The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  In part because of men like Ned Ward, Saqui’s father, Navarin, initially forbade his daughter to take up the family discipline. He also knew firsthand the craft’s inherent danger; while working in Paris, he had fallen from his rope and injured his leg, casting the family again onto the road. But Saqui was an energetic child, and, during a stop in Tours, she found a way.

  On the fairgrounds, Saqui’s family happened to park their wagon next to a legendary family of acrobats, the Bénéfands. The daughter of the family, Françoise, a.k.a. Mademoiselle Malaga, was a ropedancing star, famous for working on a silver stage. After a few days of star-struck hesistation, Saqui asked her for a lesson. Malaga agreed, and the girls began training in secret. Given her years of observation, Saqui picked up the basic maneuvers quickly—how to walk and fall, how to gauge the rope’s rhythms and sways. Inspired, the girls decided to mount a small show. They posted bills announcing the spectacle on wagons around the lot. To avoid the attention of Saqui’s parents, they gave her a stage-name: “Young Nini.”

  On the day of the show, a surprisingly sizable crowd formed at the foot of the makeshift wooden stage, curious to see the skills of the mysterious new performer. Backstage, Saqui listened nervously to the building murmur as she slipped on her supple deerskin slippers. At the appointed hour, she assumed her position by the rope that ran across the stage. Her heart pounding in her chest, nodding absentmindedly at Malaga’s final instructions, she stepped onto the rope and inched her way into the view of the crowd.

  Instantly a cry erupted in the gallery. Saqui looked out from the stage to see her mother collapsing into the dirt. Her father was already dashing toward the stage.

  She continued with the routine, executing each move with pointed-toe poise, her father poised beneath her, waiting in case she fell. Afterward, Navarin delivered her a proper scolding, but he couldn’t deny the raucous applause from the crowd: his daughter was a natural.

  Madame Saqui first took to the rope in Tours in 1778. Meanwhile, in Paris, the Boulevard du Temple was erupting as the new commercial theaters made it the nucleus of acrobatic action. Noted an observer, “With their high facades, their large windows framed by columns and marquees, most of these theaters make you forget their fairground pasts.”

  But not everyone approved of the boulevard’s success. Besides the commercial theaters, Paris also featured a number of so-called legitimate theaters, state-sponsored venues that featured more highbrow fare, works of what Charles Dickens once called “poetic quality or superior literary worth,” such as Molière or Racine. The venues were supposed to pull the public into higher work, to introduce them into art. But with the rise of the boulevard, their popularity had suffered.

  The city decided to crack down. Beginning in 1807, the Paris conseil passed a series of draconian laws that choked theatrical action. Only eight Parisian theaters remained open, each with a specific license dictating the right to work in a particular genre. Nicolet’s Théâtre de la Gaîté was restricted to mime shows and harlequinades (acrobatic pantomimes). Circuses could only feature “horses and related attractions.”

  Collectively known as the “patent laws,” the injunctions would prove a defining force in the development of the circus over the next century. In the long term, they served their intended function by stifling venues into limited theatrical boxes. In the short term the effort backfired. Restricted to their genres, venue directors innovated to expand the range of their offerings as far as lawfully possible. The result was a proliferation of curious forms. At the Théâtre des Funambules, where the laws forbid performers from talking, actors expressed themselves in gestures and acrobatics. In theaters where dialogue was forbidden, venues would have their audience sing the exchanges or make their protagonists speak while balancing on a rope.

  Much to the city’s chagrin, the public loved the hybrid shows, and the boulevard boomed to even greater heights. Jean-Baptiste Deburau, an acrobat and mime, whom Baudelaire described as “mysterious as silence, supple and mute as the serpent, thin and long as a gibbet,” became a darling of the Parisian literati, lauded by Nodier, Nerval, Balzac, and George Sand. King Louis XV summoned Nicolet’s ropewalkers for a royal performance, and afterward allowed the company to rename itself the Grands-Danseurs du Roi, the Great Dancers to the King. For a summer in Versailles, two of Nicolet’s most famous acrobats, Placide and Le Petit Diable, even gave the young Count of Artois (later King Charles X) secret ropewalking lessons at Versailles. For the saltimbanques, the attention was unprecedented. After nearly a thousand years on the periphery of society, they had finally penetrated the mainstream.

