The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  CLOWN: Heeeeeyyyyyy!!!!

  (CLOWN strides to a new spot. After a pause, AUGUSTE again shuffles behind. CLOWN turns and glares.)

  CLOWN (whispering): What are you doing?

  AUGUSTE: What?

  CLOWN: You’re supposed to stay over there. Remember? I’m here. You’re there.

  (AUGUSTE looks at him blankly.)

  CLOWN: Jesus.

  (He grabs AUGUSTE and stalks him offstage. A quiet moment. Then—)

  CLOWN: Heeyyyy!

  (CLOWN enters. He jogs the same circle as before, settling again downstage. A few seconds later, AUGUSTE enters, trudges up behind him.)

  CLOWN: Heeyyyy!

  (CLOWN crosses to his new spot. Again AUGUSTE treads after him absentmindedly. This time CLOWN is irate. He whips around and glares at AUGUSTE, who immediately realizes his mistake.)

  AUGUSTE: Shit …

  (AUGUSTE scurries back to his new position, but it’s too late—CLOWN is upset.)

  CLOWN: Is this complicated?

  AUGUSTE: Sorry, I …

  CLOWN: No! It’s not complicated. I come here. You stay there. This isn’t brain surgery. What’s the freaking problem?

  (AUGUSTE’S bottom lip begins to quiver.)

  CLOWN: Oh God.

  (AUGUSTE buries his face in his hands and begins to sob. CLOWN watches him, disgusted.)

  CLOWN: Really?

  (AUGUSTE sobs. CLOWN waits as the sobbing continues. He begins to sympathize.)

  CLOWN: C’mon. Please. Stop it.

  (AUGUSTE wails on.)

  CLOWN: Seriously. How long can this go on? I’m sorry. Okay? I apologize.

  (AUGUSTE tries to pull himself together.)

  AUGUSTE: You …

  (CLOWN waits.)

  AUGUSTE: You …

  CLOWN: I …?

  AUGUSTE: You …

  CLOWN: Say it!

  AUGUSTE: You don’t love me!

  (The wailing resumes. CLOWN sighs heavily.)

  CLOWN: I don’t love you?

  AUGUSTE: See!

  (CLOWN watches AUGUSTE sob. He doesn’t know how to respond.)

  AUGUSTE (through sobs): I want you to say it.

  CLOWN: Say what?

  (AUGUSTE regards CLOWN plaintively—he knows what.)

  CLOWN (turning away): No.

  AUGUSTE (heartbroken): I knew it.

  (He goes back to crying pitifully. For a long beat, CLOWN tries to ignore him. He taps his foot. Gives the audience a “How’s it going” nod. But he can’t keep it up forever. Eventually his sympathy wins out—)

  CLOWN: Fine.

  (AUGUSTE falls instantly quiet. He pivots to face CLOWN, who adjusts his feet, twitches, stalls. Then, in a painful whisper—)

  CLOWN: I love you.

  (AUGUSTE erupts. Charging over to CLOWN, he seizes him in his long arms, hauling him off the ground, hugging him. CLOWN tolerates this for a moment, then raps AUGUSTE sharply on the back. AUGUSTE sets him down.)

  A silence ensued. The clown smoothed his suit. The auguste looked blankly to André.

  André: “Is that the ending?”

  The clown shrugged. “Umm, yeah, I guess.”

  André nodded and slowly rose from his seat. “First of all, you have to do something about that ending. This isn’t a movie. Even after you’ve delivered your punch line, you have to make an exit.”

  The clowns listened, still juiced with adrenaline. Both had pulled off their noses, so the balls hung around their necks like round red amulets.

  The larger issue, André went on, was what he called “complicity.” A clown had to make an audience feel as if it was part of the action. “You’re not performing a play. Everything that happened in the space is part of our shared experience. We need to know that you see us, that you’re with us.” As an example, he referred to a moment during their entrée when another clown poked his head through the theater’s rear door, as if looking for someone. “We all saw him. We knew he was there. That’s a golden opportunity. Something changed in the space. So use that!” The reaction didn’t have to be much, he went on—a look, a gesture. “Are you startled by him? Are you upset that he’s interrupting your show? It might not go anywhere, or it might turn into something interesting or hilarious.”

