The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  The shows inspired Antonio Franconi. At Astley’s theater in Paris, he spent three years studying the genre and then galloped off to Lyon to create spectacles of his own. With the outbreak of the revolution, Astley was forced to flee to England, abandoning his beloved Parisian venue. Franconi, now a successful circus director in his own right, returned to the capital and claimed Astley’s building, still the only circus in Paris. He renamed the venue the Cirque Olympique. Scholars consider it the first native circus in French history (and the first use of the word cirque).

  Two decades of creative circus followed, as Franconi, now aided by his two sons, Laurent and Henri, worked to expand and refine the fusion of circus and theater. At first they stuck to Astley’s military model. During Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, Franconi staged adaptations of The Death of General of Marlborough and The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, featuring heroic charges and countercharges, exploding ammunition wagons, and crackling musketry. “We forget the theatre!” proclaimed an adoring observer of one such show. “We’re watching a battle!”

  As his directorial talents blossomed, Franconi incorporated a wider variety of fauna into his shows: dogs, pigs, bears. On stages around the world, producers had similar ideas; in 1808, the prestigious Park Theater in New York rented an elephant for their production of Blue Beard. But whereas most shows incorporated animals for simple stunts or set pieces, Franconi was an innovator. Every season he premiered a new hybrid: animal operas, animal melodramas, Easter pantomimes. For each, he would train a beast for the starring role and incorporate it seamlessly into the action. The 1812 production of Le Pont infernal, for example, starred a stag named Coco who wandered through the audience, presenting flowers to ladies and nibbling from their palms, and in a climactic final scene escaped a bawling cohort of dogs and men by triumphantly leaping over a mountain chasm.

  For The Elephant of the King of Siam, staged in 1829, an elephant named Mademoiselle Djeck carried the Prince of Siam into battle, sprung him from prison, and, in the final scene, indulged in a celebratory banquet with an enormous napkin tied around her neck, summoning slaves and courtiers with a bell. Franconi’s animals were the stars of Paris.

  The Franconi reign would last for decades. Between 1807 and 1848, the Olympique staged 260 pieces, premiering five or six new scripts a year, including pantomimes, mimodramas, and melodramas. In England, his shows incited a rage for elephant drama, leading theater managers to reinforce their stages and playwrights to revise their old plays for pachyderm actors. In Paris, the Franconis became royal favorites: regal theaters recruited them to perform in shows, and Napoleon’s grandson hired them as equestrian coaches. In 1826, when those fireworks set the theater ablaze, King Charles X himself created a royal fund to have the circus rebuilt. Dukes, generals, and judges all contributed to give the circus a new home at 66 Boulevard du Temple, in the center of the action, and just a few doors down from Madame Saqui.

  The new circus, the boulevard’s first, opened on March 31, 1827. Enormous and intricately constructed, with a cast-iron roof, the biggest ring in Europe, and a stage hidden by a gold-fringed crimson velvet curtain, the building marked the apex of the age of theatrical circus. It became, in the words of one critic, the “people’s theatre par excellence.”

  Ultimately, Franconi’s love of excess drove him into ruin: swimming in debt, facing state repossession, he sold the building and the company to a butcher turned real-estate developer, Louis Dejean. (About this epic character, more later.) Historical forces were also at play. The popularity of the Franconi brand of circus, that of intellectual “meaning,” started to wane, supplanted by a new type of show, more spectacular and dangerous, full of flying men and women with beards. Officially, this form wouldn’t fully emerge until the 1860s, with the arrival of a certain celebrated gymnast in Paris. Harbingers of its birth, however, could be felt decades before. Ironically, the earliest signs appeared at Franconi’s circus itself.

  Arriving for the show on April 21, 1831, spectators at the Olympique found the circus in an agitated state. Armed policemen lingered at the heads of aisles. On the stage, half of the scenery had been obscured by a sturdy wire net masked with jungle foliage. To the side, a series of vertical bars leaned against the wall.

