The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  In their purest form, the fairs (foires in French, Jahrmärkte in German) date from the fifth century, when they began as religious festivals, a fixed time and place for pilgrims from across Europe to worship together and swap doctrine. In the fifteenth century, fueled by the new wayfaring class, the gatherings grew. Visitors flocked to hear news from the outside. Merchants from abroad set up booths to hawk their goods: telescopes, spices, miracle potions, exotic birds. Lyon, Cologne, Southwark, Florence, Nuremberg, Naples—they all had their fairs, and by the seventeenth century, the biggest of them—the Saint-Germain Fair in Paris, the Bartholomew Fair in England—were rollicking festivals of commerce, whole barrack villages that lasted upward of a month.

  For the saltimbanques, who survived on their ability to find a regular crowd, the fairs were a godsend. Because merchants and visitors came from great distances, the fairs were obligated to stick to consistent schedules. An industrious performer could plan his season in advance, hopping from one fair to the next, connecting them like links on a chain. What’s more, the atmosphere of the fairs also fit their skills nicely. The foreign merchants imbued the events with an air of adventure. Audiences came with money to spend and the will to spend it.

  And so the performers flocked. Records from the Saint-Germain Fair in Paris show them arriving in waves. The puppeteers appeared toward the end of the sixteenth century. Next came the acrobats, including some of the oldest circus families, like the Chiarinis, a group of ropedancers, who arrived in Paris in 1580. The Roma (a.k.a. the Gypsies) arrived around the same time. Originally from northern India, the caste of metalworkers and musicians had fled their homeland in the eleventh century and taken up performing on the road—telling fortunes, dancing, and training bears, monkeys, and goats. In Paris, where they first appeared in 1427, they found a comfortable place among the tumblers, magicians, and jugglers. Over the centuries, the saltimbanques and the Gypsies intermarried and swapped customs, leading to the modern associations between the two groups. Nevertheless, it’s important to note that the Roma weren’t the only itinerant people to make their mark in the performance milieu. As Lord George Sanger, a nineteenth-century showman, noted in his autobiography, in the fairgrounds of his youth, Jewish families “passed the number of goys 2 to 1.”

  BY NOVEMBER, I had become fascinated by circus history. Weekdays, I pored over pictorial volumes at the city libraries. Weekends, I drifted between dusty antique shops in the Marais, picking over the collections of old circus postcards and prints.

  Much of this interest was spontaneous, an instinctual curiosity. But Pascal also played a role. In class, he brought circus history alive. Each week, he would recount stories of the past, of the arrival of Paris’s first rhinoceros, of the tragic suicide of the great trapezist, Alfredo Codona. I came to think of him as my circus Virgil, my guide through the circus past. Before long, we started meeting outside of class, for coffee or dinner. Each meeting took a lesson. Once it was the elegant period of the Parisian Belle Époque, when circuses were staged in buildings that looked like opera houses. Another time, it was the great American train circuses of the nineteenth century, the behemoth shows that chugged across the young country at the cusp of the railroads.

  The biggest lesson was Pascal himself. He approached the circus with a seriousness of intention that I had never encountered and could never have imagined. Like Jean-Michel Guy, he had intellectualized the form. But whereas Jean-Michel focused on the modern period, Pascal had intellectualized all of the circus, from the jugglers of ancient Egypt to the clowns of Soviet Russia. To him, every aspect merited serious consideration, on aesthetic grounds, with regard to expression and form, but also on the “cultural” level: how the circus reflected the values of a given society.

  My first inkling of this perspective came during one of our afternoon chats, in a café near the Place de la Bastille. On the way to the café, we had stopped to view a portion of his memorabilia collection at HorsLesMurs, a French circus advocacy organization. As we were perusing the objects, which were piled by the hundreds on metal shelves, an image of a clown caught my eye. It was almost 150 years old, but the clown’s hair—a pair of spikes jutting off his head—looked familiar: he reminded me of Bozo.

