by Duncan Wall
Omar was fascinated by the circus. He had seen his first show as a boy, when a group of bear-toting Russians had pitched a tent in his mountain town. They had stayed a single night, almost forty years ago, but the troupe had so marked Omar, so defined the circus in his head, that he talked about the experience like it was yesterday, with a jovial look, as if he was describing his first kiss. Needless to say, Omar loved that I was in circus school. “So how are my lions today?” he would say, leaning his elbow on the corner of his bar. “Are they being fed?”
I would come to find out that this kind of thing wasn’t uncommon. In fact, one of the first noteworthy aspects of my time in France was witnessing the effect the circus had on other people. Everybody had a reaction. They almost always smiled and asked me to repeat myself (“The circus?”). Often they would launch into stories of their own experiences, even if those experiences were only tangentially related. In a bar on Rue Oberkampf, I met a Spanish woman who had trained as an equestrian as a girl and felt the need to educate me on the finer points of horsemanship. My neighbor, a jolly father who worked at some sort of insurance company, told me about a friend of his from college who kept a cheetah on a leash. (“He used to bring the cheetah into restaurants. The cat would curl up under the table.”)
Still, Omar was a particular case. For months, I tried explaining that the circus had changed, that my courses didn’t include animal husbandry, but he couldn’t resist making the same joke every morning. “So how are my lions today? Are they being fed?” It was as if the magical myth in his head was more real, more powerful, than whatever reality I had to offer.
From Omar’s, I caught the RER, Paris’s regional train, east to Noisiel, a suburb forty minutes outside of the city. As Anny had said, the classes were being held in a cultural compound called the Ferme du Buisson. In a former life, the site, which consisted of several large buildings surrounded by a high brick wall, had served as a chocolate factory, and it retained an industrial feel. You entered the compound through an enormous iron gate. The buildings themselves were imposing and windowless. Most had been converted into cultural venues, including a theater and a cinema, but the school occupied what had once been the factory’s main floor, a cavernous hall affectionately known as the Grande Halle, or the Great Hall.
Regal name notwithstanding, there was nothing special about the space. The walls were exposed brick. The floor was concrete, covered by a thin industrial carpet. Gymnastic equipment littered the ground, including mats of various shapes and sizes and a pair of Olympic-caliber trampolines. I even remember feeling a wash of disappointment when I saw the facility for the first time. As part of my pre-arrival fantasies, I had imagined the school as an eccentric, jubilant place, Willy Wonka’s factory crossed with an Olympic training center. Instead it looked like a boxing hall or a prison yard. The steel bars were rusted on the weight bench, the pads worn smooth. The spring-loaded floor was a narrow runway, a set of pads bolted onto squeaky springs.
And yet, as I discovered that first week, my fantasies weren’t entirely out of line, either. There was a worn intimacy to the hall that felt natural, authentic to the work being done there. On busy days, the place crackled with an energy that I had never experienced. Heaving open the hall’s rusted steel door one morning that first week, I found myself facing a scene of almost clichéd circus action. In front of me, a pair of women stood next to each other on their hands, gossiping. Nearby, a pair of jugglers were whipping around a rainbow of clubs, while two more acrobats—shirtless and muscular—thundered down the runway. Loud, accordion-rich music blared from a weathered boom box near the door.
I stood at the threshold for a moment and watched the scene. I was reminded of “The Ring of Time,” an essay by E. B. White, the great New Yorker writer. In the essay, White recounts his experience visiting a circus, where he observed a young female equestrian in training. “For me,” White writes, inspired by the girl, “the circus is at its best before it has been put together.… Under the bright lights of the finished show, a performer need only reflect the electric candle power that is directed upon him; but in the dark and dirty old training rings and in the makeshift cages, whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources—from internal fires of professional hunger and delight, from the exuberance and gravity of youth. It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.”
I had only vaguely understood what White had meant. Now, absorbing the scene, I felt that I knew better, and I felt lucky to have discovered it.
