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Background: Recently, activation-dependant structural brain plasticity in humans has been demonstrated in adults after three months of training a visio-motor skill. Learning three-ball cascade juggling was associated with a transient and highly selective increase in brain gray matter in the occipito-temporal cortex comprising the motion sensitive area hMT/V5 bilaterally. However, the exact time-scale of usage-dependant structural changes occur is still unknown. A better understanding of the temporal parameters may help to elucidate to what extent this type of cortical plasticity contributes to fast adapting cortical processes that may be relevant to learning.

Principal Findings: Using a 3 Tesla scanner and monitoring whole brain structure we repeated and extended our original study in 20 healthy adult volunteers, focussing on the temporal aspects of the structural changes and investigated whether these changes are performance or exercise dependant. The data confirmed our earlier observation using a mean effects analysis and in addition showed that learning to juggle can alter gray matter in the occipito-temporal cortex as early as after 7 days of training. Neither performance nor exercise alone could explain these changes.

Conclusion: We suggest that the qualitative change (i.e. learning of a new task) is more critical for the brain to change its structure than continued training of an already-learned task.

Occupational therapy and circus: Potential partners in enhancing the health and well-being of today’s youth

PURPOSE: To describe the frequency of injuries according to anatomical location and type among Cirque du Soleil artists over a 5 year period from 2002 to 2006.
METHODS: We obtained injury data from the Cirque du Soleil injury database. The database is used as an electronic patient record and records all injuries and associated treatments. We included any injury that occurred between Jan 1, 2002 and Dec 31, 2006 inclusive. We excluded any duplicate records for which the artist, injury date and location were identical. If a second injury was recorded to the same anatomical location within 3 months of the index injury date, we hand-searched the comments associated with the injuries and excluded any injuries that were exacerbations or re-injuries. We also excluded all personal health conditions and injuries that were not related to show or training.

RESULTS: There was a total of 6000 injuries over the 5 year period. Lower extremity injuries were more common in general. In the lower extremity, and the knee (~28%) and ankle (~28%) were the most commonly injured areas of the lower extremity. The shoulder represented 50% of injuries to the upper extremity. Most injuries were to muscles and tendons (~45%) and fractures or injuries to the nervous system (including concussions) were very rare (less than 5% together). Fifty percent of the injuries required 2 treatments or less, and 80% of the injuries required 7 treatments or less. Overall, there was no difference in the anatomical location or types of injuries suffered by males and females (p>0.6), and the pattern of injuries has remained consistent from year to year (p>0.6).

CONCLUSIONS: Circus arts performers incur injuries consistent with those of elite athletes in other activities. There is no difference in the pattern of injury among males and females.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, popular entertainments thrilled audiences throughout the United States, using a variety of techniques to encourage their potential audiences to part with their hard earned money. Rather than simply being a commercial exchange, attendance at a popular entertainment such as melodrama, circus, burlesque, or musical theatre often placed that individual in the midst of an active site of meaning making. This dissertation uses Modernity as a guiding historical, social, and cultural context to examine three specific performance events in three different Southern cities at three different historical periods to examine how popular theatricals provided a space for the discussion of what it means to be Southern. Looking at burlesques of Uncle Tom's Cabin in New Orleans in the Summer of 1854, Medicine Shows in rural Appalachia in the 1920s and 30s, and the Atlanta stop on the first national tour of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas in January of 1980, illustrates how performance spaces staged debates, documenting and contributing to changing notions of Southern identity. These show offered depictions of Southern life that often placed older, stereotypical characterizations alongside increasingly nuanced or modern ones. In each of my three theatrical examples, Southern identity becomes a critical strategy or construct for audience members to use to navigate the space between the realities of their own existence in the South, the ever more modern world around them, and the mythic images of the South presented both onstage and in the popular media.

The time frame extends from 1854, the summer of three prominent burlesques of Uncle Tom's Cabin in New Orleans that directly responded to the increasingly nation phenomenon of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, to the 1920s and 30s, when Medicine Shows traveled throughout rural Appalachia trying to transforms mountaineers into consumers using live performance and fake medicinal products, to 1980, when Whorehouse staged a debate between the Old and New South at The Fabulous Fox Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia. I conclude with an examination of the career trajectory of the Dixie Chicks and their recent troubles with identifying themselves as Southern.

Jugglers, Clowns and Showmen: The Use of Accounting Information in Circus in Australia

Language: PORTUGUESE

The author then goes on to employ qualitative methods to examine youth circus training at Fern Street Circus in San Diego, California, using data collected in interviews conducted with young participants in the Fern Street program. The results were transcribed, all statements given equal weight, and sorted for themes of meaning. Those themes that emerged in every interview became the basis for the phenomenological assertions in the findings. Multiple intelligences theory provided a conceptual framework for organizing these themes. The author conducted additional interviews late in the study to confirm and enrich findings.

