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Circus embodies the excitement of experimentation. But possibly because circus
lacked too much of an image that the avant-garde artists wanted to convey, the way
it was formative for the avant-gardes has hardly been explored. Until this book.
Andreas Kotte, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Bern, Switzerland,
Author of Studying Theatre: Phenomena, Structures and Functions and
editor of the Swiss Theatre Encyclopedia
Excitingly elaborating the historical interplay of the circus with avant-garde think-
ers and practitioners, this volume shows how the spectacular cacophony of radical
hum/animal body acts and mechanics under the Big Top inspired manifold breaks
from tradition into new forms and technologies across the arts, including emergent
cinema, and other popular cultural expressions. Essays by a wide range of interdis-
ciplinary international contributors expand understandings of modernism and its
material and ideological reverberations into later eras.
Kim Marra, Professor Emeritus of Theatre Arts and American Studies,
University of Iowa.
Taking as its starting point the interest that some avant-garde practitioners took
in forms of popular culture, this interdisciplinary collection focuses specifically on
circus, addressing not only theatre, fine art, and visual culture but also what was
happening contemporaneous in the circus itself. Taking examples from the early
twentieth century and the 1970s and 1980s, it draws on queer scholarship and new
ideas about the body and modernity to investigate relations between popular physi-
cal spectacle and experimental artistic practices.
Ramsay Burt, Professor Emeritus of Dance History, Drama and Performance
Studies Research Institute, De Montfort University
This adventurous volume breaks new ground by revealing the complexity of the
historical relationship between circus and the avant-garde. While other scholarship
illuminates connecting threads between particular avant-garde artists or art forms
and circus, this volume teases out many strands of influence, not just of circus upon
avant-garde artists and art forms, but also of the avant-garde upon circus. The inter-
national selection of contributors ranges from creative artists working in circus, cir-
cus training, and affiliated popular entertainments such as cabaret, to scholars of art,
literature, media, film, theatre, and popular entertainment. Modernist discourses
pertaining to the expressive limits and capacities of space and the body and the
boundaries between performance and reality are seen as evolving through two-way
exchanges between circus and dance, the visual arts, theatre, and film. The early
parts of the book are devoted to historical circus and the emergence of the avant-
garde around 1900. Later parts trace enduring two-way influences into the era of
film and through to the ‘new circus’ from 1968 onward, exploring not only avant-
garde aesthetics of theatre but its mobilisation in mid-century political movements.
These exciting discoveries about circus and the avant-garde lead to a new model for
the growth modernism: not a phenomenon rippling out from a cultural centre but
rather, ‘many small eruptions’ transmitted across transnational, transhistorical and
transmedial networks of creative practice.
Kate Flaherty, Senior Lecturer in English and Drama,
Australian National University
Circus and the Avant-Gardes brings together leading experts from a range of aca-
demic disciplines, from film studies and art history to the burgeoning field of circus
studies. Equally well researched and well written, the individual chapters add up
to a rich kaleidoscopic history of modernism with its relentless drive for renewal,
be it artistic, social or technological. Viewing the circus and the avant-garde as an
embodiment of modernism’s conflicting sensibilities, its utopian hopes and its fail-
ures, proves to be an astute and far-reaching approach.
Matthias Christen, Media Studies, University of Bayreuth,
Author of Der Zirkusfilm
Circus and the Avant-Gardes
This book examines how circus and circus imaginary have shaped the historical
avant-gardes at the beginning of the twentieth 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 trans-historical 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 twentieth-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 into 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.
This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and
edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics
such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are
characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative
studies on emerging topics.
ASHÉ
Ritual Poetics in African Diasporic
Paul Cater Harrison, Michael D. Harris, Pellom McDaniels
Dancehall In/Securities
Perspectives on Caribbean Expressive Life
Patricia Noxolo, ‘H’ Patten, and Sonjah Stanley Niaah
Aesthetic Collectives
On the Nature of Collectivity in Cultural Performance
Andrew Wiskowski
Preface x
Acknowledgements xii
List of illustrations xiv
PART I
Historical circus, popular entertainment and avant-
gardes: Influences and interrelations 17
PART II
Staging circus outside the ring: Avant-garde experiments
in the early twentieth century 73
PART III
Stages of technology: Circus, avant-gardes and (new) media 119
PART IV
Circus-avant-garde bodies: Contemporary artistic
physicalities 155
PART V
Circus and avant-gardes reimagined since the late
twentieth century 213
At first glance, the bustling circus arenas and the experimental avant-garde
movements of the twentieth century have little in common. The attractions
of the circus, awe-inspiring and hilarious in turns, seduce the audience into
distraction and restlessly shift its gaze. In contrast, the progressive and rigidly
determined avant-garde, with its eyes firmly fixed on the future, seems to
belong to another cultural sphere. Often equated with literary modernity tout
court, the avant-garde appears to be at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum
occupied by the popular, supposedly low-brow world of the arena.
And yet, both the circus and the avant-garde were, in their own ways,
the “other” of bourgeois art, challenging and effectively changing aesthetic
experience and cultural production. Indeed, to a degree that has not been duly
acknowledged in the literature, there is a dense web of affinities and affiliations
between the circus and the historical avant-gardes that still awaits exploration.
For while the avant-garde has been the subject of intense critical attention, the
field of circus studies has only begun to emerge in the last few decades. In this
volume, they are subject to a common analysis for the first time.
As a first step in the direction of a broader dialogue, the editors of this
volume have brought together a range of scholars and perspectives in order to
shed light on the complex relations between the circus and the avant-garde.
They demonstrate that the fascination and inspiration was mutual and stretched
across arts and media, from the early narrative pantomimes and their appro-
priation of Wagner’s operas to the “typocircus” of the Czech avant-garde that
drew on characteristic design features of the circus, ranging from the circularity
of the arena to the striking designs of the wheatpaste posters.
The editors have done an excellent job in assembling a series of analyses
and perspectives that highlight the innovative force of the circus and associated
formats such as clowning and wrestling. As the contributions demonstrate, the
bustling entertainment styles introduced and promoted by the circus, with its
reliance on cutting-edge technology, its division of labour, its new readings of
the body, and its flickering regimes of attention, not only resonated with the
proponents of the avant-garde, but also readily translated into their program-
matic efforts at challenging the orthodox and the conventional. Moreover, by
offering an archaeology of the circus on the one hand and studies of avant-garde
Preface xi
movements on the other, the contributions provide a fresh perspective on
some cultural entanglements that have long been sidelined in academic critical
discourse. Beyond the postmodern concern with collapsing the divide between
high and low, the assembled chapters excavate historical patterns of engage-
ment that, while obvious at the time, have not yet received due critical atten-
tion in the myriad studies that have sought to describe and define what has
been termed the century of the avant-gardes.1
The affinities and affiliations illuminated here for the first time point to a
bigger picture. They highlight a fundamental connectivity of the arts through
time, space and cultural registers that is integral to literature and the arts in the
broadest sense. This correspondence, among other things, is what the juxta-
position of the circus and the avant-garde reveals: while supposedly belonging
to discordant or even competing communities, they formed an improbable
alliance at the interface of apparently diametrically opposed forms of cultural
production. The editors and the contributors have approached this topic with
exemplary theoretical ambition and methodological rigour. The end result is a
work that sheds new light on established themes and cultural predispositions,
cutting across disciplines, challenging orthodoxies and investing core questions
with an entirely new dynamic.
