What reference book would you use to read about the history of the circus?

This beautiful book charts the development of the circus as an art form around the world, from antiquity to the present day.

Using over 200 circus related artworks from the French National Library's private collections, celebrated cultural historian Pascal Jacob tells the story of travelling entertainers and their art and trade. From nomadic animal tamers of the Dark Ages to European jugglers and acrobats of the 1800s, from the use of the circus as Soviet propaganda to the 20th-century Chinese performance art renaissance, this is an exhaustive history with a uniquely international scope.

Jacob draws on both rare and famous artworks, including prints dating from the 13th century, and paintings by Picasso and Doré. In doing so he demonstrates the circus to be a visual and physical masterpiece, constantly moving and evolving, and just as exciting an experience for audiences now as it was 1,000 years ago.

“In a time of ever-accelerating change, memory still provides important threads of identity and connection to the past.” The opening lines of the foreword in Life Beyond the Big Top: Stories of the Tai Thean Kew Circus by the noted anthropologist, Roxana Waterson, underline the importance of capturing social histories that “risk being obliterated from memory altogether”. Famous people and important events get written about time and again but the stories of seemingly ordinary people, some of whom have remarkable tales to tell, are often glossed over or unspoken, leading to serious gaps in the formation of our identity as Singaporeans.

A Singapore Circus Story

It is our good fortune that Adele Wong remembered stories from her childhood about her grandparents, Wong Fu Qi and Sze Ling Fen, who were circus performers in Singapore for nearly five decades from the 1940s to 1980s. Inspired by their amazing tale of guts and gumption, she has painstakingly researched and written their stories and put together a collection of precious old photographs that could have easily been discarded or lost for good.

Life Beyond the Big Top is a photobook that captures the history of the Tai Thean Kew Circus, a once-great Chinese circus that was founded in Singapore in 1932. But more that it is a book that celebrates the story of ordinary Singaporeans who led extraordinary lives. Adele’s grandmother Sze Ling Fen was born into the Tai Thean Kew Circus family, established by her grandfather and continued by her father. Ling Fen was only 14 years of age when she met her would-be husband Wong Fu Qi, who was two years her senior, in 1948. Both spent their youth and a substantial part of their adulthood touring the region as lead circus acrobats. The young performers, who married in 1954, earned about 50 cents a day when they first started out in the circus.

It was a tough but rewarding life: the circus performers were like one extended family as they spent all their time on the road throughout Malaya (even going as far as Sabah, Sarawak, Thailand, the Philippines and Hong Kong), entertaining the crowds wherever the circus set up tent. Depending on demand, the Tai Thean Kew Circus would stage up to three shows a day – one matinee and two evening shows, often staying put at one fairground for 10 to 15 days before moving on to another destination. At its peak, the Tai Thean Kew Circus had over 100 members, and provided entertainment throughout the day with its outdoor carnival, animal menagerie and circus acts.

About the Book and Author

As a child Adele grew up amidst circus props and stories, and old black-and-white photographs of her grandparents performing heart-stopping acts on the trapeze. These memories eventually led her to document the oral histories of her grandparents and write about their amazing circus careers in her book.

Published in August 2015 by Goff Books, Life Beyond the Big Top, which is lavishly illustrated with old photographs, is available for reference and loan at the National Library as well as at all public libraries. More information on the book can be found at this site: www.facebook.com/taitheankewcircus.

The book is supported by the Singapore Memory Project’s (SMP) irememberSG Fund that was set up to encourage organisations and individuals to develop content and initiatives that collect, interpret and showcase memories of Singapore. The fund has currently stopped accepting applications.

“Our fascination with the fantastic―people and animals doing things most of us simply cannot do―is apparently as old as humankind. Simon offers ancient historical evidence, some from thousands of years before the Common Era, of incredible performers, from dancing Egyptian girls to ceramic Mexican acrobats to depictions of ancient Japanese tumblers. Through an engaging narrative and impressive photos, posters, and famous paintings by Lautrec, Degas, and others, Simon conjures the long and captivating history of the circus. . . . A sweeping look at the ancient fascination with spectacle and how it has evolved over time.” ― Booklist

“A jewel of a publication. . . . Simon writes about the various phases of circus history in a dense, rich prose—enlivened by some superb chapter-headings, quotes, and anecdotes. Here is an eclectic and well-chosen compilation of responses to, and illustrations of, the circus. . . . I enjoyed this book greatly. Linda Simon is clever and a thorough researcher. . . . she writes with a sharp eye for detail and page-turning momentum.”  ― Spectator

“Engrossing. . . . It takes a book such as Simon’s vividly written and richly illustrated one to give us some inkling of what Emily Dickinson felt when she wrote ‘Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel. A Circus passed the house—still I feel the red in my mind.’”  ― Sunday Times

“Handsomely presented on superior paper and with many illustrations, over half of them in colour. . . . [the book] ranges widely in time and place and evokes its subject with great immediacy. . . . A whirl of chapters on trick-riders, trapeze artists, animals, prodigies, and so forth, sweeps the reader into the atmosphere of the circus. . . . Simon enlivens history with roughly equal helpings of anecdote and philosophical enquiry.”  ― Times Literary Supplement

“Like anyone with a hankering for fairs, puppets, and music halls, I adored the world of the circus—and as [this] beautifully illustrated and superbly researched volume makes plain, it is a form of entertainment that has accumulated distinguished devotees.”  ― Daily Mail

“A whimsical and enlightening history of the circus. . . . Simon does a fine job of exploring the subtexts of the circus. In addition to what is promised—‘a living cabinet of wonders, a theatre of the improbable, and even the impossible, an escape from reality’—the circus has always appealed to our baser instincts. . . . Above all, Simon shows how men and women over the centuries have been obsessed with controlling their bodies and, by extension, their minds—and how the spotlight and the ‘irresistible burst of applause’ were often fatally addictive.”  ― Macleans Magazine

“In the age of CGI and editing, the ‘fleeting moment of magical spectacle’ that the circus represents holds a grip on our popular imagination about as firm as an aerialist’s on the trapeze. It’s an obsession that is intriguingly documented in Simon’s The Greatest Show on Earth . . . its great strength is providing both a strong practical narrative and a considerably interwoven portrait of the related thoughts of artists and writers (and later filmmakers) from the earliest stages of the circus’s existence, given, in many cases, the very specific inspiration that the circus provided them.”  ― Daily Beast

“Simon has achieved a great deal in this book. Often relating circuses to the ways they have been represented in art, she offers detailed descriptions of the basic elements of circus acts. After a fine introduction covering circus history, she devotes chapters to the elements that make up circus performance. . . . This beautifully produced book—with its excellent color reproductions, extensive notes, and useful bibliography—is a must for those interested in popular culture. . . . Essential.”  ― Choice

Review

“To paraphrase the words of the great poet E. E. Cummings, dang everything but the circus. Simon evokes the greatest show on earth in all its history and wonder. So run away from home, crawl under the tent, and enjoy this book.” -- Wavy Gravy

About the Author

Linda Simon is professor emerita of English at Skidmore College in New York. She is the author of Genuine Reality: A Life of William James, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from the Telegraph to the X-Ray, and Coco Chanel, the last also published by Reaktion Books.

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