The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  In videos such moves can make him look cheesy and overwrought (Pascal once called him “kitsch”), but their inclusion marked a fundamentally important shift. By incorporating his body as a central element of the performance, by refusing to “hide behind” his objects, Brunn changed the emphasis of his juggling. No longer was the work a mere demonstration of skill. Now it was about the juggler himself, about the visual and potentially poetic presentation of his body in dialogue with objects as well as the connection between its movement and his personality. “Francis used to stress this to me all the time,” Viktor Kee once told me. Kee, the Cirque du Soleil star, was a Brunn protégé. “He told me never to compete, literally or metaphorically. Your real act is who you are.”

  This was one of the central tenets of the modern circus movement, and the first essential point in understanding how the circus evolved: the circus isn’t just a series of skillful displays; it’s a vehicle for personal expression, for the conveyance of an artist’s ideas and emotions. Perhaps this truth seems obvious, but for a long time it was rarely voiced. Traditional circus performers took their acts seriously, investing a tremendous amount of themselves in those acts’ execution. But their interest was in a kind of classical purity. Perfection was produced by conforming to the codes, attaining the correct form. It was an admirable approach, but for the circus to become a modern art, something more was needed; the performers would need to apply their skills as a means of personal communication with an audience.

  Personal expression can take myriad forms. Like a dancer, a circus performer might attempt to express a negative feeling in the routine—pain, loss, sadness—or an idea or a concept. As with most modern art, the concept doesn’t have to be obvious, and in most cases it isn’t, but the audience still feels the effects. For “Light,” one of his more popular routines, Michael Moschen manipulated a crystal ball across his body, rolling it over his arms, his chest, and his back. The act was supposedly a tribute to Moschen’s sister, who had died in a car accident several years before. To Moschen, the crystal ball symbolized her soul; he endeavored to communicate the idea that, for the two or three minutes the ball was in motion, she was alive.

  Among jugglers, Brunn was the first to aspire to create such work, and it’s this intention that makes him important. By declaring himself an artist, by aspiring to make work that meant something to him personally, that spoke to his own ideas, his own experiences, his own past, his loves, anxieties, attitudes, he willed modern juggling into being.

  After Brunn, the movement continued to develop through the seventies and eighties. Many of the practitioners were American. In the East, Moschen was big. Out west, in Colorado, a group of jugglers called Airjazz created theatrical juggling shows, combining the skill with dance, character work, and physical theater, and they eventually landed on Broadway.

  During the eighties and nineties, the art of juggling sputtered in America, largely for reasons of cultural funding. (On the vagaries of American funding, more later.) Europe, however, carried the torch. In England, one of the earliest and most influential groups was Gandini Juggling. Founded in London by Sean Gandini and Kati Yla-hokkala, the group, according to their company mission, was born of the desire to create full-length juggling shows, “fueled by the belief that juggling is an exciting living art form.” In France, where much of the early action centered on the National School, modern juggling became so popular that, by the time Gilligan visited, it was the art’s dominant form. The majority of French schools taught at least some “art” juggling, and professionals could expect to live off their work through shows and grants and teaching.

  After his exposure to modern juggling, Gilligan deliberately set out to learn the form, primarily by talking to as many European jugglers as he could. He cultivated a style of his own, which he billed in America as Postmodern Juggling. People didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Because they have never been to Europe, most performers in the States have no idea of the possibilities,” Gilligan told me that day in the store. “The bar is still set really low. The typical reaction was two-part. First they’d say, I’ve never seen anything like that. Then they’d admit, I liked it. Which I guess is a good thing.” Nevertheless, Gilligan eventually tired of the “hustle,” of educating people about the work, and returned to Europe, where he had made a name for himself.

  I asked if he could ever see himself living in the States again.

  “Sure, I’d love to,” he replied, “but the work’s just not there yet. It’s the kids now, the first wave who know about Europe, mostly through the Internet, who are making the changes. In fifteen years, it is going to be the kids with that experimental spirit who are really badass performers,” he said. “We’re just going to have to wait fifteen years, that’s all.”

  JUGGLERS ESPECIALLY ENGAGED the issue of what “modern” circus means. On the Internet, where they collected in droves, there were long debates over the recent changes in the field, and how the new “modern” forms differed from more technical forms. The issue had become so prevalent that a backlash had emerged. “Can’t we just shut up about this whole thing?” one forum poster wrote.

  Initially, I didn’t know what to make of this discussion. Listening to a juggler talk about Marcel Duchamp, I would feel my ironic knee start to jerk, the product of my own stereotypes about the craft. But I was overlooking an essential point. The circus had “absorbed” juggling during the twentieth century, which was a period of immense artistic changes. There was a chasm between the classical art of 1900, when Cinquevalli made his mark in London, and the art of 1980, when the art broke away. In the intervening period, modernism and then postmodernism had swept through the world. As a reaction to the destruction of two world wars, and the sense of increasing instability brought on by accelerated industrialized life, the old codes fell away, yielding to a more fractured, individualized approach to art.