  Such, then, was the state of things in Paris, when, in 1804, at the age of eighteen, Madame Saqui came strutting into town. Slim and strikingly featured, with piercing gray-brown eyes, she was by then a star of the fairground circuit and looking to make her name on a larger stage. After the death of her father, she had written to Daneaux, the director of the Tivoli, a variety venue like Nicolet’s. He had promised her a leading role, but she arrived to find the marquee occupied by an even bigger name: Forioso, one of the great stars of Europe, famous for his luxurious costumes and brazen stunts, such as his midair walk from the Pont de la Concorde to the Pont des Tuileries. Saqui resigned herself to working under her master.

  She didn’t have to wait long. On her very first night, Forioso, ever his reckless self, and perhaps distracted by the young star waiting to assume his position, botched the landing of a leap and crashed to the stage, snapping his ankle like a twig. Saqui made her Parisian premiere the following night.* Dressed in a garland of roses and a white tulle skirt spangled with blue stars, she launched herself through a display of unexpected prowess—bounding, spinning, and twisting on her wire. Daneaux, fearful of losing another star, was irate. But as Saqui’s memoirist Paul Ginisty writes in Memoirs of a Ropedancer, the young ropedancer “was destined to conquer the capital in a night.”

  And conquer she did. Over the next decade, Saqui would go on to become one of Europe’s biggest stars and a staple of Parisian entertainment. Endowed with a will and a fearlessness forged on the road, she had an incandescent charisma. A journalist who met her in 1852 for the French weekly L’Éclair called it an uncommon “vivacity, a fire.” Whereas other dancers dressed as ballerinas, Saqui wore silver sequins and scandalous flesh-colored leggings. Alone on her rope, she enacted full dramas, complete with characters and plot twists woven around a central theme. Accoutered like a Spartan warrior—in a golden helmet, a golden chest-plate, and, on special occasions, a golden beard—she reenacted Napoleon’s glories abroad: the “Siege of Saragossa,” the “Passage over Saint-Bernard Mountain.” Men flocked to ogle her bravery and catch a glimpse of her thigh. Women copied her style. Within months of her premiere, confection shops had stocked their shelves with candy boxes featuring her angular face. When she adopted a headpiece made of colorful ostrich plumes, milliners suffered a rush of orders for identical hats.

  In 1810, at the height of Saqui’s Parisian fame, word of the feisty young starlet reached Napoleon, who invited her to perform for his Imperial Guard in the Beaujon Gardens. It was a warm summer night when she stepped onto the rope before the emperor and his watchful soldiers. As per Saqui’s custom, a barrage of sparks and smoke met her arrival on high. But that night the timing was off, and as she hoisted her arm for her final salute, a rocket scorched her shoulder.

  Saqui screamed and tumbled from the rope. With her undamaged arm, she managed to catch herself, and she slid to the ground, white as a specter.

  Napoleon rushed over to receive her. “Madame!” he implored. “I beg you not to continue.” But Saqui would hear nothing of it. To the horror and titallation of the crowd, she climbed again onto the rope and ascended into the now silent night. She executed her routine as intended, then descended. Again, the emperor was waiting at the bottom of the rope, baffled.

  He began to interrogate her in his usual aggressive way: Who was she? Where did she come from? How did she lear
n her art? “One does not learn this art, Sire,” Saqui replied coolly. “One discovers it. If, that is, one is bestowed the sacred fire.”

  In Ginisty’s memoir, the badinage continues for two pages. Afterward, other scholars note, more intimate contact ensued, primarily in Napoleon’s secret apartment in the Tuileries Gardens. Ultimately, Saqui became a staple performer at royal ceremonies (including Napoleon’s second marriage, to Marie-Louise), and also at the battlefront, where she buoyed the weary troops with sassy reenactments of their triumphs. In private, Napoleon called her “mon enragée” (my little lunatic). In public, she proclaimed herself “First Acrobat of His Majesty the Emperor and King.” She painted the imperial eagle onto her bags and hired a team of Turks to serve as her cavaliers and, with them, paraded through the French countryside in a carriage painted gold.

