Posts Tagged ‘Circus’
“I raised you up to fly to the heavens, not to brood over a clutch of eggs!”*…
Susanna Forrest takes a deep dive into a fascinating subculture that lasted for almost a century: the Amazons of Paris…
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the social range of people who could ride for leisure widened, and more and more women rode. This was because horses became more accessible, but for women it was also due to an improvement in the sidesaddle. I will write more about sidesaddles and my – to me – unexpected love for them in another issue of the newsletter. All you need to know here is that in the early 1830s, either in England or in France, a much-disputed innovation made these saddles more secure, which meant in turn that women could attempt greater feats: more daring jumping, more radical “tricks”, and more sophisticated high-school or haute-école dressage.
The term “amazon” was adopted to deal with these new horsewomen. The implication was of fearless, perhaps manly women like the she-warriors who fascinated classical Greece. They were overstepping into a male world, and while they were often admired, there was also something not quite feminine – or perhaps threateningly hearty – about them. The term is used in multiple European languages at this time. In French, it was also part of the term for riding sidesaddle, “monter en amazone” and for a sidesaddle riding habit or “amazone”, often masculine in style from the waist up, with, later in the century, breeches under an apron rather than a flowing skirt. Gradually the term became more feminised and general and seemed to be applied to any horsewoman.
The earliest named women performing on horseback are Philippine Tourniaire and Patty Astley in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the time, male performers did acrobatics and other stunts on horseback, and the women followed suit…
The Amazons were in the ring from, roughly speaking, the 1830s to the early twentieth century, when both circus and circus horsewomen were falling from fashion. They travelled across Europe and sometimes further afield to dance on and ride their horses, which leaves me with a huge variation of place, time, language, social class, and style of performance spread across many archives. I’ll try to both generalise here and introduce you to the subtleties of their professional and personal lives…
It’s an exciting ride. Stuntwomen, dancers, acrobats, jockeys, charioteers, Olympians, actresses, courtesans, dressage riders – and more: “Who were the Amazons of Paris?” from @Susanna_Forrest.
* Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
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As we saddle up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1978 that The Carol Burnett Show aired the last of its 279 episodes; Ms. Burnett had decided, after 11 seasons, to move on. The series had won 25 primetime Emmy Awards; it ranks number 17 on TV Guide‘s list of the 60 Greatest Shows of All Time, and figures in most “100 Best series” lists.
Consider, for example, the iconic “Went with the Wind” sketch…
“The world cannot be governed without juggling”*…
Innovation in juggling? David Friedman investigates…
How many new ways can there possibly be of throwing a bunch of balls up in the air and catching them? I mean, people have been juggling for thousands of years. There’s even an ancient Egyptian tomb that includes this wall painting of what sure looks like juggling [illustration above].
So as a modern juggling performer, how do you keep your routine fresh? Is it all about the patter and the performance? Or is there still room for innovation in the art and craft of throwing balls to yourself?…
With the help of professional juggler Luke Burrage, he finds some fascinating examples:
Even more at “Innovations in Juggling,” from @ironicsans.
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As we stay aloft, we might send amazingly entertaining birthday greetings to John Bill Ricketts; he was born on (or around, records are sketchy) this date in 1769. An English equestrian, famed for his trick riding, he was also an impressario– who brought the first circus performances to the United States in Philadelphia in 1793.
“Damn everything but the circus!”*…
Meg Wallace, of the University of Kentucky, teaches the philosophy course that I wish I’d taken…
The circus is ridiculous. Or: most people think it’s ridiculous. We even express our disdain for disorganized, poorly run groups by claiming, disparagingly, that such entities are “run like a circus.” (This isn’t true, of course. The amount of organization, discipline, and hard work that it takes to run a circus is mind-blowingly impressive.) But this is one reason why I teach Circus and Philosophy. I want to show students a new way into philosophy – through doing ridiculous things.
It seems strange that philosophers often teach philosophy of art, philosophy of sport, philosophy of the performing arts, and so on, without having the students at least minimally participate in the activities or artforms that are being philosophized about. This lack of first-person engagement is especially unfortunate when the topic at hand crucially involves the perspective of the participant– the painter, the dancer, the actor, the aerialist, the clown. Circus and Philosophy is an attempt to explore this participation/theorizing gap. (Another aim is just to magic-trick undergrads into loving philosophy.)
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[The circus is] rich with potential for deep discussions about an array of philosophical topics in aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, personal identity, mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on. It is also intrinsically interdisciplinary, so students with interests and majors outside of philosophy can easily find a way in…
Finding the profound in the profane: “Circus and Philosophy: Teaching Aristotle through Juggling.”
* e e cummings
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As we benefit from the big top, we might recall that it was on this date in 1987 that another instructive family of entertainers, The Simpsons, made their debut on television in “Good Night,” the first of 48 shorts that aired on The Tracey Ullman Show before the characters were given their own eponymously-titled show– now the longest-running scripted series in U.S. television history.
