by Joshua Cohen
Barnum’s management turned the American circus into the tented embodiment of this country’s expansionism: He increased the number and type of its acts and brought on midway attractions (games of chance, not games of skill) and sideshows (ranging from temperance sermonizing to burlesque striptease). Before Barnum’s innovations, the American big top shaded only a single performance area, demarcated from the bleachers by a single wooden ring, which meant that there were frequent pauses, to clear the area of excrement, or prep the apparatuses for subsequent acts. To rid the circus of such pauses, and so keep the audience enrapt, Barnum added a second ring, and then a third, which he found to be the minimum that permitted uninterrupted entertainment: In the event that two rings would have to be serviced—returfed, rerigged, or caged—one ring would still always be available for performance. This three-ring model ensured that the show would go on, the circus would never stop, and that the audience was regularly gavaged with fresh stimuli. It was Barnum’s belief—a belief arrived at on the road, and through having to advertise and superlativize his every appearance—that people were never as interested in what was in front of them as they were in what was in front of others, and that they were best engaged when being made actively covetous, concerned with what other people were engaged with elsewhere. To be at Barnum’s circus—not merely in the round, but in the tripartite round—was, and still is, to be trapped in an antique, physicalized split screen, tugged perpetually between expectation (the mental chyron of “What comes next?”) and neurosis (the mental chyron of “What’s going on now in the rings to my left and right?”). Barnum’s ideal circus customer has become today’s ideal consumer, not least of “breaking news”: kept in a state of constant distraction, constantly solicited diversion, suffused not with fear for someone’s life, but with what is acronymized online as FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out.
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IN 1884, BARNUM DISPATCHED twenty-one of his elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge as a public-service demonstration of the span’s resilience—to verify that it would bear any and all trafficked weight—but obviously too as a publicity ploy, a jumbo lumbering billboard-parade for his circus, whose final incarnation I attended at the newish, mallish Barclays Center six times in one week, walking there across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan.
And the first thing I noticed was: No elephants. Stampeding children, yes. Stampeding parents buying children cotton candy and popcorn and light-up top hats and crowns, yes. Even a sad, tiny gaggle of PETA protesters. And yet: Not a single solitary pachyderm. The GOP’s mascot (or its endangered Asian variety) left the circus last year, after a decades-long spate of PETA-filed lawsuits and PETA-backed animal-rights legislation finally succeeded in making their presence too costly, and Feld Entertainment transferred all of their elephants to the Center for Elephant Conservation, a private nonprofit preserve in central Florida about an hour inland from corporate headquarters, where the big gray rugose beasts are cared for, bred, and used for genetic-disease research, and reemployed as “therapy animals” for children with cancer. Nearly every Feld executive I spoke with blamed the precipitousness of RBandB&BC’s demise on the elephants’ absence—they were surprised when ticket sales declined by roughly 30 percent in the six months since their departure—and, I’ll admit, I’m inclined to agree with their conclusion. There at the Barclays, I missed the tuskless wonders myself; not visually or apparitionally, say—not as much their delicate, almost dainty high-stepping, not as much the way they used to chorus-line, linked trunk to tail, mounting each other for the climax of the ménage—but, honestly, as I queued through the metal detector into the concourse, I missed their shit, the reek of it, the warm fecal atmospherics.
The first circuses I ever attended, as a kid in the 1980s, were the Clyde Beatty Cole Bros. circuses, which by their phasing out in the mid-2000s were the last American touring circuses to still be held in the open air, under tattered tents, redolent, in the doldrums of summer, of sawdust and straw and hot piss-puddles of dung. That dung remains my fondest circus memory: its smell so strong that it was also a temperature, a climate, so tropically intense as to transcend the sensory and become, nearly, a philosophical condition. What I mean is: The shit was there, it was plainly there, just where the shitters had dropped it, and I and my siblings and the other children would joke about it, while all the grown-ups around us, including my parents, would ignore it. They’d pretend that it didn’t exist.
