Tag Archives: circus

Circus Acrobats

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Acrobats are another piece of the circus story that has a long history. The first known depictions of acrobats jugglers appeared about 5000 years ago, in Egypt, in the early dynastic period (3000 B.C.). The Egyptians developed a strong tradition of these arts and later taught them to the Greeks. They in turn taught the arts to the Romans.

The Romans spread them throughout their Empire via itinerant troupes of performers.

Acrobatics rose independently in China.

Although the earliest performances had religious overtones, the entertainers soon realized the audiences enjoyed the performances as entertainment. This created tension with the religious powers, culminating in the Middle Ages who accused the performers of being in league with the devil. During the Reformation in England during the 1660s, all such forms of frivolity was forbidden.

Clowns

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When Philip Astley set up his equestrian show in England, he hired clowns to amuse the audiences between equestrian acts. Although those clown owed their history to Italy’s Commedia del’ Arte from the 16th century, with a little bit of court jester thrown in, the trickster character has a long long history. Folktales from around the world showcase the tricksters, sometimes amusingly and sometimes scarily.

Although the more modern clowns are figures of fun, they did not start that way. (I think Stephen King really put his finger on an atavistic fear of clowns in IT. I wonder if it is part of the same psychology that makes zombies and vampires scary; something that is looks human, or once was human, but isn’t.) Even some of the characters who were supposed to be funny were also monsters. Think of Punch (from Punch and Judy) who beat his wife and murdered his children. I remember visiting the Taos reservation during a celebration. The clowns were punishers, running through the crowd and throwing people who had disobeyed customs or cultural norms into a pond of water. I was merely an onlooker and I was terrified.

Clown from the Commedia was a buffoon, a foil to the sly Harlequin, but the two characters have been rolled together. According to Wikipedia, the word clown was first recorded in 1560 meaning boor, peasant. It took on the meaning of fool. Clowns have evolved from the fool to other characters. Think Emmett Kelly’s weary Willie, Charlie Chaplin’s tramp. Funny and Sad both.

In any event, when Astley set up his circus, the first modern clown, Joseph Grimaldi, was so popular he became a star in his own right.

Animals in the Circus

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When we think of circuses, we usually think of exotic animals: lions and tigers and elephants.

But the first animals that were used in the early circus in the United States were not those exotics (especially then). The first elephant l did not come to this country until 1794. One elephant was brought from the Orient (which covered India, China, Japan and more then) by the Salem merchants.

No, most of the animals that would have been used in a circus were more homey. Dogs, pigs ( like the pig used by Billy the clown in A Circle of Dead Girls), and maybe bears. Horses were the stars for many years since the circus begun by Astley in England had begun as an equestrian show.

Some of the primary sources I read quoted farm boys who went home after the circus and tried to train their farm horses to circus tricks.

A Circle of Dead Girls

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A Circle of Dead Girls is set against the beginnings of the circus in the new U.S.

The circus itself, of course, is very old. Acrobatics began with the Ancient Egyptians and, independently, in China. By the Middle Ages, traveling troupes went all through Europe and England, performing at fairs and other events. But when the Puritans came to power in England, such frivolity as the circus was forbidden. The circus did not begin again until 1768 when a retired military instructor, Sergeant-Major Philip Astley, decided to display his equestrian prowess. It proved surprisingly popular and a few years later he decided to add jugglers, acrobats and other performers, ending each show with a pantomime.

A student of Astley, John Bill Ricketts, was the man who brought the circus to the United States. He’d planned to open a riding school/circus in France but with the increasing hostilities between England and France chose to go to the United States instead. Following the lead of Astley, Ricketts opened a riding school in Philadelphia first in 1792. Philadelphia was the capital of the United States at that time. When that was established and his reputation made, he built an arena for his circus in 1793.

By 1900 the circus was the most popular form of entertainment in the country.

In A Circle of Dead Girls, I posit the beginnings of the traveling circus that makes a stop in Maine. And from there lies a tale . . .

Women and the circus

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The scantily dressed female circus performers are such a feature of American lore that few of us considers their history or how unusual they were when this entertainment first arrived in the United States.  Although the circus has a long history – the Egyptians are commonly credited with inventing acrobatics – all forms of entertainment including the jugglers and the acrobats were banned during the Puritan era.  It was not recreated in England until Sergeant-Major Philip Astley began exhibiting his equestrian prowess on the outskirts of London in 1768. He performed in a circle (a ‘circus’ in Latin).

In 1770 he decided to expand the appeal of his show by adding acrobats, ropedancers (or wire walkers) and jugglers. (The trapeze, which evolved from the high wire acts, had not yet been invented.) He finished the production with a pantomime, a farcical play that included characters from the Commedia del Arte: Harlequin, Columbine and Clown. His new circus was a huge success.

Like many parts of American culture, this new version of the circus came to the United States from England. As Europe prepared for war, one of the many between England and France, a pupil of the English equestrian tradition, John Bill Ricketts, brought the circus across the Atlantic. He set up a riding school in Philadelphia in 1792 and established the first circus the following year. It was not a traveling circus but was, like the Astley entertainment, housed in a wooden amphitheater.

From the first, despite the social and cultural mores that repressed women, they performed in the circus. They were career women before the term was invented. And they were frequently the stars.  In 1772 Astley’s circus featured two equestriennes. The wives of Astley and another trick rider J. Griffin were so popular and famous they were invited to perform before the royal families of England and France. Following their lead Ricketts included a woman in his circus who not only worked as an equestrienne but also doubled as actress and dancer.

