by Duncan Wall
Just as I was about to leave, the librarian produced something that changed my mind not only about the library, but also about the future of circus.
“Can you tell what it is?” she asked.
I was looking at a book she had presented to me. It was spiral-bound and as thick as a dictionary. Flipping through it, I judged it to be some kind of catalogue. Every page outlined a different show, with a list of acts and names next to each. The old-time circuses kept what were known in the business as “route books,” thorough logs of their activities—expense reports, towns visited, miles traveled, plus descriptions of special events. But this wasn’t detailed enough to be a route book. And the shows listed were too new; the majority seemed to be from the last decade. Stumped, I asked what the book was.
“They’re films!” the librarian announced proudly. She tapped a number in the corner of each page—the running time.
I ran my thumb through the book. There had to be hundreds of them.
“A lot of the films we took ourselves,” she went on cheerily. “We have a videographer on staff. I mean, he’s based here, but he travels all over, filming. And not just shows. He records workshops, rehearsals, lectures, events—anything related to the circus. We want to record the history as it’s being made.”
I had thought before about the role of technology in contemporary circus. Circus artists are increasingly incorporating video and digital effects in their shows. The Internet revolutionized how performers book gigs, how they find inspiration, even how they learn—in the modern world, anybody with a decent Internet connection can tutor herself on everything from a back handspring to a pratfall. Stupidly, though, I had never reflected on the effect of technology on circus history, and it excited me to think about it now. Video makes it economically feasible for the art to have a lasting legacy. In the future, a circus historian will be able to read about Les Arts Sauts and watch them fly, to observe Jérôme Thomas for himself. The art’s history will play a greater role in the present. Every historian must view this change as important—what would a Civil War historian give for a live recording of the Battle of Gettysburg? And for the circus, the difference is particularly seminal. For the first time, the skills of an artist can live on after she is gone.
DOWNSTAIRS, the hallway was empty. The tests were rolling again. I could hear the murmur of commands and vocal warm-ups and, from somewhere, Brubeck’s “Take Five” again. At the end of the hallway, a pair of glass doors led to the parking lot. Through them, I could see the parents milling around. In a few hours the kids would come streaming out, hopeful and spent.
I checked the schedule on the wall. Maud’s acrobatics section was all that remained. But there was something else I wanted to look into first. Following a hunch, I pushed through a set of double doors along the interior wall of the hallway, which led to a set of cement stairs. I climbed them and, sure enough, found they opened onto a landing surrounded by a railing, overlooking the old ring.
I knew of the space from my reading. Built in 1889, the building had witnessed a century of highs and lows. According to Charles Degeldère and Dominique Denis, who write about the building in Cirques en bois, cirque en pierre de France, its inaugural show was Cuba, a three-act pantomime “celebrating a glorious episode of the Spanish-American War.” Not long after, with the circus at its apex, a telepath named Lucile made an appearance, followed by Barnum & Bailey, which passed through on the westward leg of its great European tour.
The high times lasted for decades. Then, during World War II, the building took several direct hits, and it fell into disuse. For several years, the circus lay dormant. That it survived at all was mere good fortune. With the decline of manufacturing, workers migrated to bigger cities, and factories in Châlons had closed. There was such a glut of property that nobody felt the need to tear the old circus down.
The space was quiet now, empty and small, almost quaint compared with other rings I had seen. Eight rows of wooden benches encircled a simple floor littered with the sort of detritus I had come to associate with circus training grounds: a plastic water bottle, a juggler’s club. There was nothing showy or even decorative about the space. Hairline fissures wriggled through the plaster ceiling. The benches, once bright red, had faded to dull pink, with ghostly white splotches marking the spots of heavy traffic. The only real ornament was the cupola in the ceiling, a circular crown of dirty windows. Hazy sheets of sunshine poured down into the ring.
I felt unexpectedly moved by it all. There was something comforting about the simplicity of a ring surrounded only by benches. I walked down and took a seat.
