The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  “Lost?!” I said a little louder than I should have.

  The woman nodded. “It happens, you know. We do our best, but there are so many graves—over ten thousand.” She shook her head—at the historical weight of her position perhaps, at I don’t know what. “And, you know, it’s the circus …”

  In the end, the librarian’s suspicion proved to be correct. In 1814, Astley was in fact buried in Père Lachaise, followed by his son seven years later. For a century, their graves remained a site of circus pilgrimage. (According to Pascal, the French circus-historian Henri Thétard had once paid a visit.) But things changed. The circus fell on hard times. For years nobody cared about the dead showman, and his grave fell into neglect. Sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, the grave “disappeared.” Nobody had bothered to record its location.

  I learned this later. That day, as I slumped toward the exit, rose in hand, my eye fell on a pack of Italian teenagers that I had seen earlier. The girls wore big Jackie-O sunglasses, and the boys had glossy hair, and everybody wore pants two sizes too small for them.

  I went over to investigate. They had formed a half-moon around a grave, a flat stone almost completely invisible under a mound of flowers and other diverse tributes—unlit cigarettes, a Yankees baseball cap, a rolled joint, postcards written in a half-dozen languages. A couple of the teens were engaged in a heated conversation in Italian. I heard the words, “Cam un baby laht my fiyar.”

  Standing a few feet back from the scene, surveying the horde with a bored look, was the guard who had directed me to the house of records.

  “Pretty crazy, huh,” he said. He was portly and demure. “Jim Morrison. People love him.”

  I asked him who had the second-most-popular grave in the cemetery.

  “Hard to say,” he said. “Édith Piaf. Chopin. Maybe Proust.”

  They were all artists—not politicians, not scientists, not generals. But they were also artists who had left legacies. For Chopin, there were scores. For Piaf, recordings. For Proust, his books.

  But circus performers of the past left no such legacy. Their art was physical and largely ephemeral. Critics rarely reviewed shows. Acts were rarely filmed. Instead, we are left to piece together the stories of their lives from secondary sources: photographs, advertisements, programs with lists of acts and mysterious names written next to each.

  Some consider this ethereality part of the circus’s charm, a quintessential part of the “here today, gone tomorrow” magic. Personally, I find it tragic. The circus is among the oldest art forms in the world, and yet so much of its past remains an empty canvas. No wonder circus historians are so obsessed with “ghost-hunting.” With so little tangible history, you have to cling to what remains—the clothes performers wore, the graves that hold their bones. And no wonder circus families cling so steadfastly to tradition. If your children fail to carry on your name, your reputation might be lost forever.

  Loving the circus, I thought, is like loving a fictional character.

  * * *

  * Both venues still exist. They are familiarly called Covent Garden and Drury Lane, respectively.

  † According to Pascal, records indicate that another London equestrian, James Woolton, staged a spectacle that combined horsemanship with “feats of activity” a few weeks before Astley’s premiere. “But it doesn’t matter,” Pascal said. “He performed a few weeks and disappeared. Astley persevered.”

  (illustration credit 10.1)

  ONE OF THE INTERESTING ASPECTS of learning to juggle was how systematic the process is. This is doubly true for acrobatics, the discipline that circus historian Tristan Rémy called the “substance” of the show. Every aspiring acrobat submits himself to a sometimes harrowing hierarchy of exercises, each building on the last. The path is challenging but also reassuring: if you trust the system, it will take you where you need to go.

  My own engagement with the system occurred three days a week. Mondays and Fridays were with Ryszard and Luc, respectively, both of whom taught tumbling. Ryszard handled the “power moves,” like hand-standing and hand-balancing. Luc taught more dynamic moves, like round-offs, back handsprings, and back flips. On Wednesdays, under the tutelage of Gabby, a Spaniard, we studied rudimentary moves on the trampoline.

