by Duncan Wall
Of course, when you look at it from a distance, there’s nothing terribly profound about any of this. The school’s method is not terribly complex. It teaches the kids a variety of skills, and encourages them to bring those skills to bear on a particular form.
But, then again, who else does this? Where else can you receive such a panoply of experience? Where can you learn to act, flip, speak French, play an accordion, and paint a watercolor, all in one year? It might be the most interdisciplinary education on the planet, and it’s a circus school, of all places. It’s a physical education, where the intellectual reigns. This notion was introduced the first week, and drilled into me the second, when I reported for a course called Analyse du Spectacle.
IN THE NATIONAL SCHOOL CURRICULUM, Analyse du Spectacle, or Circus Theory, was a relatively new addition. In the 1980s, during the school’s early years, there had been no call for such a class, because, broadly speaking, there had been no theory of the circus. Writers covered the subject—enough to fill a circus library in Baraboo, Wisconsin—but most of the work was factual or narrative, memoirs and histories and fiction, rather than analytical. Only one man, an anthropologist named Paul Bouissac, could have rightfully printed “circus theorist” on his business card, but he was something of an outsider, since he worked in Canada, a backwater for circus at the time, and since he wrote sentences like “Although jugglers and magicians are frequently praised for the quickness of their movements and, more particularly, for the precision and efficiency of their hand techniques, the meaning of these movements and the fascination they produce can be accounted for only by relating them to uses of hands that occur in everyday life.”
In the eighties, the academic sands shifted. As the circus drifted from the carnival to the cultural, critical theory was dragged along. Dissertations were written, critical niches staked. “It was natural but also sort of a shock,” Gwénola David, an arts critic for Libération during those years, told me. Until then, the circus was seen as a shallow display of prowess, nothing more. “I’d attended circuses my whole life,” David said, “but I’d never thought of studying one.”
Observing this aesthetic sea-change, the French National School decided to hire a resident theorist of its own, someone to stay abreast of the intellectual developments in the field. They put the feelers out in the circus community, and one name kept coming up: Jean-Michel Guy. In the circus world, Guy was something of a ubiquity, an older, taller Truman Capote. At most show openings, he could be found leaning on the bar in his trademark trench coat and fedora, with a leather valise slung over his shoulder, the modern incarnation of the veteran newspaperman. Like Gwénola David, he had started out as a theater critic, then drifted to the circus as the modern version emerged. When I met him, he was also working for the Ministry of Culture as an ingénieur de recherche, a job that required him to compile reports about the modern circus landscape. For one such report, he attended more than two hundred shows in a single year. In practical terms, he was possibly the most modern-circus-aware person on the planet, and when the National School called to offer him the job, he accepted on the spot.
On the first day of class, I arrived early to find him arranging himself at the head of the classroom. He had a narrow, stubbled face and tousled salt-and-pepper hair that flopped messily over his ears. A worn leather valise lay open on the table.
Once the students had settled into their seats, he pulled a videotape from his valise and slipped it into the combination TV/VCR. “I want you to take notes,” he said, as the screen flickered to life. “What do you see? What do you think?”
The tape was of a hand-balancing routine, or what the French call a main-à-main. In the traditional circus, the act is a classic. One acrobat (the base) muscles a second acrobat (the flyer) through a series of positions. The flyer might do a handstand on the base’s hands, say, or the pair might balance shoulder to shoulder, with the flyer upside down. Insofar as the flyer never touches the ground, the act is essentially a display of strength and control, values that acrobats typically emphasize by wearing sleek bodysuits or painting themselves silver. This latter practice ultimately led to the act’s other name: the human-statues routine.
That at least was the standard form. Jean-Michel’s version was from a modern circus, and so it differed slightly. The acrobats, a man and a woman, wore formal outfits—the woman a sheer satin dress, the man a tuxedo. As they moved from position to position, the man barked commands—“Give me your hand! Place your foot on my knee!”—which the woman obeyed unthinkingly, almost robotically.
