ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the viewing and reviewing of the video record of Circus Oz performances over the course of their history as a company. Circus as an art form institutionalises repetition, whether exact or variations on a theme. It focuses on a set of musical clowning acts, demonstrate a set of paradigmatic relationships that are played out through multiple variations. Paul Bouissac considers the circus act as a communicative text that is open to a structural analysis and provides many examples in his seminal work Circus and Culture, a position elaborated further in a recent work, Semiotics at the Circus. The relationship between maestro and clown-musician in these two orchestral acts replicates the traditional auguste and whiteface clown relationship, a staple of European clown routines during the twentieth century. The Circus Oz Living Archive, with its multitude of recorded single-spectator positions, offers the possibility to change the register and focus of analysis open to the circus researcher.
