Tasks and Skills
The primary job of the bullfighter is to protect a fallen rider from the bull by distracting the bull and providing an alternative target for the bull to attack, whether the rider has been bucked off or has jumped off of the animal. These individuals expose themselves to great danger in order to protect the cowboy. To this end, they wear bright, loose-fitting clothes that are designed to tear away, with protective gear fitted underneath. Rodeo clowns require speed, agility, and the ability to anticipate a bull's next move. Working closely with very large, very powerful animals, rodeo clown are often injured seriously, and, sometimes, fatally.
In some venues, rodeo bullfighters still wear clown makeup and some may also provide traditional clowning entertainment for the crowd between rodeo events, often parodying aspects of cowboy culture. But most modern bullfighters no longer dress as clowns, though they still wear bright, loose-fitting clothing. At larger events in the USA, the job is split, a bullfighter (sometimes two or more) protects the riders from the bull, and a barrelman and clown (sometimes one person, sometimes two) provide comic humor. Some barrelmen provide both comedy and support to bullfighters, but the job of a bullfighter is generally distinct from that of the comic.
Read more about this topic: Rodeo Clowns
Famous quotes containing the words tasks and/or skills:
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
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“While most of today’s jobs do not require great intelligence, they do require greater frustration tolerance, personal discipline, organization, management, and interpersonal skills than were required two decades and more ago. These are precisely the skills that many of the young people who are staying in school today, as opposed to two decades ago, lack.”
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