12
Popular Culture Review
60s, cigarette advertisers in the USA targeted women but sales increased after
the 1970 television ban as advertisers concentrated on print and sports and
cultural sponsorship (Webb Smith 1990: 36 [Fox]). As public warnings against
smoking eventually gained momentum, so too did warnings to performers about
the dangers of circus performance, and safety regimes and apparatus for circus
performers began to be used widely. Nonetheless even in a more health and
safety conscious and risk-averse society (Beck 1999), circus and cigarettes still
carry impressions of personal risk-taking.
Advertising Female Daring
The most famous female aerialist of the twentieth century, Antoinette
Concello, who was one of the three women to master the triple somersault prior
to 1980 (Tait 2005: 101-3), features like a soloist in Camel program
advertisements in 1937, 1939, 1942, and 19507 although she actually worked as
a member of a flying troupe of usually three world-leading male performers.
During her career she worked with and/or trained the 20th century’s leading male
aerialists of mid-air somersault and pirouette tricks. Certainly Concello was a
long-time smoker, so there is some veracity to her promotion of cigarettes.
In the first illustration of the 1950 Camel advertisement considered in
detail, th Rf