This Master thesis is about Western circus performance styles. It is the aim to describe, compare, and contextualise traits and tendencies of early Western circus performances (EWCP) and contemporary Western circus performances (CWCP) through academic terms. The investigation is centred around the thesis that CWCP have revitalized a suffering and almost dying art form called 'circus' – causing it to reach a new level of social and artistic acceptability in a postmodern world – mainly through the introduction of a significant stylistic feature: Identification. The feeling of a spectator's close emotional association with the action taking place onstage. This feature stands in opposition to the acrobatic skills exposed, and through this implementation, the author therefore claims an exposition of contrasts to occur onstage: The foreign and mysterious combined with the familiar and 'real'. The exposition of superior and seemingly unobtainable physical abilites combined with the exposition of human fragility, flawedness, and inferiority. The spectators' passive observance in awe of an artist flying high and far away combined with spectators' active engagement with an artist staring them closely into the eyes on the ground. The imaginative combined with relatable everyday-like images. Establishing a common ground between artist and audience while at the same time distorting it. According to the author, the feature of identification has been absent in stylistic expositions of EWCP. This absence is argued to create dichotomous gaps, rather than ties, between sender and receiver as well as between performed images and images linked to 'reality'. The author suggests that these modes were crucial causes of EWCP' decrease in popularity due to the arrival of postmodernism, and that the increasing popularity of CWCP in the later 20th century was due to the elimination of these gaps. The research is done by interweaving 1) historical contextualizations and comparative studies between EWCP and CWCP, 2) discussions of selected circus scholars' literature about circus performances' stylistic developments, 3) the author's embodied experiences with circus performances (ie. as an acrobat in the company Cirque du Soleil), and 4) stylistic analyses of tropes and patterns in selected EWCP and CWCP. Conclusions are reached through the author's constructions of coherence between these aspects. Paula Saukko's eclectic research model has been applied in order to integrate various methodologies. The analyses are based on dance scholar Susan Foster's theory about modes of representations as well as selected rhetorical terms related to stylistics. It is a core aim of this Master thesis to provide studies of circus performances' stylistic executions with more clarifying and adequate terminologies.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-190594 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Creators | Stjernebjerg, Christel Klan |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för kultur och estetik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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