  “Oh, sure,” Pascal said, when I pointed out the similarity in the café. “It’s the Feast of Fools.” Once a year, he explained, certain towns in medieval France had allowed a local fool to replace the mayor or bishop for a day, as a symbolic reversal of power. To mark the occasion, the fool would wear a floppy tentacular hat such as jesters wear, what Pascal called “a crown without the power.”

  This was a new idea for me. I had never thought of the clown’s look as having any particular origin, much less a political or social origin. I asked the historian if other iconic clown qualities also came from specific sources: the red nose, the floppy shoes, the multicolored outfit. “Of course,” he replied, “there are reasons for all of it.”

  A circus show wasn’t just a series of acts. Every movement, even something as simple as a back flip, was weighted with history and loaded with meaning.

  Another indication of this view came during a conversation about acrobatics in different parts of the world. We were talking about how different countries approached acrobatics. In my naïve view, location mattered little: a handstand was a handstand, a flip a flip. Pascal took an anthropological tack. In the West, he speculated, we tend to consider a back flip an arbitrary pursuit. “It doesn’t serve any purpose,” he said. “It’s just to demonstrate that you’re capable of doing it. Its only function is to surprise you, to make you say ‘wow.’ ”

  The Chinese take a different view. During the ancient period, Chinese emperors trained cadets to tumble and dispatched acrobatic troupes to perform for foreign heads of state, as emissaries and proof of power. Among the Chinese populace, this courtly attention inspired widespread interest in the skills. Peasants whiled away the frigid winters practicing with household items—tumbling through threshing hoops, spinning plates on sticks. In the spring, they flocked to festivals in the capital, enormous affairs featuring tens of thousands of amateur acrobats eager to demonstrate their skills. Today, acrobatics remains a popular practice in China, but echoes of the discipline’s aristocratic history have imbued the practice with a different emphasis.

  “The Chinese don’t valorize the violence,” Pascal told me. “They don’t celebrate the danger.” They exalt refinement. “It’s a little like pulling a bow in Japan: it’s about concentration and precision.” The acrobat aspires not to glorify himself but to testify to the perfection of the state, even the universe. “It’s really related to their culture,” Pascal noted. “The body of the Chinese acrobat is integrated into his community, into the cosmos even. People say ‘wow’ there, but not for the same reason.”

  The more I got to know Pascal, the more I wondered about him. His unique perspective—the fusion of the past with the present, the high with the low—seemed indicative of the circus today, of an art in transition. I wondered how his obsession had started. Given his elegant bearing, I thought his perspective might reflect his upbringing. (Stories abound of aristocratic children hitching on with acrobats.) In fact, his parents were working-class Parisians. His father was a furniture distributor, his mother a fonctionnaire—an administrator in France’s byzantine bureaucracy. Neither particularly liked the circus, but, thanks to an old French tradition known as “Arbres de Noël,” his mother received tickets from her company every Christmas. When Pascal was four, she took him to see his first show, a one-ring show directed by the Bouglione family, one of France’s venerable dynasties. The experience captivated him. “I was fascinated by the smells,” he once told me. “The burned gas off the trucks, the hot canvas, the stables with the animals, the sawdust.” Another time he said it was the mystery of the circus life, what he once called “the secret.” “What’s in the tent? What’s in the trailers?”

  He started attending other shows. Every Wednesday, his grandmother took
him to the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris’s oldest circus building, where he saw some of the biggest circus stars of the day, including Gunther Gebel-Williams. He quickly grew obsessed. He kept his tickets and the programs, which blossomed into a collection of circus books and memorabilia. In his free time, he constructed intricate wooden circus models, with mechanized equestrians and hand-painted crowds. One model filled his bedroom. When the family went on vacation to London, Pascal insisted on packing it in his bags. “I’m sure my father appreciated that,” he said with a chuckle.

