The Meaning of the Circus: The Communicative Experience of Cult, Art, and Awe 9781350044135, 9781350044166, 9781350044159

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Prologue
Acknowledgments
1 Like Moths Flying to a Candle in the Night
2 Ritual and Sacrifice: The Circus between Cult and Art
3 The Music Is the Message
4 Flashback
5 Great Expectations
6 The Ethnography of Memory
7 A Sense of Gravity
8 To Laugh or Not to Laugh
9 Lives under Siege
10 Where Is Home? The Circus’s Endless Odyssey
Epilogue
References
Index

Citation preview

The Meaning of the Circus

Also Available from Bloomsbury Circus as Multimodal Discourse, by Paul Bouissac The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning, by Paul Bouissac Linguanomics, by Gabrielle Hogan-Brun Technolingualism, by James Pfrehm The Semiotics of Emoji, by Marcel Danesi

The Meaning of the Circus The Communicative Experience of Cult, Art, and Awe

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Copyright © Paul Bouissac, 2018 Paul Bouissac has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xxiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Olivia D’Cruz Photographs © Getty Images/Henrik Sorensen All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bouissac, Paul, author. Title: The meaning of the circus : the communicative experience of cult, art, and awe / Paul Bouissac. Description: London ; New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018001762 (print) | LCCN 2018008031 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350044142 (ePub) | ISBN 9781350044159 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781350044135 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Circus–Social aspects. Classification: LCC GV1815 (ebook) | LCC GV1815 .B684 2018 (print) | DDC 791.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001762 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-4413-5 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4415-9 eBook: 978-1-3500-4414-2 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to: Catherine Dagois a.k.a. Sandy Sun Brenda Häni François Bouvier and Sascha Grodotzki whose friendship inspired its writing

Contents List of Figures  Prologue 

viii

xiii

Acknowledgments 

xxiii

1 Like Moths Flying to a Candle in the Night 1 2 Ritual and Sacrifice: The Circus between Cult and Art  3 The Music Is the Message 23 4 Flashback 39 5 Great Expectations 61 6 The Ethnography of Memory 83 7 A Sense of Gravity 105 8 To Laugh or Not to Laugh 127 9 Lives under Siege 145 10 Where Is Home? The Circus’s Endless Odyssey 161

Epilogue 179 References  Index 

194

191

11

List of Figures 1 Sandy Sun, hanging from the trapeze bar with her bare heels

and straightened legs. Photo credit: Jean-Noël Ferragut 

xvi

2 Sandy Sun: body calligraphy in space. Photo credit: Kathleen

Blumenfeld 

xvii

3 François Bouvier, a delicate balance on the wire, with a smile.

Photo credit: Lutz Schneider 

xxi

4 A typical traditional circus troupe in the times of horse-drawn

transportation (from the archives of Nikolai Tovarich) 

5

5 Two posters (reprinted from Paul Bouissac 1973). Naturally,

circus acts are never as perfect as the posters that purport to represent them but these icons influence our perception and remain in our memory  16 6 Picture perfect, ready for performance 

26

7 Four posters from Jovan Andric’s collection with his own

comments 

42

8 A sample of the Vesque Sisters’ contribution to the

ethnography of the circus of their time (reprinted from Paul Bouissac 1973)  56 9 A photo by Kenneth Elliott featured in the article “The

Professors’ Wonderful Circus” by Frank Rasky, published by Maclean’s on June 5, 1965  73 10 Brenda Häni, Blackpool, July 2016. Photo credit: Zbigniew

Roguszka 

89

ix

LIST OF FIGURES

11 Brenda and Julio Häni: Haute école, the dancer and the horse.

From Brenda Häni’s archives 

91

12 Brenda: the cannon ball lady at Cirque National. From Brenda

Häni’s archives 

92

13 Brenda and Baby: gracefully posing for the audience at Cirque

Bouglione. From Brenda Häni’s archives 

92

14 Brenda and Baby: a daring act of trust. From Brenda Häni’s

archives 

93

15 Brenda and Baby: in the mouth of a gentle giant. From Brenda

Häni’s archives 

94

16 The Regio. The flyer, Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella, pirouettes

in space before being caught by the catcher, Sandro Regio. Photo credit: Edgard Marcondes  110 17 The Regio. Triple somersault by Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella.

The “flight” is an elegantly controlled fast fall toward the catcher’s hands after performing the three somersaults in space. Photo credit: Edgard Marcondes  110 18 The Regio. Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella, intensely focused

on the catcher’s helping hands. Photo credit: Alexander Leumann  111 19 François Bouvier: live on the wire. Photo credit: Einar King-

Odencrants 

117

20 François Bouvier: the cabaret version of his persona,

performing with high heels on the wire in a variety show produced by Stephan Masur. Photo credit: Christian Rätzel  118 21 Sandy Sun, hanging from the trapeze with a single bare

heel. Confident but fully aware of the risk, Sandy says: “Entering the ring to perform is like going to the front.”

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LIST OF FIGURES

Indeed, the battle with gravity is never won in advance. Every performance is a new fight. Photo credit: Kathleen Blumenfeld  123 22 Sandy Sun. Balance on the lower back with great split. Photo

credit: Kathleen Blumenfeld 

124

23 Sandy Sun gave a name to the acrobatic figures she created.

Here: “Nô Theater.” Photo credit: Jean-Noël Ferragut 

125

24 Gaston Häni: the man. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  25 Gaston, the clown. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka 

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135

26 The classy cast is in place, ready for the action: The Maître D’,

the guest, and the two waiters. Note the white table cloth and the flowers on the table. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  137 27 The goofy waiters suffer mishaps of their own: Gaston steps on

a mop that hits Roly between the legs. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  138 28 Any problem? Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka 

138

29 Gaston serves the soup. Roly protects the guest. Photo credit:

Zbigniew Roguszka 

139

30 The dish of noodles gets stuck on the guest’s face. Photo credit:

Zbigniew Roguszka 

139

31 Alois Spindler. In a family circus, even the director plays his part

in setting up the tent. Photo credit: Sascha Grodotzki 

166

32 (a) Sascha Grodotzki: “In a circus, someone has to do the

paper work.” Photo credit: Axel Biewers. (b) Sascha Grodotzki: “Schakira is our female giraffe in Circus Voyage. She is 14 years old and very kind. I love to spend my free time with her and watch her long, beautiful eyelashes.” Photo credit: Alois Spindler  167

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LIST OF FIGURES

33 Circus Voyage: rola bola creates the first emotions. Will the

artist manage to keep his balance on the successive boards he adds on top of the unstable sphere? Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  171 34 Circus Voyage: harmonious balancing and contortions

within a metal frame by Anastasia. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  171 35 Circus Voyage: spectacular hand balancing by an impressive

young athlete, Akim Weisheit. Slow motion in artistic body choreography. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  172 36 Circus Voyage: foot-juggling with fire by Alicia Spindler. Photo

credit: Zbigniew Roguszka 

172

37 Circus Voyage: emerging from her aquatic realm, Anastasia

projects a contagious smile of triumph and joy. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  173 38 Circus Voyage: the elephants learn fast how to play ball

games. This one will drop the ball to the ground and kick it toward the audience. A kid will immediately launch it back and the elephant will kick it again. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  175 39 Circus Voyage: Schakira the giraffe expects a reward after

following Alois Spindler around the ring. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  175 40 Circus Voyage: The hippo takes its time but Diana Spindler can

wait with a succulent cabbage in her hand while the audience admires the slow walk of this massive and docile animal, which eventually reaches the stool where it now stands. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka  176 41 Eva Tovarich. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives 

183

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LIST OF FIGURES

42 The Tovarich troupe. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives 

184

43 The Tovarich troupe. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives 

184

44 The Tovarich troupe. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives 

185

45 A family moment: Nikolai Tovarich with his sister

Francesca 

186

46 Michael Ferreri. Photo credit: Steven Ferreri 

190

Prologue Meaning and emotion

T

his book is about meaning, not the abstract notion discussed in logic, semantic, or philosophy, but in the sense we intuitively understand when we talk of a meaningful experience. This kind of meaning is an emotion rather than a concept. Perhaps, after all, meaning is ultimately grounded in feelings rather than cognition. The pleasure of meeting a challenge, realizing a dream, or solving a problem is what gives meaning to our life. Understanding a word, a sentence, and others’ intentions; discovering patterns and connections; fulfilling immediate goals and long-term plans, all these moments cause us to feel that life makes sense. The circus is a crucible in which such meanings are forged, experienced, and shared with intense acuity by both the artists and their audience. Therefore, the main focus of this book will be the people who make the circus what it is: an extraordinary human achievement of extreme skill and courage. They are artists in the full sense of the term, both as creators and interpreters. Their art is ephemeral and precarious as it depends on the unique synergy of a multitude of physical and mental capacities. Time is the wild animal they ride, always on the brink of collapse. It is also a ferocious beast ever ready to snap and claw. Circus artists are supported by a trade rife with hazards. The meaning of the circus refers also to the sense it makes for the outsiders, the spectators who are drawn to experiencing again and again the thrill, beauty, and awe of its performances. Many are irresistibly attracted to its magic like a magnet. This book is also about falling in love, for better or worse, with the circus as an intoxicating art, a constantly renewed source of meaning. Circus acts are indeed works of art produced by a creative process and aimed at causing a range of pleasures from mere fun to extreme relief. Conception, innovation, training, staging, and performing are distinct stages in their development, often simultaneous rather than successive. But there is more: the process never stops because every performance, day after day, requires the constant mobilizing of all the human resources on which the recreation of the act depends. More than anyone else, circus artists relentlessly struggle in the grip of an open-ended game.

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PROLOGUE

This book endeavors to explore circus acts from the point of view of the artists themselves. It will probe the vital interface they maintain with their human and animal partners, and with the tools of their trade: ropes, cables, bars, ladders, balls, clubs, hoops, chairs, pedestals, whips, and the like. Much attention will also be paid to the ways in which they experience their audience. The public is their other half, their lifeline, and their mirror. My ultimate goal is to give a voice to circus artists and to deepen the understanding and appreciation of their work by their spectators. Therefore, this book is addressed primarily to the public at large, both those who love the circus and those who criticize this form of popular entertainment. Circus breeds a double-edged fascination, at times verging on fanaticism, like a religion. In my previous books, Circus and Culture (1976), Semiotics at the Circus (2010), Circus as Multimodal Discourse (2013), and The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning (2015), I have described circus performances as they appear to the audience, displays of special actions that captivate our attention and trigger our emotions. These acts unfold in a few minutes packed with information that engages all our senses and the resources of our minds. They offer as much to perceive and understand as to feel and be moved. A circus act is like any work of art we may think of. It is dramatically organized, self-contained like a musical piece, choreographed like a ballet, colorful like a painting, and plastic like a sculpture. It is also fundamentally played out as a game of chance whose outcome is uncertain until we can relieve our anxiety and succumb to our enthusiasm in a loud, collective applause, often with involuntary tears in our eyes. The temporal depth of this art over the past two centuries has been perceptively and empathetically documented, notably by Peta Tait (Tait 2005, 2011, 2016). Like a master’s portrait, a poem, or a piece of music, a circus act can be revisited again and again. Instant recording now makes this possible. What is missing in these replays, though, is the vibrant presence of the circus. The open-endedness of life itself is absent from a video. We know that the act has already ended well. “Revisiting” here literally means attending again the live show. It will never be exactly the same act in every detail but the esthetic integrity of its technical and emotional dynamic will be re-experienced anew. It cannot be revisited forever, though: time is of the essence in this ephemeral art. By chance or by necessity, circus acts enjoy limited life spans. Circus art is unique because of its immediacy: its substance is the human body as both the subject and the object of its creations. There is no physical or temporal distance between the artist and her or his work. It is a totally embodied art. All the instruments that may be used to play the act are attuned to the corporal proportions of the artists. They are empowering extensions of their bodies. The aerial acrobat and her swinging trapeze form an organic whole embedded in the world of universal gravity, the formidable force she confronts and challenges.

