1st Edition

The Routledge Circus Studies Reader

Edited By Peta Tait, Katie Lavers Copyright 2016
    652 Pages
    by Routledge

    652 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.