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c h a p t e r t h r e e Learning to Take Direction American animal shows offered consumer-friendly narratives mingled with naturalistic and biographical information about their elephants, all of it contextualized with a glamorous Orientana celebrating the power of the show business entrepreneur. As they could not speak in human language, performing elephants did not explicitly quarrel with these messages. When they took direction by moving calmly in a parade or posing on a pedestal as the band played, they came across to many as comfortable with or even comprehending of the larger story the presentation told—about the affluence of the Asian elite, the immense resources of the menagerie company, the privileged leisure of American audiences, or the elevating nature of homo sapiens’s presumed power over beasts. However, not everyone bought what the showmen were selling. For instance, in 1888 New York journalist and art critic Horace Townsend commented on the phenomenon of animals “advertised extensively as being . . . actors, rather than mere trained animals, and as exhibiting a wonderful amount of intelligence.” He confided, “Those who watched them can bear me out when I say that they had merely been taught to obey mechanically a few arbitrary gestures of their teacher. . . . Oftentimes, too, they resolutely refused even to do as much as this.”1 Ninety years after William Bentley had left Boston’s Bowen Museum, disappointed by the lethargic creatures he saw displayed there, Townsend and others still sensed that, in spite of the incredible advertising, in the flesh many performing animals displayed body language that revealed no understanding of the human stories their keepers strove to tell. When he complained that the animals were bad actors because they did not emote convincing human attitudes, Townsend was really working through a crucial and chronic fact of interspecific performance: the lack of actor’s trust between human and nonhuman on stage.2 Animal performers were unlike one’s human colleagues, whose identity was invested in a successful performance and an artistic ethic such as “the show must go on.” 3 Animals might unpredictably hesitate to follow a cue, perform a move with obvious lack of interest, skip a step, or simply walk away mid-act because they had no stake in audience enjoyment or the take at the ticket wagon. When they rejected the conditions of their experi- Learning to Take Direction 71 ence in these ways, circus elephants exposed their disconnection from events people referred to as “Grand Parade Spectacular,” “wondrous show of sagacity,” or “circus.” In fact, the most successful animal trainers were those who capitalized on nonhuman performers’ incomprehension of the human performance context. “A phase of animal-act training likely to be forgotten by the lay audience is that the animals must be accustomed to them—to the audience,” as one vaudevillian later explained this industry truism. “After finally obtaining mastery of the routine—it may take years—the trainer must make his animal unmindful of applause, laughter, and music before the act is presented to the public.”4 Elephants so trained often appeared impassive to many circus goers, although an emotive effect could be produced with particular movements, such as the classic raisedtrunk salute to the crowd, which affected an elephantine smile and wave. This was the conundrum that defined the work of an animal trainer: how to produce elephants who appeared to be both invested in an act’s human narrative or humor and unresponsive to audience noise and their own fatigue, boredom, and other needs that might inspire disobedience. In working through this puzzle , nineteenth-century animal trainers developed methods of creating an elephantine parallel reality constituted by props, trainers’ commands, and a host of management tools, the experience of which produced desired elephant movements on cue. Elephants operated through a trainer-crafted process of positive rewards (i.e., access to food, exit from the arena, familiar human words and tones of voice) and negative sensations (i.e., pain, memories of earlier discomfort associated with specific human sounds or gestures). That parallel reality drove elephants to focus solely on the trainer (or other human presenters who worked them) while in a ring performance. Unlike many other wild animals, as social beings genetically predisposed to oblige a known individual in allomother groups, preadult elephants tended to be tractable and thus flexible storytelling tools. They exhibited apparent patience and self-restraint when addressed by trainers who asked them to stop eating hay or dozing in the barn and instead...

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