Circus and the Avant-Gardes ed. by Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Circus and the Avant-Gardes ed. by Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand Dave Peterson Circus and the Avant-Gardes. Edited by Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand. Routledge, 2022. Hardcover $128.00, E-book $39.16. 284 pages. 27 illustrations. Ann-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand’s Circus and the Avant-Gardes consists of fourteen essays by sixteen authors, most using focused case studies to center the relationship between European and Russian circus and the avant-garde. The essays explore not just how circus served to inspire avant-garde movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also how the lens of circus can challenge presumptions about the avant-garde, both as a historical set of movements and as an ongoing spur of change in the world of performance. The book is invested in how the relationship between circus and avant-garde has long been a two-way street, with theatrical forms drawing inspiration from circus, and circus then absorbing and reworking many of these innovations to its own ends. The book is divided into five groups of essays. Part 1 focuses on circus and its relation to a variety of early avant-garde movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Part 2 examines performances in the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century, centering ways that the intersection of circus, popular entertainments, and avant-garde destabilize traditional hierarchies and artistic borders. Part 3 explores the influence of circus and avant-garde on the emergence of film in the early twentieth century. Part 4 focuses on contemporary performances, both live and filmed, and how they reenvision or use avant-gardeand circus-inspired materials from the past. Part 5 explores how circuses have changed in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond, often incorporating ideas from the avant-garde or from other artistic movements. Taken together, the diverse essays interrogate the ways in which circus has been used by innovative art forms, while also using circus as a lens through which to challenge avant-garde presumptions of innovation and high art. Many of the essays in Circus and the Avant-Gardes work to reframe the narrative around the workings and cultural importance of circus. In part 1, Hildbrand challenges the notion that early circus was largely without narrative through a close analysis of nineteenth-century circus practices. Hildbrand links the rise of narrative in circus, through forms such as pantomime, to the increasingly literary nature of the theatre. In doing so, she challenges the presumption that circus primarily offered the avant-garde nonnarrative models of performance, and thus reaffirms circus’s potential as an experimental site in non-literary performance. Her essay also provides details on early circus performance content, an under-documented area of circus studies. In part 2, Martyn Jolly positions a collection of novelty acts performed in mid-nineteenth-century Australia as tools for understanding the colonial settler worldview but also as sites that destabilize views of urban colonial capitals and avant-garde innovations as centers in the modern colonial [End Page 93] world. Instead, acts or apparatus were changed or altered at the colonial site, so that, “however fleetingly, ‘the new’ was actively produced, as well as passively consumed” (110). Jolly concludes that “most scholars of the avant-garde still tacitly accept this topos, obsessed with the one-sided ‘cutting edge’ rather than the two-sided ‘border’” (110). These essays and others add insight into early circus and variety performances, while reframing traditional relationships between circus, avant-garde, and modernity. Essays in Circus and the Avant-Gardes also work to expand the definition of avant-garde and broaden what the term can mean. In part 3, Kristian Moen argues that early film animation, including Alexander Calder’s miniature circus, owed more to avant-garde and circus practice than to traditional theatrical narrative, stating that early animated “films share the aesthetic approaches associated with avant-garde art, including qualities of subversion, resistance, playfulness and liveliness” (139). Similarly, in part 4, Claire Warden seeks to expand the term avant-garde in more popular directions while also using circus as an apt frame for...