by Duncan Wall
Above all, the whole scene struck me as fascinating and improbable—this collection of government-sponsored acrobats in an unmarked hall in the suburbs of Paris. I don’t know how long I watched, until a voice pulled me out of my reverie.
“You know …” Gabby, my trampoline coach, said with a wry smile. “It’s possible to watch with your mouth closed.”
ON MY DESK IN PARIS was a black-and-white picture. In the foreground was a man with a black mustache and a bow tie. In his hand was his infant son, the boy standing on the man’s palm. In the background other performers, the man’s family, presumably, watch the scene, smiling and clapping. Behind them you can see a line of trailers and a tent.
If you know one thing about circus history, it’s likely this: the circus was a family affair. For centuries, families owned the biggest circuses (the Knie Circus, the Ringling Brothers Circus, Circus Krone). They comprised most of the acts. Each had a specialty, a circus skill they passed down through the generations like a gift. For the Ravels, it was wire-walking; for the Franconis, horsemanship. “They don’t force their children to join,” observed a reporter for The New York Times in 1903. “The urge comes almost by instinct. They see their mothers riding or their fathers tumbling and immediately want to do it themselves.”
Of course, the circus wasn’t the only business to function this way. For millennia, most professions worked according to the family model—carpenters raising carpenters, preachers raising preachers. What made the circus unique is how long the model persisted. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, well after the rise of public education, circus performers continued to educate their children themselves. Being itinerant, circus parents found that it wasn’t practical for them to enroll their children in stable schools. The system had technical advantages as well. Over time, each family developed an encyclopedia of practical arcana, what essayist Edward Hoagland once called “a special whirlwind momentum and glory, the craft of a lifetime piled on the craft of previous lifetimes.” Circus children, or enfants de la balle, as the French call them, received this knowledge from a young age, from birth, basically. “I knew more about timing when I was less than a year old than I did about walking,” trapezist Alfredo Codona once noted in The Saturday Evening Post. They didn’t just learn their skills, they lived them, an intuitive experience that translated into astonishing ability. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the majority of the great international circus stars hailed from circus families. Codona, son of a Mexican circus owner, was celebrated by Life magazine as the “Nijinsky of the circus.” His wife, Lillian Leitzel, the daughter of a Czech acrobat, starred for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, the biggest circus in the world. Circus children so dominated the circus landscape that it was even presumed—to some extent correctly—that only those born into the business could compete.
The family system defined the circus for centuries. But while it provided the source for much of the circus’s strength and allure, it also had a fundamental flaw. Ruled by families, the circus was what physicists call a closed system. Although the troupes traveled widely, they remained almost totally isolated from the outside world. On tour, circus families stuck to a consistent rhythm: arrive, set up, perform the matinee, relax for a few hours, perform the evening show, move on. Fraternization with the outside world was permitted, but only to a certain point. “[They live] in a world that is half childlike and half unreal, full of amazing simplicities,” Morris Markey wrote for The New Yorker in 1927. Some families even practiced a kind of scorn for the outside world. They swindled locals with abandon, fought them in “clems,” referred to them by pejorative nicknames—gillys, towners, and rubes. “The families held the world at arm’s length for centuries,” Steve Gossard, a trapeze historian, told me. “They wanted people’s money, but would refer to them as ‘lot lice.’ ”
To be fair, much of this was defensive, a natural reaction to the mistreatment circuses were forced to suffer on the road. But the families also participated in their detachment, and over time it had a deleterious effect. Beholden to tradition, each generation mindlessly duplicated the work of the last. “It would never occur to them to make fun of the gaudy clothes they wear … or the prankish things they do for the world’s amusement,” Markey wrote. In the early twentieth century, a kind of artistic bubble enveloped the form. Technical ability continued to rise, but the art as a whole stagnated. A cheap uniformity ensued. Every show had the same elements: clowns, acrobats, jugglers, animal trainers. Even the details were identical, and to an astonishing degree. In every circus around the world, regardless of size or location, the rings were thirteen meters in diameter. An act lasted five to seven minutes. Ringmasters wore red coats and riding boots. Clowns had red noses. These weren’t mere choices; they composed what circus scholars call the “codes” of the form. “You didn’t go to a circus,” French circus writer Jean-Michel Guy once pointed out, “you went to the circus.”
Of course, some people like these details, and like to claim that the almost aristocratic dedication to tradition is vital to the circus’s whimsical charm. The circus, they say, provides the comfort of stability: in our fast-paced, ever-changing world, it’s reassuring to know that the circus you shared with your mother will be the circus you share with your son.
But it’s also totally bizarre. As a point of contrast, imagine if all music was classical. You could listen to Beethoven or Bach but no Beatles. Or what if the only dance that existed was ballet? This would feel silly and confined. And yet with the circus, almost nobody felt this way. People just took the stasis for granted.
THE STORY OF HOW the circus finally extracted itself from this creative hole is, in large part, the story of the development of circus education. It begins in Russia.
In 1919, Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky, the newly appointed People’s Minister of Education, summoned to Moscow the key players in Russia’s circus industry, including administrators, intellectuals, writers, directors, and performers of various acts. Two years before, the Revolution had swept through Russia. Now the task was to discuss how the new Communist state would handle the art.