Now—as a grown-up myself, in a time of streaming media, when no one ever has to leave the couch (except to go to the bathroom)—I can’t help but regard the experience of being forced in my youth to sit in public amid the officially unacknowledged fetid stench of the feces and partially digested plant matter of the world’s largest land mammal as not merely educational, but morally educational: morally improving, compared to which the Barclays experience seemed fraudulent, weak, and coddled. There was even something evil, something lazy-evil, about showing up to witness scared live animals follow commands and whiplashes delivered by scared live imperiled sweaty humans, and smelling nothing: utter shitlessness, and I had to resist suggesting to the circus’s press agent—who’d met me at the box office to conduct me to my roomy ringside seat fitted with two beverage holders and a food ledge—that RBandB&BC ought to sell their elephants’ excrement as merch, coprophilic concessions, or else have the odor laboratory-synthesized into a liquid, spray, or gel, so that I might, one day, in the circusless future, use it to anoint the VR headsets of my offspring.
RBandB&BC still tours around by train, not for the romance, but for the efficiency: Even at this late date, rail remains the only way to ensure that all of the nearly three hundred people, five dozen or so animals, and umpteen tons of heavy equipment get exercised, fed, showered, rested, and to the show on time. To perform as many dates as possible, in as many cities as possible, RBandB&BC splits up—into a Red Unit and a Blue Unit. Each unit maintains its own mile-long train—the longest privately owned trains in the world—and each plies its own route across the country, one up north, one down south, because that’s the way the train lines are in this country: mostly latitudinally oriented, rarely intersecting along longitude. The circus heads, as the tracks head, as the country spread, east to west, and so its itineraries can be read as archival maps, drawn by North-South animus, forgotten industrial feuds, and obsolete freight monopolies. Circus acts are so dependent on individual talents that they’re essentially unduplicable—you can’t just go online and find a substitute family of prestidigitators, plate spinners, or llama wranglers—and so the Red/Blue split requires RBandB&BC to present two different productions, both of which were rejiggered this past year, to compensate for the loss of the elephants. The Red Unit presents Circus XTREME—in which the classic circus arts alternate with extreme-sports demonstrations sourced from a score of other properties owned by Feld Entertainment (Monster Jam, Monster Energy AMA Supercross, Marvel Universe LIVE!): BMX biking, slackline, parkour. Meanwhile, the Blue Unit, which was the unit that stopped in New York, presents Out of This World, the last production that RBandB&BC will ever put on, yet also the first in all of its history to have a story—as if the circus couldn’t bear to leave us without a narrative; it couldn’t go gently without a plot.
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ONCE UPON A TIME in faraway deep space (or so this last RBandB&BC production begins) there was a circus Starseeker named Paulo, who was out canvassing the universe with his Magic Telescope when he spotted two stars, Johnathan and Davis, both of whom he hoped to recruit for his extraterrestrial circus. But—due to union rules, or HR issues, or just the basic ambience of nonsense that pervades every turning point in the circus’s script—he was able to pick only one, and he picked Johnathan. The pair flew from planet to planet in a caboose-like spacecraft, scouting out the best circus routines and talent.
That’s the backstory. The story itself begins just after the “spec,�
�� or opening number, with Davis left behind and feeling (clownishly) dejected. Indeed, he’s fallen in with a band of clowns that has the tragicomic luck of becoming imprisoned (not “recruited” but taken hostage and imprisoned) by the evil Intergalactic Circus Queen Tatiana.
Queen Tatiana, then, offers Davis a deal: She’ll release him along with the rest of the clowns, but only after he leads them on a mission to find Paulo and Johnathan, steal their Magic Telescope and their roster of performers.
Which is a crazy move on the queen’s part, of course: To negotiate with clowns. To trust a clown—even a clown bent on revenge—with anything but clowning.
