Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: circus perspectives, precedents and presents
Part I: Perspectives
Aesthetics
Chapter 1: Aesthetics
Chapter 2: The staging of actions: heroes, antiheroes and animal actors
Chapter 3: An epic of new circus
Chapter 4: The man in the red coat: management in the circus
The clown
Chapter 5: Clowns and clown play
Chapter 6: Diminutive catastrophe: clownβs play
Cross-arts
Chapter 7: Circus music: the eye of the ear
Chapter 8: Art and androgyny: the aerialist
Chapter 9: When the future was now: Archaos within a theatre tradition
Gender and sexuality
Chapter 10: Respectable female nudity
Chapter 11: A queer circus: Amok in New York
Race
Chapter 12: Celebrated, then implied but finally denied: the erosion of Aboriginal identity in Australian circus, 1850s to 1950s
Sideshows
Chapter 13: Freaks of culture: institutions, publics and the subjects of ethnographic knowledge
Chapter 14: The Jim Rose Circus Side Show: representing the postmodern body in pain
Child performers
Chapter 15: Sensational imbalance: the child acrobat and the mid-Victorians
Spectators
Chapter 16: Ecstasy and visceral flesh in motion
Chapter 17: Marginal body: the British acrobat in reference to sport
Part II: Precedents
Origins
Chapter 18: The circus and nature in late Georgian England
Chapter 19: The American circus
Chapter 20: P.T. Barnum: the legend and the man
Chapter 21: Notes on the MexicanβAmerican circus
Chapter 22: The circus and modernity: a commitment to βthe newerβ and βthe newestβ
Politics
Chapter 23: Bending the body for China: the uses of acrobatics in Sino-US diplomacy during the Cold War
Chapter 24: When pigs could fly and bears could dance: a peculiar institution
Chapter 25: A contemporary history of circus arts in Buenos Aires, Argentina: the post-dictatorial resurgence and revaluation of circus as a popular art
Physical exceptionalism
Chapter 26: To reach the clouds: my high-wire walk between the Twin Towers
Chapter 27: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Animal performers
Chapter 28: Why circuses are unsuited to elephants
Chapter 29: View from the big top: why elephants belong in North American circuses
Part III: Presents
Chapter 30: Female circus performers and art: the shift to creative art forms and its implications
Chapter 31: The resilient body in social circus: Father Jesus Silva, Boris Cyrulnik and Peter A. Levine
Chapter 32: Risk, danger and other paradoxes in circus and Circus Oz parody
Chapter 33: The Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas: an American strip-tease
Chapter 34: Contemporary Nordic circus: introduction to the art form
Chapter 35: Contemporary circus research in QuΓ©bec: building and negotiating an emerging interdisciplinary field
Selected Bibliography
Index