Playing with (The Erotics of) Fire in Circus Performance: The Circus of Horrors

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Notes

¹ I have focused, in this article, on the performances of The Evilution that I attended at the Charter Theatre, Preston, on Tuesday 14th and Wednesday 15th November 2006. I have attended several productions by the Circus of Horrors and my reason for choosing to focus on The Evilution is simply that productions tend to be essentially variations on a theme and, having attended the show twice – and made notes on the second occasion – I have a better recollection of it than other Circus of Horrors shows that I have attended more recently.

² The present-day Circus of Horrors emerged from a prototypical version of the show that performed in clubs and universities and made its ‘official’ debut at Glastonbury festival in 1995. Subsequent (per)mutations of the show have been performed in various locations, including tents, theatres, stadiums and arenas, as well as in cameo appearances on mainstream television. The Circus of Horrors has played in the UK, Holland, Germany, South America and Japan, and has grown from a ‘small cult show’ (Haze in Cottle 2006: 248) into a performance event with a much broader popular appeal. It currently performs predominantly in the cultural mainstream.

³ The figure of the ‘fakir’ invoked here, while loosely rooted in the practices of Muslim and Hindu religious ascetic mendicants, is arguably largely a creation of the Western popular imagination and discourses of Orientalism. The term ‘fakir act’ is widely used to refer to a variety of popular entertainment acts styled around aesthetics and feats that have become associated, in the popular imagination, with what are regarded as the mystical mental and physical powers of Hindu ascetics, yogis and, more generally the ‘exotic (Eastern or Oriental) Other’. Such acts tend to be characterized by a generalized ‘Eastern’ or ‘Oriental’ aesthetic and feature feats of extreme physical endurance such as lying on a bed of nails, climbing a ladder of sword blades, walking on or eating broken glass and, of course, various tricks with fire.

⁴ Notwithstanding a popular perception of circus as a rather ‘old-fashioned’ performance discipline, this use – or perhaps ‘misuse’ – of technology is arguably very much in keeping with the spirit of circus. A glance at the history of circus shows that for much of its early history circus was quick to capitalize on and incorporate the technological innovations of the time, with performances including fireworks, light displays, automata, dioramas, electric lights, bicycles, and even early film screenings (Speaight 1980: 31, Stoddart 2000: 34-36).