04Spring 2005
   
 

 

MEDIATIZATION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE CIRCUS

by

Beryl Hawkins


 

 

 

ABSTRACT

The circus, which has a longstanding tradition of trapeze artists flying under the big top, along with the raw smell of elephants, tigers jumping through fire hoops and the zany antics of clowns, has been completely transformed. Along with “Zatsugi”, other world class circus and illusion shows such as  Cirque Du Soleil and Siegfried and Roy are also examples of this burgeoning phenomenon.

Do the “contortionist” body images and technical acrobatic feats  that resemble well-oiled machines fit neatly into the reality of our own transformation into “cyborgs”, or “hybrids of machine and animal-humans”, as Donna Haraway theorizes  (Haraway, 259)?  Will our nostalgia for the circus ritual withstand the “digitization” of time?  This writer believes the answer is affirmative to all of these questions that raise serious concerns about the state of circus culture today.

The one overriding factor that may be both the cause  and, at the same time, the salvation for the circus dilemma, in all likelihood, could be our own obsession with machines and technology.  Our media-driven society has programmed us to expect the "mediatized" to encroach in all areas of our lives, including the live performance.  In the case of circus performances, producers have evidently yielded to these expectations.  Furthermore, circus acrobats also symbolize both the real and the "ideal" technical machine, or in other words, icons of the technology we crave.  This fascination, in turn, could very well help to preserve the circus as a form of mass entertainment that will never die out completely.


Martian-looking figures in glittering silver unitards with one star poised on their chests emerge from the white milky mist, stepping in perfect formation.  Small but brilliant round lights outline the perfect unisphere in the looming backdrop that resembles perhaps a space ship, or the global society we live in.  The pulsating, heavy hitting, orchestral music wraps you into this interplanetary world while long streams of fast moving floodlights heighten the cinematic style drama.

Contrary to what it may seem, this is neither a scene from George Lucas' latest film creation nor a musical number from Madonna’s latest galactic tour.  As unconventional as it appears, this is the 21st century’s mutation of the circus, a scene from “Zatsugi”, the world famous Chinese acrobatic troupe.  The circus, which has a longstanding tradition of trapeze artists flying under the big top, along with the raw smell of elephants, tigers jumping through fire hoops and the zany antics of clowns, has as you can plainly see, been completely transformed. Along with “Zatsugi”, other world-class circus and illusion shows such as Cirque Du Soleil and Siegfried and Roy are also examples of this burgeoning phenomenon.

Was this metamorphosis to New Age style productions an attempt to head off the onslaught of slick, digitized media entertainment?  Has the new media economy of conglomerate entertainment swallowed up the “antique” family-oriented circus culture? Do the “contortionist” body images and technical acrobatic feats that resemble well-oiled machines fit neatly into the reality of our own transformation into “cyborgs”, or “hybrids of machine and animal-humans”, as Donna Haraway theorizes  (Haraway, 259)?  Is the “Big Top”, as we know it from our childhood recollections, a casualty of the social forces that shape our post-modern society? Will our nostalgia for the circus ritual withstand the “digitization” of time?  This writer believes the answer is affirmative to all of these questions that raise serious concerns about the state of circus culture today.

The one overriding factor that may be both the cause and, at the same time, the salvation for the circus dilemma, in all likelihood, could be our own obsession with machines and technology.  Our media-driven society has programmed us to expect the "mediatized" to encroach in all areas of our lives, including the live performance.  In the case of circus performances, producers have evidently yielded to these expectations.  Furthermore, circus acrobats also symbolize both the real and the "ideal" technical machine, or in other words, icons of the technology we crave.  This fascination, in turn, could very well help to preserve the circus as a form of mass entertainment that will never die out completely.

