Cirkus och cirkuskonster

Costumes designed and made for devised or physical drama, for contemporary circus or for dance, differ radically from the more traditional costume work produced for naturalistic performance. For those working in the field - whether professional or student - these differences present challenges that this book seeks to highlight and explain while offering effective solutions to overcome them.

Inspire a love of reading with stories that are written from a child’s perspective and will encourage children to discover the world around them. With audio and activities, Peapod Readers are the perfect start to a child’s journey into learning English.Ivy and Mack put on a circus.Includes: Before and after reading activitiesMini-dictionaryExam practice for Cambridge A1 MoversReading guide online

A staple of American popular culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the freak show seemed to vanish after the Second World War. But as Rachel Adams reveals in Sideshow U.S.A., images of the freak show, with its combination of the grotesque, the horrific, and the amusing, stubbornly reappeared in literature and the arts. Freak shows, she contends, have survived because of their capacity for reinvention. Empty of any inherent meaning, the freak's body becomes a stage for playing out some of the twentieth century's most pressing social and political concerns, from debates about race, empire, and immigration, to anxiety about gender, and controversies over taste and public standards of decency.Sideshow U.S.A. begins by revisiting the terror and fascination the original freak shows provided for their audiences, as well as exploring the motivations of those who sought fame and profit in the business of human exhibition. With this history in mind, Adams turns from live entertainment to more mediated forms of cultural expression: the films of Tod Browning, the photography of Diane Arbus, the criticism of Leslie Fiedler, and the fiction Carson McCullers, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Dunn. Taken up in these works of art and literature, the freak serves as a metaphor for fundamental questions about self and other, identity and difference, and provides a window onto a once vital form of popular culture. Adams's study concludes with a revealing look at the revival of the freak show as live performance in the late 1980s and the 1990s. Celebrated by some, the freak show's recent return is less welcome to those who have traditionally been its victims. At the beginning of a new century, Adams sees it as a form of living history, a testament to the vibrancy and inventiveness of American popular culture, as well as its capacity for cruelty and injustice."Because of its subject matter, this interesting and complex study is provocative, as well as thought-provoking."—Virginia Quarterly Review

From 1840 until 1940, freak shows by the hundreds crisscrossed the United States, from the smallest towns to the largest cities, exhibiting their casts of dwarfs, giants, Siamese twins, bearded ladies, savages, snake charmers, fire eaters, and other oddities. By today's standards such displays would be considered cruel and exploitative—the pornography of disability. Yet for one hundred years the freak show was widely accepted as one of America's most popular forms of entertainment. Robert Bogdan's fascinating social history brings to life the world of the freak show and explores the culture that nurtured and, later, abandoned it. In uncovering this neglected chapter of show business, he describes in detail the flimflam artistry behind the shows, the promoters and the audiences, and the gradual evolution of public opinion from awe to embarrassment. Freaks were not born, Bogdan reveals; they were manufactured by the amusement world, usually with the active participation of the freaks themselves. Many of the "human curiosities" found fame and fortune, becoming the celebrities of their time, until the ascent of professional medicine transformed them from marvels into pathological specimans.

This carefully researched study of America's greatest showman, huckster, and impresario is both an inclusive analysis of the historical and cultural forces that were the conditions of P. T. Barnum's success, and, as befits its subject, a richly entertaining presentation of the outrageous man and his exploits.

Elephants, lions, tigers and leopards evoke fascination and awe, fear and excitement. This book analyzes trained acts in twentieth-century live circus and cinema, reveals how humans anthropomorphize animals with their emotions, and interrogates the notion that animals embody a phenomenology of emotions and feelings in culture.

