir (Paré 2014a, 2014b; Leroux and Baillargeon 2014), which included a front-page feature on the current state of flux of the multinational corporation. Permanent productions in Las Vegas, all running ten performances a week, roughly year-round, include: Mystère directed by Franco Dragone (running continuously since 1993), O directed by Dragone (since 1998), Zumanity directed by Dominique Champagne and René-Richard Cyr (since 2003), KA directed by Robert Lepage (since 2005), Beatle’s Love directed by Dominic Champagne (since 2006), Criss Angel Believe directed by Serge Denoncourt (since 2008). Viva Elvis closed after two years and was replaced in 2012 with Zarkana directed by François Girard (which had been in

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3

4 5

6

7

8

9 10

Louis Patrick Leroux New York) and Michael Jackson ONE, opened in 2013. La Nouba at Orlando’s Walt Disney World, has been running since 1999. Iris in Hollywood, directed by French choreographer Philippe Decouflé, closed prematurely in January 2013, after an 18 month run. At the time of writing (2014), Soleil had ten produc­ tions touring internationally (excluding the permanent productions in Vegas and Orlando), and their production, Kurios, set to open in the Spring 2014. Some of their productions are relatively recent “big top” shows, a growing number are older big top productions that were converted into arena shows, accessing a new market and decreasing the set-up and travel time between cities. After the initial shock and media frenzy surrounding the 400 employees laid off between January and March 2013, Cirque du Soleil discreetly pursued its reengineering. Cirque spokespeople admit that there are but 1,500 employees left in Montreal and 4,000 worldwide, down 1,000 (Paré 2014a). However, this is also due to the closing of a number of permanent productions as well as to a rationalization of technical and production resources. Both these companies have not-for-profit and commercial entities. While the not-for-profit numbers can be verified, the commercial ones cannot readily be accessed. The Québec provincial arts funding agency, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec established a circus arts program, with a distinct budget from other per­ forming arts, in 2001. The Canada Council for the Arts integrated contemporary circus into its interdisciplinary Inter-Arts Office. As I explore in an article in Québec Studies (Leroux 2014b), Cirque du Soleil sought “ownership” of the word “cirque” by trying to obtain a copyright on American soil after an excessive number of companies copied their style and maintained a level of confusion by using the French moniker. Cirque du Soleil sued Florida-based Cirque Inc (also known as Cirque Productions), but lost the lawsuit in 2004, after a five-year battle reportedly costing each company up to four million dollars (Benston 2004). Much has been written about the animal-free origins of Québec circus, but Cirque du Soleil has made it clear that the initial decision was not ethical but economical. For instance, when presented with the opportunity to work with animals, Guy Caron and Guy Laliberté did not hesitate to co-create a show with their Swiss counterparts Cirque Knie in 1985. Cirque du Soleil alumni and co-founders Normand Latourelle and Gilles Ste-Croix each created their own horse-based circuses. Latourelle’s Cavalia has become an important producer of equestrian spectacle, touring shows around the world. Ste-Croix’s ChevalThéâtre and later Saka haven’t attained the same level of success. There is also a smaller regional equestrian circus, near Montmagny, La Centaurée-La luna Caballera. While Québec contemporary circus is first and foremost acrobatic and artistic, it does include a few interesting examples of equestrian practice. A circus-trained high level practitioner such as Andréane Leclerc recently wrote a particularly strong and lucid MA thesis in Theatre at UQAM on the topic of the dramaturgy of contortion. I co-supervised an MA on social clowning written by long-time clown Sue Proctor. There seems to be a growing number of scholarpractitioners, scholars who also seriously practice circus. The Chair holder, Patrice Aubertin, a former director of training programs at Cirque du Soleil, is also Director of research and of the teacher training program at the School. Various research initiatives are under the umbrella of the National Circus School, others at Concordia, others at Université de Montréal or McGill. The Montreal Working Group on Circus Research, while independent from the School’s own

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research initiatives and agreements with industry partners, remains in constant conversation with all concerned. A growing number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are drawn to Montreal’s circus scene and the universities have only begun to tap into this rich and varied field. 11 The Montreal Working Group on Circus Research documents these on its website: http://resonance.hexagram.ca. Most of the talks and round table discussions are now recorded (video or audio) and they are available for consultation, onsite, at the National Circus School Library.

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Kriellaars, Dean (2013). “Physical Literacy and the Circus,” National Circus School, Montreal, November 1. Working Group. Lafortune, Sylvain, Jon Burtt, and Patrice Aubertin (2012). “L’introduction de l’entraînement à la prise de décision dans la formation supérieure en arts du cirque et ses effets sur les strategies d’enseignement sur l’apprentissage et sur la perform­ ance,” National Circus School, Montreal, paper presentation, February 3. Lafortune, Sylvain, Jon Burtt, and Patrice Aubertin (Forthcoming). “The introduc­ tion of Decision Training into an elite circus arts training program,” in Louis Patrick Leroux and Charles Batson (eds). Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Lavers, Katie (2012a). “The Political Body—Embodied Protest in Contemporary Circus: Archaos, Circus Oz, 7 doigts de la main,” National Circus School, Mon­ treal, paper presentation February 3, now published as, Lavers, Katie (2014). “The Political Body in Contemporary Circus: Philippe Petit and Philippe Ménard,” Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, 8(2): 55–68. Lavers, Katie (2012b). “Animals of the Mind: the Body of the Horse in Contemporary Circus,” National Circus School, Montreal, paper presentation. Now published as, Lavers, Katie (2015). “Horses in Modern, New and Contemporary Circus,” Ani­ mal Studies Journal 4(2), available at www.ro.uow.edu.au/asj/. Lavoie, Sylvain (2009a). “Le dernier homme. Entre cirque et religion,” Spirale, 227 (Summer): 31–3. Lavoie, Sylvain (ed.) (2009b). “Rayonnement du cirque Québécois,” Spirale, 227 (Summer). Leclerc, Andréane, Paloma Holmes, and Patrice Aubertin (2013). “On Pain and Cir­ cus in Training and Practice,” National Circus School, Montreal, paper presenta­ tion, January 25. Working Group. Leroux, Louis Patrick (2009). “Le Québec à Las Vegas: pérégrinations postidenti­ taires dans l’hyper-Amérique,” in Louis Patrick Leroux (ed.), Le Québec à Las Vegas, L’Annuaire théâtral: revue québécoise d’études théâtrales, 45 (Special Issue/Spring): 9–20. Leroux, Louis Patrick (2009). “Zumanity: la spectacularisation de l’intime, ou le pari impossible d’authenticité au Cirque,” L’Annuaire théâtral. Revue québécoise d’études théâtrales, 45: 69–91. Leroux, Louis Patrick (2012). “Cirque in Space! The ethos, ethics, and aesthetics of staging and branding the individual of exception,” Durham, NC: Duke University, Lecture, unpublished paper, April 11. Leroux, Louis Patrick (2013). “Que raconte le cirque québécois, quel sens y donner? Quelques pistes pour une dramaturgie circassienne,” Montreal: École nationale de cirque de Montréal, May 10, Lecture. Leroux, Louis Patrick (2014a). “Contemporary circus research in Québec: building and negotiating an emerging interdisciplinary field,” Theatre Research in Canada, 35(2): 263–79. Leroux, Louis Patrick (2014b). “North–South Circus Circulations: Where Québé­ cois and American Circus Cultures Meet,” Québec Studies, 58 (Fall) 3–24. Leroux, Louis Patrick and Stéphane Baillargeon (2014). “En avant, comme avant! Diversification et dilution à la mode Cirque du Soleil, qui est en redefinition,” entrevue avec Louis Patrick Leroux, propos recueillis par Stéphane Baillargeon, Le Devoir, January 18–19, p. A6.

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Leroux, Louis Patrick and Charles Batson (eds) (Forthcoming). Cirque Global: Québec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Leslie, Deborah and Norma M. Rantisi (2010). “Creativity and Urban Regenera­ tion: the Role of La Tohu and the Cirque du Soleil in the Saint-Michel Neigh­ bourhood in Montréal,” Concordia University, paper presentation, November 16. Working Group. Mahy, Isabelle (2008). Les coulisses de l’innovation, création et gestion au Cirque du Soleil, Dissertation, Université Laval. Marotte, Bertrand and John Barber (2013). “The Show won’t go on for 400 Cirque du Soleil Employees,” The Globe and Mail, January 16. Nestruck, J. Kelly (2013). “Massive Layoffs and Mediocrity: Has Cirque du Soleil Lost its Way?” The Globe and Mail, January 16. Paré, Isabelle (2014a). “Le Cirque du Soleil cherche un nouvel élan,” Le Devoir, January 18 and 19: A1, A12. Paré, Isabelle (2014b). “Les retombées de la ‘comète’ Cirque du Soleil,” Le Devoir, January 18 and 19: A7. Spiegel, Jennifer (2012). “Singular Bodies, Collective Dreams and the Making of a Mass Movement: How Street Circus Helped Create the ‘Maple Spring’,” “The State of Circus Research in Quebec Conference,” Concordia, McGill, and the National Circus School, Conference paper presentation, September 21. Spiegel, Jennifer (2014). “Evaluating the Socio-cultural Impact of Social Circus in Québec,” McGill University, paper presentation, February 28, Working Group. Wall, Duncan (2014). “Circus as Community Building,” McGill University, paper presentation, February 28. Working Group. Zhang, Tracy (2011). “A Preliminary Study: International Recruitment and Chinese Artists at Cirque du Soleil,” Concordia, Montreal, paper presentation, December 9. Working Group.

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Barton, Bob, as told to G. Ernest Thomas. (1939) Old Covered Wagon Show Days, New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Baston, Kim. (2010) ‘Jacques Brel and circus performance: the compiled score as dis­ course in The Space Between by Circa’, Australasian Drama Studies, 56: 154–69. Baudelaire, Charles. (1975) Oeuvres Poétiques, edited by Claude Pichois, Paris: Gal­ limard. Baudreault, Julie. (1999) ‘Les Nouveaux Cirques: Rupture ou Continuité?’, unpub­ lished PhD dissertation, Université Laval. Baudrillard, Jean. (1983) Simulations, New York: Semiotext(e). Baum, L. Frank. ([1900] 1973) The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Reprint, annotated by Michael Patrick Hearn, New York: Clarkson N. Potter. Bauman, Charly, with Steven, Leonard A. (1975) Tiger, Tiger: My 25 Years with the Big Cats, Chicago, IL: Playboy Press. Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles. (1996) ‘Género, Intertextualidad y Poder Social’, Revista de Investigaciones Folklóricas, 11: 78–108. Bayly, Charles, Jr. (1931) ‘The circus: say, pa, which cage is Barnum in?’, Theatre Arts Monthly, 15: 655–58, 671–86, 691–99. Beadle, Ron. (2003) ‘In search of a peculiar goodness: towards a reading of Nell Stroud’s Josser – Days and Nights in the Circus’, Tamara: The Postmodern Jour­ nal of Critical Organization Science, 3(2): 60–8. Beal, George B. (1938) Through the Back Door of the Circus, Springfield, NY: McLoughlin. Bean, Jennifer M. and Negra, Diane. (2002a) A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bean, Jennifer M. and Negra, Diane. (2002b) ‘Introduction’, in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1–26. Beatty, Clyde with Adward, Anthony. (1933) The Big Cage, New York: Century Co. Beck, Ulrich. (1999) World Risk Society, Cambridge: Polity. Beck, Ulrich. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck, Ulrich. (2009) World at Risk, translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Polity. Becker, Howard Saul. (1982) Art Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Beckett, Samuel. (1983) Worstward Ho, London: Calder Publishing. Beckett, Simon. (1993) ‘Roll up for an unnatural act’, The Times Magazine, 13 March, 16–7. Bederman, Gail. (1995) Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bégardi, Bernard, Estournet, Jean-Pierre and Meunier, Sylvie. (1990) L’Autre Cirque, Paris: Mermon. Beisel, Nicola. (1997) Imperial Innocents: Anthony Cornstock and Family Repro­ duction in Victorian America, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benedict, Barbara M. (2001) Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Enquiry, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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Benjamin, Walter. (1968) Illuminations, New York: Schoken Books. Berghahn, Volker. (2001) America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bergson, Henri. ([1911] 1935) Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, translated by Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. London: Macmillan. Berlant, Lauren. (1991) The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Berman, Marshall. (1982) All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London: Verso. Best, Geoffrey. (1979) Mid-Victorian Britain, 1851–70, London: Fontana. Bidegain, Marcela. (2007) Teatro comunitario: resistencia y transformación social, Buenos Aires: Atuel. Bishop, George. (1976) The World of Clowns, Los Angeles: Brooke House Publishers. Blache, Marta. (1991) ‘Folklore y nacionalismo en la Argentina. Su vinculación de origen y su desvinculación actual’, in Runa. Archivos para las Ciencias del Hom­ bre, vol. XX, Buenos Aires: FFyL, UBA. Blandford, W.F.H. (1922) ‘Studies on the horn. No.l: the French Horn in England’, The Musical Times, 63(954): 544–7. Bledstein, Burton J. (1976) The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, New York: W.W. Norton. Bogdan, Robert. (1986) ‘Circassian beauties: authentic sideshow fabrications’, Bandwagon, 30(3) (May/June): 22–3. Bogdan, Robert. (1988) Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bolton, Reg. (2004) ‘Why circus works: how the values and structures of circus make it a significant developmental experience for young people’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Murdoch University. Booth, Michael R. (1965) English Melodrama, London: Jenkins. Booth, Michael. R. (1981) Victorian Spectacular Theatre 1850–1910, London: Routledge Kegan Paul. Bostock, E.H. (1927) Menageries, Circuses and Theatres, Reprint, New York: Ben­ jamin Blom. Bostock, Frank. (1933) The Training of Wild Animals, New York: Century Co. Boudreault, Julie. (1996) Le Cirque du Soleil: la Création d’un Spectacle: Saltim­ banco, Quebec: Nuit Blanche. Bouissac, Paul. (1976) Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bouissac, Paul. (1982) ‘The profanation of the sacred clown performance’, in Sym­ posium on Theatre and Ritual, unpublished manuscript, Toronto: Wenner Gren Foundation. Bouissac, Paul. (2010) Semiotics at the Circus, New York, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Bouissac, Paul. (2012) Circus as Multimodal Discourse: Performance, Meaning, and Ritual, London: Bloomsbury. Bourdieu, Pierre. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Bourdon, Anne-Marie. (ed.) (2005) ‘Une école pour un cirque de création: les partipris pédagogiques du CNAC’, La Formation pluridisciplinaire de l’ interprète du spectacle vivant, Paris: Editions du CNRS. Bowlby, Rachel. (1985) Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, London: Methuen. Bowman, Harry P. (1942) As Told On a Sunday Run, Flint, MI: Circus Research Foundation. Braathen, Sverre O. (1958) Circus Bands: Their Rise and Fall, Evanston, IL: The Instrumentalist. Bradby, David, James, Lewis and Sharrat, Bernard. (eds) (1980) Performance and Politics in Popular Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradford, Philips Verner and Blume, Harvey. (1992) Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo, New York: St Martin’s Press. Bradna, Fred. (1952) The Big Top: My Forty Years with The Greatest Show on Earth, New York: Simon & Schuster. Bratton, J.S. (1981) The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction, London: Croom Helm. Bratton, J.S. (2007) ‘What is a play? Drama and the Victorian circus’, in Tracy C. Davis and Peter Holland (eds), The Performing Century: Nineteenth-Century Theatre’s History, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan: 250–62. Bratton, Jacqueline and Traies, Jane. (1980) Astley’s Amphitheatre, London: Chad­ wyck-Healey. Braun, Edward. (ed.) (1969) Meyerhold on Theatre, New York: Hill & Wang. Brecht, Bertolt. (1986) Brecht on Theatre, edited by John Willett, London: Methuen. Breton, André. (1972) Manifestoes of Surrealism, translated by Seaver and Lane, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Brewer, John. (1997) The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eight­ eenth Century, London: HarperCollins. Brooks, Peter. (1976) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melo­ drama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Brooks, Peter. (1989) The Shifting Point, New York: Harper & Row. Brooks, Peter. (1995) The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melo­ drama, and the Mode of Excess, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Broome, Richard. (1995) ‘Enduring moments of Aboriginal dominance: Aboriginal performers, boxers and runners’, Labour History, 69 (November): 171–87. Broome, Richard. (1996) ‘Theatres of power: tent boxing circa 1910–1970’, Aboriginal History, 20: 1–23. Broome, Richard. (2001) Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Domi­ nance, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Broome, Richard with Jackomos, Alex. (1998) Sideshow Alley, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Brown, Bill. (1996) The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Economies of Play, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brown, Fredrick. (1968) An Impersonation of Angels, New York: Viking. Brown, Maria Ward. (1901) The Life of Dan Rice, London: Branck, New York: By the author.

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Budd, Michael Anton. (1997) The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bull, Cynthia Jean Cohen. (1997) ‘Sense, meaning, and perception in three dance cultures’, in Jane C. Desmond (ed.), Meaning in Motion, Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 269–87. Burger, Baudouin. (1974) L’Activité Théâtrale au Québec 1765–1825, Montreal: Parti Pris. Burgess, Hovey. (1977) Circus Techniques, New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell. Burke, Peter. (1994) Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Aldgate: Ashgate Publishing. Burleigh, Bertha Bennet. (1937) Circus, London: Collins. Burn, W.L. (1964) An Age of Equipoise: A Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation, London: Unwin Books. Butler, Judith. (1990) Gender Trouble, New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York: Routledge. Butler, Lauren. (2012) ‘Everything seemed new: clown as embodied critical peda­ gogy’, Theatre Topics, 22(1): 63–72. Cahn, Susan. (1994) Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sport, New York: Harvard University Press. Camus, Raoul F. (1976) Military Music of the American Revolution, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Cannon, Judy with St Leon, Mark. (1997) Take a Drum and Beat It: The Astonish­ ing Ashtons 1848–1990s, Sydney: Tytherleigh Press. Cannon, Michael. (1971) Australia in the Victorian Age, vol. I: Who’s Master? Who’s Man?, South Melbourne: Curry O’Neil. Cannon, Michael. (1973) Australia in the Victorian Age, vol. II: Life in the Country, Melbourne: Thomas Nelson Australia. Carlin, David and Kennedy, Laurene. (2015) Performing Digital: Multiple Perspec­ tives on a Living Archive, Abingdon: Ashgate. Carlson, Marvin. (1996) Performance: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge. Carmeli, Yoram. (1987) ‘Played by their own Play: fission and fusion in British circuses’, The Sociological Review, 35(4): 744–74. Carmeli, Yoram. (1990) ‘Performing the “Real” and “Impossible” in the British Travelling Circus’, Semiotica, 80 (3/4): 193–230. Carmeli, Yoram. (1991) ‘Performance and family in the world of British circus,’ Semiotica, 85(3/4): 257–89. Carmeli, Yoram. (1997) ‘The sight of cruelty: the case of circus animal acts’, Visual Anthropology, 10: 1–15. Carmeli, Yoram. (2001) ‘Circus play, circus talk and the nostalgia for a total order’, Journal of Popular Culture, 35(3): 157–64. Carlyon, David. (2001) Dan Rice: The Most Famous Man You’ve Never Heard Of, New York, NY: PublicAffairs. Carmeli, Yoram S. (1990) ‘Performing the “Real” and “Impossible” in the British Travelling Circus’, Semiotica, 80 (3–4): 193–230. Carroll, Jerry. (1992) ‘Return of the “Circus of the Scars”’, Chronicle (San Fran­ cisco), 15 July, D3. Carter, Angela. ([1984] 1994) Nights at the Circus, London: Vintage.