METHODOLOGY

Witnessing other live circus performances over the past 25 years, this writer started to observe a noticeable pattern - the gradual rise of the techno circus; a decline in the number and popularity of the raw "Big Top" acts. After attending a recent performance of the Chinese acrobatic troupe, "Zatsugi", it became abundantly clear that the circus is no longer the raw, zany, "low culture" entertainment of the past.  It was this recent performance that prompted this writer to probe more deeply into this transformation and the extenuating factors that contributed to this new trend.  The economic reality has shifted as well.  Above all, ticket prices are costly for these techno circus productions ranging anywhere from $45 - $120.  Has the target audience for the circus shifted, too, away from those young people who grew up worshipping "the circus that's coming to town".  After all, parents and young people can hardly deal with these harsh economic realities.  Therefore drawing upon my own personal experiences with circus live performances, television and videotaped shows, this writer also researched recent trends in circus and techno productions and gathered opinions from some of the leading experts examining circus culture.  From this examination, this writer will attempt to show, that to some degree, most of these factors as stated in the above questions, play a part in the “mediatization” of the mesmerizing, earth-defying, bizarre, but most of all, extraordinary “world” of the circus.

LIVENESS AND MEDIATIZATION

These avant garde or New Age circus and illusion troupes display strong symptoms of what Phillip Auslander in Liveness describes as mediatization in live performance. “Zatsugi”, the Guangdong Acrobatic Troupe, which is considered one of the premier Chinese ensembles, is a prime example. The troupe manages to integrate the traditional oriental folk culture along with technological themes as well as adapting other non-circus artistic forms into their productions.

The power of electronic technology in live performance creates an even stronger impression upon an audience that is accustomed to the hype, glitz and allure of mediatization.  During the evening of the troupe’s recent performance at Green Hall Theater in Sagami Ono (Kanagawa, Japan), the audience, comprised mainly of adults, was captivated by the acrobatic spectacle and continued to respond throughout the show with “oohs” and “ahs” and ongoing applause. Other examples of technological elements were the heavy rhythmical disco beats accompanying the acrobats, who were encased in gigantic rolling steel rings with blue cone-shaped lights, emulating pulsating disco lights, during the second act in the show.

Heavy thunderous sounds opened the seventh act in the show with floating video patterns on the floor and a large blue image in the backdrop that turned into the same video floor pattern.  The use of video and electronic music also heightened the dramatic elements of this scene featuring aerialists on steel poles performing gravity-defying feats, while being held by another acrobat standing on huge rubber balls.  An Olympic-style theme with a strong syncopated drum and symphonic accompaniment is featured in the eighth act where more than 10 gymnasts dive and roll through rotating rings, which uncannily resemble the real Olympics icon.  Perhaps China’s upcoming sponsorship in the Olympics may have been the impetus for this particular act.  Clearly these examples show the heavy influence of technology and mediatization in avant garde productions like “Zatsugi”.  The development of technology as well as the rise in television are two extremely important factors that caused major changes in the circus, according to Robert Sweet and Robert Habenstein in Some Perspectives on the Circus in Transition.

Similarly Cirque de Soleil, the spectacular Canadian circus troupe, incorporates a number of nontraditional circus themes, some of which are based on media images.

Ironically, the show’s production, DRALION, borrows heavily from the Chinese circus tradition and actually hired about 37 Chinese acrobats from the Xu-Nan Flag Circus based in Kumming, a city in the Yunnan province (Yoo).  While the traditional clown and juggling acts still remain in this production, they seem to take a backseat to the more spectacular mediatized acts such as the bamboo poles or the aerial pas de deux. 

In his critique of the DRALION show for the Times Picayune newspaper, Doug MacCash recalls the numerous themes – “everything from “Swan Lake’ to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind’; Samuel Beckett to the ‘Three Stooges’".  He also commented on the show's non-traditional approach by saying that this production has all the “trappings” of the circus with a “different tone” (MacCash). 

Other Cirque de Soleil shows such as

ALEGRIA capitalizes on the themes of power in governing groups and people;  

QUIDAM focuses on the isolated individual who attaches herself to the universe and   SALTIMBANCO is concerned with a new vision of urban life.

