Constructing the Fantasy of a Spectacular Flying Body: Jules Léotard at the Alhambra Music Hall and Cremorne Pleasure Gardens in 1861

For nearly 18 months from May 1861, Jules Léotard created a sensation in London as ‘the flying man’. Reports equate his movements with birds, despite his unbirdlike somersaulting and twisting action. I argue that Léotard's first two London venues were integral to his ‘flying’ fantasy. Examining the interplay between these spaces and performance deepens an understanding of the role place plays in bodily spectacle. I analyse his repertoire and how audiences were primed to understand his action through publicity, before exploring each space as a visual/experiential backdrop integral to the experience of witnessing Léotard. Both venues were liminal exoticised other spaces of sensational entertainment that invited fantasy. Within these spaces, Léotard created wonder through anticipation and his body's strikingly spectacular appearance. He upturned the usual conventions of each space, adapted his act and accentuated the unmechanised nature of his flight within spaces that exploited new industrial technologies such as gaslight and plate glass. Léotard's performances in these particular places cast the fantasy that he was ‘the flying man.’