The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  Oddly, though, with very few exceptions, the countries with the strongest modern circus scenes are countries with little circus legacy. Finland, for example, is doing quite well. In 2004, Parliament allocated part of the federal budget to circus support. According to critics, Finnish companies, including Circo Aereo, do some of the most sophisticated work in Europe. Some people credit the success, or a good chunk of it, to the work of a single man: Tomi Purovaara, director of the Finnish Circus Information Center, unofficially known as “Mr. Contemporary Circus.” Purovaara himself attributes the progress to history—or lack thereof.

  “We were blessed with a tabula rasa here,” Purovaara said when I met him at the Helsinki headquarters of Cirko, an organization dedicated to spreading the circus in Finland. After the Finnish Civil War of 1918, he explained, the victorious conservatives levied a 40 percent “recreational tax” on venues where the working classes were likely to converge, including the circus, essentially eradicating the form for almost fifty years. “We had to build everything from scratch,” he said, “but we also didn’t have to tear anything down. We had no reputation to deal with. We could define the circus however we wanted.”

  Purovaara’s comment came to mind as I examined the objects of Pascal’s exhibit. Like Finland, Quebec had had a limited circus history. John Bill Ricketts, the father of American circus, established a building on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River in 1797, but he left after six months, and for centuries the province had never hosted a native company. When the modern circuses, including Soleil, emerged in the eighties, the lack of negative stereotypes around their work allowed them to convince authorities to give them funding and space.

  But at some point Montreal’s circus caretakers must have realized that practicing an art without understanding its history was a mistake. For a movement to continue to grow, for it to sustain itself and develop its own culture, it has to examine its tradition. Lacking a history of its own, Montreal bought one in the form of Pascal’s collection. And it wasn’t just any past. On display here in the hallway was the circus at its best. “I want them to see the cultural dimension,” Pascal had said in the vault. He’d stooped and picked up a poster drawn by Jean Cocteau for the Medrano. “I want people to know that the circus could have produced something like this.”

  The circus of today is serious business—but so was it always. The mission of the exhibit was to ensure the link between the present and the past. This was made particularly clear to me as we were preparing to leave.

  Waiting for Pascal in the lobby, I happened to notice a lantern dangling above the doors that led to the performance space. The lantern was old and antique-looking in a way that was at odds with the building’s modern, nondescript décor. The glass bulb was cloudy, white, and tulip-shaped. Thin vines wrapped around it and connected to a brass chain that ran to the ceiling. When Pascal arrived, he cheerily told me that the lantern came from “Amiens,” circus-lover’s shorthand for the Cirque Municipal d’Amiens, one of the few remaining circus buildings in France and a totem in the circus world. Built in 1889, Amiens had been the passion project of Jules Verne, who fought to construct it and then delivered the inaugural address. (“The new circus is a work of art endowed by your municipal administration with every improvement of modern industry!”)

  “We liked the idea of a tangible connection between the old buildings and the new,” Pascal said, gazing up at the lamp. “This building”—the Tohu—“is actually based on the old circuses in France. I was on the design committee. We wanted the building to be reminiscent of the old circuses of before, but also to be unique, to be alive.” Stéphane Lavoie, the director of the Tohu, had told me that ten cities had sent emissaries to study the Tohu in the hopes of constructing hard circuses of their own.§ “I like to think of it less as a copy than an echo,” Pascal said. “The voice changes as it recedes, but there’s always the essence of what came before.”

  * * *

  * The pair make a brief, magical appearance in Fellini’s The Clowns: Chaplin runs the bubble machine; Thiérrée, who wears a magician’s cape, seizes a bubble between two fingers and taps it with a ball-peen hammer.

  † Some shows, like the Big Apple Circus, use only domesticated animals, such as horses and dogs.

  ‡ Laliberté supposedly left his parents a note with a quote from Kahlil Gibran: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.”

