The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2013 by Duncan Wall

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wall, Duncan.

  The ordinary acrobat : a journey into the wondrous world of the circus, past and present / Duncan Wall.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-96229-4

  1. Wall, Duncan. 2. Acrobats—Biography. 3. Circus performers—

  Biography. 4. Circus—History. I. Title.

  GV1811.W16A3 2013

  796.47′6092—dc22

  [B] 2012038250

  Jacket image: Montage with background photo art by Jules Chéret

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1

  To my family

  For me the circus is at its best before it has been put together. It is at its best at certain moments when it comes to a point, as through a burning glass, in the activity and destiny of a single performer out of so many. One ring is always bigger than three. One rider, one aerialist is always greater than six. In short, a man has to catch the circus unawares to experience its full impact and share its gaudy dream.

  —E. B. WHITE, “The Ring of Time”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1. Circophiles

  2. State of the Art

  3. Ring

  4. Art School

  5. Crossroads

  6. An American Juggler in Paris

  7. Juggling Clubs

  8. King of the Juggle

  9. Father of the Circus

  10. Tradition

  11. Physical Theater

  12. What Grace, What Hardiness

  13. Catch

  14. Opera for the Eye

  15. Clown Equals Funny

  16. A Regal Past

  17. The Inner Clown

  18. Circus City

  19. Popular Art

  20. Cirque de Demain

  Acknowledgments

  Illustration Credits

  A Note About the Author

  Illustration Insert

  (illustration credit 1.1)

  GROWING UP, I had no connection to the circus. My ancestors weren’t acrobats or wire-walkers; I’m aware of no Gypsy blood.

  I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My mother and father both came from the Midwest, from Ohio and Iowa, respectively. After meeting in Chicago, as a pair of corporate accountants working three floors apart, they retreated to the suburbs, first of Milwaukee, then of Saint Louis, where I received the blessing of an upper-middle-class childhood. I attended a good public high school, where I captained the soccer team and edited the yearbook. When I didn’t have practice or a meeting, I liked to lie on the couch and watch Saved by the Bell with my sister. On the weekends, I met up with my friend Sean, and we cruised around in his Nissan. If we scored some beer or met up with some girls—well, that was a pretty big night.

  And the circus? It was around, of course, but I don’t remember thinking about it, or even really noticing it. I saw one show in the sports arena downtown. What sticks with me most about the experience is the atmosphere. Built in the late sixties, the arena was battered and unattractive, and I can remember walking across the enormous asphalt parking lot with my father, hand in hand, past the rows of cars and the soot-stained trucks. Inside, we climbed the concrete stairs to our seats, which peered down on the three rings from a great distance. I remember watching the show with a mixture of confusion and boredom. The overweight acrobats wore out-of-style sequins. The tigers looked sluggish and distracted. Their trainer, a stocky man dressed like Indiana Jones, snapped his whip indiscriminately.

  My father clearly had a soft spot for the circus—he had insisted that we come. I didn’t really understand why. I had video games with motion-capture graphics. I had blockbuster movies that filled screens as tall as my house. I had been to Space Camp and Disneyland. That was entertainment. The circus felt like some previous generation’s idea of fun, a tradition almost, like the Pledge of Allegiance, or the sweater my parents forced me to wear to church on Sundays—something you did not because you wanted to but because that’s what people had always done. The world had moved on, I felt, and left the circus behind.

  And in these judgments I wasn’t entirely wrong. As I later learned, I first encountered the circus at a historical low point. Founded by a British cavalier in 1768, the art, a combination of popular physical forms, had spread around the world like a virus. In less than fifty years, it infected every continent but Antarctica. During the nineteenth century, the circus was arguably the world’s most popular entertainment, as popular as cinema today. Circus performers were revered as celebrities. The biggest shows were famous brands, as familiar as Disney and MTV are now.

  This golden period lasted through World War II, after which, plagued by economic hardships, such as the oil crisis of 1973, and the rise in mass media, the circus fell into precipitous decline. Troupes plunged into bankruptcy. Those that survived did so by slashing costs, importing acts from abroad, and trading their tents for arenas. By the late sixties, the art was a shell of its former self. “The great days of the European circus are over,” Jack C. Bottheim, a prominent member of Holland’s Friends of the Circus, wrote in 1967. Even die-hard fans wondered how long it would survive. They expected the circus to limp along, scrounging by on nostalgia and manufactured pride, until the day when—like vaudeville, like pantomime, like the wandering minstrels of the Middle Ages—it would either pass quietly from the world or exist thereafter as a sort of museum entertainment, a reminder of how strange and simple the world had been.

  But then, just when nobody expected it, the freefall came to a halt. During the seventies, the old circuses regained their footing. In France, a circus run by Alexis Gruss, Jr., an equestrian from one of the oldest families, was named the country’s national circus. In America, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus saw attendance rise by upward of 12 percent a year.

