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in french
Teaser Display (6'44)
in french
This online encyclopedia is available in 3 languages : English, French and Spanish.
Pushing your body to its limits, sometimes risking your life, is what is at stake in acrobatics with very distant origins which, like everything that approaches death, touches the sacred.
This is how fundamental disciplines of acrobatics will emerge, grow and interact: jumps, balances, contortions, Icarian games, equestrian games... and then, later on, they will be combined with propulsion devices and apparatus and develop aerial acrobatics.
Laughter has long been associated with the performing arts. Jumper, musical squire, trainer, august or white clown become symbols of the circus until the contemporary clown, in the role of a fierce loner or an empathetic militant, shifts the lines once again.
Juggling has been around for centuries. Its meaning evolves with the modern circus, the revolutions of amateur juggling and the "new circus". The drop, once shameful, is now a pretext for major innovations.
Another art of dexterity, magic makes the boundaries between spectacle and mysticism porous. After the great illusions evolving towards macabre fantasies, New Magic is nowadays established as an autonomous language where the arts come together.
If the horse is the first and main partner of the circus pioneers, very quickly all kinds of animals appear in small skits where they demonstrate their learning abilities. Even wildlife animals, also exhibited in circus-menageries. The training of wild animals fascinates people immediately and is nowadays more and more contested.
- Aesthetics, forms and genres-
- Chronology-
- Circus fantasies-
- Iconography-
- Circus spaces.
A very rich glossary and bibliography are also available.
Nearly 400 videos, mainly of contemporary circus,
1,700 still images from the BnF collections,
1,320 images from the CNAC collections.
With the expertise of many specialists
Pascal Jacob, Philippe Goudard, Jean-Michel Guy, members of the scientific committee, in association with Marika Maymard, and with Arnaud Thomas for acrobatics, Valentine Losseau and Raphaël Navarro for magic, and many experts, worked together to provide comparative perspectives on the history and evolution of circus arts, through a variety of aesthetic, technological and historical approaches.
Their abundantly illustrated summaries provide many insights and are complemented by substantive articles that will also be of interest to researchers, students and professionals.