The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  She came to a stop next to a steamer trunk mounted on wheels. “I mean, it’s still a bit cramped. I feel a bit like I’m juggling in their laps, but I’m not sure we have a choice.” I gathered that they were rehearsing for the evening show.

  André hoisted himself to his feet and joined Rosaline onstage. He was smaller than I’d expected and dressed almost formally—in pleated khakis, brown loafers, and a navy sweater over a white-collar shirt.

  “Remember, the audience is closer than normal,” he said to Rosaline. “There’s less room to play with, so everything needs to be even clearer, even more precise.” He paced a small circle on the stage. “Here.” He stopped and poked the ground with his toe. “When you do it again, try it here.” Rosaline nodded and retreated behind the curtain, pushing the trunk like a mining cart.

  Over the next ten minutes, I watched them repeat the twenty seconds of action fifteen different ways. Each time, Rosaline would burst onto the stage, riding a trunk like a steer, waving enthusiastically to the imaginary crowd. “Salut, les filles!” She leapt to the ground, hips first, her hands plunging into her dress coat for five balls, which she juggled easily.

  After each iteration, André corrected a detail—her stance, her posture, her place on the stage. It was like watching a sculptor install an exhibit or a chef in a kitchen, zipping here for the sauce, bounding there with a dash of salt.

  “Yes, yes. No, there. A few inches more. Perfect!”

  Nouveaux Nez was known for rehearsing relentlessly. This particular show, I later found out, was more than two years old.

  When they wrapped, Rosaline disappeared. André collapsed back into the front row. Peeling off his derby, he gave his hairline a good scratch.

  “As they get older they get better,” he said to me, dabbing his forehead with a white handkerchief. Without the hat, he looked ten years older. Wrinkles creased his forehead. His hair was matted by sweat. “Not just her,” he clarified. “Most clowns. They get sadder, too, but that has to happen naturally, as the soul replaces the body.” He looked at me squarely. “You came to talk about clowning. Well, that’s the first lesson. A clown is like any artist, any real artist. The work comes from experience, experience of practice but also experience of life. This is especially true for clowns.” He nodded in the direction of the stage. “They had amazing training, but in that way, they were almost at a disadvantage. They started younger than most.”

  In preparation for my meeting with André, I had watched a series of old clown films, including one of Grock, famous for his music-hall routine, and several classic “cinema clowns”—Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy. Beyond a vague haplessness, it was hard to say what unified the men. There was no consistency to their appearance, for example. Some wore makeup, others didn’t. None of them dressed like the deranged clowns of my imagination, with polka dots and swelled red noses. I found myself wondering who might count as a clown. Woody Allen? Seinfeld’s Kramer? The vocabulary of the circus tends to be straightforward: a wire-walker, a strongman. But what is a clown?

  “There’s no precise answer,” André replied when I put the question to him. “If I’m going to be specific,” he said, “I’d say a clown is a kind of improvisatory actor. He tends to be physical and multitalented. Often he plays music.” He paused to swig from a bottle of water. Out in the hallway I could hear the gathering din of a crowd.

  “But of course that’s just on the surface. When we talk about clowning, what we’re really talking about is a type of personality, possibly even a state of being. A clown is a searcher. He’s lost. He’s looking for something, but he doesn’t know what. The audience becomes his radar—his guide for how to behave.”

  The last two sentences confused me.

  “Here,” André said, registering the response on my face, “let me give you an example.” He stood and walked to the center of the stage. “Imagine I’m a clown. Let’s say I do this.…”

  Suddenly his entire physicality changed. He blew his eyes open and puffed out his chest and started strutting in tight circles, his backside jutting out behind him like that of a rooster. I laughed.

  Immediately André stopped and sauntered back to his seat. “Et voilà.”

  “What?”

  “What?” He seemed taken aback. “I made you laugh.”

  “And so?”

  “And so?” He chuckled in mock disbelief. “That laugh, for a clown, that’s magic. Suddenly I know I’ve done something right. I have approval.”

  He jumped up and returned to the stage. It was clear he didn’t like to sit still for long.

  “That approval,” he continued, pacing, “that’s everything. And once I have it, I’m like anybody else: I want some more.”

