The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  My guide in such maneuvers, as I said, was Gabby. Like Ryszard, he came from the world of gymnastics, but his style was totally different. He was methodical, almost clinical. His jogging suits were always impeccably crisp; his head was shaved clean. When explaining a move, he liked to employ the chalkboard bolted into the brick wall by the trampolines, diagramming stick figures in stages of movement. In his explanations, he often used scientific terminology, words like “leverage” and “rotation.” For the back flip, his word was “torque.”

  “For a back flip, you want to rise gradually,” he noted, tapping the stick man’s hips with his nub of chalk. “Wait until you’re parallel to the ground. Then pop your knees to your chest. That pop—that’s where the torque comes from.”

  The back flip was relatively simple, a matter, as Gabby said, of rise, tuck, and open. From a purely physical perspective, the back flip was no more complex than any of the other basic moves—cartwheels or round-offs, for example—except for one essential difference: it went backward. We hardly ever hurl ourselves over backward, so our brains rebel against it. I first experienced this reaction when I was drilling back handsprings. A few minutes before any attempt at the move, my heart started to pound. I felt my body resist, right until I bent at the knees and started rocking backward.

  “Oh yeah, that happens to everybody,” Ryszard said. He also said that my age probably made the issue worse. “A kid watches and repeats. He doesn’t know enough to be afraid.”

  To conquer my problem, he gave me éducatifs, aimed at acclimating my subconscious to the idea of flinging myself over backward. I rolled through countless backward somersaults on the padded floor; I stretched into innumerable back bends. To train for the takeoff, I repeatedly flung myself backward into a crash pad the size of a small automobile.

  The moves felt vaguely ridiculous (especially when performed in the shadow of an acrobat doing a double somersault on the trampoline), but they had a positive effect. After a week, I noticed that my heart wasn’t beating quite so hard when I stepped onto the runway. That was on the ground, however. On the trampoline, following Gabby’s instructions, I could feel my heart drumming in my chest. Sometimes the fear would come in the middle of a move. Professional acrobats call this “casting” or “getting lost in the trick.” Trapezist Alfredo Codona once compared it to “a sharp knife drawn against the strings.”

  My worst experience with this occurred while I was attending my second class on the back flip. Gabby worked with me for a few flips and then hopped down. Without him, the trampoline felt empty and grand.

  “Same as before,” he said, standing at the edge of the trampoline, his fingers gripped around a foam pad, safety protection in case of errant flips. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  I was actually feeling quite calm. We were fine-tuning the rotation, since I had a tendency to jump back instead of up. By this point, I had established a reputation for intense precision. Perhaps because I was still working on a few simple moves, I was very conscious of the little things I could control, such as pointed toes and correct posture, and in this spirit I had developed a little prep routine of arm circles and toe-pointing, which I now performed. The other students got a kick out of the routine—I imagine it made me look as if I had some kind of compulsive disorder—but I ignored the titters and focused on the move. I gave myself a little pep talk—hips out, knees tucked. Then I flipped.

  The start was fine. I kept my arms above me. My hips rose until I was parallel to the ground. But just as I was about to tuck, I seized up. My chest tightened and the air rushed out of my lungs. I began to flail. My legs kicked, my fingers clawed for purchase. Completely panic-stricken, I came crashing earthward. I heard Fanny gasp, and from the corner of my eye saw Gabby launch the pad underneath me. Landing headfirst, like a duck shot out of the sky, I folded into the trampoline, my knee barreling into my mouth.

  The next few moments are vague. I remember the rafters in the hall spinning, then dissolving into a nebulous wash. For a moment the world was black. Then I heard a voice:

  “Is he okay?”

  The world came swirling back. Light from the overhead lamps sparked in my eyes. After a moment, a dark object hovered into view—Fanny’s round face.

  “Oh, mon Dieu,” she said. I could see her brow flexing. “He’s bleeding.” As she said the words, I felt a brackish worm inch across my tongue.

  The accident rattled me. For a week afterward, I couldn’t go near the trampoline without feeling fear. But in the longer term it was almost calming. I had made a mistake, but all the proper precautions had been in place: Gabby was watching; the mattress was ready. As a result, the damage was minor: my neck was sore for a few days, but my lip healed quickly.

