The Ordinary Acrobat

by Duncan Wall

  BY THE SEVENTIES, the traditional circus in France had reached its breaking point. Wracked by the 1973 oil embargo, which sent gas prices skyrocketing, the industry saw a rash of closings. The Cirque Medrano was demolished in 1973. In 1978, Cirque Jean Richard, one of France’s biggest and best-known operations, threatened bankruptcy, an event of national magnitude. Rénée Sasso-Cuinat was special assistant to the minister of cultural affairs at the time. “You can’t imagine how bad it had become,” she told me. “Shows were literally abandoned, hordes of people and animals sitting by the side of the road in protest.” In 1977, beset by rising debts and wary of the future, Alexis Gruss, Jr., head of one of the most venerated circus families in France, brought the suffering to the government’s attention. The circus needed help.

  In 1978, inspired by Gruss’s plea, the government took action. Led by France’s then president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the state sanctioned the creation of an “inter-ministerial commission,” a sort of circus think tank, composed of representatives of the ministries involved in the crisis (finance, education, culture, and agriculture). Charged with determining why the circus, once a mainstay of French popular culture, had degenerated to the point of near extinction, the commission ordered a series of studies, the results of which were clear: to survive, the industry would have to modernize. The commission ordered the creation of a fund, aptly titled “The Fund for the Modernization of the Circus.” More symbolically, the commission transferred custody of the art from the Ministry of Agriculture, where it had wallowed because of the animals, to the Ministry of Culture.

  That was in 1979. For two years the effort stalled. In 1981, François Mitterrand, a socialist, was elected president; overnight, cultural funding doubled. With the increased funding came a shift in emphasis. The state would now support all cultural output, not just high culture but popular forms as well, including jazz, rock music, graffiti, comic books, and fashion. Christian du Pavillon, author of a book on circus architecture and adviser to Jack Lang, the new minister of culture, was given responsibility for the circus. He proposed a three-pronged attack.

  Part One: Promotion. To shine a light on the circus’s importance to France’s patrimony, the government would designate an official “National Circus of France.” (For the first year they selected Alexis Gruss’s Cirque à l’Ancienne, a “classical” equestrian circus.)

  Part Two: Education. Like the other arts, du Pavillon argued, the circus needed an institute of higher education, a space to provide performer training of the highest caliber and serve as an incubator for theorizing the circus of tomorrow. As Jack Lang told an interviewer, “We knew there could be no future without education.” The result was the National School.

  Part Three: Support. Going forward, the government would subsidize the circus as it subsidized other arts. Some of the money would go to the traditional companies for equipment and touring support. The rest would aid the new work being produced by the nouveaux cirques, such as Archaos.

  This last point was particularly important. In deciding to accept the circus as an art rather than a business, the government changed fundamentally and forever the landscape of the circus in France. With state support, companies had time to rehearse and create new material. They could risk making work that might not succeed financially, that was difficult or dark. “I make the work I make because of state support,” Jérôme Thomas told me bluntly.

  Interestingly, it wasn’t the first time the French state had rallied to haul an art into the present. In the sixties, recognizing that its modern-dance movement lagged behind other countries, especially America, the state injected money into the scene—for new companies, for national choreography centers, for a robust audience-development program. But the case of the circus was somewhat distinct. Though not always contemporary, dance in France has long been esteemed. In subsidizing the circus, the government was elevating it. It was asserting, for the first time, the importance of the art.

  IN THE MIDST OF ALL THIS, Bernard Turin was thinking about ice. Born in 1940, he trained in painting and sculpture at Ateliers d’Art Sacré, and after graduation specialized in installations. His sculpture was often big (“monumental,” according to one critic) and ephemeral. His most famous piece consisted of three thousand enormous fluorescent ice blocks, each one eight feet tall and bigger than a telephone booth, arranged on a beach like dominoes.

  “It was for the Festival of American Film at Deauville in 1990,” Turin said. We admired a newspaper article about the exhibit that was pinned to his wall. The picture of the piece was shot from at least a hundred yards away, but even at that distance the ice blocks looked enormous and Stonehengian. “I had been working for a decade, but my career was really taking off then.”

  It was also his final piece. Concurrent with his rise in sculpting, Turin had developed a conflicting passion: the flying trapeze. He had discovered the discipline as a sixteen-year-old, and by thirty was an accomplished amateur. In 1980, he purchased a rig and founded a part-time amateur school of his own, first in Bobigny, then in Rosny-sous-Bois. His timing was good. Government attention had jump-started interest in the circus as an amateur practice. Enrollment rose quickly. Within a matter of years, Turin had a tent and more than 350 students, several of whom departed regularly for competitions abroad and sometimes came home with medals. In 1988, in recognition of his success, he was elected the first president of the French Federation of Circus Schools (Fédération Française des Écoles de Cirque). The work there was part-time, but Turin was pleased with his schedule—sculpting by day, flying at night. “I was happy,” he said. “I thought I had found life.”