  According to the program, the star of the performance, a mimodrama entitled The Lions of Mysore, was a reknowned “zoo-gymnast” named Henri Martin. When the curtain rose, animals—a veritable zoo of pelicans, llamas, elephants, even a kangaroo—invaded the stage behind the wire netting. For two acts, Martin stalked among the animals, dressed in the white robes of the Indian nabob, cast into the jungle for his sins. Then, before the third act, the bars were installed across the front of the stage. When the audience had returned to their seats, Martin strode on, dressed as a gladiator. A moment later, a lion lumbered into the cage with him. To the astonishment of the slack-jawed, formally dressed crowd, he “tamed” the beast into submission.

  It was the first time a man entered a cage with a lion onstage. Antonio Franconi was in his nineties then, and almost completely blind. But, according to legend, he would ask to be carried to the circus every night anyway, to sit in the balcony listening to the cries of the performers and the gasps of the crowd.

  FOR A LONG TIME, circus historians talked about the hippodramas and mimodramas and their spirit of fusion as an anomaly, an errant period of experimentation before the circus settled into its true form. In the halfcentury that followed, the circus locked itself down, adhering more and more strictly to the codes we associate with it today, settling into the circus as the classically practiced “pure” form: equestrian acts, as I’ve said, interspersed with physical feats of agility, staged in a ring. Anthony Hippisley-Coxe, a British historian, went so far as to describe the hippodrama as a “bastard entertainment” that “actually inhibited the development of the circus.”

  This distinction remains fuzzy today. Aside from the single-skill shows mentioned earlier, there has also emerged a wave of modern hippodramas. Zingaro, a French “equestrian theater” company, stages voltige and exhibitions inspired by diverse cultures. Another group, Theatre Centaur, creates equestrian renditions of classic dramatic works, including a version of Macbeth that I saw in a stunning and ominous black tent pitched in the garden of a seventeenth-century château.

  The similarity between these new shows and the shows of the past forces an obvious conclusion: the new isn’t as new as it seems. But it also calls into question the conventional understanding of the past. What if the “true” circus was actually the anomaly? What if it was just a fad, a time when the art unnecessarily reduced itself to an arbitrary and restrictive combination of elements? What if the circus properly defined was actually what came before, a show of fusion, of spectacular and dramatic arts commingling?

  It wasn’t an unreasonable idea. The first “circus” building, Hughes’s Royal Circus, was designed for such entertainments. Astley spent his life staging circodramas and was charging headlong into their exploration when he died. And even after the true circus imposed itself, the fusion circus recurred, as in Le Noce de chocolat, a lavish pantomime featuring acrobats and actors at the Nouveau Cirque in Paris.

  Of course, what really matters is how you define the circus, how you distinguish it from the theater. Purists define the art practically, as a genre of performance. Others emphasize the thematic focus of the form. David Hammarstrom points out several distinguishing features in Circus Rings Around Russia, his book about Soviet circus. Whereas the theater is mental, he notes, the circus is physical. Theater treats conflict between humans; the circus treats a human’s struggle with himself or the environment. Theater is imaginative, “a display of what is unreal,” but circus is real, what is “actual and without pretense.”

  Personally, I found such distinctions useful but easily transcended, as the boulevard’s history showed. As Tina said as we walked along, “It’s funny, but I always saw this mix of theater and circus as kind of a highly evolved crea
ture—the way of the future. But maybe they are the way of the past, too.”

  * * *

  * The event gets a mention in the first paragraph of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables: “In 1817 … Madame Saqui had succeeded Forioso.”

  † Hughes chose the word “circus” for its neoclassical associations. Astley referred to his venues as “amphitheaters” for his whole life.