  The old circus families had an expression: “eating sawdust.” It referred to a performer’s first accident and marked the aspirant’s official introduction to circus life. (“Now that you’ve eaten the sawdust, you might, with a lot of work, become an artist,” the famous clown Footit’s grandmother told him when he fell off his first horse.) My frustration, my impatience, my bumps and bruises—I realized that they were all part of the system. Possibly hundreds of thousands of people had undergone identical training, had suffered the same mistakes.

  The depth and specificity of this lineage was confirmed during a research trip to Milner Library at Illinois State University, home to one of the world’s largest collections of circus literature. I went to the library to see a specific document, what circophiles affectionately call “the Tuccaro”: Three Dialogues on the Practice of Jumping and Flying in the Air, by Arcangelo Tuccaro, saltarin du roi, “Tumbler to the King.” Published in 1599, the book is important to acrobatic history on a number of levels. Like the circus generally, acrobatics was long considered a marginal discipline and so was only ever mentioned peripherally. The Latin poet Terence, for instance, once complained about people deserting his theater to watch ropewalkers. Acrobats rarely wrote about their skills or experience themselves.

  The Tuccaro was the first book to remedy this, and the first treatise in acrobatic history. Tuccaro himself was an acrobat and a royal trainer. After serving Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, he was recruited to work with France’s Charles IX. When he was fifty-nine, just two years before his death, he published his manifesto. Structured as a dialogue, the book is essentially letters to a young acrobat, with each chapter detailing instructions for various maneuvers—how to somersault, how to flip, how to flic-flac (what Tuccaro calls “monkey jumps”)—interspersed with Tuccaro’s musings on the craft.

  Today, fewer than thirty copies of Tuccaro’s book exist, and at the library at Illinois State I had to don white gloves before handling one of them. Delicately, I opened the book. The cover was vellum; the pages were yellow and brittle. Inside, the text was interspersed with woodcut illustrations, depictions of a conspicuously chubby tumbler performing various maneuvers. Other illustrations showed a teacher leading a student through the requisite preparatory exercises—helping the student bend over backward and grab his own ankles, contorting the boy over his knee as if breaking in a baseball glove.

  As I turned the fragile pages, admiring the wash of images, what struck me was how familiar they all seemed. Ryszard might have kept a copy under his pillow and referred to it before each lesson, so similar were the exercises. In writing this book, Tuccaro was arguing for acrobatics to be taken seriously as a discipline, on the level of ballet, which had just begun to emerge as a noteworthy art. His argument was based on the beauty of the craft but also on its history, which he was finally recording on paper. This resonated with me. What I was receiving as tradition, Tuccaro himself had received as tradition four hundred years before. For all the innovation (the flying trapeze, 1859), all the evolution (the triple somersault, 1859), the acrobatic rudiments remain the same. The back flip that captivates us today is nearly identical to the flip that a slave used to wow Aristotle at a banquet in Athens.

  I asked Pascal why, in a world burstin
g with distraction, such simple moves continue to hold sway over us.

  “It’s the human body,” he replied. “We changed the world around us, but we haven’t changed ourselves.”

  (illustration credit 11.1)

  PHILIP ASTLEY DIED in 1814. His art, however, lived on, and in the fifty years following his death entrepreneurs spread the circus around the world.

  Europe succumbed first. In 1805, Christoph de Bach settled in Vienna, where he set up a permanent riding and ropewalking show. Joseph Beranek, a trick rider, brought the circus to Prague. In 1827, Jacques Tourniaire, one of Astley’s best riders, installed the circus in Moscow. Around the same time, another French equestrian, Louis Soullier, extended the circus to the Balkans, then to Turkey, where the sultan appointed him the master of his stables.

  These were extraordinary lives, and, for circophiles, this period of expansion ranks as one of the great heroic periods in history. Men suffered mightily to bring the circus to the world. John Bill Ricketts, the father of the American circus, watched two of his theaters burn, then perished at sea on his return to England. During Giuseppe Chiarini’s first Asian tour, he lost a crew member every week, including a tiger trainer to smallpox in Calcutta and a canvasman to cholera in Malaysia.