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Carter, Tina. (2014) ‘Dangerous Play: “Supercrip” Aerialists and the Paralympic Opening Ceremony of London 2012’, About Performance, 12 (2012): 83–102. Casarino, Cesare. (1990) ‘Fragments on Wings of Desire (or, fragmentary represen­ tation as historical necessity)’, Social Text, (24): 167–81. Castagnino, Raúl. (1969) El Circo Criollo, Buenos Aires: Ed. Lajouane. Castle, Terry. (1986) Masquerade and Civilisation: The Carnivalesque in EighteenthCentury Culture and Fiction, London: Methuen. Chadwick, Whitney. (1993) ‘The fine art of gentling: horses, women and Rosa Bonheur in Victorian England’, in Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (eds), The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 89–107. Chamberlain, Franc and Yarrow, Ralph. (2002) Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre, London: Routledge. Charney, Leo and Schwartz, Vanessa. (1995) Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Cheesmond, Robert. (2007) ‘Where the antic sits’, in David Robb (ed.), Clowns, Fools and Picaros: Popular Forms in Theatre, Fiction and Film, Amsterdam: Rodopi: 9–24. Chen, Jian. (2001) Mao’s China and the Cold War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Chessa, Luciano. (2012) ‘The art of noise’, in Luigi Russolo: Futurist Performance, Los Angeles: University of California Press: 171–2. Chinese Acrobatics = L’Acrobatie chinoise = Akrobati ya kickina. (1974) Peking: Foreign Language Press. Chindahl, George L. (1959) History of the Circus in America, Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers. Chion, Michel. (1994) Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, translated by Claudia Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press. Chipman, Bert J. (1933) Hey Ruby, Hollywood: Hollywood Print Shop. Chiu, Melissa and Zheng, Shen Tian. (2008) Art and China’s Revolution, New York: Asia Society; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Circus! (1964) ‘Introduction by Charles Fox’, New York: Hawthorn Books. Cirque du Soleil (2014). Global Citizenship. Accessed on June 14 2014 from www. cirquedusoleil.com/en/about/global-citizenship/default.aspx. Clapp, William W., Jr. ([1853] 1968) A Record of the Boston Stage. Reprint, New York: Benjamin Blom. Clark, Alan and Clark, John. (1982) ‘Highlights and action replays: ideology, sport and the media’, in Jennifer Hargreaves (ed.), Sport, Culture and Ideology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 62–87. Clark, Paul. (2008) The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History, New York: Cam­ bridge University Press. Clarke, John S. (1936) Circus Parade, New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Clarke, William. (1827) The Every Night Book; Or, Life After Dark, London. Clausen, Connie. (1961) I Love You Honey, But the Season Is Over, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston; London: Michael Joseph. Clement, Herb. (1974) The Circus: Bigger and Better Than Ever?, South Brunswick, NJ: A.S. Barnes. Coco the Clown [Nicholai Poliakoff]. (1950) Behind My Greasepaint, London and New York: Hutchinson and Co.

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Cocteau, Jean. (1930) Opium, Paris: Stock. Cocteau, Jean. (1950) Oeuvres Complètes, Lausanne: Margeurat. Cocteau, Jean. (1970) Professional Secrets, edited by Robert Phelps, New York: Farrar Straus. Cohen, Annabel J. (2000) ‘Film music: perspectives from cognitive psychology’, in James Buhler, Carol Flinn and David Neumeyer (eds), Music and Cinema, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press: 360–77. Cohen, Morten N. (1995) Lewis Carroll: A Biography, London: Macmillan. Cohen, Stanley. (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers, London: MacGibbon & Kee. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. (ed.) (1998) Radical Street Performance, London and New York: Routledge. Colley, Linda. (1994) Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, London: Pimlico. Collins, Philip. (1965) ‘Dickens and popular amusements’, Dickensian, 61: 7–19. Conklin, George. (1921) The Ways of the Circus: Being the Memories and Adventures of George Conklin Tamer of Lions, New York: Harper and Bros. Conover, Richard E. (1956) Telescoping Tableaux, Xenia, OH: By the author. Conover, Richard E. (1957) The Affairs of James A. Bailey, Xenia, OH: By the author. Conover, Richard E. (1959) The Great Forepaugh Show, Xenia, OH: By the author. Conover, Richard E. (1965) Give ‘Em a John Robinson, Xenia, OH: By the author. Conover, Richard E. (1967a) The Circus, Wisconsin’s Unique Heritage, Baraboo, WI: Circus World Museum. Conover, Richard E. (1967b) ‘William Cameron Coup of Delavan’, in The Circus: Wisconsin’s Unique Heritage, Baraboo, WI: State Historical Society of Wisconsin and The Circus World Museum: 20–5. Conover, Richard E. (1969) The Fielding Band Chariots, Xenia, OH: By the author. Cook, Gladys Emerson. (1956) Circus Clowns on Parade, New York: Franklin Watts. Cook, James, W., Jr. (1996) ‘Of men, missing links, and nondescripts: the strange career of P.T. Barnum’s ‘What Is It?’ exhibition’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (ed.), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, New York: New York University Press: 139–57. Cook, James, W., Jr. (2001) The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cook, Nicholas. (1998) Analysing Musical Multimedia, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 208. Cooper, Courtney Ryley. (1924) Lions ‘n’ Tigers ‘n’ Everything, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Cooper, Courtney Ryley. (1929) Under the Big Top, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Cooper, Courtney Ryley. (1930) With the Circus, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Cooper, Courtney Ryley. (1931) Circus Day, New York: Farrar & Rinehart. Coover, Robert. (2000) ‘Tears of a clown’, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fic­ tion, 42(1): 81–3. Copferman, Émile. (1972) La Mise-en-Crise Théâtrale, Paris: Maspero.

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Coplan, Maxwell Frederic and Kelley, F. Beverly. (1945) Pink Lemonade, New York: McGraw-Hill. Cordières, Jules. (1976) ‘Faire de chacun l’interprète de ses propres rêves’, La Fête, cette hantise …, Paris Autrement, 7: 162–6. Corti, Victor. (ed.) (1974) Collected Works of Antonin Artaud, vol. 4, London: Calder & Boyars. Costa, T.B. et al. (2008) Memorandum of Fresh Circus: Proceedings of the European Seminar for the Development of Contemporary Circus, Paris, 25–26 September 2008, Paris: Circostrada Network/HorsLesMurs. Cott, Nancy F. (1987) The Grounding of Modern Feminism, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Coup, W.C. ([1901] 1961) Sawdust and Spangles: Stories and Secrets of the Circus, Reprint, Washington, DC: Paul A. Ruddell. From ‘Notes’ left by Coup and edited by Forrest Crissey. Court, Alfred. (1954) Wild Circus Animals, London: Burke. Court, Alfred. (1955) My Life With the Big Cats, New York: Simon & Schuster. Coveney, Peter. (1967) The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Society: A Study of the Thee in English Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Cowell, Joseph. ([1844] 1979) Thirty Years Passed Among the Players in England and America. Reprint, Hamden, CT: Archon Books (The Shoe String Press). Coxe, Anthony D. Hippisley. (1959) ‘The lesser known circuses of London’, Theatre Notebook, 13 (Spring): 89–100. Coxe, Anthony D. Hippisley. (1966) ‘Historical research and the circus’, Theatre Notebook, 21 (Autumn): 40–2. Coxe, Antony D. Hippisley. (1980a) A Seat at the Circus, Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Coxe, Anthony D. Hippisley. (1980b) ‘Equestrian drama and the circus’, in David Bradby, Lewis James and Bernard Sharrat (eds), Performance and Politics in Popu­ lar Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 109–18. Coxe, Anthony D. Hippisley. (n.d.) ‘The Clarkes’, Part II, unpublished manuscript for L’Union des Historiens du Cirque (Box 11, TS). Crawford, John R. (1982) ‘Pioneer African missionary: Samuel Philips Verner’, Journal of Presbyterian History, 60(1) (Spring): 42–57. Croft-Cooke, Rupert. (1948) The Circus Book, London: S. Low, Marston. Croft-Cooke, Rupert. (1950) The Circus Has No Home, Revised edition. London: Falcon Press. Croft-Cooke, Rupert and Cotes, Peter. (1976) Circus: A World History, Paris: Albin Michel. Croft-Cooke, Rupert and Meadmore, W.S. (1951) The Sawdust Ring, London: Odhams Press. Crosland, Margaret. (ed.) (1972) Cocteau’s World, New York: Dodd Mead. Cross, J.S. (1809) Circusiana; Or a Collection of the Most Favorite Ballets, Specta­ cles; Melodrames, etc. Performed at the Royal Circus, St George’s Fields, 2 vols, London: Lackington, Allen & Co. Crossley, Nick. (1994) The Politics of Subjectivity, Aldershot: Avebury. Culhane, John. (1990) The American Circus: An Illustrated History, New York: Henry Holt. Cunningham, Hugh. (1980) Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, New York: St Martin’s Press.

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Cunningham, Hugh. (1995) Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, London: Longman Group. Cutt, Margaret Nancy. (1979) Ministering Angels: A Study of Nineteenth Century Evangelical Writing for Children, Wormley, Hertfordshire: Five Owls. Cvetkovich, Ann. (1992) Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism, Brunswick, NY: Rutgers University Press. Cyrulnik, Boris. (2009) Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past, translated by David Macey. London: Penguin. da Costa Nunes, J.M. (1990) ‘O.G. Rejlander’s photographs of ragged children: reflections on the idea of urban poverty in mid-Victorian society’, Nineteenth Cen­ tury Studies, 4: 105–36. Dahlinger, Fred, Jr. (1983–4) ‘The development of the railroad circus’, Bandwagon, parts 1–4 Daum, Paul Alexander. (1973) ‘The Royal Circus 1782–1809: an analysis of eques­ trian entertainments’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Ohio State University. Davin, Anna. (1996) Growing Up Poor: Home, School, and Street in London, 1870–1914, London: Rivers Oram. Davin, Anna. (2001) ‘Waif stories in late nineteenth century England’, History Workshop Journal, 52 (Autumn): 67–98. Davis, Janet M. (2002) The Circus Age, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Caro­ lina Press. Davis, Janet M. (2013) ‘The circus Americanized’, in Susan Weber, Kenneth L. Ames and Matthew Wittmann (eds), The American Circus, New York: Bard Graduate Center: New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 23–53. Davis, Jim and Emeljanow, Victor. (2001) Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Davis, Tracy C. (1986) ‘The employment of children in the Victorian theatre: train­ ing, exploitation and the movement for reform’, New Theatre Quarterly, 2(6): 117–35. Davis, Tracy C. (1990) ‘Sex in public places: The Zaeo Aquarium scandal and the Victorian moral majority’, Theatre History Studies, 10: 1–14. Davis, Tracy C. ([1990] 1991) Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Davis, Tracy. (1992) ‘Shotgun wedlock: Annie Oakley’s power politics in the Wild West’, in Laurence Senelick (ed.), Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, Hanover, NH: Tufts University Press: 141–57. Day, Helen. (1992) ‘Female daredevils’, in Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds), The New Woman and Her Sisters, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf: 137–57. De Bord, Guy. (1967) Society of the Spectacle, Detroit: Red and Black. Decastro, Jacob. (1824) The Memoirs of the Life of J. Decastro, Comedian, edited by R. Humphreys, London: Sherwood, Jones and Co. Degler, Carl N. (1991) ‘In the wake of Boas’, in Carl N. Degler (1991a): 84–104. Degler, Carl N. (1991a) In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, New York: Oxford University Press. Delavoye, Will. (1925) Show Life in America, East Point, GA: By the author.

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Deleuze, Gilles. (1986) Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tom­ linson and Barbara Habberjam, New York: Bloomsbury. Delpech-Ramey, Joshua. (2010) ‘Sublime comedy: on the inhuman rights of clowns’, SubStance, 39(2): 131–41. Demers, Patricia. (1991) ‘Mrs. Sherwood and Hesba Stretton: the letter and the spirit of evangelical writing of and for children’, in James McGavran (ed.), Romanticism and Children’s Literature, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press: 129–49. D’Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle. (1988) Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, New York: Harper & Row. Denier, Tony. (1877) How to Join a Circus, New York: Dick and Fitzgerald. Denis-Huot, C. and Denis-Huot, M. (2003) The Art of Being an Elephant, New York: Barnes & Noble. Desbonnet, Edmond. (1911) Les Rois de la Force, Paris: Librairie Athlétique. Desmond, Jane C. (ed.) (1997a) Meaning in Motion, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Desmond, Jane C. (1997b) ‘Introduction’, in Desmond (1997a): 1–25. Desmond, Jane C. (1997c) ‘Embodying difference: issues in dance and cultural stud­ ies’, in Desmond (1997a): 29–54. Deuchar, Stephen. (1988) Sporting Art in Eighteenth-Century England: A Social and Political History, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Dhotre, Damoo Go, as told to Richard Taplinger. (1961) Wild Animal Man, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. ([1568] 1800) The True History of the Conquest of Mex­ ico: Written in the Year 1568, translated by Maurice Keatinge. Piccadilly, UK: John Dean. Dickens, Charles. (1836) ‘Astley’s’, Sketches by ‘Boz’, vol. 1, London. Dickens, Charles. (1841) The Old Curiosity Shop, London, Chapter 34. Dickens, Charles [Boz. pseud]. (1838) Memoir of Joseph Grimaldi, Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. Dickens, Charles. ([1854] 1989) Hard Times, edited by Paul Shilke, Oxford: Oxford University Press. DiMaggio, Paul. (1991) ‘Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston: the creation of an organizational base for high culture in America’, in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (eds). Rethinking Popular Culture: Contempo­ rary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 374–97. Disher, Willson M. (1942) Fairs, Circuses and Music Halls, London: William Collins. Disher, Willson M. ([1925] 1968) Clowns and Pantomimes, New York and London: Benjamin Blom. Disher, Willson M. ([1937] 1969) Greatest Show on Earth. Astley’s – Afterwards Sanger’s – Royal Amphitheatre of Arts, Westminster Bridge Road, New York: Benjamin Blom. Doane, Mary Ann. (2002) ‘Technology’s body: cinematic vision in modernity’, in Bean and Negra (2002a): 530–51. Dolan, Jill. (1988) The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

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Faber, Marion. (1979) Angels of Daring: Tightrope Walker and Acrobat, in Nietzsche, Kafka, Rilke and Thomas Mann, Stuttgart: Akademischer Verlag HansDieter Heinz. Falk, Bernard. (1952) The Naked Lady: A Biography of Adah Isaacs Menken, Lon­ don: Hutchinson. Farrell, Rosemary. (2007) ‘Chinese acrobatics unmasked in Australian circus in the nineteenth century’, Australasian Drama Studies, 50: 36–48. Farrell, Rosemary. (2008) ‘Sweat from the bones: politics, Chinese acrobatics and Australia’, unpublished PhD dissertation, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Fawcett, Claire H. (1949) We Fell in Love with the Circus, New York: H.L. Lindquist. Featherstone, Mike. (1992) ‘Postmodernism and the aesthetization of everyday life’, in Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman (eds), Modernity and Identity, Oxford: Blackwell: 265–90. Fellows, Dexter and Freeman, Andrew A. (1936) This Way to the Big Show: The Life of Dexter Fellows, New York: Viking Press. Fenner, Mildred Sandison and Fenner, Wolcott. (1970) The Circus: Lure and Leg­ end, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Ferguson, Harvie. (1990) The Science of Pleasure, London: Routledge. Field, A.G. (1912) Watch Yourself Go By, Columbus, OH: Spaar and Glenn. Fielder, Leslie. (1978) Freaks, New York: Simon & Schuster. Fierce, Milfred. (1993) The Pan-African Idea in the United States, 1900–1919, New York: Garland. Finnegan, Margaret (1999) Selling Suffrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women, New York: Columbia University Press. Flanner, Janet. (1972) Paris was Yesterday, New York: Viking. Flink, James J. (1988) The Automobile Age, Cambridge: MIT Press. Flint, Richard W. (1972) ‘Introduction’ in Richard W. Flint (ed., trans.), Marinetti: Selected Writings, London: Secker & Warburg: 3–36. Flint, Richard W. (1973) ‘A selected guide to source material on the American circus’, The Journal of Popular Culture, VI: 615–22. Flint, Richard W. (1979) ‘The evolution of the circus in nineteenth-century America’, in Myron Matlaw (ed.), American Popular Entertainment, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press. Flores, Javier and Ledesma, Jerónimo. (2006) ‘La Moreira’, in Bondiola. Clown Argentino contemporáneo 1983–2003, accessed 10 October 2009 from www. clownargentinocontemporaneo.blogspot.com. Fogarty, Jim. (2000) The Wonder of Wirths, Sydney: JB Books.

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et Innovation, Paris: Le Conseil Économique et Social. Foster, Frank. (1948) Pink Coats, Spangles and Sawdust, London: Stanley Paul. Foster, Susan Leigh. (1997) ‘Dancing bodies’, in Jane C. Desmond (ed.), Meaning in Motion, Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 235–57. Foucault, Michel. (1979) Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan, New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, edited by Colin Gordon, Brighton: The Harvester Press.

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Foucault, Michel. (1990) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans­ lated by Robert Hurley, New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. (1997) ‘The ethics of the concern for the self as practice of free­ dom’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), Michel Foucault: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, New York: The New Press: 281–302. Fowler, Gene. (1933) Timber Line, New York: Covici Friede Publishers. Fowler, O.S. ([1844] 1850) ‘Tight-lacing, or the evils of compressing the organs of animal life’, in S.S. Sweet (ed.), Who Was the Commander of Bunker Hill?, Boston, MA: John Wilson: 1–16. Fox, Charles Philip. (1953) Circus Parades: A Pictorial History of America’s Pag­ eant, Watkins Glen, NY: Century House. Fox, Charles Philip. (1959) A Ticket to the Circus, New York: Bramhall House. Fox, Charles Philip. (1960) A Pictorial History of Performing Horses, New York: Bramhall House. Fox, Charles Philip. (1978a) The Circus Moves by Rail, Boulder, CO: Pruett. Fox, Charles Philip. (ed.) (1978b) American Circus Posters in Full Color, New York: Dover Publications. Fox, Charles Philip. (ed.) (1979) Old-Time Circus Cuts: Pictorial Archive of 202 Illustrations, New York: Dover Publications. Fox, Charles Philip and Kelley, F. Beverly. (1978) The Great Circus Street Parade in Pictures, New York: Dover Publications. Fox, Charles Philip and Parkinson, Tom. (1969) Circus in America, Waukesha, WI: Country Beautiful. Freedman, Jill. (1975) Circus Days, New York: Crown Publishers (Harmony Books). Freeman, Hubbard. (1961) Great Days of the Circus, New York: American Heritage Publishing Co. Frega, Donnalee. (2001) Women of Illusion, New York: Palgrave. Fricker, Karen. (2008) ‘Cultural Specificity or Cultural Blankness. The Paradox of Québec in Vegas’, Revista mexicana estudias canadiense, 16 (Fall): 127–32. Frost, Thomas. ([1875] 1881) Circus Life and Circus Celebrities, London: Chatto & Windus. Fu, Qifeng and Fu, Tenglong. (2005) The History of Chinese Acrobatics, 2nd edn, Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House. Galikowski, Maria. (1998) Art and Politics in China, 1949–1984, Hong Kong: Chi­ nese University Press. Gaona, Tito with Harry L. Graham. (1984) Born to Fly, Los Angeles: Wild Rose. Garb, Tamar. (1998) Bodies of Modernity, London: Thames and Hudson. Garner, Stanton B. (1994) Bodied Spaces, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gay, Peter (1968) ‘The hunger for wholeness’, in Peter Gay (ed.), Weimar Culture, New York: W.W. Norton: 70–101. Gerson, Walter M. (1969) ‘The Circus: A Mobile Total Institution’, in Walter M. Gerson (ed.), Social Problems in a Changing World: A Comparative Reader, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Gillette, Don Carle. (1967) He Made Lincoln Laugh: The Story of Dan Rice, New York: Exposition Press.

