List of circus skills
Circus skills are a group of pursuits that have been performed as entertainment in circus, sideshow, busking, or variety, vaudeville or music hall shows. Most circus skills are still being performed today. Many are also practised by non-performers as a hobby.
Circus schools and instructors use various systems of categorization to group circus skills by type. Systems that have attempted to formally organize circus skills into pragmatic teaching groupings include the Gurevich system[1] (the basis of the Russian Circus School's curriculum) and the Hovey Burgess system*.
Hovey Burgess system
The Hovey Burgess pedagogy divides circus skills into three categories, each subdivided into three skill levels.
Category | Preliminary skills | Essential skills | Diversified skills |
---|---|---|---|
Juggling | Balancing objects | Toss juggling: balls, rings, clubs | Gyroscopic juggling: devil sticks, diabolo, plate spinning, etc. |
Equilibristics | Headstands and hand balancing | Balancing: on rolling objects (unicycle, rola bola, etc.), on "stilting" objects (stilts, freestanding ladder, etc.) and human columns. | Rigging: trapeze, horizontal bar, slackwire, tight wire, etc. |
Vaulting | Jumping | Turning the body along its long, medium and short axes | Catapults |
Hovey Burgess has been known to compare his system to Newton's third law (i.e., "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction"). Vaulting is concerned with action; juggling is concerned with reaction; equilibrium is the intersection of action and reaction.
Equilibristics
Circus skills which involve balancing or maintaining equilibrium. The term applies equally to acts in which the performer balances on a piece of equipment or a prop, and acts in which the performer balances a prop on a part of their body.
Object manipulation
Alphabetically
- Acrobalance
- Acrobatics
- Acro dance
- Adagio
- Aerial hoop
- Aerial silk
- Aerial straps
- Animal training
- Artistic cycling
- Balancing
- Banquine
- Baton twirling
- Buffoonery
- Bullwhip
- Bungee trapeze
- Cannonball catching
- Chair balancing
- Chinese pole
- Chinese yo-yo
- Cigar box juggling
- Cloud swing
- Clown
- Club swinging
- Contact juggling
- Contortion
- Corde lisse
- Cradle
- Cyr wheel
- Danish pole
- Devil sticks
- Diabolo
- Double trapeze
- Fire performance
- fit through rope
- Flag spinning
- Flying trapeze
- Foot juggling
- Freestanding ladder
- German wheel
- Globe of death
- Hair hang
- Hand to hand
- Hand balancing
- Hand walking
- Hat manipulation
- Hoop diving
- Hooping
- Human cannonball
- Human pyramid
- Juggling
- Jump rope
- Knife throwing
- Lasso
- Lion taming
- Mexican cloud swing[2]
- Mime
- Multiple trapeze
- Object manipulation
- Perch (equilibristic)
- Physical comedy
- Plate spinning
- Pogo sticking
- Poi spinning
- Puppetry
- Rebound straps
- Ringmaster
- Risley
- Rola bola,balance board
- Rolling globe
- Roman ladders
- Russian bar
- Russian swing
- Slackwire balancing
- Spanish web
- Springboard
- Stage combat
- Static trapeze
- Stilt walking
- Teeterboard
- Tightrope walking
- Trampolining
- Trapeze
- Trick riding
- Trick roping
- Tumbling
- Twirling
- Unicycle
- Ventriloquism
- Voltige
- Wheel of Death
- Whistling
Circus and sideshow
- Bed of nails
- Bee bearding
- Blade box
- Body modification
- Body piercing
- Chapeaugraphy
- Contortion
- Electric act
- Entomophagy (insect eating)
- Escapology
- Fire breathing
- Fire eating
- Glass eating
- Glass walking
- Gurner
- Hook suspension
- Human blockhead
- Human dartboard
- Impalement arts
- Iron tongue
- Magic acts
- Regurgitator
- Shallow diving
- Sideshow
- Snake charmer
- Strongman
- Sword ladder
- Sword swallowing
References
- ↑ "The Classification of Circus Techniques" by Hovey Burgess. The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 18, No. 1, Popular Entertainments (Mar., 1974), pp. 65-70. doi:10.2307/1144863.
- ↑ "Aerial Acts". Flying High Circus, Florida State University. Retrieved 13 November 2012.
Further reading
- Burgess, Hovey (1976). Circus Technique. Drama Book Specialists. ISBN 978-0-910482-72-1.