It wasn’t a straightforward issue. Prior to the Revolution, Russia had known a prosperous circus tradition. As early as 1793, Charles Hughes, a British equestrian and one of the original circus mavens, had quit England to set up shop in the court of Catherine the Great, as her horse trainer. During the nineteenth century, numerous foreign circuses had toured the Russian countryside, and a few had even set up permanent shop in the bigger cities, including Alessandro Guerra, who in 1845 established in Saint Petersburg Russia’s first circus building, a heated wooden structure with a Grecian-style pediment and a portico at the entrance. With the arrival of the Communists, however, Russia’s circus industry had collapsed. Fearful of being subsumed by the state, most of the families, who were foreign, had fled abroad. If the Soviets wished to continue the tradition, they would have to create a new circus infrastructure from scratch.
Lunacharsky’s committee met for two weeks. The debate was surprisingly contentious. Some insisted that the circus was a distraction from public progress and so should be left to die. “It has no place in our society,” argued one offended party. “We are building a world free of such depraved exploitation.” Others, including Lunacharsky, who was backed by Lenin, strongly disagreed. Rather than abandoning the circus, they argued, the state should embrace and elevate the art. “Our primary task must be to wrest the circus away from the opportunists who play to the baser tastes of the public,” Lunacharsky declared during the meetings. The circus, he said, should serve as “an academy of physical beauty and merriment.”*
In the end, thanks largely to Lunacharsky’s support, the notion of a developed circus prevailed. On August 26, 1919, Lenin signed the decision into law. Over the next decade, the circus in Russia would be transformed. According to the committee’s recommendation, all of the circuses were brought under the operation of a single governing body. To encourage
innovation, the state invited revered artists from other disciplines, including theater director Constantin Stanislavski and poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, to create experimental circus shows. In circus “labs” around the country, artists and scientists developed new circus methods and equipment. Vladimir Durov, a celebrated clown, established “Durov’s Corner,” a workshop specializing in the scientific study of animal-training techniques. The famous Soviet corps of engineers invented the Russian bar, a flexible balance beam, and the Russian swing, a giant acrobat-propelling swing. As circus historian David Lewis Hammarstrom notes in his excellent Circus Rings Around Russia, “Never had tanbark entertainment undergone such thorough analysis, nor received such careful attention.”
But the Soviets also faced a peculiar predicament. When the foreign circus owners had fled, they had taken most of their performers with them. The Soviet circus industry was brimming with big ideas, but had nobody with the technique to execute them.
To remedy the problem, the state established the State College of Circus and Variety Arts in Moscow.† Founded in 1927, the school was the first national circus school in the world, and the first large-scale attempt at circus education. Based largely on Russia’s famous ballet schools, the program took an interdisciplinary approach to education. The curriculum, which lasted between four and seven years, addressed artistic as well as technical disciplines. Older students took ballet for line and philosophy for inspiration. Younger pupils studied physics, math, and chemistry to develop their intellects.
In the beginning, the school was perceived, by those in the government and even more so by those outside, as a kind of experiment. Circus families claimed it would never work, that acrobatic education had to start early and could not be formalized. The results told a different story. In 1927, the year of the school’s creation, 90 percent of all circus performers in Russia came from circus families; by the sixties, that number had plummeted to just 20 percent. By the fifties, upwards of three thousand students were applying annually to fill the school’s eighty spots. The Soviet circus—artful, refined, and stocked with circus school graduates—became the envy of the world. When the Moscow Circus first toured to America in the fifties, The Wall Street Journal called it “the most lively, talented, and attractive troupe in the history of the circus.”
Today the Moscow School is considered the most successful circus school in history and a fundamental step in the development of an artful circus. It opened the circus to the outside world and provided a model. Other circus schools soon followed. Because of the Iron Curtain, many of the first were Communist. Romania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Cuba all created professional circus programs. In 1974, the model came west. Inspired by the Moscow school, Alexis Gruss, Jr., and Annie Fratellini teamed up with Silvia Monfort and Pierre Étaix, respectively, to create a pair of circus schools in Paris. As happened in Moscow, the Western schools touched a nerve. When Fratellini and Étaix opened their doors, they expected a few dozen students; more than six hundred applied. Circus education spread. In 1977, Paul Binder and Michael Christensen, two former Fratellini students, established the New York School for Circus Arts in a studio on Spring Street. In 1981, Guy Caron, a Canadian graduate of the Budapest Circus School, teamed up with gymnast Pierre Leclerc to establish the École Nationale de Cirque in Montreal, based on the Russian model, which Caron had investigated in Hungary.
The Soviets reinvented the circus. But there was something artistically insidious at the core of their endeavor. The Soviet performers were paragons of craft but in the service of the state. In school, they were forced to study Lenin and Marx. As professionals, the state hired them, placed them in specific jobs, and told them when to retire. The system was a vast machine, with room for creative license, but only insofar as it complied with the specific state directives. A performer who challenged official doctrine or strayed too far outside the box artistically risked repercussions. “My coaches told me that I was too minimalist, too progressive,” Viktor Kee, a Ukrainian star with Cirque du Soleil, once told me. “They said I’d never work in a circus.”