PROLOGUE

xv

Muenster, April 16, 2015. The first international conference on “Zirkuswissenschaft” (science of the circus) is taking place in this German university town. It has been organized by Franziska Trapp from the Department of Communication Studies. The day before, the opening ceremony was held in the city’s imposing historical castle, where the university is now located, but today we are under the big top of a small contemporary circus, Le Cirque Bouffon, a French company that is touring Germany and has pitched its tent between a fairground and the university. The woman who is now standing on the podium in the center of the ring is Sandy Sun, a former trapeze artist who was still a star of circus and cabaret programs a decade ago. She now trains young people who want to learn the art and enter the trade. I never saw her perform but, over the years, Sandy Sun’s name had often come up in conversations with other circus artists. She had the reputation of being among the best of her generation in this demanding specialty: a solo, untethered trapeze act high above the ground. Her voice betrays the self-confidence of high achievers with a hint of nostalgia when she comments on the videos of her act that are projected on the screen. Her poise and composure reveal how comfortable she is with her body. She conveys the feeling that she owns the space around herself and she commands our attention with natural, unassuming authority. Acrobats spend their life managing their balance and their breathing within the constraints of gravity. The frame of the trapeze holds them above the ground but their art consists of pushing the limits at the threshold of the fall. They just do not hang up there. They negotiate aerial life through the power of their grip and the timing of their muscular contractions. When their trapeze swings back and forth, they convey to their public a sense of inebriating freedom. Late at night, after the performance of Cirque Bouffon, the only place that is still open on a deserted street is an Italian restaurant. The kitchen is already closed, though, but the mustached, jovial owner welcomes our small group and we dine on almond cookies with enough bottles of Chianti to quench our thirst and open our hearts. Sandy likes the idea of this book, which is still a vague project of mine. Her enthusiasm is the push I need to start thinking seriously about what was so far a mere idea. There are many things she would like to convey to the public. Circus artists have no voice of their own. The media cast them in stereotypical images and dead metaphors. She plans to write her own memoirs, someday. We evoke the videos of her act she had shown earlier in the day. I tell her that I have been struck by her dignity when she was ascending the rope to reach her trapeze or standing on the bar in full swing before jumping and catching the trapeze with her feet. We will meet Sandy Sun again in the pages of this book. That evening, she disclosed the memory of an intense moment in her career, the day when suddenly, high above the ring, in Berlin, she lost all feeling in the hand that was grasping

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PROLOGUE

FIGURE 1  Sandy Sun, hanging from the trapeze bar with her bare heels and straightened legs. Photo credit: Jean-Noël Ferragut.

PROLOGUE

FIGURE 2  Sandy Sun: body calligraphy in space. Photo credit: Kathleen Blumenfeld.

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PROLOGUE

the bar as she was going to turn around under the trapeze and ascend to the safety of the ropes. Her life was truly hanging from that hand. “I started talking to my hand, telling it that it should keep gripping whether I felt it or not. It had no choice. I had to survive. It could not abandon me so soon. Of course, nobody in the public noticed what was happening up there. Eventually, I was able to complete the trick and regain my sitting position on the bar and go on to the next exercise.” Circus is the realm of chance encounters. The artists who appear in this book have not been deliberately selected. Our paths just happened to cross in a variety of circumstances. At times, bonds were formed on the fly. Nomadic cultures are by essence fluid and haphazard. Most often, my attention was caught by the quality of their performance and I endeavored to later connect with them on a personal level. But, on other occasions, the first contact occurred independently of their act, meeting them through friends or just under the force of an impulse, a kind of magnetic attraction. Seizing that thread sometimes led me to discover the unexpected perfection of their performance in the circus arena or high above the ring. We laughed together when I mimicked the journalists who routinely ask them: “Is it really dangerous what you do?” Or: “how does it feel to travel all the time?” They resent being treated as freaks rather than artists. Cirque Bouffon has invited the speakers from the Zirkuswissenschaft conference to their evening performance. We were all assigned a seat on the front row. Surrounded by colleagues, locked into an academic lot seated in plastic armchairs, I soon feel restless. At the first blackout I escape and climb to a sparsely occupied bleacher in the opposite direction. A juggler jumps into the ring and starts his virtuoso act: quickly throwing and catching what looks like white tennis balls, he displays all the figures of the art with a calculated increase in complexity. What is striking is the choreography. His juvenile body undulates, merging his juggling with the tempo of the music, on the verge of fluid, harmonious contortions. He does not know yet that he is sublime. I am moved to tears, submerged by esthetic and sensual emotions. I clap my hands until my palms hurt. In such moments we all tend to share our feelings. I turn toward my neighbor on the bleacher, a young man who has followed the act with noticeable intensity. “What a beautiful act! Is it not?”— “Yes indeed! His name is Jimmy Gonzales. He is my friend.” We soon start chatting. François Bouvier is a tight-wire walker from Québec who, this year, performs in Europe. He drove from Hamburg to Muenster to meet Jimmy and his wife before moving to the U.K. as he has been hired by a Welsh circus company. I will try to see his act when I go to London, later in the year. We exchange email addresses. For centuries, probably millennia, circus artists were born in the circus and trained from early childhood to master a range of acrobatic skills that

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would allow them to contribute their share to the family destiny as traveling entertainers. The parents would recognize specific aptitudes in their children and would train them accordingly so that they could take part in the show sooner rather than later. Harsh discipline was often needed at this stage. Illiteracy and lack of general education led to lives that were entirely determined by the circus condition. Some outsiders would join the circus at times after having independently acquired some acrobatic skills, often creating high-risk acts that made them attractive to circus entrepreneurs. We will encounter in this book some of them as well as artists whose ancestry goes back to the immemorial origins of the circus tradition. In the mid-twentieth century, a new phenomenon appeared in the form of circus schools. We will consider further this cultural development and the impact it had on the contemporary circus’s artistic culture as we proceed in this book. Joining the circus ceased to be a dramatic gesture of emancipation toward a fascinating unknown but became a career option, albeit a nonconventional one. But the life experience of these individuals is nevertheless put to the test on a daily basis as they remain doubly outcast: they have indeed abandoned to a great extent their social anchorage by becoming artistic nomads without being fully adopted by those who consider circus to be their unalienable heritage. We will sense at times this existential stress under the surface of the performers’ smiles. Antwerp, July 29, 2016. The NoFit State Circus where François Bouvier now works is part of a summer festival in the outskirts of this Belgium city. I happen to be there for a conference. I had not been able to make it to Cardiff or London earlier in the month. But, this time, I will not miss such a happy coincidence. The NoFit State Circus is a contemporary troupe that cultivates innovative staging. In a last-minute texting, François warns me: “Don’t expect a traditional show. There is no seating facility under the tent. The public moves around. Bring a folding chair if you don’t want to be standing all the time.” Indeed, as the public is herded under the big top, the crowd saturates the inner space. Soon elbow to elbow, we experience the kind of proximity, if not promiscuity that is found in popular bars and clubs. Four scaffoldings on wheels are moved around as the show proceeds. They are used to delimitate flexible performing spaces and provide anchors for the riggings of the acrobats. We are displaced to make room according to the required space when the towers are rolled or acts are taking place on various areas at ground level. The shortest people in the audience have to rise up on their toes or squeeze across a wall of bodies if they want to see what is happening in the center of these successive clearings. For aerial acts we tilt our heads backward. Describing the event is a writer’s nightmare as it is not possible to rely on the set formulas that are available when we can tap common spatial knowledge of our cultural built environment such as

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a stadium, a theater stage, or a circus ring. Information continuously flows around in an unpredictable manner and everybody has to struggle to assert their rights to watch lest they are confined to the blind margins of the crowd. I can’t wait for François’s wire act. Adapting to this new mode of performance is exhausting, mainly when the show is run-of-the-mill acrobatics of the graduating level of a circus school. The novelty of the moveable, interactive performing space quickly wears out. Pressing perspiring flesh on a hot summer evening has very limited charm. Cool Belgian beers from the in-house bar are part of the survival strategy. At long last, during the intermission, the apparatus of the wire act is set up at the center of the performing area. I recognize François in the background while someone checks and rectifies the angles of the metallic supports to the ground, and signals to the helpers who crank up the cable until it has reached its optimal tension. I recognize the fine features of this artist who had caught my attention in Muenster. I was not sure what to expect. I had overheard mixed comments, verging on homophobia, about his act when his name came up in a conversation. This attitude is rampant in the traditional circus culture, often rough and violent under the veneer of the performers’ charismatic smiles. I was told with a sneer that he performs in drag with high heels on the wire. And now I can see him, dancing, pirouetting, and jumping with poise and elegance on the lightly bouncing cable. No display of effeminacy. He is self-assured, dressed in a semi-casual, functional costume, as far from the gaudy style found in the traditional circus as can be imagined. His vintage cap, though, lends him a cocky air evoking the Gavroche of Les Misérables, the insolent, good-hearted urchin who eventually joins the popular uprising on the barricades. His technique is flawless. His performance is focused and sober. His tenseness is hardly perceptible as he makes everything appear so natural that the audience may have the impression that a backward somersault is the easiest thing to do on a wire. Audiences recognize exceptional talent when they encounter it. For the first time in tonight’s show, there is long, thundering applause when he concludes his act with a charming smile and a modest bow. Perfection always brings tears to my eyes. This has been an epiphany moment. When, later, we meet with some friend at the circus bar, I can’t help hugging him. I am speechless. His was the only real circus act in the program. The rest was run-of-the-mill acrobatics mixed with theatrical avant-gardism. We will meet François Bouvier again in these pages. After Antwerp, Bianca, the name of the show, will go to Prague, then to the South of France for some festivals. François has no contracts yet for the year to come. He tells me that he would love to work some day in a traditional circus. This book is not about the life of circus artists as people but the life of people as circus artists. The relationship of Sandy Sun to her own body and trapeze, for instance, is a good example that will be further explored. The creation and

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artistic management of her act cannot be separated from the entanglement of art and trade, the world of agents, contracts, promoters, directors, and colleagues. The context within which François Bouvier is beginning his artistic career is somewhat different. The contemporary circus offers new opportunities while entailing new kinds of constraints and challenges. At the core, though, the mastery of balancing, walking, dancing, jumping, and somersaulting on a taut cable requires a physical and moral commitment that deeply transforms one’s life experience. Creating an artistic persona and dramatically staging a signature performance involve a high degree of creative energy against the background of an immemorial tradition that provides both prototypes to transgress and role models to imitate and surpass. Whatever appears in this book will have been communicated by the artists themselves. As much as possible, URLs of complete acts will be added for readers to get a glimpse of the elusive wonder of the circus. For instance, as a testimony to her earlier career and as a demonstration for her students, Sandy Sun posted the following videos on the Internet: www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbLaHwOY1Q www.youtube.com/watch?=YSS7TIIIs9c Similarly, François Bouvier has made available on the Internet excerpts of his act as well as training sessions. http://fildeferiste.wix.com/bouvier

FIGURE 3  François Bouvier, a delicate balance on the wire, with a smile. Photo credit: Lutz Schneider.

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Modern artists use this means of communication to promote their skills in a direct, multimodal form. But there will also be abundant original photographs in this book to bear witness to the past as well as the present. Still photographs allow for lengthy and repeated contemplation of the qualities and emotions that mold our faces, mainly when true human contact has been established between the photographer and the subjects. This work is not a detached, clinical account of circus artists but it is in many essential respects a self-involving exercise amounting to a confession. It is a kind of auto-ethnography, if not autobiography, in as much as my own life experience in constant touch with the circus in various capacities over approximately six decades is what forged my identity and made this book possible. In other writings on the circus I had endeavored to follow the conventions of ethnographic accounts and anthropological interpretations. My point of view as a spectator whose stated goal was to be an objective observer and scientific recorder of circus performances forced me to maintain a relative distance and to gloss over whatever intimate knowledge I happened to have of the artists I described. My ambition was not to report what I saw and felt personally when attending a circus show but to use my own experience as spectator as a path toward understanding the state of mind, both cognitive and emotional, of the audience as a whole. Two orders of information served indeed as guarantees of the cultural relevance of the circus acts I observed: the fact that they had been repeatedly selected as parts of a program aimed at attracting spectators; and the response of particular audiences I could witness as a member of these audiences. Therefore, I had to factor in my analyses the success encountered by performances which left me rather indifferent or which I even disliked. I was not in the position of an artistic critic whose task is to judge performances in view of certain esthetic or technical standards but I was construing myself as a mere element in a statistical effect that I could assess, so to speak, from inside. This book is different. My goal here is to lead the readers, and hopefully the spectators they have been and will someday become again, behind the veil of the representations they admire (or despise). I want to confront the mysterious attraction that determined the course of my life. This is worth considering because I have encountered so many people who shared this irrational passion for the circus that there is more in this phenomenon than a mere individual case. We will thus explore the circus as a meaningful experience, for both the artists and their audience, in the challenging world in which they survive through performing an ancient ritual, a kind of cult that straddles the thin border that separates life and death.