  The rooster reappeared, only bigger this time, André’s eyeballs bulging, his chest thrown so far back he was staring at the ceiling.

  Again I laughed. Clearly, I was in the company of a pro. “You asked me what a clown is,” André said, “and it’s this.” He waved a hand around him. “It’s the reduction of ourselves into our purest desires, to our desperate hunger for approval. This is just a ridiculous little bit, but if it were part of an actual show, I might keep going. I know it works, so I do it again, hoping for the laugh. I would try to keep you laughing and grow despondent when you didn’t. And it’s that push and pull that makes a clown so endearing to us. We see him bumbling for our attention, desperate for a little love, and because we recognize ourselves in his fumbling, we want to give it to him. Because he is completely open about his intentions, completely vulnerable, we’re on his team.”

  I was captivated by the clowning he was describing: a unique and powerful form of dramatic communication. It was not something I’d imagined previously. Was this the “modern clown” approach? Or had clowns always been this way? As I started to ask André, the house manager entered and told us she was opening the doors.

  “Listen, we didn’t have much time here,” André said as we gathered our things. “Why don’t we meet again?” He was doing a workshop in a week. It was for advanced clowns, so I couldn’t participate, but I was more than welcome to attend. “We can chat more then. It’ll also give you a practical sense of what I’m talking about.”

  We made our way toward the stage exit. At the door, André paused. “About your earlier question,” he said. “To be honest, I don’t know that much has changed between the old clowns and the new. We’re going on here about clowns and animals and God knows what. But that’s all extra dressing. That’s all up here,” and he waved his hand above his head. “More than any of this heady stuff, more than anything, a clown has to be funny.”

  I nodded, waiting for him to go on.

  “Well, Jesus,” he broke out, “write that down!”

  On my notebook I wrote: “CLOWN = FUNNY.”

  André looked at what I had written and, clicking his tongue in dissatisfaction, plucked first the pen and then the notepad from my fingers. Propping the pad on his knee, he wrote something, then flipped it back to me. Next to my equation, he had added: “! ! !”

  (illustration credit 16.1)

  WHILE RESEARCHING LES NOUVEAUX NEZ, I read a review referring to the company as “the inheritors of France’s regal clown past.” The reference is to a specific time, from the Belle Époque through the thirties, when Paris was the center of the clown world. During this period, clowns approached their work with unprecedented seriousness and earned unprecedented prestige. Clowns were some of the most popular celebrities. They traveled in the same circles as Stravinsky, Picasso, and Hemingway. It was a beautiful time, when a city and its circus complemented each other completely.

  I decided to spend an afternoon connecting to this golden age. I boned up on clowns at the circus library and made a list of important sites. Coincidentally, as I was arranging my excursion, I received a call from Ernest Albrecht, publisher of Spectacle, an American circus magazine. We had spoken before by e-mail. Now he was in town for a circus festival, the Festival Mondial du Cirq
ue de Demain. He invited me to join him and some other circophiles—including a famous former clown—for dinner at an old circus haunt called the Clown Bar.

  I decided to make a day of it: clown sites in the afternoon, Clown Bar in the evening. What better way to spend a Saturday.

  AS WITH THE OTHER CIRCUS ARTS, the progenitors of clowning predate the circus by several thousand years. Most ancient societies had fools. As far back as 3000 B.C., midgets from African tribes dressed in leopard skins and masks to entertain royals in Egypt. On the stages of Rome, actors played stock characters defined by crass physical humor. Moriones, one such figure, had a hump on his back. Stupidus wore a pointed cap and a rainbow costume.

  As their names suggest, the primary dramatic function of these Roman characters was to serve as a comic butt, to be, as one Roman writer put it, “slapped at the public’s expense.” But clowns had other roles as well. Through their failings and eccentricities, clowns provided audiences with the chance to reflect on their own lives, and perhaps not take themselves so seriously.

