Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (2006)

Peta Tait, Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 2005) In Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, Peta Tail positions aerial performance of the past 140 years in the context of changing cultural beliefs about bodies. She channels a wealth of archival research into a nuanced account of the ways in which the tricks, choreography and costuming of aerialists have responded to 'shifts in cultural moods' (6), including cultural assumptions about male and female bodies. Her main contention is that the aerial body's complex combination of artistry and athleticism allows it to work with, against and beyond gender type, and so challenge 'assumptions about innate physical gender difference' (2). Tail's argument is persuasive, skilfully balancing a roughly chronological account of technical advances in aerial performance with the more critical task of mapping cultural representation and reception of gendered, racialised bodies in aerial performance in the past century and a half. Tait begins Circus Bodies with Jules Leotard's triumphant Parisian debut on trapeze in 1859. Though traditional rope and pole acts paved the way for Leotard's trapeze, and the still, swinging and flying return acts that swiftly followed, Tait suggests trapeze captured the public imagination in an unprecedented way (9). Her account contextualises public fascination with flying bodies in terms of a popular craving for spectacle established with nineteenth-century exhibitions of empire (13), a longstanding spiritual and scientific aspiration for mastery of the air (11), and Darwinian notions of natural and social evolution (15). Playing into such nineteenthcentury cultural tropes, 'aerialists flew between scientific precepts and poetic accolades' (16) Tait says, with narratives framing aerial acts ranging from the birdlike, godlike grace of Leotard to the 'comic pantomimes about macabre deaths' (25) of the Hanlon-Lees brothers. For Tait, aerial performance is fundamentally paradoxical; it taps into ideas of freedom, defiance, transgression and danger, but only through the most disciplined muscular training (26, 28). This muscularity mixes up (9) or doubles (28) the aerialist's identity in unique ways, showing 'the light gracefulness of males and the steely muscular strength of females' (1). In the early chapters of Circus Bodies, Tait convincingly attributes cultural anxiety about aerial acts in the late nineteenth century to male-female interchangeability in muscular prowess, and in flying, catching and weightbearing (28, 30-1 ). She looks, for instance, at the trapeze and iron jaw work of LaIa, Leona Dare and Emma Jutau (40-8). Taking the weight of themselves and their male counterparts on their teeth, these women's acts sat awkwardly with spectators' socially conditioned response to sex and race characteristics. Still, Tait reminds readers, while their acts showed a body that 'momentarily outmanoeuvred its low social positioning' (45), their feminised iron jaw apparatus was soon recuperated into a 'more socially conformist female aerial identity' (55) in anonymous aerial ballet and butterfly acts. Turning to the twentieth century, Tait acquaints readers with crossdressing and drag traditions in aerial performance. Her account of heightened hetero masculinity in the sometimes aggressive offstage behaviour of the well-documented 1920s female impersonator Barbette (72) is thorough and insightful. This said, I personally found her analysis of Luisita Leers, a female endurance performer from the same period for whom muscularity on a non-masculine body itself became a form of drag (77), more thought provoking. Tail's analysis unpacks press articles at pains to suggest that the tension between muscularity and inner identity need not queer Leers' femininity in a transgressive way (80-2), successfully underscoring her point about a cultural desire to recoup ambiguous representations of identities, relationships and power in aerial performance. …