The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  It felt ridiculous at first, but once I got over my self-consciousness the motion was pleasant. Juggling in a single position, usually over my bed with my knees plugged against the side of the mattress, I could feel constricted. Juggling with Jérôme felt more like dancing. I felt loose and expressive. I came to appreciate juggling in a new way, as a form of bodily motion.

  One sticking point remained, however. In the circus, jugglers might have the worst experience of failure. There is something noble about the failure of an acrobat—he earns your sympathy with his bravery. And clowns are supposed to be ridiculous. But when a juggler drops a ball, when he stoops or scurries after it, the audience just feels embarrassed for him. If he insists on trying again, you hope he succeeds, mostly to have the whole thing done with.

  Of course, every juggler has a way of handling such a moment. Most comic jugglers have what they refer to as “drop lines,” quick jokes that cover the flub. (“Now let me show you my floor show!”) Other jugglers I spoke with try to find their failures motivating. Greg Kennedy, a juggler with Cirque du Soleil, told me he aims for one or two drops per show, as a measure of how hard he’s pushing himself: any more means he’s being sloppy, any fewer and he’s playing it safe.

  “Don’t you ever worry about it?” I asked Jérôme after one of my own mistakes.

  A wry smile spread across his face. “Worry about what?”

  “About the balls falling.”

  He recoiled in mock surprise. “But of course they’re going to fall. You couldn’t juggle if they didn’t.”

  WHEN I FIRST CONSIDERED the changes in the circus, I thought of them as a question of modernity: how had the circus become “modern”? Talking with jugglers, I had come to understand that art lay at the center of the changes. What is art? What makes something artistic? At the National School, these questions were paramount, implicit in every aspect of the curriculum. Professionals argued the issue regularly, and used the dialogue to fuel their creations. Jugglers generally refer to it as the “art versus sport” debate.

  From a critical perspective, there were obvious answers as to how the circus had become a modern art: the shift from technical virtuosity to personal expression and meaning; the rise of longer forms; a willingness to be creative; the intellectualization of the acts. But these were concerns of process, not product. I was more interested in practicalities: What did an “artistic” circus do? What unique experience did the “artistic” circus afford?

  Over espressos after our rehearsal, I put the question to Jérôme. He chuckled as if he knew it was coming.

  “I would say that in art there’s the notion of work.” We were in an empty café near the theater. An icy chill ran through the place. Near the front a window had been propped open with a small block of wood. “In my shows,” he went on, “I make the spectator work. In a spectacle of pure entertainment, that’s not necessarily the goal.”

  I asked him what he meant by “work.”

  His eyes narrowed. Art, he said, forced the audience to ask itself certain questions. “First off, where are we?” The juggler ticked off the point on his thumb. “That’s number one. Place. Next is time. What year is it? What day is it? Who is the artist that you are watching? Why are you watching him? What’s he doing? What’s your perception of him?” Falling back in his chair, the juggler blew out his lips. “Oooh, la la. And of course that’s just the beginning. After that there are historical questions. What is the history of this thing you’re seeing? What is it referring to? What movement? Why does it refer to that and not to another movement? You see what I mean?”

  He paused to light a cigarette and took a drag. “So now think of your spectator. He’s confronted by all this at my show, by these questions, and he works on them. He thinks about them, sometimes without even realizing it.”

  I found this confusing. “How do you make a person think about something without realizing it?”

  The juggler smiled. For his reply, he leaned forward a few inches, as if sharing a secret. He spoke in a near whisper. “You make him work his imagination,” he said, and then he repeated the words, slower this time. “You make … him work … his imagination. You make him dream!”

  Over that year, I would hear innumerable explanations of the line between art and what is often called entertainment. Some refused to answer the question. “Ultimately, I don’t think it is for us to define our work,” Philippe Copin of Les Acrostiches said. “If there are those who wish to call what we do art, that’s fine. I do handstands and balances. It’s as if you pointed to a painting and asked the painter, Is that art? The painter could tell you, That’s a painting.”

