Bending over a steamer trunk in a tutu, a circus performer rummages for something while a papier-mâché tiger leaps frozen at his back, and the whole improbable scene holds the stillness of a backstage waiting to be needed. This is the Barnum and Bailey dressing area, 1950, all concrete floor and corrugated partitions, the painted stripes of a tent climbing the right wall. The man wears a checked jacket over the ballet skirt, dark tights, sneakers — a costume caught mid-assembly, the glamour not yet switched on.
The tiger is the joke and the heart of it. Mounted on a rod, mid-pounce, it sails through the air entirely flat and entirely fake, its painted stripes catching the same hard light as everything else, while a second figure stands half-hidden in a doorway behind it, watching. Faurer loved the seam between performance and the dull machinery that produces it, and here the seam is the whole picture: the beast that flies, the man who stoops, the empty floor that in an hour will be roaring with an audience that believes.
What gives me pleasure is how ordinary the wonder looks before its cue. Nobody is performing for Faurer, who has slipped into the wings and found the marvellous lying around like props, because that is exactly what it is. The performer's gesture — that patient, domestic crouch over the trunk — could belong to anyone packing for a trip. The tiger waits. The light is flat and merciless and beautiful. The show, mercifully, has not started yet.
Bending over a steamer trunk in a tutu, a circus performer rummages for something while a papier-mâché tiger leaps frozen at his back, and the whole improbable scene holds the stillness of a backstage waiting to be needed. This is the Barnum and Bailey dressing area, 1950, all concrete floor and corrugated partitions, the painted stripes of a tent climbing the right wall. The man wears a checked jacket over the ballet skirt, dark tights, sneakers — a costume caught mid-assembly, the glamour not yet switched on.
The tiger is the joke and the heart of it. Mounted on a rod, mid-pounce, it sails through the air entirely flat and entirely fake, its painted stripes catching the same hard light as everything else, while a second figure stands half-hidden in a doorway behind it, watching. Faurer loved the seam between performance and the dull machinery that produces it, and here the seam is the whole picture: the beast that flies, the man who stoops, the empty floor that in an hour will be roaring with an audience that believes.
What gives me pleasure is how ordinary the wonder looks before its cue. Nobody is performing for Faurer, who has slipped into the wings and found the marvellous lying around like props, because that is exactly what it is. The performer's gesture — that patient, domestic crouch over the trunk — could belong to anyone packing for a trip. The tiger waits. The light is flat and merciless and beautiful. The show, mercifully, has not started yet.