“The Master the Impossible” illusionists, Siegfried and Roy, are also no exception to the onslaught of mediatization.  Based in Las Vegas, the illusion extravaganza has captivated audiences for more than 25 years.  The most spectacular and highly promoted act, the disappearing white tiger, is unfortunately the same act that has caused the show to shut down indefinitely.  Roy Horn was attacked by the white tiger last year, became critically wounded and is now recovering.  Members of the audience at the show inadvertently thought the accident was part of the show -- an incident that lends credence to the shadowy connection between illusion and reality in the theater.  One prime example of mediatization occurred during the middle of show. A huge video screen was unveiled, depicting a poolside scene at Siegfried and Roy’s Las Vegas mansion and a tour of some of the rooms featuring the artists and the animals in their magical family. Tigers and other circus animals swam leisurely in the pool.

One almost half expected the animals to be sipping on cocktails as they indulged  in the comfort and the magic of “family life”. The media intrusion of the “home movie”, however, tended to disrupt the flow of the dazzling magical acts and plunks the audience into a video mindset that definitely  diverted their attention away from the magic at hand.

 

The relationship between the circus and mediatization is a more complex paradox since the circus, at one time, held some influence over the theatrical tradition. Later on theater had a profound influence over early television and radio because many of these shows were based on theatrical material. Auslander is correct in concluding that the current relationship between the live and the mediatized is an interesting study of role reversal.   Joachim Fiebach in “Theatricality:  From Oral Traditions to Televised Realities" pointed out that at one time after the turn of the century, spectacular circus feats served as a model for the theater because of its focus on perfection and precise organization. (Fiebach, 18). Thus the circus tradition played a more influential role than one might suspect over the media, although in an indirect way.  Acrobats in Chinese traditional opera as well as, according to  Fiebach, acrobatics in “old Nigerian itinerant theater", are also examples of the historically  close relationship between theater and circus.  In addition, during the Vaudeville era, circus-type acts shared the same billing with more traditional performing artists like singers and tap dancers.

It's possible to surmise from this "circus-theater-media cycle" that the circus may have had an indirect influence over the media. Ironically, a recent television program is also adding to this dilemma of role reversal if you consider Fox Television’s new program, “30 Seconds to Fame”.  Television is once again being influenced by the theatrical tradition of the circus but Fox Television, of course, puts a different spin on it.  Displaying the "extraordinary" now has a time limit - 30 seconds.

Circus-type performers (contortionists, jugglers, etc.) and other performing artists have 30 seconds to perform their act in order to compete for a $25,000 prize. In one of the recent programs seen by this writer, a sister contortionist act won the $25,000 prize beating out an R & B singer and a hip hop dance group.  Clearly our innate predilection for the "extraordinary" was the winning criteria for the audience judging this particular show.

THE CIRCUS: STEEPED IN RITUALS AND TRADITION

Since current circus productions have veered so far away from their “historical past”, it’s a pretty fair assumption to believe that the circus will never fully revert back to the heyday of its “Golden Years”, which was long before the introduction of television and radio. Nor will it completely die off.  If we examine, however, the very nature of ritual, one could surmise that the circus tradition "must go on".

If we acknowledge Roy Rappaport's theory that ritual is a “social act basic to humanity” and constitutes a kind a social contract, then we can understand that while the commercial success of the traditional circus may be at risk, the event itself may withstand the rigors of time (Rappaport 31).

Although there are variations in performance approaches, Rappaport suggests that “ritual sequences are composed of conventional, even stereotyped elements, for instance stylized and often decorous gestures and postures and the arrangements of these elements in time and space are usually more or less fixed (33)”.  We can see evidence of this in the two shows, Cirque du Soleil and the Zatsugi Chinese troupe. The same stylized gestures and postures can be seen in several acts in both productions.  These include the acts involving contortionist performers, the act where acrobats dive and roll through rotating rings and the aerialist acts. This similarity in circus acts even though they are coming from different circus troupes also supports the very definition of ritual as noted by Rappaport, which is “the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers”(Rappaport 24).