Anita Traninger
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Note
1 Cornelia Klinger and Wolfgang Müller-Funk (Eds.). Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarden.
Munich: Fink, 2004.
Acknowledgements
This book emerged from a basement. Or, should we say, from the circus
collection of a university library, hidden in dusty boxes and envelopes? Or,
possibly from historical newspaper clippings collected by a clown aficionado
throughout the twentieth century, carefully preserved by a librarian-archivist
with a sense of the collection’s value for twenty-first-century research? Or,
did it emerge from those sometimes hard-to-decipher circus playbills from
around 1900 that show what was then a sensational, cutting-edge and indeed
“avant-garde” phenomenon: opulent pantomimes, technology-driven clown-
ing, spectacular, internationally travelling entertainment institutions. In short:
circus. Actually, this book began with an archivist noticing that he was carrying
the same clown boxes on the same day to two different tables and eventually
moved these tables together, thus introducing two curious researchers. Circus
and the Avant-Gardes thus created itself through the spellbinding power of its
historical material, which, it seems, wanted to be studied, mapped, traced back
(and forward), analysed and interpreted.
We would like to thank all our wonderful authors, who joined us on our
voyage of discovery not only back to the nineteenth century but also criss-
crossing the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our authors built bridges
between stages (of aesthetics, performances, costumes, narratives and genders),
they built antennas and radio towers to talk to the past (about conventions and
revolutions), they laid underwater cables to better connect with other conti-
nents (e.g. to discuss colonial modernities) – but, most importantly, they did a
fantastic job in preparing their chapters for our book (which was sometimes a
challenge in a world of spreading instability and pandemic uncertainty).
This book also draws inspiration from two conferences that we organ-
ised in 2020 on “Circus and the Avant-Gardes”, which were co-funded and
supported by the Fund for the Promotion of Young Researchers and the
Institute of Theatre Studies of the University of Bern, Switzerland, as well as
the Cluster of Excellence 2020 “Temporal Communities: Doing Literature
in a Global Perspective” of the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany (Project
ID 390608380). We are very grateful for their (ongoing) support and invalu-
able assistance in organising these multi-day events. And we would also like
to express our gratitude to our supporters and friends from the Swiss National
Acknowledgements xiii
Science Foundation and the Janggen-Pöhn Foundation (supporting Mirjam
Hildbrand with a PhD scholarship), the Dahlem Humanities Centre of the Freie
Universität Berlin (where Anna-Sophie Jürgens was a Fellow in 2019/2020),
the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (supporting Anna-Sophie with a
Feodor Lynen Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2017–2020), the Institute of Theatre
Studies of the University of Bern (supporting Mirjam in creating this book in
parallel to her PhD thesis) and the Australian National University (supporting
Anna-Sophie in finalising this project in her new role as Assistant Professor in
Popular Entertainment Studies). This book benefited enormously from the
critical comments and editorial support of Dr Rebecca Hendershott and Dr
Bert Peeters, as well as the intellectual contribution of our brilliant Research
Assistant, PhD candidate Aiden Essery.
Finally, we would like to say two words to Dr Peter Jammerthal, the archi-
vist of the Theatre History Collections of the Institute of Theatre Studies at
the Freie Universität Berlin, who showed us his circus material and unleashed
the clowns who lured us into the ring of “Circus and Avant-gardes” – of
course with the exclamation “Today for the last time!” (see Chapter 4) – and
bestowed on us a wonderful collaboration and friendship: Thank you.
La-d-ie-s and gentlemen, step closer, please, a little closer. Before visiting the pala-
tial 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 car-
rying 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
DOI: 10.4324/9781003163749-1
2 Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand
– 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-sculp-
tural 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 clown-
ing (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 cir-
cus, 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 influ-
ence, 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
Arts for all senses 3
from mutual interest and rapprochement – and their cultural impact and leg-
acy. 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 emerg-
ing 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” des-
ignates 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 commu-
nicating 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 sensa-
tion, 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 move-
ments 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 multi-
faceted and suggestive – but by no means exhaustive – picture of the interplay
between circus and avant-garde projects. Rather than delivering a compre-
hensive taxonomy of circus and avant-garde links, this collection zooms in
4 Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand
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.
How did the aesthetics, technologies and stage concepts of the circus
impact on the artistic projects and styles of historical avant-garde artists?
How can the interplay between the performance practices of the circus
and the art and theatre of the avant-gardes be defined? How does the
link between circus and avant-gardes manifest in their representations
and interpretations – imaginaries – in different media, and how are they
updated and refashioned today?
Circus and the Avant-Gardes explores these questions by combining the voices
of leading circus and theatre scholars, art and cultural historians, film and media
researchers. Together they produce a better sense of the cultural work and aes-
thetic achievements that emerge from the interplay of circus and avant-garde
phenomena. In so doing, the book traces the fluid exchange between popular
entertainment and innovative, highly influential artistic endeavours in various
historical and contemporary circus and circus-related contexts. It also clarifies
the role of avant-garde projects as a driver for (new) entertainment and perfor-
mance styles and the circus’s contribution to modernist innovation as central
to new understandings of cultural history. Arguing that circus as an expression
of what Peter Bailey has called “popular modernism” is not merely a “dynamic
complement to that of the avant-garde”,18 but an integral part of the avant-
garde endeavour, this project aims to incite and fuel a fruitful dialogue between
Circus Studies and New Modernist Studies.
The ubiquitous, eclectically used label “avant-garde” seems to refer to
almost any type of anti-traditional art form, the leading edge of artistic experi-
ment and antagonistic groups;19 hence the use of “-isms” to describe them, as in
Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Surrealism. Likewise, the term “circus”
is a magic hat from which many meanings are conjured up: “circus” is travel-
ling family businesses, flamboyant superlative shows featuring elephant slides
6 Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand
and sword fights with electrical weapons, but also magnificent buildings in the
heart of capital cities. “Circus” is also outrageous costumes, ingenious stage
mechanics, extraordinary bodies, gender bending and much more. In many
ways, it is difficult to define the difference between circus styles, aesthetics and
performances and those of other popular entertainments (such as music hall,
vaudeville or cabaret), as they historically have shared for instance, practices
and lifestyles, as well as performers. Overlaps exist not only in performance
practice but also in terminology: music hall, vaudeville and variety theatre are
sometimes used synonymously, but depending on the geographical context
and its language, they refer to related but different cultural phenomena and
institutions.20 However, avant-garde artists explicitly refer to “circus” – and
this book seeks to find out what exactly is meant by this in the various contexts.
