The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  This greater show started as early as four in the morning, when curious locals would ride down to the railyards and wait in the hazy halflight for the long trains to arrive and disgorge their wonders—the big cats, the grizzled roustabouts who would raise the big top, what historian Dominique Jando once called “that great lake of canvas.” Some of these fans were true circophiles. Most came out of curiosity. “And everywhere, as light came, there would be a scene of magic, order, and of violence,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, remembering the circuses of his youth. Even by modern standards, the logistics of these circus operations were stunningly complex: Thousands of performers and crew. Hundreds of cars. Six tents. Five rings.

  After unloading, many circuses organized a parade through town. In an age of television and Internet, it’s hard for us to imagine how magnificent these parades might have seemed, how alien and grand. Imagine yourself a teenager in the middle of America. Your whole life is prairie, work, and church. You’ve only ever seen a painting of an elephant or a giraffe, only ever heard stories about jugglers. And then, one afternoon, here they are, parading down your dusty main street—a line of gilded chariots pulled by horses bedecked with feathers, carrying Egyptian queens; a brass band playing an English march; an elephant lumbering on a chain, its enormous ears flapping against its gleaming tusks.

  It must have felt like another world descending, another culture, which—in an anthropological sense—it was. The circus had its own language (a “clem” was a fight, “bunce” was profit), its own holidays (“Christmas in the summer” celebrated every July 4), and its own values (physicality, diversity, worldliness, an affinity for nature). It had rituals and practices that dated back thousands of years, a series of unwritten codes dictating everything from what people ate, to what they wore, to whom they courted. “Their morals are, in fact, almost thoroughly Victorian,” Morris Markey wrote in The New Yorker. “In the case of marriages that seem to go awry (although these are singularly few) there are no sudden bursts of passion or violence, but earnest family conferences—and the family includes nearly every performer on the lot.”

  I thought of these old circuses on my visit to Les Arts Sauts. I had never seen a proper backyard. I had even come to wonder whether they still existed. Touring without a tent is 30 percent cheaper and logistically simpler, without worries of lights, heating, housing, and food. The troupes that continue to use tents are often small, and so their lots have a different feel, more like that of a family on vacation. Even Cirque du Soleil, a tenting operation that takes seven days to set up a lot and three to dismantle it, fails to evoke the old wonder. The performers fly in on airplanes and sleep in high-priced hotels. The troupe’s village is organized and secure.

  Yet something about the atmosphere at Les Arts Sauts that night recaptured a lost world for me. Exiting from the cookhouse, I found the lot buzzing. The sun had set completely. A set of floodlights illuminated the bulbous tent from below, causing it to glow ethereally. The parking lot was full. Groups of people drifted around the tent, down the line of trailers, toward the dark forest.

  The lot felt like the genuine article, like the lots I had read about. I wandered among the trailers. There were at least thirty of them, of various shapes and sizes. They reminded me of the wagons in the old photos and films. I could see into their windows, which glowed with shadow plays of domesticity: a woman feeding a child with a spoon; a sturdy man hunched on his elbows over a newspaper. There was nothing extraordinary about the scene—it was what I had expected in many ways—but I was moved. The tent had a lot to do with my response. Although many modern companies tour in theaters, a tent evokes the mythic circus, the mystery and romance of swooping into one town after another, assembling a world and then tearing it down. When Jeff Jenkins got a tent for his Midnight Circus in Chicago, his phone immediately started ringing off the hook. High-level performers offered their services for next to nothing, simply for the experience. “Every performer we know wants to do a little one-ring tenting show,” he told me. “Putting up a real tent—that’s a circus!”

  But it wasn’t just the tent. The circus has changed; elephants and freaks no longer hold the same attraction. But what I felt in the lot that night was that some essential part of the old culture remained. I felt I was observing people outside the mainstream. There were echoes of the old values. It was an elemental life. These were traveling people who had chosen to work with their bodies and in relation to nature. And they were a family.

