Get ur freak on

We recoil from the notion of freakshows, but they raise issues of exploitation and voyeurism that are still relevant today, writes Brian Boyd

You just don't get a good freak any more. Political correctness, medical advances and the advent of television have all conspired against the freakshow. Where once people stood, stared and poked, they now have to make do with Jerry Springer or Big Brother.

People still recoil from use of the term "freak", but it was how those people who made a living out of appearing in sideshows referred to themselves. Born with physical abnormalities so striking that people would pay just to stare at them, they were a noble people, who fashioned an ordinary existence out of an extraordinary physical state.

Their names were prosaic, but the epithets attached to them enhanced the wonderment. Thus Frank Lentini was "the three-legged wonder"; Lady Olga "the bearded lady", and Siamese twins Millie and Christine "the two-headed nightingale". With a stronger than usual sense of camaraderie and their own "carnival-speak" language, these performing artists toured the US and Europe right up until the sideshows began to disappear into obsolescence in the 1950s.

The era is recreated by Dublin-based sculptor Stephen Dee in his Freakshow? exhibition/show, which opens at the Galway Arts Festival today. Video footage of the performers in action, sculptures of the main stars and block-mounted narratives tell the story not just of these famous performers but of the phenomenon of the freak-as-an-exhibit. Raising questions of personal freedom, exploitation, voyeurism and prejudice, this is a show that Dee says "is about people looking at people looking at freaks". And beware of a twist-in-the-tale finale to the show.

Those issues of exploitation and perception also came up in last Thursday's documentary on Channel 4, Born Freak, in which British phocomelic disabled performer Mat Fraser, who was born with short arms (he was a "thalidomide baby"), asked the question: can a disabled person ever be seen as anything other than a freak, irrespective of the "liberal" or "post- modern" attitudes of today's sophisticated audiences? Born Freak (as opposed to self-created freaks, such as tattooed people) looked at the history of freakshows in Europe and visited the remnants of the US shows, where Fra-ser experi-mented as a freakshow performer himself, playing the role of Stanley Berent, also a phocomelic, who had a successful career as "Sealo, the Seal Boy" for 40 years before retiring in 1976. Fraser teased out the contradictory issues and and subtleties involved in performing as a freak and asked why people are drawn to look at difference.

Tod Browning's masterful Freaks (1932), a controversial film which was banned in Britain for many years, is now viewed as the Elephant Man of its day, in that it humanises an often dehumanised subject. Starring the sideshow attractions of the day (Johnny Eck, Daisy and Violet Hilton, Prince Randian, the Hindu Living Torso), Browning's work undermines preconceived ideas about "otherness" and blurs the distinction between the "normal" and the "freak". Its highlight is a famous scene in which the freak community, at a wedding ceremony, assert their distinctiveness by welcoming a "normal" person into their clan by marriage.

"One of us. We accept her, we accept her. Gooble gabble, gooble gabble," they chant. One of the most potent cinematic scenes you're ever likely to see.

Dee first became interested in sideshows because of his lifelong interest in music hall and variety.

"It's difficult now to understand just how popular these travelling sideshows of freaks were, just how many there were of them, and just how famous the star attractions were," he says. "The promoter P.T. Barnum, who was also involved in beauty contests, was the main instigator of sideshow entertainment, and around about the end of the 19th century, up until the 1950s, people would travel miles and miles to see a sideshow.

"What always fascinated me, in terms of the transaction taking place between the attraction and the audience, was the question of who was the winner and who was the loser. You'd have dustbowl farmers paying in to see an act - an act who earned far more money than they did.

"There was also the question of empowerment. These acts, just by dint of how they were born, were making a very successful living just from how they appeared. Although a lot of the acts would do tricks or play a musical instrument or something, basically they were just sitting there waiting to be stared at by people who were materially less well-off than they were."

Why the attraction? "It's always been the way," he says. "People born with either extra limbs or a lack of limbs, or some form of physical oddity, have either been persecuted or worshipped throughout history. They were either ceremonially 'destroyed' or treated as idols. When the sideshows came along, it's important to remember that these people weren't being 'pimped'; they had total control of their careers and were the showbiz stars of their days. If they were being treated badly by one employer, they'd simply move to another.

"And they did liberate themselves in the sense that what other people would regard as their 'misfortune', they turned into their fortune. That's why the issue of 'exploitation' is so important here - who was really being exploited?"

Freakshow? features neat biographies of the stars of the day. Reading through them, it shouldn't come as a surprise that most of the acts lived normal lives - but it still does. While he was researching the show, Dee says that his initial curiosity about the acts was quickly replaced by a deep sense of respect.

"Their toughness and versatility astonished me, their tolerance and generosity of spirit made me feel humble. What began as that old compulsion - to peep at the misshapen - became a lesson in how physically disadvantaged people can conduct their lives with a kind of defiant, in-your-face nobility," he writes in his magazine-style programme, which delves into the issues, both sociological and psychological, raised by the subject.

The stories fascinate: read how Jane Barnell, who was born with hair all over her body, was sold by her parents to a travelling roadshow as a "bearded lady" and how, though her father tracked her down, she ran back to the sideshows where she felt happy and at home as Lady Olga, a star attraction. Read also about Frank Lentini, who was born with three legs (and two penises): when the midwife first saw him, as a baby, she tried to throw him away. Lentini was a keen fisherman and used his third leg as a stool while waiting for a bite; he was also a strong swimmer, using his extra leg as a rudder.

Johnny Eck - "the Half Boy", whose body stopped at his waist - used to take to the stage dressed in a long overcoat, sitting on top of a dwarf . When he took off the coat and the legs ran in one direction while he moved in another, people would invariably pass out.

There's also the tragic case of Lia Graf, the "Smallest Woman in the World", who, at 27 inches tall, was a star sideshow attraction, but who, being German and Jewish, was arrested on a trip back home by the Gestapo as a "useless person" and gassed in Auschwitz.

All so different from today's version of the sideshow where, because of medical advances preventing such extreme physical conditions, acts have to create their own "unique selling-point".

"What you get today is people piercing themselves all over, or tattooing themselves or, like the Jim Rose Circus, performing stunts with parts of their body," says Dee. "It's different from what went before. I think, though, that what has really happened is that the sideshow of old has now mutated into another form.

"You have sideshow TV like Jerry Springer, where it's about freakish behaviour, or Japanese TV programmes featuring people eating a bucket of maggots.

"And the hypocrisy here is that people used to call the sideshows of old gross and unsophisticated . . ."

Freakshow? is at Victoria Place, off Eyre Square, Galway, as part of the Arts Festival, from today until July 28th.

wwwshockedandamazed.com is a good US sideshow site, and www.shef.ac.uk is a British fairground archive site