  Oddly, though, Pascal never wanted to be in the circus. “It’s strange,” he said, “but in retrospect I think I intellectualized the circus from early on.” He was fascinated by the circus as an art form and a historical subject. He was able to imagine the extravagant circuses of the past very clearly, and they hijacked his mind. “I used to stay up late in my room and look at pictures of the American circus trains under a magnifying glass. I couldn’t get enough of it—the myth of the wagons, of the city on the rails.”

  What makes this fascination especially noteworthy is the era in which it developed. Pascal grew up in the late sixties, the low point of the art. Across Europe, traditional circuses were collapsing by the dozen. “Modern” companies had just started to form, but nobody really knew about them. “You have to understand that nobody liked the circus back then,” he said. “Nobody.”

  Well, almost nobody. While he was out wandering the antique bookshops of the Latin Quarter one afternoon, a shopkeeper summoned him over to his desk. The man had seen him poking around, ogling the old circus volumes, counting and recounting the change in his pocket, and he asked Pascal if he had ever considered joining the local circus club. Pascal hesitated. Every country has a similar organization: the Circus Friends Association of Great Britain, the Gesellschaft der Circusfreunde. In Paris, it was the Club du Cirque. Pascal of course knew about the club, but the idea of joining intimidated him. The members were serious circus fans and significantly older—of “a certain age,” mostly. But it didn’t matter. Before he could respond, the shopkeeper had picked up the phone and dialed up the local club’s director, a puppeteer named Jean Villiers.

  It was the call that changed his life. On the phone, Villiers told Pascal to come to his apartment the following week, and there he sold Pascal the first valuable item in his collection, a Barnum & Bailey program from the company’s 1902 French tour. For the next twenty years, Pascal returned to Villiers’s apartment every Wednesday. Villiers taught him how to judge circus artifacts and introduced him to the circus club. They talked circus history and argued over shows. “He would call and say, ‘Bon, we’re going to Lille, to Versailles. Be at the house at five o’clock. We’ll take the car and see some circuses.’ ” They drove all over Europe—to Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Germany. They saw all of the great traditional shows—Knie, Krone, Medrano. Villiers was Pascal’s mentor and his friend, and when the National School was created in 1985, Villiers became the first historian on staff. “Jean once told me, ‘I’m going to do this now, but you’ll be the next.’ ” And he was.

  The circus is an art of community. Pascal found his community in the older generation.† But by then the circus had started to change. The nouveau cirque was exploding in France. New companies were emerging every year. They garnered headlines in Le Monde and filled big venues, like the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris.

  Their success led to a schism in the circus community. The traditional community accused the moderns of being upstarts without experience or an appropriate respect for tradition. They said the contemporary work was pompous and extreme, something other than circus—a form of physical theater, maybe. The modernists responded by critizing the traditionalists for being stuck in the past, for letting the art fester. Through the eighties the divisions deepened. Debates turned into animosities. “There were literally fistfights,” one participant told me.

  At the circus club in Paris, most of the members sided with the traditionalists. But Pascal wasn’t so sure. Outside of the circus, his tastes were almost exclusively highbrow. He was a connoisseur of the opera and literature and cuisine. More important, he saw a continuity between the old form and the new. “People said the modern circus was different, but I didn’t believe that,” he once told me. “I thought it was what it always was: an assembly of incredible forms. Aren’t the effects the same? Do we not feel the same fascination, the same surprise?” Even the inciting question—What’s a circus?—struck him as an extension of the past. “If you look at the history, we’ve been having the same debate for centuries. ‘This is circus, but that isn’t.’ The truth is that the circus is like all art—it changes.” During another conversation, he compared it to music. “Music changed and we take it for granted. It becomes baroque with Monteverdi in the seventeenth century. During the French Revolution it’s Romanticism. One form isn’t necessarily higher than another, but there’s an evolution. When we talk about Wagner and Mozart, there’s a chasm between them.”