Queen Tatiana, Davis, and his merry squad pursue Paulo and Johnathan across four planets (two before intermission, two after), each named for an element: Fire, Sand (which I guess is Earth), Water, and Ice (no Gas). On the Sand Planet, Paulo and Johnathan find Alexander Lacey and his tribe of “big cats” (lions, tigers); on the Ice Planet, they find troupes of contortionists and ice skaters and, under the massive Snow Mountain, the Vortex of Ice, which is actually a globe made of steel, in which nine motorcyclists ride simultaneously.
Just then, a moment before intermission, Queen Tatiana, Davis, and his bozo platoon catch up with Paulo and Johnathan, and proceed to hijack their spacecraft, kidnap the talent they’ve amassed, and rob them of their telescope.
Cue the pyro, smoke, and Queen Tatiana’s Russian-inflected cackling.
ALEXANDER LACEY, BIG-CAT TRAINER
I love the circus but I do what I do because I love big cats. And so as long as I can carry on doing that, wherever that may be, then I’ll be very happy. Sometimes people say, the animals would be better off in a preserve, where they can relax and do nothing; they can live their lives and be peaceful—but these are working animals, these animals are used to being busy, and you can’t expect an animal that’s used to being busy six days a week to all of a sudden sit down and do nothing.
ME: You’re sure you’re not also talking about yourself?
LACEY: Well, yeah.
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THE SECOND ACT OF THE CIRCUS feels only slightly shorter than, but just as predictable as, the lines for soft beverages ($8), cheesy nachos ($10), and bathrooms (gratis). Here, chaser and chased have just been changed around: Now Paulo and Johnathan go after the Queen Tatiana/Davis/clown troika, who make an escape to the Water Planet (where they conscript the King Charles Troupe, an act that plays slapstick basketball on unicycles), and from there to the Fire Planet (where they impress into their ranks acrobats, hoop divers, and, finally, the Constellation of Cossacks, a pack of daredevil equestrians). With Davis and the clowns busy corralling the acts, and bungling the corralling, Paulo and Johnathan are able to retake the Magic Telescope, though once it’s back in their possession, they make the inexplicably generous offer to share it, and Queen Tatiana accepts (how can’t she?). As a finale, they announce their intention to join forces and combine all the myriad acts they’ve been squabbling over into a single mega-circus, and then they take their bows, in an emphatic endorsement of what the souvenir program ($20) describes as “Out of This World Friendship.”
KANAK TCHALABAEV, EQUESTRIAN
The horse, I think, is the circus.
ME: Is the circus? Why?
TCHALABAEV: Because it is—versatile? It can be in comedy, or in acts like ours, with a lot of adrenaline and speed. But also there are dancing horses, and the liberty, in which the horses do the tricks on their own, with no rider. The horse has been part of Ringling Bros. for a long time, very long. How did they bring the circus? The horse. How did the audience go to the circus? The horse. The ringmaster, who does he dress as? He is the man who rides the horse.
ME: How does it feel, then, to not only be in charge of the horses, but also to be married to Tatiana, the Intergalactic Circus Queen?
TCHALABAEV: Not bad, not bad. We don’t have to sleep in the stables.
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HERE ARE THE ACTS I LIKED: the spacewalking, in which gymnasts in astronaut suits balance on the rim of a revolving wheel, simulating zero gravity; the silks routine, in which aerialists jump and twirl and unravel themselves to mimic shooting stars; the gradual, measured, concentrated way that three leotarded women twisted themselves into becoming basically balloon animals, or balloon human furniture for one another; the fat/buff husband, fat/buxom wife team who brought out the shivery dogs and prodded a hog over hurdles.
I even liked the circus’s theme song:
Fast and strong, turbo speed, they don’t need any rest!
We’re on fleek, our space fleet, Paulo knows we’re the best…
But each time I filed out of the Barclays—the aisles clogged by audience members pausing to applaud or clock the Jumbotron, which was scrolling the social-media posts they’d been encouraged to share throughout the show: “dat wuz awesome!!! #ringlingbros,” “the sutton and riley families thank u 4 the memories @ringlingbros”—each time I was returned to the street, I had the weird sensation of having missed something.
Not having missed some act, but having missed some deeper message.
