Wrangling, Wrapping the Reconfigured Body within the Contemporary Circus

Working with our bodies means reframing and questioning the hows and whys of the figure.  Female strength historically has been separated from the female figure, placed outside the societal norm. The circus consistently has been a space where female strength and the female figure were permitted, even encouraged, to be together and visible—reclaimed, transformed and reconfigured.

Tangle Movement, a contemporary Philadelphia-based circus company, features a mix of traditional circus performance forms—the trapeze and the acrobatic—with dance theater to weave a multi-dimensional story, to explore. Using contemporary discourse on the ‘queered body’ as well as the context of the historical, traditional circus to examine two of Tangle Movement’s performances: Ampersand (2011) and Tell it Slant (2015), I will explore how the Philadelphia circus company allows the female queer body to inform their work in order to subvert narrative stereotypes that play with gender and genre.

In 2011, Tangle Movement was founded as an all-female ensemble and reflects many diverse identities. Since the company's inception, its performances have always  been featured at the Philadelphia Fringe Arts festival. The chosen name “Tangle” references the troupe’s acrobatic performances and the possibilities that arise when moments become complicated. Tangle also represents the shapes and angles that we see when a performance is happening on stage. In an interview in Phindie: Independent coverage of Philadelphia theater and arts founder Lauren Rile Smith shares how she sees the relationship between the circus and the body:  “Over time the circus reframed my body into a project, a partner, a challenge, and a source of pleasure and self-expression”

In the traditional circus that spans from nineteenth century, women were framed as dainty, frilly and fragile. In fact, their performances were much more than advertised. A lecturer in English and Film Studies, Helen Stoddart in Ring of Desire: Circus History and Representation writes about how through their extensive training and performances, these women performers became heavily muscled even when this kind of physical female form was considered taboo. Winnie Colleano, part of an Australian troupe, dressed as a porcelain doll during her swing trapeze performances that were done outside with audiences looking from below. A female swing trapeze artist, who swung fifty to sixty feet up in the air without a safety net, Colleano’s figure flips and turns and finally ends up landing on her heels on a trapeze bar, creating harsh and precise lines with her muscular form.

Selina Powell, another early well-known female tightrope walker who was known as Madame Blondin, performed in 1863 as a high wire walker and in many of her performances was blindfolded with a bag over her head. In a fatal performance, Powell tumbled to her death when the rigging broke: “Her performance and subsequent death horrified the nation and sparked a nationwide outcry against “dangerous performance”. Her death might have gone unnoticed, but she was eight months pregnant at the time of her fall so for the next three decades there was concern about sex, the family and childhood and artistic regulation.

Lillian Leitzel, an acrobat and strong women who dressed in quaint costumes, worked for Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus and was framed as “Miss Leitzel World’s Foremost Lady Gymnast.”. During Leitzel’s performances, the lights would dim and a spotlight would be pointed towards her female figure that was to be lowered into the three-ring arena where there were ropes attached to rings without a safety net. Her Roman rings act would place her up to sixty feet in the air where she would grasp the ring with one hand and rotate her whole body, often sometimes even dislocating her shoulder. The traditional circus celebrated accomplishing these physical feats. According to professor of theater and drama Peta Tait in Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance, “celebrity aerialist[s like] Lilian Leitzzel [and] to some extent, female circus performer up to the 1930’s, were freer in their display of muscular development because of its continuing novelty, but it also marked them as socially different.” She also mentions that “nevertheless accounts and drawings of the performance confirm that feminine and masculine identity was physically performed as part of the action and that the space in between was one of androgynous identity. An aerial body with multiple gender identities was especially mysterious.” Tangle Movement and its ten troupe members have helped to redefine what it means to be female within the circus.   Blurring the lines gender is what happens within each of its performances. 

By centering the queered body/figure through a melding of theater, storytelling and dance with circus tradition, Tangle Movement addresses this misreading of female strength. It shows young women how they can have a cultural identity outside of social norms. Tait again writes, “Where a body is interpreted as presenting meaningful social codes (as a context for communicating (reading) cultural identity, female muscularity remains ambiguous and resists prescriptive ideas.” This all-female troupe creates a mysterious ensemble by accomplishing physical feats of hoisting, pulling and dropping their bodies from heights unimagined by its audiences.

In both of their recent performances, Ampersand and Tell It Slant, Tangle Movement repositions viewers to question what is to be a performer within a space. Their ‘truths’ about female bodies are told in a non-linear fashion and references a contemporary, queer narrative what literary theorist Eve Sedgwick calls “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning” and what cultural theorist Paul Gilroy refers to as “refusing the binary” that is imposed by an ‘or’ and replacing it with the multiplicity signified by an ‘and’.