“The circus comes as close to being the world in microcosm as anything I know; in a way, it puts all the rest of show business in the shade.”*…
Come one, come all!…
While circus acts go back to the midst of time, the circus as commercial entertainment dates to the opening decades of the nineteenth century. In Victorian England, the circus appealed across an otherwise class-divided society, its audiences ranging from poor peddlers to prestigious public figures. The acts that attracted such audiences included reenacted battle scenes, which reinforced patriotic identity; exotic animal displays that demonstrated the reach of Britain’s growing empire; female acrobatics, which disclosed anxieties about women’s changing role in the public sphere; and clowning, which spoke to popular understandings of these poor players’ melancholy lives on the margins of society.
The proprietor and showman George Sanger (from whose collection the following photographs come) was a prime example of how the circus was to evolve from a small fairground-type enterprise to a large-scale exhibition. Sanger’s circuses began in the 1840s and ’50s, but by the 1880s, they had grown to such a scale that they were able to hold their own against the behemoth of P.T. Barnum’s three-ring circus, which arrived in London for the first time in that decade.
Like many circuses in the nineteenth century, Sanger’s was indebted to the technology of modern visual culture to promote his business. Local newspapers displayed photographs alongside advertisements to announce the imminent arrival of a circus troupe. Garish posters, plastered around towns, also featured photographs of their star attractions. And individual artists used photographic portraits, too (in the form of the carte-de-visite or calling card), to draw attention to their attributes and to seek employment. One striking image in this collection [the image above] poses six performing acrobats amid the other acts—a lion tamer, an elephant trainer, a wire walker, and a clown—in one of Sanger’s circuses, all in front of the quintessential big-top tent. Maybe the projection of the collective solidarity of the circus in this image belies personal rivalries and animosities that might have characterized life on the road. Moreover, at the extreme edge of the image, on the right-hand side behind the dog trainer, there appears to be the almost ghostly presence of a Black male figure. By dint of their peripatetic existence, all those employed in the circus were often viewed as marginal and exotic. However, this image is a reminder of how racial and ethnic minorities were a presence within circus culture, even if, as here, they appear to have been banished to the margins of the photograph.
That most democratic of Victorian popular entertainments: photos from the Sanger Circus Collection.
* E. B. White
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As we head for the big top, we might recall that today is International Yada Yada Yada Day. Lenny Bruce is often credited with the first use of “yadda yadda” on the closing track on his 1961 album “Lenny Bruce – American,” though earlier uses are documented in vaudeville. Employed by comedians and TV shows to convey that something unimportant or irrelevant was being elided, it gained vernacular currency when Jerry Seinfeld’s show featured a variation on this phrase as an inside joke between characters Elaine Benes (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and George Costanza (Jason Alexander).
The Yada Yada,” the series’ 153rd episode, focused on just how badly using the phrase can backfire when the details being omitted are actually extremely important– the fact that George’s new girlfriend is actually a kleptomaniac who steals to kill time, or that Jerry’s new girlfriend is both racist and antisemitic. (That episode also introduced the term”anti-dentite.”) Hilarity ensues when both these unwitting men find out what kind of people they have been dating, and must break off the relationships.
In 2009, the Paley Center for Media named “Yada, Yada, Yada” the No. 1 funniest phrase on “TV’s 50 Funniest Phrases.”
“Everything we know and love about the universe and all the laws of physics as they apply, apply to four percent of the universe”*…
In 1969, the American astronomer Vera Rubin puzzled over her observations of the sprawling Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s biggest neighbour. As she mapped out the rotating spiral arms of stars through spectra carefully measured at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Lowell Observatory, both in Arizona, she noticed something strange: the stars in the galaxy’s outskirts seemed to be orbiting far too fast. So fast that she’d expect them to escape Andromeda and fling out into the heavens beyond. Yet the whirling stars stayed in place.
Rubin’s research, which she expanded to dozens of other spiral galaxies, led to a dramatic dilemma: either there was much more matter out there, dark and hidden from sight but holding the galaxies together with its gravitational pull, or gravity somehow works very differently on the vast scale of a galaxy than scientists previously thought.
Her influential discovery never earned Rubin a Nobel Prize, but scientists began looking for signs of dark matter everywhere, around stars and gas clouds and among the largest structures in the galaxies in the Universe. By the 1970s, the astrophysicist Simon White at the University of Cambridge argued that he could explain the conglomerations of galaxies with a model in which most of the Universe’s matter is dark, far outnumbering all the atoms in all the stars in the sky. In the following decade, White and others built on that research by simulating the dynamics of hypothetical dark matter particles on the not-so-userfriendly computers of the day.
But despite those advances, over the past half century, no one has ever directly detected a single particle of dark matter. Over and over again, dark matter has resisted being pinned down, like a fleeting shadow in the woods. Every time physicists have searched for dark matter particles with powerful and sensitive experiments in abandoned mines and in Antarctica, and whenever they’ve tried to produce them in particle accelerators, they’ve come back empty-handed. For a while, physicists hoped to find a theoretical type of matter called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but searches for them have repeatedly turned up nothing…
Dark matter is the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found. Is it time to consider alternative explanations? “Does dark matter exist?“
[image above: source]
* Neil deGrasse Tyson
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As we interrogate the invisible, we might recall that it was on this date in 1944 that one of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history occurred; the blaze broke out during an afternoon performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus that was attended by an estimated 7,000 people. It killed 167 people; more than 700 were injured.
Because of the paraffin wax waterproofing of the tent, the flames spread rapidly
Emmett Kelly holding a water bucket on what became known as “the day the clowns cried“
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