Far from aiming to reduce the complexity of these terms slipping and sliding
between oppositional meanings, authors in Circus and the Avant-Gardes were
not given or asked for fixed definitions but were invited to present and explore
what they understand as “avant-gardes” and “circus”. However, the authors
of this book seem to agree that the term “avant-gardes” does mark the most
radically experimental and innovative arts in modernism from the nineteenth
century onwards (most authors refer to the many early twentieth-century van-
guard movements of Futurism, Dada and Surrealism as “avant-gardes”, hence
the plural), rather than a cultural or conceptual order abiding outside of, or
differing altogether from, that of modernism. Like Gabriele Brandstetter’s 2015
(1995) book Poetics of Dance: Body, Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-gardes,
this volume takes the historical avant-garde as a point of departure to address
contemporary phenomena.
Part 1 of Circus and the Avant-Gardes investigates the historical influences
and interrelations between circus, popular entertainment and avant-garde pro-
tagonists and projects within different but interconnected cultural contexts
and media. To set the scene, the first chapter of this section is dedicated to cir-
cus historiography and the current state of research on circus around 1900 as
a European, but also international, cultural entertainment form. It provides
insights into actual historical circus practice and thus into what circus style,
performance routines and technologies circus visitors of the early twentieth
century could see in circus shows. In other words, it explores what kind of cir-
cus or circus performances avant-garde artists might have actually seen in order
to better understand what circus elements and aesthetics they drew inspiration
from. This includes, for example, circus pantomimes, which have received lit-
tle attention in circus research despite their considerable presence on historical
circus posters and playbills and their crucial importance for the success of circus
companies. The following two chapters in the first part of the book explore
the intersections between circus and avant-garde art by examining, on the
one hand, the theatricalisation of circus and the circusation of theatre in early
twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union and, on the other hand, revo-
lutionary Czech avant-garde typography. These chapters emphasise that circus
influenced not only aesthetics and practices of avant-garde artists, but also their
Arts for all senses 7
approach to, and experiments with, various technologies and media. Circus-
related new book design – inspired by non-narrative circus programmes, cir-
cus visuals and graphic rhetoric – became indeed the specific contribution of
the Czech artists to the international avant-garde. They aimed to democratise
access to their artistic products and sought to change society in line with their
utopian vision. Other avant-garde artists, including Sergei Eisenstein, experi-
mented with circus arts as a means of rethinking causality, integrity and identity
in their works. New, highly influential artistic concepts and methods (such as
the method of montage) were the results.
The second part studies the ideas and techniques the historical avant-gardes
– Dada avant-gardists in particular – drew from the practices of popular thea-
tre for their own experimental projects and the development of avant-garde
strategies, and how these practices themselves relate to older forms of popular
entertainment: fairground theatre and travelling spectacles. Chapter 5 draws
our attention to the historical separation of performance styles and genres
and their institutionalisation. In the European context, the understanding of
theatre shifted from performative body arts to the literary art of drama in
the course of the eighteenth century, where the (physical) theatre arts such
as acrobatics, tightrope walking and clowning were separated from a theatre
based on literary texts. From a historical perspective, this separation goes hand
in hand with the long-standing debate between “high” and “popular” culture.
However, the interplay of different performance traditions and genres that
avant-garde artists associated with and inscribed into (their) circus also bor-
rowed from other intertwining strands of spectacle: mechanical puppets, wax-
works and spectral illusions that were popular in the nineteenth century. As
shown Chapter 6 these spectacles and popular performances also constituted
a specifically “colonial modernity”. Part 2 of the book not only gives insights
into specific (historical) performances and contextualises the diverse enter-
tainment and performance practices that were engulfed and absorbed by the
avant-gardes – and which reappear throughout Circus and the Avant-Gardes –
but also proposes a “rethinking of Modernity away from a model of concentri-
cally diminishing ripples, towards a model of small eruptions of energy across
interconnected transnational webs of interaction between the apparatuses,
performers and audiences of both the frontier and the metropole” (Chapter 6).
Many of the projects and experiments described in the first and second
part of this book participated in a major media revolution that finally blitzed
the appeal of turn-of-the-century circus and other popular entertainments
– such as cinema. For instance, in Paris, the success of this new entertain-
ment was dramatically signalled when in 1907, the old Cirque d’Hiver on the
Boulevard du Temple became a Cinéma Pathé and the Hippodrome in the
Rue Caulincourt became the Gaumont Palace in 1911, a cinema that three
years later surpassed the perennial leader of the nonsubsidised entertainments –
the Folies Bergère, the city’s most famous English-style music hall – in terms
of income.21 However, as this collection pinpoints from various perspectives,
circus lives on, not least in cinema.
8 Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand
Film, attraction and distraction are discussed in detail in Part 3 of the vol-
ume, which investigates the ways the novel medium film (and its cousin film
animation) emerged from the mould of avant-garde and circus experimenta-
tion, and how they transported, carried on, visualised and narrativised their
intrinsic link to the world of popular entertainment and avant-garde endeav-
ours. In the first chapter of this section (Chapter 7), Tom Gunning’s influential
concept of the “cinema of attraction(s)” – that quality of early cinema and
animation that celebrated “its ability to show something”22 – is reassessed and
remobilised in relation to how modern spectatorship was envisioned and nur-
tured by P.T. Barnum – and (his) late nineteenth-century American three-ring
circus – as an aesthetic response to the conditions of modernity. The second
chapter (Chapter 8) takes new artistic and technological forms of the spectacu-
lar as a point of departure for an exploration of the interplay between circus
and (early) animation film. It elucidates the cultural and aesthetic links between
the animated potentials of the circus, avant-garde visions of mobility and
motion contraptions, particularly in relation to the Cirque Calder, Alexander
Calder’s miniature circus performances. Together, the authors of this section
make it clear that circus-avant-garde collaborations, interrelations and influ-
ences have been capturing the audience’s imagination all over the world not
only because of their thematic, aesthetic and cultural power and potentialities,
but also because of their varied technology.