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Gillis, John R. (1981) Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, New York: Academic Press. Gilman, Sander. (1985) Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Gilman, Sander L. (1986) ‘Black bodies, white bodies: toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine, and literature’, in Henry Louis Gates Jr (ed.), ‘Race’, Writing and Difference, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press: 223–61. Gilroy, Paul. (1993) The Black Atlantic Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gipson, Rosemary. (1972) ‘The Mexican performers: pioneer theatre artists in Tuc­ son’, Journal of Arizona History, 13(4) (Winter): 235–52. Gledhill, Christine and Williams, Linda. (eds) (2000) Reinventing Film Studies, Lon­ don: Arnold. Glenn, Susan. (1998) ‘“Give an imitation of me”: Vaudeville mimics and the play of the self’, American Quarterly, 50 (March): 47–76. Glenroy, John H. (1855) Ins & Outs of Circus Life, compiled by Stephen S. Stan­ ford, Boston, MA: Wing M.M. Goffman, Erving. (1974) Frame Analysis, Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Goffman, Erving. (1976) ‘Gender advertisements’, Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication, 3(2): 69–154. Goffman, Erving. (1979) Gender Advertisements, London: Macmillan. Goldman, Merle. (1981) China’s Intellectuals: Advice and Dissent, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Goldman, Richard Franko. (1961) The Wind Band: Its Literature and Technique, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Gollmar, Robert H. (1965) My Father Owned a Circus, Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers. Gombrich, E.H. (1973) ‘Illusion and art’, in R.I. Gregory and E.H. Gombrich (eds), Illusion in Nature and Art, London: Duckworth: 193–243. Goodall, Jane. (2002) Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin, London: Routledge. Gosh, Oroon. (1965) The Dance of Shiva and Other Tales from India, New York: New American Library. Gossard, Steve. (1994) ‘A reckless era of aerial performance: the evolution of the trapeze’, Manuscript Self-Publication. Gould, Paul. (1946) ‘The lady could shoot’, Buick Magazine (November): 12, Annie Oakley Vertical File, Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center (RLPLRC), Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wis. Gould, Stephen Jay. (1981) The Mismeasure of Man, New York: Norton. Greaves, Jack and Earl, Chris. (2001) Legends in Brass: Australian Brass Band Achievers of the 20th Century, Kangaroos Flat, Australia: Muso’s Media. Green, Harvey. (1986) Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Green, Martin. (1966) Children of the Sun, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

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Greenfeld, Liah. (1992) Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenwood, Isaac J. (1898) The Circus, Its Origins and the Growth Prior to 1835, New York: The Dunlop Society. Greimas, A. ([1966] 1986) Sémantique Structurale: Recherche de Méthode, Paris: Puf. Grock [Adrian Wettach]. (1931) Life’s a Lark, edited by E. Behrens, translated by Madge Pemberton. London: W. Heinemann. Grosz, Elizabeth. (1994) Volatile Bodies, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Gruesser, John Cullen. (2000) Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa, Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky. Gundle, Stephen. (2002) ‘Hollywood glamour and mass consumption in post-war Italy’, in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Histories of Leisure, Oxford: Berg: 337–59. Gunning, Tom. (1989) ‘An aesthetic of astonishment’, Art & Text, 34 (Spring): 31–45. Gunning, Tom. (1995) ‘Tracing the individual body: photography, detectives and early cinema’, in Leo Charney and Vanessa Schwartz (eds), Cinema and the Inven­ tion of Modern Life, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 15–45. Gustafson, Donna. (2001) Images from the World Between, Cambridge, MA, and New York: MIT Press and the American Federation of Arts. Guy, J. M. (1998) `La Transfiguration du Cirque’, Théatre Aujourd’hui: La Cirque Contemporain, 7: 26–51. Guy, Jean-Michel. (2001a) ‘Introduction’, in Jean-Michel Guy (ed.), Avant-Garde, Cirque! Les Arts de la Piste en Révolution, Paris: Autrement. Guy, Jean-Michel. (2001b) ‘Les Arts du Cirque en France 2001’, Chronique 28, Paris: Association Française d’Action Artistique – AFFA, Ministère des Affaires éstrangères. Hagenbeck, Carl. (1909) Beasts and Men: Being Carl Hagenbeck’s Experiences for Half a Century Among Wild Animals, translated by Hugh S.R. Elliot and A.G. Thacker, London: Longmans, Green. Hagenbeck, Lorenz. (1956) Animals Are My Life, translated by Alec Brown, Lon­ don: Bodley Head. Haley, Bruce. (1978) The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Haller, Jonathan. (1971) Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority 1859-1900, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hamid, George A. (1950) Circus, New York: Sterling Publishing Co. Hamilton Buckley, Jerome. (1952) The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture, London: George Allen & Unwin. Hammerstrom, David Lewis. (1980) Behind the Big Top, South Brunswick, NJ, and New York: A.S. Barnes and Co. Hanlon-Lees. ([1879] 1995) Mémoires et Pantomimes des Frères Hanlon-Lees, Paris: Reverchon et Vollet. Hansen, Richard K. (2005) The American Wind Band: A Cultural History, Chicago, IL: GIA. Haraway, Donna. (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, London: Routledge. Hargreaves, John. (1986) Sport, Power and Culture, London: Polity Press.

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Harlow, Alvin F. (1951) The Ringlings: Wizards of the Circus, New York: Julian Messner. Harper, Kenn. (2000) Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo, South Royalton, VT: Steerfort. Harris, Jose. (1953) Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain, 1870–1914, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Neil. (1973) Humbug: The Art of P.T. Barnum, New York: Little, Brown and Co. Harrison, Brian. (1982) Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harrison, Larry, Alaszewski, Andy and Walsh, Mike. (1998) ‘The influence of infor­ mal relations on the management of Risk’, in Andy Alaszewski, Larry Harrison and Jill Manthorpe (eds), Risk, Health and Welfare, Buckingham, UK: Open University: 64–86. Hartwell, R. Max. (1954) The Economic Development of Van Diemen’s Land, 1820–50, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Harvey, Douglas S. (2009) ‘Strolling players in Albany, Montreal, and Quebec City, 1797 and 1810: performance, class, and empire’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 38: 239. Harvey, Jen. (2014) Fair Play: Art, Performance, Neoliberalism, London: Palgrave. Hattam, Ed. (1992) A History of the Woorayl Municipal Band 1892–1992, Leon­ gatha: Hues Graphics. Hediger, H. (1955) Studies of the Psychology and Behavior of Captive Animals in Zoos and Circuses, New York: Criterion Books. Heikkinen, Merja. (1999) Sirkus, ja estraditaiteilijat: Raportti kyselytutkimuksesta/ Circus Artists and Stage Entertainers: Report Survey, Working Papers. Helsinki: Taiteen keskustoimikunta. Heiskanen, Ilkka. (2001) Muuttuvatko laitokset, miksi ja miten? Taide – ja kulttu­ urilaitosten institutionaalinen muutos 1990 – Iuvulla [Did the Institutions Change, Why and How? Arts and Cultural Institutions in the 1990s Institutional Change], Helsinki: Taiteen keskustoimikunta. Heizer, Robert F. and Kroeber, Theodora. (eds) (1979) Ishi and the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hendershot, Cyndy. (2003) Anti-Communism and Popular Culture in Mid-Century America, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Henderson, J.Y., as told to Richard Taplinger. (1952) Circus Doctor, Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co. Herbert, Trevor. (1990) ‘The repertory of a Victorian provincial brass band’, Popular Music, 9(1): 117–32. Herbert, Trevor. (2000a) ‘Nineteenth century bands; making a movement’, in Trevor Herbert (ed.), The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 10–60. Herbert, Trevor. (ed.) (2000b) The British Brass Band: A Musical and Social History, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Higgins, Christopher. (2004) ‘MacIntyre’s Moral Theory and the Possibility of an Aretaic Ethics of Teaching’, in Education and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and Learning, edited by J. Dunne and P. Hogan, Oxford: Blackwell: 35–47.

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Hillman, David Asaf. (1996) ‘Hamlet, Nietzsche, and visceral knowledge’, in Michael O’Donovan-Anderson (ed.), The Incorporated Self, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers: 93–110. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. (1968) Victorian Minds, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Hinchcliffe, Arnold P. (1969) The Absurd, London, Methuen. Hinsley, Curtis. (1981) Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Hodge, Alison. (2000) Twentieth Century Actor Training, London: Routledge. Hofsess, Lisa. (1986) ‘Those daring young men (and women) on the flying trapeze: impetuous folly or calculated master?’, The Association for the Anthropological Study of Play Newsletter, 12(2): 14–17. Hofsess, Lisa. (1987–8) ‘A somatic view of flying’, Somatics Magazine. Journal of the Bodily Arts and Sciences, 6(3): 43–7. Hoh, LaVahn G. and Rough, William H. (2004) Step Right Up!: The Adventures of Circus in America, e-edition, The Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia. Holland, Charlie. (1998) Strange Feats and Clever Turns, London: Holland and Palmer. Holland, Wendy. (1999) ‘Reimagining Aboriginality in the circus space’, Journal of Popular Culture, 33(1) (Fall): 91–104. Holm, David. (1991) Art and Ideology in Revolutionary China, New York: Oxford University Press. Hoppen, Theodore K. (1998) The Mid-Victorian Generation, Oxford: Clarendon. Hornaday, William. (1927) Minds and Manners of Wild Animals, New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Horowitz, Helen. (1975) ‘Animal and man in the New York Zoological Park’, New York History, 56: 426–45. Houghton, Walter E. (1957) The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Houni, Pia and Paavolainen, Pentti. (1999) Taide, kertomus ja identiteetti [Art, Narrative and Identity], Acta Scenica 3, Helsinki: Teatter-ikorkeakoulu. Howes, David. (ed.) (1991) The Varieties of Sensory Experience, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hubler, Richard. (1967) The Cristianis, London: Jarrolds. Hutcheon, Linda. (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism, New York: Routledge. Hughes, Langston and Meltzer, Milton. (1967) Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in America Entertainment, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Hugill, Beryl. (1980) Bring on the Clowns, Seacaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books. Hunt, Charles T., Sr, as told to John C. Cloutman. (1954) The Story of Mr Circus, Rochester, NH: Record Press. Hunter, Jane. (1984) The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn-of-the-Century China, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hurley, Erin. (2010) Theatre and Feeling, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Hurley, Erin. (2011) National Performance: Representing Quebec from Expo 67 to Céline Dion, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hurley, Erin and Harvie, Jennifer. (1999) ‘States of Play: Locating Québec in the Performances of Robert Lepage, Ex Machina, and the Cirque du Soleil’, Theatre Journal, 51(3): 299–315.

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Jin, Yeqin. (2012). ‘Acrobatic whirlwind in New China’s cultural diplomacy: the early foreign cultural exchange in Jin Yeqin’s memory’, in Shaohua Zhao (ed.), Golden Memories: The Oral Accounts of Early Cultural Activities in New China, Beijing: Writers Press: 18–33. Johnson, Paul E. (1978) A Shopkeeper’s Millennium Society and Revivals in Roches­ ter, New York, 1815–1837, New York: Oxford University Press. Jones, Amelia. (1998) Body Art/Performing the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Josselson, Ruth. (1996) ‘On writing other people’s lives: self-analytical reflections of a narrative researcher’, in Ruth Josselson (ed.), Ethics and Process in the Narrative Study of Lives, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage: 60–71. Joys, Joanne Carol. (1983) The Wild Animal Trainer in America, Boulder, CO: Pruett Publishing Co. Keele, M.N. and Dimeo-Ediger, N. (2000) Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) North American Regional Studbook, Portland, OR: Oregon Zoo and American Zoo and Aquarium Association. Keele, M.N. and Lewis, K. (2003) Asian Elephant (Elephas maximus) North American Regional Studbook Update, Portland, OR: Oregon Zoo. Keen, Dora. (1913) ‘How I climbed a 14,000-foot mountain’, Ladies’ Home Journal, 7 (August): 41. Keith, Charlie. (1879) Circus Life and Amusements, Derby: Bewley & Roe. Keith, Ronald C. (1989) The Diplomacy of Zhou Enlai, New York: St Martin’s Press. Keller, George. (1961) Here, Keller: Train This, New York: Random House. Kelley, Francis Beverley. (1966) Denver Brown and the Traveling Town, New York: Exposition Press. Kelly, Emmett, with Kelly, F. Beverly. (1954) Clown, New York: Prentice Hall. Kelly, Emmett, with Kelly, F. Beverly. (1956) Clown: My Life in Tatters and Smiles, London: Robert Hale. Kelly, Frances Beverley. (1931) ‘The land of spangles and sawdust’, National Geographic, 60(4) (October). Kerr, Alex. (1957) No Bar Between: Lion Tamer to Bertram Mills Circus, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Kibler, Alison M. (1999) Rank Ladies, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Kinsley, Philip H. (1911) ‘Untainted life revealed by Aborigine’, San Francisco Examiner, 6 September 1911. Reprint, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 100–103. Kirby, Michael. (1971) Futurist Performance, New York: PAJ Publications. Kirk, Rhina. (1972) Circus Heroes and Heroines, USA: Hammond. Kirkham, Pat and Thumim, Janet. (eds) (1993) You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Kitson Clark, G. (1962) The Making of Victorian England, London: Methuen. Klein, Christina. (2003) Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagina­ tion, 1945–1961, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Knight, Kelvin. (ed.) (1998) The MacIntyre Reader, Oxford: Polity Press. Knoepflmacher, U.C. (1983) ‘The balancing of child and adult: an approach to Victorian fantasies for children’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37(4): 497–530.

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Kober, A.H. (1928) Circus Nights and Days, translated by C.W. Sykes, London: Sampson Low, Marston. Kolker, Robert Phillip and Beicken, Peter. (1993) The Films of Wim Wenders, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kralj, Ivan. (ed.) (2011) Zene and Cirkus, Women and Circus, Zagreb: Mala per­ formerska scena. Kraus, Richard Curt. (2004) The Party and the Arty in China: The New Politics of Culture, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Krauss, Rosalind. (1988) ‘The impulse to see’, in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visual­ ity, Seattle: Bay Press: 57–78. Krementz, Jill. (1979) A Very Young Circus Flyer, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Kroeber, A.L. (1911) ‘It’s All Too Much for Ishi, Says the Scientist’, San Francisco Call, 8 October 1911. Reprint in Robert F. Heizer and Theordora Kroeber (eds) (1979) Ishi the Las Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 111–12. Kroeber, A.L. (1912) ‘Ishi, the last Aborigine’, The World’s Work, July 1912. Reprint, in. Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 119–23. Kroeber, A.L. (1916) ‘Ishi’s death – a Chico commentary’, Chico Record 1916. Reprint, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kroeber, Karl. (1998) Artistry in Native American Myths, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kroeber, Theodora. (2011) Ishi in Two Worlds, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kroker, Arthur and Kroker, Marilouise. (1987) ‘Theses on the disappearing body in the hyper-modern condition’, Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kroll, Fredric (ed.). (1986) Klaus Mann Schriftenreihe 3, 5, Wiesbaden: Blahak. Kumiega, Jennifer. (1985) The Theatre of Grotowski, London: Methuen. Kunzog, John C. (1962) The One-Horse Show: The Life and Times of Dan Rice, Jamestown, New York: By the author. Kunzog, John C. (1970) Tanbark and Tinsel, Jamestown, New York: By the author. Kuper, Adam. (1988) The Invention of Primitive Society: Transformations of an Illusion, London: Routledge. Kwint, Marius. (1994). ‘Astley’s Amphitheatre and the early circus in England, 1798–1830’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Oxford University. Kwint, Marius. (2002a) ‘The circus and nature in late Georgian England’, in Rudy Koshar (ed.), Histories of Leisure, Oxford: Berg: 45–60. Kwint, Marius. (2002b) ‘The legitimization of the circus in late Georgian England’, Past and Present, 174(1): 72–115. Kwint, Marius (2004) ‘Philip Astley (1742–1814)’, New Dictionary of National Biography [electronic version] Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lacan, Jacques. (1977) Écrits: A Selection, London: Faber and Faber. ‘La Carpa: El teatro popular de México’, Norte: Revista Continental (May, 1945). Lachaud, Jean-Marc. (ed.) (1999) Art, culture et politique, Paris: PUF. Lafortune, Michel and Bouchard, Anne. (2011) Community Worker’s Guide: When Circus Lessons Become Life Lessons, Montreal: Cirque du Soleil.

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Landay, Lori. (2002) ‘The flapper film: comedy, dance and jazz age kinaesthetics’, in Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra (eds) (2002a), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema, Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 221–48. Lang, Marjory. (1980) ‘Children’s champions: mid-Victorian children’s periodicals and the critics’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 23(1–2): 17–31. Lano, David. (1957) A Wondering Showman, I, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press. Lathrop, West. (1953) River Circus, New York: Random House. Laurie Jr, Joe. (1953) Vaudeville: From the Honky Tonks to the Palace, New York: Henry Holt & Co. Lavers, Katie. (2014a) ‘The Political Body in Contemporary Circus: Philippe Petit and Philippe Ménard’, Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts, 8(2): 55–68. Lavers, Katie. (2014b) ‘The Resilient Body in Social Circus: Father Jesus Silva, Boris Cyrulnik and Peter A. Levine’. The International Journal of Arts Education, 8(3): 47–55. Lavers, Katie. (2014c) ‘Cirque du Soleil and its Roots in Illegitimate Circus’, M/C Journal 17(5). Lavers, Katie (Katrina). (2015a) ‘Sighting circus: perceptions of circus phenomena investigated through diverse bodies’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia. Lavers, Katie. (2015b) ‘Horses in Modern, New and Contemporary Circus’, Animal Studies Journal, 4(2): 140–72. Leach, Edmund. (1964) ‘Anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal abuse’, in E.H. Lennenberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press: 23–63. Leach, Edmund. (1972) Humanity and Animality, 54th Conway Memorial Lecture, London: South Place Ethical Society. Leach, Edmund. (1985) Lévi-Strauss, London: Fontana. Leach, Hugh. (1994) ‘The Egyptian circus remembered and revisited’, King Pole, 103 (June): 45–72. Lears, T.J. Jackson. (1981) No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transforma­ tion of American Culture, 1880–1920, New York: Pantheon. Leavitt, Penelope Marguerite. (1979) ‘Spalding and Rogers’ Floating Palace, 1852– 1860’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Washington State University. Lecoq, Jacques. (2002) The Moving Body, London: Methuen. Lecoq, Jacques. (2006) Theatre of Movement and Gesture, edited by David Bradby, London: Routledge. Le Feuvre, Lisa (2010) ‘Introduction’, in Lisa Le Feuvre (ed.), Failure: Documents of Contemporary Art, London: Whitechapel Gallery: 12–21. Lehman, Rolf. (1979) Circus: Magie der Manege, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe. Lemon, Andrea. (2009) The Circus Diaries: Nomadic Narrative/Nomadic Culture. (PhD Oral History), Australian Centre, Melbourne University, Melbourne. Lennenberg, E.H. (ed.) (1964) New Directions in the Study of Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Léotard, Jules. (1860) Mémoires de Léotard, Paris: Simon Bacon & Co. Léotard, Jules. (1862) Dean’s New Moveable Book of Leotard, Blondin as Ape, Blondin, Etc., London: Dean & Sons.

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Le Roux, Hugues and Garnier, Jules (illustrator). (1890) Acrobats and Mounte­ banks, translated by A.P. Morton, London: Chapman & Hall. Leroux, Louis Patrick. (2009) ‘Le Québec à Las Vegas: pérégrinations postidenti­ taires dans l’hyper-Amérique’, in Louis Patrick Leroux (ed.), Le Québec à Las Vegas, L’Annuaire théâtral: revue québécoise d’études théâtrales, 45 (Special Issue/Spring): 9–20. Leroux, Louis Patrick. (2009) ‘Zumanity: la spectacularisation de l’intime, ou le pari impossible d’authenticité au Cirque’, L’Annuaire théâtral. Revue québécoise d’études théâtrales, 45: 69–91. Leroux, Louis Patrick. (2014a) ‘Contemporary circus in Québec: building and nego­ tiating an emerging interdisciplinary field’, Theatre Research in Canada, 35(2): 263–79. Leroux, Louis Patrick. (2014b) ‘North-South Circulations: Where Québécois and American Studies Meet’, Québec Studies, 58(Fall): 3–24. Leroux, Louis Patrick and Batson, Charles. (eds) (forthcoming) Cirque Global: Que­ bec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Leverentz, David. (1989) Manhood and the American Renaissance, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. (1968) Structural Anthropology, London: Allen Lane/Pen­ guin. Levine, Joseph. (1977) Dr Woodward’s Shield: History, Science and Satire in Augustan England, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levine, Lawrence. (1988) Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierar­ chy in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levine, Peter A. (1997) Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma: The Innate Capacity to Transform Overwhelming Experience, Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books. Lewis, George ‘Slim’ and Fish, Byron. (1978) I Loved Rogues: The Life of an Elephant Tramp, Seattle: Superior Publishing Co. Li, Zhijuan. (1988) ‘The history of acrobatics art in Yan’an era’, in Di Zhi, Lu Jing, Ke Lan, Huang Zengjiu, Shao Shendong and Tan Weihe (eds), Yan’an literature and art series – dance, folk opera, acrobatics, vol. 14, Hunan: Hunan Culture and Art Publishing House: 365–402. Liebovitz, David. (1946) The Canvas Sky, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co. Lindfors, Bernth. (1983) ‘Circus Africans’, Journal of American Culture, 6(2): 3–19. Lindfors, Bernth. (1984) ‘P.T. Barnum and Africa’, Studies in Popular Culture, 7: 18–25. Lista, Giovanni. (1997) La Scène Moderne, Arles and Paris: Acts Sud/Carré. Little, Kenneth. (1995) ‘Surveilling Cirque Archaos: transgression and the spaces of power in popular entertainment’, Journal of Popular Culture, 29(1): 15–28. Logan, Herschel C. (1954) Buckskin and Satin, Harrisburg, PA: Stackpole Co. Lou, Jiaxun. (2008) Shanghai Urban Entertainment Studies, 1930–1939, Shanghai: Wenhui Publishing House. Loxton, Howard. (1997) The Golden Age of the Circus, New York: Smithmark. Lutz, Catherine A. and Collins, Jane L. (1993) Reading National Geographic, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. MacFarquhar, Roderick. (1966) The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, New York: Praeger.

