The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  By May, with my return to America approaching, my circophilia had reached a plateau. I was still going to shows, but with less regularity, and I anticipated that the fascination would end with my study abroad, that the “new circus” would be, forever after, a quirky French treat, something to look forward to if I ever came back, like the booksellers on the Seine or pain au chocolat. Then, one muggy afternoon, a discovery changed my plans.

  PERUSING THE PARISCOPE, I stumbled onto a listing for a trapeze workshop. I had never swung on a trapeze, had never even considered trying, but the workshop was free and directed specifically at amateurs.

  And so, the following Saturday, I caught the RER, Paris’s regional train, to one of Paris’s eastern suburbs. The workshop was held in an old factory, and I arrived feeling anxious. People deal with nervousness in all sorts of ways: I tend to babble, and that day I was babbling a lot. First, I babbled to the other amateurs as we wiggled into our harnesses under the shadow of a giant net. Next, I babbled to the ox of a man holding the bottom of a precariously thin wire ladder. The big man showed me how to climb the ladder and then dispatched me up to the perch, a table-sized platform bolted to the ceiling, where I babbled even more uncontrollably to the pair of startled stocky acrobats assigned to help me fly.

  The acrobats were from Sweden and Portugal. I told them about my recent interest in the circus, and all the kind circus people I’d met in Paris, and how heartbroken I was to be leaving. They were nice, and nodded amicably as they prepped the bar for me, but something must have gotten lost in translation, because the acrobats missed a critical point: they somehow mistakenly understood I had flown on a trapeze before. And so, instead of strapping my harness into the safety ropes—the way they had done for every other amateur—they let me fly “open,” without ropes. Obviously I should have noticed it myself, but I was too busy babbling, and it was only after I had gripped the bar, hopped off the platform, and rushed into the open air that my perilous circumstances dawned on me.

  An unfortunate scene ensued. Once I realized the potential danger of my situation, my body seized into a fist, every muscle clamping simultaneously in fear. Voices sprang to life around me, voices shouting instructions. From below: “Bouge pas! Bouge pas!” Don’t move! Don’t move! From behind: “Speak English! Speak English!” In the end, the coach below and the acrobats behind managed to talk me down, but only after my swing had drifted to a stop, so that I hung, limply, ridiculously, like a dead fish on a string.

  Back on the ground, my brain buzzing with unfamiliar chemicals, I paced in delirious circles. It was the single most traumatic experience of my adult life. But I had survived! And it was invigorating.

  After a few minutes, I fled outside for some air. More pacing ensued, until I noticed a young woman, small and svelte, with short, spiky hair. I recognized her immediately. Before the workshop, while I had been wrestling with my harness, she had scurried up the ladder with the ease of a jungle monkey climbing a vine and breezed out over the net with pointed-toe perfection. She was obviously a professional, and she watched me now, leaning against the bike rack, with an amused curiosity, as if I were a squirrel trying to bury a nut in the sidewalk.

  Propelled perhaps by the chemical cloud in my brain, I decided to talk to her. I asked where she’d learned to swing so gracefully.

  “The National School,” she replied.

  It was the first I’d heard of the place. I asked her if it was indeed a state-subsidized circus school. She nodded, puffing on her cigarette in that cool, casual way they must teach in French kindergartens.

  “En fait, we’re all students there,” she said, waving a hand in the direction of the hall.

  The words seeped into my brain. The ox, the Swede, the Portuguese acrobat—they were all students at a professional circus school, on their way to becoming circus performers. I grunted in admiration, and then, for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, I asked, “What about me?”

  The girl looked at me skeptically. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest.

  “You want to be in the circus?”

  I feigned nonchalance. “Is that an option?”

  She shrugged and took another long forties-film-star pull on her cigarette. “I don’t see why not,” she said finally. “The National School has an entrance exam. You might not get in, but there are plenty of other schools. I’m sure somebody would take you. It’s not like the circus is some secret club anymore.”

  The rest was logistics. Back in America, I started scheming ways to return to Paris and its circus scene. That summer, with my senior year approaching, I received an e-mail from my college about the Fulbright fellowship, a government program for projects abroad. I applied with a proposal to study the contemporary circus in France, and, six months later, received word: I would be attending circus school in Paris the following fall.

  Later, during my circus sojourn and afterward, people would occasionally ask me if I had run away with the circus. It never felt that way. Nothing could have felt more natural. I was young and unencumbered. I found something that inspired me and profited from an opportunity to explore it.

  Which is maybe the biggest indication of just how much the circus has changed. Not only can you be born outside the circus, you don’t even need to work that hard to get in. You can decide, in a capricious, curious way that it might have something to offer, and because the circus is open, because anybody can take pleasure from it, you can go explore it. As people in the business today like to say, the circus has a place for everyone.

  “You know that’s hilarious, right?” a friend said. My bag lay half packed on the bed. I had called to tell him about my upcoming adventure.

  “Why’s that?” I said.

  “To be honest, I didn’t even know you liked the circus.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, neither did I.”