While the first three parts of this volume explore stage activities, visual fic-
tions and film, the chapters of the fourth section concentrate on theatrical set-
tings and style in relation to performed corporealities and contemporary artistic
physicalities (as stages for social theatrics). The first chapter in Part 4 (Chapter 9)
ventures into a bold re-definition of wrestling as a contemporary performance
practice that emerges from an intricate circus-avant-garde relationship. The
author explores how the radical body aesthetics staged in wrestling are linked to
the circus mould within the context of avant-garde exhibitionism, and reflects
on their connection with burlesque and drag performance. In conversation
with contemporary performance artist Le Pustra – who regularly performs on
the international circuit in cabaret, burlesque and variety – the second chapter
(Chapter 10) focuses on contemporary avant-garde and circus-related visual
spectacle. It explores the evolution of a particular Dada costume through vari-
ous twentieth- and twenty-first-century performances (from David Bowie and
Klaus Nomi to Lady Gaga) and its manifestation and meaning in Le Pustra’s
contemporary reinterpretation. Le Pustra is not only a dazzling performer but
also the director of a famous Berlin-based cabaret show that reinterprets early
twentieth-century avant-garde performances. His show includes a Serpentine
Dance à la Loïe Fuller, whose “style owned a great deal to her early career in
burlesque and cabaret” and who became “a full-fledged participant in avant-
garde theatre” in 1924 when she collaborated with Tristan Tzara, among
others.23 It is fitting, then, that the third chapter in this section (Chapter 11)
is dedicated to Fuller’s dance and queerness in the 2016 biopic The Dancer
by Stéphanie Di Giusto, discussing how vaudeville and other popular stages
Arts for all senses 9
provided Fuller with a space to experiment and transgress stereotypical gender
roles in her dance. These three chapters explore how avant-garde performance
and costume transform(ed) the body of the performer, and how innovations
in bodily movement and costume destabilise(d) the relation between differ-
ent visual, theatrical and performative practices and their established meanings
and (modern and contemporary) experiences. By discussing the connections
between circus and avant-garde through this contemporary prism, this edited
volume also provides an answer to the question of what has become of circus
in (what) avant-garde contexts, if the late twentieth century is considered “a
time when avant-garde art seems to have become advanced entertainment”.24
Setting off with and referring to history, and then moving on to the imaginar-
ies of circus and avant-gardes bodies, the chapters of the fourth part act as a
smooth transition to the fifth part of the book, which is dedicated to a bigger
picture and offers theoretical reflections on circus and avant-garde interfaces
since the 1970s.
Part 5 of Circus and the Avant-Gardes elucidates the cultural fantasies about
and around circus and avant-gardes, as well as the ways avant-garde phenom-
ena themselves appear as part of popular entertainment and vice versa. If the
late twentieth century is “a time when avant-garde art seems to have become
advanced entertainment”,25 what became of circus in (what) avant-garde con-
texts ever since? Removed from the institutional live circus, separated from
their role in the circus arena and their performance routines, and reinterpreted
in different, interrelated media, circus phenomena overlaid with representa-
tions of an idea of the circus generate the imaginary of the circus. Avant-garde
protagonists explore(d) such circus imaginaries. Celebrating the circus’s imme-
diacy and difference from everyday life, and its enchanting power to bring very
diverse people together, theatre makers and painters of the early twentieth
century nurtured and propagated ideas of circus that were only loosely linked
to circus reality. The Czech avant-garde artists discussed in Chapter 4, for
example, had little opportunity to see real circus performances in their capital
city because there was no permanent circus building in Prague and travelling
circuses rarely ventured into the capital. Nevertheless, they were inspired by
the (imagined) circus and aesthetics and used and developed New Circus visu-
als (e.g. poster design with hyperbolic slogans and gigantic fonts) and iconog-
raphy for their revolutionary book designs and typography. The fifth and last
part of the book further explores and theoretically frames this circus imaginary
(which is not only a product of nostalgia, romance or pure fantasy but also of
political ideas and actionism); its exploitation by early twentieth-century artists
as well as its cultural legacy, which was particularly revived in and since the
1970s with the New Circus (see Chapter 12).26
New Circus contested the iconic elements of traditional circus such as “the
animal acts, the circus ring, and the ringmaster, and hybridised with different art
forms. It was from this form of circus that Contemporary Circus emerged”.27
Protagonists of the New Circus (who are often trained theatre profession-
als) have been called “avant-garde circus practitioners” as they explore and
10 Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand
embody “circus via the avant-garde ideas on theatre which had percolated
through western theatre and dance schools in the post-1968 period”.28 While
the first chapter of this section (Chapter 12) focuses on performance activism of
and since the 1970s, the second chapter (Chapter 13) maps what “avant-garde”
means in today’s circus. The practice of contemporary circus artists is often
described as “avant-garde”. However, the contemporary does not necessar-
ily belong to the avant-garde; it defines the contours and ethos of the circus’s
contemporaneity. Chapter 13 explores its meaning and definitions. Overall,
the last part highlights the significance of circus/avant-garde phenomena for
the past, and – through an exploration of their contemporary actualisations (in
different media)29 – also carves out their achievements, relevance and cultural
and aesthetic impact on the present.
To bring Circus and the Avant-Gardes full circle, the last chapter (Chapter 14)
recaps themes from this volume and shows that and how circus is a ver-
satile frame for interpreting our relationship with avant-garde endeavours.
It reflects on the coexisting juxtapositions, ambiguities, contradictions and
paradoxical dynamics revealed in this book – past and present, “elitist” and
“pop”, “high” and “low”, art and entertainment – and highlights that tradi-
tion does not mean stagnation. The chapter tentatively maps how the mean-
ing of “avant-garde” has shifted in circus contexts, and vice versa, and what
role the “culture of narration” (not only attraction) plays between them. It
critically reflects on what the historical avant-gardists perceived and inter-
preted as circus – their “idea of circus” – and how this can be defined in
the light of circus history. Finally, the last chapter of the volume explores
how the insights collected in this book add to and disrupt current discus-
sions revolving around modernism/modernity, in order to revisit what has
been called “popular modernism”,30 and, potentially, could be called “popu-
lar avant-garde”.
Notes
1 Chicago Record-Herald, quoted in Leonard Diepeveen (ed.), Mock Modernism: An
Anthology of Parodies, Travesties, Frauds, 1910–1935 (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto
Press, 2014), 3.
2 Oskar Schlemmer, “Mensch und Kunstfigur (1925),” in Theater im 20. Jahrhundert:
Programmschriften, Stilperioden, Reformmodelle, ed. Manfred Brauneck (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rororo, 1993), 149.
3 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “Theater, Zirkus, Varieté (1925),” in Theater im 20. Jahrhundert:
Programmschriften, Stilperioden, Reformmodelle, ed. Manfred Brauneck (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rororo, 1993), 158. See also Claudine Amiard-Chevrel (ed.), Du cirque au
theatre (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1983).
4 See Giovanni Lista, “Esthétique du music-hall et mythologie urbaine chez Marinetti,”
in Du cirque au theatre, ed. Claudine Amiard-Chevrel (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1983),
51–52.
5 See Martine Maleval, “An Epic of New Circus,” in The Routledge Circus Studies Reader,
eds. Peta Tait and Katie Lavers Tait (New York: Routledge, 2016), 50–64; Katie Lavers,
Louis Patrick Leroux and Jon Burtt, Contemporary Circus (London: Routledge, 2019).
Arts for all senses 11
6 See Mirjam Hildbrand,“Theaterlobby gegen Zirkusunternehmen. Über die Aufwertung
des ‘Theaters’ auf Kosten der zirzensischen Künste,” Forum Modernes Theater 30:1–2 (2015
[2019]), 19–33.
7 Donald Kuspit, “Avant-Garde and Audience,” in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of
Formalist Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modernist Thought, ed. Sally Everett (London:
McFarland, 1991), 173.