Acknowledgments S

pecial thanks are due to those who have contributed to this work through their friendly, candid conversations: Jovan Andric, François Bouvier, Charlie Cairoli Jr., Michael Ferreri, Philippe Goudard, Sascha Grodotzki, Brenda Häni, Gaston Häni, Laetitia Lapin, Simon Preissing, Adrian Ramos, Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella, Nikolai Tovarich, Sandy Sun, Hubertus Wawra, and Gregor Wollny. Stephen Harold Riggins has provided precious editorial advice. Victoria University granted funds to build a companion website to this volume and to produce original photographs by Zbigniew Roguszka.

1 Like Moths Flying to a Candle in the Night

A world apart

A

recurring theme in the chapters of this book will be the deep bond that many people experience with the circus. For some, it is because they were born into this way of life, which they would not trade for any other. For those who grew up in the sedentary world, their fascination originated in an early exposure to its magic presence. Many became irresistibly attracted to the circus through children’s storybooks and toys, or after having been taken to a show by their parents or grandparents. These brief glimpses of another world appeared to them to be so strikingly alien to the constraints of their daily routines that it made them dream of a more meaningful existence. The mirage of a world where play and freedom ruled had become both tangible and elusive, like a lure dangled in front of their dazzled eyes. All their senses had been aroused. For most of them, it remained a lifelong nostalgia for a meaningful experience that was periodically revived when a circus visited their town. The happy few, though, made the drastic move to join the circus for better or worse. November 2015. The refugee crisis dominates the daily news. Razor sharp fences are hurriedly built along the southern borders of several European countries. There is a general feeling that we live at the end of an era when we could freely move across an almost seamless Europe, if not the whole world. I decide not to wait to complete a brief tour I was planning for the spring, and visit some circus friends in Poland, Germany, and Switzerland. Indeed, this book is being written in symbiosis with circus artists, a fluid population that performs in perpetually moving shows as in a borderless universe. For

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THE MEANING OF THE CIRCUS

most circuses, the time to wind up this year’s tour has come. Soon, artists will disperse only to recombine within a few weeks in diverse spectacles celebrating Christmas holidays and other winter festivals. I must quickly be on the move to catch up with my elusive contacts, doing mostly “one-night stands” and spending endless hours in trains and buses. This month, five circuses happen to play in Southern Germany and Northern Switzerland. Munich is a convenient epicenter from which railway lines radiate. The opportunity of meeting Sascha Grodotzki, who lives nearby, can’t be missed. I have known Sascha for five years since the time when, as the public relation person for Zirkus Charles Knie, he facilitated my interactions with some of the artists who became the subjects of my latest books. He also arranged for photographic sessions during the performances. Our casual conversations, then, had led to a mutual understanding. Obviously, he was not from a circus family. He had first joined another show before being hired by this one. Like many of us, he had been irresistibly attracted to the circus at a young age, first working as a candy floss seller at Zirkus Krone. Sascha has taken a year off from circus life to help with his parents’ business, not far from Munich, where I will spend the night on my way to Biberach, in Eastern Swabia, to see Circus Carl Busch, which is scheduled to play there. We meet for a drink near the main train station. Good vibes allow us to skip any kind of formal talk. Obviously, family considerations were accessory in his decision to temporarily leave the circus. The daily routine is stressful. The press man is under constant pressure. The show must be relentlessly promoted through all the local media. Circus haters often make that job challenging. Sascha is on the frontline. He is the one who must call the police when a dozen vociferous animal rights activists—he call them “animalists”—brandish aggressive placards and interfere with the families lining up in front of the “Kassa” to buy their tickets. I found him, one day of July 2012, in Frankfurt, quite agitated because a handful of protesters had frightened the three stallions that were displayed in a large enclosure that had been set up in front of the circus under the shadow of the trees. The police were slow in showing up. The circus director was getting impatient. That day, Sascha had only a few minutes for me, always smiling but tense. Some TV celebrities were expected to arrive any time soon for a live interview with the lion trainer. The show is always on the move. The press man is the social face of the circus. I remember Sascha’s cordiality the first time I met him on the lot under the rain in Heidelberg. He had nicely replied to my email, and he welcomed me at the circus. As we were chatting over an espresso, under the awning of the reception tent, one of the circus directors twice walked by us with a supreme air of haughty indifference. I winked to Sascha who winked back. We cracked a joke. But the matinee was going to start. Sascha had to rush. He had to sell programs at the entrance and keep an eye out for any person of media

LIKE MOTHS FLYING TO A CANDLE IN THE NIGHT

3

importance who would have to receive VIP treatment. As an academic, I am small fry. He always understood that I was happy with this relative invisibility and the freedom it affords. His cooperation in my research, though, has been invaluable. Now we are talking, relaxed, free from the circus surroundings that had constrained our earlier meetings. Some fifty years apart in age, we share a similar experience. The same fascination had drawn him to the circus. He recalls his first dream day at Zirkus Krone, where his job was to sell candy floss. He had been assigned to a supervisor who immediately warned him: “Outside lies Germany. Here it is Krone country. We have our own rules. Remember: never address the director nor look at her when she walks by. It would cost you a fine of 100 Euros, deducted from your pay.” He had found out soon after, a day when her lap dogs greeted him and he had dared to make a complimentary remark about them. The constriction of circus space increases the social distance that structures its inner society. Necessary proximity must not breed familiarity. A French circus family once mentioned to me that when they were working at Zirkus Karl Althoff in the 1960s, they had been warned that nobody should address the director from less than 3 meters. We both had been attracted to the circus like moths to a candle in the night. Stepping into the dream often turned out to be a nightmare. Our wings had got burned, and our feelings had been bruised more than once. Still, nothing was like being in rather than out. Sure, we were taken advantage of. But we would not quit. Sascha agrees that it sounds like a kind of addiction. Why? We are not sure. We only know that circus makes us happier than anything else whatever the cost may be. Sascha will return to the same circus for the next season. He hopes, though, that, this time, his task will be limited to keeping the books in order. He got the deal he wanted. But he also knows that the circus has its own laws and turbulent logic under the shiny surface of its contracts, posters, and glossy program booklets. This new job has not been definitely confirmed yet. He expects to hear from the circus owner any time soon. Nothing will be sure until then.

What is the circus? The traditional circus is primarily a nomadic trade. It is based, like all trades, on a range of skills used to produce values. Its conditions of existence determine to a large extent its modes of production and operation. Its challenge is to achieve a profitable balance between costs and income. From its immemorial origins, it had to adjust to a variety of socioeconomic and cultural contexts within which it is by necessity embedded. Although the age of industrialization

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THE MEANING OF THE CIRCUS

and urbanization has drastically modified its survival strategies, the traditional circus remains conditioned by its original mode of production. Nomadism is not a choice. It is an adaptation to a set of natural or social circumstances. If we consider the mode of life of hunter-gatherers or nomadic pastoralists, it is obvious that the economic motor of human mobility is the distribution of resources within a relatively large area that is nevertheless bounded. Within these areas, settlements are temporary but are periodically reused year after year following the seasonal curves of abundance and scarcity of resources. Since immemorial times, troupes of entertainers have exploited the resources of sedentary populations by providing them with some services not readily available locally. These nomads have long been associated with magic. Mainstream religions have not treated them kindly as they were competing for the same resources. They nevertheless survived through their hardened resilience and their tightly knit family groups. These bands belonged to ethnic networks within which marriages contributed to reinforce and expand alliances. They were sharing information whenever they happened to meet regarding which rich villages and towns were friendly to their trade, which fairs offered the best opportunities, and which hostile regions should better be avoided. Sometimes, they were agreeing not to compete in the same territories. They were rumored to have a secret king who served as an arbiter when conflicts arose. Until recent times in Western Europe, these small troupes caused a mixture of anxiety and fascination among the mostly sedate villages and districts they were visiting for brief periods of time. They instantly created their own niche in the fabric of urban space and quickly disappeared to ply their goods and services elsewhere. For information-deprived communities, they created the ephemeral embodiment of wonder. No time was left for the scrutiny of a second look. They left a luminous trace in the memory of those they had actually preyed on. Their mode of survival can indeed be construed economically as predation or parasitism with benefits, though, for their mostly willing victims because they offered them the kind of stuff dreams are made of. The trades of these traveling groups were diversified: baskets made of reeds and other freely available materials, horse trading, or even seasonal work. Women would peddle fortune telling, miracle medicines, aphrodisiacs, the lifting of curses, and other illusory solutions to the mostly insoluble problems of life. These were the hallmarks of their contributions that were fulfilling human dreams for a modest fee. They were the incarnation of the absolute “other,” both feared and cherished. They were also producing performances based on uncommon skills that were staged to capture attention, astonish, provoke sensual excitements, and cause lewd or rebellious laughter. They were also experts in monkey, bear, dog, and horse husbandry and training, and could demonstrate an unusual control of animals including extraordinary equestrian expertise.

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FIGURE 4  A typical traditional circus troupe in the times of horse-drawn transportation (from the archives of Nikolai Tovarich).

Whether in fairgrounds or on village squares, these groups were producing spectacles whose purpose was to gather a crowd, keep it together for a length of time, and repeatedly solicit the payment of small amounts of money as a token of appreciation for what had been shown or as an incentive to prompt the performance of what was going to be attempted. The performers had to cater to a variety of expectations and pleasures among their spectators: the wonders of dancing bears and calculating dogs or horses; the exhibition of juvenile contortionists in tight outfits; the lightly clad females balancing on trapezes; dexterous young men tumbling or juggling balls and clubs; muscular athletes lifting each other and heavy loads; and clowns cracking crude jokes and doing slapstick comedy. Overbearing force and power were combined with seductive vulnerability to keep an audience captive and enchanted as long as they could be prompted to reach for coins in their pockets. All this was only a part of their activities but one that captivated the imagination of people and created a horizon of expectation as well as the hostility of those who considered their presence as a threat to civil order and morality. With their horse-drawn living quarters on wheels, they crisscrossed the countryside, looking opportunistically for performing spaces where they could display their surprising, if not uncanny, skills. These nomads were family or extended family units in which two or three generations were contributing to the production of a series of different acts

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THE MEANING OF THE CIRCUS

that formed programs whose length was adapted to the circumstances. In fairgrounds where dense crowds were an invaluable, renewable resource, the audience could not be held for too long. But in entertainment-starved villages, the public could be treated to longer shows. However, novelty is a rare commodity whose value declines if it is offered too often and whatever the level of skill of the artists, familiarity generates boredom and contempt. Nomadism is essential to the traditional circus trade. This economic model has been documented for more than three centuries in Europe, but there is ample evidence that its origin is lost in a very distant past. Such traveling troupes were witnessed in the Roman Empire where they were called circulatores and their feats are reported in the literature and iconography of the time (Bouissac 1958). Some centuries earlier, Plato alluded, in one of his letters, to entertainers who display their tricks on Athens’s central square, including a man thrusting his head into a tame lion’s jaws. Nomads of this sort can still be observed in modern India and Pakistan in spite of countless restrictions on their trade. In No Five Fingers Are Alike (1982), Joseph Berland published the results of his ethnographic research among the Qalandar, a nomadic tribe in Pakistan whose members exhibit trained bears and monkeys. He notes that “like the Roms, tinkers, and other non-pastoral nomads of Asia and Europe, the Qalandar maintain themselves as an economic parasitic group within a sedentary society” (76–77). Under the strict condition that he would not betray their trade secrets, he was able to share their life for a long period of time and to report some of his findings regarding their daily activities. A similar mode of survival is documented in Lee Siegel’s Net of Magic (1991) in which the techniques and behaviors of troupes of nomadic magicians in India are thoroughly described. Siegel had been able to establish a trusting relationship with one of these clans due to his own sleight of hand skills. These two books open revealing windows on the world of nomadic entertainers whose means of existence are constrained by the same circumstances that determined the context within which the circus developed in Europe. What we nowadays call the traditional circus is indeed the perpetuation of this model on a variety of scales. In my life time, I experienced this kind of circus in all its forms.