  This shift affected most forms of creative human endeavor. Take painting. From the Middle Ages until the end of the nineteenth century, painters had adhered to strict rules of composition and restricted themselves to the representation of subjects largely culled from the natural and religious world. But with Impressionism, painters stopped trying to convey a realistic image of the world and instead tried to capture their subjective experience—their impressions of a moment, how a subject made the artist think or feel. Other forms went through equivalent transitions: Composers developed atonal chords. Poets abandoned rhyme and meter.

  This unshackling of artistic rules occurred in all the arts at roughly the same time, and yet the circus and its component art remained unaffected. Enslaved by their own traditions, the forms of circus art failed to evolve. Only in the 1970s did the circus finally wake up, like a man emerging from a mythic slumber. Only then did artists engage with the essential modernist questions that other disciplines had long since resolved: What is juggling? What defines it? What are its limits? What can it be used for?

  No wonder jugglers were excited. In a small but justifiable way, they felt they had arrived at a historical moment in their discipline. And it was all happening so quickly. Changes that had occurred in other forms over decades were happening in the circus arts in a few years.

  Of course, nobody knows where this is headed. Technical juggling is still the dominant form of the discipline, especially in America, and perhaps it always will be. As I was reminded in the shop with Gilligan, for all the changes in the form, the new overlay of intelligence, the fundamental appeal remains the same.

  We were standing near the back of the shop, perusing a shelf laden with juggling paraphernalia of every conceivable shape and size—clubs, balls, scarves. Feeling inspired, I had decided to buy some juggling materials of my own, and Gilligan agreed to help pick them out. I plucked a beanbag off the shelf. It was round and plum-sized, with blue and white panels. “Yeah, that’s good.” Gilligan squeezed the beanbag. “You’re gonna suck in the beginning, so it’s better you don’t spend half your time cha
sing shit.”

  Just then the door to the shop clanged open. A postman backed into the shop, his arms wrapped around a cardboard box, which he delivered to the shopkeeper at the counter. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but when the shopkeeper pried open the flaps of the box, his face lit up. “Merci! Merci!” he said fervently to the postman, then shuffled quickly over to where we were standing.

  “Eh, excusez-moi.” He approached Gilligan tentatively. “If you want, I have some white rings for you now.” He held one up.

  The juggler’s face erupted into a smile. “You are my new best friend,” he said to the shopkeeper.

  We moved to the register in a pack, where the shopkeeper pulled four more rings from a box and handed them to Gilligan, who gave them his jeweler’s appraisal. The shopkeeper watched him. “You are Mr. Gilligan, non?”

  Gilligan nodded.

  “We have some films of you,” the shopkeeper said as his wife appeared from a back room behind the counter, watching Gilligan wordlessly.

  “Merci,” Gilligan said.

  “We have also this,” the shopkeeper’s wife chimed in, picking up a colored flyer from the counter and handing it to Gilligan. Since Gilligan’s initial trip to Europe, he’d been back to France several times. This time he had been invited specially to create a new juggling show with a French troupe led by Jérôme Thomas, an artistic-juggling legend. The flyer was for the upcoming show, and Gilligan stared at it with seemingly genuine astonishment, like a rookie admiring his own baseball card for the first time. “Wow,” he said. “C’est moi.” He thanked the woman and put the flyer in his bag. He’d started to do the same with the rings when the shopkeeper stopped him with a hand and a playful grin.

  “First, a figure, maybe.” The shopkeeper and his wife stood shoulder to shoulder, beaming.

  “A figure?” asked Gilligan.

  “Yes, just one figure, one trick, please.”

  Gilligan shrugged. Nowhere, not in airports, not in hotel lobbies, not even in Accro’Balles, was he immune. He picked up the white rings from the counter, and we all took a step back to watch as he casually performed a basic five-ring trick. The shopkeeper, his wife, and I all applauded. Then the juggler laughed and, rings in hand, executed an overly dramatic Shakespearean bow.

  * * *

  * One article from the period claims Katsnoshin sired the first Japanese children born outside of the imperial mainland.

  (illustration credit 7.1)

  A MONTH AFTER MY EXCURSION with Gilligan, I still couldn’t juggle. When I tried, I quickly grew frustrated. Practice seemed willfully Sisyphean: I threw balls in the air and then scrambled after them as they fell. Depressed, I stopped trying to learn, and the balls began to gather dust on my mantel. In retrospect, I think I might never have learned to juggle had an unexpected meeting not spurred me to action.

  Nestled in a cobblestone side street on the Left Bank is the Librairie Bonaparte, a boutique shop specializing in littérature de spectacle—anything related to the performing arts. To drum up business, the owner, an imperious woman in her forties, had taken to hosting readings by local performing artists in which they read passages that had “marked” their work. One week it was a choreographer reading Nerval. Another reader, a director, shared Dostoevsky. The week I attended, the guest was Jérôme Thomas.

  I had been hearing about Thomas since the beginning of the year. In circus circles, as I said, he was a living legend. Jean-Michel Guy openly referred to him as “a master” (un maître). Back in the eighties, Thomas had been the form’s primary progenitor in France as well as the creator of the country’s first full-length juggling show, Extraballe.