As a distinguishing characteristic between ceremonial ritual and theatrical ritual, Rappaport believes that the audience’s relationship with the performers is generally more separate and isolated in theatrical events.  While there is a clear separation between the performers and the audience in theatrical style events, the circus seems to create more intimacy between the two groups than traditional theater.  Oftentimes, clowns intermingle with the audience members. Circus audiences invariably seem to share common emotions such as fascination and astonishment, feelings that are usually freely expressed at these events. Japanese audiences are normally quite reticent with regard to showing emotions at public theatrical events, yet the audience at the "Zatsugi" performance continued to express cries of amazement and clapped profusely throughout the show.  Similarly the Japanese audience at the Siegfried and Roy show several years ago was spontaneous with their verbal reactions.  At an American performance of Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus, the mood of the crowd was overwhelmingly enthusiastic and the high energy level of the show infused the audience with exhilaration and heightened pleasure.  In countless reviews of circus performances as part of the research for this paper, critical comments ranged from “spectacular” to “still the greatest show on earth".

 

In addition to Rappaport's ritual theories, the circus tradition constitutes a kind of ritual in and of itself.  A great deal of the circus tradition revolves around and is dependant upon the family of dedicated performers who have passed on their skills and knowledge from one generation to the next.  In Some Perspectives on the Circus in Transition, Robert Sweet also confirms that the circus is “highly traditionalized” and is based on a solid “social organization” and culture.  For example, the vice president of operations for the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bros. Circus , Elvin Bale, believes that many circus people are born into the tradition, according to Hugh Mulligan’s interview with the veteran performer in the Chicago Tribune in 1999 (Mulligan). Bale’s father was a ringmaster and tiger trainer, his mother was a trapeze artist and his great grandfather was a trick cyclist.  In another example, Alexander Pikhienko and his daughter Olga were a team, famous worldwide  for their handstand act in the Russian Circus, Ringling Brothers and now Olga has ventured out on her own and joined Cirque du Soleil, according to Christine Bordeon’s article in the Times-Picayune in 1998 (Bordeon). 

Indeed we can also surmise from Chinese acrobatic training and dramatic culture that tradition plays a very important role in the Chinese circus.  As it is true in Western circuses, Chinese performers undergo rigorous training oftentimes from an early age (around 5 or 6), and that training itself is steeped in the tradition of the Circus art.  Chinese acrobatic performances and the brilliant costumes are the central focus of, for instance, traditional Cantonese festivals, Barbara Ward, from Newnham College at the University of Cambridge  noted in her article, “Not Merely Players:  Dramas, Art and Ritual in Traditional China” (Ward 30).  Other traditions can be found in the use of color.  The color red, which signifies good and brave in Chinese tradition, was used abundantly in both costumes and stage props in many of the acts in the “Zatsugi” production.

 

The use of white in the opening scene, which denotes coldness, and danger in traditional Chinese culture added a symbolic message to the ambiance of the cold, ethereal, outer space scenery.

Despite this writer's assumption that the social necessity of ritual may help preserve the circus culture, one cannot ignore, either, the harsh economic reality facing the circus. Ten years ago there were a little more than 100 traveling circuses in the U.S. and Canada, according to statistics from the Circus World Museum research center in Florida (Yenckel).  In Europe, however, the circus is not faring as well because so many circus performers who thrived in the state-sponsored circus troupes lost their jobs with the collapse of the Eastern bloc countries, although some of them have found employment in the American and Canadian shows. 

Thus merely to survive many small circus troupes have disappeared from the previously populated circus “landscape”  and performers have transferred their talents to the mega circus troupes such as Cirque du Soleil . 