The students watched the act with curiosity. Guy meanwhile shuffled around behind the television. He tore off three sheets of paper from an easel and taped them to the wall. At the top of each he wrote a word: “Description.” “Interpretation.” “Judgment.” He was crossing the final t as the video came to a stop.
“Et alors …” He clicked off the television and faced the class. He asked the students what they saw. A girl raised her hand. She had sturdy shoulders and a ponytail.
“It’s a hand-balancing routine,” she said.
Guy nodded. “Can you be more precise?”
The girl described the act, the acrobats’ positions and movements. While she was speaking, the theorist moved to the board and recorded her words in shorthand on the sheet of paper labeled “Description.” “Hand-to-hand stand,” he wrote, and “Inverted shoulder stand.”
A series of similar exchanges followed. “Talking strange” was a Judgment. “No music,” a Description. At one point an acrobat commented on the act’s “gender relations.”
Guy hesitated. “Say more.”
The acrobat twirled a pen in his fingers. “Well, the relationship between the man and the woman is sort of the point, right? The man gives the commands. The woman obeys. They’re calling attention to that with their physicality.”
Guy nodded. He turned to the board and wrote “gender roles” on the Interpretation paper.
What the students had done, he explained, when the exercise was over and the three pages were buried in ideas, was to engage in the critical process. “First you describe the work, then you analyze the meaning, then you judge it,” he said, and he ticked off the three phrases with his marker. As a critic, he noted, he spent his days engaging in this exact process, and he encouraged the students to think similarly, not as critics but as creators.
“In a few short years, you are going to be professionals,” he said, slipping into a serious tone. “You are among the best performers in France, and you’re arriving at an important moment in circus history. Take it seriously. Think about the work you’re seeing. Think about the work you’re making. As somebody who knows the profession quite well, I can guarantee it will be good for your career.” He paused and grinned and popped the cap on his marker. “More important, it will be good for the art.”
* * *
* Marx generally approved of the circus. “On seeing a fearless acrobat in bright costume,” he once wrote, “we forget about ourselves, feeling that we have somehow risen above ourselves and reached the level of universal strength.”
† The official name changes regularly; people in the business call it the Moscow Circus School.
‡ In the beginning there was just one school. The school in Rosny-sous-Bois (often called “Rosny”) spun off from Châlons later.
(illustration credit 5.1)
IN ADDITION TO Circus Theory, Anny invited me to attend a second freshman course, Circus History, taught by a circus historian, Pascal Jacob. He was one of the world’s foremost circus experts, and his obsession with the art made my own look like a passing fancy. Though not yet fifty, he had helped author more than nineteen books on the subject and was writing an additional half-dozen when I met him, including a comprehensive ten-volume history. He taught at three of the best circus schools: the national schools in France, Canada, and Belgium. With a partner, he had amassed one of the world’s largest private collections of circus memorabilia (“circu
siana”), a museum’s worth of circus posters, programs, costumes, paintings, statues, and random circus artifacts. When his parents passed away, he once told me, he sold their property and sank the money in the circus past. “I might be homeless,” he said, “but at least I’ll be happy.” Needless to say, I was interested in meeting him.
I was not, however, interested in his class. My interest was in the contemporary circus, not the past, which, based on what little I knew about it, I imagined as a sort of grotesque Dalí painting, full of juggling midgets, sword-swallowers, and abused animals. It almost seemed like another form entirely, a tawdry prelude to the more sophisticated modern work. I expected Pascal’s class would offer some context, but not much else.
The first class took place in one of the classrooms reserved for academic work. Pascal arrived in dapper fashion. There was something elegant, almost Old World about him. He wore a black velvet scarf and a black silk jacket embroidered with the name of France’s biggest circus, Cirque Phénix. His black hair was combed straight back from his brow, like a cinematic duke.