  What really made Thomas famous, though, was his personality. In interviews he was animated and eccentric. He talked about juggling the way Picasso discussed painting. “The ball is the master,” Jérôme once told a reporter. “One must understand it like a shell discovered on the beach and listen to it in order to hear the sea.” When I asked other people about Thomas, they described him with a mixture of amusement and admiration that made me curious.

  On the night of his reading, I took the Métro to the bookshop after my final class. I had arranged to meet a couple of other students there and found them sitting on a staircase in the back, among a crowd of forty or so. Patrons were crowded into folding chairs and spilling onto the floor.

  Thomas arrived and took a seat in a high-backed wooden chair. He was tall and sinewy, with an angular face and black hair flecked with gray. Professionally cool, he fielded a series of typical questions (“Are you going to juggle for us?”) with professional sagesse (“It’s true that one could make a show with objects in this room”), and then turned to his selected passage from If This Is a Man, by Primo Levi, an account of Levi’s time in Auschwitz. The passage described an informal market prisoners had established in the camp to exchange bits of food and clothing. Thomas read the words in the slow and somber voice of a poet.

  When he finished, he placed the book on his knee and related his own trip to Auschwitz. He described the cold rain that fell as he boarded the van in Kraków, and his expectations for the visit, and how paltry those expectations proved to be when he was confronted with the horror of the camp as expressed in the smallest details: where the fence burrowed into the dirt, a line scratched into the plaster wall. “As an artist, you ask yourself what can be done in the face of such insurmountable evil—what can I do? The answer is, very little. I can only try to tip the balance away from all that evil, toward something better, something more hopeful, toward the beautiful.”

  From my perch in the back of the room, I listened intently to his monologue and tried to grasp the sentiment he was expressing. On the one hand, Thomas made a clear and serious point about the function of art and an artist’s ability to add light in the war against the world’s dark forces. But to me Thomas was just a juggler pontificating on the evils of Auschwitz. Despite all my research and conversations with Gilligan, I was still stereotyping jugglers: there was still a limit to how seriously I could take them.

  And so I approached Thomas after the reading. We chatted briefly at the front of the store, the crowd buzzing around us. I told him about my classes at the National School, my interest in the circus, and my meeting with Jay Gilligan. He listened attentively, nodding sharply and interjecting “Hmm-hmm” and “Umm-hmm” with distracting regularity. The man had what pulp novelists call a “penetrating gaze,” exaggerated by his height. But he also seemed congenial and genuinely curious about my activities. At the end of our conversation, we agreed to meet again in three weeks, when he would return to Paris for another performance.

  I thanked him, and was heading for the door when I heard his voice behind me.

  “Hey! American!” He was staring at me over the crowd, his lips crimped into a wry smile. “Are you a juggler?”

  I winced. What Thomas was asking was whether I was part of his tribe of jugglers—an “insider.” I had been confronting this question since the beginning of the year: Do you merely like the circus, or do you actually perform in it? Invariably, when I mentioned my attendance at the National School, I would be treated with the informality of camaraderie. There was still a low wall around the circus.

  Influenced by such concerns, I found myself exaggerating to Thomas: Yes, I told him, I juggle a bit.

  His face unfolded perceptibly. “Excellent! An American juggler!” He cast his eyes about the shop. “I don’t often get to juggle with Americans!”

  I hedged. “Really,” I said, “I only juggle a little bit.”

  But the damage had been done, and when the juggler gazed at me, there was a glint in his eye.

  “Oh, don’t worry.” Thomas smiled sardonically. “Just be sure to bring your balls when we meet.”

  I HAD THREE WEEKS to learn to juggle. To the layperson this time frame might not seem like an issue, given my enrollment in the best circus school in Europe, but there were complications. For starters, the school offered no regular
juggling classes. Occasionally there were workshops, usually for the advanced students, but for the most part jugglers were left to their own devices. Frédéric explained that jugglers learned mostly by doing. Though I knew this was a reasonable way to learn, it was not exactly helpful in my case.

  I thought about approaching the students themselves for help, but after several months of making a spectacle of my failings as a tumbler, I was reluctant to add juggling to my list of public embarrassments. The jugglers were also a peculiar lot. Historically, they had a reputation for being self-motivated and solitary; they generally ate and trained alone. I saw hints of this reclusive behavior at the National School. At night, after the other students had retired to the campfire in the courtyard to swig wine from bottles and swap stories, the jugglers would slip into the empty hall to practice. To observe this ritual, the habits of this rare and lanky species of circus performers, was to conduct a piece of circus ethnography.

  “The jugglers are the crazy ones,” Ryszard whispered in my ear during one such session. We had been lounging on a mat, discussing his trip to New Orleans (“I was hoping to use my French”), when a pair of sophomore jugglers, Alex and Julien, entered the hall. I knew both in passing. Alex, who was lean and muscular with a delicate air, specialized in “bounce juggling”; he hurled white silicone balls at the ground rhythmically, as if squishing bugs. Julien was more unconventional and was quiet to the point of being stern. I had previously encountered Julien juggling two balls and a rusty sickle. Later in the year, he would shave his head with a razor and spend weeks trying to catch a ball on his barely visible hairline.