Includes index.

1. Arts for all Senses: Circus and the Avant-Gardes – Introduction / Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Mirjam Hildbrand -- PART I : HISTORICAL CIRCUS, POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT AND AVANT-GARDES – INFLUENCES AND INTERRELATIONS. 2. A Treasure Trove for Avant-garde Artists? Metropolitan Circus Performances around 1900 / Mirjam Hildbrand -- 3. The Present as a Trick or the Assault on the Spectator’s Psyche : Circus and the Soviet Avant-Garde / Oksana Bulgakowa -- 4. Typocircus and the Czech Avant-Gardes / Anne Hultsch -- PART II : STAGING CIRCUS OUTSIDE THE RING: AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTS IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY. 5. Circus, Dada, Vaudeville : Historical Avant-Garde : Between Popular and Experimental Theatre / Martina Gross -- 6. “Attractive Novelties” : Spectacular Innovation and the Making of a New Kind of Audience within Colonial Modernity / Martyn Jolly -- PART III : STAGES OF TECHNOLOGY: CIRCUS, AVANT-GARDES AND (NEW) MEDIA. 7. “Like a Three-ring Circus” : The Avant-garde Appropriates the Circus in the Battle between Distraction and Attractions / Tom Gunning -- 8. The Animated Circus and New Arts of Motion / Kristian Moen -- PART IV. CIRCUS-AVANT-GARDE BODIES : CONTEMPORARY ARTISTIC PHYSICALITIES. 9. “Glitter and Broken Bones” : Professional Wrestling, Circus, Avant-Garde and the Radical Participatory Body / Claire Warden -- 10. Glam Clowning : From Dada to Gaga : A Conversation with Le Pustra / Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Le Pustra -- 11. The Aesthetics of Queer Work : Loïe Fuller’s Exhausting Life as Performance Art in Stéphanie Di Giusto’s “The Dancer” (2016) / Wesley Lim -- PART V. CIRCUS AND AVANT-GARDES REIMAGINED SINCE THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY. 12. Political Clowns, Strong Women and Animal-Free : Circus Reimagined through 1970s Avant-Garde Political Theatre / Jane Mullett and Peta Tait -- 13. Avant-Garde Gestures and Contemporaneity in Today’s Circus / Louis Patrick Leroux -- 14. “Today for the last time?” : On the Cultural Meanings of Circus and the Avant-Gardes : Some Final Provocations / Mirjam Hildbrand, Anna-Sophie Jürgens and Aiden Essery