  By acknowledging the reality of the situation and responding to it, a clown created a collaborative relationship. “You’re not creating something for us. We’re creating something together.” This is what André meant by complicity, and it’s what makes real clowning so difficult. (As turn-of-the-century French circus sage Georges Strehly says, “Only in watching him work with the audience can you see if a clown is good or not.”) I saw this relationship approached vividly in New York City, years later, and the moment involved Pillard and de Valette.

  The duo had formed a trio (with the nerd from the sexual sketch). They called themselves Chiche Capon, and by then they had become possibly the best-known clown trio in France. They had flown to America as featured performers in a theater festival.

  I have never seen a crowd conquered so quickly. Within ten minutes, the room was laughing joyously. By the midpoint, audience members were yelling at the stage, addressing the clowns by name. As a climax, the clowns induced the crowd to pass Patrick over their heads. It felt like a rock concert. Afterward, the whole audience spontaneously assembled in the lobby and paraded to a bar up the street, the clowns leading the way.

  BY MIDAFTERNOON in André’s workshop, I felt I had a rough idea of what clown training entailed. But the psychological mind-set was still difficult to grasp. On the way to find some clowns willing to talk about their experience, I stopped by the bathroom, where I found a red clown nose resting in the soap basin.

  It felt like a windfall. Like the oversized shoes, the famous red nose originated in a character trait and grew over time. Back in the English pantomime shows, when the “clown” often represented a rustic peasant with a fondness for alcohol, a few performers added a spot of red paint to their noses to indicate drunkenness. With the passage of time, the feature grew more prominent. Historically, few of the great clowns wore red noses: not Tabarin, Grimaldi, Footit and Chocolat, Grock, two out of the three Fratellini brothers, Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, or Jacques Tati. But the nose became a cultural signifier nonetheless, and among modern clowns it was nearly sacrosanct. The clowns at the workshop treated their noses with almost talismanic power. They put on their noses when they were about to inhabit their clowns, and took them off when the exercises were finished. “I think of the nose as the dividing line between myself and my clown,” one said to me.

  For all the noses I had seen, I had never worn one or even touched one. The nose in the bathroom was squishier than I had imagined, like a dog’s chew toy. There were a pair of small holes in the bottom to breathe out of, and a string of elastic dangling off the back. Whether modern clowns performed in a nose or not, many of them liked training in noses—what Lecoq called “the smallest mask in the world”—because they felt less inhibited, more free.

  Drawing back the elastic band, I slipped the nose over my head and looked at myself in the mirror. Something about the nose’s roundness softened my features. It eliminated the angles on my face and made my eyes look bigger and gentler, more childlike. Picturing André and his deranged-rooster impersonation, I pushed my shoulders back and waggled my head. I looked less like a rooster than a pigeon.

  But I strutted around anyway, winging my arms, jutting my head forward and back. My pigeon lacked André’s dynamism, but it was goofy and playful and pleasing. A smile stretched from beneath my red nose.

  In the lobby, I asked a few clowns how much this playfulness was part of the appeal for them.

  “Oh, absolutely,” said Franky, the egg-juggling clown. He had the shaggy look of an aging surfer. Dark ringlets fell over his temples, and silver hoops hung from his ears. Until his early thirties, Franky had worked as a mime, mostly in the streets of France, Spain, and the Balkans. He had
made the jump to clowning six months ago and was feeling good about it.

  “I’m just beginning to learn, but so far being a clown is great,” he said. “You can do things you never thought possible. Scream, laugh, jump, cry. Being a clown is all about following your instincts.”

  Another clown added, “I’m hungry, so I want a sandwich. I’m thirsty, so I want something to drink. I want to have sex, so I have sex.”

  Franky was smiling and nodding. “That’s right. As kids we behave this way normally—we’re open to the world and to ourselves. Then, as we get older, we adopt roles and responsibilities. You have to be a good husband. You have to be nice to your boss. Be strong, be sociable, be a success.” Being a clown, he said, lets a person shed all those roles, what Lecoq called the “social masks.” “A clown is supposed to be ridiculous. He’s supposed to be nasty and selfish and incompetent.”