8 See e.g. Andrew McConnell Stott, The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi: Laughter,
Madness and the Story of Britain’s Greatest Comedian (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2009);
Louise Peacock, Slapstick and Comic Performance: Comedy and Pain (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2014); Peta Tait and Katie Lavers (eds.), The Routledge Circus Studies Reader
(New York: Routledge, 2016); Katie Lavers, Louis Patrick Leroux and Jon Burtt (eds.),
Contemporary Circus (London: Routledge, 2019); Anna-Sophie Jürgens, “Being the
Alien: The Space Pierrots and Circus Spaces of David Bowie, Klaus Nomi and Michael
Jackson,” in Southern Space Studies: Outer Space and Popular Culture, ed. Annette Froehlich
(Cham: Springer, 2021 (in press)).
9 See e.g. Gillian Arrighi, “The Circus and Modernity; A Commitment to ‘the Newer’
and ‘the Newest’,” Early Popular Visual Culture 10:2 (2012), 169–185; Gillian Arrighi,
“Synthesising Circus Aesthetics and Science: Australian Circus and Variety Theatre at the
Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Early Popular Visual Culture 17:1 (2019), 1–19; Gillian
Arrighi, “Circus and Electricity: Staging Connexions between Science and Popular
Entertainments,” in Circus, Science and Technology: Dramatising Innovation, ed. Anna-Sophie
Jürgens (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 81–100; Anna-Sophie Jürgens (ed.), Circus,
Science and Technology: Dramatising Innovation (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020a); Anna-
Sophie Jürgens, “The Pathology of Joker’s Dance: On the Origins of Arthur Fleck’s
Body Aesthetics in Todd Phillips’s 2019 Joker Film,” Dance Chronicle 43:3 (2020), 321–
337; Anna-Sophie Jürgens, “Fun-de-siècle: Dance, Popular Spectacles and the Circus,”
Tanz & Archiv 8 (2020c), 172–188.
10 See e.g. Naomi Ritter, Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer since Romanticism (Columbia,
MO: University of Missouri Press, 1989); Helen Stoddart, Rings of Desire: Circus History
and Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Sophie Basch (ed.),
Romans de Cirque (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2002).
11 See e.g. Joel Schechter, Durov’s Pig: Clowns, Politics and Theatre (New York: Theatre
Communications Group, 1985); Oksana Bulgakowa, FEKS: Die Fabrik des Exzentrischen
Schauspielers (Berlin: PotemkinPress, 1996).
12 See e.g. Maria DiBattista and Lucy McDiarmid, High and Low Moderns: Literature and
Culture, 1889–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Sascha Bru et al. (eds.),
Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture (Berlin and
Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2011); Scott Ortolano, Popular Modernism and Its Legacies: From
Pop Literature to Video Games (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).
13 See e.g. Martin Puchner, Stage Fright: Modernism, Anti-Theatricality, and Drama (Baltimore,
MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2002); Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, “Modernism and
Theatrical Performance,” Modernist Cultures 1:1 (2005), 59–68; Olga Taxidou, Modernism
and Performance: Jarry to Brecht (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007 (briefly mentioning
circus, 198)); Penny Farfan, Performing Queer Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2017); Claire Warden, “Modernism and European Drama/Theatre,” in The Modernist
World, eds. Stephen Ross and Allana C. Lindgren (New York: Routledge, 2015), 356–364.
14 See e.g. Peter Bailey, “Theatres of Entertainment/Spaces of Modernity: Rethinking the
British Popular Stage, 1890–1914,” Nineteenth Century Theatre 26:1 (1998); Len Platt,
“Popular Theater,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture, ed. Celia Marshik
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 221–236.
15 Claire Warden, “Foreword,” in Dance, Modernism, and Modernity, eds. Ramsay Burt and
Michael Huxley (New York: Routledge, 2020), xii.
16 Ramsay Burt and Michael Huxley, Dance, Modernism, and Modernity (New York:
Routledge, 2020), 34.
12 Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand
17 Warden, “Foreword,” xiv.
18 Bailey, “Theatres of Entertainment/Spaces of Modernity,” 6.
19 Christopher Innes and Maria Shevtsova, The Cambridge Introduction to Theatre Directing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1.
20 Unlike vaudeville, music halls, variety theatres and other primarily urban forms of
entertainment, which experienced a boom in the course of massive urbanisation in the
nineteenth century, the circus was on the move in all regions, large and small towns. It
developed rapidly with the expansion of national and international transport. Around
1900, circus offered acrobatics and clowning as well as (‘wild’) animal performances in
a large round cage and performances specially adapted to the ring and the circus tent.
Circus is less tied to a specific cultural context than vaudeville and other urban popular
theatres (see Chapter 5).
21 Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-
Century France (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1985), 193.
22 Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-
Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed.Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam:Amsterdam
University Press, 2006), 382. See also Sébastien Denis and Jérémy Houillère (eds.), Cirque,
cinéma et attractions. Intermédialité et circulation des formes circassiennes (Villeneuve d’Ascq:
Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2019).
23 Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2007), 19, 214.
24 Kuspit, “Avant-Garde and Audience,” 171.
25 Donald Kuspit, “Avant-Garde and Audience,” in Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of
Formalist Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modernist Thought, ed. Sally Everett (London:
McFarland, 1991), 171.
26 In exploring the links between circus and the avant-garde beyond the historical avant-
gardes from the early twentieth century, this book concentrates on the circus. See
Maleval (“An epic of new circus”) for a discussion of how avant-garde theatre mak-
ers of the 1970s and 1980s embraced the circus, and studies such as the following for
other perspectives, e.g. on how Alice Cooper aspired to create a rock form of Dada and
Surrealism (Simon Reynolds, Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy from the Seventies
to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Faber & Faber, 2016), 121–125) or to what extend
clowning has shaped David Bowie’s and Klaus Nomi’s work (Jürgens,“Being the Alien”).
See also Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 197–228.
27 Katie Lavers and Jon Burtt, with Erin Ball, “Unreal Limbs: Erin Ball and the Extended
Body in Contemporary Circus,” in Circus, Science and Technology: Dramatising Innovation,
ed. Anna-Sophie Jürgens (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 50. See also Jean-Michel
Guy (ed.), Avantgarde, Cirque! Les arts de la piste en revolution (Paris: Autrement, 2001).
Overall, the works of a new generation of circus artists increasingly broke away from
narrative dramaturgies and crossed the borders to other art forms, such as contempo-
rary dance, performance art and visual and media art. At the same time, more and more
ensembles were formed that developed performances based on only one discipline, such
as the French Compagnie XY (focusing on partner acrobatics) or the British juggling
group Gandini Juggling.
28 Stoddart, Rings of Desire, 93.
29 In Europe, the term “contemporary circus” became established in connection with
the production of Le cri du caméléon (“The Cry of the Chameleon”), which was created
in 1995 by a graduating class of the Centre National des Arts du Cirque (CNAC,
Châlons-en-Champagne, France). This conceptual shift from Nouveau Cirque to
Cirque Contemporain points to a generational change as well as an aesthetic shift
within the field.