  § In 2007, Madrid converted an old cookie factory into the nineteen-hundred-seat Teatro Circo Price, named for the city’s old circus.

  (illustration credit 19.1)

  AFTER SPRING BREAK, I returned to Paris to find an enormous circus tent in the school’s courtyard. Henceforth, we were told, classes would be there instead of at the Great Hall. We spent the following Monday hauling over equipment—the mats, the trampolines—the big freshman Baptiste carrying the weight bench all by himself. There was no official explanation for the move. When I asked Anny, she said, “A circus school should take place in a tent.” Personally, I thought the tent lacked the Great Hall’s shabby warmth. Big and echoey, it was lit by a few harsh bulbs dangling from steel tensile chords.

  Within a week, however, my opinion had altered. There was something energizing about the tent. Approaching the school through the suburbs, I was struck by the tent’s incongruence and specialness. Training in it felt more authentic, somehow. You had a more direct connection to the elements. In between the mats you could feel the ground pressing against your feet. When it rained, you could hear the drops before you saw them. A tent wasn’t just a space, it was a symbol, and as such it reinforced our collective purpose and imbued every activity with a kind of circus spirit: This handstand isn’t just a handstand; it’s a circus handstand.

  It even felt like a promotion of sorts, another step in our acculturation. Participating in the circus, I’d concluded during my visit to Les Arts Sauts, was as much cultural as physical. It was as much what you wore and how you behaved as the particular tricks you learned. But I’d increasingly seen this in the students as well: I saw them dress more eccentrically, speak more philosophically. I grew less critical of the school’s culture than I’d been, and even participated in it myself: I bought a colorful scarf and started rolling up the cuffs of my jeans; I walked around my apartment with my shirt off.

  I never thought of this process as an “acculturation” at the time. I was participating, absorbing whatever attracted me or seemed to express part of me. It didn’t occur to me that I was adopting a “style,” and only rarely did I glimpse how my participation had affected my personality or the way I was perceived.

  One such moment, however, came a week or so after we moved into the tent. We were visited by a group of neighborhood boys I had never seen before. They were intrigued by the sudden appearance of the tent over the school’s ramparts. The boys were middle-school-aged, mostly of North African descent, sons of the immigrants who populated the apartment towers around us. The first day, they drifted as close as the courtyard. The next day, their numbers had swelled, and a few ventured to talk with some students juggling by the mouth of the tent. The third day, they came all the way inside. They sat on mats near the doorway, awestruck by the tent’s volume.

  It felt like a collision of worlds. To the boys, the students were exotic and extreme. They could manipulate their bodies in hard-to-fathom ways. They dressed in ratty, colorful garb, spoke in unfamiliar accents. I say “they” because I didn’t count myself among them until one of the smaller boys approached me, his hair in a high Afro, walking with a swagger. He peppered me with questions: Could I do a back handspring? Could I do a back flip? Could I juggle? Had I flown on a trapeze? As I continued to answer yes, his eyes grew wider, until he finally, simply said, “Cool.”

  I still saw a huge difference between myself and the other students, the “real” acrobats. But to that boy I was part of the circus: an ordinary acrobat.

  THIS SMALL ACKNOWLEDGMENT of my
place in the circus world came at a pivotal time: the concours, the school’s placement test, was less than a month away. Among our prep group, only Maud and Fanny were scheduled to take the exam. As Luc had predicted early in the year, pursuing degrees in philosophy and circus concurrently had distracted Boris, and so he had withdrawn his name. (He had also found another calling: during spring break, he flew to Vietnam, where he volunteered at a circus school run by his former coach, and now he wanted to go back. “They have a completely different sense of space over there,” he said after his return. “You could build a show around it.”)

  My own plans for the test were less clear. Early in the year, I had surrendered any hopes of passing and accepted my role as what anthropologists call an observer-participant: I had come to study the circus, not to be in it. I presumed once more that I would return to the “normal world” and “normal life.”

