by Duncan Wall
In the bookshop, the shopkeeper and I studied the image of Fratellini sitting on the rubble. We talked about the building. I asked her if she had ever visited the circus itself.
“In fact, I grew up not too far away,” she said with a smile, as she replaced the book on the shelf. “My mother would take me to special Christmas shows they put on. The circus used to parade the animals in the streets. It really was a part of the neighborhood, of la vie du quartier. It was a blow when it was destroyed.”
Today the Bougliones are one of the great dynasties of circus, the Ringlings of France. Their legacy, however, is mixed. Traditionalists praise them for their stewardship of the Cirque d’Hiver, which they still own, and which remains the only hard circus in Paris and perhaps the most important circus monument in the world. Modernists, or those with a sentimental attachment to the Medrano, paint them as spoiled and clannish—a “mafia,” even. The truth is probably somewhere in between. That said, on the day of my trip to the former site of the Medrano, I found myself resenting the family tremendously.
Crossing the street from the bookshop, I made my way over to the apartment building the family had constructed on the spot of the Medrano. I noticed for the first time the inscription above the doorway, bolted in big bronze letters: LE BOUGLIONE.
It’s one thing to destroy a piece of history. It’s another to gloat about it. I tried the door. It was locked, but a moment later I managed to slip inside behind a woman with a grocery bag.
The lobby was empty and dark. Small sheets of light angled through the front windows. When my eyes adjusted, I was confronted by a striking image: Built into the wall across from the elevators was a vast and colorful circus mosaic. It was strangely chilling. Most of the disciplines were represented—a wire-walker, a contortionist, a clown—but there was no movement to the work. The characters, who had black dots for eyes and black shards for mouths, appeared frozen. In the dim light, the wall looked hauntingly primitive, like a cave drawing left behind by a lost society.
THE CLOWN BAR WAS PACKED. At the front of the restaurant, the maître d’ spun like a figure skater, ran his gaze over the crowd, and pointed to a table where three men sat huddled. As I shuffled back to meet the men, I reveled in the bar’s décor. Near the front was a display case filled with circus memorabilia, including porcelain figures and painted plates. Framed posters lined the walls. On the ceiling, more posters were pressed into a kind of papier-mâché, their images dimmed under shellac of nicotine. Though I couldn’t make out any dates, the posters looked old. They must have been there for decades.
The Clown Bar occupies a special place in Parisian circus lore. Founded in 1919, located next door to the Cirque d’Hiver, the bar had served for almost a century as the Parisian circus gathering ground, the place where producers, performers, and fans assembled to talk shop before, after, and sometimes even during the shows. (According to the owner, Joey, a secret door used to connect the kitchen to the circus, and clowns would sprint over during intermission for a drink.)
With the decline of the industry, business had sagged. The Internet changed how performers related to each other and booked gigs. The Bougliones still hosted shows next door, but the audiences weren’t ideal (“kids and old people,” Joey complained). Still, there were occasional highlights. During the eighties, Cirque du Soleil had rented out the building for several nights and, to hear Joey tell the story, made bedlam of the block. Annually, too, the circus hosted the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain (World Festival of the Circus of Tomorrow), which was the circus’s equivalent to the Sundance Film Festival. Over four nights, the best international circus prospects (or at least the best prospects with a traditional seven-minute act) competed for a host of medals. Circus-lovers—including the three men I had come to meet—flocked to the festival from around the world.
At the table, I greeted Albrecht, who introduced me to Hovey Burgess and Dominique Jando. As a juggler in the seventies, Burgess had helped bring the modern circus to America from Europe and had later written a seminal book on circus skills, a subject he taught at New York University. Jando was a jack-of-all-trades—historian, teacher, clown, writer. As a boy in Paris, he had attended the Medrano with his father, a circus-obsessed movie producer, and in the five decades since, Jando had observed a number of critical modern circus moments: he was working at the Medrano the day the Bougliones seized the keys in 1964; in 1974, he helped found the first circus school in Paris; in 2002, he joined Lu Yi, a Chinese acrobatics coach, in developing a professional training ground at the Circus Center in San Francisco. Jando was something of a traditionalist, and I had barely sat down before he was impugning the state of the circus in France.
