Circus and the Avant-Gardes

History, Imaginary, Innovation

Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Mirjam Hildbrand, Anna-Sophie Jürgens, Mirjam Hildbrand

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000552409
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Categoría: Arti performative

This book examines how circus and circus imaginary have shaped the historical avant-gardes at the beginning of the 20th century and the cultures they help constitute, to what extent this is a mutual shaping, and why this is still relevant today.

This book aims to produce a better sense of the artistic work and cultural achievements that have emerged from the interplay of circus and avant-garde artists and projects, and to clarify both their transhistorical and trans-medial presence, and their scope for interdisciplinary expansion. Across 14 chapters written by leading scholars – from fields as varied as circus, theatre and performance studies, art, media studies, film and cultural history – some of which are written together with performers and circus practitioners, the book examines to what extent circus and avant-garde connections contribute to a better understanding of early 20th century artistic movements and their enduring legacy, of the history of popular entertainment, and the cultural relevance of circus arts. Circus and the Avant-Gardes elucidates how the realm of the circus as a model, or rather a blueprint for modernist experiment, innovation and (re)negotiation of bodies, has become fully integrated in our ways of perceiving avant-gardes today.

The book does not only map the significance of circus/avant-garde phenomena for the past, but, through an exploration of their contemporary actualisations (in different media), also carves out their achievements, relevance, and impact, both cultural and aesthetic, on the present time.

1 Arts for all sensesCircus and the avant-gardes – introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163749-1

Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand

La-d-ie-s and gentlemen, step closer, please, a little closer. Before visiting the palatial palaces of sculpture and art in other portions of this famous institute see the cubist sideshow – the show they are all talking about. Here, here, here we have the famous one-eyed lady, brought from the wilds of France; the human skeleton carrying a heliotrope owl and leading a camel with elephant ears; the horse with legs like a bullfrog; the greatest galaxy of normal and abnormal nudes ever assembled on this or any other continent.¹

This article from an American newspaper – entitled “Step In! No Danger! Cubist Show Now On” (1913) – embodies a parodistic approach to cubism as an early twentieth-century avant-garde art movement (and thus to modernism). It also reminds us of how sensational circus shows and related cultural spheres – such as sideshows (evoked in the quote), vaudeville, variety theatre and other forms of popular theatre – turned novelty into cultural value and entertainment style, thus rewiring popular amusement and changing visual habits. In fact, around 1900, circuses were 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 technologies (trains, automobiles), but also offered exciting new opportunities for experiencing reality through visual turmoil and displays of extravagant aesthetics.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, avant-garde artists – including Futurists and Dadaists, Bauhaus protagonists but also Russian theatre reformers and Czech graphic designers – discovered circus and its aesthetics as a treasure trove and creative goldmine for both ideas about the recasting of the existing artistic practices and the art of the future. Whether in Russia, Germany or France (and many other countries), avant-garde artists drew inspiration from the depiction and exploration of performing bodies and body techniques seen in the circus; from hyperbolic rhetorical pyrotechnics of the circus; its anti-Aristotelian dramaturgy; and its entertaining, non-conventional protagonists who contrasted the prevalent realist and naturalist – or simply conventionalist – views of art. The experimental, unorthodox and radical projects of avant-garde innovators also drew on the circus’s concept of space, which allowed and forced interaction with and among the audience; and on the idea of playing for and with a heterogeneous community. Circus invigorated modernist artists and thinkers breaking away from tradition and pushing the boundaries of what was accepted (as the norm, as beautiful, as culturally important, as the bourgeois understanding of culture).

What did the circus enthusiasm of avant-gardists look like? For instance, the excitement of Russian artists – including Grigori Kozintsev, Leonid Trauberg and Sergei Yutkevich – for circus coincided with their efforts to reform the medium of communication in theatre, and its stage. Bauhaus artists like László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer were interested in the geometry of the movement of a human body in abstract space. Intensely inspired by circus and dance, and following their vision of freeing man from the manifold bondages of physical limitations, Schlemmer and his team created elaborate hyper-sculptural costumes in the 1920s – personifications of the unification of costume, dance and music – that transmogrified dancers into artificial figures. According to Schlemmer, circus was an “artistic institution”² with a potential to reform art; while Moholy-Nagy proclaimed that circus, operetta, variety and clowning (Charlie Chaplin, Fratellini) were to act as models for the abolishment of subjectivity.³ Reforming art and theatre through circus was also a vision of Futurist artists; above all Marinetti, who visited the Cirque Médrano in Paris together with Picasso and Apollinaire and possibly Meyerhold.⁴ The circus, which naturalist artists had considered a microcosm of primarily social interest, was now perceived as an aesthetic space, a space of strong contrasts of light and colour. Exploring this sensational space, theatre reformer Max Reinhardt staged the theatre play Oedipus in Berlin Circus Schumann in 1910. And in 1941, Ballets Russes-star George Balanchine choreographed a ballet for 50 elephants (in pink tutus) for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus (for which Igor Stravinsky wrote the music), yet again using the circus as a stage for avant-garde experimentation. These few examples highlight that modern circus had a genuine significance for avant-garde artists and thinkers: it served as an important source of inspiration not only for the reformation of drama-based theatre but also for the theorisation of avant-garde visions for the performing and fine arts.

