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Chapter 10 - Aerial Performance

Aerial Aesthetics

from Part II - Circus Acts and Aesthetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2021

By
Kate Holmes
Edited by
Gillian Arrighi  and
Jim Davis
Gillian Arrighi
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle, New South Wales
Jim Davis
Affiliation:
University of Warwick
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Summary

The origins of aerial performance are difficult to identify with any certainty, but ever since Jules Léotard popularised trapeze in the mid-nineteenth century, aerial arts have captured the public imagination. The role that aerial action has played, and continues to play, within performances is to provide spectacle and sensation. Although aerial action appears to demonstrate performers taking real risks, there is a distance between what the performer experiences and the audience perceives. Examining both key historical figures and contemporary practice, this chapter proposes four aesthetics for aerial performance: weightlessness, risk, gender, and physical appearance.

Keywords

aerial performanceaerial apparatusJules LéotardPink Gazelle (Vreni May)John-Paul ZaccariniLillian LeitzelBarbette (Vander Clyde)artists with disabilities
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to the Circus , pp. 155 - 168
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Further Reading

Brunsdale, Maureen, and Schmitt, Mark. The Bloomington-Normal Circus Legacy: The Golden Age of Aerialists. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Carter, Katrina. ‘Exposing the Implicit: AD for Aerial Action, Identity, and Storytelling.’ Teaching Artist Journal 16, no. 3–4 (2018): 106–13.Google Scholar
Day, Helen. ‘Female Daredevils.’ In The New Woman and Her Sisters: Feminism and Theatre 1850–1914, edited by Gardner, Vivien and Rutherford, Susan, 137–57. London: Wheatsheaf, 1999.Google Scholar
Lawrence, Kate. ‘Hanging from Knowledge: Vertical Dance As Spatial Fieldwork.’ Performance Research 15, no. 4 (2010): 49–58.Google Scholar
Ritter, Naomi. ‘Art and Androgyny: The Aerialist.’ Studies in 20th Century Literature 13, no. 2 (1989): 173–93.Google Scholar
Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess & Modernity. London: Routledge, 1994.Google Scholar
Sizorn, Magali. ‘Female Circus Performers and Artification: The Passage to Art and Its Implications.’ In Žene & Cirkus, edited by Kralj, Ivan, 75–93. Zagreb: Mala performerska scena, 2011.Google Scholar
Tait, Peta. ‘Danger Delights: Texts of Gender and Race in Aerial Performance.’ New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 45 (1996): 43–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tait, Peta ‘Feminine Free Fall: A Fantasy of Freedom.’ Theatre Journal 48, no. 1 (1996): 27–34.Google Scholar
Tait, Peta ‘Fleshed, Muscular Phenomenologies: Across Sexed and Queer Circus Bodies.’ In Body Show/s: Australian Viewings of Live Performance, edited by Tait, Peta, 60–78. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.Google Scholar
Tait, Peta ‘Re/membering Muscular Circus Bodies: Triple Somersaults, the Flying Jordans and Clarke Brothers.’ Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 33, no. 1 (2006): 26–38.Google Scholar
Tait, Peta ‘Risk, Danger and Other Paradoxes in Circus and in Circus Oz Parody.’ In The Routledge Circus Studies Reader, edited by Tait, Peta and Lavers, Katie, 528–45. London: Routledge, 2016.Google Scholar

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