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MacGregor-Morris, Pamela. (1960) Sawdust and Spotlight, London: H.F. & G. Witherby. MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1985) After Virtue, 2nd edition with corrections, London: Duckworth. MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1999) Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues, London: Duckworth. MacMillan, Margaret. (2007) Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World, New York: Random House LLC. MacPherson, M. (2001) The Cowboy and His Elephant: The Story of a Remarkable Friendship, New York: St Martin’s Griffin. Magubane, Bernard Makhosezwe. (1987) The Ties That Bind: African-American Consciousness of Africa, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Mahy, Isabelle. (2008) Les Coulisses de l’Innovation, Création et Gestion au Cirque du Soleil, Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Maleval, Martine. (2000) ‘Materiaux dispersés pour un portrait du CNAC’, Arts de la Piste 19: 18–20. Maloney, Tom. (1934) Circus Days and What Goes on Back of the Big Top, Philadelphia, PA: Edward Stern. Man, Ray. (1980) Le Numéro Barbette, Paris: Jacques Damase. Mander, Raymond and Mitchenson, Joe. (1974) British Music Hall, London: Gentry Books. Manea, Norman. (1994) On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, London: Faber & Faber. Mankowitz, Wolf. (1982) Mazeppa, New York: Stein and Day. Mann, Thomas. (1957) Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, translated by Denver Lindley, New York: New American Library. Manning, Susan A. (1993) Ecstasy and the Demon, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Manning-Sanders, Ruth. (1952) The English Circus, London: Werner Laurie. Marcosson, Isaac F. (ed.) (1910) Autobiography of a Clown, Foreword by Alfred T. Ringling, New York: Moffatt, Yard and Co. Marey, Étienne-Jules. ([1891] 1995) ‘La Chronophotographie’, in Laurent Mannoni, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni and David Robinson (eds), Light and Movement, Gemona, Italy: Le Giornate del Cinema Muto. Maria y Campos, Armando de. (1939) Los Payasos, Poetas del Pueblo, Mexico City: Ediciones Botas. Marinetti, F.T. (1972) ‘The founding and manifesto of futurism’, in Marinetti: Selected Writings, translated by R.W. Flint, London: Secker & Warburg. Martel, Frederic. (2011) Mainstream: Enquête sur la Guerre Globale de la Culture et des Médias, Paris: Flammarion, Champs Actuel. Mason, Bim. ([1992] 2002) Street Theatre and Outdoor Performance, London: Routledge. Mason, Tony. (1988) Sport in Britain, London: Faber and Faber. Matlaw, Myron. (ed.) (1979) American Popular Entertainment, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press. Mauclair, Dominique. (2002) Planète Cirque, Baixas: Balzac. May, Earl Chapin. (1963) The Circus From Rome to Ringling, New York: Dover Publications.

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Mayhew, Henry. ([1851] 1967) London Labour and the London Poor, vol. 3, London: Frank Cass. McCabe, Colin. (ed.) (1986) High Theory/Low Culture: Analysing Popular Televi­ sion and Film, Manchester: Manchester University Press. McCarthy, Michael. (1983) Dark Continent: Africa as Seen by Americans, Westport, CT: Greenwood. McClintock, Anne. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, New York: Routledge. McGavran, James Holt, Jr (ed.). (1991) Romanticism and Children’s Literature in Nineteenth Century England, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. McGroaty, John Steven. (1921) Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea, vol. I (Chicago and New York: The American Historical Society). McKennon, Joe. (1975) Horse Dung Trail: Saga of American Circus, Sarasota, FL: Carnival Publishers of Sarasota. McKennon, Joe. (1980) Circus Lingo, Sarasota, FL: Carnival Publishers of Sarasota. McKinven, John A. (1998) The Hanlon Brothers, Glenwood, IL: David Meyer Magic Books. McKinven, John A. (2000) Stage Flying, Glenwood, IL: David Meyer Magic Books. McMahan, Alison. (2000) ‘The quest for motion: moving pictures and flight’, in Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin (eds), Visual Delights, Trowbridge: Flick Books: 181–93. McNamara, Brooks. (1992) ‘“A canvas city … half as old as time”: the carnival as entertainment’, in The Country Fair Carnival: Where the Midway Meet the Grange, Elmira, New York: Chenung County Historical Society. McWilliam, Rohan. (2000) ‘Melodrama and the historians’, Radical History Review, 78 (Fall): 57–84. Mead, George Herbert. (1934) Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Meisel, Martin. (1983) Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mell, A.J. (1992) ‘It’s geek time’, Seattle Weekly, 12 February. Melville, Herman. ([1846] 1986) Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, New York: Penguin. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1995) The Visible and the Invisible, translated by Alphonso Lingis, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (1996) Phenomenology of Perception, translated by Colin Smith, London: Routledge. Meschonnic, Henri. (1993) Modernity, Paris: Gallimard. Meyer, Charles R. (1978) How to Be an Acrobat, New York: David McKay. Middleton, George. (1913) Circus Memories; reminiscences of George Middleton as told to and written by his wife, Los Angeles: Geo. Rice and Sons. Mill, John Stuart. ([1861] 2001) Utilitarianism, edited by G. Sher, Indianapolis: Hackett. Miller, Henry. ([1948] 1974) The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder, New York: New Directions Books.

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Miller, Mary Ashe. (1911) ‘Indian enigma is study for scientists’, San Francisco Call, 6 September 1911. Reprint, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 97–100. Miller, Mel. (1963) Ringling Museum of the Circus: The Circus and Its Relation to the History of the Circus, Sarasota, FL: John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art. Millette, Ernest Schlee, as told to Robert Wyndham. (1971) The Circus That Was, Philadelphia: Dorrance and Co. Mills, Bernard. (1954) ‘The greatest act I ever saw’, The Tatler and Bystander, 18 November: 37. Moffett, Cleveland. ([1901] 1926) Careers of Danger and Daring, New York: D. Appleton-Century. Moody, Jane. (2000) Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770–1840, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morelli, Dirce and Lafortune, Michel. (2003) The Phoenix: Building the Concept of Resilience into Cirque du Monde Practices, Montreal, Quebec: Cirque du Monde. Morgan, Edmund. (1979) American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, New York: W.W. Norton. Morley, Christopher. (1924) Careers of Danger and Daring, New York: Century Co. Morris, Ron. (1976) Wallendra: A Biography of Karl Wallendra, Chatham, NY: Sagarin Press. Moss, C. (1988) Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family, New York: Fawcett Columbine. Moss, David A. (2002) When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moy, James S. (1977) ‘John B. Ricketts’ Circus 1793–1800’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Illinois. Moy, James S. (1978a) ‘Entertainments at John B. Ricketts’s Circus, 1793–1800’, Educational Theatre Journal, 30(2): 192–3. Moy, James S. (1978b) ‘A checklist of circus buildings constructed by John B. Rick­ etts’, Bandwagon, 22(5): 21–3. Moy, James S. (1979) ‘The Greenwich Street Theatre 1797–1799’, Theatre Survey, 20 (November): 15–26. Moy, James S. (1987) ‘Subverting/alienating performance structures’, in James Red­ mond (ed.), Themes in Drama, vol. 9, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Mullett, Jane. (2005) ‘Circus alternatives: the rise of new circus in Australia, the United States, Canada and France’, unpublished PhD dissertation, La Trobe University. Mulvaney, John and Harcourt, Rex. (1988) Cricket Walkabout, South Melbourne: Macmillan. Munro, John M. (1971) The Royal Aquarium: Failure of a Victorian Compromise, Beirut: American University of Beirut. Murray, Charles. (1900) ‘On the road with the ‘Big Show’, Cosmopolitan, June 1900: 127–8.

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Murray, Marian. (1956) Circus! From Rome to Ringling, New York: Appleton, Century, Crofts. Murray, Simon. (2002) ‘Tout Bouge: Jacques Lecoq, modern mime and the zero body – a pedagogy for the creative actor’, in Franc Chamberlain and Ralph Yarrow (eds), Jacques Lecoq and the British Theatre, London, Routledge Harwood: 17–44. Murray, Simon. (2003) Jacques Lecoq, London: Routledge. Muscio, Inga. (1993) ‘Katherine Dunn: art is a verb’, The Stranger, 11–17 January, 3. Nance, Susan. (2013) Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus, Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nasaw, David. (1993) Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements, New York: Basic Books. Neale, Steve. (1983) ‘Masculinity as spectacle’, Screen, 24, (6) (November– December): 2–16. Neirick, Miriam. (2012) When Pigs Could Fly and Bears Could Dance: A History of the Soviet Circus, Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Nelson, Dana. (1998) National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Newton, Douglas. (1957) Clowns, New York: Franklin Watts. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1969) Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by R.J. Hollingdale. Middlesex and New York: Penguin. North, Henry Ringling and Hatch, Aiden. (1960) The Circus Kings, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Norwood, Edwin P. (1926) The Other Side of the Circus, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Norwood, Edwin P. (1929) The Circus Menagerie, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Nussbaum, Martha. (2000) Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha. (2006) Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Brien, Esse F. (1959) Circus: Cinders to Sawdust, San Antonio: Naylon. Odell, George C. (1936) Annals of the New York Stage, vol. VIII 1865–70; (1937) vol. IX 1870–75; (1938) vol. X 1875–79; New York: Columbia University Press. Ojala, Raija and Takala, Kimmo. (2007) Zodiak: uuden tanssin tahden [Zodiak: For the Sake of New Dance], Helsinki: Like. O’Malley, Pat. (2002) ‘Imagining insurance: risk, thrift, and life insurance in Britain’, in Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (eds), Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago: 97–115. O’Shea, John Augustus. (1892) Roundabout Recollections, vol. 1, London: Ward and Downey. Osinski, Zbigniew. (1986) Grotowski and His Laboratory, translated and abridged by Lillian Vallee and Robert Findlay, New York: PAJ. Otis, James. (1881) Toby Tyler; Or, Ten Weeks with a Circus, New York: Harper Brothers.

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Papp, John. (1971) Those Golden Years: The Circus, Schenectady, New York: John Papp. Parr Walker, Diane. (1983) ‘From “Hawk-Eye March and Quick Step” to “Caprice Hongrois”: music publishing in Iowa,’ American Music, 1(4): 42–62. Parry, Albert. (1933) Tattoo: Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised Among the Natives of the United States, New York: Simon & Schuster. Pattison, J. Grant. (1939) ‘Battler’ Tales of Early Rockhampton, Melbourne: Fraser & Jenkenson. Pattison, Robert. (1978) The Child Figure in Literature, Athens: University of Geor­ gia Press. Payne, K. ([1988] 1998) Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants, New York: Penguin. Peacock, Shane. (1996) The Great Farini, Toronto: Penguin Books. Peiss, Kathy. (1986) Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of­ the-Century New York, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pescovitz, David. (1992) ‘Take it on an empty stomach’, LA Weekly 19 August, 12. Petersen, Robert C. (2011) ‘Instructing the Indians at Botany Bay’, Aboriginal His­ tory, 24 (January): 132–40. Petit, Philippe. (1991) Funambule, Paris: Albin Michel. Petit, Philippe. (2002) To Reach the Clouds: My High Wire Walk between the Two Towers, New York: North Point Press. Phelan, Peggy. (1993) Unmarked, London: Routledge. Plowden, Gene. (1967) Those Amazing Ringlings and Their Circus, New York: Bonanza Books. Plowden, Gene. (1971) Merle Evans, Maestro of the Circus, Miami, FL: E.A. See­ mann Publishing. Plowden, Gene. (1972) Gargantua, Circus Star of the Century, New York: Bonanza. Plowden, Gene. (1977) Singing Wheels and Circus Wagons, Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers. Poignant, Roslyn. (2004) Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Specta­ cle, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Polacsek, John F. (1974) ‘The development of the circus and menagerie, 1825–1860’, unpublished dissertation, Bowling Green State University. Politzer, Heinz. (1965) Franz Kafka der Künstler, Frankfurt: Fischer. Pond, Irving K. (1934) A Day Under the Big Top: A Study in Life and Art, Chicago, IL: Chicago Literary Club. Pond, Irving K. (1937) Big Top Rhythms, Chicago, IL: Willett, Clark. Pope, Saxton. (1998) ‘The medical history of Ishi’. Reprint, as ‘The characteristics of Ishi’, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds), Ishi and the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 225–36. Pope, Saxton Temple. (1932) Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, San Francisco, CA: Jas. Posey, Jake. (1959) Last of the Forty Horse Drivers, New York: Vantage Press. Power, Michael. (2004) The Risk Management of Everything, London: Demos. Powledge, Fred. (1975) Mud Show: A Circus Season, New York and London: Har­ court Brace Jovanovich.

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Powledge, Fred. (1976) Born on the Circus, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Preston, Paul. (2013) The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth Century Spain, New York and London: W.W. Norton. Prevots, Naima. (1998) Dance for Export: Cultural Diplomacy and the Cold War, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Prieto, Adolfo. (1988) El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna, Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Propp, V. ([1928] 1968) Morphology of the Folktale, translated by L. Scott, Austin: University of Texas Press. Proske, Roman. (1956) Lions, Tigers and Me, New York: Henry Holt and Co. Purcell Gates, Laura. (2011) ‘Locating the self: narratives and practices of authen­ ticity in French clown training’, Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 2(2): 231–42. Purovaara, Tomi, Damkjaer, Camilla, Degerbol, Stine, Muukkonen, Kiki, Verwilt, Katrien and Waage, Sverre. (2012) Contemporary Circus: Introduction to the Art Form, Stuts: Saftelsen for Utgivning Av Teatervetenskapliga Studier. Pykett, Lyn. (1994) The Sensation Novel from ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moon­ stone’, Plymouth: Northcote House Publishers. Quimby, Harriet. (1908) ‘The feminine side of sawdust and spangles’, Leslie’s Weekly, April 16, p. 374, Periodicals Collection, Robert L. Parkinson Library and Research Center, Circus World Museum, Baraboo, Wis. Ramsland, John and St Leon, Mark. (1993) Circus Children: The Australian Experi­ ence, Springwood, NSW: Butterfly Books. Rapee, Erno. (2002) Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists: 1924 Cue Compendium for Silent Film Accompanists, North Stratford, NH: Ayer Company. Rattenbury, Arnold. (1977) The Story of English Clowning, Nottingham: Notting­ ham Castle Museum. Rawls, J. (1971) A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Raymond, George. (1844) Memoirs of Robert William Elliston, Comedian 1774– 1810, 2 vols, London: John Mortimer. Reade, Amye. (1890) Ruby: Or, How Girls Are Trained for Circus Life, Founded on Fact, London: Trischler. Reade, Amye. (1892) Slaves of the Sawdust, London: F.V. White. Redmond, Frank S. (1891) Official Route Book of the Adam Forepaugh Shows, Season 1891, Buffalo, NY: Courier. Reed, Christopher Robert. (2000) ‘All the World Is Here!’: The Black Presence at White City, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Regan, T. (1983) The Case for Animal Rights, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Reiss, Benjamin. (2001) The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rémy, Tristan. (1945) Les Clowns, Paris: Bernard Grasset. Rémy, Tristan. (1962) Entrées Clownesques, Paris: L’Archie. Rémy, Tristan. (1997) Clown Scenes, translated by Bernard Sahlins, Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee.

602

Selected Bibliography

Renevey, Monica J. (ed.) (1977) Le Grand Livre du Cirque, 2 vols, Geneva: EditoServize. Rennert, Jack. (1974) 100 Years of Circus Posters, New York: Darien House. Renoff, Gregory J. (2008) The Big Tent: The Traveling Circus in Georgia, 1820– 1930, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Reynolds, Chang. (1966) Pioneer Circuses of the West, Los Angeles: Westernlore Press. Reynolds, Henry. (2005) Nowhere People, Sydney: Penguin. Riker, Ben. (1948) Ponby Wagon Town, Along U.S. 1890, Indianapolis, IN: BobbsMerrill Co. Ringling, Alf T. (1900) Life Story of the Ringling Bros., Chicago, IL: R.R. Donnelley and Sons. Ritter, Naomi. (1989) Art as Spectacle, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Ritvo, Harriet. (1900) The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Robeson, Dave. (1935) Al G. Barnes, Master Showman, As Told by Al G. Barnes, Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers. Robeson, Dave. (1941) Louis Roth: Forty Years with Jungle Killers, Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printers. Robinson, Gil. (1925) Old Wagon Show Days, Cincinnati, OH: Brockwell Publishers. Robinson, Josephine DeMott. (1925) The Circus Lady, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Rogers, Phyllis A. (1979) ‘The American circus clown’, unpublished PhD disserta­ tion, Princeton University. Roose-Evans, James. (1989) Experimental Theatre: From Stanislavsky to Peter Brook, London: Routledge. Roosevelt, Theodore. (1902) The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses, New York: The Century Co. Rosaldo, Renato. (1989) Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Rosen, Ruth. (1982) The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rowe, J.A. (1926) California’s Pioneer Circus, edited by Albert Dressler, San Francisco, CA: Crocker H.S. and Co. Royle, Edward. (1987) Modern Britain: A Social History, 1750–1985, London: Edward Arnold. Rudé, G. (1962) Wilkes: … Wilkes and Liberty, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rudnitsky, Kontantin. (1988) Russian and Soviet Theatre, 1905–1932, translated by Roxane Permar, New York: Harry N. Adams. Russell, Charles and Depping, Guillaume. (1871) Wonders of Bodily Strength and Skill in All Ages and Countries, translated and enlarged from the French by Russell, New York: Charles Scribner. Russell, Dave. (1987) Popular Music in England, 1840–1914: A Social History, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Russell, Gillian. (1995) Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793– 1815, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Russett, Cynthia Eagle. (1989) Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Wom­ anhood, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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603

Russo, Mary. (1994) The Female Grotesque, New York: Routledge.

Ryan, Mary P. (1981) Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County,

New York, 1790–1865, New York: Barnes & Noble. Said, Edward. ([1978] 1995) Orientalism, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Salamero, Emilie. (2009) ‘Devenir artiste de cirque aujourd’hui: espace des écoles et socialisation professionnelle’, Doctoral Thesis, Université Toulouse III. Salmon, M. (1904) ‘An old-time circus’, Australian Town & Country Journal, 3 August. Sanger, George. (1927) Seventy Years a Showman, London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Saunders, Frances Stonor. (2000) The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, New York: New Press. Savary, Jérôme. (1970) ‘Zartan’, The Drama Review, 15(1) (Fall): 89. Saxon, A.H. (1968) Enter Foot and Horse: A History of Hippodrama in England and France, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Saxon, A.H. (1975) ‘A Franconi in America: The New York Hippodrome of 1853’, Bandwagon 19(5): 13–17. Saxon, A.H. (1977) ‘Le Cirque Américain’, in Monica J. Renevey (ed.), Le Grand Livre du Cirque, 2 vols, Geneva, Switzerland: Edito-Service: Chapter 17. Saxon, A.H. (1978) The Life and Art of Andrew Ducrow and The Romantic Age of the English Circus, Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Saxon, A.H. (1989) P.T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man, New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press. Scarry, Elaine. (1985) The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, New York: Oxford University Press. Scher, Edith. (2010) Teatro de vecinos de la comunidad para la comunidad, Buenos Aires: Argentores. Schlicke, Paul. (1985) Dickens and Popular Entertainment, London: George Allen & Unwin. Schlicke, Paul. (1993) ‘Dickens in the circus’, Theatre Notebook, 67(1): 2–19. Schlicke, Paul. (1999) ‘Circus’, in Paul Schlicke (ed.), Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scigliano, E. (2002) Love, War, and Circuses: The Age Old Relationship Between Elephants and Humans, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Scott, Derek B. (1998) ‘Orientalism and musical style’, The Musical Quarterly, 82(2): 309–35. Scott, Matthew. (1885) Autobiography of Jumbo’s Keeper and Jumbo’s Biography, Bridgeport, CT: Matthew Scott and Thomas E. Lowe. Scully, M. (2002) Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy, New York: St Martin’s Press. Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Segel, Howard B. (1998) Body Ascendant: Modernism and the Physical Imperative, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Seibel, Beatriz. (1993) Historia del Circo, Biblioteca de Cultura Popular 18, Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Sol. Senelick, Laurence. (2000) The Changing Room, London: Routledge. Senelick, Laurence and Venne, Bill. (1977) A Cavalcade of Clowns, San Francisco, CA: Bellerophon Books.