  IN 1814, at the height of her Parisian fame, Madame Saqui purchased the Spectacle des Acrobates, a five-hundred-seat theater on the boulevard. The address of the place was number 62, and Tina and I tracked down the site. A four-story neoclassical apartment building now loomed in place of the old theater. It had stone doorways and iron flower boxes. A plump white cat lounged in the second-story window.

  I told Tina about Saqui and the site. Saqui performed on and off on the boulevard until she was well into her sixties. After her reign, theatrical ropedancing had faded. The sorts of theaters that could support such acts had disappeared, especially after the rise of the cinema, and circuses weren’t equipped for (or interested in) all the dramatic scenery. Today, however, the dramatic shows are coming back. Working under the Soviet state, the Voljansky troupe, a group of wire-walkers, choreographed a number based on the myth of Prometheus that won the coveted Silver Clown at the Monte Carlo Circus Festival. Cirque Baroque, one of France’s earliest and most respected modern companies, created Ningen, an account of the life and works of Japanese author Yukio Mishima. The modern era parallels the historical moment of the boulevard in other ways as well. Over the last thirty years, theater practitioners have increasingly adopted the circus and variety arts. Acrobatics, mime, puppetry, music—all have been integrated into what critics call “physical theater” or “total theater.”

  Tina had studied at a physical-theater school, and I asked her what she thought explained the shift.

  “On the surface, I think there’s respect for the technique,” she said, looking out over the churning rush-hour traffic. “The amount of time and dedication is obvious, certainly more obvious than in something like theater, and theater artists know this.” More persuasively, perhaps, she added that actors had come to understand the potential value of the circus arts in their own work. “Theater got kind of staid for a while there. Physical performance is engaging. It’s dynamic. The skills bring a live element that people can relate to.” She paused to watch an ambulance roar up the boulevard, siren whooping, blue lights ablaze.

  ON THE NIGHT of March 14, 1826, Philip Astley’s circus on Rue du Faubourg du Temple caught on fire. An errant firework had whizzed into the drapery during the aptly titled Fire of Salins, and now the whole building was engulfed in flames. A fire brigade rushed to the scene, but they arrived too late. Though the spectators had escaped, and so had the horses, the building itself was beyond repair. Paris’s first circus was gone. Astley was long dead by then, so the burden of recovery fell to the building’s director, the noted equestrian and France’s first circus mogul, Antonio Franconi.

  In the story of the circus, Franconi is a figure as big as Astley and as dynamic as Saqui. A striking physical presence, with a broad chest and a booming voice that made the timid shrink, he is credited with founding the first French circus, the Cirque Olympique, and deepening the genre confusion in the hybrid of circus and theater. More specifically, his specialty was theatrical zoology: vast animal pantomimes, or “mimodramas,” written by noted local playwrights and starring everything from hundreds of horses to domesticated stags.

  Unlike Saqui, Franconi hadn’t seemed destined for such idiosyncratic greatness. Born to a pair of Italian aristocrats in 1738, he spent his youth hobnobbing not with Gypsies and bearwards but with the courtesans of Venice at palace balls. When Franconi was a teenager, however, his father killed a senator in a duel and was condemned to death. Antonio, his own life threatened by the prospect of revenge, fled to the road, where, among the ruffian company of merchants and vagabonds, he turned to animal training to survive.

  Such animal acts have a long history. There are two types of acts: animal showing and animal training. Animal showing was the easier of the two. Returning from conquests abroad, soldiers or entrepreneurial explorers would pack exotic animals into their hulls to display upon their return. In 1749, an intrepid Dutch sea captain boasted Europe’s first rhinoceros. “It runs with an astonishing lightness,” bragged an advertisement. “It knows how to swim and likes to dive in the water like a duck.”

  Animal training required less money but more skill. Performers taught small domestic animals—dogs, monkeys, pigs, mules, and occasionally bears—how to dance, tumble, count, and perform imitations. Today these displays seem trite and, according to some, morally dubious. But they nevertheless require great ability and, when practiced correctly, an intimacy between the trainer and his charges.

  Hundreds of years ago, the feats could be astounding. The British Museum has an Arundel manuscript showing an ox riding a horse. In 1660, after a trip to the Saint Margaret’s Fair, the famous diarist John Evelyn noted seeing monkeys and apes dancing on the high-rope, saluting, bowing, pulling off their hats, all “with as good a grace as if instructed by a dancing master.”

