Sammenfatning Omkring 1900 var cirkus en meget populær form for underholdning. Et ekko af dette populærkulturelle fænomen findes i nogle af Herman Bangs berømte cirkusnoveller og i mere end halvtreds ...avis- og tidsskriftsartikler, som han skrev mellem 1880 og 1911. Cirkus udgjorde for Bang ikke kun en vedvarende personlig fascination og inspiration, men en heterotopisk model for menneskets status i den moderne verden. Dets repræsentation åbner for refleksioner over nogle af modernitetens centrale emner: tempo og innovation, nervøsitet og kraft, mobilitet og fremmedfølelse og, ikke mindst, kunstens varestatus.
This pioneering study is one of the major publications in the increasingly popular and largely undocumented area of circus studies.
Through photographs and illustrations, Peta Tait presents an ...extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the socially changing ideas of muscular action in relation to our understanding of gender and sexuality. She questions how spectators see and enjoy aerial actions, and what cultural identities are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement.
Adeptly locating aerial performance within the wider cultural history of bodies and their identities, Circus Bodies explores this subject through a range of films such as Trapeze (1956) and Wings of Desire (1987) and Tait also examines live performances including:
* the first trapeze performers: Léotard and the Hanlon Brothers * female celebrities; Azella, Sanyeah, black French aerialist LaLa, the infamous Leona Dare, and the female human cannonballs * twentieth-century gender benders; Barbette and Luisita Leers * the Codonas, Concellos, Gaonas, Vazquez and Pages troupes * imaginative aerial acts in Cirque de Soleil and Circus Oz productions.
This book will prove an invaluable resource for all students and scholars interested in this fascinating field.
Peta Tait is Professor of Theatre and Drama at La Trobe University, Australia. She is author of Performing Emotions: Gender, Bodies, Spaces in Chekhov’s Drama and Stanislavski’s theatre (2002) as well as books on gender identity in Australian theatre, and editor of Body Show/s (2000).
Beautifully illustrated and filled with rich historical detail and colorful anecdotes, this is a vibrant history for all those who have ever dreamed of running away to the circus, now in paperback. ..."Step right up!" and buy a ticket to the Greatest Show on Earth—the Big Top, containing death-defying stunts, dancing bears, roaring tigers, and trumpeting elephants. The circus has always been home to the dazzling and the exotic, the improbable and the impossible—a place of myth and romance, of reinvention, rebirth, second acts, and new identities. Asking why we long to soar on flying trapezes, ride bareback on spangled horses, and parade through the streets in costumes of glitter and gold, this captivating book illuminates the history of the circus and the claim it has on the imaginations of artists, writers, and people around the world.Traveling back to the circus's early days, Linda Simon takes us to eighteenth-century hippodromes in Great Britain and intimate one-ring circuses in nineteenth-century Paris, where Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso became enchanted with aerialists and clowns. She introduces us to P. T. Barnum, James Bailey, and the enterprising Ringling Brothers and reveals how they created the golden age of American circuses. Moving forward to the whimsical Circus Oz in Australia and to New York City's Big Apple Circus and the grand spectacle of Cirque du Soleil, she shows how the circus has transformed in recent years. At the center of the story are the people—trick riders and tightrope walkers, sword swallowers and animal trainers, contortionists and clowns—that created the sensational, raucous, and sometimes titillating world of the circus.
Original language summary:
S Jiřím Berouskem na prohlídce zvěřince jeho cirkusu.
Extended description:
Jiří Berousek je ředitelem a majitelem cirkusu. Jeho medvědi hráli ve známém filmu "Šest medvědů ...s Cibulkou". Od té doby svůj cirkus rozšířil o mnoho dalších zvířat. Na otázku, zda cirkusová zvířata při drezúře trpí, odpovídá záporně. Drezér i zvíře se musejí vzájemně respektovat. Úspěšná vystoupení jeho rodiny slibují, že cirkus Berousek bude ještě dlouho jezdit po světě.
Jiří Berousek is the manager and owner of a circus. His bears have acted in the famous film "Šest medvědů s Cibulkou" (Six bears and Mr Cibulka) Since then, he has enlarged his circus by a lot of other animals. For the question whether the animals suffer during their training he replies no. The trainer and the animal must respect each other. Successful shows of his family promise that Circus Berousek will continue in travelling around the world for a long time.
Information:
Jiří Berousek gives us a tour of his circus menagerie.
For more than seven decades the circuses enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Soviet Union. How did the circus—an institution that dethroned figures of authority and refused any orderly ...narrative structure—become such a cultural mainstay in a state known for blunt and didactic messages? Miriam Neirick argues that the variety, flexibility, and indeterminacy of the modern circus accounted for its appeal not only to diverse viewers but also to the Soviet state. In a society where government-legitimating myths underwent periodic revision, the circus proved a supple medium of communication.     Between 1919 and 1991, it variously displayed the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution, the beauty of the new Soviet man and woman, the vulnerability of the enemy during World War II, the prosperity of the postwar Soviet household, and the Soviet mission of international peace—all while entertaining the public with the acrobats, elephants, and clowns. With its unique ability to meet and reconcile the demands of both state and society, the Soviet circus became the unlikely darling of Soviet culture and an entertainment whose usefulness and popularity stemmed from its ambiguity.
Original language summary:
Sovětský cirkus Moskva je na úspěšném turné v Československu. Od Košic přes Moravu nyní přijel do Prahy na Letenskou pláň. Mezi mnoha atrakcemi bude zde představeno 80 ...cvičených zvířat.
Extended description:
Information:
The Soviet circus Moscow is on its successful tour in Czechoslovakia. It has arrived at Letenská pláň in Prague from Košice via Moravia. 80 trained animals will be shown in a large number of spectacles.
A century ago, daily life ground to a halt when the circus rolled into town. Across America, banks closed, schools canceled classes, farmers left their fields, and factories shut down so that ...everyone could go to the show. In this entertaining and provocative book, Janet Davis links the flowering of the early-twentieth-century American railroad circus to such broader historical developments as the rise of big business, the breakdown of separate spheres for men and women, and the genesis of the United States' overseas empire. In the process, she casts the circus as a powerful force in consolidating the nation's identity as a modern industrial society and world power.Davis explores the multiple "shows" that took place under the big top, from scripted performances to exhibitions of laborers assembling and tearing down tents to impromptu spectacles of audiences brawling, acrobats falling, and animals rampaging. Turning Victorian notions of gender, race, and nationhood topsy-turvy, the circus brought its vision of a rapidly changing world to spectators--rural as well as urban--across the nation. Even today, Davis contends, the influence of the circus continues to resonate in popular representations of gender, race, and the wider world.