According to the librarian, the building was scheduled for renovation that summer. The classrooms, the library, the ring—the whole thing would be given a $7-million face lift, as part of France’s developing interest in circus patrimony. Of course, I was happy to hear it. A few of France’s other circus buildings had been renovated, and the results were impressive. In Elbeuf, Normandy, the “cirque-théâtre,” constructed in 1892, with a stage overlooking the ring, had been redone. During the spring, I had paid a visit. On walking into the space, I nearly fell over. The enormous proscenium had been re-created with the original staff—a gypsum compound resembling plaster of Paris—and then painted a glowing baby blue. “The companies are excited to perform here,” Roger Le Roux, the director of the space, told me. “They feel as though they are connecting to something.”
Even so, I was thankful I had come to Châlons before the repairs. The building would look magnificent all dressed up, but something authentic would be lost. In the space now, there was a raggedness that testified to the building’s resilience. In the dim, dusty light, I felt as though I was seeing the circus in its original state. For once I didn’t have to imagine the history.
DURING MY TRIP to Montreal with Pascal, as we left the Tohu one evening, we had spoken about where the circus was going, about how the form would evolve. There were reasons for optimism. The possibilities for professional growth look good. According to rumors, Soleil has its gargantuan eye trained on Asia, specifically China and India, where a rising economic tide is lifting millions of people into the middle class, affording them the opportunity to travel to cities like Macao, the Vegas of China, where nightly receipts already quintuple those of the American gambling capital. If Soleil can convince these tourists to spend their yuan on circus instead of gambling, the circus stands to profit handily.
But for the first time it might have real competition. In 2000, Franco Dragone, Soleil’s old artistic muse, returned to his boyhood town of La Louvière, Belgium, where he established the Franco Dragone Entertainment Group, a company bent on creating shows to rival Soleil. One of Dragone’s first productions, Le Rêve, was a $110-million spectacle at the Wynn Resort in Vegas. More recently, he created The House of Dancing Water, a $250-million water extravaganza for Macao. Not long after, Soleil was forced to close its own $150-million Macao show, Zaia, due to poor attendance. A spokesman for the company claimed that China wasn’t ready for circus, that that entertainment sector was underdeveloped. This is hard to believe: across the street, Dragone was doing 95 percent capacity.
Behemoths aside, the circus is poised to grow in other ways. Circus schools have continued to emerge around the world. In Rabat, Morocco, the Minister of Professional Training had recently sanctioned the first circus school, L’École Nationale de Cirque Shems’y. In Puebla, Mexico, the Universidad Mesoamericana recently added a Center for the Development of Circus Arts, a four-year professional training program with an emphasis on “the creative body language specific to the aesthetic of contemporary circus.”
Meanwhile, modern companies continue to appear in places previously untouched by the form as well. One such company is Sapana in Nepal. Every year, dozens of Nepalese young people are sold into Indian circuses against their will. A nonprofit organization, the Esther Benjamins Trust, works to rescue them. Sapana is the result of a collaboration between the trust and a group of British circus art
ists who wanted to give the children hope and work after they returned to their homeland.
America is another place that has seen a recent resurgence, especially at the amateur level. Around the country, community circuses have sprouted up, such as the Stone Soup Circus, based in Princeton, New Jersey, the mission of which is to “build community through sharing the fun of circus.” The States has also seen an uptick in circus education. The American Youth Circus Organization, America’s network of youth circuses and circus educators, currently includes more than two hundred programs, with 350 total members. Most major cities have at least one school, and the biggest of them are major operations. The Minneapolis-based Circus Juventas, founded by Dan and Betty Butler in 1994, has an annual budget that tops $2 million and a tent that cost another $2.1 million. At any given time, over eight hundred students are enrolled in their classes, with another 250 waiting to join. When I met Betty at their facility in Minneapolis, she was exhausted but ecstatic. “It’s like a runaway train down a mountain!” she told me.