604

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Sergel, Sherman Louis. (ed.) (1973) The Language of Show Biz, Chicago, IL: Dramatic Publishing Co. Shapiro, Dean. (1989) Blondin, Ontario: Vanwell Publishing. Shapiro, R. (2012) ‘Avant-Propos’, in R. Shapiro and N. Heinich (eds), De l’artification. Enquêtes sur le passage à l’art, Paris: EHESS: 20–1. Shaviro, Steven. (1993) The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sherwood, Robert Edmund. (1926) Here We Are Again: Recollections of an Old Circus Clown, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Co. Sherwood, Robert Edmund. (1932) Hold Yer Hordes! The Elephants Are Coming, New York: Macmillan. Shields, Stephanie A. (2002) Speaking From the Heart: Gender and the Social Mean­ ing of Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silva, Erminia. (2007) Circo-teatro. Benjamin de Oliveira e a teatralidade circense no Brasil, Sao Paulo: Altana. Simon, Eli. (2009) The Art Of Clowning, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Simon, Peter Angelo. (1978) Big Apple Circus, New York: Penguin Books. Simpson, Margaret. (1993) ‘Hard Times and circus times’, Dickens Quarterly, 10(3): 131–46. Singer, P. (1975) Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, New York: Avon Books. Sissons, David C.S. (1999) ‘Japanese acrobatic troupes touring Australasia 1867– 1900’, Australasian Drama Studies, 35: 73–107. Sizorn, Magali. (2013) Trapézistes, Rennes: Presse Universitaire de Rennes. Slout, William L. (1998) Olympians of the Sawdust Circle, San Bernardino, CA: The Borgo Press. Smith-Rosenberg, Carol. (1985) Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America, New York: Oxford University Press. Sobchack, Vivian. (1992) The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experi­ ence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sokan, Robert. (1975) A Descriptive and Bibliographic Catalogue of the Circus and Related Arts Collection at Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois, Bloomington, IL: Scarlet Ibis Press. Spangenberg, K. and Walk, D. (eds.) The Amazing American Circus Poster, Cincin­ nati and Sarasota: Cincinnati Art Museum and the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. Speaight, George. (1978) ‘Some comic circus entrées’, Theatre Notebook, 32: 24–7. Speaight, George. (1979) ‘The origin of the circus parade wagon’, in Myron Matlaw (ed.), American Popular Entertainment, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press. Speaight, George. (1980a) The Book of Clowns, New York: Macmillan. Speaight, George. (1980b) A History of the Circus, London: The Tantivy Press. St Leon, Mark. (1983) Spangles and Sawdust: The Circus in Australia, Melbourne: Greenhouse Publications. St Leon, Mark. (ed.) (1984) Australian Circus Reminiscences, Ultimo, Australia: Jones St Ultimo. St Leon, Mark. (1986) ‘The great Con Colleano’, This Australia, 6(1).

Selected Bibliography

605

St Leon, Mark. (1990a) The Silver Road: The Life of Mervyn King, Circus Man, Springwood, Australia: Butterfly. St Leon, Mark. (1990b) ‘May Wirth: an unbelieveable lady bareback rider’, Band­ wagon, 34(3): 4–13. St Leon, Mark. (1993) The Wizard of the Wire: The Story of Con Colleano, Canberra, Australia: Aboriginal Studies Press. St Leon, Mark. (2011) Circus: The Australian Story, Melbourne: Melbourne Books. St Leon, Mark. (2005a) Circus in Australia, Volume II: Index of Show Movements, 1833–1969, Sydney: Self-published. St Leon, Mark. (2005b) ‘Jones, Billy’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supple­ mentary Volume, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press: 207–8. St Leon, Mark. (2007) ‘Circus and nation: a critical enquiry into circus in its Austral­ ian setting 1847–2006’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sydney. Staiger, Janet. (1995) Bad Women, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon. (1986) The Politics and Poetics of Transgres­ sion, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Steedman, Carolyn. (1995) Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930. London: Virago. Steegmuller, Frances. (1970) Cocteau, A Bibliography, Boston, MA: Little Brown. Stepan, Nancy Leys. (1990) ‘Race and gender: the role of analogy in science’, in David Theo Goldberg (ed.), Anatomy of Racism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press: 38–57. Stites, Richard. (1992) Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900, New York: Cambridge University Press. Stoddart, Helen. (2000) Rings of Desire: Circus History and Representation, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stokes, John. (1989) In the Nineties, New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Stokes, John. (2004) ‘Lion griefs: the wild animal act as theatre’, New Theatre Quar­ terly, 20(2): 138–54. Storey, Robert. (1985) Pierrots on the Stage of Desire, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stoute, Lenny. (1992) ‘Sideshow gets set to freak out Toronto’, Toronto Star, 9 April, H3. Stratton, Frances. (1898) Nan, the Circus Girl, London: John F. Shaw. Stretton, Hesba [Sara Smith]. (1889) An Acrobat’s Girlhood, London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Strong, George Templeton. (1952) The Diary of George Templeton Strong, edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, 4 vols, New York: Macmillan. Strong, Roy. (1972) Splendour at Court, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Stroud, Nell. (1999) Josser: Days and Nights in the Circus, London: Little Brown & Co. Studwell, William E., Conrad, Charles P. and Schueneman, Bruce R. (1999) Circus Songs: An Annotated Anthology, New York: Haworth. Sudjic, Deyan. (1992) ‘Seductive image of burning boulevards’, The Guardian, 8 May. Sunstein, C. and Nussbaum, M. (2004) Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Direction, New York: Oxford University Press.

606

Selected Bibliography

Sussman, Mark. (1998) ‘A queer circus: Amok in New York’, in Jan Cohen-Cruz (ed.), Radical Street Performance, London: Routledge: 262–70. Sutton, Felix. (1966) The Book of Clowns, New York: Grosset and Dunlap. Sutton, Felix. (1971) The Big Show: A History of the Circus, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Sweet, Robert C. (1970) ‘The circus: an institution in continuity and change’, unpub­ lished PhD dissertation, University of Missouri. Swortzell, Lowell. (1978) Here Come the Clowns: A Cavalcade of Comedy from Antiquity to the Present, illustrated by C. Walter Hodges, New York: Viking Press. Tait, Peta. (1996a) ‘Danger delights; texts of gender and race in aerial performance’, New Theatre Quarterly, 12: 43–9. Tait, Peta. (1996b) ‘Feminine free fall: a fantasy of freedom’, Theatre Journal, 48(1): 27–34. Tait, Peta. (1998a) ‘Defying gravity: trends and meanings’, Real Time, 24: 31–2. Tait, Peta. (1998b) ‘Performing sexed bodies in physical theatre’ in Veronica Kelly (ed.), Our Australian Theatre in the 1990s, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tait, Peta. (2000a) ‘Fleshed, muscular phenomenologies across sexed and queer circus bodies’, in Peta Tait (ed.), Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, Amsterdam: Rodopi: 60–78. Tait, Peta. (2003) ‘“The Australian Marvels”: Wire-Walkers Ella Zuila and George Loyal and Geographies of Aerial Gender Body Identity’, in Playing Australia, Eliza­ beth Schafer and Susan Bradley Smith (eds), Amsterdam: Rodopi: 80–92. Tait, Peta. (2005) Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, London: Routledge. Tait, Peta. (2005b) ‘Viewing Deadly Targets for Feminine Identity: Alar, the Human Arrow’, in Visual Delights Two, Vanessa Toulman and Simon Popple (eds), Eastleigh UK: John Libbey Publishing: 123–34. Tait, Peta. (2006) ‘Re/membering Muscular Circus Bodies: Triple Somersaults, the Flying Jordans and Clarke Brothers’, Nineteenth Century Theatre & Film, 33(1) Summer: 26–38. Tait, Peta. (2012) Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Tarachow, Sidney. (1951) ‘Circuses and clowns’, Psychoanalysis and the Social Sci­ ences, edited by Geza Roheim, New York: International University Press. Taylor, Arthur R. (1979) Brass Bands, London: Granada. Taylor, Charles. (1992) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Jenny Bourne. (1988) In the Secret Theatre, London: Longman. Taylor, Robert Lewis. (1956) Center Ring, Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co. Temkine, Raymonde. (1972) Grotowski, translated by Alex Szogyi, New York: Avon. Thackeray, William Makepeace. (1854) The Newcombes: Memoirs of a Most Respectable Family, London: Bradbury & Evans. Thayer, Stuart. (1971) Mudshows and Railers: The American Circus in 1879, Ann Arbor, MI: Privately printed. Thayer, Stuart. (1976) ‘The anti-circus laws in Connecticut 1773–1840’, Band­ wagon: Journal of the Circus Historical Society, 20 (January–February): 18–20.

Selected Bibliography

607

Thayer, Stuart. (1976) Annals of the American Circus 1793–1829, Manchester, MI: Rymack Printing Co. Thayer, Stuart. (1981) ‘Legislating the shows: Vermont, 1824–1933’, Bandwagon, 25 (July–August). Thayer, Stuart. (1986) Annals of the American Circus 1830–1847, Seattle, WA: Peanut Butter Publishing. Thayer, Stuart. (1997) Traveling Showmen: The American Circus Before the Civil War, Detroit, IL: Astley & Ricketts. Thétard, Henry. (1928) Les Dompteurs; ou La Ménagerie des Origines à Nos Jours, Paris: Librairie Gallimard. Thétard, Henry. (1947) La Merveilleuse Histoire du Cirque, vols 1 and 2, Paris: Prisma. Thinee, Kristy and Bradford, Tracy. (1998) Connecting Kin: A Guide to Help Peo­ ple Separated from their Family Search for their Records, Sydney: Department of Community Services. Thomas, David Hurst. (2000) Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity, New York: Basic Books. Thomas, Keith. (1984) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin. Thomas, Lowell. (1936) Men of Daring, New York: Grosset and Dunlap Publishers. Thomas, Richard. (1960) John Ringling, New York: Pageant Press. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. (ed.) (1996a) Freakery, New York: New York University Press. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. (1996b) ‘Introduction: from wonder to error – a genealogy of freak discourse in modernity’, in Rosemarie Garland Thomson (1996a) Freakery: 1–22. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. (1997) Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, New York: Columbia University Press. Thompson, E.P. (1963) The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin. Thompson, William. (1903) On the Road with a Circus, New York: Goldmann. Todd, Jan. (1999) Physical Culture and the Body Beautiful: Purposive Exercise in the Lives of American Women, 1800–1870, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. (1968) Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? Tome 2: Poétique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Toll, Robert C. (1976) On with the Show: The First Century of Show Business in America, New York: Oxford University Press. Toole-Stott, Raymond. (1958–71) Circus and Allied Arts, A World Bibliography 1500–1970, vols I–IV, Derby, UK: Harpur & Sons. Vol. V in manuscript format. Towsen, John H. (1976a) Clowns, New York: Hawthorn Books. Towsen, John H. (1976b) ‘The clown to the ring: the evolution of the circus clown, 1770–1975’, PhD dissertation, New York: New York University. Trimmer, Sarah. (1788) Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals, 3rd edn, London.

608

Selected Bibliography

Truzzi, Marcello. (1968) ‘The decline of the American circus: the shrinkage of an institution’, in Marcello Truzzi (ed.), Sociology and Everyday Life, Englewood Clifts, NJ: Prentice Hall. Truzzi, Marcello. (1979) ‘Circus and side shows’, in Myron Matlaw (ed.), American Popular Entertainments, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Turner, John. (1995) Victorian Arena: The Performers. A Dictionary of British Circus Biography, vol. 1, Formby, UK: Lingdales Press. Turner, John. (2000) Victorian Arena: The Performers. A Dictionary of British Circus Biography, vol. 2, Formby UK: Lingdales Press. Turner, John. (2003) ‘Pablo Fanque, black circus proprietor’, in Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina (ed.), Black Victorians, Black Victoriana, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press: 20–38. Tuttle, George Palliser. (1972) ‘The History of the Royal Circus, Equestrian and Philharmonic Academy, 1782–1816, St George’s Fields, Surrey, England’, unpub­ lished PhD dissertation, Tufts University. Urdapilleta, Alejandro. (2001) ‘Prologue’, in María José Gabin (ed.), Las indepila­ bles del Parakultural. Biografía no autorizada de Gambas al Ajillo, Buenos Aires: Ed Libros del Rojas. Urry, John. (1990) The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies, London: Sage Publications. Vail, R.W.G. (1953) This Way to the Big Top! New York: New York Historical Society. Vail, R.W.G. (1956) Random Notes on the History of the Early American Circus, Barre, MA: Barre Gazette. Vail, R.W.G. (1977) ‘Le Cirque Américain’ in Monica J. Renevey (ed.), Le Grand Livre du cirque, Paris: 347–85. Vamplew, Wray. (ed.) (1987) Australians: Historical Statistics, Sydney: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates. Vamplew, Wray and Stoddart, Brian. (eds) (1994) Sport in Australia: A Social History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vattimo, Gianni. (1992) The Transparent Society, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Verney, Peter. (1978) Here Comes the Circus, New York: Paddington Press. Verner, Samuel. (1903) Pioneering in Central Africa, Richmond, VA: Presbyterian Committee of Publication. Vertinsky, Patricia. (1990) The Eternally Wounded Woman: Women, Doctors, and Exercise in the Late Nineteenth Century, Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Vesque, Marthe and Vesque, Juliette. (1977) Le Cirque en Images, Paris: G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose. Von Geldern, James. (1993) Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–20, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Walkowitz, Judith R. (1992) City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wall, Duncan. (2013) The Ordinary Acrobat: A Journey into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present, New York: Knopf. Wallace, Grant. (1911) ‘Ishi, the last Aboriginal savage in America, finds enchant­ ment in a Vaudeville show’, San Francisco Call, 8 October 1911. Reprint, in

Selected Bibliography

609

Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds) (1979), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Docu­ mentary History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 107–11. Wallenda, Tino. (2005) Walking the Straight and Narrow: Lessons in Faith from the High Wire, Gainesville, FL: Bridge-Logos. Waller, Michael J. (ed.) (2009) Strategic Influence: Public Diplomacy, Counter­ propaganda, and Political Warfare, Washington, DC: Institute of World Politics Press. Wallett, W.F. (1860) The Public Life of W.F. Wallett, the Queen’s Jester: An Autobiography, London: Bemrose & Sons. Walton, O.F. (1877) A Peep Behind the Scenes, London: Religious Tract Society. Wang, Feng, Fu, Qifeng, Fu, Tenglong, Li, Zhijuan and Huang, Jienong. (1997) The Contemporary Chinese Acrobatics, Beijing: The Contemporary China Publishing House. Wang, Feng, Zhengwen, Zong, Shixi, Zhou, Qiufan, Zhou and Shucheng, Sai. (1991) The History of Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe, 1951–1990, Shanghai: The Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe. Waterman, T.T. (1979) ‘The Yana Indians’. Reprint, in Robert F. Heizer and Theodora Kroeber (eds), Ishi the Last Yahi: A Documentary History, Berkeley, Ca: University of California Press. Watkins, Clifford Edward. (2003) Showman: The Life and Music of Perry George Lowery, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Watlen, John. (1791) The Celebrated Circus Tunes Perform’d at Edinburgh This Season, with the Addition of Some New Reels and Strathspeys Set for the Piano Forte or Violin and Bass by John Watlen, Edinburgh: Self-published. Weber, Susan, Ames, Kenneth and Wittmann, Matthew. (eds) (2012) The American Circus, New York and New Haven, CT: Bard Graduate Center and Yale Univer­ sity Press. Weiss, P. (1973) ‘Records and the man’, in Robert G. Osterhoundt (ed.), The Phi­ losophy of Sport, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publishers. Weitz, Eric. (2012) ‘Failure as success: on clowns and laughing bodies’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17(1): 79–87. Wemmer, Christen and Christen, Catherine A. (eds) (2008) Elephants and Ethics, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. West, Philip. (2002) The Last Horse and Wagon Circus Family: The Australian Traveller, Macksville, NSW: Bookbound Publishing. White, Hayden. (1990) The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Histori­ cal Representation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Whiteoak, John. (1999a) ‘The development of Australian circus music’, Australasian Drama Studies, 35: 59–72. Whiteoak, John. (1999b) Playing Ad Lib: Improvisatory Music in Australia 1836– 1970, Sydney: Currency. Whitton, David. (1987) Stage Directors in Modern France, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wiegman, Robyn. (1995) American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wiles, D. (2003) A Short History of the Western Performance Space, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilk, Christopher. (2006) Modernism: Designing a New World, London: V&A Publications.

610

Selected Bibliography

Williams, Linda. (ed.) (1995) Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, New Bruns­ wick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Williams, Linda. (1999) Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Williams, Raymond. (1977) Marxismo y Literatura, Barcelona: Península. Williams, Raymond. (1981) Cultura: Sociología de la comunicación y el arte, Buenos Aires: Paidós. Williams, Raymond. (1984) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London: Fontana. Williams, Vernon, Jr. (1996) Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries, Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky. Williams, Walter L. (1982) Black Americans and the Evangelization of Africa, 1877–1900, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Williams, Walter L. (1982) ‘William Henry Sheppard (1982), Afro-American mis­ sionary in the Congo, 1890–1910’, in Sylvia M. Jacobs (ed.), Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa, Westport, CT: Greenwood: 135–54. Wills, Gary. (1997) John Wayne’s America, New York: Simon & Schuster. Wilmeth, Don B. (1980) American and English Popular Entertainment, Farmington Hills, MI: Gale Group. Wilmeth, Don B. (1982) Variety Entertainment and Outdoor Amusements, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Wilson, Alexander. (1992) The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Wilson, Ame. (2002) ‘Cirque du Soleil Reimagines the Circus’, unpublished disserta­ tion, University of Oregon. Winstock, Lewis. (1970) Songs & Music of the Redcoats: A History of the War Music of the British Army 1642–1902, London: Leo Cooper. Wirth, George. (1925) Round the World with a Circus: Memories of Trials, Triumphs and Tribulations, Melbourne: Troedel & Cooper. Woods, Sarah. (2005) Only Fools, No Horses, unpublished play. Wordsworth, William. (1805) The Prelude, ‘Book Seventh, Residence in London’ (Bartholomew Fair), lines 708; 715–18, in M.H. Abrams et al. (eds), (1993), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th edn, vol. 2, New York: W.W. Nor­ ton: 253. Wright, John. (2006) Why Is That So Funny?, London: Nick Hern Books. Wysling, Hans (1982) Narzissmus und Illusionäre Existenzform, Thomas Mann Studien 5. Bern: Francke. Xu, Guoqi. (2008) Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895–2008, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Youngs, Gillian. (2000) Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspec­ tives, Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan. Zaccarini, John-Paul. (2013) Circoanalysis: Circus, Therapy and Psychoanalysis, Stockholm: Dans (och Cirkushogskolan). Zhang, Tracy Y. (forthcoming) ‘China’s connections to the Quebec circus art’, in Patrick Louis and Charles Batson (eds), Cirque Global: Quebec’s Expanding Circus Boundaries, Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Zhao, Ruitai and Fang, Yuefang. (2004) The Legend of the Acrobatics Queen: Xia Juhua, Wuhan China: Hupei People’s Press. Zora, Lucia. (1928) Sawdust and Spangles, Boston, MA: Little, Brown.