  The classes stuck to a fairly consistent schedule. We started with calisthenics, followed by stretching. The first day, Ryszard advised stretching at least twenty minutes before every class. This struck me as a lot, but by week’s end I understood. Acrobatics is a full-body exercise. Every muscle and every joint has to be coaxed into action, from your neck to the cartilage in your toes. (This is no joke: I dislocated my toe halfway through the year.) We also stretched to build flexibility. For this, partner stretching was helpful, because it allowed for what was called an “active” stretch, in which your complementary muscles worked against the muscles being used. It was one of the pleasant fringe benefits of the school: watching physically perfect women tug each other through vaguely tantric positions. Pleasant, that is, when I wasn’t involved myself.

  “Ow! Goddamn, Ryszard! Seriously?”

  I had been stretching peacefully, legs splayed, nose nudging gingerly toward the industrial carpet, when, without warning, I felt a weight pushing against my back, pressing down against my shoulder blades. I didn’t know what was going on. Then I realized: Ryszard was sitting on me, a buttock on either side of my spine, such that my torso was now pressed painfully to the floor. I heard a crunching noise above my head. Was Ryszard eating an apple?

  Shards of pain shot up the inside of my groin. The dank musk of the carpet invaded my nostrils.

  “Um, Ryszard …” My voice was pinched.

  “Shut up.” He chomped at his apple. “Try to breathe.”

  Ryszard was of the old school. He specialized in ground-based moves, what’s known as “carpet work” for the threadbare rugs saltimbanques used as makeshift stages (and sleeping mats) in the Middle Ages. In his native Poland, Ryszard had trained as a gymnast until the wall fell and Europe opened up. Like a lot of Poles, he headed west in search of work—and then wandered into the circus. (“I never think I end up in circus. Not in million years.”) In style, he adhered to the Eastern European sportsman’s look: the knock-off Adidas tracksuit, with hues that varied according to the season. As a person he was harder to read. Over the year I came to find out that he had followed avant-garde Polish theater quite closely when he was younger and now read Chekhov in his spare time. He would come to be a friend.

  I felt my muscles ease into the stretch. It felt good but not good. “Um, Ryszard …” I repeated.

  “Shut up.” He polished off his apple. “You’ll thank me later.”

  The stretching was initially mostly left up to us. (After my first embarrassing day, I had researched maneuvers on the Internet, and nobody ever corrected me.) Standardization came when we tackled the moves themselves. The Greek term for “acrobatics” literally means “to walk on the extremities”; indeed, learning acrobatics often felt like relearning to walk. Before attempting difficult moves, as I said, you had to master the basics. On the trampoline, for example, we spent the first week learning the correct bounce, a sort of a vertical breaststroke—arms shooting upward on the ascent, fanning outward on the way down.

  In tumbling class, the basics included the old classics: somersaults, cartwheels, round-offs. Mastery was a matter of refinement and reminding my body of what it already knew but had buried in adulthood. Perched by the padded runway, Ryszard would usually bark one piece of advice with each turn, a single physical idea to focus on.

  “Dive. Go to the floor. It’s like woman—you must go to her.”

  “Why you are falling into cartwheel? You are not tree. You are human.”

  “Point toes in somersault.”

  “Chin tucked all through! Tuck, tuck.”

  At first, much of the advice felt nitpicky, little points of body position. (Ryszard was forever reminding me to point my toes.) Later, I came to understand that eve
n the simplest training occurred with the higher moves in mind. Once, as I was jogging back to the end of the line, Ryszard pulled me aside yet again to coach me on the position of my hands after my round-off.

  “Why I always have to tell you—finish round-off, you put hands up.” I nodded, out of breath and only half paying attention, the adrenaline still churning.

  “Hey! I am serious. Repeat. Hands up.”

  “Hands up.”

  “Show me.” He thrust his hands in the air. “Hands up.”

  I followed his example. “Hands up.”

  He nodded and dropped his hands. “Yes. You know why?”

  I didn’t, actually.

  “Because—if no hands, no next move.” In the not-so-distant future, he explained, we would connect a back handspring to the end of the round-off. If I didn’t train myself to put my hands up now, that connection would be harder to make and maybe even dangerous. “You no learn round-off with hands, you break neck on handspring. You want to break neck?”