Within the interdisciplinary acrobatic performance space of Ampersand (2011) we see four white walls and standing lights that frame the apparatus as well as a trapeze and silk. One performance features a female figure who creates shapes and lines by wrapping strands of silk around her body and moving laterally up and down the strands.

Hoisting, pulling and dropping her body, she reaches for her clothing as she ‘begins’ her day using the strands of silk as if they are second appendages.  The tangling motion of the figure, fifty feet in the air, creates scene of everyday life—the web of movement a tangle of body and fabric. Collaboratively devised to use surreal language to describe the ordinary, the performance makes the mundane extraordinary focusing on the (inner-)female strength and the dynamic relationship that women have between each other and subverting the traditional stereotype of women in domestic spaces. Stoddart remains us that the aerialist “above all circus performers seems to embody the circus’ own general fantasy of itself as a space of transcendence in which the usual constraints of time and space do not operate”  

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Tangle Movement Arts’ Tell it Slant performance references nineteenth-century US poet Emily Dickinson’s Tell all the Truth—where she warns against direct honesty—and unfolds as a vignette about female relationships. Created by fiber artist Julia Wilson who created apparatus to go along with acts, the sets for the performance feature backdrops of hand woven fiber apparatus and overhead lighting to hold the focus of audience. The trapeze duo of Megan Gendell and Lauren Feldman perform as two female figures who create space as both move laterally up and down. Each body movement is made into a line, a shape, an angle that allows the two figures to move through motions of falling and catching. The lines appear as the duo moves their limbs in a certain direction; shapes are made with a slight touch of a hand or flip; and angles appear as they work together within the limited bar space of the trapeze. In Rings of Desire Helen Stoddart writes that “the female aerialist is odd and is perplexing in nature. At the same time, the exceptional appearance provides the imprint of their physical oddness: an oddness which as a trace of the labours imposed on the body, invites sympathy, but at the same time promotes a curiosity about the definition and potential of [...] human body” Understanding an intimacy of the bodies performing is important not only to experiencing fully its physical feats but also to experiencing the weaving together of  the storyline with their bodies and the music. 

Within the elements of each of its performances, Tangle Movement Arts and its founders center the idea of syncretism. Their art center as a “Tiny Circus” becomes a spin on the traditional traveling circus and helps to explore and narrate the female queer body by exposing the fringe to the outside world while encouraging its audiences by either walking by when there is a pop up show, through word-of-mouth, and social media. To become educated on the contemporary circus and how they too might get involved. 

Tangle Movement Arts allows the circus to become art form within a long history of being stuck in tradition by allowing us as outsiders to step within its ambiguous ring and join in its creation of fantastic physical feats, redesigning the circus within the image that we imagine. An indication of how much the circus has changed, Tangle Movement Arts redefines and re-calibrates the conversation of the meaning of theater and dance— what it means to be hung, wrapped and swung, inverted and flipped but also queering a narrative that will be told through spoken word. 

Tangle Movement Arts questions what our bodies mean of body and reframes how audience experience the traditional circus performance. By using the queered body to examine stereotypes associated with female performance, the troupe helps us to understand the female figure in all of its complexities of strength.  There is power when creating a narrative within a space in a running sequence. Framing a narrative collaboratively is like creating quilt, cutting, shaping and sewing an amalgam of squares together. Devising collaboration is about improvisation but also about encouraging performers to have artistic license over the framing of the act. 

Bibliography 

Assael, Brenda. "Women on Top: Female Acrobats and Dangerous Performances." In The Circus and Victorian Society, 108-35. N.p.: University of Virginia Press, n.d.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Print.

Jensen, Dean. "Lillian Leitzel, The High- Flying Queen of The Circus." Interview. NPR. Last modified June 29, 2013. http://www.npr.org/2013/06/29/195971072/ Lillian-Leitzel-the-tiny-high-flying-queen-of-the-circus.
Sedgwick, Eve. Tendencies. N.p.: Routledge, n.d.

Smith, Lauren Rile. "No Elephants in This Circus: Lauren Rile Smith talks about Tangle Movement Arts’ circus-theater cabaret TELL IT SLANT." Interview by Christopher Munden. Phindie Independent coverage of Philadelphia theater and arts. Last modified March 6, 2015. http://phindie.com/no-elephants-lauren-rile-smith-interview-7251/.

Stoddart, Helen. "Flights of Fantasy: Representation of Female Aerialist." In Rings of Desire:  Circus, 166-77. Manchester, NY: n.p., n.d.

Tait, Peta. Circus Bodies. N.p.: Routledge, n.d.

Winnie Colleano." Circopedia. Accessed October 28, 2016. http://www.circopedia.org Winnie_Colleano_Video_(c1939).