Urban entertainments in nightclubs and cafes were long familiar, in the work of Degas and Manet, when Seurat began his own tenebrous and melancholy riffs on the subject. This drawing depicts the kind of traveling street show, with pony, clowns, and lady equestrienne, that toured the working-class suburbs and shantytowns on the outskirts of Paris. Seurat found in such spectacles a fusion of urban grit and symbolist dream. The spectators in the lower half of the drawing have morphed into a frieze or barricade of crosshatching. There seems something confrontational in the impersonal audience and the joyless performers in their creepy, Halloween-like costumes.