Flying and Smoking
17
notes that the discourses of pleasure and danger in relation to inhaling and
exhaling cigarette smoke, the function of the breath, continue to be apparent if
re-interpreted through the prism of anti-smoking campaigns. Smoke is the visual
aftermath of the bodily experience of smoking. Advertising makes use of visible
reminders of the bodily sensations.
The smoke from a lit cigarette gradually dissipates in a visible act of
disappearance, one that has parallels with the disappearance that Peggy Phelan
finds to be the ontology of live performance (1993: 146-66). As well, the circus
body in physical action compounds ideas of escape, as it defies the predictable
limits of physicality, as it obliterates socially defined boundaries between male
and female bodies for the duration of the live event. As explained elsewhere,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1996) ideas suggest how to understand that a
performer’s action might be received and perceived in the phenomenal field as
and in a sensory body to body engagement.
The traditional circus provided a cultural metaphor of escape with the
widely known cliche of running away to the circus. The circus sets up and
traverses liminal spaces within culture. Through its performance, the traditional
circus presented itself as a temporary escape from everyday routine, one that is
based on the viewing of artistic bodies in extreme muscular action. Additionally,
in its travelling way of life, the circus held the promise of escape from a
regimented social order, if not realising this in practice because of its strict
hierarchies (Davis 2002: 62-3). Ideas of physical and social escape arising from
the circus contain dangers. Stoddart argues that “the demonstration and taunting
of danger” is the “defining feature” of the circus (2000: 4). I would elaborate
that because it is a heightened idea of danger, one delivered through the illusions
of performance and performative identities within a form produced through the
action of muscular bodies working with and on apparatus/2 the dangers include
those received and perceived by spectators through sensory visceral encounters.
Cigarettes in circus echo back through what Sally Banes and Andre Lepecki
call, “orperformative power o f the senses” that unfolds through performance (3).
The instabilities of the sensory responses of spectators in relation to
embodied performances produce a complex mesh of possible intersections and
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