Today we started working on DFTA, looking into it and blocking it. We started the lesson by discussing the meaning of circus and is it still entertaining. Circus is a group of acts trying to make you laugh and entertain you. It involves various types of acts, mainly acrobatic Rachel then asked us if we found it entertaining or not and we split into two groups. I don't think circus is that entertaining because I think its just a load of people dancing and playing tricks with a bit of music in the background. I think its almost like watching the gymnastics in the Olympics but with music. We then argued whether its popular or not. My group thought it was very unpopular, because in the UK you don't hear of many circus acts, and they are meant to be for families and children, but when people talk about circus's we associate them with clowns and clowns are very scary, so children may not go to watch them.
Traditional circus mainly involve clowns and animal taming. Clowns were a lot more associated with circus's than they are now. Nowadays there is a lot more movement and dance involved in the act. Also you have people risking their lives to entertain you nowadays. This was apart of the argument we had earlier in the lesson. The people who were fore circus's said that one of the reasons they thought circus's were entertaining because people are risking their own lives and people like the idea of this, as it brings people in to see whether they will succeed or fail. Plus its the excitement of seeing someone in danger or hurting themselves.
Their also use to be something called 'freak shows'. These are similar to circus acts, except their not like your traditional circus's with clowns and acrabatics. Instead the use people with disabilities or someone who has something abnormally wrong with their body. These sort of acts had appeared in travelling fairs in England since the 1600s. These included dwarfs, fat people, very thin, giants, and conjoined twins. Freak shows were very popular in the victorian times, when people from all different classes gathered to see these unusal humans. They would make their money by not showing the audience any of the performers in the flesh, until they paid money to come and see these abnoramal people everyone had been talking about. The advetisers of these shows often aroused the curosity of the audience, to know how these people gained these abnormal things and reinvented their life stories through the show.
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