  At the National School, students were drawn into the place’s culture. Everybody gained ten pounds of bulk. They all became a little freer. They let their hair grow long and spent more time with their shirts off. During breaks in class, they wandered out into the grass, the girls in their sports bras, the young men with their sunburned backs, to lounge or train barefoot. But there was something suspect about their behavior. Because the transformation was so uniform among the students, it felt forced, even disingenuous, more like a style than a lifestyle. (I wasn’t the only one who thought this. My trampoline teacher, Gabby, thought the “hippy” vibe distracted the students from the discipline and physical rigor they would need to be strong performers.)

  With Les Arts Sauts I observed none of that. The life felt genuine, the sense of community real. “It’s almost incomprehensible how well they get along,” Roger Le Roux, director of the Cirque-Théâtre d’Elbeuf and a longtime collaborator with the company, told me later. “One could almost claim that their lifestyle, their way of living, is more important than their artistic productions. It’s as if their lives were themselves a work of art.”

  Where did this closeness come from? In part it was a result of the way the company organized itself. From the outset, Les Arts Sauts had been established as a “pure collective.” Every member—the cooks, the performers, the crew, and the musicians—contributed equally to its finances and had an equal voice in company operations. But I suspect the communal sense also originated in the idea of the circus itself. Both historically and by definition, the circus is inclusive and collaborative, a form that brings people together. Because of the way shows operated—the travel, the sheer physical proximity of the performers to one another—the circus provides a life in which community plays a central role. “It’s the opposite of my friends in the dance community,” Gypsy Snider, director of the Canadian circus company Les 7 Doigts de la Main, told me. “In dance, everyone is hypercompetitive—every man for himself. That’s the last thing you feel in the circus.”

  I was halfway through the year. As I reflected on my first semester, it occurred to me that, because of my interest in the circus as an art form, as an evolution of performance, I had ignored the circus as a life. Now I was starting to get it.

  “AYEEEEEEEEEEEE.”

  Inside the tent, Patrice Wojciechowski, one of the company flyers, watched a little girl zip above him. She streaked through the dome’s open expanse, arms and legs churning the air. Cast against the tent’s luminescent black interior, she looked like a pale spider swinging by its thread.

  “They’ve been doing this all day,” Patrice said. He kept his blue eyes pinned on the girl. “We call it the pendulum. On most days we don’t let the kids near it, or any of the rigging. But, you know, it’s a special night.”

  It’s been said that flyers are the “aristocracy of the circus,” and there’s some truth to this. There’s unquestionably something elegant, even graceful about the way they drift and plummet. Like the higher rungs of society, flyers are also uniquely distinguished, both within the circus and without. Gossard likes to call them “the greatest performing athletes in history.” “Of all the great athletes, how many would have the courage to even climb a rope ladder?” he told me. “Of those that do, how many have the ability to swing off? How many have the timing to make a hand-catch? How many have the personal ability to do any kind of trick? That’s a really unique person who can pull that off, one in millions.”

  There’s also something dynastic about the history of th
e craft. Since the beginning, a rotating roster of nations have produced the discipline’s greatest stars. First came the French, then the British; in 1897, Lew Jordan, an American, discovered and trained Lena Jordan to throw the world’s first triple somersault. Other triple somersaults followed: Ernie Clarke in 1909; Ernie Lane, in 1921. There was a hub for American aerial royalty in Bloomington, Illinois, and another in Saginaw, Michigan. Neither city seems especially regal, but they were milling towns and so produced sawdust, whole barns of it, which was useful in an age before nets.

  Since then, the reign has shifted several times: to the South Africans, the North Koreans, and especially the Mexicans, who are power specialists. Their technical feats are astounding. Tito Gaona estimates that he had thrown more than twenty thousand triples by the age of forty-three, including several dozen blindfolded. He tried to become the first flyer to throw a quadruple, but never managed it in performance. Instead, the honor went to Miguel Vasquez, who, as a sixteen-year-old, first threw a quadruple somersault to his brother during a practice for Ringling in August 1981, and then during a performance in Tucson the following July. (News of the stunt was featured on the front page of The New York Times.)