  But the rewards outweighed the risks. In an age of limited possibilities, an age of class restrictions and geographical isolation, before the radio or even the telegraph, the circus offered a life of potential almost unfathomable adventure and wealth. Born to a family of poor fairground acrobats, Chiarini played to Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, and King Rama V of Siam. The son of poor wire-walkers, Ernst Jakob Renz built opulent circus buildings across Europe, in Berlin and Milan. When he died in 1891, his fortune was estimated at more than $16 million ($384 million today).

  The beginning of the nineteenth century also marked a time of unparalleled openness and creativity, because the circus was still defining itself as a theatrical form. On the road, circus owners adopted local traditions to woo audiences. In Turkey, Soullier rebranded his show the Cirque Impérial and adopted a Turkish colonel’s uniform. In 1854, he packed off to Asia, where he discovered Chinese acrobatics—plate-spinners, hoop-divers, and perch-pole balancers. In Europe, circus moguls experimented with form. They constructed buildings featuring both rings and stages. They hired writers to pen circus scripts with characters and plots. There was almost no distinction between genres. Equestrians graced royal stages. Ropewalkers recited soliloquies on their cords. Almost a century later, the great Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold would proclaim that there was “no true dividing line between the circus and the theatre,” and for a brief time this was true.

  This period of experimentation encompassed most of the capitals of Europe, from London to Berlin. There was, however, one spot where the innovation was most developed: the Boulevard du Temple in Paris.

  Located on the eastern edge of the city, less than a mile from Astley’s circus, the boulevard, also known as the Boulevard du Crime, which began as a quiet walkway for Sunday strollers, had emerged by the turn of the nineteeth century as the most eclectic corner in Europe. One writer called it a “perpetual fairground” inside the Paris city limits. “How could I even try to enumerate all the action?!” wrote Victor Fournel in Le Vieux Paris. “The hand-balancers, the learned fleas and dogs, the ferocious animals, the midgets, the giants, the colossal women and savage women, the Hercules, the card-sharks, the acrobats, the torch swallowers, the puppets, the monsters, the freaks.”

  Initially the saltimbanques, most of whom came from the fairgrounds, installed themselves on the city sidewalk, on wooden barrack stages, where they harassed the passers-by, trying to summon them to their shows. As the sidewalks filled, a few ambitious entrepreneurs ensconced themselves more permanently. In vacant lots, they constructed full theaters, venues specializing in hybrid productions of their skills. At the Théâtre de la Gaîté, founded by puppeteer Jean-Baptiste Nicolet in 1759, ropewalkers sang operas. At the Théâtre des Funambules, the house specialty was acrobatic pantomime (pantomime sautant), scenic fairy tales starring tumblers and mimes. Some of the theaters were hugely extravagant. The Cirque Olympique had enough room for a full orchestra and a team of elephants. All were hugely popular. Wrote Nicolas Brazier, a singer and playwright from the period: “It was stunning, it was deafening … But it was crazy … original … varied … it was exciting, it was alive!”

  Reading about the boulevard, I became fascinated by it and the era of circus history it exemplified. One of the defining qualities of the modern circus was how it combined circus skills with theatrical techniques—plot, character, and stagecraft, such as lights and sound. Suddenly it struck me as a throwback as much as an innovation.

  I decided to visit the site. Baron Haussmann had razed the theaters in 1862, as part of his great Parisian renovation. But I didn’t care. After my failed pilgrimage to Astley’s grave, I had become increasingly interested in what Pascal once referred to as “ghost-hunting”—of connecting to history through tangible experience, even if that experience was sparse. Astley’s grave had disappeared, but I found myself returning regularly to the former site of his theater, the courtyard on the Rue du Faubourg du Temple. I liked the buzz of historical conection that I felt when I entered. After a few trips, I became custodial about the place. I picked up the cigarette butts and empty beer bottles in the entryway, and eventually brought a soapy rag in a Ziploc bag and cleaned off the plaque. It was a small contribution, more symbolic than real, but it felt good.

  And so, on a sunny Sunday in December, I ventured out to see what remained of the Boulevard du Temple. Joining me on my pilgrimage was a college friend, Tina, an American expat and actress. I knew a lot about the circus by now, but less about the theater, and I thought she could offer some insight into this genre-bending period.