The students entered in a cacophonous parade. When they had settled, Pascal clicked off the lights and cycled through an introductory circus slide show, an illuminated tour of the art’s extensive history. He began with an etching of the Roman Colosseum. He talked about the circus arts in ancient Rome, the brutal contexts of their employment. “Look at this,” he said, pointing to a church that had been erected in the bleachers of the stadium. “They built it after the fall of Rome, to commemorate all the Christians who died in the ring.”
He clicked. The projector whirred. A chubby acrobat appeared. He was dressed in a doublet and diving through a line of hoops held aloft by soldiers. Pascal explained that the image was from the sixteenth century, from the first book ever written about acrobatics, a treatise by Arcangelo Tuccaro, the personal acrobatic trainer to French Kings Charles VII and Henri III.
“But here’s the peculiar thing.…” He gestured to what looked like a small wooden ramp in the lower corner of the drawing. It was a springboard, he said, an angled plank to create additional height. “But as far as we know, springboards weren’t widely used until almost a hundred years after this image. This is the first recorded use.”
The show went on. Each image marked an era: traveling performers huddling miserably against the wheel of a covered wagon; a wire-walker perched precariously over a cobbled medieval plaza.
“What is that?” a student exclaimed. A Victorian animal trainer had emblazoned the screen. Dressed like Tarzan, the trainer lay sprawled on the ground, a lion huddled over him, its jaws clenched around his throat.
Pascal smiled. Before mass media, he said, before television or the movies, the circus had been the world’s most popular spectator event, a combination of professional entertainment and professional athletics. Like we glorify athletes or movies stars today, audiences had glorified circus performers. “This was a celebrity poster for the trainer. It’s the sort of thing a child might have hung on his bedroom wall.”
I studied the image of the lion-tamer. It wasn’t tawdry or cheap. It was oddly ornate. A series of words ran around the outside: “Strength,” “Courage,” “Power,” “Will.” It occurred to me for the first time that I might have misunderstood circus history, that the image in my head might have come from the circus of my youth, the circus of clichés. But what if in the past the circus had been something different? What if it hadn’t been a punch line, but an actual part of daily life?
Gazing at the illuminated image of the lion-tamer, I worried, quite rightly, that I had tumbled into a new obsession.
BEFORE THERE WAS the circus proper, there were the “circus arts,” physical disciplines that date back to the roots of human spectacle. The list of these circus arts is long and imprecise, but it usually includes tumbling, ropewalking, juggling, animal training, and clowning. There is no consensus about which circus art came first. Many of them likely began in religious contexts, before the written record. Acrobatics, for example, was probably first practiced as a hunting ritual. To invoke what anthropologists call “sympathetic magic,” a shaman might have imitated an animal’s movement, by walking on his hands or dancing nimbly around a fire. Similarly, many sacred myths include characters with clownish features. In pre-Columbian North America, native tribes, including the Nez Perce and the Hopi, celebrated the coyote as a trickster who scandalized, humiliated, and amused the community. In Norse mythology, Loki, a buffoonish figure, jokingly cut off the hair of Thor’s wife.
With the classical period, the circus arts shed their religious connotations and became entertainment. Specialists roamed the world, plying the skills wherever they could lure a crowd—at crossroads, in town plazas, in banquet halls. The audiences could be quite regal. In the Middle Kingdom of ancient Egypt (2050–1650 B.C.) jugglers or “ball-dancers,” performed for the pharaohs and princes. In Greece, Socrates attended a banquet with a female hoop dancer, who “threw the hoops into the air, making them spin and judging how high she would have to throw them to catch them in time to the music.” The performers themselves occupied a low social caste. Their work was demanding, intensely physical and often dangerous. In his Satyricon, a description of the Feast of Trimalchio, the Latin poet Petronius (A.D. 27–66) describes a ladder act by a family of acrobats. According to Petronius, the father of the family held the ladder while his son, a small boy, danced from rung to rung. For the grand finale, the father compelled the boy “to jump through blazing hoops while grasping a huge wine jar with his teeth.”
