The most famous tight-rope artist was Blondin who crossed the Niagara Falls in However, perhaps the greatest innovation was the flying trapeze act, first introduced by Jean Leotard at the Circque d'Hiver in Paris in By the end of the nineteenth century the circus was an established and popular form of family entertainment, the aristocracy of travelling entertainment. Queen Victoria invited a range of circus showmen including P. Barnum to perform for the royal family at Windsor and Balmoral from the s and this royal patronage secured its place as both an art form and one of the most popular of all the forms of entertainment exhibited during her reign.
From that auspicious time in the late eighteenth century, the circus has travelled, developed and incorporated many more elements, with each generation of circus showmen challenging and innovating the art form.
The showmen that feature largely in the NFCA's collections have two things in common. First, none of them came from traditional circus backgrounds. Second, each played a key part in expanding the concept of circus, thereby bringing the circus experience to new audiences.
Each one of them defined circus for their generation. Beginning with the Father of Circus, Philip Astley, we move to the two great showmen of the nineteenth century Lord George Sanger, who did more than any other to broaden the circus's appeal in the United Kingdom and P.
He called this performance arena a Circle and the building an amphitheater but they became known in time as Circus. Andrew Ducrow continued after Astley and was at time proprietor of his Amphitheater. All these circuses were in especially built buildings for them. Tents appeared later. Joshuah Purdy was the first to use a large tent for his circus and he did it in Thomas Taplin Cooke brought tent to England in Because tents were easier to use they slowly but surely replaced circus buildings, retrofitted buildings and open spaces.
This type of circus still has traditional circus acts but it combines it with theatrical techniques to tell a story or present a theme. Another significant transformation factor was a renewed interest in gymnastics and physical activities which led to the resurrection of the Olympic Games in at a time when few gymnasts could be seen outside the circus. The most consequential early-twentieth-century innovation in the circus, however, occurred in Russia.
In , Lenin nationalized the Russian circuses, and the vast majority of their performers, natives of Western Europe, fled the country.
Faced with the task of training a core of uniquely Russian performers, the Soviet government established, in , the State College for Circus and Variety Arts , better known as the Moscow Circus School. Not only did the school rejuvenate the Russian circus, it also developed training methods modeled after sport-gymnastics, created original presentations with the help of directors and choreographers, and even originated innovative techniques and apparatuses that led to the invention of entirely new kinds of acts.
When, in the late s, the Moscow Circus a generic name adopted by all Soviet circus companies touring abroad started showing in the West, those trained by the Soviet school contrasted favorably with those trained by the traditional circus families. Russian performers displayed originality, unparalleled artistry, and amazing technique, whereas the rest just repeated themselves in a desperate attempt to compete with both the Russian innovations and increasing competition from movies, radio, and television, which they did using the only weapons at their disposal: time-tested traditional acts.
But resistance to change had transformed tradition into routine. The old circus families were losing touch with their audience's ever-transforming world.
There was obviously a strong planetary need for a circus renaissance: That same year , in Adelaide, Australia, a young company of clowns, acrobats and aerialists that called itself "New Circus" began to perform and attract attention. It was followed a year later by the Soapbox Circus; both companies merged in , to become Circus Oz.
Perhaps not coincidentally, all these changes came at a time when European intellectuals—mostly French—were fretting over the decline of the circus as a performing art. It was followed in by Paris's Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain World Festival of the Circus of Tomorrow , created to showcase and promote a new generation of circus performers, mostly trained in circus schools.
In , the French government created the Centre National des Arts du Cirque, a professional circus college on the Russian model. Other schools, often private not-for-profit entities and with varying degrees of professionalism, were established in England, Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Australia, Brazil, and the U. Although China has a year-old acrobatic theater tradition of its own, its many troupes—similarly to their Russisan counterparts—developed new training method]]s after the Communist revolution and found themselves welcome participants in the circus renaissance.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the circus, which has always been a highly adaptable performing art, is undergoing cosmetic changes and a new expansion. Jump to: navigation , search. By Dominique Jando If the history of theater, ballet, opera, vaudeville, movies, and television is generally well documented, serious studies of circus history are sparse, and known only to a few circus enthusiasts and scholars.
Category : History. Tools Glossary Links. Months before the show arrived, an advance team saturated the surrounding region with brilliantly colored lithographs of the extraordinary: elephants, bearded ladies, clowns, tigers, acrobats and trick riders. Families witnessed the raising of a tented city across nine acres, and a morning parade that made its way down Main Street, advertising the circus as a wondrous array of captivating performers and beasts from around the world.
For isolated American audiences, the sprawling circus collapsed the entire globe into a pungent, thrilling, educational sensorium of sound, smell and color, right outside their doorsteps.
What townspeople couldn't have recognized, however, was that their beloved Big Top was also fast becoming a projection of American culture and power. The American three-ring circus came of age at precisely the same historical moment as the U. Three-ring circuses like Barnum and Bailey's were a product of the same Gilded Age historical forces that transformed a fledgling new republic into a modern industrial society and rising world power.
The extraordinary success of the giant three-ring circus gave rise to other forms of exportable American giantism, such as amusement parks, department stores, and shopping malls. The first circuses in America were European—and small. Although circus arts are ancient and transnational in origin, the modern circus was born in England during the s when Philip Astley, a cavalryman and veteran of the Seven Years War , brought circus elements—acrobatics, riding, and clowning—together in a ring at his riding school near Westminster Bridge in London.
Ricketts, a trick rider, and his multicultural troupe of a clown, an acrobat, a rope-walker, and a boy equestrian, dazzled President George Washington and other audience members with athletic feats and verbal jousting. Individual performers had toured North America for decades, but this event marked the first coordinated performance in a ring encircled by an audience.
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