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Danger Delights: Texts of Gender and Race in Aerial Performance

Circus artists, especially aerial performers and wire-walkers, transgress and reconstruct the boundaries of racial and gender identity as part of their routine. In the following article, Peta Tait analyzes the careers of two twentieth-century Australian aerialists of Aboriginal descent who had to assume alternative racial identities to facilitate and enhance their careers. Both Con Colleano, who became a world-famous wire-walker in the 1920s, and Dawn de Ramirez, a side-show and circus aerialist who worked in Europe in the 1960s, undermined the social separation of masculine and feminine behaviours in their acts. Theories of the body and identity, including those of Foucault and Judith Butler, inform this critique of the performing body in circus. The author, Peta Tait, is a playwright and drama lecturer at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Original Women's Theatre (1993) and Converging Realities: Feminism in Australian Theatre (1994).