Stomach Surrealism

In our past gallery dedicated to Circus Busch of Berlin, we hosted this poster of MacNorton, the professional regurgitator. Today, we dedicate him a gallery, to celebrate a time when the now quite boring theatrical and circus artists still felt as necessities the extreme, the crude, the irrational, the genuine. This was during the first decades of last century, when the avantgardes and surrealists emerged. It was the time when Artaud celebrated the “theatre of cruelty”, Stanislavski was insipred by the circus and the italian futurists wrote the “manifesto of variety theatre”…With such acts as McNorton’s, was not difficult to think about those renovations of stage languages: as well as with his contemporary colleagues as Houdini with his upside down water escape, Selbit introducing the sawing of a live woman, Rastelli juggling in the air a plethora of objects, the clown Grock revolutioning the use of musical instruments…