“It’s very bad, what they’ve done here,” he proclaimed, in heavily accented but grammatically flawless English. He wore thick glasses and leaned over the table so far that I thought he was going to knock over the saltshaker with his chin. “The circus here is at a low point. The technical ability is terrible! And, my God, they’re so pompous!” He nudged Burgess. “I can say that because I’m French. They had this whole idea that they were reinventing circus, that they were making it art, but that is bullshit. The circus has always been art. When it started to die everywhere else, the Russians took it on.”
This was true. During the fifties and sixties, while the critics were lamenting the death of the circus in the West, the Soviet circus was soaring. After nationalizing the circus in 1919, the government continued to pour money into the art, as a populist entertainment and a form of propaganda. In 1927, Russia created the first national school to assure themselves of a stable crop of circus prospects. Twenty years later, they developed what was known as “the Studio,” a sort of circus production house, in which artists from all disciplines (directors, choreographers, composers) teamed up to devise original circus material. The work coming out of such institutions was unparalleled in artistry and professional polish. Unfortunately, few people knew it, thanks to the Iron Curtain. “Even the Russians were in the dark,” Jando said. “They didn’t know how good they were.”
In 1956, the proverbial lights came on. After successfully touring Europe with its now famous ballet and opera companies, the Soviet state decided to do the same thing with the circus. For three months, the Moscow Circus visited Paris, London, Brussels. At every stop, pandemonium reigned. In Brussels, hordes of frustrated ticket-seekers gathered outside the tents, and thousands more were turned away. According to The New Yorker, the circus had “the most disarming effect on Paris of anything Muscovite since the October Revolution.”
The Soviets scheduled more tours. In 1958, their circus returned to Europe, with similar results. In 1963, the company flew to America, where The Wall Street Journal called them “the most lively, talented, and attractive troupe in the history of the great circus.” Audiences everywhere celebrated the artists, but the clowns proved especially popular. In contrast to the white clowns and augustes the Soviet clowns pursued a more naturalistic ideal. Many took Chaplin as their model. Mikhail Rumyantsev (a.k.a. Karandash, Russian for “pencil”), the first big star under the new regime, wore a black top hat and a black mustache. Like Chaplin, he created satirical routines, including a parody of Hitler during World War II, in which Rumyantsev wore a tin-pot helmet and screamed “Nach Moskau!” (“To Moscow!”) at his dog, Pushek.
In the post-Stalinist period, clowns remained realistic but took on a softer, more “poetic” edge. Oleg Popov is the most famous example. A student of Karandash and a 1949 graduate of the national school, he developed an act based more in mime than in slapstick. There was something wistful and childlike about him. He had a round face and big eyes. His humor was gentle. The act could seem playfully naïve but was in fact the product of an almost philosophical approach to his craft. “The old clown routines are not good for us,” he once told an interviewer. “We want some thought in our routines—laughter without the slaps and humiliation.” The chief object for every circus artist, he believed, “is the high
dignity of man which must be shown in the ring.” In Russia, Popov became a national hero. On tour in Europe, he was a revelation. Josephine Baker made a special trip to see him in Paris. (Popov honored her visit by presenting her with a big red cloth heart.) Chaplin trailed the Russian genius through the city, “as a man follows a torch bearer down dark streets.” (Popov himself was “politely unimpressed” by the clowns of the West.)
After the tours abroad, the Soviet circus spread. The state injected even more money into training programs and engaged in a building spree: in 1956, Russia had twenty circus buildings; by 1976, they had eighty (the vast majority still exist). During this period, as many as a hundred circus programs played daily across the USSR, with five thousand artists performing twelve hundred acts. A hundred million circus tickets were sold every year. Young people dreamed of becoming circus stars, for the prestige but also for the luxurious perks: a cash per diem, the opportunity to travel, access to Western goods—all rare privileges at the time. And it wasn’t just in Russia! As communism spread, the Soviet circus ideal spread with it—to Mongolia, Korea, Cuba, Cambodia, Egypt, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. “The Soviets created an empire of circus,” Pascal once said.
