Documents 

This book documents and discusses the meaning(s) of the creative process at play in the crafting and staging of circus acts. It highlights the experience of circus artists as their skills develop and mature into public performances that create aesthetic and emotional values in the modern economy of live spectacles. It scrutinizes the meaning that circus acts produce for the spectators and for the artists themselves who live this process from the inside. This is a book for those studying semiotics and wanting to see it applied to a real life milieu in accessible and passionate prose.

The Meaning of the Circus is grounded on the personal experience of Professor Paul Bouissac as both a circus entrepreneur and a researcher with decades of primary material on the significance of past and contemporary circus acts. It is based on substantial accounts provided by many men and women who have agreed to share the challenges, joys, and anxieties of their life as artists. Personal and rigorous, it contributes to the hermeneutics of the circus arts by adding existential depth to the production and reception of their performances.

During the last 300 years circus clowns have emerged as powerful cultural icons. This is the first semiotic analysis of the range of make-up and costumes through which the clowns' performing identities have been established and go on developing. It also examines what Bouissac terms 'micronarratives' - narrative meanings that clowns generate through their acts, dialogues and gestures.

Putting a repertory of clown performances under the semiotic microscope leads to the conclusion that the performances are all interconnected and come from what might be termed a 'mythical matrix'. These micronarratives replicate in context-sensitive forms a master narrative whose general theme refers to the emergence of cultures and constraints that they place upon instinctual behaviour.

From this vantage point, each performance can be considered as a ritual which re-enacts the primitive violence inherent in all cultures and the temporary resolutions which must be negotiated as the outcome. Why do these acts of transgression and re-integration then trigger laughter and wonder? What kind of mirror does this put up to society? In a masterful semiotic analysis, Bouissac delves into decades of research to answer these questions. [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]

A circus act is a set of actions, that is, a succession of implemented plans which are ordered according to an overall rhetorical structure. Physical survival and the negotiation of social situations constantly require that we act or abstain from acting. The latter can be, of course, construed as a form of action. The kernel of a circus action is the implementation of a physically challenging plan but such actions are performed within a cluster of verbal, musical, and visual modifiers whose deliberate purpose is to make the actions appear easier or more difficult and dangerous than they actually are. The attitudes and behaviour of the assistants who monitor aerial acts from the ground play a significant part in construing modality of an action as particularly dangerous. Trainers belong to two different categories depending on whether they deal with domestic animals of higher status like dogs and horses or wild animals which qualify them as able to perform the impossible.

This article addresses the challenges of engaging in ethno-semiotics research of circus performances and provides an example to illustrate the methodological strategy that is proposed. The approach is bottom-up rather than top-down. First a fine-grained description that integrates both perceptual information and emotional experience from the individual point of view of the observer is produced after several attentive viewings of the performance. Reactions from other members of the audience are also noted to limit the possibility of a strictly subjective verbal rendering of the experience. Secondly, the cultural implications, semantic connotations, and cognitive semiotics of the performance are probed in order to develop a ‘thick description’ that can serve as a basis for a tentative interpretation. The article then proceeds from the description of a goat act to examine other acts belonging to the same paradigm in circus culture: animals that are paradoxically trained to do nothing. The final section attempts to explain the cognitive reason for which such acts are enjoyed by the audience, and, more generally, why the circus makes sense even in its most unexpected productions.