From Spectacle to Regeneration: Animal Performance, Dominion, and the Environmental Imagination in British Visual Culture

Britain’s historical spectacles of animal performance, from Victorian circuses and travelling menageries to early visual media, did more than entertain, they shaped how humans imagined, controlled, and valued nonhuman life. Animals were transformed into objects of fascination and domination, while hunting and poaching practices reinforced imperial authority over wildlife. These performances codified visual and moral frameworks that positioned Britain as arbiter of “wildness,” embedding hierarchies of power and ethical order into the cultural imagination. This paper draws on performance studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and visual anthropology to trace how circus rings, menageries, and early animal films laid aesthetic and ideological foundations that resonate in contemporary British environmental art and regeneration discourse. By historicising these visual legacies, it reveals how dominion, spectacle, and exploitation persist as underlying structures in Britain’s engagement with nature. Yet contemporary environmental arts are not merely reactive, they reinterpret these histories, transforming frameworks of control into imaginative possibilities for ethical, regenerative, and multispecies representation. By linking past and present, this study demonstrates that understanding the visual politics of historical animal performance is essential to imagining sustainable and inclusive futures for human and nonhuman life in Britain.