30 See Bailey, “Theatres of Entertainment/Spaces of Modernity.”
Arts for all senses 13
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Theatre at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Early Popular Visual Culture 17:1 (2019),
1–19.
Arrighi, Gillian. “Circus and Electricity: Staging Connexions between Science and Popular
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14 Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand
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Arts for all senses 15
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Part I
2 A treasure trove for
avant-garde artists?
Metropolitan circus performances
around 1900
Mirjam Hildbrand
In a search for new artistic forms and avenues, the circus of the early twen-
tieth century served as an inspiration for the Western European and Russian
avant-garde. Many avant-garde artists picked up on elements and aesthetics
from the modern circus and thus questioned the prevailing conventions of the
bourgeois cultural institutions. Today, we commonly think of circus as the
presentation of extraordinary (physical) abilities and sensationalism, the con-
scious play of risk, the mastery of human and animal bodies and the absence
of narrative forms. But counter to the common imaginary of circus, circus
performances around 1900 throughout major European and Russian cities had
overarching, narrative dramaturgies. The great success of circuses in the nine-
teenth and well into the twentieth century is largely due to these theatre-like
productions, which have been more or less forgotten by the general public and
scholars who, until today, have mostly ignored the role of these performances.
Using historical sources, I first discuss the performance conventions of circus
that were being established in the late eighteenth century and throughout the
nineteenth century. Subsequently, I provide insight into performances that
were staged in Berlin and Paris around 1900, in order to explore the histori-
cal avant-gardes’ impressions of the circus of their time.1 As there is a lack of
research on historical circus performance practice, I enter uncertain territories.
In my conclusion, I discuss this research neglect which is, from my perspec-
tive, strongly influenced by the current and consolidated image of circus as a
performance format based on autonomous acts without overarching narratives
as well as by the categorisation of circus as a so-called “low” art. Given what is
(un)known about historical circus practice, the relationship between circus and
the avant-gardes, or their circus references, may also need to be re-examined.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003163749-3
20 Mirjam Hildbrand
of Enlightenment and capitalistic industrialisation – the cities of London and
Paris saw the rise of a new performance format that, today, we call circus. The
format developed through the public performance of equestrian artists. Well-
known representatives of this first generation of circus makers were Philip
Astley, Charles Hughes and Charles Dibdin in London and Antonio Franconi
and his sons in Paris.2 By the late seventeenth century, the theatre of western
culture was undergoing both a literarisation and a shift towards an educational
claim, which was mirrored in, and fostered by, corresponding legal regulations.
While the concept of theatre became increasingly narrow and confined to the
staging of literary texts, the late eighteenth-century circus created a space for
the distinctly physical and visual forms of theatre that were popular with large,
diverse audiences well into the twentieth century. Austrian theatre scholar
Birgit Peter notes that during the establishment of theatre as a drama-based and
bourgeois art, the circus became a gathering place for the “other” theatre. This
“other theatre” included the performative body practices of performers seen at
fairs and markets until the eighteenth century.3
From 1800 onwards, particularly successful circus companies built perma-
nent venues that, in many respects, resembled the then-contemporary theatre
and opera buildings, both in architectural style and interior design. Hughes and
Dibdin’s Royal Circus was equipped with both a circus ring and a proscenium
stage; so too were Astley’s Amphitheatre and Franconi’s Cirque Olympique
in Paris. The directors, who were often former cavalrymen, hired equestrian
artists, tightrope walkers, acrobats, musicians and comedians. Astley, his com-
petitors and their successors distinguished themselves from their less-famous
predecessors primarily in their strategic entrepreneurial spirit. From the choice
of the venue to the organisation and promotion of their international tours,
they left nothing to chance.4
In the late seventeenth century, both English and French rulers had estab-
lished a system of control over cultural performances that took the form of
censorship and strict legal regulations. This system of control assured privileged
patent theatres a monopoly over dialogue- and stage-based performances. In
other words, the system reflected the then-consolidated concept of theatre
that considered drama and opera as “high” art and all the other theatre forms
(including circus) as “low” or non-art.5 Therefore, the London circus pioneers
were repeatedly confronted with temporary closures and imprisonments dur-
ing their establishing phase.6 However, they skilfully used legal grey areas to
stage the so-called hippodramas, or, in other words: horse theatre. The early cir-
cus companies joined and fuelled the hippomania that began in 1750 and con-
tinued into the nineteenth century; horse-riding and dressage were in vogue.7
Horse-riding formed the basis of legitimising and legalising circus practices.
By 1800, horse-based performances with acrobatics, tightrope walking,
music, ballet and harlequinades were solidified formats, from which the mod-
ern circus has continued to develop. Stable (private and municipal) circus
buildings began to shape the cityscapes of London, Paris, St Petersburg, Berlin,
Madrid, Copenhagen, Vienna, Riga, Milan and others.8 The performances
A treasure trove for avant-garde artists? 21
in these venues captivated large and diverse audiences consisting not only of
lower socioeconomic classes but also the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. The suc-
cess of circuses, as British theatre scholar Jacky Bratton notes, is a testament to
the great appeal of performances that were “free of the ever-tightening con-
strictions of the moral and literary conception of the drama”.9
Until well into the twentieth century, circus performances consisted of
more than just assembled acts, which is in contrast to common perceptions
of modern circus. Circus companies – like the minor theatres in London or the
théâtres secondaires in Paris – staged narrative performances that were referred to
as pantomimes but were not necessarily silent.10 Patrick Désile, a French thea-
tre and media scholar, defines pantomime, in this context, as a generic term
for productions that were, among others, billed as hippo-, mimo- or melo-
dramas, tableaux, féeries and vaudevilles. These terms did not correspond to
precise categories, but were used according to trends in the performing arts.11
Today, in the British context, the term “pantomime” is primarily associated
with Christmas pantomimes; in France, it mostly refers to the silent Pierrot figure
made famous by Jean-Gaspard Deburau; and in the German-speaking world
pantomimes are considered silent mimic-based gestural performances. Behind
these associations lies a multifaceted historical performance practice.
Figure 2.1 Cirque Médrano in Paris around 1900. Source: Albert Brichaut (photographer),
courtesy of Paris Musées/Musée Carnavalet.
26 Mirjam Hildbrand
These clowns, from whom the historical avant-garde drew inspiration, also
performed at the Nouveau Cirque; a circus building built in 1885, frequented
by the Parisian upper class and known for its elaborate aquatic circus produc-
tions. The Nouveau Cirque advertised a matinee performance on 22 March
1899 that included a three-part performance. After the first part with equestrian
acts, the second consisted of acts with trained elephants and clown interludes
by the three Fratellini brothers – Paul and Louis and François, who performed
daring jumps from horse to horse – as well as by the famous duo Footit and
Chocolat. This part was concluded with a water polo game, which, accord-
ing to the programme, was performed daily. Unsurprisingly, for the third
part, a “pantomime nautique à grand spectacle” was announced – La Cascade
Merveilleuse in three scenes.42 This aquatic pantomime with flamboyant decor,
set in Java, told the story of the two daughters of a wealthy couple; circuses
often fuelled the culture of exoticism and orientalism common of the time.