  * * *

  * Scholars have a plethora of names for the movement: the new circus, the new-style circus, the contemporary circus, the circus of creation, the other circus. I’ll use “modern circus” as the blanket term for anything after 1968.

  † Today the model is housed at the Ringling Estate’s Tibbals Learning Center in Florida.

  (illustration credit 2.1)

  FOR GOING ON FORTY YEARS NOW, the government of France has funded a National School for the Circus Arts. Most people don’t know this fact about France, and lots of puns spring to mind when they hear it. Americans especially enjoy it, since the circus occupies roughly the same artistic echelon in America as synchronized swimming or pot-holder-making. “How do you pick the class clown?” they frequently ask. “Boy, it must be hard to juggle all those classes!”

  Not surprisingly, the attitude toward circus education is different in France. The government allocates €9 million a year to the circus, an amount equivalent to their support of the Palestinian Authority. The money is earmarked for a variety of functions—troupes, festivals, and other special events—but the largest chunk, roughly 40 percent, goes to support the National School, the crown jewel of their circus educational system and one of the most prestigious circus training grounds in the world.

  As in most American universities, the curriculum at the National School takes four years to complete. The first two years occur at the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque de Rosny-sous-Bois, where I would be studying. The rest are hosted at a bigger facility, the Centre National des Arts du Cirque, located in Châlons-en-Champagne, a village ninety miles east of the capital. Technically, the schools exist as separate institutions with distinct budgets, directors, and facilities, but practically, they function as a single track, and admission is highly competitive. Each year more than three hundred circus hopefuls apply. Fifteen students are picked to attend—an acceptance rate lower than most Ivy League schools. The students come from all over the world—from Brazil, Holland, Finland, Sweden, England, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Japan, Chile, Germany, the United States, China, and a dozen other countries. What at
tracts them varies. Many praise the unique curriculum, the renowned staff. The free tuition is a plus, as are the fringe benefits. It’s not uncommon for a student to find a lifelong performance partner or even a spouse while training at the school. France also has munificent cultural policies, making it a good place to start a company after you graduate. If you want to organize a show, for instance, the government will seed you the money and the school will often provide a space to train. Being an elite institution, the National School has networking tentacles that reach across the continent and around the world. There is, so to speak, no better springboard.

  Not that any of this mattered to me when I enrolled. My interest in the circus was personal—I wanted a taste of the circus life—but it was mostly intellectual. I wanted to understand how and why the art had changed, and why it had become so popular in France specifically. Although the movement was international, with companies and schools from the Arctic to Australia, the French had played an exceptional role in its development. Many of the early “new circus” companies were French, including what many consider the first, Le Cirque Bonjour, founded in 1971. In 1974, Annie Fratellini and Alexis Gruss, Jr., a pair of descendants from famous French circus families, had created the first western circus schools in Paris. Beginning in 1981, the French state even began subsidizing circus companies, the way it subsidized theater and dance companies. It initiated infrastructural support for the industry in the form of professional networks and a series of “circus poles” around the country, venues specializing in circus shows.

  This attention isn’t completely surprising. As I would come to find out, the French have always had an impassioned relationship with the circus. Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini once commented that Paris was “the city that made the circus an art,” and, during the Belle Époque, Paris was to the circus as Vienna was to opera, or as New York was later to jazz, with elegant, aristocratic shows featuring ballerinas on horseback and acrobats in bow ties.

  Still, the current enthusiasm seems unprecedented. In 2003, the year of my investigation, the country, which is slightly smaller than Texas, had more than four hundred circus companies, 85 percent of which were founded in the last twenty years. The French Federation of Circus Schools included more than 150 institutions, extending from the Alps to the English Channel. In 2002, the government even went so far as to declare a “Year of the Circus,” during which the circus portion of the federal budget rose to €10.5 million, with additional aid for circus companies, schools, publications, and theaters, as well as a bevy of special events (e.g., “The Cinema Goes to the Circus,” three days of circus-film projections). A headline for Libération, the Parisian daily, said it all: “Vive le cirque!”

  How had the French helped spark this theatrical revolution? What place did this new form have in Europe’s contemporary artistic landscape? How did the French performers perceive their work?

  Such were my questions when I embarked. I thought they amounted to an artistic study—an examination of the renaissance of a theatrical form. Later I realized that my study would be as much cultural as artistic, that the circus spoke volumes about what it meant to be French. I didn’t realize this when I landed, but there were intimations of it early on—even on my very first day.

  After a night of fitful circus dreams, I reported for a morning meeting with Anny Goyer, the director of the École Nationale des Arts du Cirque de Rosny-sous-Bois. At first or even second glance, Anny hardly seemed like the sort of woman to be directing a circus school. Small and birdlike, she wore a schoolmarmish dress suit and a serious expression.

  We met in her office, a cluttered room in a metallic trailer in Rosny-sous-Bois. The trailers, Anny explained as we installed ourselves, were temporary. A few years before, the school’s tent, a marvel of Italian engineering and the pride of the neighborhood, had been ravaged by what some called the “storm of the century,” which had blown through Paris on Christmas Eve of 1999. Since then, the school had been working to find a replacement, but the work was slow, the bureaucracy thorny. In the meantime, Anny said, classes were being held in a cultural compound across town, in a suburb called Noisiel. “If you have any trouble finding it, just ask around,” she said, printing out a map.

