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Danger Delights: Texts of Gender and Race in Aerial Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Peta Tait
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Abstract

Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 12 , Issue 45 , February 1996 , pp. 43 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes and References

1. Bouissac, Paul, Circus and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 10Google Scholar.

2. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 140Google Scholar.

3. Ibid., p. 140.

4. See Tait, Peta, Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (Sydney: Currency Press, 1994), p. 105–29Google Scholar.

5. Senelick, Laurence, ‘Boys and Girls Together’, in Crossing the Stage, ed. Ferris, Lesley (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 83–4Google Scholar.

6. St Leon, Mark, Spangles and Sawdust: the Circus in Australia (Richmond: Greenhouse Publications, 1984)Google Scholar: Ernie ‘Daisy’ Shand, p. 99, and photograph on p. 105; ‘Senorita Phillipina’, Phillip St Leon, p. 133, 136.

7. Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p. 138Google Scholar.

8. Ibid., p. 137.

9. Paul Bouissac, op. cit., p. 15.

10. Said, Edward, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 8Google Scholar.

11. St Leon, Mark, The Wizard of the Wire (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1993), p. 25Google Scholar.

12. Ibid., p. 27.

13. Ibid., p. 26. Aboriginal audiences were permitted to attend circus shows although they were not seated.

14. Miller, James, Koori: a Will to Win (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1985), p. 93Google Scholar. Miller notes the categorization of Aborigines by the Aborigines Protection Board, using terminology such as ‘half-caste’ and ‘full blood’, and subsequent changes to government policies (p. 172).

15. Interview with Dawn de Ramirez, 19 April 1994. Subsequent references to Dawn de Ramirez's experiences are derived from this interview and follow-up telephone conversations.

16. Ibid.

17. Bakhtin, Mikhail, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 5Google Scholar.

18. St Leon, Mark, The Silver Road: the Life of Mervyn King (Springwood: Butterfly Books, 1990), p. 113Google Scholar.

19. St Leon, op. cit., 1993, p. 39. There was a ‘them and us’ mentality that distinguished the showies from the ‘townies’.

20. Ibid., p. 59. In 1913 the Colleano family also worked for Ashtons for a time.

21. St Leon, op cit., 1990, p. 113.

22. Garber, Majorie, Vested Interests (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), p. 268Google Scholar.

23. The Swiss Bauer family, working in Europe, currently operate a rig with a double trapeze for two of the sisters suspended under a motorbike which is driven by their brother up a straight wire. The whole rig revolves through 360 degrees.

24. Ramsland, John with St Leon, Mark, Children of the Circus (Springwood: Butterfly Books, 1993) p. 89–90Google Scholar. Nikki Ashton lost a kidney in a serious fall from the Cloud Swing. Recently, the Australian Circus Oz performer Anni Davey broke her neck in a trapeze fall caused by a broken foot loop.

25. St Leon, op. cit., 1993, p. x–xi.