  In the history of flyers, however, one Mexican stands out: Alfredo Codona (he of the cracked ribs). Born in Hermosillo, Sonora, in 1893, he was the son of a circus manager and a former flyer. After starting as a solo trapezist for Barnum & Bailey in 1909, he switched to the flying trapeze in 1913, recruited by his father for an act with his brother, Lalo.

  Technically, Codona was top-shelf: he was one of the first flyers in history to throw a triple consistently, a stunt he learned without the use of a safety belt. His fame, however, was also due to his grace. “He couldn’t look bad,” Art Concello, another flyer, once said. “If Alfredo had been run over by a truck he’d have done it so gracefully that your first instinct might have been to applaud.”

  I was hoping to talk to Patrice about some of the great flyers; jugglers loved to chat about the old masters, from Brunn to Rastelli. But Patrice was distracted. Melancholy tinged his voice. His answers meandered. When I asked him about the joy of flying, he talked about work. “People compare us to birds,” he said, watching another child get buckled into the pendulum above us. “Unfortunately, we’re not birds. A bird flaps its wings—flap, flap—and up he goes. For us it’s incredibly hard.”

  After a few minutes, the problem dawned on me: I had interrupted Patrice’s pre-show routine. The clowns of Cirque d’Hiver were notorious for drinking until showtime, then sprinting back to the bar during intermission, but few acrobats are so cavalier. They take this time seriously. (The backstages of Cirque du Soleil, I’m told, can be as tense as the locker room of a professional football team before a playoff game.)

  I reflected on this in silence next to Patrice, watching the kids whiz by above. For all my dabbling—all the books, conversations, and classes—here was something I would never comprehend: how it must feel to be a circus performer, to experience the pressure and the pleasure of executing a dangerous feat with hundreds of people watching, to gaze down on all those faces, grip the bar, and swing.

  * * *

  * The show, Ola Kala, toured in the cone until the cone was destroyed in a storm. Fortunately, they were able to buy back the Bubble.

  † Apparently, lions have bad breath; they can also have bad gas, but this is a good thing. “As I often say: a lion who farts, it’s absolutely insupportable!” wrote a lion-tamer from the Rubba family. “But that also means he’s well fed. Which for us, the tamers, is also reassuring.”

  (illustration credit 13.1)

  THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY, I returned to the Great Hall for my reintroduction to the flying trapeze. As I arrived, another student, an obvious amateur, was breezing through her final flight—swinging out, her knees draped over the bar, ejecting into the arms of a stocky catcher in leopard-print leggings. I felt my heart pound. I had been hoping the conversations with Les Arts Sauts would have worked some osmotic magic on me. Clearly, this wasn’t the case.

  “Who’s next?”

  Stripping off a pair of work gloves, a coach came striding toward me under the net. He was in his forties, with tousled blond hair, an unseasonable orange pallor, and the saunter of a cowboy president. When we shook hands, I could feel the calluses on his palms, stiff sheets on top of muscle. He introduced himself as François, but said that everybody called him Tiger. Later, I would find that his type was common among flyers. As Laurence said, they tend toward casual cool.

  Tiger briefed me on the trapeze. When he asked me about my previous experience, I told him I was a rookie, not feeling the need to rehash unpleasant memories, and this seemed to please him. Grunting in a satisfied way, he clapped me on the shoulder and said, “All right!” And then, “Don’t worry, we’ll make sure you won’t die! You’re gonna live!” Which I appreciated.

  We walked to a box of harnesses. In circus lingo, the rigging acrobats use to train or as a security precaution during performances is called a safety belt. (Codona referred to the device as the “life belt of the circus.”) Safety belts, surprisingly, are the object of some controversy among circus professionals. The pro-belt camp points, of course, to the increased safety that belts bring, and also to their effectiveness in training: learning with a belt allows an acrobat to focus on technique without thinking about danger. Those against belts claim the devices interrupt the learning process by providing a false crutch and detract from how acts look in performance. They also lower the appeal: wearing a belt for a high-wire walk, they say, is false, dramatic, and sometimes just unimpressive, like putting a helmet on before banging yourself in the head with hammer.