  Then, in 1989, he received a call from Bernard Faivre d’Arcier, the director of theater and spectacles for the Ministry of Culture. He wanted to talk about the National School. It had become the government’s one glaring failure in an otherwise successful plan to save the circus. Five years after its inception, the school was a mess. Students complained of dropped classes and a constantly changing curriculum. There was conflict among the faculty. “The school was split in half,” Anny told me. “Teachers weren’t even talking to each other.”

  The problem was a clash of cultures. In creating the school, the state had hoped to unify two worlds: the traditional circus and the modern circus. It intended for the skills of the former to be joined with the ideas of the latter. This proved difficult. The two camps were too far apart and could not unite around a common purpose. The traditionalists saw the modernists as hippies and upstarts who lacked respect for the customs and commitment of the art. The modernists thought the traditionalists were too stuck in their ways, unappreciative of the changes bubbling up in the form. The government cycled through a series of directors, four in five years, including Guy Caron (one of Soleil’s founders). Each proved less effective than the last. Now the government was running out of patience. The squabbling was unbecoming of a national institution. The school was hemorrhaging money.

  At their meeting, Faivre d’Arcier solicited Turin’s opinion on the issue. Turin said the school’s real problem was a lack of ambition. In creating the National School, the government relied on conventional models, largely drawn from the communist world. The first director, Richard Kubiak, was the former director of Polish circuses; his curriculum centered on the “master-pupil” relationship, wherein teachers spoke and students listened. The course load revolved around technical prowess, and each student graduated with a “number,” a five-to-seven-minute act, to begin their careers. To Turin, the model was potentially effective but “artistically reductive.” What was needed, he felt, was a more forward-thinking approach. Instead of technique, the school should emphasize creativity. It should be, he said, an art school that lived up to its name.

  Prior to their meeting, Faivre d’Arcier had assured Turin that their talks would be purely informational. But at the door, as they prepared to part, he offered Turin the job of director.

  “It was one of the great shocks of my life,” Turin s
aid in the studio. “My first instinct was to refuse.” Although he considered himself a capable amateur coach, he had never performed or even worked in a circus. Besides, he had his sculpting career to think of. To walk away now would be professional suicide.

  But Faivre d’Arcier responded with an offer Turin couldn’t refuse: carte blanche. He would have the full backing of the government to remake the school however he chose. “It was an artist’s dream,” Turin told me. “I wasn’t just making art. I was helping define an entire art form.” This liberty was in fact a last-ditch attempt by the authorities to save their initiative. “We didn’t know it then,” Anny told me later, “but if it didn’t work under Bernard they were going to close the school.”

  In the autumn of 1990, Turin assumed control of the Centre National des Arts du Cirque. As a first order of business, he split the school in half: in order to remove incoming students from the “poisoned” environment of Châlons, the first two years of study would take place at Rosny-sous-Bois, where he installed Anny, his former assistant, as a director and his proxy. Next, he overhauled the curriculum. Following up on his comments to Faivre d’Arcier, he scrapped the technical model and replaced it with a course of study based on his experience in the beaux arts, with an emphasis on innovation and interdisciplinarity (polyvalence), as expressed through “a kind of artistic osmosis.” Drawing on his contacts in the art world, Turin invited a fleet of “contemporary creators” to teach workshops at the school. More than a hundred artists from all manner of disciplines—theater, painting, sculpting, composing, dance, writing, and filmmaking—would “nourish” the circus with lessons from their disciplines, while supplying the students with “a sense of the thinking and the conditions of the creator,” so that they could eventually design their own shows.

  In the circus world, especially among traditionalists, the policy changes were met with skepticism. People complained that the school lacked technical rigor. They said it was too intellectualized, too artistically driven. The school’s “final exam” was particularly controversial. Instead of encouraging the students to develop a “number,” Turin added a year of what he called “professional invention,” during which the students would stay at the school and create a full-length modern circus show under the guidance of a professional theater director or choreographer.

  To critics, the model was ridiculous: how would the students find jobs? Turin disagreed. He felt the new system would provide the students experience in creating original work and exposure to boot: each new show would premiere in Paris, where producers, critics, and government ministers would be watching.

  In 1995, Turin’s method was put to the test. After four years, his first complete class was graduating and would be performing its final show in Paris. As director, Turin had selected Joseph Nadj, a young Yugoslavian-born choreographer. It was a risky choice. Today Nadj is a bellwether of the French dance scene, but in 1995 he was still very much an upstart, known among modern-dance specialists for a dark, almost dystopian style that they liked to label “Kafkaesque.” But Turin felt that Nadj “had something to offer the circus,” an intense playfulness that would translate, and he offered the choreographer the same vote of confidence that Faivre d’Arcier had given Turin: carte blanche.

  Nadj’s show, entitled Le Cri du caméléon (The Cry of the Chameleon), premiered at the Parc de la Villette on January 12, 1996. The crowds who made the trek that night encountered a startling phenomenon. The show, based on a novel by Alfred Jarry, felt less like a circus than a piece of surrealist dance. The theme was metamorphosis, the tone abstract and unabashedly avant-garde. The performers dressed like Magritte characters, in tattered brown trench coats, baggy pants, and bowler hats. The music was discordant: trombones, snare drums, and xylophones battled messily. The circus skills were presented not as displays of prowess but as the work of bodies in motion, theatrical elements creating a world that was at times deliberately disturbing. For one handstand routine, an acrobat wore a white plaster-of-Paris mask. At the culmination of the show, the performers arranged themselves into a kind of giant slug and slithered across the stage. Le Cri du caméléon was, quite simply, the strangest circus France had ever seen.

