![]() ![]() Be prepared for a broad definition of physical comedy (mine!) and a wide variety of approaches. Welcome to the All Fall Down blog, an exploration of all aspects of physical comedy, from the historical to the latest work in the field, from the one-man show to the digital composite, from the conceptual to the nuts & bolts how-to. Ring around a rosie, a pocket full of posies ![]() This striptease film continues an old circus tradition of titillating display. I've written about this slightly hidden sexual display in “‘Soft and Silky Around Her Hips’: Nineteenth-Century Circus and Sex,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre, 22.2 (Spring 2010): 25-47. When Walt Whitman reviewed Dan Rice's circus in 1856 Brooklyn, he made a point of praising the display of men's legs that drew him to circus.īy the late 20th-century, it became G-strings with a G rating. Nor was it only women subject to the male gaze. She was not fully naked but represented what the scholar Tracy Davis has called "clothed nudity." In many circus acts, the presence of tights was often "a matter of inference and faith, not of observation and knowledge." Paris's Chez Molier circus was more explicit, featuring naked equestriennes, pictured in Le Courrier Francais, June 21, 1891. her legs all sprawling perched up there, naked and unprotected" (74-75). In George Spaeight's wonderful HISTORY OF CIRCUS (1980), he wrote about a Londoner who fairly drooled in his diary, writing about a woman on the trapeze, her arms "all bare her leg, cased in fleshings, were as good as bare to the hip. While officially respectable as an adult form, and later as family fare focused on children, it has continued to show as much skin as then-current cultural standards allowed. ![]() Ever since the mid-1800s, circus has balanced respectability and titillating display. ![]()
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