That said, America also faces a particular problem. Though the boom in amateur interest had led to the same renewed interest in circus as in Europe, it hasn’t necessarily translated into professional artistic work. Currently, there are few working circus artists in America and almost no full-fledged companies. There’s no professional group to advocate for the sector, no major festival where performers can meet, and, most critically, no professional training ground. What makes this especially frustrating is that America was an early adapter of the form: during the late sixties and early seventies, the country produced some of the first circus schools, and many of the early modern vanguards, such as the aforementioned Michael Moschen, Bill Irwin, and the Pickle Family Circus.
What happened? Two factors contributed heavily: reputation and economics. As elsewhere, traditional notions of circus have proved a burden, and arguably more so than in Europe. Even during the down days, the European circus retained a certain artistic dignity. The most traditional European shows, like the Circus Knie in Switzerland, are still performed in a single ring. Groomed horses feature prominently, and their riders often wear cravats.
In America, by contrast, the traditional circus is louder and wilder. It’s bigger and more overtly popular—the three-ring extravaganzas of Barnum & Bailey, and the hundred-car trains of Ringling Brothers. Moreover, the American circus history was rougher, filled with freaks and con men, which taints our modern conception of the form. As Jay Gilligan once told me, when he was touring with his first company he and his partner had struggled to find a label for their work that wouldn’t stigmatize them. “We couldn’t say ‘juggler,’ because that had a negative ‘clown’ sense in America,” he said. “We couldn’t say ‘artist,’ because that sounded too pretentious. We certainly couldn’t say ‘performance artist’—that’s like shooting yourself in the head.” Eventually, they chose to describe their work as “postmodern juggling,” a phrase they appropriated from a review. The moniker was potentially esoteric, but it served their purpose. “It mostly left them confused, but in a way that we could explain ourselves. It would start a conversation.”
But even the historical challenges facing American artists pale when compared with the economic woes. America has no Ministry of Culture, and little public funding for the arts. (The entire National Endowment for the Arts, America’s cultural fund, hovers around $150 million, roughly equal to what the French government spends annually to support the Paris Opera.) Of course there’s private money—foundational grants, corporate sponsorship, donations from deep pockets—but donors like local causes, and foundations tend to favor established institutions, not arts trying to reinvent themselves. To make matters worse, most grant applications don’t include a section for the circus, and certain arts bodies—including the New York State Council for the Arts—explicitly ban funding for circuses, since they associate the form with carnivals. “With a lot of description, you can get beyond their prejudices and show that there are theatrical merits to your work,” Keith Nelson of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus in New York told me. Often he applies the category of “performance art.” “It is a joke, but it’s also the reality. They understand classical theater as being important to the history of art, whereas circus is not.”
For the time being, some Americans circumvent these problems by teaching. Many more work day jobs and channel their passion into nights and weekends. For serious performers, the most popular route is commercial or corporate work. They flip in rap videos, twirl on trapezes at car conventions, lead workshops for hundreds of employees with ladder-balancing acts that symbolize the climb to the top. The gigs can be lavish (one juggling duo purportedly makes $20,000 per show). They can travel the world, sleep at the best hotels; one performer, Christine Van Loo, at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, soared above the stage at a Paul McCartney concert before a crowd including Vladimir Putin, a squadron of military leaders, and a hundred thousand Russians with tears streaming down their cheeks.
Over time, however, such work cuts with the proverbial double edge. It employs circus skills divorced from circus context, and devoid of much of what makes the circus special: culture, community, collaboration. “It’s basically a commercial transaction,” Aloysia Gavre, a Los Angeles–based circus director, told me. “You arrive at three p.m. Do your light check, check your rigging. Okay, here’s a little dance number we’re going to do at the top of the show. Great. Do your act. Here’s your paycheck.”
