ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of circus skills and the machine in drama. Archaos’s stage world was sexually complex and often dynamically contradictory, embracing both ugly carnal violence and moments of intensely erotic beauty. Although circus theoretically found a home in anti-naturalistic theatre that welcomed sensory and physical symbolism, very little was actually incorporated in practice. Archaos was the circus that juggled chainsaws and generated acres of newsprint through a publicity machine that spewed out sensational stories of risk, madness and debauchery. Archaos implicitly shared not only Marinetti’s libertarian justification of war, but also his position that it raises a post-Apocalyptic aesthetic consciousness. Archaos’s stage world was sexually complex and often dynamically contradictory, embracing both ugly carnal violence and moments of intensely erotic beauty. In 1913, a Futurist manifesto was published entitled ‘The Variety Theatre’ which exalted performance fed by swift actuality, erroneously assuming that variety theatre had no traditions.
