The Routledge Circus Studies Reader

Peta Tait, Katie Lavers, Peta Tait, Katie Lavers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138915435
• eBook ISBN: 9781000156058
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

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.

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Part I
Perspectives

Aesthetics

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Chapter 1
Aesthetics

Helen Stoddart

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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 display, 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 painting, 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

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 ‘interpretative’ dimension to it.²

A number of important and controversial assumptions, however, underpin 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 spectators 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 pantomimic 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 relatively recently, the frisson attached to the human and animal representatives of other cultures whose very existence, despite perhaps fantastic ornamentation, was to be proved rather than disputed by their exhibition in the ring. The circus performance ‘frame’, therefore, depends on its periodic expansion and contraction in that although the audience is clearly divided physically 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 concepts 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 performance 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, secondly, to Coxe’s reinforcement of what Raymond Williams has demonstrated to be a separation between the terms ‘art’ and ‘work’ which has historically specific origins in mid-nineteenth-century shifts in production and exchange values. Art and artists therefore were separated from industry which meant they could be seen as forms of activity ‘which were not determined 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 well-known of the so-called ‘new’ circuses have also returned to forms of narrative 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 corruption, 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 considered art, rather than entertainment, when the acts presented within it are purely demonstrative. It should be pointed out that Coxe is clearly a passionate 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, integrity, 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 representation. 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 establishment 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

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 unexpected’.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, postures, 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 sinc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: circus perspectives, precedents and presents
• Part I Perspectives
• Part II Precedents
• Part III Presents
• Selected Bibliography
• Index