Popular entertainment has always been intertwined with the cutting edge of technology and (thus) engineering, given that technologies by definition embody some level of engineering. This also applies to the many facets of the circus, which, surprisingly, have hardly been explored. For example, when powered aviation was a new concept at the beginning of the twentieth century, barnstormers carried out exhibition flights and gravity-defying aerial stunts at fairgrounds and country shows throughout America. These pilots were commonly known as ‘air circus performers’, a title that became ‘official’ in 1920 when the census classified them as circus performers (see Ganson 2014, 38–45; Batteau 2010, 31). A little earlier, in 1884 Berlin, at a time when light bulbs were new to the world, German Circus Renz presented an ‘electric lady’ in the opulent pantomime ‘Harlequin à la Edison, or everything electric’—a show featuring 2000 differently coloured light bulbs and a sword fight with electric weapons (see Günther and Winkler 1986, 66). And in turn-of-the-century France, a reviewer for the Revue bleue depicted the circus of the New World—Barnum & Bailey—as ‘a vast machination, an American, gargantuan, indigestible distraction’ that, appropriately, played in the ‘Galerie des Machines’, a leftover from the 1889 world fair (Rearick 1985, 149).
This era, when popular culture combined (mass) entertainment with an advanced technological matrix, is the one Michael Carroll defines as ‘popular modernity’ (2000, xii). Carroll does not mention, however, that circus was a crucial ingredient of popular modernity. Around 1900 it was one of the—if not the—major cultural institution travelling the world with monumental productions, huge menageries and myriads of human and animal performers. Before novel technologies gave rise to the cinema industry, internationally touring circuses did not merely use and showcase brand-new transport technologies (trains, automobiles, etc.), but also offered exciting new opportunities for experiencing reality through visual turmoil and displays of mobility and speed.
The speed—and ‘mobility mania’ (Hård and Jamison 2005, 183)—of that time was embodied and reflected by the circus. In the early 1890s, it had even been parodied in the French Cirque Molier, the circus of Paris’s elites, in which luminaries such as the Comte de Sainte-Aldegonde clowned in a pantomime and the Comte Hubert de La Rochefoucauld performed on the trapeze. In the parody-pantomime ‘Barnum Express’, which was part of the programme, Barnum (the American impresario who became the archetype of the modern ringmaster) is stranded in Paris for a couple of hours and goes to Molier to get a quick idea of the attractions of the French circus. What he witnesses there is a frenetic performance at comically high speed (see Rearick 1985, 149).
Given all these and many more connections, and given the circus’s pervasive cultural presence, it is startling that the interplay and relationship between technological inventions, engineering endeavours and circus arts have scarcely been investigated within the context of popular modernity—and beyond. This edited collection aims to do just that: it breaks new ground by asking questions such as the following:
What kind of cultural and aesthetic effects does engineering in circus contexts achieve? How do technological inventions and innovations impact on the circus, both at the apogee of its popularity around 1900 and today? How does the link between circus and technology manifest in representations and interpretations – imaginaries – of the circus in other media?
Circus, Science and Technology answers these questions by combining the voices of leading performance and circus scholars, art and cultural historians, media and literature researchers and an engineer. Its aim is to produce a better sense of the narratives and cultural work that emerge from the interplay of circus and technology, and of its transhistorical presence and interdisciplinary expansiveness. In so doing the volume contributes new insights to the circus as a versatile frame for interpreting our relationship with technology. It also offers new insights in the popular history of technology, the cultural history of engineering and the history of popular performance; as well as in the material, practical nature of popular entertainment, and its imaginaries in other media. The volume clarifies to what extent circus contributes to shape cultural ideas of technology-related desires, fears and uncertainties by mapping the cross-fertilisation between engineering and imagineering in various historical and contemporary circus contexts.
Engineering and Imagineering
P. T. Barnum is the founder of The Greatest Show on Earth, that ‘vast machination’ mentioned above that was to become the largest circus in history. Itself an amalgam of museum, menagerie, sideshow, human zoo and circus, Barnum’s superlative, kaleidoscopic travelling show-empire presented automatons, wax figures, mummies, (fake) fossils and an ‘Ethnological Congress of Savage Tribes’ including ‘Bestial Australian Cannibals’ and ‘Mysterious Aztecs’. Barnum is remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes. In fact, during his lifetime and ever since, deception, hoaxing and humbugging have become words commonly associated with his name. As the inventor of many ‘wonderful specimen[s] of creation’ (Barnum in Kunhardt et al. 1995, 41), he fits the definition of an engineer as discussed by performance technologist Thomas Gilbert: set on ‘remaking the world’ for entertainment purposes Barnum ‘approaches nature with a swagger, determined to change it into something it never has been and never would be if left to itself’ (1978, 3).