Themes that developed within the data include engagement with interpersonal relationships including friendships and family dynamics, developing a sense of self-identity, balancing risk taking and risk management, economic considerations, athletic physical development, and learning the aesthetics of circus performance. It is hoped that this rich set of ways in which the participants in the study reflected on their experience of youth circus training will support the rationales given by youth circus educators, and that this study will meaningfully add to the limited scholarly discourse regarding youth circus training.

The nature of circus is also examined; particularly the elements of risk and the perceived sense of danger that are associated with successful circus. These aspects are recurring, necessary elements in the discussion of in-school circus programs. Other recurring themes outlined in the results include:

• an increase in the physical fitness of participating students;
• individual and community pride as dominant student, staff and parent reactions;
• a new “positive” utilization of space;
• an alignment of individuals’ projected and actual selves;
• the development of peer tutoring systems and new ways of learning;
• a new public face of the participating schools which, in turn, creates a new climate within the schools -which includes an overall decrease in violent and anti-social behaviour in the school, the home and the community.

All five of the de-Script-ive case studies are considered successful by the staff, students and parents interviewed. Success in this case is measured in terms of popularity, both within the school and its wider community, and in the decrease of various anti-social and identified destructive behaviours.

These results are examined under the categories of physical, psychological, mental, scholastic and sociological benefits. The data also emphasizes a number of obstacles to successful circus programs, and offers suggestions for overcoming these obstacles. The principals and practices extrapolated from the data collected provide a framework for how “circus works” within an educational framework.

The text that will comprise this thesis will be made up of the opening four chapters of this story. These chapters will tell the following tales: Jules’s first encounter with Sunra during a childhood outing with his estranged father; Jules’s brief relationship with a neighborhood friend which ends abruptly after a racial incident in Atlanta, and after which Jules runs away from home; The boyhood of Sunra in Istanbul, the tale of his street performing and his running off with the troupe of strongmen; and the travels of Jules through the wilderness and as a stowaway on trains in pursuit of the circus. This builds the first section of the novel which takes Jules from his first experience with Sunra until the point that they actually meet.

Bogdan Draganski

To explain this I first introduce six 'elements' of childhood, whose absence often seems to result in an incomplete personal maturity. Ith en conduct a wide exploration of both the real and the imagined circus, showing how these elements occur or are evoked there, and I establish a correspondence or 'homology' between the two entities - childhood and circus. The discoveries shed light on the aesthetic code of circus itself, leading to the conclusion that circus works as an art form because its essential composition recalls profound experiences of childhood.

I argue that contemporary Western childhood presents unexpected hazards, mostly involving passivity and over-protection. I n other parts of the world, and in some Western populations, childhood has other problems, linked to deprivation, exploitation and physical danger. I n either case, a child involved in circus activities has a chance to make good some deficits, by experiencing constructive physical risk, aspiration, trust, fun, self-individuation and hard work. My hope is that this dissertation will contribute some strength to the case for well-designed programmes of circus activities for young
people,in both formal and informal settings.

The question which focuses my research is this: with incredible diversity, rigid stratification, and a wide gulf between imagination and experience, how is it that the circus community functions on a practical everyday level? How and why does it work?

First, I outline the social structure of the multi-cultural, multi-lingual, and multi-national circus community. Although the performances within and outside the ring present an advertised and celebrated circus ideal of international harmony and warm “family” integration, categories of people inside are clearly marked off into classes which dominate circus life. Categories of difference (nationality, gender, etc.) largely determine opportunities, experiences, and treatment within the circus world.

Second, I explore how the social order is played out and challenged by use of multiple and overlapping systems of reference: gender roles, rules of talk, language, and affiliation. Performances, communications, and interactions of members both reinforce and cross-cut the separations in tangled webs of connections and power. The resulting networks allow some sense of mobility across the hierarchies, and a parallel system of belonging: insiders versus outsiders.

Third, I analyze the ideals and images which enable investment in the lifestyle despite and in some ways because of the unfulfilled reality. Circus people are perfectly aware of the contradiction between their often negative experiences and their positive imagination of the circus. This is not some sense of false consciousness or imposed ideology operating to mystify an oppressive society. The imagination of circus is a fantasy members use to reframe their sense of their own experiences as a magical escape from “normal” life.

I argue that any human collective is at least in part imagined, based upon fantasies and ideologies about its nature, performance, and identity. The symbols of physical and imaginary existence enact not only power and oppression, but utopian vision.