  On an anthropological level, clowns offered implicit cultural commentary. In one sense, when they were mocked, they demonstrated the repercussions of acting outside societal rules and thereby reinforced those rules. But in another sense, clowns provided an outlet. As Dario Fo notes in Tricks of the Trade, clowns are natural rebels whose seemingly childish antics in fact display “an utter cynicism which undermines all the conventional values of the moral code—honesty, human respect, fidelity.” This was especially true in cultures where strict social codes dictated behavior. As the lowest of the low, a clown had nothing to lose and so obeyed no rule. He could criticize local powers or serve as a proxy for those who lacked the agency to do so themselves. Clowns often suffered, but they were free.

  In the Middle Ages, clowns, like other performers, took to the road, where they assumed a variety of guises. In castles and châteaux, kings, nobles, and sometimes clergymen employed jesters in colorful patchwork suits (possibly inherited from Stupidus) to “bring some merry.” Even more numerous were “gleemen” or “minstrels” and jongleurs, who performed musical poetry and banter mixed with an impressive array of skills.

  With the passage of time, clowns teamed up to offer more complicated comic fare. Some of the first proper duos consisted of a traveling quack doctor or potion salesman (a mountebank) and a “zany,” who lured the crowd and entertained them during the pitch, an over-the-top monologue delivered in an unrecognizable slurry of Spanish, French, Italian, and Latin, and peppered with comic interjections. Mondor and Tabarin, who worked on Paris’s Pont Neuf and then in the Place Dauphine, were especially famous. Beginning in 1618, the partners premiered a new show every Friday for nearly a decade. Their act tended toward the sexual and the scatological. Cross-dressing featured prominently. One writer of the period described them as a “constantly renewing celebration of asses, farts, and public toilets.” In 1622, the duo published their farces to great success. Later, Molière borrowed from them heavily.

  In Italy, the commedia dell’arte was being born. Today the form is considered the root of clowning as we know it. Commedia always featured a group of stock characters in familiar situations, although the shows were improvisational and physical. Each character was recognizable via traditional costumes and behavior. The gullible lover Pedrolino (origin of the Spanish word for clown, payaso) wore floppy white pants and a mask with a bulging nose. Harlequin capered around in a patchwork rainbow suit, waving a wooden bat called a batte. Later the bat would have another name: a “slapstick.”

  Commedia peaked at the beginning of the eighteenth century, roughly fifty years before the emergence of the circus as we know it. With the rise of the new genre, clowns would find what British historian George Speaight calls their “natural home.” But not right away. The first circus clowns were rudimentary and, from a comedic standpoint, a regression. Astley himself played the first circus fool, a hapless tailor who tries and fails to ride his horse in a bit called “The Tailor of Brentford.” Other performers burlesqued their own skills or served as maladroit assistants by helping out with an act (holding a ribbon for a rider, say) and bantering with the ringmaster. (“Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Merryman has a great deal of wit!”) The acts were simple, almost brainless, providing a point of comparison with the main acts. As Soviet scholar Victor Kalesh has noted, in their ineptitude the clowns “underscored the beauty of those who are really beautiful.”

  Across town, however, a more complex form of clowning was developing on the pantomime stages. Born from commedia, but silent in accordance with the theater laws, the pantomime shows also featured stock characters, including Harlequin and Pierrot, in raucous miming and acrobatics. With the migration to England, however, the character roles had shifted: Harlequin, once a beloved mischief-making servant, became a romantic lead. This left space at the bottom, to be filled by a new character: “clown.”

  Derived from the English words “clod” or “colonus,” meaning “foolish rustic,” the clown was an earthy, rural buffoon. Initially, his role in the show was minimal. Dressed in worn trousers and scuffed leather boots, he worked as a servant to the miserly old Pantaloon. As the character evolved, he insinuated himself more fully into action, largely thanks to the work of Joseph Grimaldi. Beginning in 1781, Grimaldi, the son of a ballet master, starred for decades as the lead clown at London’s Sadler’s Wells. He is responsible for many of the clown traits we know today. Dispatching with the bumpkin model, he wore a blue Mohawk wig and painted his face white with red streaks. Clever and physical, he was known for his intelligence and wit. Charles Dickens edited his memoirs. On stage, he recited parodies of Macbeth. “I never saw any one to equal him—there was such mind in everything he did,” theater director Charles Dibdin wrote.