A memory that would never die When I was 9 years old, we lived on the outskirts of a French city close to the curve of a highway that was making a sharp turn to the right after the bridge that linked us to the center of the town. There was a row of houses on the left side that formed a right angle with the crumbling wall of an old private

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park in which we had our dwelling. Two small dirt roads were leading from each side to the vacant triangular area that had been created by the buildings and the highway. This spandrel had emerged from random constructions and offered an interstitial space that had no specific functions at a time when cars were still relatively rare. I remember my excitement the day when, on my way to school, I discovered that during the night a red and yellow circus trailer had been parked there. A big pinto horse was attached by a long rope to the back and was browsing on the grass that was growing along the wall. A little cage hanging from the lower part of the trailer contained two small black-and-white dogs. There was a board on the side showing a monkey and a clown with the inscription: “Tonight performance at 8.” On my way back from school, I saw from a distance that two poles had been erected and that a trapeze was hanging from a bar they supported. A single row of bleachers was drawing an approximate circle around the poles. A couple of intriguing men were busy stretching some ropes and piling up mysterious props on a low table. Still in their cage, the two male dogs had their red penises erected and were engaging in obvious sexual play. Close by, a cute little monkey was collared and tied to a loose leash and jumped around begging for food from the curious kids of the neighborhood who had gathered there. I remember my anxiety when I wondered whether I could convince my mother to let me go and see the show. I vaguely knew what a circus was. But this one was so close and at the same time so distant and different from my everyday life that it irresistibly attracted me. I had been warned again and again against these vagabonds who had no home and had the bad reputation of stealing chickens and children. The prospect took a turn for the worse when my grandmother returned home quite upset because the monkey that had escaped from his collar had jumped toward her and pulled at her skirt. In fact, my grandmother was apparently secretly as excited as I was by the presence of the circus and agreed to take me and my little sister to the show after we heard toward the end of our dinner the enticing drum that was announcing the imminent start of the spectacle. My memories of that first circus are still vivid in spite of the many other such performances that, over the years, have created layer upon layer of images and emotions. The show started with some juggling by the clown who cracked some jokes to warm up the scant audience. This was followed by a boy, hardly older than me, doing amazing contortions on the low table I had noticed earlier among the props. At the end, slowly bending backward until his head reached his feet, he caught in his teeth a cigarette that the clown had placed on the front of the table. Then, as the night was slowly falling, a lamp shade with several electric bulbs was turned on at the top of one of the poles and a girl in a glittering bathing suit got ready to ascend the rope ladder toward the trapeze. But we were prompted to put some coins in the

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THE MEANING OF THE CIRCUS

hat that the clown with the monkey on his shoulder was passing among the audience that had become more numerous with two or three rows of people now standing behind those seated on the bleachers. We were told that this acrobat had performed with great success in Paris. She started her exercises on the trapeze while the clown, probably her father, played a romantic tune on his saxophone. She balanced in various poses on the bar “without any net,” but the robust woman in a blue evening dress, probably her mother, was standing below her, paying attention to all her movements, mainly when at the end she was swinging upside down hanging from her insteps. Her feats were punctuated by spontaneous rounds of applause. It was announced that there would not be an intermission but while the ring was being prepared for the dog act, we were encouraged to play a raffle by buying a ticket for a very small amount of money. The draw was to take place at the end of the show. The grand prizes were a teddy bear and a bottle of “champagne.” Now the dog act could start. The clown made the two dogs walk on their hind legs, then on their front legs. Large playing cards were set up side by side, and members of the audience were asked to name any of them that a dog would immediately fetch and bring to the clown. The dog named Jack was now going to perform a double somersault from the table to the ground. He needed, though, some encouragement and the other dog was prompted to pass around a little basket it was holding in his mouth for us to deposit a coin. It was so cute that nobody would have dared to refuse. After the dog act, the boy reappeared in colorful tight shorts to tumble and walk on his hands before being held high upside down by the clown and finally performing with him head-to-head balancing while the man was ascending the table. As a child from the audience had been requested to pick up the winning numbers from the clown’s hat, all the other members of the cast were doing their best to encircle the remaining audience, smiling with their hands holding out tambourines with requests to show appreciation for their performance. The public had been entertained by this ephemeral rupture in their daily evening routine that did not yet include the invading presence of television. That circus performance could foster in their imagination visions of a dreamlike life of wonder on the road: how could a dog remember the name of playing cards? How could a boy stand on his head on a clown’s head? How could a girl keep her balance on a swinging bar so high above the ground? According to my recollections, comments on the show were the main dinner conversation topics for several days. I quickly developed the habit of making such little circuses in clay and in cardboard, all painted in gaudy colors. These were my toys through which I could re-enact the dream. For these travelers, though, the show was not play but hard work. There were rainy days and hostile villages that they could cross only while keeping a

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low profile. Larger families could provide more varied spectacles, and success could allow them to enclose the performing space with an opaque fence of canvass so that they could charge an admission fee rather than depend on a mixture of begging, intimidation, and good luck to secure an income. At its core, traditional circus is a trade run by the iron fist of liberal economics. Reflecting upon this experience, we can reconstruct the strategy that was at play in the performance I witnessed. First, the opportunistic selection of an exiguous but sufficient space temporarily carved out in the urban fabric; second, the promise of something unusual through the display of a board with a clown and a monkey in addition to the word “cirque” drawn in vivid colors on a decorated wagon; third, the presence of a pinto horse strikingly different from the farm horses that we were used to; dogs lodged in a cage that qualified them as performing animals; fourth, the construction of an odd structure with poles and trapeze, props and hoops, and a low table that would have been useless in a kitchen; fifth, the people themselves were not looking like the locals: they were the other of ourselves both attractive and frightening. Their sudden discovery when local families started to wake up and go to work had marked the day with a special connotation, a mixture of liberating joy and irrational anxiety. I vaguely remember that I had been distracted at school by the anticipation they had created in me and that I had feverously lingered around when I had to cross the cramped space between the house trailer and the “ring” on my way home as if walking through a forbidden unknown populated by rough-looking men, exotic animals, and lewd dogs. The performance itself had been managed so that we would stay riveted to our seats or to the place where we were standing; trying to get closer in order to better see whenever there was a brief movement in the crowd. There was always the promise of something else, still more interesting than what we had just admired. All the human and animal resources of this family unit had been tapped and calibrated to our pleasures: the shameless display of well-formed young male and female bodies in postures that explored all the facets of space as if they were following the curves of the melodies played on the saxophone with, at times, the deep punctuations of the drum that stirred our emotions; the demonstration of animal intelligence beyond the range of what our pets were capable of doing; strength and balancing skills that we did not think were possible. We were members of a Catholic culture that tended to make us ashamed of our bodies and convinced us of our ultimate powerlessness. We also had a concept of animals as soulless and dumb creatures separate from humans by an unbridgeable gap. We were sedentary, bound to a house and a piece of land, and to time cycles of the same routines, day after day, year after year. Our starving eyes and hearts could not get enough of what that small circus was giving us. The circus people obviously knew it: they calibrated their acts

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to our span of attention, on a sustained rhythm that achieved a crescendo to stimulate our interest, but allowed for brief pauses during which they could solicit a small payment commensurate to our means. Their absolute imperative was to hold us in place and to gratify our hidden desires and untold fantasies. They made us laugh. They aroused our unconscious drives and created in us deep emotions on the brink of the unknown. At the end, all smiles and palms stretched, they pretended to wish us a good night while blocking our retreat and prompting us to extract some more coins from our pockets. This was their trade. They had added the value of dreams to our lives. But we had to pay for it. Our money was their living as they had to eat and dress and survive like we did but through other means. We knew it was a fair deal, and we could not wait for another morning when we would discover again, on the square, these colorful trailers, horses, and people because the truth was that we were addicted to the circus.

2 Ritual and Sacrifice: The Circus between Cult and Art

Initiation

M

y early experience of a circus performance was not a total novelty. Children of my generation were exposed very early to comics and story books with enticing circus images and tales. I had already read in an abridged version Hector Malot’s Sans famille (“without a family” or “the orphan”) (Malot 1878), a novel that recounts the tribulations of a young boy who had been stolen as a baby, brought up by a poor family, and eventually sold to an old man who was a nomadic performer. This kind mentor taught him acrobatic skills and how to play the violin. This small troupe traveled on foot with three trained dogs that performed tricks and a little monkey that they dressed up in a military uniform. I had empathized with their plight when they were starving and cold in the dead of winter, and I had cried when the monkey died of pneumonia after wolves had caught and eaten two of their lovely dogs. I wished then that I had been that little boy in spite of their ordeal. I still remember the names of these fictitious animals, the dogs Zerbino and Dolce, and the monkey Joli-coeur as I remember the name of the dancing horse I admired when, a few years later, I saw for the first time, a big traveling circus that had pitched its tent in the center of our town. Roxane, mounted by Mrs. Glassner, the lady who owned circus Bureau, was dancing to the classical tunes I recognized from some radio broadcasts. These memories are mentioned here not because they are claimed to be exceptional but because the experiences they recall were shared by a very large number of children of my generation and the generations that followed until today. We indeed live in a world that is culturally permeated by the haunting icons of the traditional

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circus, both big and small. Literature and the visual arts have added a symbolic value to the productions of this nomadic institution that, over the last two centuries in Europe, has carved its niche among the performing arts but was for a much longer time an important part of popular entertainment at least across the Eurasian continent over which the horse culture reigned. The circus is not just another performing art. Its nomadic nature makes it paradoxically both periodic and unpredictable. It was always perceived as an exceptional event that inserted itself into the space and time of everyday life. All circuses generally produce the same kind of experience. Indeed, there are a limited number of circus acts that are variously brought in sequence to form a program: horses, wild animals, aerialists, tumblers, jugglers, and clowns. All horse acts, let them be presented mounted or unmounted, and other animal acts are basically the same because they are determined by the physical and behavioral competences of the species involved and of the human trainers. All acrobatics over a wide range of specialties are constrained by the neuromuscular abilities of the human body even if they are pushed to some extreme degree. Clown performances are highly stereotyped. There are countless variations in the details, but these variations are not foregrounded in the eyes of the general public. Only experts and other artists can appreciate the subtleties in the skill and staging of an act: for instance, whether the mastery of balancing or juggling allows for stylistic elegance or whether the lions are adults or sub-adults that have not yet fully matured and therefore are easier to control. In contrast to the performances of literary and film narratives whose twists and turns strive to produce the unexpected, the traditional circus is very repetitive and redundant. Its rhetoric may invoke a feat that has “never been seen before” or a dangerous trick that is being “attempted for the first time,” but it is still the same old tricks that have been seen again and again generation after generation. How to reconcile the intense experience of circus audiences with the fact that they are presented with the recurrence of the same tricks in various guises? A possible answer is that the traditional circus is a secular ritual and that this peculiar quality marks it as strikingly different from other kinds of popular entertainments. Like a religious ritual, it is performed in a special space and at a special time; it takes the form of a sacrifice in as much as circus artists confront real extreme situations that can be construed as games of success or failure, and even often games of life and death; circus acts are performed according to their own liturgy with special costumes and music; they also cause a deep involvement on the part of their participatory spectators who are emotionally transformed by the circus experience. Either in the minimal format of single street performers or in the grand versions of major circus companies, they follow a predictable canonical form. It is symptomatic that the space of the traditional circus is compatible with the performance of religious rituals, such as an elephants’ Pooja in India (Bouissac 1998) or a Catholic mass in Europe.

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Like a religious ritual, a circus performance is always both new and the same as before because its time is out of time. The time of the ritual is paradoxically timeless. In spite of their apparent great diversity, all circus acts repeat the same fundamental narrative pattern that represents the triumph of an agent over a primal challenge thanks to an acquired skill rather than chance. However, they take the form of games in which each move confronts a higher degree of uncertainty. Returning to my first experience of a circus performance, let us recall that the boy bent his body in various twists and angles until at the end he went backward to catch a cigarette that had been placed between his feet, and that in his second act in the program he ended his feats of strength with balancing on his head on the head of his father. Similarly, the little girl in the sparkling bathing suit started by climbing the rope ladder and taking poses on the trapeze hanging from the swinging bar and ropes with her hands until, at the end, she survived this ordeal upside down by holding to the trapeze bar with her feet. As to the dogs, they performed first some physically unusual exercises such as walking on their hind legs and making somersaults; then, they passed intelligence tests such as being able to recognize various playing cards and adding or subtracting numbers. In large modern traditional circuses, the same basic patterns are performed on a larger scale using the same skills and producing the same effect on empathetic audiences who experience anxiety when they assess the odds of success of an exercise and eventually enjoy relief and inner joy when the artists triumph at the end as if a symbolic fusion had occurred between each spectator and the artists themselves. The vicarious experience of a circus spectacle construes the artist as a sacrificial victim who redeems our mediocrity through his or her heroism. This may sound like a kind of godless religion that nevertheless irresistibly evokes transcendence and destiny. After the first little circus we had seen in my childhood, my grandmother kept repeating: “For sure, someone up there must be taking care of them! This poor little girl could fall any time to her death.”