  Over the millennia the circus produced myriad chasms of its own, myriad versions. The ancient games, the saltimbanques, the rise of the fairgrounds—these were three of the first. Dozens more followed. The “traditional circus” (or the “conventional circus,” as Pascal likes to say) was the version that dominated the first half of the nineteenth century. But it was only a version like all the others, not the art itself.

  It took me awhile to accept this sense of continuity. Once I did, the belief had demonstrable effects on my experience. History gave the modern work a different reality. I was able to read the echoes of the past. I took a greater interest in traditional circuses. I sought them out around Paris and was able to watch them with more clarity and respect, less blinded by the clichés.

  Pascal understood the benefits of this dual view more than anyone. Because he refused to distinguish between the old circus and the new, he somehow managed to straddle both worlds and was rewarded with an almost fantastical richness of experience, a mix of high art and exoticism. A few years ago, for example, the mayor of Venice invited him to Carnevale to help compose a show for one of the luxurious balls. He was invited because the show was supposed to include a rhinoceros. (“It was a mean rhinoceros, very difficult to work with.”)

  Another time, he was brought in to broker a deal between a highranking emissary from the Chinese government and one of the big American circuses. The circus wanted to acquire a giant panda, the first in Western circus history. “I learned a lot that night,” Pascal said with a smile, at one of our dinners. The Chinese government owns all the giant pandas. You can’t buy one, but they’ll rent you one for the year. “To even begin the negotiations, you have to put $1 million on the table. If you want panda twins, it’s $2 million.” And of course you have to bring in a zoo veterinarian who can testify that the panda will be well cared for. “You can imagine the trouble if the giant panda died on you.”

  He was the personification of the circus today: multifaceted, refined, international—as concerned with animals as with art. With this in mind, I once asked him if he ever regretted the changes he had witnessed in the circus during his life. Did he ever miss the old shows that had transfixed him as a boy, the lions and calliopes?

  “No,” he said. “There are places were I can still see those sorts of shows if I want to.” When he’s in Russia, for instance, he’ll attend a quiet matinee, to be reminded of how the circus smelled when he was a boy, the mix of sawdust and animal fur. Just a few weeks before our conversation he had traveled to India, where touring circuses still take place in gigantic tents, and where animals and freaks still feature prominently. He spent the week touring the country, attending as many shows as possible. One night, after one performance, the director of the troupe, a stern and sober man, invited him into the dressing tent for tea. They spent the night with the troupe talking about circus history. The only light came from a lantern, swaying slowly from the ceiling. Pascal sat on a wooden stool. Contortionists and dancing girls and midgets sat o
n the ground around them. Outside, on the other side of the canvas, he could hear the elephants shuffling in the dirt.

  * * *

  * Perhaps the most encompassing term is saltimbanque, derived from the medieval Latin saltare (jump) and banco (bench), because performers overturned wooden boxes or benches for stages.

  † On Pascal’s efforts to connect to his own generation: “I studied theater in college, hoping some people would be interested in the circus. Of course, there weren’t any.”

  (illustration credit 6.1)

  JAY GILLIGAN HAD RETRIEVED his duffel from the baggage claim when a middle-aged airport customs official waved him over to inspect his bag. Because he had a connection to make, Gilligan fidgeted as the portly agent snapped on a latex glove and plunged his arm into the duffel. Gilligan watched the hand ripple like a snake over his tube socks, his oversized cotton T-shirts, and his dirty nylon gym shorts. The official, working quickly, almost absentmindedly, flashed Gilligan a warning look, jerking an object free. It was a milky white ring, ten inches in diameter and less than a centimeter wide. After placing the ring on the table, the official plunged his hand into the duffel again and emerged with another ring, and another. When a stack of six wobbled like pancakes on the tabletop, the official snapped the glove from his hand, flicked it into the trash can behind him, and asked Gilligan, “What is going on?”

  Gilligan explained that he was a professional juggler and that the rings were part of his act. The official nodded warily. Peeling a ring off the stack, he examined it intensely. “I don’t know,” he demurred, dropping the ring back onto the pile. “I think I’m gonna need some proof.”