The Routledge Circus Studies Reader offers an absorbing critical introduction to this diverse and emerging field. It brings together the work of over 30 scholars in this discipline, including Janet Davis, Helen Stoddart and Peta Tait, to highlight and address the field's key historical, critical and theoretical issues. It is organised into three accessible sections, Perspectives, Precedents and Presents, which approach historical aspects, current issues, and the future of circus performance. The chapters, grouped together into 13 theme-based sub-sections, provide a clear entry point into the field and emphasise the diversity of approaches available to students and scholars of circus studies. Classic accounts of performance, including pieces by Philippe Petit and Friedrich Nietzsche, are included alongside more recent scholarship in the field. Edited by two scholars whose work is strongly connected to the dynamic world of performance, The Routledge Circus Studies Reader is an essential teaching and study resource for the emerging discipline of circus studies. It also provides a stimulating introduction to the field for lovers of circus.

Freedom, adventure, romance; a spellbound audience, bright-eyed children, rolling drums, a brass band playing lively music; intrepid acrobats in colourful costumes and garishly made-up clowns. The same old stereotypes about the world of the circus are trotted out on many occasions. Over a period spanning more than 15 years, the photographer Oliver Stegmann visited different circuses to take photos of what happens behind the curtains. His muted images attempt to break the usual stereotypes. Again and again, the photographer captured protagonists in moments of unawareness, showing scenes that the audience would normally never get to see from the edge of the ring. Above all, Stegmann is interested in the atmosphere of tense expectation and utmost concentration when the artists are about to perform their hair-raising acts. Using neither colour nor flash, he creates an enigmatic atmosphere reminiscent of expressionist films. For his circus series, Stegmann develops a kind of imagery that has rarely been applied to the small world of the circus as consistently and confidently as in this case. In terms of subject-matter, design, and production, Circus Noir takes a different approach to this genre by adding an entirely unromantic perspective that focuses on the true essence of what it means to work in a circus. Text in English and German.

Beneath the Big Top is a social history of the circus, from its ancient roots to the rise of the 'modern' tented travelling shows. A performer and founder of a circus group, Steve Ward draws on eye-witness accounts and contemporary interviews to explore the triumphs and disasters of the circus world. He reveals the stories beneath the big top during the golden age of the circus and the lives of circus folk, which were equally colourful outside the ring: * Pablo Fanque, Britain's first black circus proprietor * The Chipperfield dynasty, who started out in 1684 on the frozen Thames * Katie Sandwina, world's strongest woman and part-time crime-fighter * The Sylvain brothers, who fell in love with the same woman in the ring

This book explores the circus as a site in and through which science and technology are represented in popular culture. Across eight chapters written by leading scholars - from fields as varied as performance and circus studies, art, media and cultural history, and engineering - the book discusses to what extent the engineering of circus and performing bodies can be understood as a strategy to promote awe, how technological inventions have shaped circus and the cultures it helps constitute, and how much of a mutual shaping this is. What kind of cultural and aesthetic effects does engineering in circus contexts achieve? How do technological inventions and innovations impact on the circus? How does the link between circus and technology manifest in representations and interpretations - imaginaries - of the circus in other media and popular culture? Circus, Science and Technology examines the ways circus can provide a versatile frame for interpreting our relationship with technology.

Part clown manual, part storytelling and part rant - The Clown Manifesto covers the experiences, philosophies and methods of the clown performer/director/teacher Nalleslavski. A book for clowns, physical comedians, actors, musicians, jugglers, puppeteers, magicians, street performers and dancers. Whatever form your clowning takes - theatre, street theatre, comedy, burlesque, magic, circus - the mischievously named Nalleslavski Method gives you practical tools to create comedy material that works universally, across cultural and language barriers.

In its heyday, the American circus was the largest showbiz industry the world had ever seen. From the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, traveling circuses performed for audiences of up to 14,000 per show, employed as many as 1,600 men and women, and crisscrossed the country on 20,000 miles of railroad in one season alone. The spectacle of death-defying daredevils, strapping superheroes and scantily clad starlets, fearless animal trainers, and startling "freaks" gripped the American imagination, outshining theater, vaudeville, comedy, and minstrel shows. This book sheds fresh light on the circus phenomenon. With photographic gems of early circus performers, as well as original posters, lithographs, sideshow banners and engravings from the 16th to 19th centuries illustrating the worldwide roots of the circus, readers are transported to a world of thrill and skill, grit and glamor. Highlights include iconic circus photographs by Mathew Brady, Cornell Capa, Walker Evans, Weegee, and Lisette Model, and little-known circus images by Stanley Kubrick and Charles and Ray Eames.

I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, to attract attention to a "show, " Phineas Taylor Barnum wrote to a publisher in 1860. "I don't believe in 'duping the public, ' but I believe in first "attracting" and then pleasing them."

The name P.T. Barnum is virtually synonymous with the fine art of self-advertisement and the apocryphal statement, "There's a sucker born every minute." Nearly a century after his death, Barnum remains one of America's most celebrated figures.

In the "Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum, " A.H. Saxon brings together more than 300 letters written by the self-styled "Prince of Humbugs." Here we see him, opinionated and exuberant, with only the rarest flashes of introspection and self-doubt, haggling with business partners, blustering over politics, and attempting to get such friends as Mark Twain to endorse his latest schemes.

Always the king of showmen, Barnum considered himself a museum man first and was forever on the lookout for "curiosities," whether animate or inanimate. His early career included such outright frauds as Joice Heth, the "161-year-old nurse of George Washington," and the Fejee Mermaid-the desiccated head and torso of a monkey sewn to the body of a fish. Although in later years he projected a more solid, respectable image-managing the irreproachable "legitimate" attraction Jenny Lind, becoming a leading light in the temperance crusade, founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus-much of his daily existence continued to be unabashedly devoted to manipulating public opinion so as to acquire for himself and his enterprises what he delightedly termed "notoriety."

His famous autobiography, "The Life of P.T. Barnum, " which he regularly augmented during the last quarter century of his life, was itself a masterpiece of self-promotion. "Will you have the kindness to announce that I am writing my life & that fifty-seven different publishers have applied for the chance of publishing it," he wrote to a newspaper editor, adding, "Such is the fact-and if it wasn't, why still it ain't a bad announcement."

The "Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum" captures the magic of this consummate showman's life, truly his own "greatest show on earth."