Many of the women who performed in circuses were the wives and daughters of male owners or performers. In Europe there was already a culture in which the children raised by circus parents became performers in their turn. A famous ropedancer, familiarly called Bambola, was one such in Italy. I borrowed the name for a character in A Circle of Dead Girls.

The circus allowed women to exhibit their bodies and their physical strength in public.  The equestriennes certainly could not do tricks on the backs of galloping horses in long trailing skirts so, horrors!, they wore knee-length skirts that clearly showed the shape of their legs. To modern eyes, this reveal would look remarkably tame. But in the eighteenth century this was titillating. Women of that time were tightly corseted and completely covered. It was not proper for them to attend the circus, which was on a par with Burlesque.  Until the Civil War (1861 – 1865) the audience of the American circus was predominantly male. The female performers, like actresses, to whom they were compared, were suspect, considered little better than harlots. But unlike the actresses, who only had to be pretty and seductive, the women in the circuses had to have talent and be willing to undergo the grueling training required for the acts. They, like their male counterparts, had to be unusually healthy and fit. 

The circus proved extremely popular in the United States and Ricketts expanded to include New York and Boston and even cities in Canada. To reach more people, the circuses began to travel, building and then tearing down the wooden arenas as necessary. In 1825, Joshua Purdy Brown decided to present his show under a canvas tent instead of the temporary wooden structures. The modern circus was born. 

A Circle of Dead Girls, my eighth Will Rees, is set against the newly formed circus in the 1790’s United States. Once the popularity of the circus was established, I thought it likely that other men would set up small traveling companies. Outside of the few big cities at that time, (which were primarily New York, Philadelphia and Boston, most of the U.S. was rural. Picture how exciting the arrival of such entertainment would be. And how exotic the performers would appear to the farmers and small shopkeepers who came to see them. And imagine how seductive such a beautiful ropedancer would be in a tiny town in Maine . . .

A Circle of Dead Girls

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I am very happy to announce that A Circle of Dead Girls, Will Rees number 8, will be released March 3, 2020.

The Circus has come to town. Rees arrives for the performance but the sight of his old nemesis, Magistrate Hanson, sends him home again. On his way, he meets a party of Shaker Brothers searching for a young girl. Her body is found in a nearby field.

Who killed Leah? The circus trick rider? The strong man? One of the Shaker Brothers? Maybe even the Magistrate.

A Circle of Dead Girls Cover v3

Tarot and circuses

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Why am I interested in tarot? These cards have been around since the mid 1500s. They were used as playing cards and like our deck, they had suits.

But aren’t they used for divination? That is certainly what I was most familiar with them as. Certainly, their use for that purpose is documented from about 1540. Manuscripts from shortly after document a system for laying out the cards. According to Wikipedia “Giacomo Cassanova wrote in his diary that in 1765 his Russian mistress frequently used a deck of playing cards for divination

Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French-born Protestant pastor and Freemason, published a dissertation on the origins of the symbolism in the Tarot in volume VIII of his unfinished fifteen volumes of the Le Monde Primitif. De Gébelin, who never knew the Tarot as the thought the Tarot represented Egyptian theology including Isis and Osiris. For example, he thought the card he knew as the Papesse and known today as the high priestess represented Isis.

The 1700s saw a rebirth of the circus.

I say rebirth because the kind of performances one thinks of have a long long history. The Egyptians had a tradition of acrobatics and juggling and they passed that onto the Greeks and the Romans. And these itinerant performers, called funanbuli – literally rope dancers – traveled throughout the expansive empire. During the middle ages, all the fairs boasted performers: jugglers and the like.

But all of this ceased in Great Britain and then in the new country with the Puritans who thought performances of all kinds were works of the Devil. Theaters in New England were forbidden right up until the late 1700’s. But in Europe traveling performers continued. In 1768 Sergeant-Major Philip Astley began exhibiing his equestrian prowess outside of London. Other equestrian acts followed. He called it a ‘circus’, the Latin word for circle because the riders rode around a ring. He struck gold. In 1779 he built a riding school. His ampitheater became the model for circuses everywhere.

At first these circuses were primarily exhibitions of trick riding but gradually acrobats, jugglers, rope dancers – tightrope walkers – were added. Family dynasties of circus performers were born.

A pupil of his, John Bill Ricketts, brought the circus to America. He first began a riding school in Philadelphia in 1792. It was wildly successful; people were hungry for entertainment. By 1793 he had begun bringing over European performers – including acrobats, clowns and rope dancers.

Other entrepreneurs followed suit, including a farmer from Brewster, New York , who found an elephant somewhere and brought it on tour. The display of exotic animals had been popular as early as the Bronze Age but this was a first in the U.S. Animal acts, primarily using dogs and pigs, followed.

Since tarot had been popular in Europe for centuries and had been used almost as long for divination, I wonder if some of these early circus performers didn’t bring the cards with them. Tarot would have predated the stereotypical circus fortune teller with the glass ball.

Now, with our jaded sensibilities, it is hard to imagine how exotic and wonderful these early circuses appeared. Farmers knew horses but not ones who allowed riders to stand on their backs. Pigs and dogs, animals they saw every day, performed the most amazing tricks. And any fortune telling would have seemed truly magical.