  Certainly no one cast the divide in such sharp relief as Jérôme. Of course, the circus has always made people dream. That was one of its charms. As Ernest Hemingway wrote in a 1953 program for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, “The Circus is good for you. It is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a truly happy dream.” But happy dreams are often facile dreams, and audiences returned to the circus every year not to experience something new, but to see something old. The circus offered stasis as a virtue. If it gave you pleasure, it was by distraction. If it made you think, it was by confirming what you already knew: that everything would be all right; that man would triumph and succeed. Jérôme was talking about a different type of dreaming. Art, he was saying, pushes you beyond yourself, into ideas or history. It encourages you to question your sense of the world, or how the world could be.

  “But, you know …” Jérôme paused to puff on his cigarette. Outside, a light rain had started to fall. A man was scuttling down the street, holding a folded newspaper over his head. “This whole argument—‘What’s art? What’s not art?’—there are more important things.”

  This from a man who had spent his life dragging his craft up an artistic mountain.

  “No,” he continued, “what matters is the dedication, an artist’s work. How I got to where I am. How any great juggler gets to where he is. By the work.”

  This was one more concept vital to my understanding of the circus as an art. With very few exceptions, Jérôme was reminding me, all the great performers abandon themselves to their craft. They view their art not as a practice, but as a prism through which to experience the world. As Marco Paoletti told me, “Juggling is my lifestyle. It’s my way of being.” This defining quality, the mad desire to work, cut across all time periods and all forms of the discipline. Technical jugglers burned no less for their work than creative jugglers. Modern jugglers practiced no more than the historical greats, than Cinquevalli or Rastelli. And in this sense, I realized, the circus has always been an art.

  (illustration credit 9.1)

  OVER AFTERNOON ESPRESSO in a cramped café near the Place de la Bastille (I drank a lot of coffee in Parisian cafés), I asked Pascal which figure in circus history most fascinated him.

  “Astley,” he said, without hesitation.

  The answer came as a surprise. Philip Astley is often dubbed the “father of the circus” for the shows he performed in London during the 1760s, medleys of stunts on horseback and “feats of activity.” But in my readings about Astley, nothing struck me as particularly intriguing. Asking the question, I had been hoping to discover some new quirky star, another Cinquevalli or Mazurier, the nineteenth-century monkey man. Astley was a soldier and a businessman. In an art of armless trumpet players and wire-walking lions, what was so exciting about that?

  “It was his resiliency,” Pascal said. “He was obsessed. There’s no other word for it. He lived his entire life inside the circus.”

  PHILIP ASTLEY WAS BORN on January 8, 1742, in Newcastle-under-Lyme, a market town in the West Midlands of England. About his mother, nothing is known. His father, Edward, worked as a cabinetmaker, though poverty seems to have converted him into a kind of working-class Renaissance man. He introduced his son to the family trade at the tender age of nine, but the tutelage didn’t last long. Edward was big and domineerin
g, and as Philip blossomed into his own imposing physical presence, the two men frequently quarreled. Often Philip ran away. Then as now, Newcastle-under-Lyme served as a crossroads for farms on the western periphery and villages to the east, and according to legend, the lanky teenager could often be found sitting on the city’s wooden gates, ogling wagons as they passed through town. The spirit of the circus was born on these delinquent afternoons. On the fence, Astley made his first contact with the eccentric wayfaring class, the tinkerers and fairground performers who would later populate his shows. There he developed his thirst for travel and adventure, what P. T. Barnum once called life beyond “the ordinary trade.”

  Most critically, the fence-sitting provided Astley his first exposure to horses. Mingling with the travelers, he learned to groom and feed. When a merchant popped into the local tavern for a drink, Philip would sit outside with the man’s mount, running a currycomb through its mane. If the horse needed food or drink, Astley would scamper to fetch it. This interest soon became a fixation. He dreamed of working with horses full-time, and of owning a horse. In 1759, he got his chance.