In the Clown Bar, we discussed these developments and debated their influence on the West. Jando argued that the movements were intimately related. “If you’re looking for the beginning of the modern circus, you have to look in Russia,” he said. “If you talk to [juggler] Sergei Ignatov, he’s an artist. If you talk to Popov, he is an artist. They were making art for fifty years.”
While he spoke, I noticed that Burgess and Albrecht were both smiling and deliberately peering into their glasses, the way old friends might if they knew better than to contradict. Yes, the Russians had developed the art while it was languishing elsewhere. But both in their training methods and in their performances, they celebrated (and continue to celebrate) a kind of classical purity, an emphasis on form and line borrowed from the ballet. Like the Chinese, the Russians are technical virtuosos—which is why Cirque du Soleil loves them—but they have yet to embrace the modern age.
But why quibble? What unites the Russians and other European artists—and what separates them from the Chinese—is a kind of passionate personal spirit that imbues their work. (The Chinese are more practical, more self-effacing.) This was illustrated by a story that Burgess told as we were getting ready to leave.
We were talking about clowning, and specifically about what made a clown. Almost two decades ago, Burgess said, he had been brought in as a judge for the Festival Mondial. Among the obvious future stars that year was a young David Shiner, who is today an icon in the clown world. Since launching his career as the lead clown in Cirque du Soleil’s Nouvelle Expérience, he has created and appeared in numerous internationally acclaimed shows, including, as I mentioned earlier, Fool Moon with Bill Irwin.
Back in 1984, however, he was just starting out, and the judges didn’t know quite what to make of his act. Dressed in a blue suit and a battered derby, he was surly and aggressive, almost mean. He harangued the audience and pretended to take pictures of them with a little plastic camera that sprayed water. He stole a real camera from a professional photographer and hurled it into the air, ten, twenty feet, as if it were a toy. The crowd laughed uproariously throughout, but when it came time to award the medals, the judges balked. Several felt that Shiner was missing the spirit of clowning, that he was too nasty. They were on the verge of omitting his name from the winners when a voice rose from the back of the room: “Can I talk?”
“Everyone turned,” Burgess recounted. “And there was Youri Nikouline, the famous Russian clown, alone in the corner.” Burgess switched into a thick Russian accent. “For forty years I am clown,” he said. “After forty years, I think I know what is clown. Today I am sitting in this circus when this young man perform. I am laughing. I am listening to the people. They are laughing. Everybody is laughing.” He looked sternly at the room of circus-lovers. “This young man will be great clown one day. If you do not give him medal, you do not understand what is clown.”
Burgess paused for a sip of wine. “ ‘Well,’ somebody said, ‘I guess we could give him the bronze.’ ”
* * *
* There are multiple stories about how the auguste character originated. The most common attributes the character to Tom Belling at the Circus Renz.
(illustration credit 17.1)
ONSTAGE AT LE SAMOVAR, André Riot-Sarcey stood in the middle of a circle of clowns, a resplendent ring of plaid.
“That’s right,” he was saying, “shake it out! Shake the energy out of your hand!”
The clowns were warming up. A moment before, they had been mewling like animals; before that, impersonating opera singers. Now they were flapping their hands like dead fish.
“Okay, now feel the energy move up your arm.” André flapped along with the rest of them, his porkpie derby jostling on his head. “Now feel it in your whole body.”
The jiggling increased to a fever pitch. At the back of the stage, a man in a purple zoot suit emitted a jittery moan, like a kid riding his bicycle over cobblestones: “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh …”
Observing this from the back of the theater, I had the sense all over again of knowing nothing about clowns. Nominally, André had told me, the purpose of the workshop was to help the clowns work on their entrées, which they had prepared in advance. But this was just a means to an end, and the real goal was to get at something deeper: their “inner clowns.”