While there are important individual studies of the avant-gardes’ embrace of and engagement with the circus, the question of how the circus itself relates to the avant-gardes in the broader context of modernism/modernities (and since) remains largely unexplored. Barely discussed are the many ways in which avant-garde ideas, projects and innovators have influenced, and continue to influence, circus practitioners and shows. This edited collection aims to dive deeper into circus and avant-garde history to uncover their connections, interrelations and influences in more detail, including, for instance, the avant-garde-inspired theatricalisation of the second Moscow Circus by Nikolai Foregger in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the many collaborations that resulted from mutual interest and rapprochement – and their cultural impact and legacy. Authors of this book argue that modern circus was not only productive for, but integral to, avant-garde cultural creation; that circus played a key role in the historical emergence of modernist innovation and artistic identity, both of which have left a continuing footprint on new and contemporary circus.⁵ They trace the actual circus practices and circus imaginaries explored in, and emerging from, avant-garde projects, as well as the knowledge (or rather fantasies) of circus with which they approached the arts of the ring.⁶

Avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century drew inspiration from the techniques of the circus to viscerally involve the audience and sought to use it to influence the audience with political ideas, which was recalled and echoed by the social activism of the 1960–1970s. It is little wonder that in this period, theatre-makers and performers referred to the circus – and the New Circus movement reflected the social activism of the 1970s as much as the milieu and spirit of avant-garde artistic approaches. Furthermore, it is sensical that circus, a realm of thrill and excitement, appealed to social activists as a vehicle of working-class politics, gender politics (for instance, about strong women) and animal agency – all of which generated a new type of circus. In other words, the emergence of the New Circus is closely linked to the aspirations of theatre practitioners in the wake of the 1968 movement; the term “New Circus” designates the form of the circus that is widely considered to have emerged out of the events of May 1968 and the widespread social unrest of the following years. In search of new forms of art-making, of performing, of working, of communicating with the audience, in search of a contemporary popular theatre and, above all, in search of new and more accessible venues beyond the established institutions, the movement became interested in the circus. Theatre makers of the 1970s and 1980s thus combined circus elements such as acrobatics or clowning with acting, narrative dramaturgy or literary texts. Some of them received their training from traditional circus companies (see Chapter 12). The combination of circus and storytelling was, among other things, what made this New Circus new. Interestingly, however, there was a time long before that when circuses themselves created productions with narrative dramaturgies (see Chapter 2). Like the historical avant-gardes in the 1910s and 1920s, circus arts once again served as a point of reference and source of inspiration in times of social upheaval and aesthetic reorientation – and once again their cultural amalgams became “institutionalised as an acceptable shock, a fashionable sensation, a necessary stimulus”.⁷

Considering a range of perspectives woven together to form an illuminating set of ideas that show new insights into early twentieth-century artistic movements on the one hand, and their late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century reinterpretations and revival on the other, Circus and the Avant-Gardes presents a mosaic of interconnected analyses and discussions that offer a multifaceted and suggestive – but by no means exhaustive – picture of the interplay between circus and avant-garde projects. Rather than delivering a comprehensive taxonomy of circus and avant-garde links, this collection zooms in on some of the spectra of their cultural halo, based on chapters chosen for their inherent ability to narrate the diversification and dynamics of circus-avant-garde phenomena that inform modern sensibilities, and predate and unfold in contemporary ones – in a transhistorical discursive cultural continuum.

Curtain up! – about this book and its context

Scholarship on circus and clowning has been flourishing in recent years,⁸ including analyses of the circus’s role as an agent of modernity and vehicle for modernism.⁹ Circus scholars have recognised the importance of circus for individual avant-garde projects, for instance in modern literature,¹⁰ and have discussed how individual early twentieth-century artists approached and drew inspiration from circus phenomena (focusing, for example, on Durov, Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Russian avant-garde movements¹¹ ). However, circus performance practice around 1900 – and thus the question of what kind of circus the avant-garde artists actually knew – has hardly been researched, nor has the influence of avant-garde endeavours on the circus itself. This is particularly interesting in the broader context of modernism/modernity. Jeffrey Weiss’s 1994 The Popular Culture of Modern Art (discussing music hall as the epitome of the modern and an inspirational source for avant-garde aesthetics) and a 2000 article by Erika Fischer-Lichte – “Avant-Garde and the Semiotics of the Antitextual Gesture” – are among the first steps in this direction.

Given the circus’s cultural ubiquity and the rich body of evidence of circus as a vital site of avant-garde activity, it is astonishing that it has been neglected in avant-garde and (new) Modernist Studies, which have privileged other popular art forms over the circus as influential “global players” of popular entertainment. Circus is missing in studies exploring the interplay between popular culture and avant-gardes/modernism,¹² as well as in investigations of avant-garde and modern theatre contexts.¹³ Even in studies focusing explicitly on popular stages (including musical comedy and revue, music hall), circus is barely mentioned.¹⁴ Adam Versényi’s (2006) look at itinerant circus and performance forms influencing Mexican theatrical avant-garde is a rare exception.

Circus and the Avant-Gardes thus contributes novel insights on circus to the fields of Circus Studies and Popular Culture/Entertainment Studies, while also feeding new perspectives into the emerging discourse around the importance of the performing body in modernism (described as a “physical turn” in New Modernist Studies by Claire Warden¹⁵ ) – most recently examined in publications such as Burt and Huxley’s Dance, Modernism, and Modernity (2020) and Penny Farfan’s Performing Queer Modernism (2017). Among others, these books recognise the connections across “high” and “low” cultural domains within the context of modernism (see al...