Bouissac Paul. Semiotics at the Circus

De Gruyter Mouton, 2010. — ix, 196 p. — (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition). — ISBN: 978-3-11-021831-2.How can we account for the intensity and resilience of the meaning making power of the circus? For centuries, actually millennia, audiences have flocked to contemplate tight rope walkers, jugglers, tumblers, jokers, feats of horsemanship and wild animal training. All these performers from immemorial times have relied on the same techniques to survive the physical and social challenges to which they confront themselves. Their programs unfold with remarkable precision and predictability. Failures are the exception.Yet, the fascination they cause seems to be inexhaustible. They eke out a living from providing an ephemeral commodity as essential as bread and water, something that can be watched, and watched again when the desire returns, intact, to feed the eyes and the mind with the wonders of their arts.Semiotician at the circus
The production of circus space
The constraints of nomadic life
The spatial algorithm of the circus
Squaring the circle
Olli and Illi: playing with space and desire
The time of the circus. Cognitive and emotional dimensions of acrobatics and other circus acts
Circus acts as texts
A brain to brain affair
Another kind of time
The timeless tools of time
Clowns at work: the melodic structure of social interactions
Concluding remarks: circus time and cognition
In what sense is a circus animal performing?
Meaning, text, and context
The civilized animal
A symphony of signs: the art of deceit and the pitfalls of self-deception
Horses’ feathers: from tacit knowledge to circus metaphors
A theoretical prelude
Birds, horses, and feathers
Horses, ostriches, and chorus girls
Circus horses in times of cultural changes
Circus and cycles
Horse and bicycle: preliminary analogies
History, cultural evolution, and the circus
The introduction of the bicycle in circus spectacles
Pondering the strange history of the bicycle
The semiotics of the bicycle
The bicycle enters the kingdom of the horse
The pyramid and the wheel: the visual discourse of circus acrobatics
The representation of law and anarchy
The language of the pyramid
The Tangier troupe: from order to chaos and back
The staging of acrobatics as social metaphors
Revolution(s) on a trampoline
Triumph and tragedy: the semiotics of fear and danger
Under the semiotic magnifying lens
Gender economy and tacit rules: norms and transgressions in the air
The predictive power of semiotics
Order and chaos on wheels
The logic of clown faces
The structure of European clowns’ make-up
From structuralism to biosemiotics
Icons of biomorphology
White faces and white patches: the management of leucosignals in clown make-up
A cross-cultural probe of clown make-up and its transformations
Expanding the scope: toward a global semiotic theory of clown make-up
Incident, accident, failure: life and death at the circus
The representation of negative experience in performance
A science of the individual
Toward a model of negative experience
When failure means success: the staging of a negative experience
The semiotic dissection of George Carl’s comic act
Anatomy of a negative masterpiece
Subjective vs. objective situations
A lady in danger
There’s no business like show business: the marketing of performance
Marketing the performing arts
The golden rules of performance
How to capture an audience
The power of stories
The researcher as spectator: the pragmatics of circus performances
Toward a theory of live performances
The predicaments of description
The rules of performance
How to make a verbal copy
From rules of performance to rules of descriptionCircus in perspective