  Five years before, the country had tumbled into war with France. Now word reached Newcastle-under-Lyme that George II, England’s aging monarch, had ordered a cavalry unit to be formed in Coventry, less than sixty miles away. Astley didn’t hesitate. With only a satchel of clothing and food, he kissed his sisters goodbye and absconded under the cover of darkness, hitching a ride with a passing traveler. Once in Coventry, he quickly located the regiment, the 15th Light Dragoons, and enlisted under the command of Lieutenant George Elliott.

  The lieutenant was happy to have him. In an age when the average private stood five feet seven, Astley towered over six feet tall, with what historians describe as “an oaken chest” and “the proportions of a Hercules.” Recognizing the new recruit’s passion for horses, Elliott put him to work breaking the mounts and readying them for battle.

  Such techniques date from the ancient period. As early as 4000 B.C., armies in Central Asia were training horses to pull their chariots and wagons. Around the first millennium B.C., nomads on the Iranian steppe developed the first cavalry techniques, employing their horses not just for transport but as implements of battle. Over the centuries, these methods, collectively known as horsemanship, became progressively more complex. The Romans, for example, invented vaulting as a means of mounting and dismounting quickly. In the Middle Ages, knights taught their horses “war moves”—how to kick and rear up, how to wheel and caracole.

  As a soldier under Elliott, Astley became a master of such techniques. He also studied more acrobatic routines made possible by the advent of gunpowder, which rendered heavy chain mail obsolete. Astley learned to pluck a pistol from the dirt at full gallop and to slide himself perilously under the belly of a horse. He practiced slipping out of his saddle to avoid an enemy bullet, lowering himself against the horse’s haunch. In the military, soldiers referred to such stunts as “trick riding.”

  Later, when these exercises composed the beating heart of the circus, they were collectively called vaulting or voltige. Instead of snatching pistols from bloody dirt, riders plucked lace handkerchiefs from sawdust. Instead of dodging enemies, they hurdled colorful silk ribbons held aloft by quaking clowns. The practicality was gone. What mattered was daring and flamboyance. One of Astley’s early circus posters advertises him “play[ing] an air on the violin, and display[ing] a flag in many comic attitudes.” A later performance promised “a young Lady nine years old … which Mr Astley will carry on his head.” But these feats were still down the road.

  All told, Astley spent seven years trooping with the army. By the few extant accounts, he was an admirable soldier. The official regimental history notes his “peculiar power over animals.” On June 21, 1766, Astley submitted his resignation, captivated by a force even more dazzling than war. Stopping in London on furlough, Astley had observed former cavaliers trick riding for money in makeshift arenas sprinkled through the fields of Islington, Lambeth, and Mile End, and it struck a chord in him.

  The notion of equestrian theater wasn’t entirely novel. At the Roman games, acrobatic riders known as desultores would race four or more horses abreast and hop from one to another. During the Renaissance, court equestrians trained their horses for lavish exhibitions, including a “grand ballette-dance,” choreographed by Louis XIII’S riding master, Monsieur Pluvinel. But never before had such entertainment been so ubiquitous. With the end of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the resultant flood of horses into the marketplace, prices for the animals plummeted. For the first time in history, anyone could own his or her own horse. English nobles closed their private manèges. To support themselves, several of the royal trainers took to performing, first outside taverns and in village greens and later in more permanent venues.

  And though today the names Thomas Price, Jacob Bates, and Thomas Johnson have been forgotten, if Astley is the father of the circus, they are the art’s great-uncles. In their arenas, simple pastures cordoned off by circles of rope, they traced the contours of the circus’s form: a series of equestrian displays based on spectacular prowess. These men are also responsible for the circus’s shape. At palaces and on battlefields, equestrians trained in rectangular pens; in London, they chose rings, allowing for more difficult tricks; as the horse galloped around, the centripetal force naturally pushed the rider’s feet into his mount, granting him stability.