Circus as religion As a teenager, I had no choice but to participate in the education system of the Catholic Church. The biblical narratives and theological arguments that the children of my age had to memorize under the strict mentorship of older men dressed in black were as boring as the rest of the curriculum they were teaching us. Most smelled of tobacco and sometimes alcohol. They were strict. We had to call them fathers and confess to them the sins they had defined in advance for us. Some of them were intrusive. But we had developed defense mechanisms

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similar to those we used to negotiate the authority of our parents: complying without compromising. My inner private life ran at a distance from these stories of guilt and redemption, and I felt immune to their claim of ownership. Jules Verne’s fictitious adventures in Patagonia or miles under the sea were far more meaningful and exhilarating. They sounded more real than the stories of Babel or Noah’s floating nave. Jesus’s miracles were less impressive than the magicians’ tricks that were performed in circus rings. He had not transformed a scantily dressed girl into a roaring tiger. If he had, they would have written that in the book. I was living with my classmates, some closer to me than others, in a parallel universe, just waiting for the time we could take off. However, the Catholic rituals in which we had to participate were a different kind of experience. The Sunday masses could be spectacular. The great organ was playing deeply emotional music that followed a dramatic curve from plaintive melodies to the final blasting that signaled the end of the ceremony. At times, a choir added a moving human touch mainly if we could see the faces of the singers standing near the altar in their white gowns. The priests were dressed in colorful apparels, in hues that were meant to fit the liturgical calendar, with glittering embroideries, over their white skirts made of fine fabrics and fringed with delicate laces. Some were in bright red, some others in purple. Golden orange, bright yellow, vibrant green, or celestial blue combined with floral displays. Some priests were wearing shining jewels and held golden sticks. They moved around, and up and down. We had to follow their prescribed movements: kneeling, standing, sitting, standing again, and kneeling again. The place was perfused with the smell of burning incense mixed with the scent of fresh wax. The priests were manipulating with theatrical gestures silvery and gilded props that looked like nothing outside the church. We were prompted to be happy or sad, depending on the season and the date. We were part of a crowd, next to each other. Sometimes, this allowed us to steal a moment of intimate physical contact. The ceremonies were always the same but spaced out enough during the year for us to forget them and to look forward to these special moments that were often associated with secular festivities and family gatherings. For us, these rituals had little to do with the background narratives that served as their pretexts. They were self-contained, bounded experiences. The forms and meanings of rituals are hard to define because it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to experience and observe them at the same time. From an outsider’s point of view, they are collective behaviors that are not spontaneous but dictated by a set calendar or distinct circumstances. They are indeed constituted by prescribed movements, gestures, utterances, and emotions (Bell 1997). Whether truly felt or acted out, the latter are embodied by demeanors involving facial expressions, postures, and clothes. Rituals are characterized by the way the roles are distributed among the participants.

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Officers, leaders, assistants, and followers perform the prescribed actions in a specified order in a particular space and at an appropriate time. Weddings, funerals, rites of passage, cult celebrations, Catholic masses, and Hindu Poojas, for instance, are ruled by algorithms, that is to say, a series of instructions to be implemented in a given order, like a culinary recipe. These constraints may be more or less flexible depending on circumstances but rituals are the opposite of haphazard, purely reactive behaviors. Participants in rituals can be assumed but are not compelled to truly experience the inner emotions they play out. The main agenda is ruled by social conformism but is often open to opportunism either political or sexual. These formal characteristics have provided a model for describing metaphorically a wide range of social and individual behaviors that appear to be repetitive and stereotyped, and to possess some of the formal features that have been mentioned above. For example, polite greetings, turn taking in conversations, and private or reciprocal grooming can be construed as kinds of rituality. To consider traditional circus performances as rituals, though, is not to take the term as a mere metaphor.

Rites of spring When I was a child, circuses were not traveling in winter. We had to wait for the spring that came rather early in the southwest of France. I had to cross the city every day to go to school on my bicycle. There was a pretty direct way, following the main streets, but I could also make a small detour along a wall plastered with commercial posters. This was where circuses used to advertise their forthcoming visits to our town. In late March, I would often make the detour eager not to miss the first harbinger of the season. Easter holidays were not expected with as much anticipation as the epiphany of the circus posters on the walls of this factory. The names of the circuses were more important to me than the list of saints, emperors, kings, and presidents we had to memorize at school. I still can vividly visualize the “musician horses” of Cirque Bureau. This poster represented half a dozen horses, each of them positioned in front of an enlarged instrument they were playing. The colorful drawing was sufficiently realistic to be credible. This circus had the reputation of being trustworthy. I also remember the “herd of wild mustangs shown for the first time in a circus” of Cirque Amar, galloping through a pampa landscape dotted with cactuses. I was wondering whether they would be presented in the steel arena like lions or in the ring like other horses. But that turned out to be a bluff. This circus’s pinto horses simply did their routines without any kind of trapping under the direction of a mounted gaucho. Other posters were equally memorable.

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FIGURE 5  Two posters (reprinted from Paul Bouissac 1973). Naturally, circus acts are never as perfect as the posters that purport to represent them, but these icons influence our perception and remain in our memory. Nothing was more important in my life than going to the circus. This was subject to parental permission. Getting good marks at school was the best guarantee that my request would not be turned down. Circuses used to stay

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a few days in our town. They pitched their tent right in the center of the city on the market square. After school, I would slowly cycle around that place, catching glimpses of the animals and artists on their way to the ring during the afternoon show, counting the number of their trucks and house trailers, and breathing with delight the unique scents emanating from the stables and cages: the smell of the circus, the smell of another world I invested with all kinds of freedom and obscure desires. Crossing the gate, I nervously hold my admission ticket for one of these wild-looking men in red uniforms to examine it and let me in. Then, I am thrilled to step into the holy temple of my dreams and reach my seat. I am filled with warmth and happiness. The bleachers are occupied to capacity, and nobody has much elbow room on either sides. The space is buzzing like a hive. Everyone seems excited in anticipation of the show. I am intensely looking at the red curtain from which the artists and the animals will soon emerge. In the alcove above it, the musicians are slowly taking their place and testing their instruments. Suddenly, the spotlights are turned on and music blasts from the band. Drums and wind instruments make my body vibrate. Emotion presses my throat. Some tears come to my eyes. A dignified gentleman in a red tuxedo greets us. We clap our hands. He is given a long whip as a horse gallops around the ring. A graceful boy in a white leotard runs and jumps on its back. Then, he lands in the sawdust to run and jump again. Every time, it is a different trick and it seems to be more and more difficult. Now, he stands on the horseback. He catches a flag that the ring master throws to him. Three times the horse runs around the ring while the boy holds high the huge colorful flag that floats above him. I would love to know this boy. He is about my age. I would love to be this boy. But I am trapped in a different life. The show goes on. The pace of the music changes and becomes solemn. Two men and a woman who appear to be painted in gold perform feats of balance in slow motion on a small revolving platform. Their bodies are as perfect as the classical statues I saw in the encyclopedia that my grandfather lets me explore from time to time. It is as if David, Venus, and Hercules had joined the circus. How can they be so still for such a long moment when they reach the most daring figure with Hercules keeping both David and Venus balancing on one arm on his muscular thighs?

“There is danger of death at Filles du Calvaire” From circus to circus, from year to year, the programs were much alike. Acts did not always come in the same order. Some were more stunning than others. They all unfolded with the same kind of predictability. They were like ceremonies. Danger, though, was obvious. Death was always lurking. One

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day, my mother came home quite upset. She had heard while shopping at the grocery that the acrobatic couple we had seen a few days before had fallen to the ground in a nearby town. It was a nerve-wrecking act of balance on a bicycle standing upon a high, narrow platform. The man was keeping the bicycle in balance with his two feet on the front wheel that was maintained perpendicular to the frame. In the meantime, the woman was performing contortions and handstands on the saddle and on the back wheel. There was no safety net. My mother said that the handlebar had pierced the woman’s belly in the fall. She added that this poor girl probably would not survive. All this was hearsay and assumptions, but it was an essential part of the circus I experienced as an adolescent. Most circus acts were holding death at bay. There was much in common between the circus and the religious rituals but the circus was more serious and engaging. The bishops in their regalia were as sparkling and glittering as the whiteface clowns in their traditional costumes. They both wore funny hats under the glare of bright light. They both embodied supreme authority that radiated across their surroundings. Circus artists were performing their acts with as much seriousness, precision, and punctuality as the priests when they completed their liturgical gestures and chants. The priests, though, were not risking their life. They were only speaking about death, albeit with insistence. They were the ones who took over when someone died. They were in charge of the rituals. They had a special, unique connection with the end of life once it had happened. The artists acted defiantly within the reach of death. We did not know that accidents are relatively rare in the circus and that the staging and the music were playing a decisive part in building the audience’s anxiety. Fatalities occur, though, in the sawdust rings. The circus has its martyrs. Even when acts were ending well, with the performers enjoying our applause, death had been present in the form of a possible, if not an unavoidable, outcome. The rhetoric of the presentations insisted on how perilous the tricks were: “Salto mortale” was an explicit reference to a tragic end, as were other elements of the performances such as the fact that acrobats were sometimes making the sign of the cross before “attempting” a perilous leap while a drumroll underlined the gravity of the moment. Some artists performed feats of balance on revolving giant “wheels of destiny,” also called “wheels of death.” As a teenager, I trained a small dog that had been adopted by the family of one of my classmates. Tailhac was black and lively, always eager to learn some tricks in exchange for bits of roasted chicken or other meat that I saved from my plates at lunchtime. My trainee could soon walk on its hind legs for a distance and cheerfully jump on command through a hoop. The final feat, though, was meant to be a death-defying exercise: the ascending of a metallic ladder that was maintained in a vertical position by four ropes tied to the corners of a table. Tailhac could slowly climb to the top and come down

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head first. I had made an appropriate costume that consisted of a floating piece of black satin fixed to its collar and I had decorated the fabric with silvery symbols borrowed from the paraphernalia of the funeral masses I had to attend from time to time. We never performed publicly. Unfortunately, my career as a circus dog trainer crashed to an end when the dog became a nuisance in my friend’s home as it had learned to climb to places where dogs are not supposed to go. They gave Tailhac to a local farmer who had never seen before a dog that could use ladders to go and sleep in the upper levels of the barn. All the forms of human survival are embodied in circus acts with the force and purity of well-defined icons: heroic achievement of a single man or woman confronted by an extreme task; the success of couples united in their mutual support toward a challenging goal; harmonic cooperation among the members of a team whose coordination ensures the eventual success of a daring pyramid or flying act. These acts, though, receive their deep meaning from the plausibility of tragic failures. They represent death as an ultimate frame of interpretation. At times, death occurs in front of the audience as if a human sacrifice had been performed as a part of the ritual. If we had been present, we probably would have felt both relief and guilt, as if we had been complicit in a crime while participating in a compelling ritual. The circus is no stranger to the ambiguity of human feelings. What does attract us to the circus whose performances celebrate the usual but uncertain triumph of life over death? Paris, damp and grey winter 1957. Surviving my last student year with a minimal budget. I would rather skip a meal, though, rather than miss the show at the Cirque d’Hiver. Even the cheapest seats at the top of the steep incline of the circular amphitheater offer a direct view of the ring from above. The highest row also allows the spectators to be almost at the same level as the aerialists. Two acts fascinate me. They are the ones that trigger the most fervent applause. Henri Dantès and his lions and the Antares, three acrobats performing on a revolving apparatus high above the ring. Dantès’s action-packed number is legendary. This young, charismatic trainer has often left the cage bleeding after being clawed or bitten. Like a torero, he works provocatively close to his animals. At the end, he lies down in the center of the ring and entices all the roaring lions, one after the other, to come and crouch on his body. In his white uniform, he looks innocent and vulnerable. In the second part of the program, a small but realistic military plane propels the apparatus of the Antares. A woman is in the cockpit and two men rest on a bar in the opposite direction. As the plane gains speed, the orchestra plays a march that is both tragic and triumphant. The two men execute risky tricks of strength and balance, jumping and catching, hanging by the teeth and spinning madly in the air. The woman makes some acrobatic figures on

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a trapeze hanging from the plane while the men pause between their tricks. There is no net below, nor are they secured by safety lunges. In this circus, there is a history of aerialists plunging to their death. In the chronicle of the circus, many trainers have been killed by their lions. The subway station in front of the Cirque d’Hiver is called Filles du Calvaire (Daughters of the Calvary), by reference to an ancient convent. That year, some repairs were being made on the platforms of this subway station and passengers were warned by signs posted on each door in the train that it was dangerous to exit too quickly before the complete stop of the train. The signs read: “There is danger of death at Filles du Calvaire!” Every time I was going to the circus, the warning had a strong impact on me. It had a double, coincidental, and premonitory meaning that haunted my ritualistic visit to this hot spot of the circus arts.