  Thanks to Grimaldi’s success, the clown became a totem in London society. After his death in 1837, the model spread to pantomime stages around the world, including New York, where George Fox clowned for twelve hundred performances. In the 1820s, John Ducrow brought the Grimaldi-style clown to the circus. Billed as “Prime Grinner, and Joculator General to the Ring,” he appeared at Astley’s, where he enacted elaborate tea scenes with his horses, Darby and Joan. In the 1830s, Grimaldi imitators surfaced on the boulevard in Paris, flipping, grimacing, and balancing on ladders. At first the French didn’t know what to make of the character. “Clowning is a particularly English specialty,” commented a Parisian writer of the period, “because it personifies the Englishman’s extraordinary penchant for eccentricity, the dominant symptom of Anglo-Saxon melancholy.”

  But soon locals were adopting the act. At the Cirque Olympique, Jean-Baptiste Auriol, a Grimaldi impersonator, became Paris’s first clown star. He was a clown-sauteur, an acrobatic clown, because his act was mostly physical. In the 1840s, another type of clown arrived from England, the clown-parleur or “talking clown.” Attributed to William Wallett, a British actor turned “Shakespearian jester,” the talking clowns improvised comic monologues based on verses cribbed from the Bard. (“Is this a beefsteak I see before me?”) In Paris, where the linguistic barrier limited the effectiveness of such speeches, clowns compensated with absurd, often macabre surrealism. James Boswell, an artist as well as a clown, and a hero to French intellectuals, wrapped himself in a bloody bedsheet and ran around screaming lines from Hamlet. Billy Hayden, star of the Cirque des Champs-Élysées, trained a pair of mules to box and took as his assistant a small black pig, whom he dressed in boxer shorts, derbies, and summer dresses.

  By the 1860s, clowns were a staple of European circuses. Their acts were somewhat limited, however, because of the patent laws, the city codes dictating the sort of performance each venue could produce. Circuses could only feature “horses and related acts.” Anything encroaching on drama, including comedic dialogue, was forbidden. Clowns could speak to an audience or to an animal but never to each other.

  Then, in 1864, Napoleon III changed all that. Bowing to democratic pressure, he str
uck down the patent laws and opened the city to unlimited theatrical action. Overnight, shows proliferated as itinerant performers flocked to the capital. In Parisian circuses, clowns began to develop new material. Their skits became more dramatically complex. “It’s not enough to jump and bounce around,” Hayden told an interviewer for the Revue Bleue. “You also must mock men, poor men, touch them with their own stupidity, and amuse them with their own ridiculousness.”

  In many ways, this new period marked a return to the past, to the situational comedy of the mountebanks and commedia. But clowning had also changed. Banned from speaking, clowns had perfected the art of physical expression—mime, acrobatics, grimacing. Now they would bring these skills to bear in developing their new comedy. Across Europe, clowns would set out to integrate these new skills with the old. And one pair of clowns would lead the way: Footit & Chocolat at the Nouveau Cirque.

  THE DAY OF THE DINNER at the Clown Bar, I tracked down the former site of the Nouveau Cirque, 247–251 Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The building was long gone, closed on April 18, 1926. But, here again, the site was under construction. A scaffold covered the front of the building. Off to the side a construction permit was posted onto the brick. This was the heart of the city’s haute couture district, and the street was luxurious. Gold logos emblazoned the shops: Gucci, Prada, Dior. Paragons of musculature and personal grooming packed the sidewalks. The scene was vaguely reminiscent of a Fellini movie. Everyone was tan.

  Ironically, had it survived, the Nouveau Cirque wouldn’t have been so out of place. Constructed by Joseph Oller in 1886, the peak of the city’s fascination with haute couture, the circus was for the freewheeling champagne-and-fur crowd what the Cirque des Champs-Élysées had been for the aristocrats. The building itself was opulent, almost to the point of being gauche. Originally built as a Turkish bath, it had been converted to stage pantomimes nautiques at night, lavish water circuses conducted in a pool hidden beneath a retractable floor. The shows were impressive in their extravagance. One featured thirty polar bears on water slides. Contracts at the Nouveau Cirque required performers to maintain an “irreproachable freshness.” What made the venue truly famous, however, were its star clowns: Footit & Chocolat.