  On the road, Franconi became a master of such precise animal control. After briefly tending lions for a zoo in Lyon, he developed a canary act that was revered. Later, during a stop in Spain, the Duke of Duras introduced him to bullfighting, a Moorish practice newly popular among the Spanish elite. Franconi convinced a few of the matadors to join him on the road. According to legend, when they refused to perform one afternoon in Toulouse, he stepped in and tamed the bulls himself.

  In 1783, Franconi (who was now in his forties) came to Paris. He arrived at an electric time. In the hectic prelude to the revolution, commercial theaters were sprouting up around the city, including Nicolet’s Théâtre de la Gaîté on the boulevard, and Astley’s first circus on the Rue du Faubourg du Temple. Eager to participate, Franconi made his way to Astley, who hired him on the spot. The men worked together for three years, Franconi running his canary act while Astley captained the horses. In time, Franconi learned the rudiments of voltige. (His sons would become some of the finest riders in Europe.) He also studied the peculiar genre of spectacle that Astley had begun cultivating, a curious mix of horsemanship and theater known as “hippodrama.”

  Today hippodramas are forgotten. The word itself sounds like a Disney cartoon. In the nineteenth century, however, the shows were all the rage, and the epitome of this fluid period in circus history. Loosely speaking, the term refers to “horse plays,” melodramas staged on horseback. Nobody knows how the genre started. Theaters had long imported equestrians to work on their stages; as early as 1668, Samuel Pepys noted the use of horses during a revival of Shirley’s Hyde Park at the King’s Playhouse. With the rise of the circus, the overlap between horsemanship and drama deepened. Lacking proper venues, early circus entrepreneurs rented theaters for their tours, incorporating the orchestra pits as rings. In 1782, Astley’s rival Charles Hughes joined forces with librettist Charles Dibdin to construct the “Royal Circus” in London, a dual-purpose theater, with both a ring and a stage, the latter hidden by a curtain.† Similar hybrid venues followed, and by the turn of the century they littered England. The venues featured a cornucopia of acts: circus acts, pantomimes, melodramas, staged hunts, plus what hippodrama specialist A. H. Saxon calls “sub-dramatic entertainments”—burlettas, dances, fireworks, farragos, and ballets d’action—all performed in rotation.

  Naturally, the forms began to fuse. As Sa
xon notes, “A grace equestrienne might interpret the role of a young prince in the opening stage spectacle, while a featured ropedancer or strongman might appear as Harlequin or a bereaved father in an afterpiece.” Soon full hybrid shows emerged. In 1789, the Royal Circus staged a piece called The Bastille, by John Dent. In 1807, Astley produced The Brave Cossack, a military drama that concluded with a cavalry battle. As the genre grew more popular, the shows grew more spectacular and complex, with hundreds of equestrians, charging over mountain peaks and bridges, capturing châteaux designed by the finest decorators of the period. Astley’s stage was the biggest in London. Circus owners contracted local writers to pen scripts, often drawing on myth and literature. A show that proved popular would be remounted in various venues. Marzeppa and the Wild Horse of Tartary, based on Byron’s poetic account of a youth lashed naked to a horse roaming the steppes of the Ukraine, made a splash at Astley’s in 1831. Its sets featured spectacular mountain views, moving panoramas, and a mechanical vulture. It was restaged around the world. Shakespeare was an equally frequent choice, especially the horse-laden Richard III. Equestrians and their mounts always were the heroes of the show, galloping through cannon smoke, rearing up, swooping in to save children in peril.

  Hippodramas signify for us the essentially limitless potential of the circus as a dramatic medium and its inherent lack of clear boundaries. Like pure circuses, hippodramas aspired to baffle and amuse; like plays, they had themes, morals, and plots. The shows weren’t just demonstrations of prowess. The audience derived meaning from the shows, from their dramatic elements and contextualization of the skills. They weren’t “flat” performances. “The action is simple and moves quickly toward the goal,” a government censor wrote of one piece, Le Drapeau ou Le Grenadier français, staged in Paris in 1827. “The feelings expressed by the various characters are honest and generous.”