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The first purpose of this chapter is to contribute to a long-ignored field of circus ethnography and the analysis of the significance of circus body presentation. Most of the author’s argument is illustrated through one acrobatic act presented in Jimmy Brown’s Circus in Britain during the late 1970s. Sport (the body engaged in gymnastics in particular is suggested as a comparative reference due to similarities in performance. Beyond a description of the acrobating body and its uniqueness, this chapter alludes to body presentation as a perspective for its context, that is, the codes and processes by which its significances are reproduced. The performance of the late 1970s ‘traditional circus’ is considered in this chapter as a reconstruction of the circus, which emerged through the reality of modernity characterized by fragmentation, the rise of fetishism, as well as the phenomenon of the spectacle.

This article deals with exclusion and the construction of periphery as modes of ritualizing and binding together a dominant social order. Under scrutiny is the peripheral British traveling circus and the way its traveling and performance define the margins of the modern fragmented order, particularly vis-á-vis the crisis of the premodern Culture/Nature paradigm. A lion act presents the Culture/Nature opposition, that is, human trainer, props, routines versus animals, in the context of circus traveling (fieldwork carried out in 1975–79). The circus display of both animals and humans as exemplifications of their own kind erases their "realness," turning them into images in the public's perception. However, a totalization of the performance and of the display of circus traveling reifies the animal and human images and the circus image, with the effect of placing them out of social time and relations. On the margin of the fragmented modern order, the reified traveling circus thus embodies transcendence of culture/nature categories and implies its own ontological apartness. For its nostalgic spectators, it thereby illusorily resurrects a totality of order—from which the circus itself is apart.

The main argument of our present enquiry is that the Circus travels be-
cause a circus travels. That is, circus performers travel because their trav-
elling is part of the circus performance. For the performers, travelling
is not only a way of life, a tradition they follow, nor just an economic
necessity, a way of reaching the public but also a semiotic constraint en-
coded in the tradition of performance as historically negotiated be-
tween circus performers and their public.
Our concern with the travelling of the performers is, then, a con-
cern with living as circus, as well as with the processes of the very con-
stitution of circus and its significance within its social context
Following a brief presentation of the travelling performers and cir-
cuses in England in 1975 (Section A), we will address the question of
the symbolic significance of travellers for the sedentary order (Section
B). This will be followed by the two main sections of the paper in
which the ethnography of travelling will be presented (Sections C, D).
The ethnography will then be analyzed to support the argument of trav-
elling as performance and to elaborate on the symbolic significance of
the performance for the sedentary order (Section E). In the last section
(F), circus performance in 1975 will be placed in an historical and con-
textual perspective.