In the first scene, the two protagonists prepared for a feast for Prince Ghédé in
the presence of four jesters – perhaps played by the circus’s famous clowns?
The two daughters rode an elephant to the prince’s palace, where – in the
second scene – the festivities began with various dances. As befits the Nouveau
Cirque, the celebration came to a spectacular finale in the third scene; the play-
bill promised swans, horses, elephants and divers swimming in the ring. The
Nouveau Cirque, which existed until 1926, was technically equipped to lower
the circus ring with a hydraulic gear into the water basin below in just a few
minutes. For the pool, the venue also had a specific and sophisticated lighting
system.43 These stage installations for the water pantomimes were often imi-
tated as the Circus Ciniselli in St Petersburg and Berlin circus venues, too, had
them in the 1890s.44
In Berlin, the theatre reformer and avant-garde artist Max Reinhardt is
famous for (among other things) his 1910 production of Oedipus in Circus
Schumann’s Berlin venue. Later, after World War I, Reinhardt’s company
bought the circus building and renamed it Grosse Schauspielhaus. The theatre-
maker saw potential in the circus venue for the reformation of the theatre arts
through circus by, for example, performing on the round stage – which, in
his eyes, enhances the physicality of the performers and allows for more direct
communication with the audience. Reinhardt was also attracted by the techni-
cal possibilities of the former circus building. His predecessors – from Circus
Salamonsky (1873–1879) to Circus Renz (1879–1897) and Circus Schumann
(1899–1918) – had already experimented for half a century in this venue with
new lighting and other stage technologies, such as a retractable ring that could
be filled with water (part of the venue since the 1890s).45 This innovative spirit
of earlier creators in the circus building is forgotten today.
Max Reinhardt must have been familiar with the larger productions of his
predecessor Albert Schumann, who used the latest technologies in his circus
pantomimes in innovative ways. In December 1903, for example, the panto-
mime Babel premiered in this Berlin venue. The pantomime dealt with the
Babel-Bible controversy prominent at the time, triggered in January 1902 when
A treasure trove for avant-garde artists? 27
Figure 2.2 Cross section of the Nouveau Cirque in Paris with the hydraulic gear to lower
the circus ring. Source: Technical drawing published in the journal Le Génie
Civil in 1886, courtesy of Circopedia.org.
For this psychologist and teacher, who was also for some time
president of the New England Watch and Ward Society, a voluntary
censorship which asserts itself chiefly over books and plays and in
opposition to the social evil, always had “a love for glimpsing at first
hand the raw side of life. I have never missed an opportunity to
attend a prize fight if I could do so unknown and away from home.
Thrice I have taken dancing lessons from experts sworn to secrecy,
and tried to learn the steps of ancient and some of the tabooed
modern dances—just enough to know the feel of them—up to some
six years ago, although I have always been known as a non-dancer.”
In Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, New York and San Francisco he
found guides to take him through the underworld by night. In an
institution for the blind, he blindfolded himself for an entire day; he
learned the deaf mute alphabet; he had seen three executions,
visited morgues, revival meetings, anarchist meetings. Paupers,
criminals, wayward children, circus freaks were among his hobbies.
“I believe that such zests and their indulgence are a necessary part
of the preparation of a psychologist or moralist who seeks to
understand human nature as it is.” And as, probably, it will continue
to be for a while to come.
ii
If there is no single preoccupation common to the new fiction of
other authors, readers will be highly content to find thoroughly
characteristic new work by such favorites as Joseph C. Lincoln,
Hugh Walpole, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Arnold Bennett, Bertrand W.
Sinclair, Susan Ertz, Robert Hichens, and Ruth Comfort Mitchell.
Both Joseph C. Lincoln and Hugh Walpole—and different as they
are—seem to me to have surpassed themselves. Mr. Lincoln’s
Rugged Water is not basically different from his other Cape Cod
novels. Perhaps in the loose chronology of his stories it is more
nearly contemporaneous with Cap’n Eri than with his more recent
books. It is a story of a Coast Guard Station in the days when the
Coast Guard was the Life Saving Service. The chief character is
Calvin Homer, Number One man of the crew, brave, honest, and shy
of women. In temporary command of the Station, he does gallant
rescue work which should place him in line for promotion to Keeper
of the Station. But in the same storm, Benoni Bartlett, of a nearby
Station, stands out more conspicuously as the sole survivor of a
brave crew. Benoni is made Keeper over Homer.
These two men, Benoni Bartlett and Homer; Myra Fuller, to whom
Homer became engaged before he quite knew what was happening;
Norma Bartlett, daughter of the former Keeper and the young woman
with whom Homer eventually discovers himself to be in love, are the
main persons of the novel. It is difficult to regard them as Mr.
Lincoln’s real subject, for the life of the Station and the drama of
shipwreck asserts itself constantly in pages that teem with humor
and with other qualities of human nature less easy of superficial
exhibition.
In other words, the largeness of what he is essentially dealing with
has seized upon Mr. Lincoln, and without the sacrifice of his lesser
drama, or any of the picturesqueness that has made him so beloved,
he has caught something of the loneliness of the Station, the whisper
and thunder of the surf, the struggle of men in an “overmatched
littleness” under a black sky in the tempest of waters. To me, these
captures make Rugged Water the best novel he has written.
As for Mr. Walpole in The Old Ladies, my verdict, arrived at on
different grounds, is equally affirmative and emphatic. Here is a short
novel to stand beside Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome. There is
bleakness as well as sunniness about the story; no haze; no
sentimentality, though sentiment a-plenty and a deep, clear feeling.
Three women, Lucy Amorest, May Beringer, and Agatha Payne, all
seventy, live together in the top of a “rain-bitten” old house in
Polchester. All are very poor. Lucy has a cousin who may leave her
money, and a son in America from whom she has not heard for a
couple of years. May Beringer, close to penury, is a weak, stupid,
kind creature always terrified of life. Agatha Payne is sensual and
strong. There has never, in my knowledge, been a picture more
honest or more terribly pathetic of what old age sometimes means.
Mr. Walpole has not evaded an inch of the truth or the tragedy; and
the measured happiness accorded at last to Lucy Amorest comes
not in the least as a concession toward a “happy ending” but solely
as a reprieve of pity for her—and for the reader also.
The stories in Mary Roberts Rinehart’s Temperamental People
represent her most recent work and have a unity as interesting as
their wide range. Each shows the force of temperament—that quality
in people which makes the drama of life. But who are the
temperamental people? A queen, a cowboy, a famous singer, a wife,
a great sculptor and a business man’s secretary are some of them.
People as diverse as life; but all of them have temperament, and
each story is a revelation of human emotion in action. As one of the
characters says (it is the opening of the story of the sculptor,
“Cynara”): “I suppose once in every creative life there comes the
sublime moment, the consecrated hour when, not from within but
from without there comes the onrush of true greatness.” These
records of that moment and that hour are among the best things Mrs.