  I did not.

  “I didn’t think so,” Ryszard said.

  On the whole, I liked the system and made quick progress. Within a month, my acrobatic repertoire included a somersault, a cartwheel, and a pretty solid round-off, none of which I would have expected to achieve even six months before. I liked having a coach. This was especially the case as the moves got more difficult. Instead of teaching the maneuvers in their entirety, which would have been dangerous, Ryszard broke the motion into component parts, the way you might deconstruct a golf swing or a dance step. These exercises were known as éducatifs. In the best cases, éducatifs could lead to surprising successes. Training for back handsprings, for example, I began with so many backward somersaults and back walkovers—to get used to the position and going backward—that when I attempted my first actual back handspring, the ease of the move caught me off guard. Pitching backward, with Ryszard supporting me on one side and Boris on the other, I was shocked to find myself suddenly back on my feet. Almost before I left the ground, I felt my palms make contact with the floor, felt my feet follow. I must have looked dazed, because Boris smiled wryly. “Congratulations,” he said. “You shouldn’t look so shocked.”

  That said, the process could also be frustratingly gradual. There was a sense of going two steps forward, one back. This was especially true with handstands.

  As I discovered early in the year, handstands as practiced in the circus require a certain technique: the body is bullet-straight, clenched in a sturdy line from your hands through your pointed toes. To get the hang of this, we began by forming countless handstands against a wall. Once we were inverted, Ryszard would maneuver our bodies into position, shaping us like lumps of clay. It was a strange and somewhat uncomfortable feeling. Upside down, my palms pressing into the ground, I would see Ryszard’s Keds park themselves a few inches away and then feel his muscular hands grip my ankles. “Hold still,” he would say, and started to pull, raising my feet toward the ceiling. I felt the weight ease off my palms, and my body lengthen. I felt the blood rushing out of my feet, falling through my chest, pooling in my face, pressing against my eyeballs.

  By lengthening my body, Ryszard was modeling the proper position. He was demonstrating how a handstand should feel, how my shoulders should “extend” from their sockets, how the spine should “stack” into a single column, vertebra on vertebra. And against the wall the instruction worked. Once Ryszard had pulled me into position, I would often feel my body “lock.” When he released me, I would stay upright, perfectly straight, a few inches from the wall. In such moments the position felt easy—natural, even. I thought I was getting it.

  Unfortunately, the operation went to hell on the open floor. My particular difficulty was what Georges Strehly, a turn-of-the-century circus sage, referred to as “the block,” the moment when, after kicking your legs up, you lock into the position. Gymnasts make the block look easy, but, on a purely physical level, it’s actually completely bizarre. When you kick up, the entire energy of your body is headed forward. To arrest this motion, you have to “block” the movement—using the same muscles that you’re trying to stop. In essence, you have to prevent yourself from falling forward by falling forward—and while balanced upside down.

  The whole thing evaded me. Kicking up, I would either come up short and buck like a mule, or else kick up with too much energy and go sailing over the top, which was frightening and ultimately painful, since it meant crashing to the ground upside down and directly on my tailbone. I tried focusing on specific pieces of practical advice. If I felt myself going too far, I would clench my stomach and my backside, as I understood was necessary. But this just made the landing harder. I practiced for hours at the school and in my apartment. (The practice resulted in one of the stranger, more linguistically tortured conversations I had in France. When my downstairs neighbor asked me, “What is all the crashing?” I was forced to reply, “I am all the crashing.”) But with the exception of those magical moments a few inches from the wall, not once was I able to hold the position on my own.

  After two months of failure, I took my frustrations to Ryszard. We were eating lunch in the tent outside the Great Hall, a spot that was normally reserved for dance classes but which Ryszard and I had taken to commandeering with our Tupperware on account of the microwave in the corner.