  Yet now I found myself more seriously entertaining the thought of taking the test. A circus life seemed more attainable than it had. Meeting so many performers and students had shown me that the circus was always open, even to someone only ready to pursue it as an adult. The test had grown less intimidating to me as well. In the early spring, I noticed that the gap between myself and the other students had narrowed. By April, I had pulled even with Boris at tumbling and with Fanny on the trampoline. (I was putting in extra hours with Ryszard, who thought I was more dogged and ambitious than my French partners.) My odds of passing were low, but what if I got lucky?

  With two weeks to go, this question came to a head of sorts when I hosted a little soirée at my apartment. I invited my cohorts in the prep program—Boris, Maud, and Fanny—as well as most of the freshmen and some friends from the city. By midnight, my third-story walk-up was rocking with the sort of party I had come to associate with the circus over the year. There was loud singing fueled by cheap red wine and hand-rolled cigarettes. There was ecstatic dancing punctuated with paroxysms of skillful acrobatics—handstands on the kitchen tile, break-dancing on the living-room rug.

  In the mêlée, Maud, Fanny, and I found ourselves together on a couch and reminisced about the year. We talked about the professors and their quirks, about the girls’ hopes for the upcoming test. Then, as the night was winding down, Fanny turned the question on me.

  “So what about you?” she asked. She had paused next to Maud in the doorway to wrap her scarf around her neck, a buttress against the damp spring chill. Outside, dawn was breaking.

  I asked her what she was talking about.

  “The test,” she said matter-of-factly. “Why aren’t you taking it?”

  I fidgeted. I didn’t know how to respond. I asked her if she believed I had a shot. She shrugged a casual shoulder in reply.

  “I don’t see why not. We’ve all seen you improve. And you obviously care about it.”

  I was flattered. Only later did I realize that her words were an uncanny echo of what the beautiful trapezist had said to me years before, the words that launched me on this whole escapade: “I don’t see why not.”

  And so I spent the next week thinking about it. I could have taken the test merely for the experience. But that seemed wrong somehow. The exam was a genuinely important moment for the applicants, and it felt selfish to diminish the process or risk distracting them. If I was going to take the test, I would have to take it for real. But what would happen if I passed? Was I willing to dedicate the next four years to training, and years after to performing? Did I want to be a circus performer?

  After several late nights, I had my answer: I did not. I enjoyed imagining a circus version of myself, ten years down the road, buff and bare-chested, dangling from a trapeze with my buxom Ukrainian wife in my arms. But in truth I wasn’t a performer, not in the way I needed to be. I did not like the idea of appearing publicly. Even executing a move in class felt pressurized. I couldn’t imagine reproducing the move in a ring in front of a scrutinizing public. And training felt like a chore. I liked acrobatics, the trampoline especially, but I was too lacking in abandon to really excel at it. After a few months, my juggling obsession had faded as well.

  Being a strong circus professional requires a special dedication, a commitment bordering on faith. Becoming a circus artist isn’t like becoming a dentist or a real-estate agent. It’s not a practical decision. You have to burn to do it. You have to risk losing yourself—to risk losing your life, even. Without this passion, it is possible to work as a professional: you can make a healthy, exciting, engaging living, with four-star hotels and international travel and, rumor has it, lots of very good sex. But you can’t make art.

  What I liked were the aesthetic and critical possibilities of the circus. I liked examining the form historically and understanding how it had evolved through time. I liked the sense of mission, the feeling that the history and the form itself were underrepresented and misunderstood—and the idea that I could change that. I even liked considering the business of the circus, and occasionally entertained visions of producing or directing. In short, I had intellectualized the art. I wasn’t an artist.

  Therefore, I decided to abstain from the test. I would attend instead as an observer, to cheer on Maud and Fanny and witness the selection of the next generation of circus stars. That was the right decision. Nevertheless, in the days after officially withdrawing from the test, I found myself feeling disappointed. My classes seemed suddenly arbitrary. Watching Maud and Fanny tumble in preparation, I again felt outside their world, as at the beginning of the year. I walked around with the suspicion that I had truncated my future in some horrible way. I believe Ryszard picked up on this, because in our last class he decided to offer me some consolation.