Index

Aaron Turner’s Circus 351, 361, 371 Aboriginal Australian, performers 8, 184, 209–29 accident(s) 37, 40, 41, 72, 100, 101, 111, 144, 187, 283, 286, 322, 369, 382, 529–34, 538, 540; fatal and serious 216, 534 acrobat(s) 8, 9, 30, 39, 41, 42, 49, 52, 55, 127–8, 129, 138, 158, 160, 164, 174, 180, 183, 202, 215, 221, 222, 223, 280, 282, 283, 288, 290–2, 302, 313, 319, 350, 353, 377, 379, 381, 390, 394, 406–15, 417–24, 435, 436, 537, 548; pyramidbuilding 411, 512, 518, 519 Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (1889/1894) 291 Act of Congress (1774) 350 act(s) see acrobat, aerial, animal, clown, diabolo, human cannonball, ropewalker, trapeze, wire-walker Adam Forepaugh, Circus 183, 353, 390, 397 Admiral Dot 359, 372 advertising 4, 20, 32, 118, 159, 174, 183, 199, 210, 215, 219, 222, 226, 362, 383, 386, 422 aerial(ist) 3, 7, 8, 30, 31, 41, 43, 136–49, 160, 299–310, 322, 391, 393, 458, 501, 518, 530–40; act(s) 41, 301, 316, 318, 320, 386, 395, 399, 528, 529, 530; action 299, 301, 303–6, 308–10, 393, 534; apparatus 57, 301, 519, 535, 540; female 183, 184, 303 aesthetic(s) 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 15–18, 24–7, 50, 68, 92, 136, 139, 142–3, 147–9, 238, 303, 308, 310, 337, 344, 386,

389, 394, 408–9, 411, 414, 420, 421, 430, 435, 499–505, 506, 525, 530, 531, 536, 537; contemporary or new circus 50–2, 54, 58, 61–2, 154–7, 160, 198, 202, 530–1, 535–6, 546–9, 553, 562, 564, 565, 566; pleasure 308–10 African 30, 32, 33, 126, 173, 218, 237, 241, 250, 251 Al G Barnes, Circus 174, 188, 491, 495 Al Sands, Circus 174, 188 Alar, the human arrow, Pansy Chinery 302 American circus 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 22, 23, 24, 32, 85, 117, 119, 120, 128, 144, 213, 217, 221, 224, 225, 227, 232, 270, 309, 349–58, 359, 368, 371–3, 378, 396, 436, 489–96, 546–51, 557, 561, 562, 565; and Aboriginal Australian identity 224, 225, 226; and African identity 237, 242, 243, 246, 247–8, 249; and African-American identity 175, 242–3, 246–9; and American identity 22, 180–2; golden age 353; and Native American identity 237–8, 242, 252–3, 257, 258, 377 androcentric 473 androgyny 136–49, 504, 548 animal(s): acts and trained 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 15–16, 24, 30, 31, 38, 39, 42, 44, 55, 61, 68, 70, 71, 122, 125, 126, 140, 180, 185, 186, 189, 319, 326, 334, 338, 342, 343, 349, 350, 383, 390, 392, 393, 439, 502, 533; and androcentrism, anthropocentrism, 473; animal performers 37–49; care of 489–96; and eco-feminism

612

Index

473, 475, 479; escapes 72, 372; exhibition (menagerie) 6, 8, 120, 185, 186, 241, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 250, 333, 337, 350, 351, 352, 354, 359, 360, 371, 373, 387, 393, 396; exotic 60, 344, 360, 361, 367, 389, 562; imaginary 103, 162, 200, 275; machine 342; species 341; thinking with 335–6, 342, 461, 462, 463, 466, 536 animal rights 158, 338, 469–86; accreditation 493; animal rights theory 470–9; anti-cruelty 9, 363–8, 372; capabilities approach 477–82; cruelty 332; liberation 470, 471, 472, 478; versus welfare debates 469–76 animal welfare 469–86, 489–96 animal-free circus 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 32, 60, 200, 424, 531, 546, 562 animal-trainer 44–9, 125, 144, 183, 188, 391; female 173, 174, 188, 189 antebellum (American) circus 174–7, 179 anthropocentric 473, 476, 479 anthropology, anthropologist, 8, 32, 237–44, 251–62, 307, 333 Antonio, Adelina (trapeze artist) 386 anxiety 26, 41, 42, 109, 128, 165, 279, 283, 292, 299–301, 302, 317, 322, 340, 482, 517, 532, 542 apocalyptic and post- 153, 156, 163, 270, 304 Apollinaire, Guillaume 140, 159, 163 apparatus 2, 3, 6, 42, 153, 270, 301, 302, 323, 386, 395, 444, 501, 529, 530, 532, 533, 534, 539; see also equipment apprentices (apprenticeships) 53, 68, 75, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219, 222, 289, 501, 562 Archaos 5, 7, 50, 51, 55–7, 61, 89, 153–68, 519, 520, 554, 557 Argentinian circus 9, 383, 424, 434–50, 509 Aristotle 68 art(s) and circus: cinema 6, 8, 19, 48, 55, 300, 301–4, 306–7, 438, 548; literature 136–49, 279–92; visual art 3, 159; see circus arts; see also dance; film; music; theatre

Artaud, Antonin (and Theatre of Cruelty) 6, 18, 155, 160, 161, 162, 164 artists (Chagall, Miro) 3, 110; see also Picasso Ashton’s Circus 121, 213, 214, 215, 216 Asiatic Caravan 359, 361 Astley, Mrs 24 Astley, Philip 4, 21, 22, 27, 28, 55, 56, 60, 117, 118, 119, 331–44, 350, 356, 357, 391, 392, 394, 397; Amphitheatre (London) 118, 332, 333, 357, 391, 392, 395; Amphitheatre (so-named, Melbourne) 210; Astley’s Circus 3, 4, 20, 21, 22, 28, 331–44, 351, 391, 393, 394, 395, 396 athletic(ism) 3, 5, 7, 173, 174, 175, 180, 181, 182, 191, 203, 290, 305, 308, 310, 411, 532, 537, 538 audience(s) 1, 4, 6, 8, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 24, 27, 28, 32, 33, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 49, 51, 56, 59, 61, 62, 66, 68, 71, 74, 82, 83, 84, 86–101, 103, 108, 109, 125–8, 137, 141, 149, 153, 158–61, 163, 164, 165, 176–7, 182, 183, 185, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 198, 199, 200, 201–6, 209–11, 213–16, 219, 222–4, 226, 239, 240–2, 249, 253, 256, 270–4, 280–1, 284–6, 299–310, 320, 335, 337, 338, 344, 349, 354, 355, 362–3, 365, 372, 379, 380, 386, 391, 392–5, 397–9, 406, 408, 411, 418, 419, 422–4, 438, 439, 442, 446, 501, 502–3, 529, 531, 533, 535, 536, 538, 539, 541, 542, 550, 558, 562–3; see also spectators audience reception/reception theory 117, 149, 255, 256, 258, 299–310, 388, 407, 418, 419, 422, 538 Auguste 7, 30, 68, 81–4, 88, 98, 99, 110, 111, 112, 504; counter-Auguste 81, 83; see also clown Australia(n) 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 26, 50, 107, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 127, 128, 173, 184, 209–29, 386–99, 509, 510, 512, 520, 521, 528, 530–1, 534–42, 554

Index authentic (action) 8, 17, 32, 52, 175, 240, 254, 258, 260, 270, 272–4, 322–5, 362, 369, 436–8, 500, 502, 518 authority: manager 72, 74, 76; moral 21, 22, 179, 250; performer 72, 74, 205, 238, 536; personal 178, 259, 364; political, institutional and cultural 21, 23, 85, 153, 204, 237, 240, 241, 252, 262, 282, 290, 334, 432; see also ringmaster Aycardo, José Soledad 378 Bailey, James A. 390, 397; see also Barnum & Bailey Bakhtin, Mikhail, and carnivalesque 8, 28, 29, 301, 314, 334, 444, 505 balancing action 3, 41, 42, 45, 122, 140, 204, 292, 313, 315, 317, 318, 320, 350, 420 balancing, pole 153, 455, 457, 458, 460 Banham, Billy (ropewalker) 210, 223 Barbette (Vander Clyde) 31, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148 Barnum & Bailey Circus Greatest Show on Earth 32, 173, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 205, 206, 353, 354, 360, 383; elephant conservation 490 Barnum, P. T. (Phineas Taylor) 4, 9, 176, 240, 245, 271, 353, 356, 359–73; in circus 368–72, 390, 397 Barnum’s museum and ethnographic shows 186, 227, 241, 246, 353, 363, 367 Baudelaire, Charles 142, 148, 149 Baudrillard, Jean and hyperreality 8, 269, 270, 276 Bausch, Pina 110 bearded lady 7, 173, 198, 199, 200, 203, 435, 505, 507 Beck, Ulrich and risk society 10, 529–31, 541 Beckett, Samuel 25, 93, 106, 108, 163 Beckett, Simon 109 Bell Family, Hermanos, 378, 380, 381, 382 Bell, Ricardo 378, 379 Benga, Ota 237–52, 254–6, 258, 261 Benjamin, Walter 137 Bentham, Jeremy and utilitarian theory 471

613

Bergh, Henry 9, 363, 364, 365, 366, 367 Bergson, Henri 6, 28, 29, 30, 86 Berman, Marshall and historical eras 388–9, 397–8 Bidon, Pierrot 5, 55, 57, 154, 519 bibliography, annotated 1, 9, 355 bicycle and acts 30, 180, 181, 243, 286, 411 Big Apple Circus 2, 106, 355 big cat and acts 4, 125, 126, 188, 189, 336, 533 big-cat trainer 173 Björfors, Tilde 544, 555 black performers 8, 183, 209–15, 218, 226, 242, 243–4, 245, 248–9, 379; see also race Boal, Augusto 519 body, physical 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 17, 18, 28, 29, 41, 44, 45, 51, 53, 54, 57, 60, 87, 94, 95, 100, 127, 129, 144, 157, 173, 175, 176, 179, 191, 215, 240, 242, 249, 251, 260, 269, 270–3, 275, 276, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, 288, 299–310, 313–26, 389, 393, 405, 411, 413, 414, 418, 420, 422–3, 424, 441, 456–7, 462, 466, 491, 500, 501, 506, 509, 513–18, 519, 525, 529, 540, 563; ambiguous gender 140, 143; animal body 494; bodily integrity 480, 481, 482; bodily responses to circus 302–5, 307, 309; body-madness 158; female body 179, 191, 272, 303, 501; ideal 61; misshapen 287 body theory 28, 299–310, 313–26, 513–18 Bolton, Reg 509–10, 513 bouffons 81, 94, 95; see also clown boxers, boxing 220, 221, 226 Brazil, Brazilian circus, performers 56, 57, 155, 160, 163, 209, 215, 216, 424, 436, 447, 509, 519 Bread and Puppet Theater 200 Brecht, Bertholt (Brechtian) 6, 17, 18, 19 Breton, André 160 British Circus 3, 7, 8, 15–16, 20, 22, 69, 117, 120, 209–10, 279–92, 313–26, 331–44, 388, 390, 393; Circus Development Agency network (UK) 556

614

Index

Brook, Peter 155, 164 Brooks, Peter 21, 22 burlesque 15, 20, 149, 158, 162, 177, 553 business, circus 4, 9, 23, 119, 217, 287, 332, 354, 355, 362–4, 369, 380, 395, 396, 439, 449, 483, 484, 547, 560; family 3, 7, 70, 320, 540; show 222, 229, 244, 359–61, 397 Butler, Isabella 184, 190 Butler, Judith 578 Canadian circus 6, 50, 350, 356, 509, 531, 546–51, 554, 560–7 Cantinflas (Mario Moreno) 379 Capellis 315–16, 318 capitalism 19, 137, 202, 308, 389, 395, 397, 530; neo-liberalism 56, 424, 447, 449, 540, 542 car/automobile, act 30, 56, 87, 157, 160, 162, 164, 166, 189, 190, 191; chase 304; L’Auto-Bolide 189, 190 carnival 183, 199, 226, 237, 247, 271, 334, 341, 349, 382, 432, 439, 444, 505 carnivalesque 3, 8, 301, 314, 432, 537 carpa (tent show) 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384 Carpa García 381, 383 Carrara, Guy 55, 57 Castello, Dan 359, 360, Castello’s Circus 352, 353, 359, 360, 367, 371 cavalry, cavalrymen 4, 331 celebration(s) 175, 226, 324, 409, 432 Chacovachi (clown) 441, 443, 446 chair balancing act 8, 316–18, 321, 324 Chaplin, Charlie 81, 83, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 379, 381 Chiarini Circus 123, 378, 379, 382 children, and trauma 514–15 children, in circus, 180, 186, 187, 210, 211, 212, 214, 215, 220, 221, 279–92, 378, 410, 447, 448, 511, 513, 521, 525, 538, 557 Children’s Dangerous Performances Acts (1879/1897) 538 children’s entertainment 58, 65, 70, 74, 88, 101, 140, 240, 313, 340 China National Acrobatic Troupe 406, 407, 410

China, People’s Republic of, Chinese circus 4, 30, 32, 405–24; People-to­ people exchange 405, 408, 418 Chinese acrobatic history 9, 127, 128, 129, 405–24 Chinese acrobats 9, 127, 128, 129, 405–24 Chinese pole 411 Christian, campaigns against circus 8, 24, 157, 179, 180, 250, 283–4 Christian imagery 112, 158, 249 cinema, and circus 6, 8, 19, 48, 55, 300, 301–4, 306–7, 438, 548 circo(s) 105, 379, 380–3, 448, 508, 509, 511, 512, 519, 520 Circo Americano 511 Circo Aereo 558 Cirko – Center for New Circus 558, 559 Circo Columbia 520 Circo Criollo 436, 438, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 449 Circo de Madrugada 519 Circo para Todos 520 Circo Price 511 Circo Social del Sur 440, 448 Circo Tihany 105 Circostrada 556 circus: as body based 2, 18; changing over time 69, 117, 319, 334, 392, 393, 441, 529; as constantly changing 5; drag 141, 192, 200, 202, 204, 206, 222, 273, 299; as extreme physical action 5, 6, 40, 275, 301, 308, 310, 528, see also clown; fantasy 16, 30, 32, 92, 136, 139, 148, 251, 254, 256, 261, 283, 303, 338, 422, 550; generic 15, 17, 30, 38; idealistic appeal 2; institution 3, 15, 19, 30, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 76, 237–62, 280, 284, 380, 389, 391, 394, 398, 407, 408, 410, 411, 421, 430, 444, 489, 490, 491, 502, 503, 509, 549, 554, 555, 557, 558–9, 566; and language 2, 7, 18, 19–20, 22, 26, 31, 32, 38, 46, 61, 86, 91, 92, 128, 129, 137, 160, 162, 240, 251, 270, 272, 300, 303, 310, 313, 335, 355, 380, 407, 436, 439, 441, 444; as mood 5, 62, 68, 161; as organization/ organization/organizational 2, 7, 10, 38, 66–70, 72, 76, 97, 118, 349,

Index 380, 388, 389, 395, 396, 407, 410, 423, 434, 501, 521, 530, 539, 561, 566; school 3, 26, 53, 94, 96–7, 183, 332, 340, 434, 441, 442–3, 444, 445, 446, 503, 506, 508, 509, 510, 512, 513, 520, 521, 522, 557, 560, 561–6; social space 173, 178, 199, 202, 203, 206, 240, 247, 305, 441, 443, 444, 445, 446, 456, 503, 566; space of performance 2, 4, 17, 31, 42, 56, 58, 61, 92, 96, 157, 165, 166, 191, 198, 200, 201, 320, 334, 392, 395, 419, 439, 442, 531, 532, 534, 553, 558; see definition of circus Circus Amok 7, 198–206 circus and combined shows (Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey) 224, 354 circus arts 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 10, 41, 52, 53, 68, 301, 434, 437, 439, 443, 445, 446, 449, 450, 503, 519, 522, 529, 531, 553–4, 556, 561, 564, 565, 566 Circus Cirkör 554–5 Circus Finlandia 557 Circus Harlequin 65 Circus Knie 46, 105, 108 Circus Oz 10, 528–9, 531, 534–42; human kangaroos 536; see also Flying Cockatoos Circus Renz 364 Circus [Zirkus] Roncalli 43 Cirqiniq 522 Cirque Baroque 7, 50, 51, 52–4, 61 Cirque Baroque (Canadian) 26, 32 Cirque Bidon 55, 57, 519 Cirque de Barbarie 502 Cirque du Monde 447, 508, 509, 521, 522, 523, 524 Cirque du Soleil 4, 10, 32, 85, 355, 424, 447, 521, 522, 523, 524, 531, 534, 546–51, 554, 560, 561, 562, 563, 564 Cirque Éloize 561 Cirque Médrano 141 Cirque Plume 7, 50, 51, 57–61, 506 City of Boys and El Circo de Los Muchachos 508, 511, 525 class 283, 338, 437; see also working class clown(s), clowning 3, 4, 7, 16, 19, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 40, 42, 44, 49,

615

60, 61, 68, 71, 72, 74, 81–104, 105–12, 119, 136, 137, 142, 143, 153, 160, 164, 174, 176, 187, 202, 205, 316, 319, 332, 334, 337, 350, 351, 353, 358, 359, 365, 371, 377, 378, 379, 381, 382, 383, 386, 390, 391, 393, 441, 443, 446, 499, 500, 501, 504, 505, 506, 509, 519, 529, 531, 535, 536, 537, 539, 548, 553, 562; clownesque 94; creation 106–7; deviance 89; disruption 89–91, 107; drag queen 200; female 100–3, 504; metal clowns 56, 153, 155, 156, 158, 557; pathetic 81, 98, 99; shows 92, 93; theatre 91–3; tragic 81, 98, 100; tramp 83; whiteface 30, 82, 88; with objects 26, 30, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 153; see also Auguste; the flop clowning, idea of catastrophe 105–12 clowning, idea of creativity 106–7 Cocteau, Jean 7, 110, 136, 138–43, 144, 146–9, 163, 164 Cold War 405–8, 417, 420, 421, 422, 423 Colleano’s Circus, Colleano circus family 220–5 Colleano, Con 119, 220–5 Collins, Wilkie 283 Columbian circus 520 community, community circus 1, 2, 24, 67, 69, 75–6, 120, 121, 198, 201, 218, 223, 227, 228, 246, 247, 280, 290, 361, 443, 447, 490, 493, 508–10, 518, 522, 523, 554, 540, 555, 558, 563, 565; Belfast Community Circus School 509; see also social circus Coney Island 179, 198, 199, 200, 247 contemporary circus 1, 2, 5, 6, 8, 10, 20, 32, 33, 47, 50–2, 54, 57–8, 61–2, 154–7, 158, 160, 198, 202, 271–2, 434–50, 469, 501–6, 528, 530–1, 535–42, 546–9, 553–9, 560–9 contortion(ism) 31, 85, 87, 128, 216, 284, 302, 382, 411, 501, 506, 536, 537 Cooke, William 159 costume(s) 1, 18, 31, 43, 45, 53, 54, 56, 61, 62, 65, 70, 82, 83, 89, 94, 103, 125, 142, 145, 173, 191, 198, 203, 206, 216, 220, 223, 226, 247,

616

Index

256, 285, 316, 320, 386, 408, 411, 413, 416, 420, 424, 439, 500, 504, 523, 529, 532, 534, 535, 536, 548, 549, 550, 560; body-fitting 4, 175, 532 Coup, William C. 352, 359, 373 Coxe, Anthony Hippisley 15, 16, 17, 300, 308, 356, 357 Cristianis, circus 512 cross-dressing 188, 191–2, 386 Cuba, Cuban 84, 191, 379, 383 cultural reassurance 124–8 Cultural Revolution, China, 407–9, 413–16, 417, 423 curiosity 104, 185, 211, 246, 252, 253, 258, 292, 339, 391, 398, 435, 466 Cyrulnik, Boris 10, 508, 513, 514–15, 518 dance, dancer 2, 5, 6, 7, 26, 32, 47, 52, 54, 56, 61, 62, 106, 107, 110, 119, 122, 137, 140, 142, 144, 153, 158, 160, 163, 164, 179, 198, 200, 201, 202, 205, 210, 213, 222, 224, 253, 276, 302, 305, 306, 307, 310, 331, 341, 342, 350, 368, 381, 382, 383, 408, 411, 416, 420, 421, 422, 423, 430, 436, 437, 439, 455, 458, 466, 503, 506, 512, 524, 532, 533, 548, 555, 556, 557, 558, 562 danger, dangerous 10, 16, 19, 20, 25, 27, 29, 40, 41, 42, 52, 54, 68, 87, 95, 122, 124, 125, 126, 141, 144, 149, 155, 158, 165, 173, 179, 180, 181, 188, 190, 191, 202, 222, 223, 272, 275, 280, 281, 282, 286–9, 291, 292, 301, 317, 318, 322, 323, 324, 354, 365, 370, 371, 372, 388, 430, 438, 449, 458, 463, 466, 471, 514, 528–42 dare, daring 46, 274, 335, 365, 366, 379 dare-devil 289 Dare, Leona 533 Darwin, Charles, Darwinian 243, 246, 259 Davey, Anni 534, 539–40 De Castro, Angela (clown) 93, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104 De Riaz trio 301 decline of circus 121, 178, 332, 349, 354, 399, 439

definition of circus 2–6, 16, 17, 40, 55, 60, 71, 76, 81, 92, 93–5, 98, 101, 251, 279, 349, 434, 503, 504, 538 definition of social circus 509–10 definition of species 341 Deleuze, Gilles 302, 305, 306 democratic 22, 23, 28, 435, 439, 449 DeMott and Ward Circus 184 diabolo 417 Diaghilev Ballet Russe 141, 163 Dickens, Charles 26, 68, 76, 283, 332, 338 difference, identity 46, 237–62, 538; class 202, 203, 332; cultural 420, 422; ethnic identity 2, 129, 538; gender identity 189, 499–501, 506, 507, 538; race identity 202, 203, 246, 252, 256–9, 261; sexual 149, 203, 499–501, 538; species 8, 241, 333, 335, 339, 343, 366, 478 Dimitri, clown 108, 109, 110, 112 diplomacy, cultural 405–24, 566 discourse, cultural, scientific, philosophic 2, 8, 27, 30, 31, 33, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 54, 68, 125, 183, 199, 239, 240, 247, 279, 280, 407, 408, 409, 410, 420, 465, 499, 507, 515, 550, 554, 565, 566 display 1, 4, 15, 17, 20, 21, 27, 28, 31, 39, 40, 48, 49, 68, 85, 175, 177, 179, 182, 189, 199, 200, 202, 206, 232–43, 247–9, 253, 260, 271, 273, 279, 280, 281, 282, 285–6, 292, 302, 315, 316, 318, 320, 323, 324, 335, 339, 340, 341, 342, 349, 351, 366, 389, 393, 395, 396, 411, 413, 483, 499, 500, 502, 504–6, 536, 538 dog and acts 7, 24, 38, 42–9, 60, 186, 189, 331, 342, 343, 344, 537; bassett hound 44; boxer 43; Pekinese 46; training 42–6, 48 Dostoyevsky, Mikhail 110 Douglas, Mary 529, 541 Ducrow, Andrew 26, 31, 81, 209, 216, 335, 337, 338, 339, 341, 357 economic 60, 75, 121, 200, 202, 205, 206, 211, 214, 302, 380, 389, 435, 437–9, 509, 530, 532, 540–2, 548,