  She also printed out a copy of my classes. I was enrolled in what Anny referred to as the school’s “preparatory program.” It was a bit of an experiment. The goal was to prepare the students for the school’s competitive entrance exam, which would take place the following spring. As such, my classes would focus on the three disciplines covered on the test: acrobatics, dance, and acting.

  Anny and I had exchanged a few e-mails before my arrival. I knew the broad outline of the classes and had been excited. I imagined the experience joyfully, like some sort of summer camp for adults. But that was dreaming about the curriculum from afar. Now that I had the schedule in front of me, with the details printed in ink, I felt a surge of nervousness whip through me as the reality of my situation hit me for the first time. According to the schedule, I would be studying tumbling for three hours per day. I didn’t really even know what tumbling was. Handstands? Back flips? I had never even tried tumbling. Down below, there was a course labeled “Trampoline.” Of course, I had friends who had trampolines in high school. But I had never been on one, and even studiously avoided them for a period, after meeting a once aspiring doctor who had shattered his spine when he bounced off a trampoline at his high school graduation party.

  And that wasn’t the worst of it. At the bottom of the page, below the regular curriculum, there was a list of other classes, including the Trapèze volant, the “flying trapeze.” At the sight of the words, I felt my heart kick.

  “This here …” I gestured to the words. “I’ll be doing the trapeze?”

  Anny registered my hesitation. It wasn’t a part of the regular curriculum, she explained. It was an adult amateur class that the school offered at night. I was of course invited, even encouraged to attend. “I know the trapeze can be scary in the beginning, but after you get the hang of it, there’s really nothing better.” It was, Anny added, how she’d been sucked into the circus herself.

  I told her I would think about it.

  Earlier I said that I sensed that the circus was accessible, and this is true. Nevertheless, looking back on this first meeting with Anny, reflecting on the sheer anxiety that the circus managed to incite in me, it occurs to me how wrapped up my feelings were in my perceptions at the time. On a purely physiological level, learning to fly on the trapeze is no great feat, at least no more complex than any number of physical activities, such as learning to swim, for example. And yet the trapeze sounds so much more difficult because of our mental context for the activity, because of everything the trapeze connotes—wagons bumping over country roads, clowns dozing on piles of straw, big-shouldered women waving from the backs of elephants. And, in spite of my explorations, I was still affected by those connotations. Even after my arrival in France, the art remained a magical question mark. Would I really learn to turn a back flip? Would I really fly on the trapeze? It all still seemed so impossible, not physically, but as an idea, because I romanticized that idea. It made up, as the writer Edward Hoagland once noted, part of the “furniture of [my] mind.”

  When we had finished chatting, Anny took me on a tour of the grounds, which, for the time being, consisted of a few metal trailers and an empty concrete slab. In the “library,” a trailer cluttered with books, she assembled for me a sizable stack of contemporary circus information—brochures, newspaper articles, the school’s student guide.

  Back at the main trailer, Frédéric Leguay, the school’s programming director, was waiting. Like Anny, he had a professional, almost professorial air, with dark hair, stylish horn-rimmed glasses, and a black V-neck sweater.

  Reading the look on my face, perhaps, he asked me how I was feeling.

  My French had declined with my nerves, and so I decided not to go into details, but instead gestured to the packet of informatio
n that Anny had given me and commented on the impressive amount of circus scholarship in France.

  “Ah bon?” Frédéric replied. “It’s different in America?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, we’re a little behind. All anyone talks about in America is Cirque du Soleil.”

  Immediately I saw Frédéric wince. He shot a look to Anny, who had raised herself on her toes, like a cat bristling under attack.

  “Attention!” she said, waving a pedagogical finger. “Cirque du Soleil is fine, but that’s not at all what we do here.”

  “It’s not?” I said.

  She shook her head adamantly. “What we do, it’s not just divertissement”—not just entertainment. “It’s …” She hesitated.

  “Art?” Frédéric suggested.

  Anny smiled. “Exactement!”

  I promised to keep that in mind.

  (illustration credit 3.1)

  AT SOME POINT during my first week I noticed that Paris is shaped like a circus ring. Inside is le centre ville, the Paris of postcards, with its monuments and warrens of cobbled streets. Outside is la banlieue, the suburbs, gazing into the city with curiosity and sometimes envy. From my apartment in the center I made the transition almost daily to the school in the suburbs—inside the ring and out.

  My days started at seven, with a hot shower, followed by a breakfast and a stretch on my shag rug in the sun. I tried to be out the door by nine. Paris at nine feels like New York at seven—dim, sluggish, and serene. It was autumn, and though the air had turned cold, the locals still huddled on the café terraces, smoking and sipping espressos from porcelain cups. I took my own espresso at a little café called L’Annex, a quaint, one-room place run by a jovial Moroccan named Omar.