  I also had a more selfish reason for inviting her. After cleaning up the site of Astley’s theater, I had brought friends to see it. I would walk them through the grounds and tell them the story of Astley, of his creation of the circus and his more colorful adventures. I enjoyed telling the stories. I came to feel they were important in a small way. I had come to understand that the circus’s reputation suffered because of a lack of historical perspective; people were ignorant of circus past, so they misjudged its present. The guided visits were my attempt to help remedy the situation, to demonstrate to others what Pascal and the books had demonstrated to me: that the circus past was richer, more varied, and more culturally important than they thought; that it was rich with extraordinary stories and extraordinary lives.

  In the case of the Boulevard, I was interested in two of those lives in particular: Madame Saqui and Antonio Franconi. Saqui was a fiery ropewalker who rose to become one of the biggest stars in Europe, and in the process catapulted her disciplines to new dramatic heights. Franconi was an aristocrat–turned–animal trainer, France’s original circus mogul, and creator of some of the biggest and strangest circuses in history. I brought Tina to listen to the stories.

  “Sure, I get it,” she said, as we traversed the southern rim of the Place de la République and arrived at the top of the boulevard, a wide, nondescript street branching off the southwest corner. “You want to make sure the graves don’t disappear.”

  THEY CALLED HER the “Queen of the Boulevard,” but she was an unlikely queen. Endowed with features that one critic described as “so misshapen as to seem deformed,” Madame Saqui (née Marguerite-Antoinette Lalanne) captivated Paris’s popular imagination for an astonishing fifty years. She was by no means destined for such notoriety. Born poor and far from Paris, Saqui grew up traveling with her family. Her father, Jean-Baptiste Lalanne (a.k.a. Navarin the Famous), was a tooth-puller and a potion salesman. Her mother, Hélène, came from the Masgomieri clan, a dynasty of ropewalkers.

  Historically, ropewalking is one of the oldest of the circus arts. Numerous ancient societies practiced a version of the discipline. In A.D. 33
3 the Roman playwright Terence famously complained about ropewalkers distracting from a public performance of his play Hecyria. (“Ita populus studio stupidus, in funambulo animum occuparat.”) In Greece, where ropewalkers wore white, like the members of the Senate, there developed a whole ropewalking vocabulary to designate different categories of performance. Oribates danced and played the flute on horizontal ropes. Schoenobates dangled by their feet. Most of these performers worked on ropes made of hemp or hardened animal guts, which, when twisted like taffy, became almost magically thin.

  By Saqui’s time, the discipline remained popular, but the form had narrowed slightly. Now there were two main types: the funambules and the fils-de-féristes. The funambules were the high-wire specialists. Traveling from town to town, they fastened their ropes between the cathedral towers or the gables of tall houses. The acts were simple; the main appeal was danger. Inching onto the rope, outlined against the sky, they would execute a series of ordinary feats—pivoting on the rope, sitting down, making the rope sway to elicit a gasp. Occasionally more daring fare was added to spice up the act. During one seventeenth-century London performance, a certain Mr. Barnes traversed a rope with a pair of children dangling from the spurs of his riding boots like Christmas ornaments. A century later, Blondin (né Gravelet) made headlines around the world by cooking himself an omelet on a rope over Niagara Falls.

  The fils-de-fériste, the second type of rope performer, weren’t so daring. Also known as “ropedancers,” they strung their cords closer to the ground, in plazas or on the fairgrounds, where audiences paid to slip behind a curtain and watch them perform their impressive, precarious stunts—dangling, flipping, dancing popular dances, like the waltz and the gavotte. Since the discipline required minimum upper-body strength and maximum grace, many of the earliest stars were women. Sex appeal also played a role. In an age when an ankle was considered revealing, it could be downright scandalous to watch a woman in a billowing skirt and a bust-enhancing bodice bounce energetically while waving her shapely calves. After a visit to the Bartholomew Fair in 1669, Ned Ward, the “London Spy,” remarked of an agile German: “If she be just as nimble between the sheets as she is upon a rope, she must needs be one of the best bed-fellows in England.”