Circus as a fine art The specter of death and the haunting tradition of sacrifice that permeates the spectacles of the traditional circus are found in other forms of artistic entertainment. We relish tragedies, operas, and films that stage dying heroes and heroines through fights, assassinations, suicides, or diseases. From this point of view, there is an obvious affinity between the circus and the other arts. It has been often noted, though, that there is a profound difference in the sense that, in dangerous circus acts, death is usually kept at bay rather than represented through dramatic simulations. Nevertheless, both make death vividly present to our existential conscience through the means of artistic creations. The term artists that is used rather than actors to refer to circus performers is indeed appropriate. Any circus act has been constructed as a multisensorial drama, an action that unfolds in real time as a one-of-a-kind event that is experienced as a whole, self-contained unit by the audience. Such works of art are endowed with relevance and integrity that command the cognitive and emotional involvement of their spectators. The construction process itself is not visible to the audience that enjoys the end product. But lots of energy and creativity have been required in the form of trials and errors for the construction of an act from the acquisition of the necessary skills to the final staging. As time passes, the staging can be so transformed by a change of music and costume that the act can appear to be a new creation. All acts, though, are based on the same general rules. It is structured as a narrative whose successive moves are rhetorically ordered in view of their effects on their audience. The odds are increased and, at times, a

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contrived failure is designed to emphasize the difficulty of a particular exercise and to catch the attention of the spectators who might miss the eventual achievement. Great care is taken to stage the act in an effective manner through the use of esthetic gestures, harmonious colors, and appropriate music that sets the desired mood for the audience. As any work of art, a circus act can be experienced again and again like a master’s painting in a museum and a symphony in a concert hall or in a recorded form. Each time, new details are revealed, which may have escaped attention during the first experience. Moreover, successive views sensitize the spectators to the little variations that are the essence of any ephemeral art, like, for instance, musicians interpreting scores. There are of course various levels of sophistication in the choices that determine the end product. It is possible to elaborate an esthetics of the circus by paying attention to the way in which an act displays semiotic consistency (i.e., how the signs fit together), rhetorical skill (i.e., how each move adds to the preceding to create a dynamic crescendo of its own), and felicitous closure (i.e., how it comes naturally to its conclusion). Another important dimension is the rapport of the artist with the audience that is formed by a system of behavioral signs parallel to the technical movements of the act since the artist has to play the two scores simultaneously. The esthetic qualities of the traditional circus have not escaped the attention of other artists, such as painters, writers, and film makers. From the nineteenth century on, the circus has become a topos of the arts to such an extent that an imaginary circus has emerged and found its expression both in naturalistic art and literature and in avant-garde movements (Ritter 1989). Periodically, museums organize exhibitions that display works of art inspired by the circus. The important point to be made in this respect is that this powerful symbolic expression has had a feedback effect on the circus itself, which has come to transfigure itself and acquire an artistic conscience that it was lacking in times when it was a despised trade whose forms of entertainment exemplified vulgar taste and crude appeal to uneducated crowds. From this transformation has emerged the new circus that has developed the esthetic potential of the traditional circus and transformed its productions into high-brow art on a par with ballet, opera, and installations. However, let us not forget that the emergence of this new circus that is based on the same acrobatic lexicon has not made the traditional circus obsolete since both are currently prospering side by side. These two modes of “circusing,” so to speak, are not supported by the same economic model and do not offer quite the same added value. The traditional circus remains imbued with the popular and ritualistic meaning of its origin, whereas the contemporary circus has tended to cast its forms in the model of a sophisticated elitist aesthetics. In other words, they do not provide their audience with the same kind of experience. They are two

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different kinds of trade that are based on different skills and esthetics, each with its own merits and drawbacks. We are all the richer if we can enjoy both. The companion website that provides recorded performances to illustrate this book offers in its anthology some examples of artistic achievements: https://semioticon.com/circus-alive/ This database will be periodically updated.

3 The Music Is the Message

The colors of time

M

usic is the embodiment of time. The continuous curves and rhythms of sound allow us to experience our temporal existence more faithfully than a staggered succession of different visual states representing changes from year to year. Musical streams carry the feelings of our inner body and color them with all the fluid emotions that permeate our sense of self. Music entrains and molds the tempo of our gestures and our breathing. We often tailor the music to which we choose to listen to our desired moods, or find solace in familiar melodies that haunt the memories of meaningful moments in our life. A circus act without music would not be a circus act but an athletic display of strength or balance. All musical scores evoke some particular circumstances or cultural landscapes. The circus exploits these musical resources to play on the imagination of the audience and thus create added ethnic, period, or style values. Lightheartedness, joy, romance, heroism, and danger are qualities that are conveyed by tunes through their intrinsic acoustic properties or through their association with the lyrics of well-known films or operas. Because of this crucial role in the meaning-making process of circus acts, this chapter will explore the role of music in the creation of acrobatic and animal acts. Reference will be made to the short videos that are available in the companion website to this book. Readers will be able to test how the perception of these acts is dependent on their accompanying music by cutting the sound before watching the act. When I was a child, my mother used to play music on the family piano. She had learned some pieces as a teenager and she kept performing for us from time to time. I was not particularly fond of her renderings of Chopin’s romantic melodies but I remember begging for her to play In a Persian Market. This

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was pure circus to my ears. On the cover of the score, there were a few camels covered with exotic ornaments. The figures who were leading them wore costumes that looked like nothing I had seen before. Later in my life, I have often watched with emotion camels slowly entering a circus ring at the sounds of this particularly evocative music that encapsulated the fascinating presence of the orient. Since then, I learned that the composer, Albert W. Ketelbey, was famous in the first part of the twentieth century for the score he wrote for silent films that, like circus acts, had to be made meaningful through appropriate musical accompaniments. On many occasions, I have been struck by the power of music to transfigure circus acts. During my student years in Paris, I saw a German trainer who presented a lion act with a J.S. Bach’s fugue. The beginning of the act is still vividly present in my mind: the entrance to the steel arena was 2 or 3 meters wide, rather than the usual low tunnel, and the portly trainer, dressed in a formal tuxedo, advanced from the backstage surrounded by a large troupe of lions and lionesses. They all walked calmly like a shepherd with his flock of sheep. The deep sound of the organ was creating a solemn atmosphere akin to a procession in a cathedral. The slightly dimmed light was lending an air of sublime mystery to the whole performance. For a while, I secretly considered becoming a wild animal trainer. I had neither the skill nor the animals but I was wondering what kind of music I would use. One day, playing some vinyl records at random on an old turntable, I discovered the ideal music for my dreamed act. I was convinced that Sergei Prokofief’s Overture on Hebrew Themes op. 34 would be ideal for a Siberian tiger act. I repeatedly listened to it, adding in my imagination the roaring, whip cracking, and shouting of the animals’ names to put them through their paces: “Amur! Wladi! Yalta! Vostok!” I thought that four was a reasonable number for a start. That was a private virtual show that never saw the glaring spotlights of the ring. It remains alive, though, in my imagination and listening to this music is still effective as ever and I can experience the beautiful tiger act that never was.

“I have the music. Now, I need the birds.” When we analyze a circus act, we tend to engage in a kind of reverse semiotic engineering, starting from the bare tricks and successively adding significant elements such as costumes, makeup, decorations, and, finally, music. However, the creative construction of a circus act does not always follow that logical sequence. The concept can develop from an image, a name, or a tune. As for poetry, chance associations and the unpredictable dynamic of symbols may play a determining role.

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Munich, November 2015. As our conversation comes to a close, Sascha mentioned that he will have to pick up some equipment the next day for friends from Zirkus Krone. My inquisitive look prompts him to explain that these friends, Gerd and Marietta Koch, wants to create a bird act and needs cages and props light enough for easy transportation. I ask about the kind of birds he has and what they do. Sascha winks and smiles: “Well, they do not have any bird yet but they have the music! They wanted to make such an act for some time. They recently heard a piece of music over the radio, Waka-Waka by Shakira, and that was it, the perfect mood and rhythm! Now they need to buy and train the birds but not until they get the necessary equipment.” Parrots, parakeets, cockatiels, macaws, even budgerigars are commonly used in circus acts. Their colors are spectacular and their social nature drives them to spontaneously interact with humans. With training based on rewards, they can perform tricks that the audience interpret as unusually clever behavior, such as pulling a miniature chariot on which another bird is perching or flying through a hoop from one platform to another. The success of such acts largely depends on the constant talking of the trainer who frames their movements in meaningful contexts by lending them explicit intentions. Norman Barrett has presented for many years a successful budgerigars act. As soon as he opens the portable cage he has put on one end of the display table, all the birds rush to a little platform at the other side of the table. “They are eager to perform for you!” Never mind if these feathery actors run to the spot where they usually find some tasty seeds or other delicacies. The trainer never stops commenting on what is going on while manipulating some basic behaviors of the species of his charges, at times even putting them through their pace with his hands. And, of course, the accompanying light and joyful music cast a playful aura on the whole performance. The act is lively because budgerigars are chatty birds that constantly interact with each other and with their keeper. This combines harmoniously with the pulse of the lighthearted music within which the actions are loosely integrated. The display and manipulation of reptiles constitute another kind of act in which the music plays a crucial role without being strictly tailored to the specific actions that are performed in the ring or on stage. Pythons, boa constrictors, crocodiles, and alligators are brought in trunks or baskets from which they are extracted, but they usually do not move fast on the ground and are often simply carried around by the performers. Their sudden presence at relatively close range causes immediate awe and repulsion among the public. Lethargic snakes wrapped around humans or slow-walking crocodiles inching their way toward the border of the ring would be devoid of drama if the background music did not convey a sense of mystery and danger. The music is an essential part of the staging that evokes uncanny exoticism. Dressed as a fakir, the

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FIGURE 6  Picture perfect, ready for performance. Gerd and Marietta Koch provided this comment when they sent the photo to illustrate this book: “We have been working for years in the circus with all kinds of large animals such as horses, giraffes, and elephants. In 2015, we started to train an act with parrots, cockatoos, and a poodle. This was a new experience, quite different but also very funny. We succeeded but it took several months and lots of patience with these small animals. They are very clever. They immediately sense it if one of us is not as fit as usual and it is hard to make them do their tricks. On the other hand, we can live closer to them than the big animals. This is very nice. They quickly understand what we want from them. At first, the most challenging was to bring the poodle close to the parrots. It was scared of them. Now they are good friends and they enjoy working together in the act.” Photo credit: Mary Vooijs

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presenter claims to hypnotize the beasts. Eventually, he opens wide the jaws of the largest crocodile and briefly places his head at the mercy of its teeth. In one of his latest versions of such an act, Kara Kawak spices up the show by drawing musical and visual symbolism from the popular epic sagas of Indiana Jones. Using the striking outfit of the movie’s hero, he drives into the ring on a rough motorcycle while, in a dim light, mysterious men and women clad in black bring darkly decorated trunks and sarcophagus. The ring is perfused with the sinister penumbra of a Hindu temple with a flame rising from a sacrificial altar in the center. Mummy-looking props with painted hieroglyphs evoke an Egyptian pyramid tomb. This collage of various icons of orientalism forms the backdrop that suggests sacred ruins lost in a deep jungle or funeral chambers buried deep under the desert. Without a congruent music matching the visual context, this act would be a mere animal display lacking drama and relevance. This multimodal setting elevates it to the concrete embodiment of myths that are alive in popular culture. This explains why finding the proper music understandably can be the first step in the creation of an act because artists may have a technical vision of the performance they want to produce but they need ways of making it meaningful for their audience by tapping powerful symbolic sounds and images. However, most of the time, the music is selected in the final stage of the act. The music can also be changed with specific effects during the life span of acrobatic and animal acts. For instance, the display and manipulation of reptiles offer a limited range of spectacular actions. Switching from music that is associated with the mysticism of Indian magic to a score that evokes the brash American explorer Indiana Jones drastically changes the significant register of this act.