Contortionists, “Cyborgs” and the Extraordinary Power of the Circus

The hypnotic, mesmerizing and ecstatic reactions to circus performances are perhaps tied into our innate fascination with the bizarre and  the superhuman as it is reflected in the extraordinary physical prowess of acrobats. The acrobats, contortionists and aerialists “project a holistic and synthetic state of being, unifying the ideal and the real” according to Don Handelman, who is affiliated with the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University Jerusalem, (Handelman). As spectators we believe that circus artists represent an ideal, almost superhuman state of being. Watching the spectacle puts us in a state of mind where we can connect the bridge between the impossible and the possible because after all, we are witnessing it live, with the naked eye. This perception also underscores the importance of liveness in circus performance.  If we know there are no camera tricks, we can be more easily swept away by the spectacular feats.

Janet Davis, affiliated with the University of Texas at Austin also makes a similar claim that acrobats and contortionists “play with the boundary between the real and the fake” but she goes one step further be including the analogy of the tenuous boundary between the animal and the human”(Davis).

Coupled with that dichotomy between the “ideal” and the “real” is our own “intense pleasure with machines” as Haraway conjectures, and circus performers can conjure up machine-like body images, if we consider the current staging and presentation of the “mediatized” circus performers discussed in this paper.  Jane Goodall who teaches at The University of Western Sydney also believes that  “perhaps the performer and the machine have some strange affinity that draws out cultural anxieties about becoming automatic.” (Goodall 441)   In other words, performers have genuine fears about viewing themselves as automated machines.  Goodall cites an example of the ballet “Swan Lake” where the prima ballerina, in asserting her own interpretation,  whips through 32 fouettes (sequential turns) during the famous court scene; setting up a tradition that subsequent ballerinas felt compelled to emulate.  We find evidence of this same artistic interpretation in the “Oriental Swan Lake” act in the “Zatsugi” acrobatic troupe’s live performance. A petite, lithe prima ballerina primly poises herself on the shoulder or head of her partner, while she performs arabesques, penches, leg kicks and other spectacular ballet feats. The “Oriental Swan Lake” act was the most well received act in the entire show, perhaps because of this anxiety between "machinery and human" or "the ideal and the real".

Davis also believes that we’re skirting that boundary between animals and human. Circus performers and animal trainers grapple with these boundaries. Animal rights activists are active in the circus culture because they also believe those boundaries are too tenuous.  According to the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) website, the activists claim that captive wild animals are subjected to physical and psychological pain from unnatural confinement and the use of whips and electric shock prods, which are used to train them to do circus tricks.  Their unrelenting activities have, as a result, sharply reduced the number of animals performing in circuses nowadays and affected the future viability of the circus industry as a whole.  British circuses have been particularly hard hit by this socio-political movement.

Do the “contortionist” body images and technical acrobatic feats  that resemble well-oiled machines fit neatly into the reality of our own transformation into “cyborgs”, or “hybrids of machine and animal-humans”, as Donna Haraway theorizes  (Haraway, 259).  This transformation, that Haraway suggests, is a result of our present day social reality; our increasing obsession with machines in this post modern era.

 

The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated.  The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment (Haraway 275).

 

If, in fact, machines have now dominated our bodies and ourselves, then we may look upon acrobats and other extraordinary performers as representing the “ideal” technical machine, hence we became overly enamoured with this kind of public exhibition. Our social reality dictates that we are more closely wrapped in our own shells, interacting more with technology than other human beings. Circus performers have thus become icons of the technology we crave.

This writer also fully agrees with Haraway's  dire picture of our current socio-psychological state. She postulates that “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert (Haraway 259).  Can this be the reason why we crave the technology? Is it a means to interject some liveliness into our routine existence?  Besides the obvious benefits of technology, maybe it can also serve as a barometer that reminds us of the importance of liveness, of the depths of human existence. Above all, we must guard against technology dominating our lives and suppressing our humanity.