Index 560, 561, 562, 564, 565; politicaleconomic 405, 408, 411, 413, 422, 424 Edinburgh Festival 164 education 32, 52, 73, 94, 175, 176, 180, 181, 182, 220, 221, 227, 238, 239, 245, 246, 247, 251, 284, 340, 417, 434, 447, 489, 490, 494, 495, 496, 509, 539, 554, 555, 557, 558, 561 El Circo de Los Muchachos 508–13 elephant(s) acts 2, 4, 9, 10, 189; as ambassadors 494; arguments against elephants in circus 465–86; arguments for elephants in circus 489–96; escape 372; exhibited 108, 246, 247, 336, 351, 370, 371, 393, 395; human elephant relationship 485–6, 489–96; imitate 43; research 476, 479, 483, 484, 489, 490, 492, 494, 495, 496; trainer, training 188, 533; veterinarian 489–96 emotion(al) 5, 8, 29, 40, 54, 55, 61, 98, 99, 100, 103, 109, 110, 124–6, 180, 188, 299–310, 335, 338, 344, 349, 420, 473, 480, 482, 484, 515; ecstasy 299, 301, 303, 305, 307, 309, 310; emotional reassurance 129; emotional responses 8, 124, 303, 307, 309, 310, 408, 422 entrée acts 71, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 393 entrepreneur 4, 210, 211, 227, 239, 240, 258, 353, 388, 390, 391, 392, 396, 397, 560, 562 equestrian 4, 15, 20, 30, 51, 68, 71, 117, 118, 119, 122, 123, 159, 173, 177, 209, 212, 214, 216, 219, 331, 334–47, 350, 353, 356, 357, 359, 361, 372, 379, 380, 382, 391, 392, 393, 533, 561–2; see also horse equipment 2, 4, 71, 90, 166, 393, 395, 495, 519, 529, 532, 533, 534, 535, 539, 540; equipment failure 534, 535; see also apparatus Escalante Circus 380, 381 Esslin, Martin and Theatre of the Absurd 25 ethnographic shows 6, 8, 127, 212, 237–62, 341 ethnography, ethnographic research 41, 69, 70, 250, 257, 260, 314, 319, 499

617

Euro-American circus 3, 117, 124, 126, 129, 175, 183, 224, 225 European Federation of Professional Circus Schools (FEDEC), The 557 exotic, exoticism 20, 23, 30, 31, 43, 47, 60, 125, 126, 128, 129, 145, 148, 182, 221, 222, 227, 240, 241, 244, 253, 332, 333, 336, 360, 367, 389, 398, 420, 562; see also traditional Fanque, Pablo 209, 210, 215 fear 18, 25, 41, 54, 90, 108, 156, 166, 181, 280, 281, 290, 301, 317, 318, 336, 368, 372, 456, 457, 465, 466, 482, 542; fearlessness 155, 191, 204, 369, 370; social fear 176, 438, 443, 444; see also emotion Feld, Irvin 354, 355 Feld, Kenneth 32 female performers 8, 89, 127, 143, 175–92, 222, 270, 272, 282, 300, 340, 499, 500, 501, 505, 506, 533, 534, 536, 538; see also women performers film 3, 6, 17, 37, 52, 81, 83, 105, 110, 123, 126, 128, 141, 146, 165, 270, 274, 275, 299, 300–9, 354, 411, 422, 511, 524, 548, 558; Eisenstein, Sergei and Montage of Attractions 19; see also cinema Finnish Circus Information Center 559 fire-breathing, fire-eating 55, 57, 85, 199, 200, 254, 271, 411, 512 fireworks 162, 163, 364 FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus 120, 121, 218, 219, 220, 227, 386–9, 396, 397, 399 FitzGerald, Dan and Tom 390, 397, 399 flop, the 94, 100, 101 Flying Cockatoos 534, 535, 536, 537, 539 Flying Dunbars (trapeze artists) 386 Flying Lamars 534 flying trapeze 10, 122, 138, 153, 191, 300, 528, 531, 534 foot juggling 122, 411 Foucault, Michel 70, 110, 302, 307 Franconi 28, 371 Fratellini, Albert 81 Fratellini, Annie 504

618

Index

Fratellini Brothers 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 142, 143, 163 freak and freak show 5, 8, 202, 205, 206, 237–62, 270, 272, 275, 341, 371, 435, 562; see also sideshow French circus 26, 50–62, 92, 153, 371, 499–507, 554, 556, 557, 562; companies in the 1980s 62, 153, 519 Freud, Anna 514 Freud, Sigmund 146, 179, 308 Frost, Thomas 9, 357, 388, 390–9 funambulist 393, 460; see also rope-walker; wire-walker Futurism 7, 153–64 Gaulier, Philippe 8, 94, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102 gender, gender identity 1, 5, 7, 10, 48, 110, 142, 145, 148, 174, 175, 177, 185, 189, 191, 192, 200, 202, 206, 221, 301, 302, 303, 308, 319, 340, 341, 389, 398, 408, 411, 499, 500, 501, 502, 505, 506, 538 giantess 173 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 180 global risk society (world risk society) 10, 528, 530, 541, 542 God, god(s), 142, 145, 155, 176, 286, 336, 363, 457, 458, 460, 461, 463; dancing god, Shiva 106, 107, 109, 112 Goethe 149 Goffman, Erving and framing 6, 16, 500, 502 goldfields circus 212, 214, 352 Greatest Show on Earth, The (1952) 303 Greimas, Algirdas and semiotic grid 7, 38–9 Grock 83, 84, 86, 98, 108, 110 grotesque 5, 82, 84, 111, 163, 334, 343, 435, 537, 542, 553 gymnast(ics) 5, 163, 206, 209, 276, 284, 289, 313, 314, 318, 319, 320, 331, 359, 378, 383, 392, 393, 395, 396, 411, 532 Hagenbeck (animal business) 4, 90, 191 Hagenbeck, Carl 184 hand-balancing 315, 316, 319, 320, 321, 323, 324 Hanlon Brothers 532; Thomas 533

Haraway, Donna 185 Harlequin 31, 65, 140; Tower 512 Herzog, Werner 454 high-wire walker(ing) 9, 40, 41, 54, 61, 73–4, 85, 119, 128, 153, 161, 180, 190, 191, 222, 223–4, 229, 320, 321, 455–60, 481, 530, 512; low-wire, slack wire, 86, 223, 359; see also rope-walker; wire-walker; tightrope Hillier, Joseph ‘Mungo’ 209, 213 hippodrama 4, 20, 22, 27, 31, 332, 335, 337, 338, 350, 353, 392, 395 history, historicity 1, 2, 4, 5, 7–9, 15, 17, 20–2, 28, 29, 31, 32, 47, 50, 51, 54, 57, 59, 60, 62, 68, 75, 110, 111, 117, 118, 127, 155, 158, 163, 166, 175, 177, 200, 204, 237–9, 249, 251–4, 257, 280, 292, 302, 305, 308, 314, 319, 334, 335, 339, 343, 349–57, 378, 388–99, 431, 432, 434, 435, 439, 442, 449, 450, 503, 505, 510, 512, 518, 530, 532, 538, 539, 565 Hochman, Gerado 441, 444, 445, Hodgini, Albert 191–2 homosexual 54, 141, 147, 148, 305; novels about homoeroticism 147 hoop diving 411 Hornaday, William 242, 246–8, 250 horse 2, 4, 5, 8, 19, 24, 27, 28, 45, 49, 51, 55, 56, 60, 93, 119, 122, 123, 124, 159, 174, 176, 179, 184, 186, 189, 191, 192, 212, 213, 215, 216, 219, 220, 222, 226, 228, 318, 319, 331, 332, 334–44, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 356, 357, 365, 366, 367, 369, 370, 372, 378, 386, 390, 392, 395, 436, 494, 512; diving horses 386; Little Learned Military Horse 342; see also equestrian horse riding manuals 337, 340 HorsLesMurs 556 human cannonball 186, 300, 361, 533, 537, 539 human exhibition 16, 227, 238, 248, 271, 367; see also ethnographic shows human exhibition with animals 175, 182, 237–62, 273, 341, 350, 362, 367, 370

Index human pyramid 411, 418, 419, 512; see also exhibition (menagerie) Hurd, Samuel 369–73 Huysmans J. 138, 139 ideas 1, 2, 6, 8, 9, 20, 24, 26, 57, 58, 61, 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 96, 97, 100, 101, 107, 108, 109, 137, 141, 142, 143, 154, 159, 176, 201, 242, 247, 268, 286, 299, 302, 303, 306, 307, 308, 309, 310, 388, 389, 409, 418, 421, 422, 432, 435, 442, 449, 502, 508, 509, 514, 517, 518, 522, 528, 529, 531, 533, 536, 537, 539; ideas of primitive 126, 241, 243, 254, 257, 259, 261, 271 identity: impact of 305, 308; cultural 6, 8, 129, 226, 269, 301, 304, 308, 408, 413, 422, 437; see also American circus, gender identity, marginal identity, racial identity, sexual identity, species identity identity politics 22, 299, 408, 528, 538 ideological 20, 76, 129, 306, 308, 334, 336, 339, 406, 407, 430, 431, 432, 444, 447, 528, 542 individuality, individualism 388, 506, 549 industrialization and circus 19, 28, 29, 388–9, 395–7, 409, 410 innovation 4, 9, 15, 32, 47, 51, 105, 108, 350, 368, 386, 388, 391, 392, 395, 396, 398, 442, 444, 556, 564, 566 inspiration 3, 5, 26, 38, 53, 54, 66, 103, 141, 306, 411, 416, 436, 437, 438, 439, 511, 512, 520, 548, 549, 558, 562 interval in performance 74, 126 invention, reinvention 4, 10, 61, 68, 154, 301, 398, 411, 562; mechanical, apparatus, 530, 532 Ionesco, Eugene (and absurdist) 25, 154, 163 Ishi 237–43, 252–62 itinerant 120, 163, 183, 184, 214, 220, 228, 289, 290, 350, 390, 392, 397, 398, 409, 439 Jameson, Fredric 9, 386, 388, 390, 391, 394, 398, 399

619

Japanese acrobats and acrobatics 4, 7, 117, 126, 127, 128, 129, 217 Jim Rose Circus Side Show 8, 270, 271–5 Jimmy Brown’s Circus 314–18 Jones, Billy 212, 213, 216, 219 Jones, John (later ‘Matthew St Leon’) 212–13 juggling 3, 4, 25, 85, 86, 122, 199, 201, 204, 350, 411, 445, 501, 512, 519, 558 juvenile performers 210, 212, 213, 282, 283, 338; see also children Kelly, Emmett 81, 83, 90 kinaesthetic, kinesthetic 8, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307, 308, 309 knowledge 2, 24, 33, 68, 74, 105, 107, 110, 238, 239, 240, 248, 253, 254, 255, 258, 261, 262, 300, 302, 303, 307, 308, 344, 364, 389, 393, 446, 458, 463, 491, 493, 539, 540, 554, 563, 565, 566 Kroeber, Alfred 252–9 Kudlak brothers, Bernard 51, 57, 58, 61 laughter 6, 28, 29, 44, 45, 54, 60, 86, 87, 91, 105, 107, 108, 112, 202, 257, 274, 284, 288, 301, 322, 394, 435, 441, 465 laws of nature, natural law theory 23, 247, 355, 363, 364, 470, 474–9 le Guillerm, Johann 533 Lecoq, Jacques 7, 81, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 109 legal issues, law(s) 21, 22, 23, 26, 29, 175, 176, 177, 210, 214, 225, 279, 280, 282, 286, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292, 334, 336, 344, 355, 363, 364, 366, 397, 471, 472, 475, 503, 506, 510, 538, 540 Legs on the Wall (Australia) 26 legislation 111, 214, 225, 288 Leitzel, Lillian 184 Lena, Lily 255, 256, 258 Léotard, Jules 393, 395, 532 leotards 65, 161, 175, 176, 393, 395; see also costume Les Puits aux Images 51, 53 Les sept doigts de la main 561, 562

620

Index

Levine, Peter A. 10, 508, 513, 515–18 literature, circus 3, 8, 25, 27, 50, 69, 136, 138, 139, 142, 279, 299, 355, 356, 358, 391, 406, 407, 408, 409, 416, 436, 438 London 4, 27, 28, 91, 117, 210, 219, 255, 313, 331, 332, 335, 337, 338, 342, 350, 351, 357, 373, 389, 391, 392, 395, 514, 520, Los Malabaristas del Apokalipsis 445 Ludlam, Charles and Theatre of the Ridiculous 200 lyra 519 machines in circus 5, 30, 55, 85, 87, 125, 154, 158, 166, 190, 225, 302, 303, 342 MacIntyre, Alasdair 7, 66–70, 73, 75, 76 Mallarmé 137 management 2, 9, 65–77, 182, 223, 274, 386, 393, 411, 490, 493, 530, 534; external goods (value) 66–9, 75; internal goods (value) 66–9, 75, 76 managers 71, 72, 73, 176, 180, 184, 186, 187, 188, 209, 219, 222, 226, 253, 286, 287, 290, 292, 305, 332, 335, 359, 361, 363, 364, 365, 368, 396, 406, 420, 421, 489, 491 Mann, Klaus 146, 148, 149 Mann, Thomas 7, 136, 138, 139, 143–9 marginal identity 228, 242, 251, 314, 388 marginality 3, 70, 228, 242, 251, 252, 529 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 153, 155–60, maroma 377, 378, 379, 384 mastery, skills 3, 6, 17, 24, 26, 52, 53, 57, 58, 61, 73, 86, 92, 108, 117, 125, 127, 153, 154, 163, 164, 188, 213, 221, 222, 226, 290, 318, 331, 335, 340, 350, 389, 391, 393, 395, 399, 411, 422, 424, 436, 442, 446, 502, 508, 512, 513, 517, 518, 519, 520–3, 525, 528, 529, 532, 539–42, 544 materialism 388, 395 Mayakovsky, Vladimir and Moscow State Circus 19

media 7, 55, 57, 59, 105, 159, 175, 183, 184, 191, 241, 252, 270, 405, 406, 407, 418, 420, 421, 423, 494, 503, 532, 541, 558, 562 Menken, Adah Isaacs 30, 356 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice and lived body 8, 306–10 Mexican, Mexican-American circus 9, 31, 32, 55, 224, 225, 350, 356, 377–83, 406, 424, 512, 523; Mestizo 377 military 23, 119, 120–4, 188, 336, 340, 342, 422, 434, 439, 443, 444, 510, 541, 561 Mill, John Stuart 471 Miller, Henry 110, 111–12 Miller, Jennifer 7, 198–206 mime 7, 15, 18, 25, 26, 54, 86, 89, 90, 91, 93, 163, 201, 316, 441; mimetic 15, 319, 321 modern circus 30, 55, 60, 68, 81, 118, 119, 122, 158, 308, 331, 334, 335, 337, 349, 350, 355, 390, 391, 512, 561 modern sport 319, 411 modern(ity) 9, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29, 42, 55, 62, 70, 75, 55–81, 183, 211, 214, 249, 252, 256, 258, 259, 260, 261, 302, 304, 314, 344, 386, 388, 389, 390, 391, 393, 394, 396, 397, 398, 399, 423, 435, 506 modernization in Argentina 436, 437 modernization of acrobatics in China 407, 410, 413, 416, 418, 421 Moglice-Von Verx Company 501, 504 monkey, monkey’s cage 60, 107, 186, 237, 241, 242, 243, 245, 246, 247, 248, 249, 331, 342, 343, 371, 382 moral theory 68, 470, 471, 472, 473, 474, 475, 476, 478 morality 8, 22, 144, 147, 149, 157, 279, 283 Moscow 19 motion 8, 29, 43, 123, 160, 174, 299, 301–10, 321, 324, 457, 516 movement 8, 29, 41, 42, 54, 59, 69, 70, 94, 111, 122, 123, 139, 166, 200, 226, 243, 299, 302, 303, 304, 305, 306, 307, 308, 310, 318, 324, 331, 350, 408, 411, 420, 476, 500, 504, 506, 531, 532, 535, 538; movement-image 306

Index Mr Lifto 271, 272, 273 muscular memory 304 museum 157, 186, 237–41, 243, 246, 247, 253–60, 262, 353, 359–64, 367, 369, 371–3, 407, 562 music 1, 5, 6, 7, 22, 25, 26, 41, 42, 43, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58–62, 69–72, 86, 90, 92, 111, 117–29, 141, 158, 162, 164, 166, 188, 201, 202, 243, 255, 270, 271, 273, 279, 281, 290, 307, 316, 320, 331, 332, 352, 372, 381, 386, 406, 408, 413, 420, 422, 436, 437, 439, 483, 485, 524, 529, 536, 548, 561; band 23, 42, 51, 52, 57, 65, 74, 117–22, 124, 127, 129, 162, 201, 203, 204, 223, 316, 324, 383, 395; noise 65, 91, 162, 166, 419; rhythm 53, 56, 59, 107, 122, 123, 124, 126, 129 narrative 7, 9, 17, 19, 24, 26, 27, 28, 32, 37, 38, 39, 54, 58, 90, 91, 92, 99, 106, 107, 109, 125, 126, 147, 158, 203, 239, 240, 241, 261, 262, 302, 303, 321, 341, 390, 391, 392, 393, 394, 398, 406, 418, 436, 442, 515, 518, 535, 547, 553, 560 nation state 1, 239, 406, 408, 413, 422, 541 National Centre for the Circus Arts (CNAC), France 52, 69 National Circus School, Montreal 522, 560–6 National Circus School of Circo Para Todos 520 National Institute of Circus Arts, Australia xiii, xvii nationalism 408, 437 natural law theory see laws of nature nature 8, 23, 105, 111, 142, 149, 177, 247, 255, 260, 333, 335, 336, 339, 341, 355, 360, 363, 364, 366, 475, 476, 477, 482, 484, 485, 530, 538 neo-liberalism 56, 424, 447, 449, 540, 542 networks 556–7 new circus 2, 7, 32, 50–62, 95, 121, 153–66, 198–206, 301, 305, 308, 444, 445, 446, 501, 502, 503, 512, 518, 519, 553, 554, 555, 557, 558, 560 New Woman 7, 173, 174, 181, 191