  By now I had essentially adopted Ryszard as a surrogate uncle. Since the rough winter months, his life had perked up considerably. He had decamped from the janitor’s closet into an apartment within biking distance of the school, while somehow managing to retain the house in Normandy. The cost of the house was still an issue, but the garden was in bloom, which made him happy. One weekend in April, he even took me out to see its progress. “Look at the spring lettuce and daffodils,” he said, pointing with a tuft of weeds he’d just pulled. “A garden is like a mystery. You put in all this work and you never know what will come up.” In happiness, I threw a few awkward back flips in his potato patch.

  In the tent, we were still working on my back flips. The move consisted of two parts—jumping into the air and tucking my knees. I threw one flip after another, each sharper than the last. My knees pumped toward my chest. My rotation was tight with barely a touch from Ryszard. Without the pressure of the impending test, I found that I was able to release into the moves more freely, and so was performing them better.

  At a certain point, my stomach muscles were wailing and my feet were stinging from the impact, so I paused to drink from my water bottle. When I returned, Ryszard was watching me with a peculiar, hard-to-fathom look, something between a smile and a smirk. I asked him what he was grinning about.

  “I am thinking …” he began, before his smile widened. “I am thinking that if I have modern circus I take you. Maybe not if I have traditional circus. But for modern circus, yes.”

  He was impugning the technical quality of the modern circus, but I didn’t care. For years to come I would cling to those words. I would remember that I had once been so close that a future in the circus could have been mine.

  I bounded over and gave Ryszard a hug.

  WITH A WEEK to go before the test, there was one last person that I wanted to meet, Bernard Turin, the director of the Centre National des Arts du Cirque (CNAC), the big-brother institution to my school in Rosny-sous-Bois.

  I wanted to talk to Turin about the return of the circus in France, and about the role of the government in that return specifically. Although France’s modern movement started of its own accord—with independent troupes and schools in the seventies—the government had been instrumental in recognizing and helping the movement to grow. “It’s not
a coincidence that we have so much circus,” Jean-Michel Guy, a government representative himself, had told me early in the year. “We made this happen.”

  As director of the National School, Turin was in a special position to observe this government effort. In a certain sense, he was even a product of the effort himself. Before taking the reins at the school, he had worked as a professional sculptor, and the state had intentionally recruited him to supply the school with a more progressive vision, which he had done. According to some circus thinkers, including Jean-Michel Guy, Turin had even been responsible for launching the circus into another stage of development, its most recent stage, what has come to be known as “the contemporary circus.” “Bernard was a visionnaire,” Pascal told me. “All these questions, ‘Is the circus art? Is it not art?’ Bernard showed what an artful circus would look like. At the school, he created a lighthouse.”

  I met Turin in his work studio in Paris, a high-ceilinged room in a building of government-subsidized artist studios. In his sixties, he was round as a marshmallow, with a considerate, warm grandfatherly air. His beard was dusty white, and he wore a pair of wire-rim glasses, and, to my surprise, limped on a metal cane.

  “It’s only temporary,” he explained, as we entered the space. “For my knee.” He drifted over to a makeshift kitchen to prepare a pot of tea. I lingered in the entryway. Around me, framed articles and photos speckled the walls. Artistic debris littered the floor, fluorescent tubes and rolls of paper, soaked in a bright wash of sun that poured through skylights.

  I asked him what happened.

  At the end of the year, he said, he would be retiring. In preparation, he was readying his studio, so that he could take up sculpting again. “My first project was to redo the floor. All the kneeling put a weird pressure on my knee, and something popped. It’s actually kind of funny, when you think about it. Ten years as circus director and I never get hurt.” He smiled from the kitchen. “Turns out it’s the art that’s dangerous.”