by Duncan Wall
“So.” Claudette’s shining eyes emerged around my hip. “What are you doing?”
The question struck me as a riddle. I told her I was waiting for her to finish whatever she was doing.
Her eyes narrowed. “I mean, what trick?”
In fact, Tiger had decided that I should begin with a knee-hang. I related this to Claudette and in the process realized what I was about to attempt—hanging from my knees upside down—and immediately felt another jolt of adrenaline rip through me. Meanwhile, Claudette explained the move: At Tiger’s command (“Hep!”) I would spring from the board and swing, hanging below the trapeze, until I heard his next command (“Legs up!”), at which point I would heave my legs up to my chest, pass them through my arms, and drape them back over the bar. In this tucked, inverted position, I would then swing until Tiger yelled, “Hands off!” whereupon I would let go of the bar and dangle from my knees.
While Claudette was describing this, I rehearsed the move in my head. Most acrobats, like most athletes, have gimmicks they employ to steel themselves. Christine Van Loo, a professional acrobat and former gymnastics champion, told me that as a girl she used to imagine Mikhail Baryshnikov in the room with her. “If I was really scared of something, I would imagine he was in the room watching me, and everything would be fine.” Tumbling, I had learned to visualize tricks in my head while executing a series of gestures: rotating my wrists, cracking my fingers, pointing each toe. In an interview with Marc Moreigne for the book Avant-garde cirque, one of the flyers for Les Arts Sauts claimed to use chalk for a similar purpose, to create “a space of calm before the moment of action.” With this in mind, I dug out a handful of chalk from the bag attached to the pole and slathered it on my palms and my wrists. I didn’t feel any stillness or clarity, only a small moment of feeling manly.
“Think you’ve got enough there?”
I looked up. Claudette was gazing at my arms bemusedly. They appeared to have been dipped in flour. I had also managed to get chalk on the backs of my knees and kneecaps. The manly feeling lessened before dissipating completely as Claudette drew the trapeze bar toward me with a long hooked spear (a “noodle”) and told me to take it with my left hand. I hesitated. Claudette repeated herself slowly: “Take … the … bar.…” I followed her instructions.
Watching Les Arts Sauts, I’d assumed the bar was made of wood, but in fact it was quite heavy, metal wrapped in grip tape and now, thanks to me, covered in chalk. I felt the weight of the bar pulling me out into the void, and at the same time noticed that Claudette had at some point taken hold of my harness and was tugging me backward by the diaper.
“Take the bar with your second hand.”
This seemed like an impossible command. I was sure I would tumble forward.
“Take … the … bar.…”
I took the bar. Magically, my position held, thanks to Claudette, who was now leaning backward.
For a moment, Tiger futzed with his gloves. We waited, a tableau of anticipation. It was easily the most emasculating moment of the year thus far: watching my arms wobble while a woman whom I knew to be of significantly greater fitness than myself kept me from plunging to my death by giving me an aggressive wedgie.
“Got it!” Tiger’s voice rang out, his vexing glove issue resolved. He reached up and took hold of the ropes.
I felt Claudette increase the pressure on my wedgie. Voices became inchoate. Tiger yelled something. Claudette yelled something. Again Tiger’s voice:
“Hep!”
I jumped. As I rushed downward, the wind pushing against my body, gravity pulling me toward the ground, the adrenaline flooded in. Again, I became hyperconscious of certain minute details—the pull of the bar on my armpits, the rough, stringy texture of the grip tape in my palms—and not at all of others. There was no sound, not even my breathing. It was as if I was underwater. Just a vast cloud of silence, occasionally shot through with voices.
“Knees up!” Tiger bellowed from below. I had arrived at the far side of the swing. I tried to heave my knees toward my chest, but gravity prevented it. I felt my stomach muscles clench.
“KNEES UP! KNEES UP!”
I hauled my knees toward my chest. My feet wouldn’t fit under the bar. I clawed at it with my toes. Get through! Get through!
