The Routledge Circus Studies Reader offers an absorbing critical introduction 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 performance, including pieces by Philippe Petit and Friedrich Nietzsche, are included alongside more recent scholarship in the field.
Edited by two scholars whose work is strongly connected to the dynamic world of performance, The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is an essential teaching and study resource for the emerging discipline of circus studies. It also provides a stimulating introduction to the field for lovers of circus.
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
Introduction. Circus Perspectives, Precedents and Presents
PETA TAIT AND KATIE LAVERS
Part I
Perspectives
Aesthetics
1. Aesthetics
HELEN STODDART
2. Staging of Actions: Heroes, Antiheroes and Animal Actors
PAUL BOUISSAC
3. An Epic of New Circus
MARTINE MALEVAL
4. The Man in the Red Coat: Management in the Circus
RON BEADLE AND DAVID KŐNYŐT
The Clown
5. Clowns and Clown Play
LOUISE PEACOCK
6. Diminutive Catastrophe: Clown’s Play
MAGGI PHILLIPS
Cross-Arts
7. Circus Music: The Eye of the Ear
KIM BASTON
8. Art and Androgyny: The Aerialist
NAOMI RITTER
9. When the Future was Now: Archaos Within a Theatre Tradition
ROBERTA MOCK
Gender and Sexuality
10. Respectable Female Nudity
JANET M. DAVIS
11. A Queer Circus: Amok in New York
MARK SUSSMAN
Race
12. Celebrated at First, Then Implied and Finally Denied: The Erosion of Aboriginal Identity in Circus, 1851-1960
MARK ST LEON
Sideshows
13. Freaks of Culture: Institutions, Publics, and the Subjects of Ethnographic Knowledge
RACHEL ADAMS
14. The Jim Rose Circus Side Show: Representing the Postmodern Body in Pain
CARRIE SANDAHL
Child Performers
15. Sensational Imbalance: The Child Acrobat and the Mid-Victorians
BRENDA ASSAEL
Spectators
16. Ecstasy and Visceral Flesh in Motion
PETA TAIT
17. Marginal Body and bourgeois cosmology: the British Acrobat in reference to sport
YORAM S. CARMELI
Part II
Precedents
Origins
18. The Circus and Nature in Late Georgian England
MARIUS KWINT
19. The American Circus
DON B. WILMETH
20. P.T. Barnum: the Legend and the Man
H. SAXON
21. A Brief Overview of the Mexican-American Circus in the Southwest
NICOLÁS KANELLOS
22. The Circus and Modernity: A Commitment to ‘the Newer and ‘the Newest’
GILLIAN ARRIGHI
Politics
23. Bending the Body for China: the Uses of Acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy During the Cold War
TRACY ZHANG
24. When Pigs Could Fly and Bears Could Dance
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
JULIETA INFANTINO
Human Exceptionalism
26. To Reach The Clouds: My High-Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers
PHILLIPPE PETIT
27. Extract from Thus Spoke Zarathustra
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, translated by R. J. HOLLINGDALE
Animal Performers
28. Why Circuses Are Unsuited to Elephants
LORI ALWARD
29. View from the Big Top: Why Elephants Belong in North America Circuses
DENNIS SCHMITT
Part III
Presents
30. Female Circus Performers and Art: the Shift to Creative Authorship and its Implications
MAGALI SIZORN
31. The Resilient Body in Social Circus: Father Jesus Silva, Boris Cyrulnik and Peter A. Levine
KATIE LAVERS
32. Risk, Danger and Other Paradoxes in Circus and Circus Oz Parody
PETA TAIT
33. The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas: An American Strip-tease
LOUIS PATRICK LEROUX
34. Contemporary Circus: Introduction to the Art Form
TOMI PUROVAARA
35. Contemporary Circus Research in Quebec: Building and Negotiating an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field
LOUIS PATRICK LEROUX
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Peta Tait is chair of Theatre and Drama at LaTrobe University, Australia. Her previous publications include Circus Bodies: Cultural identity in aerial performance (2005) and Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, emotions, circus (2012)
Katie Lavers is a director and producer of inter-media circus, as co-founder and director of Skadada circus company.