The same holds true when it comes to liveness in circus performance and the technological dominance that has transformed and shaped the circus of today. While the mediatization of the circus is very evident in circus culture, it is of the utmost importance to also preserve a tradition that represents a link to the past. If we allow the media to completely control the live performance in the circus culture, then we will have also lost an important cultural tradition as well.

Following Roy Rappaport's theory that ritual is a “social act basic to humanity” and constitutes a kind a social contract, then we can understand that the circus, as has been shown in the previous section, is stepped in both ritual and tradition. While the commercial success of the traditional circus may be at risk, the event itself may withstand the rigors of time because of its association with ritual.  On the other hand, in the long run it may be our obsession with the machine that winds up preserving the circus tradition, since we seem to be more comfortable with the hazy line between the “real and the ideal” and the “animal and the human” in a circus environment.  It is young people, one can conclude,  whom we need to impress upon the urgency of preserving the live circus tradition, even if it continues to undergo “mediatized” transformations.  But we certainly want to make sure we stop the momentum if it ever reaches the realm of “virtual reality”, where liveness becomes a relic of the past and technological interaction becomes the societal cultural norm.


WORKS CITED

Auslander, Phillip.  Liveness. London:  Routledge, 1999.

Bordeon, Christine.  "Circus Tradition Span Generations."  Times-Picayune. (May 24, 1998): 14F.2.  On-line. Pro-Quest. 11 May 2004.

Cirque du Soleil.   On-line Posting. http://www.cirquedusoleil.com/

Davis, Janet.  “Freakishly, Fraudulently Modern”.  American Quarterly. 53.3 (2003): 525-538. On-line. Project Muse. 11 May 2004.

Goodall, Jane. "Transferred Agencies:  Performance and the Fear of Automatism". Theatre Journal. 40.4 (1997): 441-453. On-line. Project Muse. 11 May 2004.

Fiebach ,Joachim. “Theatricality:  From Oral Traditions to Televised 'Realities'”.  SubStance.  31.2&3 (2002):17-41. On-line. Project Muse. 11 May 2004.

Handelman, Don.  "Symbolic Types, the Body and Circus". Semiotica. (1991):85,3-4,205,225. On-line. Sociological Abstracts. 11 May 2004.

Haraway, Donna.  “A Manifesto for Cyborgs:  Science Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s”.  Socialist Review. (1985): 257-276.

MacCash, Doug.  “Leaps of Imagination; Cirque du Soleil’s Dralion brings Fantastic feats to Metarie”. Times-Picayune. (Man. 31, 2003):20. On-line. Pro-Quest. 11 May 2004.

Mulligan, Hugh. "CIRCUS REFUSES TO FOLD ITS TENT DESPITE ALLURE OF TV, VIDEO GAMES, TRAVELING SHOWS CONTINUE TO PERFORM NATIONWIDE". Chicago Tribune. (Aug. 2, 1999): 8. On-line. Pro-Quest. 11 May 2004.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA).   On-line Posting.  http://www.circuses.com/

Rappaport, Roy.  Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999.

WORKS CITED (Con.)

Siegfried and Roy.  On-line Posting. http://www.siegfriedandroy.com/

Sweet, Robert and Robert Habenstein.  "Some Perspectives on the Circus in Transition".  Journal of Popular Culture. 6 (3) (1972): 583-590. On-line. ABC-CLIO. 11 May 2004.

Yenckel, James.  “Still the Greatest Show on Earth”.  The Washington Post.  (Aug. 19, 1990): e.01. On-line. Pro-Quest. 11 May 2004.

Yoo, Charles.  “Chinese Acrobats enjoy the perks, prestige of Cirque du Soleil”.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  (Feb. 1, 2001): JA 14. On-line. Pro-Quest. 11 May 2004.

Ward, Barbara. "Not Merely players:  Drama, Art and Ritual in Traditional China". Man.  News Series. Vol 14, No. 1 (March., 1979): 18-39. On-line. JSTOR. 11 May 2004.