"I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, to attract attention to a show," Phineas Taylor Barnum wrote to a publisher in 1860. "I don't believe in 'duping the public,' but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them."The name P.T. Barnum is virtually synonymous with the fine art of self-advertisement and the apocryphal statement, "There's a sucker born every minute." Nearly a century after his death, Barnum remains one of America's most celebrated figures. In the Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum, A.H. Saxon brings together more than 300 letters written by the self-styled "Prince of Humbugs." Here we see him, opinionated and exuberant, with only the rarest flashes of introspection and self-doubt, haggling with business partners, blustering over politics, and attempting to get such friends as Mark Twain to endorse his latest schemes. Always the king of showmen, Barnum considered himself a museum man first and was forever on the lookout for "curiosities," whether animate or inanimate.His early career included such outright frauds as Joice Heth, the "161-year-old nurse of George Washington," and the Fejee Mermaid-the desiccated head and torso of a monkey sewn to the body of a fish. Although in later years he projected a more solid, respectable image-managing the irreproachable "legitimate" attraction Jenny Lind, becoming a leading light in the temperance crusade, founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus-much of his daily existence continued to be unabashedly devoted to manipulating public opinion so as to acquire for himself and his enterprises what he delightedly termed "notoriety." His famous autobiography, The Life of P.T. Barnum, which he regularly augmented during the last quarter century of his life, was itself a masterpiece of self-promotion. "Will you have the kindness to announce that I am writing my life & that fifty-seven different publishers have applied for the chance of publishing it," he wrote to a newspaper editor, adding, "Such is the fact-and if it wasn't, why still it ain't a bad announcement." The Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum captures the magic of this consummate showman's life, truly his own "greatest show on earth."

This comprehensive study of the legendary showman employs diaries, letters, and business records to examine Barnum's personal and professional life--his sexual indiscretions, freak shows, and infamous hoaxes--and to debunk some of the many myths surrounding this most caricatured individual.

I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, to attract attention to a show, Phineas Taylor Barnum wrote to a publisher in 1860. "I don't believe in 'duping the public,' but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them." The name P.T. Barnum is virtually synonymous with the fine art of self-advertisement and the apocryphal statement, "There's a sucker born every minute." Nearly a century after his death, Barnum remains one of America's most celebrated figures. In the Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum, A.H. Saxon brings together more than 300 letters written by the self-styled "Prince of Humbugs." Here we see him, opinionated and exuberant, with only the rarest flashes of introspection and self-doubt, haggling with business partners, blustering over politics, and attempting to get such friends as Mark Twain to endorse his latest schemes. Always the king of showmen, Barnum considered himself a museum man first and was forever on the lookout for "curiosities," whether animate or inanimate.His early career included such outright frauds as Joice Heth, the "161-year-old nurse of George Washington," and the Fejee Mermaid-the desiccated head and torso of a monkey sewn to the body of a fish. Although in later years he projected a more solid, respectable image-managing the irreproachable "legitimate" attraction Jenny Lind, becoming a leading light in the temperance crusade, founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus-much of his daily existence continued to be unabashedly devoted to manipulating public opinion so as to acquire for himself and his enterprises what he delightedly termed "notoriety." His famous autobiography, The Life of P.T. Barnum, which he regularly augmented during the last quarter century of his life, was itself a masterpiece of self-promotion. "Will you have the kindness to announce that I am writing my life & that fifty-seven different publishers have applied for the chance of publishing it," he wrote to a newspaper editor, adding, "Such is the fact-and if it wasn't, why still it ain't a bad announcement." The Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum captures the magic of this consummate showman's life, truly his own "greatest show on earth."

This first balanced picture of circusking John Ringling North explored the remarkable career of the man who ran RinglingBros. and Barnum & Baily for thirty years. David Lewis Hammarstrom detailshow North guided the circus through adversities ranging from depressions andwars to crippling labor strikes and rapidly changing trends in American entertainment.Hammarstrom interviewed a host of circus figures including North himself; hisformers, directors, and department heads who were involved with the circus whenNorth owned and operated it.