  At the same time, a new type of circus emerged. I first encountered this new form while studying in Paris during college. I was enrolled in a special program for American students, and as part of our curriculum the program directors escorted us on a series of “cultural excursions,” chaperoned visits to local highlights we might have missed in our rush to the newest Irish-style pub. These were tasteful visits, designed to expand our understanding of France and its culture. We saw Molière at the Comédie-Française. We went to the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. You can imagine, then, our surprise when the program’s directrice, Madame Sasha, came bustling into the school’s lobby one afternoon with a handful of flyers for the circus.

  “The circus?” a girl from Ohio sneered. “Is that, like, some kind of a joke?”

  Madame Sasha flashed an educator’s smile. “Non, ce n’est pas une blague.” She arranged the flyers into a neat stack on a wooden table. “But it’s not a regular circus. C’est un cirque moderne.”

  I can still hear the words: C’est un cirque moderne. “It’s a modern circus.” The term intrigued me. The circus as I knew it seemed almost willfully unmodern, its resistance to change even part of its charm: the world changes, people change, but the circus stays the same. I took a flyer from the stack and examined it. The picture on the front was blurry and artfully composed. It was of a man in a white tank top and blac
k pants, performing what looked like a break-dancing maneuver, his palms pressed against the floor, one leg shot out in front of him. A dozen white cubes littered the ground around him. It looked more like an advertisement for a band or a contemporary dance show than for a circus.

  Curious, the following Friday I followed the directions on the flyer to Parc de la Villette, a concrete compound of museums and playgrounds at the city’s northern edge. It was dusk when I arrived. An orange haze had spread across the horizon, casting an eerie glow on the autumn evening.

  After picking up the flyer, I remembered an experience from several years before. I was studying in my dorm room one night, when I received a call from a friend, an actor, urging me to turn on the Bravo channel. I did, and there discovered a pair of acrobats, a buff man and an even buffer woman, both painted head to toe in silver and bathed in a shimmering aqueous light. The man held the woman above him, and he was manipulating her through a series of impossible positions—holding her above him in a handstand on his hands, balancing her inverted on his shoulders. “It’s Cirque du Soleil,” my friend whispered breathlessly. “It means ‘Circus of the’ something-or-other.”

  The show had been amazing, unlike anything I had ever seen, but I’d somehow forgotten about it. Remembering it now, I wondered: Was that the sort of show I was in for? Was that a nouveau cirque?

  After ten minutes of walking, I arrived at the site. A pair of tents pushed up from the horizon. Neither looked anything like the stereotypical circus tents in my imagination. One was tall and white, and surprisingly sleek, like an enormous witch’s hat designed by IKEA, with vinyl sidewalls that sloped cleanly skyward. The second was smaller but equally stylish. Nestled against the first, its flap was tied back, spilling a wash of buttery light and tango music onto the cobblestone sidewalk.

  I bought a ticket and went inside, where the surprise continued. Across an open floor, black café tables alternated with red velvet couches illuminated by white Christmas lights tastefully festooned where the sidewalls met the roof. What appeared to be a photography exhibit decorated the walls, black-and-white photographs of thighs and horse haunches. I made my way to the back, where a bar was selling various artisan tartes, espresso, and imported beer.

  I bought a Heineken and roamed around. I couldn’t figure out what to make of the scene. The space reminded me of the lobby of a hip urban hotel. Where were the clamoring hordes of children? Where were the carnival barkers, the cotton candy? The crowd here was almost prototypically Parisian. There were lots of thin black ties and meticulously weathered jeans. Nobody looked younger than twenty or older than fifty. It felt like the crowd you might see at an art gallery opening. And yet we all stood chatting in a tent, on a dirt floor, waiting to see a circus.

  The lights flickered. I felt a breath of air tickle the back of my neck.

  “Excusez,” a voice said behind me. A woman in a black top hat and crimson tie stood at the tent’s rear entrance. She had folded back the flap and was smiling and waving us into the night, toward the other tent.

  THOUGH YOU MIGHT NOT know it, there is a genre of literature known as the circus memoir. It dates back hundreds of years, covers a range of forms, and usually adheres to a number of conventions. In a good circus memoir it is customary for the author to begin with a flashback to his first childhood exposure to the art and his ensuing obsession. In Learning to Fly, for instance, Sam Keen waxes on about that “mythic day” when “the flying man soared into the center of my imagination.” In Ringmaster!, Kristopher Antekeier’s account of his year as a ringmaster with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, he writes, “I remember staring at the empty field that had been the site of the Clyde Beatty–Cole Brothers circus, unable to contain my sadness that it was now gone.”

  Since I experienced no childhood circus magic, I’ll present no such vision. Still, I understand and appreciate the sentiment the authors describe—the blood rush of big feeling, the swelling sense of fantastical possibility, the awareness of your mental aperture ticking open a notch. It’s almost exactly what I experienced in Paris.