  (illustration credit 12.1)

  JANUARY BROUGHT a brisk wind, a new semester, and changes at the National School. After four months of slogging through acrobatic basics, the freshmen set about selecting their new disciplines, a process the school referred to as the découverts (the “discoveries”). Each week, the découverts introduced students to a new piece of exotic equipment: a Russian swing, a Chinese pole. A few of the students had used them before, but most were newbies. “It looks like a medieval torture device,” a freshman named Sebastian said of the Korean cradle. Nearby, Frédéric, the equanimous administrator, smiled over his paperwork. “That’s why we call them ‘discoveries.’ ”

  And then there were the skills that needed no introduction. Stepping from the biting chill into the hall’s warmth one January morning, I found myself staring up at a monstrous web woven laterally across the air. On a table-sized platform bolted to the ceiling, a pair of bulky sophomores peered down into the hall. One was beating chalk into his hands and muscular forearms. The other fished at a limp trapeze with a long, surgical-looking hook. At a barked signal from a coach down below, the chalk-laden flyer, an Austrian, laid one hand on the bar, then the other, and, with another bark, hopped into space, his taut body rising, lingering, then rushing out over the net.

  I had been attending classes for four months, but the trapeze still intimidated me. My own traumatic first flight had scarred me. My reading hadn’t helped. One author refers to the history of the trapeze as a “history of death.” Since the discipline’s invention by a French gymnast in the 1850s, dozens of trapeze artists have died while performing or training. Hundreds more have been seriously injured.

  Watching the students, however, gave me hope. A few were obvious experts—crawling onto the rafters like spider monkeys—but most seemed as frightened as I was. Odilon, a stud on the trampoline, approached the wire ladder as if it were a wild animal: inching forward, poking at it, retreating, approaching again, tugging to see if it would hold his weight. Another big freshman, Baptiste, who rumbled the spring-loaded floor when he tumbled, got halfway up the ladder before freezing like a cartoon elephant on a chair above a mouse. “Oh non!” he bellowed, his thighs clamped to the rungs. “C’est pas possible!”

  Though mortifying for poor Baptiste, the display inspired me. The freshmen showed me that my fears were rational, and that, with work, I could overcome them. Learning the trapeze was a process of technical acquisition like any other.

  And so, the following Monday, I visited Anny in her trailer. She was hunched wearily over a stack of papers, but when I told her to enroll me in the flying-trapeze class, her eyes sparked. “Enfin!” she said. Finally!

  THE CLASS WOULD START in a month. In the meantime, to glean some insight into the craft, I arranged a visit with France’s most famous company of flyers, Les Arts Sauts. Over forty strong, including trapezists, administrators, technicians, and children, the company travels the world performing what they refer to as “aerial ballets”—poetic, open-air spectacles staged above an audience and consisting almost entirely of trapeze.

  I caught up with the company on a brisk and overcast afternoon in Lannion, a cobblestoned coastal village in Brittany. The company had pitched their tent in a field on the edge of town for a weekend of shows. The tent, affectionately known as “the Bubble,” cut an otherworldly vision. Bulbous and white, it rose from the field like an alien moon. A single line of trailers snaked off it like the tail of a mouse, toward a forest in the distance. I approached the first trailer, which turned out to be the troupe’s office, or the “red wagon,” and there found Laurence de Magalhaes, the company administrator, with her boots propped on the desk.

  “You picked a hell of a night to visit!” she said. Her hair was as black as her skintight leather pants. Her eyes were only slightly lighter, and she spoke quickly in a husky smoker’s rasp. “It’s not usually like this,” she said, waving a hand at the room, which buzzed with an election-day fervor. At desks piled with printers and paper debris, assistants prattled loudly into phones. The door banged with a constant flow of visitors.

  “Seriously,” Laurence said, “trapezists are usually pretty relaxed people.”

  The energy spoke to the significance of the night. After four years of touring, the company would give the final performance of Kayassine, their second show, and the product of ten years of work. The company had been founded in 1993 as an attempt to rewrite the rules of the trapeze. At the time, the founders, six French trapezists, were working for other circuses, including Cirque du Soleil and New York’s Big Apple Circus. But even in “modern” companies such as those, the trapeze was employed in a fairly conventional fashion. Routines rarely lasted more than a few minutes. Most were structured around a repetitive rhythm, in which the flyers, usually men clad in colorful singlets, took turns throwing flips and twists, landing in the arms of a partner.

