A redrawn diagram from Richard Schechner’s book Performance Theory:
A version of this diagram also pops up in an article written in 1986 by no other than Sheffield’s own Peter Blundell Jones. The article is called ‘Beyond the Black Box’ in AR (July 1986) and is worth a read. PBJ writes about the Half Moon Theatre in London designed by the Architecture Bureau (which included Florian Beigel, now of the London Met’s Architecture Research Unit)
It touches on the reciprocal relationship between theatre and life, and how theatre and pubic performance was once a means through which social relations and competing realities were negotiated. Although not necessarily directly written about circus, there are many overlapping fields of interest and relationships.
