This accessible page is a derivative of https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1702122/2057354 which it is meant to support and not replace.
Page description: On opening the page, above the title, a large video is playing entitled 'Hophop ! 2022'. Keywords on the page are highlighted in blue and, when clicked upon, open up a window featuring a poem, in French, by Sabrina Sow. These windows show the printed poem and also contain a sound file of the author reading the poem.
Video description: The camera looks down onto a horse’s back from a standing rider’s point of view. The horse is walking and the rider’s bare feet and skirt are revealed as the camera angle swings from the horse’s head and neck to its back. The rider’s voice muffled by the gentle gong- or chime-like soundtrack, encourages the horse to trot, exclaiming Hop Hop! A cloud of dots is superimposed on the image, blurring the lines of perception.
In the animal acts of traditional circus, two main staging strategies were always present. On the one hand, wild and domestic animals were presented as dangerous. To achieve this impression, big cats were trained to roar on cue, horses were instructed to rear, crocodiles were made to open their mouths. Through whip sounds and big gestures, the human performer underlined the need for dressage and domestication. This mode of staging, according to Tait, alludes to a complicated emotional dynamic, ‘when a big cat trainer describes enacting a persona of nervousness and fear to heighten the act’s impression of danger for spectators, while simultaneously performing relaxed calmness towards the animal performers in order to mask any fear of them’ (2012: 3). What becomes very clear in Tait’s statement is the fact that these relations in circus are first and foremost staged, provoked by a specific dramaturgy and staging strategy. The actual relation between trainer, presenter, and animal performer is thereby not necessarily visible.
On the other hand, the animals of traditional circus are anthropomorphized, they ‘are forced to perform us, to ceaselessly serenade us with our own fantasies: I want to walk like you, talk like you’ (Chaudhuri 2017: ‘Animal Rites’). The gestures of the humans onstage were downplayed, so as to increase the animal’s anthropomorphic impression. One must thereby consider ‘the process by which humans anthropomorphize [the animals…] with and through their emotions. Animal bodies became enveloped in human emotions’ (Tait 2012: 1). The superiority of the human species here is hence based on an anthropocentric worldview.
Such staging strategies were strongly related to their cultural contexts, as the peak phase of traditional circus coincided with the industrial revolution, military campaigns, and colonialism — in other words, with the peak phase of anthropocentrism. In this frame of reference, the work with animals was used to underline human superiority and dominance over other species ✿ (both human and non-human). Circus performances delivered ‘propaganda that encouraged the social acceptance of conquering military wars and oppressive practices’ (Tait 2021: 128). Tait argues that ‘big cat and elephant acts in the live circus changed in response to shifting social preferences influenced by the cinema and television of the 1960s and by animal rights campaigns from the 1970s’ (Tait 2012: 8), but most animal acts in traditional circus performances of the twenty-first century are indeed aligned with these very two strategies.