For more than fifty years, Phineas T. Barnum embodied all that was grand and fraudulent in American mass culture. Over the course of a life that spanned the nineteenth century (1810-91), he inflicted himself upon a surprisingly willing public in a variety of guises, from newspaper editor (or libeler) to traveling showman (or charlatan) and distinguished public benefactor (or shameless hypocrite).  Barnum deliberately cultivated his ambiguous public image through a lifelong advertising campaign, shrewdly exploiting the cultural and technological capabilities of the new publishing industry. While running his numerous shows and exhibitions, Barnum managed to publish newspaper articles, exposés of fraud (not his own), self-help tracts, and a series of best-selling autobiographies, each promising to give "the true history of my many adventures."  Updated editions of The Life of P. T. Barnum appeared regularly, allowing Barnum to keep up with demand and prune the narrative of details that might offend posterity. The present volume is the first modern edition of Barnum's original and outrageous autobiography, published in 1855 and unavailable for more than a century. Brazen, confessional, and immensely entertaining, it immortalizes the showman who hoodwinked customers into paying to hear the reminiscences of a woman presented as George Washington's 161-year-old nurse, the impresario who brought Jenny Lind to America and toured Europe with General Tom Thumb, and the grand entrepreneur of the American Museum of New York. Above all, it ensures that Barnum would be properly remembered . . . exactly as he created himself.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries African and pseudo-African performers were displayed as curiosities throughout Europe and America. Appearing in circuses, ethnographic exhibitions, and traveling shows, these individuals and troupes drew large crowds. As Bernth Lindfors shows, the showmen, impresarios, and even scientists who brought supposedly representative inhabitants of the ""Dark Continent"" to a gaping public often selected the performers for their sensational impact. Spotlighting and exaggerating physical, mental, or cultural differences, the resulting displays reinforced pernicious racial stereotypes and left a disturbing legacy.Using period illustrations and texts, Early African Entertainments Abroad illuminates the mindset of the era's largely white audiences as they viewed wax models of Africans with tails and watched athletic competitions showcasing hungry cannibals. White spectators were thus assured of their racial superiority. And blacks were made to appear less than fully human precisely at the time when abolitionists were fighting to end slavery and establish equality.

A showcase of the "golden age" of the circus in AmericaThe circus is a source of nostalgia for Americans of all ages, either from memories of attending P. T. Barnum's "Greatest Show on Earth," or through the colorful evocations in many movies, television programs, and books. Interest in the circus phenomenon is unflagging, yet there have been few publications that look closely at how the circus's European origins were refashioned for an American audience. Lavishly illustrated and carefully researched, this volume explores how American culture, values, demography, and business practices altered the fundamental nature of the European circus, and how, by the end of the 19th century, they had transformed it into a distinctly American pastime.At the peak of its cultural significance, the circus was a sophisticated combination of theater and business, and made effective use of advertising, train travel, and hyperbole. The subjects in The American Circus reflect this complexity, ranging widely from thematic explorations of circus music and elephants to more closely focused studies of objects such as circus toys, souvenirs, and performers' costumes. The book also explores the dark and even nefarious side of the circus, and its associations with marginalized dimensions of American life and culture. With contributions from leading scholars, this stylishly designed volume aims to identify the salient features of an Americanized cultural product and to analyze its appeal for American audiences.Published for the Bard Graduate Center, NYExhibition Schedule:Bard Graduate Center, NY(09/21/12–02/03/13)

In this volume Social Circus is explored in depth by three Circus Studies scholars working with the aim of creating new ways of engaging with the field.Lavers, Burtt, and Bochud investigate the way that Social Circus transforms in response to its immediate environment, and particularly its social, political, and cultural context. Extensively illustrated, with photos of different Social Circuses around the world, and extensively annotated, Circus for Social Change: Social Circus in Context provides a portal into ways of seeing today’s Social Circus and is of interest to practitioners and scholars. Social Circuses explored in this volume include Cirqiniq in far North Canada; Galway Community Circus in the Republic of Ireland; Zip Zap Circus in Cape Town, South Africa; Circus Harmony in St. Louis, Missouri; Circus Laheto in Central Brazil; Women’s Circus in Melbourne, Australia; the Mobile Mini Children’s Circus (the MMCC) in various locations across Afghanistan; Cirque Hors Piste in Montreal, Canada; Sencirk in Dakar, Senegal; the Slow Circus Academy in Yokohama, JDS/Juggling de Shinshu, and the Moon Night Project in Nagano, Japan; Ponleu Selpak’s Performing Arts School and Phare Circus in Cambodia; Sirkus Magenta in Helsinki, Finland; and Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde in Bagneux in the outskirts of Paris, France.This book will be of great interest to the general reader, to practitioners working within Social Circus or arts for social change, and to scholars, teachers, and students in schools, colleges, and universities.

