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Books > Arts & Architecture > Performing arts > Other public performances & spectacles > Circus
Mark St Leon presents a comprehensive, entertaining and visually
stunning history of circus in Australia. His interest was sparked
by his insatiable curiosity about his own familys celebrated past
in Australian circus.
Dudley Riggs didn't have to run away from home to join the circus.
Home was the circus. Son of the acclaimed aerial flyers Riggs and
Riggs, he made his circus debut as a polar prince parading in a
wagon pulled by a polar bear. At the age of five, he graduated to a
risque vaudeville act during the circus off- season; at eight, he
outgrew his cutes (and his child stardom) and joined his
high-flying parents on the trapeze. Eventually he had to learn to
"fly funny" because he grew too tall to fly straight. In one way or
another, Riggs has been flying ever since. The rest, as they say,
is history. And what a story it is. In Flying Funny, Riggs shares
many highs and lows while describing circus life and the evolution
of America's popular entertainment during the twentieth century.
From his early life in circus and vaudeville to his creation of the
Brave New Workshop, we see how his show business experience and
instincts helped him create in Minneapolis what became the "next
wave" in American entertainment-improvisation. As a young man,
Riggs lost everything in a tornado, got an education on the fly,
and sailed with the All American circus to post-war Japan. On a
slow boat home and restless about his future, he developed the idea
of Word Jazz-creating a script on stage as it is being
performed-and shortly after he opened the Instant Theater in New
York. Later, he moved to Minneapolis where he founded the Brave New
Workshop, launching the careers of comic greats such as Penn and
Teller, The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Louie Anderson, Peter Tolan,
Pat Proft, Nancy Steen, Liz Winstead, Al Franken and many others.
Today, the Brave New Workshop thrives as the longest running
improvisational theater in America. From flying funny on the
trapeze to theater without a net, Dudley Riggs's story is filled
with hearty laughs and eyebrow-raising insights. With a wry sense
of humor and infectious warmth, he shares the exhilaration of
flying whether through the air or on the stage.
Circuses and film are a natural pairing, and the new essays making
up this volume begin the exploration of how these two forms of
entertainment have sometimes worked together to create a spectacle
of onscreen alchemy. The films discussed herein are an eclectic
group, ranging from early silent comedies to animated, 21st century
examples, in which circuses serve as liminal or carnivalesque
spaces wherein characters-and by extension audience members-can
confront issues as far-reaching as labor relations, sensuality,
identity, ethics, and more. The circus as discussed in these essays
encompasses the big top, the midway, the sideshow and the freak
show; it becomes backdrop, character, catalyst and setting, and is
welcoming, malicious or terrifying. Circus performers are family,
friends, foe or all of the above. And film is the medium that
brings it all together. This volume starts the conversation about
how circuses and film can combine to form productive, exciting
spaces where almost anything can happen.
Winner of the 2006 Barnard Hewitt Award for Excellence in Theatre
History
Between 1904 and the Great Depression, Circuit Chautauquas toured
the rural United States, reflecting and reinforcing its citizens’
ideas, attitudes, and politics every summer through music (the
Jubilee Singers, an African American group, were not always welcome
in a time when millions of Americans belonged to the KKK), lectures
(“ Civic Revivalist” Charles Zueblin speaking on “ Militancy and
Morals” ), elocutionary readers (Lucille Adams reading from Little
Lord Fauntleroy), dramas (the Ben Greet Players’ cleaned-up version
of She Stoops to Conquer), orations (William Jennings Bryan
speaking about the dangers of greed), and special programs for
children (parades and mock weddings).
Theatre historians have largely ignored Circuit Chautauquas
since they did not meet the conventional conditions of theatrical
performance: they were not urban; they produced no innovative
performance techniques, stage material, design effects, or dramatic
literature. In this beautifully written and illustrated book,
Charlotte Canning establishes an analytical framework to reveal the
Circuit Chautauquas as unique performances that both created and
unified small-town America.
One of the last strongholds of the American traditions of
rhetoric and oratory, the Circuits created complex intersections of
community, American democracy, and performance. Canning does not
celebrate the Circuit Chautauquas wholeheartedly, nor does she
describe them with the same cynicism offered by Sinclair Lewis. She
acknowledges their goals of community support, informed public
thinking, and populareducation but also focuses on the reactionary
and regressive ideals they sometimes embraced. In the true
interdisciplinary spirit of Circuit Chautauquas, she reveals the
Circuit platforms as places where Americans performed what it meant
to be American.
![Grit (Paperback): Karen Luke Jackson](//media.loot.co.za/images/x80/440001782881179215.jpg) |
Grit
(Paperback)
Karen Luke Jackson
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R442
Discovery Miles 4 420
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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