They broke through. I pulled my thighs against my chest and draped my knees over the trapeze so that I was tucked into a ball, the steel of the bar in the soft crevice of my calves, my hands gripped on the bar, my thighs tight against my chest.
“The bar!” Tiger shouted. “The bar!”
My mind raced. The bar? What bar? I felt a half-second behind every move.
By now my swing had brought me back to the perch. I saw it and momentarily considered grabbing it.
“Not that bar!” Tiger screamed. “Your bar! Let go of your bar!”
I did.
Later, when we were settled on the ground after the flight, laughing about the warbling sound I had made upside down, about the way I had uncontrollably waved my arms and clawed nonsensically for the ground, I asked Tiger how he would describe his first flight on the trapeze, what he would compare it to.
Immediately the laughter died down. Tiger shook his head with gravitas. “No, man,” he mumbled. “There’s nothing like it, nothing like it in the world.” And Claude added: “Except maybe an orgasm!”
ALL TOLD, I made seven flights that day. The experience of each was roughly identical to the first. Climbing the ladder, I would get fired up. On the perch, Claudette would give me feedback about the previous flight. In one instance, she pointed out that I was unconsciously tensing my arms, leaving me less room to push my legs through. “Just let them go loose,” she coached, extending a pair of limp arms in front of her. “You don’t want any unnecessary tension.” Each time, I tried desperately to focus on her words before hurling myself again into the void and immediately forgetting them all. This was normal, I was told.
Afterward, with my hands still raw from the bar and my muscles still charged, the memory of the rush was very strong: the chemicals of peril charging through you, the swish of your body racing through the air, the feeling of gravity seizing at your arms. The activity was more physically challenging than I remembered, more extreme and difficult than the exercises at school. The next morning, I awoke to find every muscle in my torso was sore.
Oddly, though, it hadn’t felt like exercise, not in the way tumbling could. I was too much in the moment to notice the effort, too distracted by the rush. It reminded me of a full-body sport like rock-climbing or skiing. There was no heaviness to it, no sense of purposely expending force or power, as in many other acrobatic activities. What I actually felt was a tremendous sense of lightness. I didn’t really appreciate this right away; I had to burrow through layers of fear and learn to work with the forces of motion. But once I did, there was a feeling of covering a lot of ground quickly. In an age of increased awareness and creative engagement with the body (yoga, break-dancing, Zumba, and all the rest), it was a near-perfect workout.
Over the next two months, I went back every Friday for more of the same. I would love to say I made huge strides, but this was not the case—once a week wasn’t enough for mastery. I did see some small improvements, though. I learned the correct swing, which was surprisingly complex and involved pumping your legs to an odd rhythm and holding a pike position on the backswing—hell on the abdominals. I mastered the knee-hang and tried a few swings without a harness, a breathtaking experience, and even threw a few moves to a catcher.
The first time didn’t go well. From a knee-hang, I was supposed to arch backward with my arms extended, such that Claude, also hanging by his knees, could reach out, grab my wrists, and drag me from the fly bar. Unfortunately, on seeing Claude in my peripheral vision, dangling upside down, my head full of blood, my instinct was to lunge for him aggressively, the way you would reach for a branch if you were falling through a tree. That not only ruined the rhythm, but actually made the transfer more
difficult, since Claude had no idea where I would be. (“Don’t grab him. He’ll grab you.”)
We tried the move twice. Both times I made the same mistake, and after each received the appropriate dressing down from Tiger. (“Just don’t do anything! Just put your freaking arms out!”) Finally, on the third attempt, we connected. Claude’s printed leopard tights rushed toward me. I extended my arms. I was sure the move wouldn’t work, but at the last instant, I felt his wrists smack mine. Then I felt the hard fly bar pull away from my knees. Suddenly I was rushing forward as if on a zip line, my hands locked into Claude’s.
The accomplishment of the feat provided two notable lessons. The catch itself was thrilling. I experienced a euphoria unlike anything I had felt in other disciplines—the rush of being airborne, even for a moment. But there was also the pleasure of accomplishment in the slap of Claude’s arms against my own. It was a big achievement.
