Peta Tait

Greer, bad language and performative emotions in protests

The case of the fine imposed on Greer whilst on a lecturing tour of New Zealand Universities in 1972 is analysed. Greer received two indecent language charges while at the University of Auckland, which would be passed off as any other word at a different social context such as a theatre. Australians came to her defence by signing a petition and a march was organized in the streets of Wellington and Auckland to protest the charging of Greer.

Blondin conquers nature and invents the circus celebrity

Blondin walked across Niagara Falls on a rope in 1859 and created a sensation. His fame made him synonymous with the high rope act. Drawing on archival and secondary sources, this article explains that Blondin’s rapid rise to international prominence, the merchandizing industry surrounding him, his large earning capacity, global travel, his special shows for journalists, and at least one complicated story of female fandom, pre-empt a modern idea of celebrity. The public perceives celebrities as ‘superhuman’. Did Blondin contribute to the invention of celebrity? Blondin’s reputation and his feats slide from the conquering of geographical space into ideas of mastery over untamed nature and even control over wild animals. Blondin’s athletic skill was undeniable but the varied costumes that framed the act also reinforced cultural notions of predatory prowess. His seemingly impossible feats could be celebrated as triumphant displays of masculinity and, more broadly, of European dominance over geography, other peoples and even species. Underlying the nineteenth century idea of celebrity arising from Blondin’s physical agility were hierarchical relations between races and cultures. As his name became a brand, his act denoted extremes of spatial inversion and gravity defying action conflated with the conquest of nature’s force.

Controversy about a human–animal big cat stunt in Fillis’s Circus

This article considers objections to the nineteenth‐century stunt in which a big‐cat handler put his or her head between the jaws of a big cat in the context of attitudes to performing animals in the 1890s. This stunt was commonly seen in menageries in the USA and Europe, and a newspaper exchange developed in New Zealand in 1894 between a journalist, Scrutator, and Frank Fillis, the English proprietor of Fillis’s Circus from South Africa touring New Zealand with four African lions and a Bengal tiger. While there was a significant change to human–animal relations in the Euro‐American circus ring over the decade of the 1890s as wild animals were trained to do tricks on cue led by Carl and Wilhelm Hagenbeck’s acts, the controversial Fillis’s Circus big‐cat act in New Zealand seems to have been an older menagerie‐style display. It is argued that opposition was indicative of a nineteenth‐century anxiety about compromising the hierarchy of species and additionally in association with gender rather than a reaction against performances by wild animals and trained acts. Yet the defence offered by Fillis offers an early coherent example of what would later become standard rhetoric about the inclusion of trained wild animals in traditional circus.

Replacing injured horses, cross-dressing and dust: modernist circus technologies in Asia

Abstract Horse performers were replaced by machines demonstrating the wonders of electricity and cinema on the third circus tour of Asia by the well-known equestrian, Clarke family in 1915. Circus was part of the wider economic shift away from equine capital. The analysis considers leading horse acts in early modernist circus and their continuing popularity with the multi-racial Asian audiences, in relation to technological change and the socio-economic legacies of European colonial dominance in Asia. Four out of six horses died on the Clarke’s first tour of colonial Asia, an exceptionally high mortality rate and three died on the second tour, and this article argues that a high rate of horse injury and mortality complicates a claim that the shift to scientific display in the 1915 entertainment was simply reflecting progressive modernisation or the shortage of horses at the beginning of World War One. While the 2015 replacement of horses provides a literal demonstration of the scientific shift from horse power to electric power during the modernist (anthropocene) era, it additionally prefigures the displacement of the live animal with filmed imagery in entertainment. International ship travel continued to hold considerable physical risk for the horse performers, which meant it posed economic risks for the circus aesthetic.

Performing Ghosts, Emotion and Sensory Environments

This chapter explores how performance and photographic art that reflect feminist and ecological values contribute to political understanding of the human and the nonhuman . It argues that body-based performance can draw attention to how the environment is always phenomenologically perceived through the body’s sensory and emotional processes. Performances and photographs by Australian artists Jill Orr and r e a (Gamilaraay), in which ghost-like humans with ambiguous social identities haunt darkened and fire-affected nonhuman spaces, deliver complex postcolonial perspectives. In this interpretation, an eco-phenomenological approach builds on ideas of feminist ecologies and the concept of a shared natural world envisaged by ecofeminism, as it points to the possibility of unravelling the power relations of dominance. While emotionally felt responses towards the nonhuman potentially provide a galvanizing force for protection of the environment, performance and art facilitate awareness of troubling emotional contradictions and of the body-self’s patterns that underlie human dominance.

Introduction: ‘Street-Fighters and Philosophers’: Traversing Ecofeminisms

Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene emerges at the intersection of two progressive twentieth-century political movements, one concerned with the fight for women’s rights and the other with ecological sustainability within the environment. The book celebrates the ongoing philosophical and activist advocacy of feminist ecologies as it traces the ecofeminist movement’s roots and alignment with recent social, cultural and artistic developments. It proposes the broad term ‘feminist ecologies’ to capture the diversity of the movement over the last 45 years and the range of possible ways in which feminist and ecological concerns can speak to one another in the era of the Anthropocene. To find solutions to ecological and feminist issues we need new modes of theory and praxis, activism and philosophizing as well as radical rethinking of policy, law, spirituality and education. Feminist Ecologies sets us on this path. It challenges us to take control over the Anthropocene and shift our environments towards new and more sustainable directions.