There was something odd, something stupid-odd, about this fairy tale/reality show in which all of the characters had the same names as their performers—“Paulo” played by the Brazilian dwarf and capoeira master Paulo dos Santos; “Johnathan” played by the ringmaster, the American Johnathan Lee Iverson; “Davis” played by fourth-generation Italian clown Davis Vassallo; “Queen Tatiana” played by Russian equestrienne Tatiana Tchalabaeva, etc.—and in which each planet seemed to have its own national themes, which were often different from, or just not generally associated with, the nationalities of its resident acts: the Ice Planet, designed to have a Chinese vibe, hosting the Ecuadoran Torres family of motorcyclists yelling in Spanish; the Water Planet, with its Caribbean aesthetics, full of chihuahuas, a kangaroo, and a German dressed in superhero lederhosen.
Was it possible, I wondered, that this ridiculous story I sat through (six times) was actually the story of its performers’ own lives—their real true lives—a dramatization of how RBandB&BC had ingathered them all from their respective planet-countries, and in doing so had made them citizens of the mongrel landless circus?
Or, alternatively, was it possible that this story was actually a restaging of American circus history—the account of how rival organizations were always competing to hire, and trying to poach, new performers; how they’d try to filch each other’s tricks, and price-fix, poison, injure, arson, and just generally undercut one another until, with the public’s interest in circuses dwindling, they finally had to cut their losses and pool their resources—like how Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey together became RBandB&BC?
Or else—in the interpretation most obvious to me—was this story that started touring the country over the course of the last campaign really just a wishful preelection fable, in which an attractive, deep-voiced, red-white-and-blue-attired, undeniably Obamaesque American black man (Johnathan)—the first black ringmaster in RBandB&BC history—teams up with his disadvantaged friend, a Latin American dwarf (Paulo), to take on and ultimately tame a megalomaniacal Russian adversary (Tatiana) with a deliciously campy lady-Putin accent and enough compromising or just violent leverage over the Trumpian clowns so as to compel their complicity in her nefarious plans for intergalactic circus domination?
Of course, when I proposed as much—to the performers I was interviewing, to the Feld Entertainment PR reps who wouldn’t leave me alone during the interviewing—when I suggested to them that their pride-and-joy circus wasn’t just a mindless farce, but was in fact a vast geopolitical parable or allegory, consciously/unconsciously made out of a mix of current antiisolationist, antinativist, be-wary-of-Russia-but-don’t-blame-Russia-for-everything-especially-not-the-election imagery and signifiers that it didn’t take a Magic Telescope to spot, I got
either no response or denials, headshakes of confusion, or pity.
DAVIS VASSALLO, CLOWN
I like the fact that it’s a little bit of a mystery, the character of the clown. Because a clown is someone that nobody really knows who he is—nobody really knows what’s in his head. We call it clown logic—why sometimes does a clown do this? Or that? Or some gesture? Or nothing? I think this is why the clown is the most interesting character in the circus, because you’re never sure what to expect….
ME: You’re saying you can’t tell what’s going on, psychologically, behind the makeup, the costume?
VASSALLO: You go to the circus and what? What do you expect? You know that the juggler is going to juggle, the acrobats are going to be doing acrobatics….
ME: But you don’t know what—
VASSALLO: You don’t know what the clown is going to do. He has to be able to do all of it, but still you’re never sure what or why or how he feels about it, ever.
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THE AMERICAN CIRCUS, like the Circus Americanus, was an exploitative business based mostly on humbug, and given to animal cruelty, blackface minstrelsy, indentured servitude, and slavery—in which dwarves and giants, the hypertrichotic, the “seal-limbed,” “the Siamese,” and hordes more of the congenitally deformed and disabled were shamelessly presented to the public as “freaks”—but it was also, and sometimes at the same time, something like an aspirational sanctuary, for all the world’s discriminated-against, outcast, and shunned, in which they, and the young, and the young at heart, were at liberty to dress and act and perform themselves as they pleased, in the free exercise of their myriad strange talents.