I had a totally different kind of breakthrough on the ground afterward. Since the beginning of the year, I had struggled to make sense of the amateur circus movement. I mentioned this earlier as it relates to juggling, but it applied to every discipline. Circus schools and “youth circuses” targeting kids were rampant. In France, every little town had at least one program. America had almost two hundred, with ten new chapters added every year. Among adults, classes and what are known as “community circuses,” like the Stone Soup Circus in Princeton, New Jersey, were also booming. Like community theaters, community circuses served as a way to bring people of different ages and backgrounds together.
Easily the most intriguing and potentially groundbreaking aspect of the movement, however, is what’s known as social circus. The concept dates from the seventies. Reg Bolton, an Australian educator and clown, is largely considered the father of the movement. As part of the effort to take circus beyond its usual confines, he taught circus skills to under-served populations around the world, from the Aborigines of the outback to refugees in Palestine, not for performance purposes but in the hope of motivating social change. In 1995, Cirque du Soleil, noticing a strong response to their art from young people, picked up on Bolton’s idea and began organizing international programs through a branch called Cirque du Monde. Today Soleil is involved with over eighty communities, from some on the steppes of Mongolia to African villages that have never seen a touring circus. Other programs operate just as broadly, with a variety of aims. Some are pure service organizations, hoping to spread joy. Clowns Without Borders dispatches clowns to troubled parts of the globe—refugee camps, war zones, countries ravaged by famine or disease—to entertain the struggling populations.
Others work more locally, using circus as a tool for outreach. In Australia, the Women’s Circus works to teach circus skills to women who have suffered domestic or sexual abuse, empowering them by helping them connect with and be proud of their bodies in a noncompetitive environment. In Hillsborough, New Jersey, Craig Quat, a juggler, created a circus school with classes for children across the autistic spectrum, using adapted circus props to help them learn fine motor skills such as coordination, balance, and flexibility. CircEsteem, a Chicago-based group, focuses on urban youth and refugees.
“Instead of punching people, they are doing back flips,” Amy Cohen, the executive director of the American Youth Circus Organization, told me. “You’re teaching them life lessons, about work and teamwork, but you’re also teaching them a profession they can use to support themselves.” The veneer of danger in the circus presented an outlet for what she called the “risk-seeking curiosities” that most young people have. “The curiosities can be sexual,” Cohen said. “They can be physical. The circus translates that into a context: Doing a back flip. Throwing a knife. It’s a risk, not to mention a challenge, but practical in the sense that it’s for an end: performing in front of a public.”
Why do these organizations work? One reason is the circus’s inherent inclusivity and diversity. Historically, the circus was the place that welcomed everyone, from the tallest to the smallest, from the most skilled acrobat to the least educated roustabout. As a discipline, it offers diverse opportunities for participation, what practitioners call “access points.” Ed LeClair is the executive director of Circus Smirkus, a youth circus based in Vermont, which trains, and tours with, over thirty kids every summer. “Not everyone has to be the high-school quarterback,” he told me. “But if you want to be in the circus, there’s room for you. You can juggle, you can work the trapeze, you can be a clown.” As a mix of art and sport, the circus is attractive to both males and females. As students grow, their roles in the circus can change. “Maybe you get tired of juggling scarves and want to learn how to do a back flip,” Cohen suggested. “In a circus program that kind of extreme diversity is possible.”
The result, according to Cohen, was an “amazing space where all different activities and all different people can coexist.” In a traditionally structured show, every person is responsible for her particular act, and yet everyone also contributes to the whole. And because the roles are so different, participants judge each other less. As LeClair noted, “In the circus world, it’s not your last name or your skin color or your religion that matters. You’re accepted for what you bring to the show.”