  “It sounds cathartic,” I suggested.

  Franky mulled over the word. Yes, he agreed, it was cathartic. But there was something else going on, too, something deeper and possibly related to the unique kind of laughter a clown evokes. A clown, he explained, is supposed to fail. This was a golden rule of the craft, what Lecoq calls le bide, or “the flop.” By failing, a clown makes the audience feel superior.

  But a clown can’t just fail senselessly. “You can’t fake anything,” Franky said. “The relationship with the audience is too close. They can tell.” Or as the famous Swiss clown Dimitri has written, “The clown is the most naked of all artists because he risks all of himself, without the possibility of cheating. To avoid deceiving the public, he must be authentic, to sense always the impression that he is not offering enough.”

  Which is where the training comes in. “Our whole lives, we’re basically trained not to be vulnerable, not to expose ourselves, to avoid looking foolish,” Franky said. Getting in touch with your “inner clown” is all about tearing that artifice away, about becoming open to failure and in the process also more open to yourself.

  This feels good on a personal level, but it’s also essential for triggering a response in the audience. According to Lecoq, a clown doesn’t evoke laughter through sheer failure. Failure alone is tragic, a dramatic experience that, as Aristotle says, evokes pity and fear. A clown converts the tragic into comedy by showing the audience that he is aware of his failure and that he accepts it. This triggers empathy.

  Chaplin was a master at this. However bizarre or unfortunate his character’s situation, he accepted it as the way of the world and did what he could to resolve it. (Think of him playfully eating a shoelace while starving.) Because his suffering didn’t seem permanent or hurtful, the audience had permission to laugh.

  As a clown, Franky said, he wasn’t so much reveling in childishness as cultivating this same sense of equanimity. “It’s intensely scary to embrace your failure, but it’s also kind of freeing.” Like a lot of clowns, he felt that he was experiencing himself in a new and potentially more authentic way. “It’s nice to be yourself.”

  The aim of modern clowning isn’t so different from that of other modern forms, like Jérôme Thomas’s juggling, or Les Arts Sauts on the trapeze. In all of these cases, performers took pleasure in the circus’s possibilities for expression and exploration. They found a chance to gain access to something in themselves. The only difference was the medium. Whereas some send balls or their own bodies into the air, clowns traffic in raw emotion.

  Franky nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably right.” Around us, the other clowns were drifting back to the theater for their final lesson. “But, you know, there’s a big difference, too,” he added. Acrobatics, he pointed out, takes a certain physical agility. “A guy who’s three hundred pounds—he’s going to have a hard time doing a back flip.” But clowning is open to everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, the fattest to the thinnest. “Everybody has a clown inside him,” Franky said with a smile. “It just takes a little work to find it.”

  * * *

  * Lecoq passed away in 1999. His widow directs the school now.

  (illustration credit 18.1)

  FOR SPRING BREAK most of my fellow circus students headed home—to elsewhere in France, to Brazil, Sweden, Holland. I settled for Montreal. Outside of France, no city had succumbed to the modern circus fever so completely. Most notably, Montreal housed the headquarters of Cirque du Soleil, the biggest, most influential modern circus in the world. Additionally, the city claimed several internationally acclaimed troupes (the Cirque Éloize, Les 7 Doigts de la Main), Canada’s only official “national” school (L’École Nationale de Cirque, founded in 1981), and one of the world’s largest contemporary circus festivals (Montréal Complètement Cirque). In 2004, in an effort to become “one of the circus capitals of the world,” the city went so far as to construct a $73-million “Cité des Arts du Cirque,” an immense circus campus in a 119-acre former quarry and garbage dump. As well as new facilities for Cirque du Soleil and the national school, the site featured the Tohu, a one-ring building constructed purposely to host modern circus shows. It was the first such building in the world.

  I went because of Pascal. As I’ve said, in addition to being one of the foremost circus historians in the world, Pascal is also one of the art’s most dedicated fans, and an avid collector of circus memorabilia. For years, one portion of the collection filled Pascal’s closets. Another was housed in a meeting room at HorsLesMurs, a circus advocacy organization in Paris. Then, in 2004, the city of Montreal offered to display part of Pascal’s collection at the Tohu. They also offered to house the collection in its entirety in a vault in Montreal. And so, with the help of the official packer for the Louvre, Pascal spent a week parceling his collection into forty-five wooden crates, each the size of a piano, and then watched them depart across the Atlantic.