  In honor of his valiant service, Astley’s regiment presented him with a horse, a milky charger, which he named Gibraltar. On his back, Astley clopped off for London, his chest garlanded with medals, in pursuit of the one thing more seductive than the smell of gunpowder: the glare of the spotlight.

  LONDON WAS BOOMING. Long a center of Europe, the city was fast emerging as the center of the world, the capital of commerce and industry, thanks to the Industrial Revolution and the strength of the British naval fleet. Factories and warehouses were rising up in place of corner shops and dusty streets. Migrant workers flooded in from the countryside, to live in vast and deplorable ghettos. It was an age of growth and discovery, of action. In short, it was an age and a city tailor-made for a man like Astley.

  On arriving in London, Astley found himself a reasonably priced room and struck out on Gibraltar in search of work at one of the theaters that had inspired him. These enterprises survived by offering riding lessons in the morning and public shows in the afternoon. Astley quickly landed a job at the Jubilee Gardens, under the direction of “Old Sampson,” one of the city’s original equestrian stars.

  Paul Bemrose, Astley’s only biographer, refers to these years as Astley’s period of “industrial espionage.” In fact, he was participating in a rite dating back to ancient Rome: mentorship. From Sampson, he learned the rudiments of running a business and luring a crowd. With his wages, he purchased a second horse from the Smithfield Beast Market, a little “learned” miniature pony named Billy, and managed to win the hand of a “fine horsewoman,” Patty.

  At the age of twenty-six, ambitious, experienced, and indomitably energetic, Astley decided to strike out on his own. After investing in Glover’s Halfpenny Hatch, a boggy grove between Blackfriars and Westminster Bridges, he paid a gang of local toughs to build a deck of risers and rope off a ring. On a plank of wood he painted a sign: “Philip Astley’s Riding School.” His shows were a copy of Sampson’s model: lessons in the morning, shows in the afternoon. For motifs, he borrowed heavily from his military days. The year was 1768.

  By the following autumn, gazing back on his first season, Astley felt his life was marching along according to plan. The summer at Glover’s Halfpenny had turned a small but meaningful profit. A small buzz of respect had started to circulate around the city, with praise for his ambitions as an equestrian and a producer. And so, in preparation for his second summer, Astley did what any burgeoning capitalist would do: he expanded. Transporting his show six hundred feet up the road, he commandeered an old sawmill near Westminste
r Bridge, where he built a new outdoor amphitheater, this time with a roof over the bleachers to protect his patrons from the capricious London rain, as well as three stories of luxury boxes. From a business perspective, the move was ideal. The expansion of the bridge in 1763 had opened a new swath of the city for business, and Astley’s circus was smack in the center of the action. The capital improvements, however, had shackled Astley financially. To break even, he needed a tremendously successful second season.

  This was easier said than done. With each passing year, more equestrians were setting up shop in the city. To stay on top, he needed something unique, something novel. He needed to distinguish himself. He found his answer in the theaters across town.

  Concurrent to his own rise, the city was experiencing a theatrical revolution of sorts, the biggest boom since Shakespeare’s career nearly two hundred years before. For centuries, the city’s theatrical action had been confined to the so-called legitimate venues subsidized and indirectly managed by the king, the Theatre Royal and the King’s Playhouse.* With the Industrial Revolution came wage increases and the standardization of working hours, and a new theatergoing population: the working class. To cater to them, a new sort of venue emerged: the commercial, or “illegitimate,” theater. Unlike the royal houses, these theaters survived on ticket and beer sales, and so tailored their entertainments to fit the clientele. In place of high drama, they offered far less heady, more spectacular fare, often imported from the fairgrounds. Sadler’s Wells, for instance, founded in 1683 as a music-and-dance hall, became known for its popular operas and pantomimes.