The crafting of masterpieces “Desire of Flight” is the name of a Russian aerial straps act that received several coveted prizes in international circus festivals. It is sustained by consummate acrobatic skills and loaded with romantic emotions thanks to its musical accompaniment, and the choreography and acting of the performers. Technically, it uses two straps hanging from the top of the circus that are pulled up and down through a pulley from the backstage or that the acrobats climb when the staging demands this form of ascending. It includes a series of acrobatic figures in which the man and the woman are on various forms of intimate body contact while ascending or descending. It is punctuated by three dramatic tricks when the free falls of the woman are stopped in extremis by the man: first, the man catches her in the armpits with his insteps; then,

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sliding downward head first, the woman’s insteps lock into the man’s insteps; finally, she drops to the ground from the straps but is met by her partner’s arms. This act is technically flawless but could be perceived as purely daring and formal if it was not staged as a tense and dramatic relationship between the artists by the music: the passionate song in French of a woman addressing her distant and only occasionally responsive lover. The recorded voice of the female singer focuses the attention of the audience on the woman aerialist who appears first walking erratically on the ground until she orients herself toward the man who has ascended the straps. She pathetically expresses her desire to join him as he appears distant, if not indifferent. But he suddenly lifts her in a joint erotic flight that initiates a series of evocative figures in which their bodies are intimately entangled in the air, catching her by the hand or the neck as she slides down while the straps move in ample circles high above the ring. These figures alternate with solo exercises by the man. In the meantime, the woman acts out the words of the singer who clamors her despair far from him. Three successive episodes show her absolute devotion to the man by entrusting her life to his skill and will to save her. There are glimpses of mutual love but by and large the voice of the female singer frames the meaning of this act from the point of view of the woman’s unrequited love. At the end, the man leaves the ring in apparent indifference as she climbs the straps but he returns in time to catch her in his arms when she throws herself down in a free fall. The lyrics are selected from a song written by Serge Lama, a French pop singer. The music was composed by Alice Dona. The song, entitled “Je suis malade” (I am sick), became such a success that there are recordings of concerts in which the audience can’t help joining the singer in the midst of her performance. “Desire of Flight” uses a sound track of parts of the song recorded with pathos by Lara Fabian in a style reminding one of Judy Garland or Edith Piaf. Interestingly, the original poem is written from a man’s point of view and the object of his love is ambiguous as there is no grammatical evidence that could indicate its gender. Only the context of the performance can suggest whether the song is addressed by a man to a man, a man to a woman, a woman to a man, or a woman to a woman. This universal validity undoubtedly accounts for the huge success of the song that foregrounds the sufferings of unrequited love in whatever form. In the staging of this aerialist act, it expresses the anguish and insecurity of a woman madly in love with a man who appears aloof and indifferent, except for brief moments of erotic outbursts. The French language adds a touch of romantic exoticism for nonFrench audiences. The general theme is that far from this man she is sick, loses her identity, feels ugly, and finds her life pointless. Hence the intensity of the sublime moments when she puts herself at the mercy of the man who

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drives her through erotically charged tricks on the confines of life and death. The crescendo of the risks she incurs matches the andante form of the music ending with the ambiguous triumph of life and love as the man leaves the ring carrying her in his arms but more as if she were a dead body than a lover. There is a stark contrast between the mostly expressionless face of the man and its sober demeanor, and the mimic of tragic despair of the woman’s jerky movements as she sighs and shakes her head or wrenches her hands. He is dressed in a functional white half-leotard, while she wears a black skirt matching her auburn hair. His persona projects a self-composed impression while she acts out by her choreography an agitation evocative of madness with episodes of rolling over on the ground. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAH3876trVQ Every single time I have witnessed “Desire of Flight,” the atmosphere in the audience was thick with emotion and there were spontaneous standing ovations at the conclusion of the act when the two acrobats come to take their bow in the center of the ring. This can be verified through the videos that are available online in which it is possible to hear bursts of loud applause when the three major tricks are completed. It is noticeable that during all their performance the artists do not establish eye contact with the public. They do not engage them through smiles when they start their act, nor do they acknowledge the applause triggered by the successive tricks. Their facial expressions remain frozen at the end as if they had accomplished a serious ritual rather than a pleasurable entertainment. Only when they return to the ring after the conclusion of their act do they behave like performers who eventually enjoy their success. This act must be understood in the context of other romantic acrobatic duos in which the partners emphatically express their mutual commitment, often trading during the act the positions of flyer and catcher. They aim at displaying harmony and unity in their common confrontation of potentially lethal tricks. By contrast, playing with the words, we could say that this flight of desire implements a Buddhist theme in the sense that this act stages the sufferings of love and desire from which the sage must free himself/herself to reach inner peace and tranquility. This act indeed dramatically plays out the torments of unrequited love, with an evocation of suicide that is prevented in extremis when the man catches the body of the falling woman and lovingly carries her away. Inner bliss is symbolically attained by Anton Mikheev, a Russian artist whose solo straps act could be characterized as a Zen demonstration of selfachievement and plenitude, free from desire and pathos. At the beginning, a spotlight reveals a young man holding a white sphere in a meditative pose, next to the hanging straps. Asian sounding drums imbue the atmosphere with unusual music. The man grabs the straps and, lifted from the backstage,

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ascends while balancing the ball that spins on his index finger. The music has now developed into slow, but sustained, chords suggesting the immensity of celestial space and its serene cosmic pulse. When he reaches the desired height, the artist performs some acrobatic contortions in slow motion while keeping the ball spinning on the tip of his finger. He wears tight trousers and a jacket over his T-shirt. As the act unfolds, he removes the jacket while balancing the ball and performs new feats combining strength and choreographic elegance with the deft balancing of the sphere, evoking the cosmic rotation of the universe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZ5lKIBZzG4 March 24, 2014.

Fast track to stardom: “We need a violinist. Meet me tomorrow.” In an interview published in the circus fans magazine Bretagne Circus in October 2014, French violinist Laure Schappler vividly recounts her discovery of the musical dimension of circus performances (Pelfrene 2014). On her way from one musical engagement to another, she received a phone call from a violinist friend who had heard from the circus conductor that Cirque d’hiver was looking for a female violinist to perform in their next program. If she is interested, an audition can be arranged as soon as the next afternoon with the director, Joseph Bouglione, who is putting the show together. She decides to give it a try. She is offered a contract on the spot for the coming season (2007–2008). She has now been for years the star of this live orchestra. Chance brought her into a world totally new to her. She is now a seasoned circus musician. Every year, in the spring, the director gives conductor Pierre Nouveau the scores and tapes that have been provided by the artists who have been hired for the program. The individual musicians have to process this information and figure out how to implement their part. About one month before the opening that is due in October, the band practices in a studio, working on the scores or replicating the tapes to their best abilities by matching sounds and rhythms that will be eventually synchronized with the dynamics and structures of the various acts. Finally, after two weeks of rehearsals with the artists, several dress rehearsals precede the premiere. This process involves many adjustments, fine-tuning, changes of pace, and preparations for unexpected turns of events during the performance: the orchestra must indeed be able to negotiate musically on the fly occasional failures of tricks such as a flying trapeze artist missing the hands of the catchers and falling in the net, or a lion that is not in the mood to obey and forces the trainer to start again the routine from square one. Contrary to a ballet in which dancers

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follow the music, the circus musicians must synchronize their playing with the movements they observe on the ground or in the air. This is particularly crucial when accompanying the gait of dancing horses that respond to the cues of their riders rather than the baton of the conductor. The orchestra must also be in a state of readiness should an incident or accident occurs and provide a “natural” transition leading to what follows in the program. Although each act has its own musical part, the whole show must unfold as a seamless stream that entrains the emotions of the audience from a colorful opening that means “this is circus” to the final apotheosis when all the performers gather in the ring to take their bow. Not all circuses can afford a live orchestra. Many use pre-recorded music that is enlivened by a drummer who underlines impacts and achievements, or produces the dramatic drumroll that accompanies dangerous tricks. The sounds of a drum echo the dawn of the circus art and belonged to both its simplest and most sophisticated forms ever since. Even nowadays, street performers use this way of staking out their space against the surrounding urban noise when they want to catch the attention of distracted passersby. Affluent modern circus companies take full advantage of contemporary sound technologies. Laure Schappler explains that when the orchestra plays in synchrony with a sound track, individual musicians wear phone earplugs through which they are prompted to modify the tempo or the volume of their output by “clicks” that are programmed in the audio system. This system makes it possible to get a richer range of sonorities and a better coordination among the musicians who cannot see each other as they perform facing the public from their stand above the artists’ entrance. The conductor, of course, must have an eye on the ring below while directing the instrumentalists. For the violinist, who is positioned well in front of the others, the experience is strikingly different from the situation in a classic orchestra. She is in the spotlight right from the beginning and she must play with ample, theatrical gestures, directed to the surrounding audience. Like a double of the ringmaster, she creates the pulse that entrains both the public and the performers in a steam of unanimous emotions. Let us summarize the points made so far in this chapter. Spectators usually show appreciation for the skills and courage involved in acrobatics and animal training but they take for granted the musical accompaniment of the acts they applaud. As we saw above, in major circus productions that can afford a live orchestra, the selection, preparation, and rehearsal of the scores is a long process that requires extensive fine-tuning. A circus program is an organic whole that must unfold without glitches and gaps. Its musical streaming must be strictly synchronized with the actions taking place in the ring. The producer typically does the planning of programs months, if not years, ahead, since some high-profile acts are booked long in advance. The program must offer

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a complement of specialties: aerialists, acrobats, animals, clowns, and other acts such as jugglers, magicians, or transformers. Some acts are pre-packaged (costumes, props, and musical scores or sound tracks). Some others are more flexible and can adjust to the requirement of particular staging and undergo changes regarding choreography, costumes, and musical accompaniments.

The functions of music in circus acts Music is an integral part of circus acts. It is not a simple accompaniment for the action but it belongs to the very essence of these artistic works. It is possible to distinguish five ways in which a musical score and its orchestration can contribute to the meaning of circus acts. The first role of music is to establish a cultural theme that unifies the whole act across the diversity of the actions it includes. Among the cultural categories that are often selected we find ethnicity (Spanish, Slavic, Gypsy, Indian, Chinese, etc.) and period music according to the Western classification (classical, romantic, modern, jazz, avant-garde, rock, etc.). Each one of these possibilities leads to further esthetic decisions regarding the instruments and the genres: will it be operatic music or popular songs; solo violin or saxophone; brass band or electronic acoustics; sentimental or rap? An act can also at times be accompanied by an unmarked musical background mainly if a lack of financial means forces the circus to rely on taped music. If we recall the two acts discussed above, “Desire of Flight” definitely taps the romantic, sentimental, popular song repertory that provides an explicit, consistent meaning for the whole act. Anton Mikheev’s solo act, by contrast, uses an original composition that conveys a sense of mysterious, serene, out-of-world strangeness. In spite of the compelling perfect-fit impression produced by these two acts, it is certainly possible to imagine other musical choices and choreographies that would create strikingly different impressions. The first function of the music is thus to provide a semantic register that colors, so to speak, the whole act. The second function of the musical accompaniment in a circus act is to endow technical acrobatic movements and gestures with smooth contours that produce an illusory effect of artistic choreography at times when the body dynamic is actually dictated by the laws of gravity and muscular efforts. Naturally, technical movements can be bracketed by the artists with choreographic postures and gestures that fit the accompanying scores. Musical volumes and rhythms can thus espouse so closely the movements of acrobats that this enables the spectators to integrate the dynamic of vision and sound in a single perception. This is particularly obvious in the extreme

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case of high school horses that obey the cues of their riders but appear to the audience to be dancing to the music. There are a limited number of gaits that can be obtained from a horse but these typical gaits are compatible with a wide range of musical patterns. This is particularly striking when the musicians adapt to an act a single theme such as the scores of George Bizet’s Carmen or George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Dancing in the Rain to the same performing horses’ paces in different programs. This, of course, combines with appropriate costumes for the rider in order to complete the illusion. Some music from the repertory can also be found to coincide with the natural gait of some animals. No special training beyond maintaining a certain speed is necessary to create the desired artistic effect. Cows are not the fastest animals when they are made to perform like liberty horses in the ring. However, when they are prompted to advance speedily, their short steps can happen to match staccato ballet music such as some parts of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. This illusion was perfectly achieved for a brief moment in the 2015 program of Circus Corty Althoff when the five cows of Alexa Knie entered the ring side by side on a relatively fast pace to the tune of a folk dance. Another function of music can be metaphorically considered to be lexical. A particular musical sound or phrase can indeed be a constituent part of a circus act rather than a mere acoustic accompaniment. It can contribute to the production of its meaning by introducing in the course of the act relevant information that modifies the perception of the audience. For instance, clown André mimics enjoying a nice wash in a bathtub when he suddenly shows surprise and looks down with an expression of panic. At this very moment, the orchestra (or a sound track) plays the chords that announce the presence of the giant shark in the popular movie Jaws. Following that piece of information, his acting out of a fight in the bathtub has a clear meaning for the public. The struggle will be brief and the clown will emerge victorious, holding a deflated plastic shark in his hand. Another example is provided by the perilous balancing act of a young acrobat, René Sperlich, who stands at the top of a tower of chairs he has built while ascending this dramatically unstable construction. As he reaches the fifth chair and prepares to make a hand stand, the orchestra plays The Show Must Go On by Queen, thus introducing the possibility of a deadly accident. This musical information makes the danger more explicit for the audience and contributes to creating an intense emotion of sympathetic anxiety. The staging of such musical elements requires perfect timing for their introduction in the dynamic of the acts. In the two examples above, the tunes parallel the actions and function as semantic enhancements or clarifications. But musical patterns can also have the role of agents in the narrative of a circus act. They can symbolize a virtual object or simply stand for themselves as actors of a drama. This is often observed in clown acts. For instance, a clown attempts to kill a mosquito