Another important explanation for these organizations’ success was the feelings circus engendered, and particularly the form’s ability to bond participants. As with Les Arts Sauts, this quality emerged as a regular theme in my conversations about social circus. The circus, I was told, creates a natural camaraderie, a physical, even existential connection. Aloysia Gavre, the director of Cirque School in Los Angeles, described the phenomenon as “quick bonding,” an accelerated version of the teambuilding exercises that companies foist on their employees. “In almost every circus act,” she told me, “you are being asked to trust people quickly, whether you’re being thrown, pitched, or caught, whether somebody is holding your line or not offstage.” Our brains respond by forging a kind of biological bond born of extreme circumstances, a “very deep and profound” connection to other people. “It really is a fight-or-flight sort of thing,” Gavre speculated. “You know these people are going to have your back.”
This connection had largely been missing from my own experience in acrobatics class, mostly because I trained around others but not with them. And so my full realization of this power came only after my first catch on the trapeze. On the ground, I felt an outsized affection for both Claude and Tiger. I had probably spent a total of ten hours with them, but they felt like old friends. I found myself slapping Claude on the back and gripping his shoulder. I had the sense that they were people I could trust.
“It’s really this amazing thing,” Jonathon Conant once told me. Conant runs the Trapeze School New York, which has branches in Chicago; Washington, D.C.; and Los Angeles. Like Claude, he was a trapeze addict who had discovered the dragon during a trip to Club Med. “Something went off in me,” he said. “Watching how other people reacted, feeling my own reaction, it was clear there was something amazing going on.”
After returning to upstate New York, where he was a counselor working with abused spouses and children, he shopped around for a place to train. When he couldn’t find one, he decided to start a school of his own. By the end of the first month, he was turning a profit. By the second, he noticed that people were driving as many as four hours to attend classes. Later, he expanded to the other cities, becoming, after Club Med, the single biggest force in the propagation of trapeze in America, with a mailing list that includes over sixty-five thousand people around the country.
He described the trapeze as a “machine for helping people re-evaluate what they are capable of.” “Before a flight, people are invariably uncomfortable. They’re pissed off, they’re scared, they’re sad. There’s a real fear of getting hurt.” Behind these feelings are the preconceived, romanticized notions, often dating from childhood, that they have about trapeze: “It’s magical. It’s unattainable. It’s hugely difficult. It�
�s completely out of the realm of possibility for most people’s minds. They’re standing on the edge of the platform going ‘yes or no.’ ”
But the minute they jump off, everything changes. “I experienced it,” Conant said; “everybody experiences it. There’s an evolution, an acceptance of what’s possible. The trapeze is so built up in people’s heads. And then somebody says, ‘You can actually do this, too.’ That totally shifts the realm of what’s possible.”
The experience, he said, mirrored the breakthroughs he used to see in his counseling and organizing work. Adding other people to the mix widens and enhances the experience. Flyers come to realize the importance of other people to their success. A mutual trust develops. The bonding aspects of the trapeze are so strong, Conant said, that urban planners had started contacting him about incorporating the trapeze into attempts to rejuvenate impoverished neighborhoods. Shortly before we spoke, he had received a call from a developer in Puerto Rico, looking to enliven a dead zone in Old San Juan. “It brings families in. It builds community. It has a magical, mystical vibe.”
I asked Conant when he realized that this power existed.
“From the beginning,” he said. The first school, he explained, was founded in New York City in 2000. On September 11, 2001, Conant was in a meeting in the South Street Seaport and personally saw the planes fly into the buildings and workers jumping to their deaths afterward. When the one-year anniversary of the attack arrived, dozens of people showed up at the trapeze school in TriBeCa, uncalled, unorganized, all wanting to lay flowers and candles at the base of the rigging.
“People like to say the trapeze is a metaphor for overcoming your fears. But this is wrong. A metaphor is just a symbol. The trapeze actually works.”
(illustration credit 14.1)
OUT WALKING one early spring afternoon, I found myself admiring a circus poster tacked to a pillar on the Champs-Élysées. It was Sunday, and the crowd was thick. After a moment I felt a presence at my side. I looked to discover a girl gazing up at the poster. She must have been seven or eight, with big hazel eyes and a wide forehead curtained behind blond curls. I looked around for her parents and spotted them on a bench, indulging in ice cream.