The idea, as I’ve said, dates back to Lecoq. As described in his book, The Moving Body, the “discovery” of one’s inner clown is like tapping into your inner child, less a creation of character than a kind of stripping away. But how did this process work? How did interior exploration lead to laughs? André had confessed that it was an elusive process: “There are no rules to this sort of work.”
On the stage, André called the shaking to a halt. An electricity ran through the group. The clowns were panting, twiddling their fingers, rocking on their toes. No two looked alike. Some were in their early twenties. Others looked to be as old as fifty. There were roughly equal numbers of men and women. Every clown had a red nose. Beyond that their clothes reflected varying degrees of eccentricity, from simple black suits to striped high-waters held up by suspenders. They were of all shapes and sizes—tall, short, skinny, fat. They did have one thing in common, though: they all seemed excited to be present. The man in the zoot suit was bouncing from foot to foot like someone looking to start a fight.
I heard the theater door wheeze open. A heavyset woman walked into the room: another clown reporting. She wore a gray zip-up hoodie and a tutu made of peacock feathers, with a rainbow of plumage spilling off her hips. Nervously she headed toward the stage, stopping at the front row, where she shrugged the canvas gym bag off her shoulder and underwent a curious transformation. First she unclasped her necklace and removed her earrings. Then she hiked up the waistline of her skirt until it was halfway up her belly. She took off her hoodie and, with her thumbs, popped the high-pointed collar on her blouse and unfastened and refastened each of its buttons incorrectly, so that its two panels failed to line up. Stooping again to the bag, she pulled out a red ball on an elastic string. Like a surgeon donning a mask, she pulled the ball over her face and settled it on her nose with a wiggle of her cheeks. The change complete, she took a breath and moved toward the stage, where, jovially, the other clowns parted their circle to welcome her.
SO HOW do you build a clown? Unlike in acrobatics, there is no clear progression. In any art, the greats succeed through a combination of talent and experience, leading some to suggest that clown education isn’t possible at all—that either you have it or you don’t, that it requires an innate comedic timing, an eye for absurdity, a taste for offbeat actions and personalities. Pierre Étaix, the great French clown blanc, once quipped, “Clowns are born, not made,” but this is an exaggeration. Most clowns—my friend at the Place Pompidou aside—undergo som
e sort of training. “All too often I have seen actors trying to imitate clowns by doing no more than sticking a red ball on the end of their nose, putting on an outsized pair of shoes and squeaking in a funny voice,” Dario Fo wrote. “At best this is an exercise in sheer naïveté, and the result is invariably cloying and irritating.” “The only way to become a real clown is by long, energetic and dedicated work, and, yet again, by years of practice.”
Historically, as we have seen, there have been various classes of clowns, though they could generally be grouped into three types: the auguste de soirée, the auguste de reprise, and the clown d’entrée (including white clowns). The first two comprise the traditional clowns. They wander around arenas, performing sight gags, filling time, and distracting the crowd. Often these clowns were hired as amateurs and learned on the job. They had little or no training.
That said, there have been recent efforts to train these sorts of clowns formally. The most notable example was the Ringling Clown College, operated by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Venice, Florida, from 1968 to 1997. Part publicity stunt (the school advertised auditions wherever the circus toured), part genuine educational facility, the school attempted to train ring clowns in an effort to fill the circus’s ranks, which had been dwindling. The course was short but rigorous. For nine weeks, students mastered the skills necessary to entertain children: how to pratfall, how to walk on stilts, how to design an elaborately painted face, how to take a “nap” and react to the sound of a simulated slap. In its twenty-nine years, the school had a massive, if mixed effect. On the upside, it provided a skill base for more than fourteen hundred clowns, some of whom—including Bill Irwin and Penn Jillette—went on to impressive careers. On the downside, the majority of graduates took their skills, which were intended for massive arenas, and employed them in backyard birthday parties, which didn’t help the reputation of their craft.