Rinehart has done.
The title of Arnold Bennett’s new collection, Elsie and the Child
and Other Stories, should be notice enough to the thousands who
revelled in Riceyman Steps that the new book is one they may not
miss. Yes, it is Elsie, the humble but lovable heroine of Clerkenwell,
who figures again in this volume. It will be remembered that at the
close of Riceyman Steps, Elsie, about to marry Joe, weakly
consented to go to work as a servant for Mrs. Raste, while Joe (it
was arranged) should resume his rôle as Dr. Raste’s handy man.
This was due to the pleading of young Miss Raste; Elsie was never
one to resist children. And so “Elsie and the Child” begins
approximately where Riceyman Steps left off. It is a novelette in
length, a most satisfactory morsel left over from the novel’s feast.
With the very first page the feeling of Riceyman Steps in its more
blissful moments is restored to the reader. The dozen shorter tales in
the book are all from Mr. Bennett’s most recent work.
Bertrand W. Sinclair’s The Inverted Pyramid is work of such
proportions and of a sufficient dignity to take him quite out of the
group of “Western” writers. This is not to rate down the cowboy story,
but it is to recognize that such work as Mr. Sinclair’s is something far
more consequential. The inverted pyramid of the title is the social
structure of a family set up by entailed wealth. Hawk’s Nest, on Big
Dent, just off the coast of Vancouver Island, is the home of the
Norquay family, founded in 1809 by a roving pioneer fur trader who
obtained the immense tract of land from the Indians for a pittance.
He held it intact and it has come down unspoiled to the fifth
generation of Norquays—Dorothy, Roderick, Phil and Grove. Luck
and ability has aggregated a huge fortune from the natural resources
of the estate, which Roderick’s grandfather converted into a
corporation, seventy per cent. of income going to the oldest son, the
rest being divided among the others.
In the fifth generation various destinies open before the three
brothers. Money, in the sense of finance (money plus power); love;
the call of adventure; the quest of romance exert themselves on the
three. The very structure of the family, however, makes it quite
impossible that the destinies of one should not react in an
exceptional degree upon the others. The responsibility for the
maintenance of family standing, financial, social, moral, is
interlocking. The old question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was
never asked under a colder compulsion to return an affirmative
answer: yes, because he is a fellow director on the board.
I have said nothing about the daughter, Dorothy, and will only say
that her rôle in the novel is important. It is enough, I think, to indicate
the largeness and the serious character of The Inverted Pyramid,
and to hail it as a sign that Mr. Sinclair will give us other books as
good or even better, to stand with this, his finest so far.
Susan Ertz’s Nina is at once more brilliant and more profound than
her Madame Claire (a novel which sells better today than when it
was first published). Nina is the study of a girl whose love, once
given, cannot be revoked by any act or will of her own. Brought up
by her aunt, Nina Wadsworth falls in love with Morton Caldwell,
adopted as a boy by that same aunt. Morton is extraordinarily
handsome, good-hearted, and hopelessly susceptible to women.
Tony Fielding has the qualities of fidelity and devotion which Morton
lacks. Henri Bouvier, the son of a French family in England, is a
playmate in childhood. Miss Ertz deals directly only with Nina and
Morton after their marriage; what has gone before is cleverly
reflected in the scenes put before the reader. As in Madame Claire, a
delightful feature is the points of view from which the story is told.
Much of it is seen through the eyes of Henri, grown to manhood,
French in his ideas, sophisticated, and almost equally sympathetic
and discreet. His comments, both spoken and unspoken, are
delicious. They do much to enliven a situation at bottom profoundly
tragic by reason of Morton’s limitations as a husband and Nina’s
tenacious love.
The novel is as unusual as it is competent, and the unusualness
springs from the author’s competence. And when I say competence,
I am not thinking only of the writing, which is admirable, but of the
wisdom in human nature which underlies the tale. Every woman will
be charmed with this novel because it is veracious in its feminine
psychology, as most novels by men are not—and as most novels by
women would be if women could avoid sentimentality as cleanly as
Miss Ertz does. Yes, women will be engrossed by Nina because they
will find in it those accents and indications which are their tests of the
reality of men and women in intimate relation to each other,
especially in the relations of love and marriage.
The depths of feminine psychology have been delicately sounded
many times by Robert Hichens, whose new novel, After the Verdict,
is of great length and painstaking detail. Here also we have an
extremely dramatic story. Clive Baratrie, as the story opens, is on
trial for the murder of Mrs. Sabine, a woman older than himself with
whom he had a prolonged affair that began when Clive was a patient
in her nursing home after the war. The young man is engaged to
marry Vivian Denys, a girl of his own age, a splendid, fresh, outdoor
person and one of the best tennis players in England. Miss Denys
has stuck to Clive through his ordeal, and after his acquittal they are
married. Clive’s mother, who lives to see him acquitted and for some
time afterward, is the only other person of first importance in the 500-
odd pages.
Is Clive guilty or innocent? He has been acquitted, true. And if
innocent, of what avail to him? Must not his whole life be lived under
the dark shadow of the crime? Must he not suffer as surely one way
as the other? One goes four-fifths of the way through this novel in a
state of tortured suspense. One does not know what to think as to
Clive’s guilt or innocence, nor is there a definite clue in his uncertain
behavior. The fact, when revealed, stuns by its impact. Mr. Hichens
tells me that he had long had it in mind to study a man resting under
the cloud of a murder charge; but he had another and greater thing
in mind. “I wanted,” he says, “to show that in such a marriage as
Clive’s and Vivian’s an absolute sincerity must exist between the two
people.” But it is the studies of the women in After the Verdict which
will impress and entrance the reader.
SUSAN ERTZ
Ruth Comfort Mitchell, whose popular novels have been of a light
character, has also been led to a study of a woman capable of
ordering her world and ruling it. The title of her new novel, A White
Stone, is from the second half of the seventeenth verse in the Book
of Revelation: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden
manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name
written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.” To Joyce
Evers, the white stone at first was her diamond engagement ring.
Later it is the great rock on the mountain where she takes her woes
for quieting and consolation. It is long before she finds the unseen,
intangible white stone of the mystical passage. A homely little girl,
she had been the center of a marvelous romance when Duval, one
of the world’s great pianists, asked her to marry him. In the chapters
which show the gradual increase in Joyce of that power which is to
be her salvation, Ruth Comfort Mitchell has done much abler work
than in any story of hers before. Two somewhat unusual characters
—Hannah Hills Blade, a novelist, and Chung, a Chinese servant—do
a good deal to differentiate A White Stone from the run of novels.
Chung is picturesque and is an excellent example of a certain fresh
invention which is felt throughout the book. There is a strongly-
written love story.
iii
...
ii
When Cosmo Hamilton was eighteen, he hid himself in Dieppe,
France, for a month. It was necessary to convince his family, and
most particularly his father, that he meant to write and could make
some kind of figure at writing. There, in the Hotel of the Chariot of