Résumé :
The availability of a collection such as the Circus Oz Living Archive offers many possibilities for researchers in performance, not least a tremendous resource for a longitudinal analysis of the company’s performance style. Paul Bouissac considers the circus act as a communicative text that is open to a structural analysis and provides many examples in his seminal work Circus and Culture, a position elaborated further in a recent work, Semiotics at the Circus.1 Bouissac’s thick descriptions of particular circus acts, essential to his detailed structuralist approach, are predicated on multiple viewings of an act, a project he continues by viewing many live performances of the acts he analyses. But Bouissac continues to reject the substitution of a video recording for analysis. As Denise Varney and Rachel Fensham point out, performance studies as a discipline has a troubled relationship with the video recording.2 Much critical commentary is built around a syntax of loss, of disappearance, articulating the ephemerality of the individual performance event.

Localisation : Bibliothèque