Documents 

Early 1860s responses to Jules Léotard’s innovative solo flying trapeze performances span pleasure and excitement to provoking claims of immorality related to risk that seem strange today. I examine the relationship between risk, morality and pleasure in Léotard’s celebrity using newspaper reports and imagery, demonstrating how his celebrity reveals changing attitudes to the body. Audiences evaluated his performances depending on how they valued bodily pleasure and how they connected citizenship, religion, science and progress to athleticism. Considering Léotard alongside the wirewalker Charles Blondin demonstrates how Léotard’s performance and physique mitigated concerns around risk. Making sense of Léotard’s unfamiliar movements often involved processing conflicting physical responses and contradictory viewpoints. ‘Dangerous’ performances drew censure because they provoked these confusing experiences and risk-related concerns of audience coercion and desensitization. Resituating Léotard within the 1860s craze for ‘sensation’ on the basis of newspaper reports and affect, demonstrates Victorians’ bodily preoccupation. Wider risks in society alongside scientific advancements help explain Victorians’ increased focus on the body as they turned to bodily health in the face of urban threats. Against this background, experiencing performers’ embodied vicarious risk enabled Victorians to rehearse, not avoid, the thrills and dangers of Victorian life.

What happens when the space aerialists inhabit is made more tangible using lasers? Aerial performers are ‘air’-ialists performing in the atmosphere from suspended equipment. The space aerialists work within is delineated by the limits their limbs inscribe in the space around equipment -- space formed by practice (de Certeau 1984: 117). In Liquid Sky the air that rope-artist Aedín Walsh interacted with was given texture and form by the combined practice of lasers and aerial action – lasers acting as choreographic bodies co-creating practised space. This short article considers how introducing lasers to the aerial space reshaped and remade it, expanding spatial frontiers. It considers how laser practice made demands on aerial practice, influencing movement possibilities and contributing to a wider ritualistic performance aesthetic.

In this article, the author challenges the designation of circus and circus disciplines, including aerial performance, as grotesque. The term ‘glamour’ was used in inter-war newspaper reports and more accurately describes circus in this period. The fundamental difference between the two concepts relies on the experience generated in the audience: glamour is aspirational whereas the grotesque provokes derision. It is likely they have been confused by scholars because both rely on transformation, excess and transgression. The author discusses these three principles to conclude how circus glamour works differently from the grotesque, including how glamour pushes at the boundaries of what is acceptable within the dominant culture rather than upturning the established order. The most aspirational of circus stars of the 1920s was the female aerialist whose aerial movement inspired a positive fantasy within audience members. By analysing aerial action alongside newspaper reports, memoirs, and publicity images that glorified aerialists Lillian Leitzel and Luisita Leers, the author argues that aerialists generated and were protected by affluent circus glamour. [editor summary]