Emotion and animal agency

This chapter considers how emotion is accorded to nonhuman animals (henceforth animals) in performance. Animals played by human actors in Western culture&s;s tradition of emotive theatre were predominantly symbolic entities until the advent of the eighteenth-century circus. The equestrian-based circus expanded to include other animals during the colonial era, with elephant and big cat acts eventually becoming synonymous with the circus. This chapter offers examples from theatre and twenty-first-century contemporary circus to illustrate the attribution of selective human emotions. In particular, puppet elephants and human-kangaroos reflect enduring emotional associations in circus. By the late twentieth century, social opposition to trained circus animals had hastened the development of the contemporary animal-free circus. As this chapter explains, however, animals embody the emotional impact of the circus; therefore, substitutes for animals reinforce this appeal and, more interestingly, can also satirise circus and human behaviour. It is the contention of this chapter, however, that the emotional agency of animals (species) becomes obscured in culture when performance selectively attributes emotions to them in order to appeal to human audiences. The larger point is that theatrical performance, circus in particular, reveals how humans colonise other animal species – bodily and emotionally.