  “You want some help with that?” said the catcher in the leopard leggings, ambling over to where I stood holding the harness. We chatted as he set to work untangling the mess I had made trying to put it on. His name was Claude, and he was actually an amateur himself. Five years ago, he told me, he had discovered the discipline at Club Med. This was not uncommon. In the eighties, as other circus arts were catching on as recreational pursuits, Club Med had the brilliant idea of slipping the trapeze into their usual resort smorgasbord.

  Claude handed me the harness, and I wiggled into it as if it were a diaper. He cinched the buckles on my hips and took a step back, looking at me as if fitting me for a pair of trousers.

  “How’s that feel?”

  I did a couple of deep knee-bends. “It kind of pinches.”

  He nodded. “That means it’s tight enough.”

  I waddled after Claude to the base of the ladder, which resembled a series of metal chopsticks strung between two wire fishing lines. He reiterated the correct climbing procedure: use your heels, one rung at a time, alternating feet—like climbing a rope. I was barely two meters up before the adrenaline rushed in. The room swooned. Details became crystal clear—the shine of the metal rungs, the sweat on my palms, the sharp wires bumping my crotch. Below there was only a single mat. Its width and thickness struck me as laughably inadequate to the task of saving a life.

  I groped my way toward the feet of the women on the platform, then lunged at them. “Wow,” came a voice from above. “Very brave!”

  Meet Claudette. In the argot of the biz, Claudette was my “board muffin,” the assistant who helps the flyer find his way safely off the perch, as well as prepping trapezes and securing the lines. Usually board muffins are experienced flyers themselves, and this was obviously the case with Claudette: her shoulders bulged, and her torso cut the telltale V.

  “So,” she said, once I’d hauled myself to my feet and established a white-knuckled grip on one of the bars running up to the ceiling. “I take it this is your first time?”

  I inhaled a pungent odor, a mix of chalk and sweat, and nodded in reply.

  Claudette laughed. “I’m jealous!” And she set to fastening me into the ropes, handling me like a rag doll, jostling against my back, making the perch sway unnervingly. Trying to maintain focus, I leve
led my gaze out over the net. The mécanique might be a subject of debate, but the net was universally agreed upon. Everybody, from Cirque du Soleil to impoverished trapezists in the most reckless circuses of Brazil, flies with nets.

  This hadn’t always been the case. As with much of circus history, the exact origins of the device are murky. According to legend, a pair of American flyers, Charles Noble and Fred Milmore, saw a group of fishermen hauling a catch out of the Illinois River and had a flash of insight. But their net was slow to catch on. Theater directors balked at the cost of installation. Flyers worried about the loss of excitement. “With the net, where’s the thrill?” Louisa Cristiani, an Italian flyer, once quipped (before shattering her spine and four ribs at Madison Square Garden). But in the twenties, Parisian music halls moved to ban “flying open,” and the city followed suit. (This wasn’t the first such law. In ancient Rome, Marcus Aurelius mandated safety mattresses after a tightrope walker fell to his death.) It was an enormously important step, but, as flyers like to point out, nets aren’t marshmallows. They are rope—rigid, taut, prickly rope. It won’t hurt you if you land correctly—on your butt or your back—but this isn’t always possible, and so nets regularly snap wrists, legs, even necks. Codona, a man comfortable in a net if there ever was one, once called the device a “lurking enemy.” The knots, he noted, possess a “satanic joy in gouging the flesh.”

  I happened to read these lines two days before my trip to the workshop. I gazed out over my own “lurking enemy” with the words echoing in my head—“satanic joy in gouging the flesh”—and was grateful to hear Claudette’s carabiner click behind me, alerting me that I was officially locked in.