"I did this thesis on a program that we were teaching at an alternative high school called "Science Circus". It consisted of training high school science and communication students to participate in science demonstrations contained in the 3rd. grade curriculum/standards. The students were responsible for choosing a topic(concept), developing 5 to 8 demonstrations around that topic and traveling as a group to various elementary schools in the area and putting on a show for 10 minutes for each station. Then the elementary students, limited to 10 per group, would rotate to the next high school group that had a different concept to demonstrate. We had 10 to 12 stations with a time limit of 10 minutes per station(2 hours total). It was highly successful and our schedule filled each spring before school was out for the summer for the next school year with 12 schools getting to participate and almost that many waiting for their chance. We were fortunate to be on a block schedule for each Friday so that we could dedicate the whole day (4 hours) to getting ready, loading on the bus, traveling to the school, doing the show, packing up and moving back to the home school, and getting ready for the next week.

Emphasis was placed on the students being entertaining as well as informative."

Note: While this paper is included in a few circus bibliographies,  after reviewing the paper, it has nothing to do with circus [Steven Santos]

As a historical novel, Misshapen attempts to collect what was forgotten about the freakshow: the people, the violence, the tenderness, and the mystery. As a postmodern novel, it emphasizes the act of story-telling and how fragmented memory and experience translate into story. As a poetic novel, it challenges conventional notions of prose capabilities, often leaving story behind in order to express more compressed and linguistically reflexive ideas. As a novel about marginal figures, class, race, sexuality, and gender, Misshapen celebrates the uncontainability of human experience in the face of domination and manipulation.

The introduction to the novel is entitled "A Theory of the Freakshow Gawk, Contemporary Cultural Readings, and the Spectacular Gaze." It traces the many ways in which culture is founded on questionable acts of gazing. The freakshow gawk can be seen as comparable to the ways in which academic and scientific language orders social relations. Both depend on naming, ordering, framing, and a variety of other devices to contain the chaotic plenitude of life.

While prior to World War I the majority of Americans understood the circus as the "greatest show on earth"--the most topical and innovative amusement of the day--by 1918 the curious collection of thrills, spectacle, and clowns, was spoken of reverently as an American institution. This work examines the circus's transformation from a provocative entertainment which catered to adult sensibilities--emphasizing novelty and paradox--to one perceived as satisfying juvenile desires, or rekindling memories of youth. Literary and artistic representations as well as memoirs, press accounts, and show documents, all demonstrate a fundamental alteration in the popular image of the circus.

Before 1918 adults sought the challenging and even subversive messages carried in the circus's unusual acts and unworldly spectacles. After 1918 they celebrated circus day as a cultural tradition, a pure and wholesome ritual of a mythic American past. While the circus's post 1918 message is best labelled as cultural nationalism, its pre-1918 message is best characterized as "modernist."

The last half of the study illuminates the stresses modernity brought to America during the 1920s and 1930s. It details how economic and social upheaval facilitated the perception of the circus as a sacred symbol of America's simple serene past. The circus was invoked as an icon to buttress society. Perhaps more importantly, however, this study reveals that decades before 1900 modernism was a widespread cultural phenomenon. Seemingly all levels of society embraced the values and beliefs historians have ascribed to modernism as they were presented under the big top. This study ultimately challenges the existing historical paradigm which locates American modernism in the twentieth century, and solely within the intellectual and artistic elite.

Chapter One outlines the development of the culture of spectacle consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I focus on the irony of the bourgeois search for self-realization in a continually growing market of spectacles that holds the experience of a completed self in check. The next three chapters examine specific clown performances as parodies of the bourgeois yearning for, and yet the impossibility of constructing, a complete self. I explore the possibility that this focal irony of modernity not only inspires circus clown comedy but that it is also an irony within which clown artists themselves become caught.

In Chapter Five I explore the 'privatization' of the modern circus as it becomes dependent upon the entertainment industry. I show how this has forced circus artists to describe themselves in increasingly self-conscious terms as 'circus' individuals--as unique among entertainment artists. Chapter Six describes the lineaments of 'circus' identity in the face of 'privatization', examining how the power of artist self-definition no longer remains in the grasp of the artists themselves but increasingly becomes part of the corporate world of international entertainment entrepreneurs.

Nowhere is this 'privatization' more keenly felt than in the work of circus clowns. Chapter Seven describes the increasingly popular comic style of new 'private' clowns whose self-definition is directly tied to novel and 'private' entertainment markets. Chapter Eight goes on to examine the work of a modern 'circus' clown trio in light of 'private' clowning. Through my discussion of the comic work of this trio, I analyze contemporary circus clown self-fashioning as it is grounded in the self-conscious construction of circus 'tradition'.

Finally, I conclude with a discussion of 'circus' and 'private' clown work and the irony of their links to each other and to the late twentieth century culture industry to which both are conceptually and practically bound.

OCLC: 27422315   ISBN: 0826310249

Elena Zanzu

Il Trapezio Oscillante. Storie di Circo nell'Aria. (Translated Title: The Swinging Trapeze: Histories of Circus on the Air.). Elena Zanzu, MA. University: Bologna University, Italy, 2004-2005. Language: Italian.

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Last modified: June 20, 2009