ABSTRACT
Celebrating the rich possibilities of creative ethnographic storytelling to explore the intimacies of both staged and everyday performances, this narrative collage takes the reader inside the ethnographer’s experiences during two years of research in European traveling circuses. Simultaneously art, life, and the liminal zone in between, these villages-on-wheels embody staged performance and all the flesh-and-blood representatives within and surrounding that spectacle. For these troupes, both are the performances of everyday life. A particular story of acceptable femininity plays out in and around the lighted ring. Within the context of roles and cultural understandings, the performing body speaks. These narrative selections show rather than tell the careful packaging of staged circus performances. And on the back lot, they illustrate the structure of gendered rules for work and relationships. The characters and events portrayed are nonfiction, with names (except the ethnographer’s) and some identifying features changed to protect the individuals’ privacy.