Many performers are of course happy to have this paycheck, and some take great satisfaction and pride in the gigs. Over time, though, they’ve had a detrimental effect on the circus as an art form in America. “Performers lost intention,” Gavre said. “They lost integrity—really, the ethics of what it means to be part of a troupe.” Today this challenge endures. After years on the commercial cycle, a performer might find herself less willing and possibly less able to suffer the pangs of real art-making, to endure whatever misery or failure it takes to create work of her own in an unwelcoming climate. “The next generation hasn’t come around yet,” Gypsy Snider said. “When you’re young and doing circus, you don’t want to be bothered to invest and take on the responsibility of a company.” She added, “Dedicating your life to a circus company here is almost suicidal.”
How American artists respond to and evolve under these circumstances, especially now that interest is rising, will dictate their future. Many believe the circus could thrive here. “The market is there,” LeClair said, after pointing out that his troupe sells 94 percent of the tickets for every show. Demographics also seem to be working in favor of the circus. Americans are redeveloping downtowns, leading to a rising interest in urban live entertainment. “What’s missing are the producers,” LeClair said. “If a few capable people decided to get involved, the whole thing could explode.”
IN A CAB IN MONTREAL, Pascal and I chatted about all this. His most impassioned moment came not in reference to the modern circus, but to the traditional circus, the old animal shows. When I asked him what he thought would happen to such shows, he grew quiet for a long moment, his eyes panned out the window at the cityscape of this new circus capital.
“I really don’t know what will happen,” he said finally. “Will Cirque du Soleil continue to grow, with four, six, eight, ten, twelve, twenty, forty, fifty more shows touring in the world? Yes, I’d say that’s possible. And if that happened, it would truly be a bouleversement.” It would be an upheaval, because, wherever Soleil appears, it imposes a new definition on the local landscape, a new image of the circus, which the traditional shows are often unable to survive. “It could kill the conventional circus entirely. In a sense, it might become the new traditional circus. And that would be sad.”
I thought about this while overlooking the ring in Châlons.
Pascal is a modern, an intellectual in the purest sense, but the idea of losing the traditional circus hit him hard. He had grown up leaning his elbows on the ring at Cirque d’Hiver, feeling
his heart soar to brass-band marches, admiring the turn of the tigers, smelling their musk in the sawdust. The traditional circus was a wonderful world for him.
I had no such associations, especially now. After nine months, the modern circus had come to dominate my perspective, to define the art in my head as much as or more than the old clichés. Yet, just as I was glad to have visited this building before its renovation, I was happy to have discovered the circus now, before it changed completely. Over the year, I had come to appreciate the old form, historically but also aesthetically. I attended traditional shows whenever I could. I found even the worst shows endearing; the best, like the Cirque National Alexis Gruss, exemplars of a kind of quaint, classical form of skill. I had a respect for their discipline, grit, and resilience. Ironically, I had now come to love the circus that had bored me as a boy.
I heard a rising commotion in the hallway, the sound of the students flooding between sessions, laughing, chatting. Maud’s acrobatics test was next. I would go watch her rip her way through the routines. Three months later, on the final test, she would score just as well, and cruise into the school, part of the next generation.
I stood and walked down to the ring. In the modern circus, performers are moving away from the ring. The majority of the shows I see occur on theatrical stages, or in nontraditional spaces like the dome of Les Arts Sauts. And yet performers look to the ring with an unexpected romanticism and affection. They like to talk about the strange power of standing in the middle of a ring, the eyes of a crowd converging on you from all sides. “The public is close to you, but there’s no sense of opposition,” Hélène Cadiou, the secrétaire générale at the Cirque-Théâtre d’Elbeuf, told me. “They surround you, almost like they’re protecting you.” There are even those who feel that the ring defines the circus, that the art, in its purest sense, should rely on a space more than an assembly of forms. During the planning stages for the Tohu, Lavoie told me, the committee intended to construct a square building. “But then we attended the Festival Mondial de Cirque du Demain at Cirque d’Hiver, the famous hard circus in Paris, and everything changed,” Lavoie said. “We sat down in the building and we understood right away what a circus is. When the lights came up, we all agreed that the building had to be round.”