I ARRIVED IN PARIS with vague hopes of being thought of as a student rather than a scholar, a circus hopeful like the others in my program. If asked, I would of course tell the truth, but I honestly thought it wouldn’t come up. Although I wasn’t an acrobat, I was reasonably athletic—I had excelled at sports as a kid and done some rock-climbing in college. And it was, after all, a “preparatory” program. It would take me less than a class to figure out how hopelessly naïve I was.
Arriving to class early, I spent a few minutes milling around with the other students, making small talk. There were only three of them: Maud, Fanny, and Boris. All were French, all about twenty or so. None were particularly impressive physically. Fanny might have stepped out of a Woodstock poster. Her hair was knotted into dreadlocks, and she wore a ragged wool sweater and a pair of cutoff sweatpants, both of which looked voluminous on her tiny frame. Only slightly taller and thinner, Maud flaunted a tongue ring and a panoply of ear piercings. Boris had broad shoulders and a chiseled jaw, but even he didn’t seem particularly athletic, more like a soldier than an acrobat. In my white Adidas T-shirt and black track pants, I was feeling confident.
After a few minutes, Luc, our paunchy acrobatics professor, arrived. He introduced himself and announced our goal for the day: we would begin with a “reference test,” a simulation of the school’s entrance exam, to gauge our progress over the year. But first, he said, we should take a few minutes to stretch before we got started.
Whereupon I hit my first snag. As I lay there on the ground, arms and legs pitched to the side, the hall lights sparking in my eyes, it occurred to me that I had no idea how an acrobat might stretch. My primary sport while growing up had been soccer, and soccer players don’t worry much about their arms or their necks.
As a temporary solution, I imagined a relief pitcher stretching in a bullpen. I waggled my arm like a dead fish. I pulled my biceps across my chest and gave my arm a good tug. When I had extinguished this line of possibility, I stole a glance over at my cohorts for inspiration. All three of them were gyrating vigorously on the ground, as if engaged in a group Pilates class.
Maud was bouncing her nose toward her knees. Boris had rolled over backward, as if trying to catch a whiff of his crotch, and was alternately popping his legs skyward, then lowering them and squeezing his thighs against his chest. Nearest to me, Fanny lay sprawled on her back, sweeping her legs confidently from side to side—right over left, left over right. The cuff of her pants made a percussive swishing against the carpet. Swish, swish. Swish, swish.
I decided to give it a shot. Unfolding, as if to make a snow angel, I opened my arms and legs as wide as I could, gave a sigh to expel the air from my lungs, and twisted swiftly at the waist, so that my right leg swept across my left.
Immediately, a series of deeply unhealthy cracking sounds cascaded up my spine—pop, pop, pop, pop, pop! I had never heard my body make such sounds before. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Fanny lift her head off the carpet. She eyed me, concerned. “Was that your body?”
I looked at her blankly and shrugged as if I didn’t know what she was talking about. She scrutinized me and then went back to sweeping her legs. I rolled over for some more arm stretches.
It was my first sense that I was out of my league. It would only get worse.
“All right, who wants to go first?”
Stretching complete, Luc had summoned us to the spring-loaded runway, where he
lounged on a black cube, a clipboard on his knee. Our “reference test,” he had explained, would consist of a series of acrobatic movements, from basic to difficult. We would have three shots at each. Luc would score each movement: 0 was for not attempting, 5 for perfect. We would start with a basic somersault. “C’mon,” he coaxed again, “somebody has to start.” Maud emerged from our pack.
I had chatted a bit with her before class. She was dainty, with blond hair styled in a pixie cut, a button nose, and green eyes that sparked energetically. She seemed kind and a bit shy. Recounting her experience working as a mascot at Disneyland Paris, she had rolled her eyes, covered her mouth, and laughed an endearing, airy laugh.
