The Philosopher on the Flying Trapeze. Lyotard or Leotard?
By Reg Bolton
In the study of philosophy and theory, we are accustomed to receiving large
answers to small questions. It can be
intoxicating to look through a microscope at a previously un-regarded fragment,
question or idea, and marvel at its significance when it is magnified,
variously illuminated and prodded into life.
It is equally stimulating, but possibly more hazardous, to confront a Big
Question, armed only with a few small answers, drawn from a little scholarship
and framed in a few pages of words.
This is what I intend to do. The
Question in question is the title. My small answer to this Big Question will
consider the relationship between contemporary cultural theory, represented
here by Jean-Francois Lyotard, French postmodernist philosopher (1925-1998),
and circus arts, represented by Jules Leotard, French aerialist (1838-1870).
Both of these men were cultural pioneers by most definitions of 'culture.' To define
culture, I like the simple version: "The way we do things around here."[1]
Each man reflected his times, absorbed the achievements of his predecessors,
and exceeded them just enough to be celebrated in his own time. To go too far beyond one's current culture
is to become untimely, an eccentric, ignored or ridiculed. Blake, Van Gogh, Joyce, Manley-Hopkins are
known to us because their tangible writings and paintings remain to be
posthumously appreciated when we are ready.
How many philosophers, dancers, musicians, unpublished writers and forgotten
painters have languished and disappeared by being too far ahead of their time?
In the circus arts, many performers who worked not only culturally, but also
technologically ahead of their times, perished. Clowns died from lead-poisoning inherent in early white-face
paint.[2]
early lion tamers, working 'en ferocite' sometimes forgot the principle that
angry lions eat people.[3]
Tightrope walkers suddenly learned that they shouldn't say, "I can do this with
my eyes shut."[4] Leapers,
using new springboards found that to somersault over eight horses was easy
work-landing was the problem.[5]
The subtitle of Steve Gossard's excellent book "The Reckless Era of Aerial
Performance" is "The Evolution of Trapeze."[6] This Darwinian word, "evolution," carries
associations of mutation and selection.
Selection cuts both ways, and as trapeze acts evolved, mutations of
equipment, mischance, and incredible stupidity saw many aspirants selected
suddenly, sadly, vertically downwards.
Here are the Brothers Banvard, performing at the Adelphi Music Hall in Oldham,
England in 1868:
. . .one portion of the
entertainment consists of the taller of the men suspending himself from his
toes from the shoulders of his companion, whilst the other is standing erect on
the bar of a trapeze, at a height of twenty feet from the stage, and that it is
his duty . to slip as it were from this posture as if he were falling head
foremost on the people beneath him. The
cleverness of the feat consists in arresting his downfall by catching with his
feet the horizontal bar on which the other is standing, and then to hang head
downwards. On this occasion, however,
the performer missed the trick and fell into the orchestra, suffering a broken
arm and "mashed" fingers.[7]
In contrast to these anachronistic martyrs, both Leotard and Lyotard were perfect
for their time, and just as Lyotard did not perish from post-modernism, Leotard
did not experience trapeze trauma.
Lyotard was born on August 1, 1838 in Toulouse, France. His father, Jean, was a Professor of Gymnastics
with his own extensive studio in the district of Haute-Garonne. Young Jules passed his exams and was
destined for a career in law, but at the age of eighteen, he began to work
seriously in the gymnasium, and to experiment with trapeze bars above the
swimming pool.
Consider the era. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had
seen the flowering of Romanticism, in which the artist, the poet or other hero
is seen to celebrate unfettered humanity, to soar unencumbered by the repression
of classical, civic or even moral inhibitions.
Byron, Keats and Shelley personified this spirit in poetry. As happens,
a cultural movement may be in decline with the intelligentsia before it is
finally picked up and manifested by the masses. Thus, as European manners, dress,
religion and politics were entering the sombre 'Victorian' age, to be
brightened only by the pre-Raphaelites, the public was still eager to see
manifestations of the remarkable, aspiring 'romantic' human spirit. Acrobats
exhibiting, by costume and posture, extreme manliness, were seen as heroic,
Promethean beings, lifting the state of man closer to that of God. Even
Nietzsche reflected these passions when he wrote, in 1885 in "Also Spracht
Zarathustra," "Man is a rope, fastened between animal and Superman - a rope
over an abyss. A dangerous going-over, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous
looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and staying-still," and, " One does
not kill by anger but by laughter. Come let us kill the Spirit of Gravity!"[8]
The current architectural advances, improved lighting and new publicity techniques
of mass entertainment, made this a time when a bold performer could catch the
popular imagination and become a star.
Leotard took this opportunity.
His innovation was, simply, that he flew. His
achievement was so fundamental, so significant, and so brilliantly executed
that when he first appeared at the Cirque Napolean, Paris,[9]
on November 12th 1859, his co-artists sponsored a banquet in his honour, and a
commemorative medal was struck.[10]
His rig consisted of three trapezes, and he swung and leaped from one to
another in a variety of positions, for a twelve minute act, before alighting,
with a somersault, to his carpet-covered safety platform below. The entire
sequence would be considered an advanced training drill in a Circus School
today, but in his time, it was sensational. Jules Leotard became one of the
world's first superstars. He appeared in several European capitals, and in the
USA, and was the focus of great adulation.
G. Strehly, author of "L'Acrobatie et les Acrobates," actually saw
Leotard perform, and recalls the hysteria:
This 'saltimbanque' was the king of fashion.
It's hard to believe the welcome he received in Paris. When there is not
much politics, the public's passion looks for a new object. For a while, Leotard was that object. He
caused a storm everywhere. There were
queues to get into the Circus; people fought for seats. In addition, advertising assured that the
artist's name was in vogue, and we saw the appearance of Leotard cravats,
Leotard walking sticks, Leotard brooches.[11]
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