The New York Hippodrome theatre brought together many different types of performance on its massive stage. Its opening production in 1905, for instance, included circus acts, a ballet, and a fictionalized Civil War battle (Fig. 1). Many of the acts focused on a key feature in the theatrical environment, a water tank beneath the apron of the stage that could be filled to a fourteen-foot depth. High divers plunged into the tank; in shows with an “ice ballet,” its water was frozen into a skating rink; for a production of HMS Pinafore, a replica ship floated in its water with Brooklyn Navy Yard sailors in the rigging. Yet one tank act repeated and was recalled more than any of the others: a phalanx of women in martial costumes who marched solemnly, row after row, into the water and disappeared.

Historically, clowns have always been trained “on the job”: one was born or adopted into a circus dynasty or else ran away to join the circus, serving an apprenticeship. Breaking with the long tradition that performers learn on the job, after World War II, national circuses in the Communist bloc created their own academies; they were followed in 1974 by the École nationale de cirque founded in Paris by Annie Fratellini and Pierre Étaix, now the Académie Fratellini, and in 1982 by the Escola Nacional de Circo in Brazil. These examples led to the teaching of circus skills in universities, enabling breaches in the gender barriers between types of circus acts. For example, six years after Ringling Brothers founded a clown college in 1968, Peggy Williams was the first woman to graduate with a contract. At first she felt out of place. In an interview series for the Ringling Museum of Art, she stated that early in her training she had presumed that clowns were gender neutral: “I didn't know there weren't girl clowns. I thought being a clown was being a clown. You could be a man or woman. I had no idea what was heading my way because of gender.” Although she learned under the auspices of great clowns such as Lou Jacobs, she was left to her own devices to craft a clown that reflected her allegedly female nature.

In 1967, the US Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (VRA) awarded $331,000 to the Eugene O'Neill Memorial Theatre Foundation to fund a new company, the National Theatre of the Deaf. Endowing such an enterprise was bold, but not entirely unprecedented for this federal agency tasked with restoring disabled Americans to productive employment. Founded in 1920, the federal–state vocational rehabilitation program, or VR, ascended to institutional and ideological prominence during World War II and maintained this position well into the 1960s and beyond. VR distinguished itself not only through positing competitive employment as the solution to disabled Americans’ dependence on the state, but the specific means through which it would restore the disabled to productivity: the multidisciplinary expertise of physicians, psychologists, physical therapists, and rehabilitation counselors who collectively sought to render rehabilitants employable through a series of therapeutic interventions. Whereas disability activists focused on combatting the structural barriers disabled workers experienced in the labor market, “rehabilitationists” emphasized the imperative for disabled people to acclimate to existing work environments through individual physical and psychological transformation.