  How to describe the show? All of the usual acts were there: the juggler, the strongman, the acrobats. But the tone was totally different. The juggler had a Mohawk. The acrobats were unshaven and dressed in ratty black suits with the cuffs rolled up. They flipped and danced and spun and fought, like actors in a kind of physical drama. At one point a microphone emerged and one of them began singing Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” in a halting, screeching voice. Shortly thereafter, a juggler strutted onto the stage, juggling five oranges and reciting what sounded like poetry but turned out to be Proust. “ ‘Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray,’ ” he declaimed as he smashed the oranges into a pulp against his forehead.

  I watched, stupefied. I was young, but I thought of myself as an educated theatergoer. I was studying theater in college. I had seen dozens of shows, including avant-garde work in New York and Chicago. But I had never seen a show like this. It was easily the most theatrical thing I had ever seen—physical, tough, intelligent. I left feeling as if I had discovered a new type of theater—a new type of art, even. Yes, it was vaguely related to Cirque du Soleil, but only distantly. There was nothing sexy about the show. The movements were part of a poetic, cohesive whole. It was visceral, real, and admirably raw.

  Afterward, lingering in the lobby, watching the flushed and exhausted performers mingle with the crowd, I found myself wondering about them. Who were they? How had they created such a compelling, curious show?

  When I got home that night, I researched the company on the Internet. It turned out that they weren’t unique, but part of a movement, what French critics called “nouveau cirque,” or “new circus.”* Born in the seventies, the genre had reinvented the circus by stripping the art of the codes of old. The new circuses got rid of the animals and emphasized human talents. They “theatricalized” the form by incorporating character and plot. Instead of vast arenas, they played in intimate settings—in theaters and single-ring tents.

  Cirque du Soleil was the big example of the genre in America, but there were hundreds, possibly thousands, of others around the world. Paris, I learned, was a mecca for the form. In a given weekend you could see three and sometimes upward of five different shows.

  Pariscope, the local entertainment guide, dedicated a separate section to circus listings: “Le Cirque,” sandwiched between “Le Théâtre” and “La Danse.” The Parisian dailies—Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération—published circus reviews.

  And so I started attending other “new circuses.” Some were artsy and smart like my first show. Others were more “classical,” with horses and ringmasters in red riding jackets. I didn’t like every show, but on the whole my fascination with the form continued to build. By March I was attending multiple shows a week. Often I waited around after the shows to chat with the performers. I came to understand that there was a world of intelligent, artistically minded young people who were passionate about the circus, who took it seriously. It was inspiring.

  As circus historian Antony Hippisley Coxe once wrote, “The circus is a disease which it is very difficult to eradicate.” The most famous cases are of course the performers. As circus folk are fond of saying, every family starts somewhere, with somebody who decides to “run away,” a doctor who absconds with acrobats, a duchess who falls in love with an equestrian. But the performers aren’t the only circus victims. The circus annals are full of stories of fans who had their lives seized by the art. Stuart Thayer, an insurance agent in America, retired early from his job to conduct a sort of personal circus pilgrimage, driving up and down the Eastern Seaboard, scouring local libraries for arcane circus records. Howard Tibbals, another American, built a fifty-thousand-piece scale replica of a 1920s circus in his basement, a model that included eight miniature tents, seven thousand folding chairs, and five hundred hand-carved animals.†

  In America such circus addicts are known as “gawks”; i
n the days of the old traveling circuses they would flood to the lot at dawn to “gawk” at the circus as it unloaded from the train. The French call them “circophiles.” What engenders such rabid dedication remains a subject of debate. Most writers allude to the art’s appeal in vague, even mystical, language. William Lyon Phelps, a longtime circus lover, once referred to the “centripetal force” of the ring. In Circus: A World History, Rupert Croft-Cooke and Peter Cotes devote a chapter to the “cult of the circus,” which they describe as “the intangible something that gets into your bloodstream forever and exercises an authority upon its victim that you are unwilling to part with.” Of the specific theories, most attribute the art’s gravity to how it functioned. In the old days, the argument goes, the traveling circuses were naturally and irresistibly exotic, living fairy tales of freaks and heroes that swooped into town one night and vanished the next. This exoticism was exaggerated by the circus families, who, subject to suspicion and often scorn, kept the world at a distance. “They are more explicitly detached than almost any other class of people,” Morris Markey wrote of the families for The New Yorker in 1927. But the distance imbued their lives with an air of excitement. As Markey notes, the romance of their itinerant existence—“no false and shoddy thing”—made us “ache with the imprisonment of our unadventurous lives.”

  I mention these old reports as an indication of how much the circus has changed. In Paris, I experienced little of the exotic wonder and even less of the distance. Yes, there was a scene of sorts. There was a style (bohemian chic), an age range (twenty to fifty), and even what you might call an ethos (group over self). There were names you were expected to know (Archaos, Zingaro) and ideas that prevailed (the importance of creative play). But there was nothing detached about any of it. The performers were open, even welcoming. Most of them had grown up in “regular” families, and, as adults, they lived “regular” lives. They rented apartments in Paris and drove their kids to school. For fun, they attended movies and art gallery openings. In fact, their normality was probably what attracted me most: the modern circus life was a life I recognized. What intrigued me was the combination of qualities it endowed.