ONE AFTERNOON EARLY in the year, I sat down with Frédéric Leguay, the director of programming at the National School, to talk about the school’s core curriculum.
As a prep student, my classes mirrored the Russian model—a combination of acrobatics, dance, and acting, with an emphasis on technical prowess. As I discovered the first week, however, the school’s full-time curriculum was more ambitious. In addition to the core disciplines and the circus specialty of their choice (e.g., juggling), the students studied a bevy of other subjects. Some were academic, like the English language and French literature. Others were artistic. Every student was required to learn how to play a musical instrument, for example. There were also mandatory workshops, hosted by visiting teachers. One afternoon I found the students spread across the Marley floor of the tent in the courtyard, hunched over colorful constructions of paper and ribbon; a sculptor—a thin man in an argyle scarf—offered suggestions. A few months later, I arrived in a classroom to find an easel covered in drawings of stick figures doing flips, with vectors denoting the rotations. Back in the Great Hall, I asked Tiriac, a first-year, what the students had been doing. He looked up from his stretching and replied with a word: “Physics.”
The general French term for the educational model was polyvalence, which roughly translates as “multidisciplinary.” The term was a buzzword in French circus, one of the distinguishing foundational ideas of the school. Created by the French government in 1986, the Centre National des Arts du Cirque in Châlons-en-Champagne was charged with the task of not only educating the students but also resurrecting the circus in France.‡ In 1991, to further this effort, the school recruited Bernard Turin, head of the French Federation of Circus Schools, to serve as its director. A sculptor by trade, Turin added new artistic classes and workshops taught by contemporary artists. “Bernard gave the school a vision,” Anny Goyer told me.
I went to Frédéric to understand how this vision worked. I could understand how a potential circus performer could benefit from learning to play an instrument. But why biology? Why architecture? What did all this superfluous knowledge have to do with making strong circus?
Frédéric and I met in his office at the Great Hall, a former maid’s quarters at the top of a turret-like stairwell. Like Anny, he had a formal, even phlegmatic, demeanor, and he nodded skeptically when I suggested we play a little game: I had brought a legal pad with a list of the classes; I would say the name of the class, and he would describe its purpose. I started with an easy one.
“Circus History,” I said.
Frédéric repeated the words, as if he were in a spelling bee. “Circus History. Well, I’d say history’s always important. We’re trying to create artists, and artists need an intellectual grounding for their work. Can you imagine a young painter who never studied Rembrandt? Or a pianist who’d never heard of Chopin? Part of being a serious artist is to have a context, to have references.”
I read the next name from my list. “Mathematics.”
Frédéric lit his cigarette. Smoke curled up to the skylight above us. “Mathematics. That’s more complicated. We believe it helps the students understand the physical principles of their disciplines—how they move, what forces are acting on them.” He added that math could also come in handy if a performer wanted to develop a new act. “You might need to design a new structure,” he said. “We want the students to have the skills to execute their visions.”
And on we went. Sculpting gave the students a sense of space. Music gave them rhythm. English was the language of the world, important for touring and communicating with the press. Anatomy instilled a knowledge of the body, the performer’s tool of the trade.
As we checked through the list, it occurred to me that, in one sense, Frédéric’s responses were all quite practical. As he pointed out, one of the school’s missions was to create performers who could create their own companies, a demanding, m
ultifaceted challenge. “Running your own circus company is basically running your own business,” he said. “You have to do everything yourself, from raising funds to putting up a tent.”
But there was also a deeper principle behind the school’s diversity, which became more evident as he went on. As I noted before, a primary factor in the circus’s decline was a lack of innovation. Cut off from society, circus families had a hard time keeping pace with cultural changes, especially as developments in technology accelerated the world. The goal of the National School was to guarantee that this would never happen again. It trained the students to create new work, not just perform work, in order to keep the circus evolving. This might sound simple, but in reality it’s a hugely complicated task, especially in an art in which there was no precedent for creative thinking, and no direct models.
And so the school bombarded the students with information from other sources—from theater, dance, sculpting, math, science. It also introduced them to as much high-quality contemporary art as possible. During my year at the school, the students took field trips to the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the École des Beaux-arts. Every month, the school popped for tickets to a theater or dance show. Occasionally the shows were what you’d expect from an academic excursion (e.g., Molière at the Comédie-Française). More often, they were impressively avant-garde, and meant to challenge in some fundamental way the reigning conception of what was possible on a stage. On a drizzly night in October, for example, I accompanied the students on a trip to Théâtre de la Ville, a premier Parisian modern dance venue, for a show by Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus. As I would find out later, Vandekeybus was a staple of the European avant-garde, known for what The New York Times referred to as a “tough, brutal, playful” style, and on this night his style was in full effect. The curtain rose on a woman simulating fellatio on an unconscious man. Later, a dancer half-succeeded in sodomizing himself with a peeled banana. In the lobby afterward, surrounded by a buzzing crowd of students, I mentioned to Frédéric that the progressive content of the show surprised me. He seemed bemused. “We want them to see the best,” he replied.
