A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the YearWhen Duncan Wall visited his first nouveau cirque as a college student in Paris, everything about it—the monochromatic costumes, the acrobats singing Simon and Garfunkel, the juggler reciting Proust—hooked him. Soon he was attending circuses two or three nights a week, and soon after that, he entered the intensively competitive training program at France’s École Nationale des Arts du Cirque. The Ordinary Acrobat is a magical, funny, sometimes scar...
Contortionists and Cannons (Culture in Action)
by Marc Tyler Nobleman
With Culture in Action the arts are brought to life! The varied titles in the Culture in Action series build up into a comprehensive library from which readers can choose their favourite arts topics. Each book contains activities with easy-to-follow instructions.
This book takes a fun look at a typical week in the life of a circus performer. It is written in the form of a first-person diary and looks at some of the key skills that a circus performer needs and how they became a circus performer. The endmatter includes a spread on how readers can start their own diary.
For a hundred years, the American circus was the largest show-biz industry the world had ever seen. During the heyday of the American circus from the mid-1800s to mid-1900s, traveling circuses performed for audiences of up to 10,000 per show, employed as many as 4,000 men and women, and crisscrossed the country on 20,000 miles of railroad in one season alone. The spectacle of death-defying daredevils, strapping super-heroes and scantily-clad starlets, fearless animal trainers, and startling frea...
Although the diabolo has existed for hundreds of years, it has never been performed as dynamically as it is today in the hands of diabolists such as Donald Grant. Although Donald is one of the most innovative of modern diabolists, in "My First Diabolo Book" he lays down the foundations which any new diabolist will want to learn. Starting with getting the diabolo spinning, Donald explains the various control techniques before providing step by step instructions to a complete diabolo repertoire,...
The first comprehensive 'biography' of one of the first celebrity animals who gave us one of our favourite words. Jumbo, Victorian England's favourite elephant, was born in 1861 in French Sudan, imported to a Parisian zoo and later sold on to London, where - for seventeen years - he dutifully gave children rides and ate buns from their hands, all the while being tortured at night to keep him docile. Worldwide fame came when he was bought by the American showman and scam artist P.T. Barnum in 188...
Bertram Mills - The Circus That Travelled by Train
by David Jamieson
This work is an original and pioneering exploration of not only the social history of the subcontinent but also of performance and popular culture. The domain of analysis is entirely novel and opens up a bolder approach of laying a new field of historical enquiry of South Asia. Trawling through an extraordinary set of sources such as colonial and postcolonial records, newspaper reports, unpublished autobiographies, private papers, photographs and oral interviews the author brings out a fascinati...
Eat Sleep Baton Notebook for a Majorette, Medium Ruled Journal
by Useful Hobbies Books
Through Almost Perfect, Erika Lemay shares how she became world-famous by creating a career out of her passion - the acrobatic world of Physical Poetry. The gritty detail of a life in the spotlight is exposed - rebuilding herself after a fall that left one of her limbs compromised and challenged all she had aspired to be, avoiding child abusers in the show business world, and keeping her cool when the unpredictable happens 30 metres in the air. More than this, Erika explains the methodology be...
Flying Without a Net - The True Story of a Boy Who Defies All Odds and Runs Away with Cirque Du Soleil
by Vital Germaine
At the turn of the 20th century, the circus was the most popular form of American entertainment, and New York City was the hub of circus-related activity. Featuring superb archival photography, this book documents a wide variety of ephemera, images, and artifacts relating to the history of the circus in the city, from the seminal equestrian displays of the 18th century to the iconic railroad circuses of the late 19th century. Matthew Wittmann offers a thorough history of the circus in New York C...
Amphitheatres and Circuses (Clipper Studies in the Theatre,, #9)
by T Allston Brown
Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus
by Peta Tait