  It was also a smash hit. After several weeks of sellout crowds, La Villette was forced to install televisions outside the tent to accommodate the audience. The show toured for almost three years with the same cast, playing over three hundred performances in France and abroad. At every stop, critics hailed its originality and creativity.

  Today, Le Cri du caméléon is considered one of the most important shows in modern circus history, in France and, by extension, the world. Previously, even the so-called new circuses adhered to fairly traditional structures; shows mostly consisted of unrelated acts, or “numbers,” knit together by music or a loose story. In Le Cri du caméléon, Nadj aspired to create a more unified whole, a true mix of dance, theater, and circus. There was no boundry between the genres. Performers were actors as much as gymnasts. As a choreographer, Nadj brought a choreographer’s ambition, with an attention to theme, rhythm, pace, unity of action, shape, energy, and time. The show had a clear and distinct voice, the way a painting can feel uniquely Degas, or a work of music uniquely Satie. “Never was a circus so clearly authored,” Jean-Michel Guy noted.

  Le Cri du caméléon was the first truly modernist circus: skeptical, self-referential, symbolist. But since the “modern circus” had already emerged, critics found another category to describe it. In Libération, Marc Laumonier wrote, “After the traditional circuses, then the nouveaux cirques, we should add henceforth the contemporary circus.”

  IT HAD BEEN SEVEN YEARS since the Parisian premiere of Le Cri du caméléon, but Turin was obviously still proud. “I was totally satisfied,” he said animatedly. “It was a complete validation of the school and of our method. Joseph told me that the work was only possible because of the unique training of the students.” After graduation, every student in the class found a job.

  Since then, the school has continued to premiere a new show every year. Each stars a different batch of students working under a different director. Because the directors are encouraged to experiment and challenge prevailing notions of what a circus contains, each show is a case study of sorts. The year I was in France, for example, the show—Bye Bye Prospero, directed by theater director Christophe Lidon—explored circus and speech, with trapezists whispering breathily into wireless microphones.

  Invariably, the reactions to the shows are mixed. Some are huge successes that tour widely, like Le Cri du caméléon. Many play once in Paris, travel a little, and die quietly. Traditionalists especially tend to find the shows aggravating. In the Clown Bar, Dominique Jando called Turin “a sculptor who makes circus like a sculptor.” Later, he said the French circus was “dominated by intellectuals, by theater and dance people, with no sense of what the real circus is.”

  Nevertheless, the effect of Turin’s vision—intellectualized, interdisciplinary, and culturally relevant circus—is undeniable. In France, the echoes are everywhere. Circus artists hoping for state support must submit stacks of information about their artistic intentions and their intended contribution to the aesthetic landscape. At French schools, the circus is taught as an inherently open and creative endeavor. At the National School, this openness can even be an issue. At the beginning of the second semester, when it came time for the students to choose a specialty, some of them refused, hoping to study “acrobatics in a general sense.” (Frédéric’s reply: “It doesn’t work like that.”)

  Abroad, Turin’s philosophy has spread, and more companies are making work according to the “contemporary circus.” Circa, an Australian company, has become globally famous for their stripped-down mix of dance and acrobatics. “With a bare stage and some minimally thrumming music, the company creates moments of exemplary and sometimes astounding skill,” circus critic John Ellingsworth has written. “Cutting out the chaff of imposed narrative or imagined character, they replace str
ucture with rhythm.” In Helsinki, Finland, where the contemporary circus scene is strong, the shows are minimalist and abstract. As Tomi Purovaara, director of the Finnish Circus Information Center, told me, “We learned a lot by studying what they did in France.”

  In Turin’s studio, our cups were empty. He stood and escorted me to the door. On the way, we chatted about his regrets, the missed opportunities during his tenure as head of the school. He told me that he had always hoped to bring one of the great European directors in to direct a circus show, somebody like Peter Brook or Pina Bausch, the seminal German choreographer. “Pina and I actually discussed it once,” he said, leaning into his cane. He had taken the students to see her show at Avignon, the important European theater festival, and, afterward, she had joined them for dinner. As they were eating, Turin pitched her on the idea of doing a show at the school. “She liked the idea, but of course it was only a fantasy. The circus is young yet. I never could have afforded her.”

  While Turin was talking, I happened to notice a pair of star-shaped silver medals on the shelf behind him. They were resting in a pair of velvet-lined jewelry boxes amid a sea of bric-a-brac. One was inlaid with blue, the other with green.

  I asked Turin where they came from. He smiled. They had been given to him by the Minister of Culture. One proclaimed him a Chevalier dans l’Ordre Nationale du Mérite. The other the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres. Both were orders created by de Gaulle after World War II, to celebrate contributions to French society, a bit like knighthood in Britain.