Vantage Points: Pedagogy on Body-Based Performance

Performance Studies presents performing bodies and visuality as culturally meaningful and philosophically significant. In addition to the epistemologies of the field, embodied forms of knowledge enlarge social understanding. The author offered two subjects on body-based arts to the MAIPR students in 2010, and sought to encourage them to think about the social and aesthetic significance of bodies and to draw on ideas of body phenomenology. The interpretation of bodies in performance, however, is preceded by questions about the viewer’s position. These subjects asked: Is the interpretation of the body coming from the perspective of a performer or a spectator (or a student scholar)? How does bodily experience of nationality, gender, race and sexuality impact on this viewing process? This discussion explores how pedagogy about viewing performance implicates cultural and personal vantage points that are also phenomenologically embodied. Performance Studies proposes that these processes can be applicable to all body to body engagement. This analysis of pedagogical approaches to the bodily reception of body-based performance utilizes examples of specific performances covered in the MAIPR subjects. These provided vantage points from which to grapple with the performative ambiguity of meaning that slips and slides across bodies.

Acrobatic Circus Horses

Astley’s Circus in England was directly connected to the military through ex-soldier Philip Astley’s display of cavalry horse training, his published manuals, and his costumed identity in riding school performances. Militarized training underpinned the convergence of human acrobatic training and rider training in the founding of the circus (Saxon, 1978, p. 198), and the circus form arguably influenced the physical conditioning of the human body in nineteenth-century society. This chapter outlines how militarized processes of human-animal training in the early circus aimed to create a natural effect as acts expanded from displaying rider control over the horse to riding without visible control. It argues that while Philip Astley’s influential ideas of physical training for control without force were deemed scientific, he actually advocated the selective disciplining of the emotionality of both humans and animals in ways that were indicative of performance, and that Andrew Ducrow overlaid these training regimes with theatrical emotions suggestive of wildness. The larger point is that the conditioning of animals with human emotions not only underpinned inventive cultural practices of circus horsemanship in training and in performance, but remained allied with military practice upholding state authority.

Circus and Stage: The Theatrical Adventures of Rose Edouin and G.B.W. Lewis

National Status”. French has undertaken extensive research, drawing on primary sources, such as local newspapers, diaries, letters, and cookbooks, to present every possible angle to answer the when, where, and who questions. At times, this attention to detail can be overwhelming. However, French has done the reader a great service in providing two appendices that show at a glance (in table format) the first published recipes and the first cookbook recipes. The tables include the source of the recipe (newspaper, magazine, etc), ingredients, method, and icing. Part B, “Place and Person”, has four chapters which outline “The Minor Claims” for when, where, and who; the next three chapters are substantial and set out in detail each of the major claims for creation. Three possible contenders are: Monsieur Galland, the chef de cuisine to Lord Lamington, Governor of Queensland, 1896–1901; Miss Amy Schauer, a cookery instructor at the Brisbane Technical College; and, finally, Mrs Fanny Young of Toowoomba’s Harlaxton House. At the end of this chapter, French leaves us with a tantalising precursor to his conclusion that, in fact, “[t]he ‘heroic inventor’ might not be one but multiple cooks” (174). The conclusion, “A Summary Judgement, An Alternative Scenario, and ‘The Cleverness of the Whole Number’”, brings together the evidence and French, like a good detective, presents each of the cases as possibilities, including an alternative explanation and his own assessment. “The cleverness of the whole number”, suggested by Queensland housewife/cook Mina Rawson in 1895, is instructional. Rawson, as well as respected food historians Helen Leach and Michael Symons, acknowledge that recipes are often created, modified, copied, passed on by many people, and this might well be the answer to the who, when, where questions of the lamington’s “creation”. These two books provide an in-depth examination of many of Australia’s most loved foods and explain our food cultures comprehensively. As with many other Australian cultural and social traditions such as art, music, and film, the importance of cultural traffic cannot be underestimated—Australian food culture is also the product of the influence of many other food cultures. Santich argues, and I suggest that French would agree, that “[o]ver two centuries or so of colonisation and federation and emerging nationhood, distinctively Australian ways of cooking and eating have developed, demonstrating ‘characteristic Australian responses to unique Australian situations’” (303). These responses demonstrate practices of making do, ingenuity, and reinvention—this is perhaps what makes our food culture uniquely Australian.

Protests and circus geographies: exotic animals with Edgley's in Australia

Abstract The 1988 Moscow Circus tour by Edgley International attracted considerable newspaper coverage about a tight-wire bear act, travelling cage sizes, and animal rights protests that culminated in the prosecution of a new circus performer. This increased media attention in 1988 indicates a turning point in social opposition to performing animals in Australian circus. Yet the 1993 Edgleys Moscow Circus tour had double the animal acts and a wire-walking tiger. Despite continued media coverage of an anti-animal performance position in subsequent years, exotic animals continued to be part of successful circus tours. It seems that the strategies used in protests after 1988, which targeted all animals in the circus without differentiating between the species, may have been less effective than the species-specific protests in 1988. Protesting about a general category of animal performer correlates with the rhetoric of the modernist circus that collapses species differences. Hence the circus could maintain its defence that animals were well-treated, living with their trainers in one big circus family. This article argues that, even so, from 1988 the contradictions of the traditional circus had been exposed because newspaper stories and reviews accommodated points made by protestors about animals while they also supported human acts in the circus. These revealed that the allure of exotic geographies embodied by animals in the circus had been disrupted.