Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus by Peta Tait (review)

In this compelling and useful study, Peta Tait illuminates the complex nexus of animals, emotions, and circus. The “wild and dangerous performances” of her title refer to circus acts of exotic, as opposed to domestic, animals, chiefly big cats and elephants, which headlined tours of major companies in Europe and North America from the late nineteenth century through the peak decades of the 1920s to the ’60s. Drawing on animal-trainer and circus-owner memoirs, newspaper articles, reviews, photos, fiction and films, circus programs, magazines, and ads, Tait explores not only the awe, fear, and excitement that these acts aroused in audiences, but also the emotions imputed to the animals, as well as those felt and projected by their trainers and mobilized for publicity and various forms of social and political activism.

Both theoretically and historically rich, the book pushes interdisciplinary thinking on human–animal relations in modernity, on embodied emotions, and on animals and emotions to show how animal studies and performance studies productively intersect in affect studies. Animal performance exacerbates familiar conventions of human performance by which emotions can be socially induced by a narrative and felt by the audience while not necessarily embodied by the performer. At the same time, circus, at least in the eyes of human beholders, brings the embodied experience of different species closer together as humans become more animal and animals more human in the joint creation of emotion-laden acts. Ultimately, the book argues that “animal performers are important to the human phenomenology of transacted emotions and emotional feelings (affect) in culture…. In looking at our relations with animals, we might understand how we remake the world around us through our subjective experience of emotions” (7).

The legacy of Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) echoes through the work of the circus trainers that Tait examines. If Darwin placed animal and human emotions on a continuum, circuses could offer externalized displays of training “the animal in man” (28). Along with emblematizing how “wild” animals supplanted the circus’s foundational horses, acts featuring lions and tigers in apparently calm horseback rides demonstrated the trainer’s conquest of the primal emotional drives of prey animals to flee in fear and of predators to pounce. Partly in response to animal rights advocacy, including Henry Salt’s seminal treatise Animal Rights (1892), trainers sought better results by engendering love rather than fear in their pupils through gentle treatment rather than force. This approach applied even to Clyde Beatty’s stagings of violent big-cat acts for sawdust and screen, which, Tait argues, grew in popularity amid the twentieth century’s rising preoccupation with aggression. In contrast to the roar of lions’ and tigers’ feigned ferocity, elephants were trained to dance in skirts to make frivolous fun of their gargantuan power and mask human fears of their potential for “bad-tempered rampages.” Tait astutely brings out the contradictions and ethical problems inherent in trainers’ approaches, noting that protestations of affection for their pupils allayed suspicions of animal suffering, while claims about animal emotions supported trainers’ practices of animal containment and control.

Intersectional dynamics of gender and race come more explicitly into play in Tait’s discussion of white female trainers, such as Mabel Stark, Patricia Bourne, and Mae Kovar, and the Indian male trainer Daimoo Dhotre as they interacted with big cats. Tait highlights how both cultural Otherness and emotionality are feminized, as well as racialized, and contrasting modes of training are gendered, as in masculine dominance over animals versus feminine communion with them. These dynamics placed tiger trainer Stark in a double bind during the first half of the twentieth century: expectations of women as nurturers fostered acceptance of their work with wild animals, while that work also stigmatized them as unfit for domesticity. Carrying a live leopard around the neck suited the already ex-oticized, bare-chested, pantalooned, and bejeweled body and presumed feral emotionality of Dhotre, whereas, Tait contends, in the case of Anglo...