  Like myself, Ryszard lingered on the periphery of the school’s social circle. He liked the circus spirit, the laid-back atmosphere. But his move to France from Poland had come with sacrifices, most notably the two sons he left behind. (One of the sons came to visit and shamed us with his brawn.) His life was now tinged with a certain disquietude familiar to expatriates who head abroad later in life. Because of an unfortunate real-estate transaction—something involving a French woman he cared for—he had been forced to give up his apartment in Paris temporarily. In the meantime, he had taken to sleeping on a cot in a closet at the school. “It’s not bad,” he said. “I have little television. I read before I go to sleep. I’m usually tired.”

  I wasn’t quite as isolated, but I did feel like an outsider, and over this shared foreign status we forged a bond. During the midday break, we often joined each other for lunch, and after classes I would sometimes stick around and lounge on the mats with him, shooting the breeze in broken French. (“This is why we friends,” he once said. “Nobody else understands.”) He told me illustrative stories about his training in the old country and supplied me with additional tips. I liked to think of him as my private tumbling sensei.

  “So what is problem?” he asked on this day, popping the top off his lunch, the same goulash he brought every day. Steam poured from the Tupperware. In the corner of the tent a heater churned, muffling the sound of a trumpet playing in the distance.

  I described to Ryszard my progress when I was next to the wall, my near-total regression on the open floor. He waved his spoon dismissively. “It’s work,” he said. “You want to do handstand but you don’t want to work.” I told him that work wasn’t the issue, that I was putting in the time. He tipped his chin down and eyed me over his glasses. “The work is always issue.”

  Still, he conceded, there were a few things I could do to hurry the process. Practicing every day could help—ten minutes in the morning, ten minutes at night. He also showed me a stretch. Rising from our table, he bent down in front of its bench, placed his palms against the seat, and pressed down with his arms straight. To perform a proper handstand, he said, you had to be flexible in the armpit and shoulder regions, since the move required pulling the shoulders back.

  “But this is small thing,” he said, returning to the seat. “It not change a lot. The important thing is work. And patience. It’s not like playing the piano.”

  “The piano?”

  He nodded, chewing his food. “Yah, you know, piano player, maybe he wants to work for ten hours every day. So he work for ten hours. It’s not problem. Every song is different. His fingers hurt, yes, but he is working mostly brain.” Acrob
atics, he went on, is more physical. You have to develop certain muscles in your shoulders and your back. You have to learn to compensate for subtle shifts in balance with shifts in muscular tension. In a very literal, physical way, your body is recalibrating itself, and that takes time. Or it should take time. “I hear recently about Chinese girl,” he said. “She learns to walk the wire in a week.” He winced and shook his head, as if the idea pained him. “This is bad. This is very, very bad. It is bad for girl, but it is also bad training.” Learning the basics incorrectly, he said, led to bad habits, which could ruin an acrobat later. “This is probably number one problem. I get acrobats from other coaches and have to start over. Too many bad habits from before.”

  I pointed out that, according to this line of thinking, I was his dream student.

  A bushy eyebrow cocked over his glasses. “Yah, you know, maybe it’s exception this time.”

  BECAUSE ACROBATICS IS so physical, I got in great shape, a different kind of shape. I wasn’t buff; I was flexible and agile. Because the muscles developed naturally, from supporting my body in movement, there was no unevenness. Recently, the circus has started to take off as a recreational fitness activity, like yoga or aerobics, and it’s not hard to see why: the classes never seemed all that rigorous, and yet I saw amazing results; it was a perfect workout.

  What caught me off guard was how challenging the mental preparation for acrobatics could be. Enormous focus was required to execute the moves. And there was a fear factor. I tangoed with it throughout the year on back handsprings, the flying trapeze, and other disciplines, but the fiercest struggle came on the trampoline, when I set about learning to back-flip.

  The word “trampoline” probably evokes images of common backyard equipment—round, black, surrounded by a protective mesh netting. The school’s trampolines were of another order of magnitude. Big and rectangular, their surfaces consisted of thick strips of white webbing capable of vaulting a trained acrobat twenty feet in the air. Though rare in shows, the devices were popular in training rooms, as a means of developing the kind of “aerial awareness” essential in more high-flying disciplines: the Russian bar, the Russian swing, the flying trapeze.