  Pascal was melancholy that his collection was so far away. But he thought it was worth it, a first step toward exhibition. Montreal had agreed to fly him over annually to tend to the items. Joining him on this trip, I would have a rare opportunity to observe firsthand the crown jewels of the art.

  THE SOCIETÉ DES DIRECTEURS DES MUSÉES MONTRÉALAIS, the repository for Montreal’s most prestigious art collections as well as Pascal’s trove, is a nondescript warehouse in the city’s Old Port district. I met Pascal there on the icy morning after our arrival. The historian was typically dapper: he wore a crimson velvet tie under a black silk dinner jacket, a black belt over black slacks. To the click of his leather shoes on the cement floor, we entered the building and progressed into a massive hallway. Pascal outlined the plan for the weekend.

  We would spend the morning, he said, in the vault, organizing his collection and selecting objects for the next exhibition. Tomorrow, we would install them. I had also arranged an afternoon tour at the Soleil headquarters, a gigantic glass-and-steel building that looked like a space station from the highway. I expressed surprise at the building to Pascal. He shrugged. “Cirque doesn’t deal with people anymore. They deal with governments.”

  We arrived at a pair of tall steel doors. Pascal rapped, and we entered a room of startling enormity, with twenty-foot-high ceilings. There were wooden packing cases and bubble-wrapped frames everywhere, on the ground and piled onto sturdy metal shelves. I followed Pascal to the center of the room, where Sophie, the director of collections at the Tohu, stood near a flotilla of crates branded with the silhouette of a lion and the name of Pascal’s company, Panem and Circenses.

  After a quick discussion, the pair began to haul objects from the shelves and unpack them on the table. Earlier, Pascal had proudly noted that his collection covered a wide swath of circus history—of subjects, types, and time periods—and the items appearing quickly verified his claim. There was a black top hat made of brushed horsehair. There was a diatonic Wheatstone concertina. Pascal brought out a brass statuette of a clown, then a poster from Fellini’s 1954 masterpiece, La Strada. “Most collectors wouldn’t collect something like this,” he said, removing the poster from
the bubble. “But Fellini liked the circus. He knew people from the circus—he knew the families.”

  As the duo worked, I raced around the room like a kid on Christmas morning. Most artifacts were sheathed in bubble wrap and labeled with a few tantalizing words. “Clown Medrano,” said one box. “Boulevard pantomime,” read a frame. Unable to resist, I found myself stretching the plastic wrapping for glimpses of the wonders within. And what wonders! In a stack of framed posters I found a woodcut broadside for Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre. Then I stumbled onto an official portrait of Jules Léotard, taken in his early twenties, when he was at the height of his fame.

  It’s hard to describe how the objects made me feel. It was as if all the history I had read and heard about, all the names, all the stories, were here collected in a single room. Individually, the objects had a power that was almost talismanic: connecting each person’s name to a physical presence made all their lives seem more real. It occurred to me how much my interest in the past had been an exercise in imagination. Even my ghost-hunting trips, my attempts to root out the past, had failed. Now I felt like some foreign scholar of Renaissance painting, who—after never seeing a Leonardo or Botticelli—one day finds himself in the basement of the Louvre.

  Reflecting on the experience, I came to appreciate Pascal’s passion more fully than I ever had. He claimed that the drive to collect was a natural impulse. “Even before the circus I liked collecting,” he once told me. “Fossils. Shells. Whatever I could find.” But there was a deeper motivation as well. The world couldn’t be bothered with circus history. This had been proved to me time and again. Pascal’s passion was a response to this destruction of the past. He was on a mission to gather together what had survived and keep it safe.

  ACROSS THE STREET from the Tohu, the lobby of Soleil’s headquarters exploded in light, the resplendent sun pouring through the high glass walls. Behind a high counter, a receptionist clamped a phone to her ear. “Cirque du Soleil, bonjour.” There was a pause. “D’accord.” She hung up and peered at me. “Chantal’s on her way.”