Documents 

Sosina Wogayehu learnt to do flips and splits at the age of six, sitting on the floor of her parents’ lounge room in Addis Ababa, watching a German variety show on the only television channel in the land. She sold cigarettes on the streets at the age of eight, and played table soccer with her friends who made money from washing cars, barefoot in the dust. She dreamed of being a circus performer.

Twenty-five years later, Sosina has conjured herself a new life in a far-off country: Australia. She has rescued one brother and lost another. She has travelled the world as a professional contortionist. She can bounce-juggle eight balls on a block of marble. [editor summary]

Traveling back to the circus’s early days, Linda Simon takes us to eighteenth-century hippodromes in Great Britain and intimate one-ring circuses in nineteenth-century Paris, where Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso became enchanted with aerialists and clowns. She introduces us to P. T. Barnum, James Bailey, and the enterprising Ringling Brothers and reveals how they created the golden age of American circuses. Moving forward to the whimsical Circus Oz in Australia and to New York City’s Big Apple Circus and the grand spectacle of Cirque du Soleil, she shows how the circus has transformed in recent years. At the center of the story are the people—trick riders and tightrope walkers, sword swallowers and animal trainers, contortionists and clowns—that created the sensational, raucous, and sometimes titillating world of the circus. [editor summary]

Bouissac is one of the world's leading authorities on circus ethnography and semiotics present in this volume a theory of the circus as a secular ritual and introduces a method to analyze its performances as multimodal discourse. He cover the range of circus specialties (magic, animal training, acrobatics, clowning) and provide examples to show how cultural meaning is produced, extended and amplified by circus performances and a reflection on the potentially subversive power of this discourse and its contemporary use. [editor summary]

Circus: The Australian Story is a large format book, soft cover, in full colour. This book represents the culmination of some four decades of research into an area of modern Australia’s history, previously uncharted.

In nearly 300 pages and accompanied by as many images, Circus: The Australian Story traces the history of the circus in Australia from its ancient, medieval and London roots, to the first exhibitions in the colonies in the 1830s and 40s and through its subsequent growth, decline and recent renaissance.

The book gives considerable attention to the rich exchange of circus between Australia and the USA, Japan and other countries. It identifies Australia’s great contributions to the international annals of the circus.

A closing chapter surveys the emergence of a contemporary circus industry and the establishment of federally-funded National Institute of Circus Arts. [editor summary]

Un incontournable ouvrage de référence qui apporte une riche reflexion sur le développement du rôle et des influences de la Femme dans les arts du cirque à travers le temps et envers la communauté au sens large. Publié suite à une conférence multidisciplinaire « Zene & Cirkus » qui s’est tenue à Zagreb (Croatie) en novembre 2009, cet ouvrage regroupe les textes des conférences des historiens, spécialistes de théâtre, anthropologues, artistes et journalistes qui ont proposé leur point de vue sur la contribution de la Femme au cirque traditionnel et actuel. De plus, cet ouvrage présente plus de 191 superbes photos issues d’archives publiques et privées.

This pioneering study is one of the major publications in the increasingly popular and largely undocumented area of circus studies. Through photographs and illustrations, Peta Tait presents an extraordinary survey of 140 years of trapeze acts and the socially changing ideas of muscular action in relation to our understanding of gender and sexuality. She questions how spectators see and enjoy aerial actions, and what cultural identities are presented by bodies in fast, physical aerial movement. [editor summary]

This research presents an account of a doctoral inquiry undertaken as an embedded practitioner and researcher, in the context of the Circus Oz Living Archive Project, an interdisciplinary research project conducted at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. This project was a three-year investigation into the creation of an online digital ‘living archive’: a collection of historical performance videos, combined with an intention to rethink existing paradigms of contemporary performance archives. As an embedded practitioner and researcher, my doctoral research was led by the question of how might we design a living archive? My approach has been one of research-through-practice, in which I have undertaken the design and creation of a prototype digital archive as both a pragmatic design act and as a research activity. Informed by discourse and literature from a wide range of academic areas, I critically reflect on the work undertaken in the design of this digital archive, in order to investigate some aspects of the roles and agency of an interaction designer engaged in its creation. By bringing together contemporary theories of the performance archive, conceptions of digital practice and digital materiality from the field of Software Studies, and Verbeek’s notion of material hermeneutics (2005), I examine the practice of Interaction Design, in the context of a project concerned with designing and making a contemporary digital performance archive. I argue that the work of a designer in this context is one of mediating hermeneutic relations with the archive through the creation of specific software representations. It is also one of executing agency through the use of performative design artefacts. This is an often opaque, yet powerful role, in which the decisions made by designers—along with the decisions enabled by the work of designers in the day-to-day process of collaboratively making the archive—ultimately affect society’s relation with the archive. The effects of design decisions have implications for contemporary cultural heritage and future cultural understanding. The concept of a ‘living archive’ suggests that the digital archive is not a singular thing to design, but rather an extensible cultural resource that has the capacity to live and be re-designed throughout its life. I also argue that the role of the designer in this process is ultimately one in which they must act with certain intention: in designing a ‘living archive’, designers have a responsibility to engage non-designers in making decisions about the archive’s representation. They also have a responsibility to demystify the process of making software, such that acts of cultural mediation performed by the digital archive can be enacted in well-informed, intentional, and respectful ways. [author summary]

Increasingly within the realm of research and creative practice, collaboration, as an entity and a methodology, is being positioned as a necessity in the search for innovation. Underpinning this is the belief and expectation that the diversity and multiple perspectives that are integral to a collaboration will enable innovation and the discovery of something 'new' or of greater relevance in application. Enacting interdisciplinary collaborations that integrate both academic and external organisations is a complex undertaking. Designing a research program and methods for shared understanding is essential if the benefits of the collaboration is to be realised. This essay reflects on one of the strategies being utilised by the Circus Oz Living Archive project team as we work towards the collaborative realisation of the project outcome. [editor summary]