But as Maud assumed her position at the head of the runway, there was a demonstrable shift in her demeanor. While Luc repeated the instructions—three somersaults per pass—she bounced on her toes and jiggled her arms like a sprinter prepping to settle into the blocks. Gone was tender Maud, the Disneyland Daisy. In her stead was someone darker and fiercer. Toeing the line, she gave a soldierly nod and exhaled sharply, almost snorting. Then she sprang.
It was a spring to behold. With her chin tucked, her toes pointed, and her whole frame taut, Maud arched through the air. Curling just before she hit the ground, she rolled and emerged on her feet, finishing with a little hop, her hands in the air. She paused only momentarily before pouncing again through a second somersault, then a third, each as flawless as the first, like a porpoise cutting waves.
I felt myself shudder. This wasn’t rumpus room; it was Romanian. In the course of her young life, Maud had probably performed hundreds if not thousands of somersaults. To calm myself, I looked to the other students. They seemed unimpressed. Boris had bent over for some toe touches. Fanny was unraveling a loose seam on her sweatpants.
“Next!” called Luc sluggishly.
Over the last forty years, circus education has exploded in France. Today there are more than 150 circus institutions sprinkled around the country, from the Alps to the Mediterranean. Unofficially, the schools have structured themselves into an informal pyramid, like the system for athletics in America. At the bottom are the recreational schools, open to kids and amateur adults interested in practicing the circus for fitness or fun. Next are the circus high schools, where the students study academics in the morning and circus in the afternoon. One level up from these are also preparatory programs, which serve as feeder institutions for the professional curriculum at the National School, the aspiration of every young acrobat.
Practically, this pyramid means that a student who enrolls in a preparatory program comes equipped with a tool kit of circus experience. Most have been studying the circus for years, sometimes every day. The students in my program were no exception. As Luc ticked down his chart of moves—cartwheels, handstands, back handsprings—I watched in awe and horror as they performed each with technical proficiency. I didn’t even attempt most of the moves, afraid of hurting myself. The moves I did attempt often ended in embarrassment. Trying to kick into a handstand, I ended up bucking like a mule. For the tests of flexibility, Luc told us to do the splits and then measured the distance between our hips and the ground. For the others, it was inches. For me it was a foot.
It was the first in a long series of lessons about skill and physical capability. Before coming to the school, I had assumed that my athletic ability would be transferable, that people who excel at one sport—soccer, in my case—excel at others. But acrobatics is in a different league. There’s no analogue in everyday life. It’s a whole-body activity that requires coordination, flexibility, strength, agility, and endurance. It engages different muscle groups and different mental capacities.
It’s also maddeningly precise. Before starting my training, for example, I assumed that I knew how to do a handstand. From a standing position, I thought, you pitch onto your hands, arch your back, and let your feet dangle over your head, so that your body looks like a question mark. This was how I had seen people handstand my whole life, on playgrounds and beaches and in photographs (e.g., Robert Doisneau’s Les Frères). And from a practical perspective, the technique made sense: arching your back widens your center of gravity, which makes your handstand easier to hold.
Unfortunately, such practicalities mattered little in the circus:
“What is that?”
I had kicked up into my image of a handstand—back arched, legs dangling above my head—when Luc’s voice came booming across the hall. I levered down and found him glaring at me across a pile of mats, scolding me with a look of disappointment and disgust, like I was a dog who had messed his carpet.
He shook his Muppet hair. “C’est pas bon, ça.” That’s no good. “That’s not how it works here.”
A circus handstand, I learned, isn’t flimsy; it’s solid—an exclamation point, not a question mark. It looks like a tower of muscle, or as another instructor of mine said, “a human bar.” Aesthetically, a straight handstand looks better. The lines are clean. The performer projects control, a holy circus quality. It’s also better for your body, because the position puts less pressure on the spine. And once you get the hang of it, it’s easier to hold. By bolting your body over a single point, you eliminate all the “searching” for balance, all the tips and sways.
Unfortunately, you have to get the hang of it first. And in my case, I would have to learn every move from scratch, even the basics, which took time because the patterns were so ingrained. I learned this working on my somersault.