An engineer is not only a designer or builder of engines and machines, but also someone who does not explore the world as it is (as a scientist would). Rather, engineers carry ‘through an enterprise by skillful or artful contrivance’ (Merriam Webster online). Against this background, this volume does not merely probe the many intricate ways in which technology gets interwoven into the texture of modern circus, but it also revolves around the notion of the engineer as a contrivancer, one whose most extreme incarnation is the ‘imagineer’: a person who devises and implements ‘a highly imaginative concept or technology’ (Oxford Dictionary online). Thus, this volume’s approach to engineering is based on its wider definition as an art and practice that relates to the development, acquisition and application of technical and scientific knowledge ‘about the understanding, design, development, invention, innovation and use of materials, machines, structures, systems and processes for specific purposes’ (UNESCO 2010, 24). In addition, it remains mindful of the Latin root of ‘engine’ in ingenium: ingenuity or cleverness and invention (ibid.). This is in contrast to approaches that either consider engineering as ‘applied science’, a field or profession, or that foreground tools and techniques as a means of solving practical objectives.
In other words, this book focuses on the power of engineering to arrange elements in a way that may (or may not) appeal to human senses or emotions. Thus, although the authors discuss representations and displays of technology in circus contexts, practical and material detail will not take priority over cultural meaning. Ultimately, this volume is concerned with technology as the enactment of human imagination and creativity in the world, in line with Robert Romanyshyn’s (1989, 10) definition according to which: ‘In building a technological world we create ourselves, and through the events which comprise this world we enact and live out our experiences of awe and wonder, our fantasies of service and of control, our images of exploration and destruction, our dreams of hope and nightmares of despair’ (ibid.). This book explores technology as culture—with technological endeavour as practice and product, and circus at the culture-technology interface.
The volume pulls together scholars from a variety of disciplines, which is why there are different approaches: some authors take the circus as their starting point and ask how it relates and represents issues to do with science and technology; others do the exact opposite and ask how science and technology are represented in circus spheres. The chapters feature a potent mix of new perspectives, while at the same time presenting thematic coherence and mutual illumination. Barnum’s legacy, interconnected forms of circus showmanship (theatrical, illusionary, technological, electrical, Frankensteinian) and animation (as a spatial, imaginary, physical, technological force) are some of the recurrent thematic threads that weave the chapters together and lure the reader into a world of aestheticised technological entertainment. Together, the authors of Circus, Science and Technology make it clear that circus has been capturing audiences’ imagination in American, Australian and Western European contexts not only because of its aesthetic, cultural and political power and potentialities, but also because of its varied technology.
Exploring Popular Spectacle: Circus, Science and Technology
Since its creation by Philip Astley and his contemporaries in 1768, the modern circus has been striving to translate the public desire for wonder into acclamation for extraordinary skills and unprecedented displays of wondrous phenomena. The circus and related cultural phenomena—such as so-called freakshows, carnivals and nineteenth-century ‘scientific’ museums—are among the most productive breeding grounds for the staging, invention and amalgamation of creative imagination and scientific-technological knowledge. These sensational, kaleidoscopic institutions presented a manifold combination of scientific discoveries and marvellous exhibits, including living automatons, magical lanterns, wax figures, extra-terrestrials and mummies. Popular entertainments of this ilk, including Barnum’s establishments, provide(d) definitional challenges. Barnum’s biographer, James Cook, observes that his exhibits and ‘living curiosities’ represented ‘a form of realism understood as thoroughly flexible, provisional, and uncertain – a realism whose specific outlines emerged only through relentless public speculation and equivocation’ (2001, 121). By merging contemporary notions of realism with illusionism in his popular exhibits—and thus shaking up and challenging both aesthetic categories—Barnum transformed artful deception and the pleasure of doubt into (show) business.
Against this background, the first part of this volume—‘Engineered to Promote Awe: Circus (and) Bodies’—explores how engineering serves the playful reconfiguration of normative corporeality on the historical popular stage and in contemporary performance. It clarifies the ways in which ‘curious’ performing bodies and curiosity conflate with spectacle, as a reflection of the raise and upheavals of industrialisation. Jane Goodall discusses both how curiosity became an impulse for scientific inquiry and technological creations (leading to and associated with the Frankenstein story), and how astonishment at, and curiosity for, man-made marvels was the result of scientific and technological advances in broadly defined circus contexts. Multifaceted performing curiosities of end-of-the-century popular entertainments are not an isolated instance of the modern fascination with the imagineered and the Frankenstein myth or with the innovative in Barnum’s entertainment institutions. Instead, they inform modern sensibilities, and predate contemporary ones, by participating in a transhistorical discursive cultural continuum echoed by and challenged through the contemporary ‘extended’ body. Re-imagineered through innovative prosthetic technology, the extended body transports the circus’s exploration of the extraordinary and the interrelationship between the corporeal and the non-corporeal into the world of the surreal and the performance of the future, as Katie Lavers and...