Today circus scholars debate whether this ancient work constitutes part of the official circus lineage. It depends, principally, on how you define the form. Some historians take a rather narrow view. They consider the circus a composite art, a collection of acts first brought together in the eighteenth century. This is the perspective of American historian Fred Dahlinger, Jr., who once told me that he sees the circus as “horses around a ring mixed with physical feats.”
Others are more inclusive. The circus, they say, isn’t a specific collection of activities; it’s an experience, even a set of qualities—prowess, risk, physicality, ambition. In David Lewis Hammarstrom’s Circus Rings Around Russia, the Russian historian Victor Kalesh gives one such model. The circus, Kalesh says, consists of (1) “an artistic model of … a festival atmosphere”; (2) “ideal mastership,” or prowess; (3) a “wholeness,” a feeling of a complete show that combines separate acts. By this definition, the games of Rome were one of the greatest circuses in history. There were staged animal hunts and equestrian demonstrations. Jugglers milled in the corridors, and ropewalkers balanced over the crowds. The Roman Colosseum, the stadium where the games took place, was round. It was known as an amphitheater, but the Romans also had a second type of building—elliptical, like modern football stadiums, with a spine down the middle for chariot races. They called them “circuses.”
In A.D. 410, Rome fell, sacked by Visigoths. Performers of the circus arts took to the road in search of audiences. To survive, most performers practiced more than one skill, and so they came to be known by general names: minstrels, jestours, jongleurs, histriones, bateleurs, baladins.* Not much is known about their lives. “It’s a historical black hole,” Carol Symes, a specialist in medieval performance at the University of Illinois, told me. The performers themselves were mostly illiterate and kept few records. The clergy, the great scribes of the age, considered them base, and so noted little of their doings. Today, perhaps because of the dearth of information, we tend to romanticize their lives. In works of art about the period—films, paintings, and literature—itinerant acrobats and singers are depicted as joyful and free, frolicing in fields of wildflowers. (See Marcel Carné’s Visiteurs du soir.) In reality, their lives were horrifically difficult. Forced to travel incessantly, they were subject to starvation and disease. Wary of the seductive charms, villagers often treated them with suspicion or scorn.
The tough times continued through the Middle Ages
and into the Renaissance. In the fifteenth century, the plague descended on Europe. Fearful of contamination, mayors banned outsiders and public meetings, stripping the saltimbanques of their crowds. By the sixteenth century, the contagion had passed, but now feudalism was crumbling. A new migrant class emerged, hordes of merchants, soldiers, and pilgrims who roved from town to town in search of work. Unsure how to deal with this demographic tidal wave, the royal powers panicked. A spate of “vagrancy laws” swept through Europe. Anyone caught without patronage or proof of stable employment could be prosecuted, and the punishments were horrifically gruesome. One vagabond law, passed in 1572, recommended boring an itinerant’s ear with a rod of hot iron. Another suggested branding a culprit with the letter V.
To protect themselves, saltimbanques sought refuge among the elite. For room and board, or even just a letter guaranteeing safe passage, a saltimbanque would offer to juggle, sing, or tumble for a nobleman. In 1547, Ivan the Terrible paid 800 bear trainers to perform at his wedding. Some lucky performers even secured permanent positions. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, jesters were regularly recruited from among the minstrel class. Under Charles II, the Duchess of Cleveland paid a salary to Jacob Hall, a famous ropewalker, who “rivaled the king himself” in her affections.
Buoyed by such relations, the fortunes of the lowly saltimbanque began to rise. In England, authorities accepted the historical inevitability of migrant labor, and “vagrancy” sanctions waned. On the Continent, French King Louis XIV consolidated power and established domestic peace, allowing for easier travel. The most significant development, however, was the rise of a new venue: the fairgrounds.