Properly executed—as by Maud—a somersault is smooth and basically silent. Diving into the move, you curl your back in such a way that your entire spine, from your shoulders to your tailbone, makes constant, rolling contact with the ground. But of course this is easier said than done. Even on a mat, I found it intimidating to dive headfirst. Instead of curling my body, I would instinctually bow at the waist, converting my body into a giant L. Frozen in this position, I would hit the ground at the wrong angle, an error that registered in a noise, a clunk—or more precisely, a clunk, clunk, one for the back, one for the butt.
All week long, the coaches and the other students tried to rid me of the habit. Maud suggested I focus on tucking my chin to my chest. My Polish tumbling coach, Ryszard (pronounced “Richard,” or “Ree-shard” in French), told me to imagine getting absorbed by the mat. “When you roll,” he said, “you think neck into mat. All the way through. Neck and back.” (Ryszard’s French was a work in progress.)
Boris gave the most logical advice.
“A lot of times the problem is something you wouldn’t normally think of,” he said. We stood facing the spring-loaded floor. Classes had ended for the day, and the Great Hall was atypically quiet. Only a lone juggler worked near the weight bench, popping three clubs into the air rhythmically.
Boris came and stood next to me. “Here, let’s try something.” He had a naturally professorial air. He had studied trapeze and judo for years, and, in addition to his circus classes, was working on a degree in philosophy. “When you dive, instead of thinking about your body, focus on your arms.” He brushed up the sleeves of his sweater and extended his muscular arms in front of him. “In the air, imagine yourself reaching for the mat. Think of your arms as shock absorbers. Like this.” He took a preparatory breath and pounced, elongating himself in the air, curling quietly through his roll. “You see what I mean?” he said, back on his feet. “Really think about reaching for the ground.”
I nodded vaguely. I could see how it might work. Reaching would automatically lengthen the body, which might keep me from buckling at the waist. It also ensured that the move “traveled,” another indication of good form.
I gave it a shot. Envisioning Boris’s own roll—the dive, the tuck—I pounced, stretching for the ground.
Clunk, clunk.
At the other end of the runway Boris looked confused. “Did you do what I told you?”
I walked back toward him. “I tried to. I mean, I really reached.”
He shuffled his f
eet. “Okay, try again.”
I took my place at the head of the runway. I prepped. I rolled.
Clunk, clunk.
Boris winced. He rubbed a hand against his stubbled jaw. “You know, I might not be qualified to help here.”
Naturally, this was all pretty humbling, even dispiriting. Waking, dressing, commuting, all with the certain knowledge that I would spend the next three hours falling on my ass. The experience was physically punishing in a way I had never experienced. I was sore in muscles I didn’t know I had. By the end of the week, a permanent scab had formed on my tailbone.
But there was also something redeeming about the effort. It was, after all, why I had come: to get a glimpse of the incalculable amount of effort, embarrassment, and pain behind the seemingly effortless skills. And, in an odd way, I even enjoyed it. The first week felt like an initiation. I felt as though I was learning the circus rudiments, analogous to the knife skills—the paring, the dicing, the chopping—that chefs master in their first week of cooking school. I had the sense I was engaging my body—my joints, my muscles, my core—in a new and complete way. At night I slept like a dead man.
By the end of the week, my sense of the circus’s peculiarity—that exotic feeling I had felt in Anny’s office—had already started to fade. I came to recognize the school’s familiar combination of smells: the sharp brine of sweat, the pungent smoke of hand-rolled cigarettes, the damp musk of the carpet. I came to know its sounds: the rusty squeak of the trampoline springs, the repetitive drone of jugglers hammering silicone balls against the concrete. Everything seemed already like routine, as if I had been part of the world for years.
And then, every so often, the feeling would come roaring back, that old sense of wonder, of the circus as something grand. I remember feeling this strongly once in the middle of the year. Arriving at the Great Hall, I discovered the trapeze rigging had been strung across the space. High above, the students took turns springing off the platform, throwing tricks in the void.