In this volume Social Circus is explored in depth by three Circus Studies scholars working with the aim of creating new ways of engaging with the field.Lavers, Burtt, and Bochud investigate the way that Social Circus transforms in response to its immediate environment, and particularly its social, political, and cultural context. Extensively illustrated, with photos of different Social Circuses around the world, and extensively annotated, Circus for Social Change: Social Circus in Context provides a portal into ways of seeing today’s Social Circus and is of interest to practitioners and scholars. Social Circuses explored in this volume include Cirqiniq in far North Canada; Galway Community Circus in the Republic of Ireland; Zip Zap Circus in Cape Town, South Africa; Circus Harmony in St. Louis, Missouri; Circus Laheto in Central Brazil; Women’s Circus in Melbourne, Australia; the Mobile Mini Children’s Circus (the MMCC) in various locations across Afghanistan; Cirque Hors Piste in Montreal, Canada; Sencirk in Dakar, Senegal; the Slow Circus Academy in Yokohama, JDS/Juggling de Shinshu, and the Moon Night Project in Nagano, Japan; Ponleu Selpak’s Performing Arts School and Phare Circus in Cambodia; Sirkus Magenta in Helsinki, Finland; and Le Plus Petit Cirque du Monde in Bagneux in the outskirts of Paris, France.This book will be of great interest to the general reader, to practitioners working within Social Circus or arts for social change, and to scholars, teachers, and students in schools, colleges, and universities.

In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's 'prevailing taste for deformity'. This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; 'Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy', a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's 'missing link'; the 'Last of the Mysterious Aztecs' and African 'Cannibal Kings', who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness - and thus clarified what it meant to be British - at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.

The Victorian Clown, first published in 2006, is a micro-history of mid-Victorian comedy, spun out of the life and work of two professional clowns. Their previously unpublished manuscripts - James Frowde's account of his young life with the famous Henglers' circus in the 1850s and Thomas Lawrence's 1871 gag book - offer unique, unmediated access to the grass roots of popular entertainment. Through them this book explores the role of the circus clown at the height of equestrian entertainment in Britain, when the comic managed audience attention for the riders and acrobats, parodying their skills in his own tumbling and contortionism, and also offered a running commentary on the times through his own 'wheezes' - stand-up comedy sets. Plays in the ring connect the circus to the stage, and both these men were also comic singers, giving a sharp insight into popular music just as it was being transformed by the new institution of music hall.

Ingenious automatons which appeared to think on their own. Dubious mermaids and wild men who resisted classification. Elegant sleight-of-hand artists who routinely exposed the secrets of their trade. These were some of the playful forms of fraud which astonished, titillated, and even outraged nineteenth-century America's new middle class, producing some of the most remarkable urban spectacles of the century.In The Arts of Deception, James W. Cook explores this distinctly modern mode of trickery designed to puzzle the eye and challenge the brain. Championed by the "Prince of Humbug," P. T. Barnum, these cultural puzzles confused the line between reality and illusion. Upsetting the normally strict boundaries of value, race, class, and truth, the spectacles offer a revealing look at the tastes, concerns, and prejudices of America's very first mass audiences. We are brought into the exhibition halls, theaters, galleries, and museums where imposture flourished, and into the minds of the curiosity-seekers who eagerly debated the wonders before their eyes. Cook creates an original portrait of a culture in which ambiguous objects, images, and acts on display helped define a new value system for the expanding middle class, as it confronted a complex and confusing world.

Clowning Glory is the ideal resource book for would-be clowns of all ages - from the youngest tot to the most elderly totterer. With over 200 tips and ideas, from acrobats to zoo games, this A-Z of clowning provides a wealth of material for use in churches, youth groups, children's clubs and street theatre.

Each summer a small and glamorous part of the 1930s comes back to life, recreating magic from an era long past. Evoking a tradition common in the English countryside before the arrival of radio, cinema and television, since 2000 Giffords Circus has delighted fans from far and wide with good old-fashioned entertainment, complete with acrobats, jugglers, horses, magic, puppeteers, dancers and comedy. Lavishly illustrated with a wealth of stunning colour photographs, Giffords Circus goes behind the scenes at the not-so-big top, to show how the magic and mystery are created.