Female performers in British variety acts have long been termed “showgirls”. For the illusionist Marisa Carnesky, this demeans them. “What happens when the showgirl grows up?” she asks.
A performance artist and creator of the interactive show Ghost Train – which was in residence at Blackpool for five years – Carnesky is using first-hand testimony, archival research and a healthy dose of guesswork to conjure the world of late 19th and early 20th-century female circus performers. The lives explored in her new production, Showwomen, include those of a sword climber, a clown, an aerialist and a daredevil. “The British seaside was always this extraordinary melting pot,” Carnesky says with glee. “Women weren’t just mute leg-kickers in a lineup.”
First: the women who work with swords. Making the show with Carnesky is sword swallower Livia Kojo Alour, who was naturally drawn to the story of the sword artist, crocodile charmer and glass-walker Koringa. Working in the 1930s, Koringa was rumoured to hypnotise farm animals on enemy lines so soldiers could cross unnoticed. “There’s this picture where Koringa climbs up a high ladder of swords,” Kojo Alour says. “I do the same. I have a ladder of swords. I swallow swords; I lay on beds of nails.” She moves her hands as she speaks, occasionally flashing an intricate tattoo of a sword from elbow to wrist.
In pictures, Koringa has dark skin, but it is uncertain whether she was an Indian performer, as touted by the Bertram Mills Circus posters, or whether she was encouraged to lean on a racist British fascination for the “exotic”. This is a term Kojo Alour has had to deal with often. “When I was starting out, I had a hard time. I was one of the very few Black performers on the London scene. I was constantly searching for something that made me stand out, and not in an exotic way, which is how I was described a lot back in the day.” She was drawn to extremities in performance. “The only way to carve my way was to do something dangerous that nobody else could do.”
Another of the show’s main characters is the pioneering 1930s clown Lulu Adams. Her act would have felt something akin to drag kinging, Carnesky suggests, as clowning was only done by men. Carnesky and Kojo Alour will also be performing with the self-taught hair hanger Fancy Chance, who will explore the 1880s aerialist Miss La La, whom Degas painted hanging from her teeth. In some shows, they will be joined by the fire artist Lucifire, who will look into the life of the 1920s stuntwoman and Wall of Death rider Marjorie Dare.
Throughout her research, Carnesky has been supported by Prof Vanessa Toulmin, director of the National Fairground and Circus Archive, whom Carnesky refers to reverentially. But even with this expert knowledge, so much detail of these performers’ lives remains unknown. “Did they know each other?” Carnesky wonders of Lulu Adams and Koringa, who at one point worked in the same circus. “Were they friends? When something went wrong, did they stay with each other?” In order to piece together a better idea of what the pioneering performers’ lives might have looked like, she has been speaking to some of their contemporaries. “I want to create a tapestry of retired performers,” she explains, “to bring these women back to life.” The next two interviews she has lined up are with a 93-year-old foot juggler and a member of a historic family of Romany clairvoyants. She has also been uncovering glimpses of the past through the Posh Club, a social club for “swanky senior citizens” run by the performance art collective Duckie.
Just before the pandemic, Carnesky gave a lecture about her collated circus troupe, and was greeted at the end by a dapperly dressed gentleman in his 90s. He wore a pentagram, a sign of the occult. “I knew her,” the man said, “Koringa. I was a stuntman and she was quite a girl.” He asked Carnesky to come back for lunch, but almost immediately the pandemic hit. “By the time lockdown was over,” she says, “he had died.” She found his obituary: Count Harvey, circus showman, escapologist and wiccan high priest. Whatever he knew of Koringa, it will remain unshared.
The elusiveness is part of what makes all this so exciting. Kojo Alour draws on this as she describes the thrill of the life-threatening performances that she and Koringa have made their living from, nearly a hundred years apart. “Learning these skills is a secret,” she says. “It’s almost impossible to find a teacher for sword-swallowing, so these secrets remain in the sideshow.”
Throughout history, rare skills like these have been overlooked, a fact Carnesky is attempting to counter with a new undergraduate degree in contemporary and popular performance, which champions acts that have emerged from circus and the sideshow. Through Showwomen and the new BA, she wants to elevate these sidelined forms of mass entertainment, “to take away the snobbery and the hierarchy from spectacle”, she says. These skills, and the women who have performed them, deserve their time centre stage.
