In 1939, Titus visited Europe for five months and attended (without his wife) numerous variety shows featuring contortionist acts. His letters describ-ing these acts are probably the most engaging performance analysis of the halcyon contortionist aesthetic of the 1930s yet available. The Eve Cabaret, the Follies Bergere, and the Casino de Paris in Paris integrated contortionist acts into fantastic narratives featuring monsters, temptresses, and devils. In an Adam and Eve act the performance of voluptuous contortions allowed the sinful couple to recover its “lost” innocence: “He changed his hands to the woman’s knees and she raised her legs, showing the most sensational muscles of her neck and chest lifting the weight of the man” (Dec. 1939). The erotic element in these contortionist performances was glamorously dramatic:

The crudest and most sadistic contortion was one in which the dance[r] was standing up, raised one foot as in [a] frontkick, and the man placed this leg over the woman’s shoulders and forced it down her back, then he raised her in the air handling the other leg and swinging her back and forth. The shape of the contorted leg in her back was something hard to forget. They finished the dance with Magrita in a backbend, her legs wide open in a side-split and the man kissing her in her cachesexe. (Dec. 1939)

At the Théâtre de l’Alcazor, all acts were “performed by naked women.” These included trapezists, a lion tamer, acrobats, dancers, magicians, and sing-ers. Titus’s favorite performer was perhaps the Czech contortionist Erni Erikay, whose performance at the Théâtre de l’Alcazor exemplified the trend to situate contortionist acts within extravagantly dramatic contexts. Titus de-scribed her sensational and rather pornographic act with lively affection and in breathlessly convoluted language. The scene was a boudoir containing a polar bear rug upon which she slumbered until strange music awakened her. She wore a transparent black dress, in which she performed several lurid contor-tions. Then she

performed a backbend with her arms tied around the neck, lowering the head till she kissed the bear’s mouth. Suddenly she loosened the pin that fastened her dress in the back, the gown fell to the ground and she ap-peared in her marvelous white nakedness, except the dark spot of her cachesexe. At the sound of the applause, she walked to the front part of the stage and exhibited her body, then she projected her chest, bended backwards, closing more and more the backbend while her arms were handled in snakelike fashion. She bended then her knees and lowering the head she placed the top of the head against the floor and slided her feet farther from her face, she stretched herself at full length. She opened then her legs and when they were in a perfect side-split she raised to normal. After some coiling and bending over the bear’s skin, with the in-tention of exciting the bear to copulate (this was the leitmotiv of the dance) she came to her last posture, something marvelous not only for the difficulty of the trick, but because of the nakedness and beauty of the woman and the way absolutely boneless she handled her body. She per-formed an elbow stand over the bear’s head; first her legs were stretched horizontal over her face, then she folded the legs, projected her chest and bended the body jointing the buttocks to the top of the head, body in zigzag—then lowered the feet, opened the legs making room for the head that was coming through the thighs, and raised the head placing the back of the head against her sex in the closest backbend I have ever seen!

The reversal of this position was “so exciting that none was surprised when the bear skin started to move, raised up and walked over the acrobat to copu-late while the curtain was lowered.” In the “second act” of the show, Erikay performed on a “gigantic piano” and walked off the stage “backbended, legs stretched, hands over ankles” (Dec. 1939).

Titus’s enthusiasm for Erikay was such that he made her personal acquain-tance and began to correspond with her. A few months later, he remarked that she had written to him saying that she would send him a new set of pho-tographs “taken especially for me, performing her best contortions and wear-ing her smallest cachesexe” (29 April 1940). But soon he worried that the German occupation of Paris had broken his contact with her: “she must have run away [because she was Czech] so I’m afraid she must have a hard time with the Germans” (10 Dec. 1940). Nearly a year after his request, however, Titus reported that Erikay had sent him 20 photographs of herself, “mostly in the nude” (17 July 1941). But it is not clear from the correspondence how long he maintained his contact with her.

Aus Karl Toepfers faszinierendem Essay: Twisted Bodies. Aspects of Female Contortionism in the Letters of a Connoisseur

Wer Varieté und Vaudeville interessant findet, der wird auch "Houdini!!!" von Kenneth Silverman mögen, eine Biographie des Entfesselungswunders. Allein schon die Darstellung der Beziehung von Houdini zu Sir Conan Doyle, dem Erfinder von Sherlock Holmes ist die Lektüre wert.