  The founders of Les Arts Sauts set out to break these codes by approaching the trapeze as a medium for expression. They contracted a group of Parisian engineering students to construct a “flying machine,” a mobile trapeze, for which they choreographed a show combining traditional tricks—flips, pirouettes, layouts—with more theatrical features: characters, scenes, mime techniques.

  Like Jérôme Thomas, Les Arts Sauts developed a full performance from a single circus discipline. The performers were costumed in sprightly white loincloths. A cellist and a soprano performed what one critic described as a “nonstop medley” of everything from “Bulgarian-style vocal harmonies to baroque opera.” The company aimed for something simpler than their technically advanced Russian and Mexican counterparts were producing, if also more difficult. They aspired to create works of trapeze that were “more like a film or a work of art.” They aimed to invoke a feeling. “We would like you to see the show and, afterward, to feel as though you have flown,” Laurence told me.

  The company toured all over the world, from Korea to Norway. At each stop, they unfolded their rigging in a town plaza or an open field, like latter-day saltimbanques. Because the shows were outdoors and free, with local governments picking up the tab, the crowds could be enormous. In Laos, twenty thousand people pressed into a plaza to watch them fly. In Cambodia, where they set up at the bottom of a hill, estimates topped forty thousand.

  After almost five years of touring, the company retired the flying machine, took a short break, and started work on Kayassine, named after the Laotian word for “circus.” They expanded the dramaturgy of the first show with the help of a theater director, Hervé Lelardoux, and developed the themes of their inspiration, the story of Daedalus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Under the guidance of German architect Hans-Werner Müller, they designed the Bubble.

  Like the first show, Kayassine spent extensive time on the road—five years, 543 performances, mostly in Europe, South America, and Asia, but with stops in North America as well. The show created a minor frenzy wherever it went. Nobody had ever seen anything like it. In New York, where the company pitched their tent in the tamped earth of Damrosch Park, The New York Times called it “richly thoughtful and highly skilled entertainment.” The Washington Post said the show was “of overwhelming beauty and humanity” and “a great leap forward in the performing arts.”

  And tonight the journey would end. After the show, there would be a party. Tomorrow the Bubble would be disassembled and packed off to Belgium, where, according to Laurence, it would serve as “some sort of exhibition space for modern art.” The company would begin work the following month on their third show, to be staged in an enormous cone.* First, though, the whole crew would take
a break, which Laurence admitted she was looking forward to.

  “Don’t get me wrong, touring is the most amazing experience in the world,” she said, gazing at the tent through the dirt-caked window of the trailer. “But it’s also stressful, all the logistics. And of course the shows.”

  I asked her what she meant by this last comment.

  “We had an accident just the other day,” she said. One of the flyers had recently come back from an injury. “He was rusty, and his timing was off, and he crashed against his partner’s head.”

  She fell silent. I asked her if the flyer was okay.

  “Oh sure, he’s fine. He wanted to go right back up again, though of course I wouldn’t let him.” She thought. “It’s just an important reminder.” She noted that her own husband was a trapezist with the company. “We don’t talk about it. But it’s there every night, underneath the art. It’s the risk we have to live with.”

  IN EARLY 1859, Jules Léotard, eighteen years old, was lounging in the pool in a gymnasium in Toulouse, France, when a simple discovery altered the trajectory of his life forever. Gazing at the skylights above him, he noticed a series of ropes dangling from each window. The shape and position of the ropes reminded him of the old trapezes in the workout hall, the “moving triangles” that gymnasts like himself had employed for decades as equipment for pull-ups and sit-ups. He wondered: What if he attached a trapeze to each skylight over the pool? What if he swung between them? He gave it a shot. After mounting a bar to each of the three skylights, he built a small pile of mats at the edge of the pool. Climbing onto the mats, he gripped the first trapeze and, with a hop, swung out over the pool—once, twice, then released, shooting forward almost horizontally over the water, snagging the second bar in his hands. After a pause, he kicked himself into a swing again and repeated the flight, swinging, releasing, catching the third bar, this time landing exhilarated on cold tile. According to his memoirs, Léotard glanced back at the distance covered and felt a burst of pride. “Eureka!” he cried.