621

New York 7, 28, 119, 175, 176, 177, 182, 184, 187, 198, 200, 201–5, 210, 216, 224, 237, 239, 242, 247, 248, 251, 350, 351, 354, 362, 363, 365, 366, 367, 370, 371, 372, 373, 406, 407, 418, 455, 460, 520, 549 newer, newest 9, 337, 386, 388, 389, 391, 393, 399, 555, 557 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 9, 137, 138, 144, 155, 162, 461–5 norm, normal 6, 7, 40, 60, 70, 88, 90, 107, 112, 124, 144, 149, 173, 174, 177, 185, 187, 191, 192, 199, 200, 202, 204, 206, 228, 241, 249, 257, 258, 259, 260, 306, 334, 340, 341, 343, 389, 431, 482, 484, 486, 503, 505, 506, 507, 538; abnormal concepts 241, 360 nostalgia for 251, 270, 398, 499 novelty 20, 24, 47, 70, 210, 211, 213, 214, 215, 224, 226, 253, 270, 392, 393, 394, 398 nudity 173, 174, 175, 177, 182, 183, 191 Nussbaum, Martha and capabilities approach 470, 477–82, 486 Oakley, Annie 187, 188 Olympia(s) 120, 386 Orientalism 20, 31, 126, 418, 422 origins 6, 16, 21, 22, 30, 32, 183, 205, 339, 340, 350, 391, 397, 435, 547, 551 Orrin Circus 378, 379, 380, 381 outdoor(s) 7, 120, 198, 200–3 pain 8, 107, 269, 271–4, 302, 309, 419, 471, 472–4, 501, 515, 563 pantomime 4, 19, 32, 118, 159, 280, 291, 338, 356, 378, 379, 381, 382, 383, 386, 392, 436, 441, 533 paradox 2, 10, 22, 38, 61, 75, 106, 141, 143, 149, 151, 187, 192, 269, 292, 315, 398, 514, 515, 528, 529, 531–3, 535, 537, 539, 541, 542, 562 Perry’s Circus 121 Petit, Philippe 9, 455–60, phenomenology of the body 8, 299, 306, 307 philosophy 29, 61, 93, 353 physical, physicality, physical skills 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 28,

622

Index

29, 30, 37, 41, 42, 53, 54, 57, 68, 70, 85, 86, 87, 90, 93, 95, 106, 108, 117, 123, 124, 125, 126, 143, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 180, 185, 188, 191, 206, 210, 251, 260, 272, 279, 280, 284, 287, 299–307, 310, 334, 340, 392, 394, 395, 398, 408, 431, 442, 472, 485, 486, 490, 491, 496, 502, 503, 504, 506, 508, 513, 518, 525, 528, 529, 530–42 physical culture 180, 182, 389, 393, 418, 432 physical-culture movement 180, 182 physical theatre, performance 81, 117, 521 physical training, education 4, 561, 563, 566 Picasso 3, 7, 139, 140, 141, 149, 159 Pickles Family circus 85 plate spinning 164, 411, 417, 420 play in performance 9, 16, 81, 84, 85, 87, 88, 89, 91, 94–102, 104, 105–12, 317, 322, 323, 324, 326, 431, 482, 485, 492 poetic 9, 161, 304 political 6, 7, 19, 22, 27, 28, 50, 52, 55, 95, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 239, 248, 272, 280, 292, 307, 334, 335, 344, 370, 379, 405–23, 430–2, 435, 437, 442, 446, 480, 512, 528, 536, 537, 541, 542, 549, 553, 563 politics 1, 4, 9, 22, 67, 185, 202, 237, 270, 292, 299, 337, 406, 407, 408, 415, 528, 530, 538, 540, 541, 566 Popov, Oleg 82, 85, 86, 106, 110 popular amusement 178, 240, 332, 355 Popular Criollismo movement 436, 437, 438 popular culture 17, 18, 237, 239, 251, 252, 258, 261, 269, 380, 382, 409, 430, 431, 537 popular entertainment 9, 154, 158, 182, 199, 238, 315, 349, 352, 356, 381, 389, 409, 421, 430, 441, 536 popular music 120, 128, 129 popular performance 1, 377, 435–9, 444, 502 post-human 5, 6 postmodern body 159, 200, 269–76, 304, 557 practical judgement (phronêsis) 66, 67, 69, 73, 75, 76

practice-based community 7, 67, 69, 70, 75–6 practice/s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 19, 25, 26, 51, 53, 55, 58, 62, 66–70, 72, 90, 117–21, 125, 210, 223, 238, 241, 244, 246, 249, 287, 290, 291, 320, 334, 336, 363, 388, 406, 407, 415, 420, 422, 434–6, 439, 441, 442, 443, 447, 448, 449, 450, 471, 472, 484, 501, 502, 509, 521, 529, 530–1, 534, 537, 539, 540–2, 562, 563, 565 press 164, 173, 177, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 192, 225, 238, 250, 255, 262, 282, 283, 337, 344, 360, 362, 365, 366, 511; see also media proletariat arts 408, 409, 411, 413, 414 public 3, 4, 9, 21, 24, 27, 45, 46, 52, 55, 56, 62, 68, 76, 95, 128, 142, 166, 177–83, 202, 203, 210, 213, 216, 222, 224, 238, 240, 241, 246, 247, 248, 252, 253, 257, 258, 262, 279, 283, 286, 287, 289, 290, 291, 292, 313–26, 343, 347, 354, 360, 363, 380, 389, 391, 395, 396, 397, 407, 414, 420, 422, 423, 436, 439, 440, 444, 447, 470, 472, 474, 475, 476, 481, 494, 515, 528, 531, 532, 538, 541, 554, 555 public space 198, 199, 202, 203, 247, 442–7, 472, 474–6, 481, 494; sphere 178, 179, 182, 200, 202, 442, 511, 515 publicity 21, 92, 93, 97, 126, 153, 179, 185, 187, 192, 223, 224, 225, 245, 314, 341, 365, 374, 389, 399 pyramid building 317, 318, 323, 325, 411, 512, 518, 519 Quebec, Québécois circus 10, 521, 522, 546–51, 560–7 queer, queerness 1, 7, 197–206, 538 race 5, 8, 32, 175, 181, 185, 203, 211, 227, 228, 241, 242, 245–50, 258, 262, 331, 340, 341, 343, 389, 408, 464, 538; in circus 30, 209–29, 408; performing race 209–29, 237–62 racial classification 225, 237, 238, 247 racial identity 1, 8, 129, 211, 226, 538; racial other 129, 192 railroad circus 9, 352, 368, 379, 389, 396, 399

Index real action 8, 16, 270–6 realism 20, 21, 32, 148, 303, 414, 436 Regan, Tom and subject-of-a-life 471, 473 regulation 89, 272–3, 282, 287, 291, 493, 530, 539, 540, 557 research 1, 6, 10, 21, 42, 70, 94, 118, 127, 226, 309, 351, 355, 357, 405, 407, 408, 434, 435, 450, 476, 479, 483, 484, 489, 490, 492, 494–6, 499, 515, 516, 517, 525, 534, 539, 541, 553, 555, 556, 557, 560–6; approaches 563–9 resilience, resilient body 10, 50, 110, 508–19, 521, 523–7 Rhodesia, Mlle (Florrie Pinder) juggler 386 Ricketts, John B. 118, 119, 351, 357 rigging, riggers 2, 4, 19, 70, 71, 529, 531, 534, 535, 539, 540, 566 ring 9, 16, 17, 28, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 66, 71, 72, 74, 87, 90, 108, 110, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 158, 160, 179, 183, 187, 191, 198, 200–6, 209, 212, 221, 222, 279, 280, 283, 286, 292, 316, 317, 318, 321, 322, 326, 332, 334, 335, 337, 340, 350, 365, 367, 386, 392, 393, 397, 499, 502, 504, 505, 506, 507, 529, 533, 536; multiple 23, 31, 129, 141, 158, 160, 173, 180, 183, 184, 309, 349, 352, 353, 371, 372 Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus 31, 32, 87, 128, 224, 354, 356, 383, 480, 490, 491, 493, 520, 534 Ringling Bros. Circus 179, 184, 186, 191, 491, 493, 494, 495 ringmaster 7, 32, 65, 68–77, 85, 91, 173, 203, 216, 316, 318, 324 risk 1, 6, 10, 40, 42, 53, 103, 124, 125, 126, 129, 140, 144, 153, 188, 201, 202, 303, 310, 317, 320, 323, 369, 438, 500, 504, 506, 509, 524, 525, 528–41, 550; management 530, 534, 539, 540–3 ritual 1, 6, 18, 19, 32, 49, 89, 117, 119, 125, 142, 197, 338, 355, 377 Robinson, Josie DeMott 179, 184, 187, 191 roof walking act 537 rope-dancer 119, 137, 144, 148, 210, 341

623

rope-walker, walking 3, 4, 9, 122, 183, 209, 210, 212, 216, 221, 351, 379, 383, 461, 462, 465, 530, 533; see also rope-dancer; wire-walker Rosaire’s act 45, 46, 47, 48 Roth, Philip 138 Round House 520 Royal Circus 123, 209, 332, 351, 357, 392, 394 Rushdie, Salman 110 Russian athletes 313 Russian circus 430–2, 530; see also Soviet Circus Russian clowns 86, 110 safety 42, 71, 72, 122, 156, 191, 202, 206, 365, 417, 528, 532, 539, 540; performance of 542; performing risk 529, 539 safety line 530, 533 safety net 41, 206, 533, 534, 541, 557 Said, Edward 30, 31, 36; see also Orientalism St Leon’s Circus 120, 121, 215, 216, 217, 228 Sandwina, Kate 173 Sanger, ‘Lord’ George 159, 290, 390, 395, 396, 397 Savary, Jérôme 52, 155, 163, 164 Scarry, Elaine 272 science/scientific 39, 54, 107, 181, 185, 238, 239, 242–52, 255, 257, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264, 272, 339, 340, 341, 388, 389, 393, 415, 475–9, 483, 493, 513, 525 scientist(s) 57, 106, 237, 238, 240, 251, 254, 256–8, 260, 261, 336, 375, 478, 484, 489; specimen 237, 238, 241, 243, 244, 247, 249, 250, 253, 255, 258, 260, 262 Scully, Matthew 475–9 semiotic square 42, 48 semiotics 6, 7, 37–49, 82, 94, 118, 325; language 2, 7, 9, 18, 19, 20, 22, 26, 31, 32–8, 46, 61, 73, 86, 91, 92, 128, 129, 160, 162, 240, 251, 253, 259, 270, 272, 300, 303, 310, 313, 335, 407, 435, 444, 475 sensation 20, 27, 125, 157, 159, 160, 240, 246, 300–10, 393, 473, 484, 517, 538

624

Index

senses 62, 161, 299, 307, 480, 481, 483, 484; sensory responses 8, 300, 301–4, 307, 309, 310 sexual identities 1, 144, 146, 308, 499, 500, 502, 506, 507; see also gender identity sexuality 140, 141, 143, 146, 179, 180, 203, 204, 272, 550; bisexual 146 Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe 410, 413, 414, 416 Shaw, George Bernard 138 Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe 406, 410, 414, 415, 418–21, 423–8 sideshow(s) 5, 6, 7, 8, 129, 173, 183, 198, 199, 200, 202, 221, 227, 237, 240, 241, 243, 244, 246, 247, 253, 256, 258, 270, 271, 278, 353, 536, 537, 565 silks 519 Silva, Father Jesus 10, 508, 510–13, 525 simulacra 8, 270 Singer, Peter 470–1 Sino-US relations 405–25 skills see mastery slack-rope 82, 86, 223, 350, 533 Slava/Slava’s Snowshow 91, 92, 93, 100 Slug the Enigma (Sluggo) 269, 271, 273, 275 social 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 16, 24, 28, 29, 32, 37, 39, 41, 47, 52, 55, 70, 72, 76, 90, 92, 107, 110, 119, 120, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 137, 149, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180, 183, 185, 192, 206, 217, 228, 239, 240, 245, 248, 255, 259, 261, 279, 280, 292, 299–310, 314, 320, 321, 325, 332, 334, 336, 338, 340, 380, 388, 389, 393, 394, 397, 398, 406, 409, 432, 435, 437, 438, 442, 443, 449, 482, 484, 489, 490, 499, 500, 508, 528, 529, 530, 532, 533, 536–42, 561–2 social circus 2, 10, 447–9, 508–25, 565–6; The Charter of the Creation of the United Nations of Social Circus 509 social circuses 509; Belfast Community Circus 509; Chile Women’s Circus 509; Circo Baobab 509; Circo Social del Sur 509; Cirque du Monde 509; Cirque Pour Tous 509; Clowns without Borders 509; El Circo del

Mundo 509, Elleboog-Holland 509; La Fabrik 509; Les Saltimbanques de l’Impossible 509; Los Muchachos 509; Payasos Sin Fronteras 509; Shems’y 509; Suitcase Circus 509 social intervention 447, 513, 525 social practices 1, 2, 66–7, 76, 121, 530, 539 socialism 407–10, 421 Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Royal Society) 9, 363, 364, 366, 554 Sonrie Ecuador 524 South (Latin) American circus 56, 106, 145, 160, 175, 410, 424, 434–48; see also Argentinian Circus; Colombian Circus; Mexican Circus; Mexican-American Circus Soviet Circus 9, 430–2, 562 Soviet Union 419, 430, 431, 562 Spanish circus 6, 31, 336, 377, 508–12, 519, 554 Speaight, George 27, 122, 349, 350, 357, 375 species 6, 8, 24, 38, 106, 107, 241, 245, 247, 248, 333, 335, 337, 338, 341, 342, 343, 354, 469, 474, 475, 476, 478, 479, 480–2, 484–6, 491, 494, 535; identity 1; see also individual animals spectacle 1, 4, 5, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30–3, 40, 51, 57, 58, 60, 68, 117, 120, 124, 139, 148, 154, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 175, 177, 186, 202, 209, 239–42, 247, 256, 285, 292, 302, 303, 306, 309, 314, 322, 324, 335, 336, 339, 341, 343, 352, 377, 378, 381, 392, 503, 504, 529, 547, 550, 551 spectacle of actuality 16, 154, 158, 160, 164, 166 spectator 8, 17–20, 23, 25–7, 40, 41, 56, 75, 90, 96, 117, 123, 139, 149, 160, 163, 216, 239, 241, 242, 243, 249, 271, 273, 274, 279, 281, 299–310, 313, 314–26, 353, 361, 362, 365, 367, 369, 370–2, 382, 391, 399, 406, 407, 408, 420, 422, 431, 471, 501, 529, 532, 534, 538; gut visceral reactions 8, 271, 273, 274, 299–310, 539; spectator phenomenology 299–310; see also audience

Index sport(s), sporting 1, 4, 5, 8, 16, 31, 47, 55, 226, 305, 313–26, 390, 393, 411, 431, 519, 529, 532, 536, 561, 566; see also athleticism Stark, Mabel 173–4, 188–9 static or stationery 5, 287, 491 static trapeze 530, 537 street circus 1, 51, 52, 54, 56, 57, 59, 95, 122, 139, 166, 198, 280, 350, 353, 357, 361, 409, 410, 435, 439, 441, 442, 443, 445, 446, 447, 449, 504, 520, 554, 556 structuralist 8, 334 stunts 16, 19, 163, 186, 190, 189, 190, 192, 271, 272, 274, 301, 303, 315, 317, 331, 538 styles 19, 54, 93, 198, 201, 238, 341, 413, 443, 444, 445, 503, 504 subversions 24, 85, 414 suffragette 7, 157; see also New Woman suffragists 179 Sun Xiaoqing 414–19, 422, 423 Superman 9, 461, 463–5, 466; Ultimate Man 464–5 surrealism 137, 159, 160 symbolism 3, 158, 162, 334 Taguet, Christian 51, 52, 53, 54 Tati, Jacques 110 techniques, performing 3, 18, 19, 25, 26, 45, 53, 54, 86, 91, 92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 103, 158, 331, 339, 418, 421–4, 439, 442, 444, 452, 493, 501–4, 534 technology, technologies of: advance 1, 30, 389, 392, 399; electricity 71, 373, 386, 399; gas lighting 399 terrorism 441, 541 theatre, in relation to form, roles, and spaces 2, 6, 15, 16, 17, 18, 22, 25, 26, 27, 44, 50, 51, 52, 54, 58, 71, 81, 84, 85, 86, 88, 92, 93, 94, 98, 118, 127, 142, 153–66, 189, 198, 209, 214, 216, 223, 225, 227, 248, 269, 270, 272, 287, 290, 301, 302, 303, 306, 307, 338, 350, 378, 379, 380, 381, 388, 391, 413, 420, 422, 436, 437, 438, 439, 440, 442, 443, 444, 445, 502, 503, 512, 519, 532, 533, 536, 546, 547, 548, 549, 550, 553, 554, 556, 557, 561, 562, 565

625

theory 28, 146, 254; of action 37–9; the gaze 306; laughter 43, 86; organization 68; psychoanalytic 300; resilience 513; spectator 299–310 thrill 124, 180, 239, 301, 302, 339, 411, 528, 538 tightrope 22, 71, 107, 119, 122, 136, 209, 213, 282, 350, 351, 383, 390, 456, 461, 462, 465 tightwire 223, 224 Timm Grimm, The Torture King 272, 273, 274 Toole-Stott, Raymond 1, 11, 355 traditional circus 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 50, 55, 57, 60, 61, 67, 70, 71, 73, 90, 118, 120, 122, 124, 125, 158, 301, 314, 320, 323, 332, 334, 344, 378, 442, 443, 446, 499–506, 512, 513, 530, 531, 532, 534, 535, 538, 539, 540, 541, 546, 551, 561 tragic clown 98, 100 training as clown 3, 7, 94, 96, 97, 101, 102 transcendence 137, 138, 153, 305, 310, 326, 338 transgression, transgressive 1, 25, 85, 88, 89, 90, 174, 185, 192, 237, 443, 445, 503, 505, 506, 536, 537, 538 transportation 4, 189, 352, 368, 494 transvestite 141, 549 trapeze 4, 10, 19, 38, 39, 53, 122, 136, 138, 157, 174, 186, 191, 302, 307, 309, 313, 320, 321, 393, 518, 519, 528–35, 537, 539 Trapeze 303 trapeze artists 31, 61, 71, 139, 141, 153, 164, 180, 222, 280–1, 300, 301, 305, 324, 350, 382, 383, 386, 436, 499, 500–7, 521, 533 Trapeze Disrobing Act, The (1903) 302 trauma 100, 302, 482, 484, 508, 513–18 travelling circuses 2, 7, 66, 69, 70, 71, 120, 121, 220, 313, 315, 383, 392, 394, 439, 539 trick(s) 4, 15, 21, 27, 44–8, 69, 70, 72, 73, 83, 125, 153, 158, 164, 199, 200, 202, 203, 247, 261, 281, 287, 300, 308, 313, 318, 323, 324, 325, 326, 331, 342, 350, 351, 391, 392, 421, 563 tumbling 3, 90, 209, 332, 411, 519

626

Index

Twin Towers, New York City 9, 455–9, 460 utilitarianism 470–4 Verner, Samuel 242–6, 248, 251, 252, 261 Videla Brothers 442–5 visceral 8, 271, 273, 274, 299–310, 539 visual art 3, 6, 7, 139, 140, 141, 149, 155, 159, 335–6, 553, 556 visual synchronisation with 124 Vitaly and dog Klishko 43–5 Wallendas 512; Tino 512 When Night is Falling (1995) 305 whiteface clown 4, 7, 81–4, 88, 98, 99 Williams, Linda 302–3 Williams, Raymond 16, 17, 33, 434, 444, 447 Wilson, Matt 537, 539 Windsor, Eddie (Douglas Kossmayer) 44, 45, 48 Wings of Desire (1987) 304, 311 wire-walker, walking 40, 54, 61, 73, 74, 119, 122, 128, 222, 458, 459, 530 Wirth, May 181, 184, 186 Wogayehu, Sosina 537 women performers 4, 7, 140, 173–91, 205, 210, 211, 246, 305, 340, 411,

420, 434, 499–507, 520–1, 533, 536, 538, 540; roles 143, 174 Women’s Circus: Chile’s Women’s Circus 509; Performing Older Women’s Circus (Melbourne) 521; Vulcana Women’s Circus 521; Women’s Circus (Melbourne) 520 working class, entertainment 27, 177, 178, 227, 283, 287, 332, 338, 536 world’s fairs 182, 240, 242, 243, 244, 247, 251, 253, 370 Yan’an, acrobatic troupe 409–10, 411, 416, 422 Yangge dance 411, 412 youth at risk, young people at risk 509, 510, 522, 523, 524, 525 Zarathustra, prophet 9, 137, 148, 151, 461–6 Zazel 186, 361 Zhang Jinkui 409 Zhou Enlai 415–18 Zhou Liangtie 415, 416 Zip Zap Circus 521 zoo(s) 174, 237, 238, 240–51, 352, 396, 478, 480, 482, 483, 486, 490, 491, 493, 494, 495 Zora, Lucia 188