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whose presence in the ring is indicated merely by an imitative sound produced by an instrument in the orchestra. The clown chases this annoying insect whose high-pitch sound stops and resumes as if it were landing for a moment just to take off again causing great frustration for the clown. This assumed behavior provides a fertile ground for gags in which the matching of sounds and gestures must be exact to produce the desire effect. In other examples the musical instrument itself is an actor whose voice is the tune it emits. British clown Charlie Cairoli was attempting to play a concertina in the ring but an abusive ringmaster would not allow this and would confiscate his instrument. Fortunately, Charlie had another, smaller concertina concealed in his wide pants. This one too was taken away from him after he had played a few measures. Never mind, he then extracted from his pocket a tiny concertina with which he produced a delightful childlike tune. Furious, the ringmaster returned to the ring with a small garbage can, crushed the little instrument, and threw it violently inside. Charlie clutched the can for a while, expressing extreme sadness until he opened the cover of the can to take a look at the destroyed concertina. To Charlie’s and the audience’s delight the tiny concertina had survived this attempt to silence it: the tune was not dead but could be heard coming from inside when Charlie lifted the lid of the can. In both cases—the mosquito sound and the concertina tune—the musical rendering had to express emotions: mockery, irony, and eventual triumph of a miniscule agent over the brutal force of law and order. Musical phrases can indeed be played with language-like intonations that are interpreted as intentional symbolic interactions. But there is more. Oral language always has a melodic structure that can convey a variety of information: interrogation, supplication, passion, anger, rudeness, gentleness, and so on. This array of acoustic patterns can be used instead of articulate language whenever the gestures and the context carry sufficient information. Any instrument, but mainly wind instruments, can fulfill this vicarious function with a great range of rhythms and sonorities. Dialogues are integrated in a single continuous melody while each individual has its own voice. A classical clown act called “The Birds” or “The Nightingales” stages the mock courtship of the whiteface clown impersonating a male bird toward the august clown who wears woman’s clothes. The dialogue is performed through alternate whistling that conveys meaning by intonations, rhythms, and volume supplemented by gestures and mimics. Thus, the sketch musically displays the seductive attempts of the male bird at persuading the female to accept his invitations to consort. He is rebuffed with various degrees of irony or anger that are expressed through whistling. As the male raises the value of his offerings, from flowers to jewels, the female’s protests become less forceful. Eventually, hard cash wins her over and they both exit the ring while the orchestra plays a love song or a nuptial march.

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Music as power and protest Musical instruments offer a range of differences in acoustic qualities and volumes, distinct sonorities, and cultural statuses. Clowns often rely on the potential oppositions these instruments provide in order to signify social oppression and personal conflict. The whiteface clown who embodies eloquence, knowledge, and distinction is usually associated with violin, guitar, and saxophone or other highbrow wind instruments. His ill-mannered and scruffy partner, the auguste, expresses himself preferably with drums, double bass, and tuba, for instance. The contrast may also be conveyed by the way their respective instruments are played either to produce sounds according to the canons of musical virtuosity or used to make noise and vulgar acoustic imitations. A traditional skit has the whiteface starting to play operatic music on a highbrow instrument such as a violin or a clarinet when, suddenly, the auguste enters the ring with a tuba and blasts a discordant sound. The ring master intervenes and chases the troublemaker out. The sophisticated melody resumes only to be interrupted again, this time with a honking horn. This antagonistic dialogue continues for a while, each time further exaggerating the contrast between classical music and reputably lowly instruments. The auguste can even go as far as suggesting that his own body is making the noise in the form of flatulence. Tap dancing can be included in the range of acoustic means through which clowns can express their difference. In 1984, the Spanish whiteface clown Cervantes competed with the auguste Zippo at Circus Roncalli. Tap dancing in the flamenco style is both expressive and virtuosic. Cervantes excelled at this. After Zippo’s awkward attempts, he was scolded by the whiteface who declared: “You dance with your feet but I dance with my brain!” However, these antagonistic musical dialogues are eventually resolved with both sides agreeing to cooperate. The clowns, then, leave the ring playing a march in perfect harmony. Numerous connotations can be added to enhance the meaning of such performed confrontations. The meaning of this kind of musical game originates from much deeper layers of the human social fabric than mere anecdotal representations of characters’ squabbling would indicate. Social interactions are indeed patterned by melodic structures, and conflictual processes can thus be described as interferences of competing melodies. Musical clowns deal with the very fundamentals of the social dynamics that make up everyday life on the level of face-to-face interactions. Let us now consider two clown acts in view of these remarks.

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The Fornasari, repeatedly observed in the 1970s, were an Italian trio that performed traditional clown acts in North American circuses. For the sake of clarity, the various melodies involved will be referred to as A, B, C, D, E and F. The act unfolded as follows: The whiteface introduces himself and his “brother” as musicians who are going to play for the audience. He starts playing tune A on his trumpet while his brother accompanies him on the drums. The tune is popular and is immediately identified by the public but he introduces original variations that foreground his originality and creativity. In the meantime, a typical auguste, shabbily dressed and wearing grotesque makeup, sneaks into the ring, carrying a music stand and a trumpet. He takes a place beside the others and attempts to produce the same melody on his trumpet but he plays out of tune. The whiteface scolds him: “You cannot play here! Go outside!” So he does but soon returns with two trumpets that he plays simultaneously. “Enough is enough!” The whiteface confiscates the trumpets and shouts again: “Go outside!” As the intruder does not obey, the whiteface grabs his hat and throws it to the ground, but the auguste takes another one from his pocket. The scene is repeated seven times as the auguste has as many hats hidden in various parts of his costume. Finally, he leaves the ring in order to “go and buy another hat!” He immediately returns to the ring with a new trumpet and disrupts the performance by playing another melody (tune B). As his partners protest, he progressively modifies the music and ends up playing the same melody (tune A). In exasperation, the whiteface pulls a gun from his pocket and fires at the troublemaker’s feet. A classical slapstick gag is inserted at this moment with the production of red inflated toes protruding from the shoe and jets of water rising from the victim’s eyes while the auguste leaves the ring mimicking swimming gestures. At long last, the two musicians can resume their concert and start playing a new melody (tune C) but the auguste rushes again toward them with a trombone playing a different melody (tune D) and aggressively aims at them by extending violently the slide of his instrument toward their face. A scuffle ensues and, after having suddenly taken his jacket off, the auguste fires several shots from a gun attached to his bottom. His two partners are scared and run away while the auguste mimics the slow gait and posture of a Western cowboy who has hit his target and proudly exits the ring. The two musicians quickly return to play a new melody (tune E). Again the auguste interferes with an oversized saxophone and arrogantly signals his presence by whistling provocatively. He is allowed to join them but cannot draw any sounds from this instrument. After briefly being puzzled, he extracts from it a miniature saxophone that he introduces as a “baby saxophone.” Then they all play together the initial melody (tune A) for a brief moment.

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Troubles never stop, though. The stand explodes reducing the musical score to pieces. The auguste waves a white flag that he had pulled from his jacket. He gives up. Asked what he is going to do now, he replies with authority that they are all going to play a march together. Three other musicians with drums and trumpets enter the ring and join the clowns under the leadership of the auguste who performs as the band conductor. But, as the group proceed to march around the ring to reach the exit, a new clown joins them with a huge tuba (bass horn) playing still a different melody (tune F). This brief disruption is a reminder that no victory over chaos can be taken for granted. Musical and social harmony eventually triumph, though, and all leave the ring playing together the ultimate melody (tune F). The metaphorical use of music is a powerful means to express social values. A march integrates all participants within a single harmonious whole walking in step to the same beat. Individualistic voices can claim their own space by occupying an acoustic domain of their own, even at the cost of disrupting the social fabric. The repression of such rebellions by the rulers of the norms and, at times, the eventual triumph of freedom can be acted out through music by the clowns. An iconic musical act of the circus tradition was performed by the American auguste Rudy Dockey. He was introduced by the ringmaster as a virtuoso violinist who was going to play the cheerful melody called “Carnival of Venice.” The clown takes his instrument and the bow from the case but cannot find the right position to start. He tries on the left, then on the right. The violin is now upside-down. Another attempt ends up in a contortion that places the violin on the clown’s back. It is in this awkward position that Rudy Dockey manages to perform that challenging tune. However, this is not accepted by the ringmaster, who scolds the clown and confiscates the violin. While the oppressor walks away with an air of authoritarian legitimacy, Rudy extracts a balloon from his pocket, inflates it, and connects it to a very small tube on which he plays “Carnival of Venice” thanks to the air blowing through the pipe as the balloon deflates. The audience offer the heroic clown a glorious applause. The voice of freedom cannot be silenced. Music will always triumph.

4 Flashback

The power of images

T

 his chapter will bring us back to the pre-computer age, a time when landlines were the only way to communicate to distant places as long as you could locate a telephonic cabin and have the right coins or tokens in your pocket. More commonly, literate people were writing letters by hand or on typewriters, which were deposited in public mailboxes and delivered to their destination by trucks, trains, or ships. This could take days or weeks depending on the addressee’s town or country. This was the only way to communicate beyond one’s village or city. Postmen were the beloved heroes of this brave new industrial era. People had become used to this rhythm. I grew up in this world that, I was told, was much faster than the horses and boats that were the staples of my great-grandparents’ lives. Family news, love letters, business contracts were circulating at a pace that would now drive us crazy. Until the advent of the automobile, circuses traveled with horse-drawn wagons. Then, large companies started using merchandise trains to cover longer distances between major cities. When I was eleven, as I recalled in Chapter 2, I had to go to school by bicycle across the city. In April, I would take a slightly longer route because it was passing a wall where posters used to appear first when a circus was coming to town in the spring. This was making my day and the following week until the colorful trucks and big top were set up in the market square in the center of the city. My eyes were absorbing every detail around the tents, trying to guess the number of horses and zebras when gusts of wind were briefly blowing open a wall of canvas, wondering whether they also had lions and elephants. At the same time, I experienced an intense anxiety, uncertain whether my parents would agree to take me there with my sister or let us

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go alone to see the matinee show. Our family budget could not always afford this luxury. This experience has repeated itself generation after generation for at least two centuries, ever since posters became the main means of advertising goods and events in the industrial era. The flashy images that circus folks were gluing in advance on any available surface in town to announce the forthcoming visit of the show became the lens through which the performances would be perceived and remembered. It replaced the banners and parades of earlier times when entertainers would give free samples of their acts in front of the tent in order to entice the public to proceed inside in exchange for a fee. This was appropriate for the captive audience of a fair or the closely knit village setting but not for the distended urban layout. Cheaper color printing made mass production possible and, at the same time, raised the circus posters to the level of an artistic genre. Circuses started competing through the effectiveness of their posters and commissioned designers and graphic artists. Still vivid in my memory is a poster of Cirque Amar that one day appeared on the walls I was passing: a group of pinto horses freely galloping toward me in a pampa landscape with their manes floating in the wind. “Amar presents for the first time in a circus ring untamed horses from the American West.” That was exciting. As I noted earlier, I wondered then if they would be presented in a cage. Sunday, April 17, 2016. I am due to meet Jovan Andric in Montreal. I came across his website by chance a few months earlier. He is a circus poster collector. http://www.circus-collectibles.com is a unique trove of images. I recognized among them some I had seen in my childhood. As an introduction gift, I brought him a poster of my own short-lived circus. He had never seen it. He was not even born when that poster was made. It is from a small stock that were never used, still fresh after fifty years as if they just arrived from the printer: good quality paper; small format to be displayed in shop windows; vivid red, yellow, white, and black. A rare item for his collection. Over lunch I hear a familiar story: “I was born and raised in Belgrade. Since my early years, I felt passionate about the circus. I think it was in the mid-1970s when I became fascinated by the colorful posters of magically drawn animals, clowns, and performers covering city walls and store windows. I must have been around 4 years old when I started noticing posters on streetlight posts. I remember observing every detail. These first images have left a lasting impression on me: Circo Medrano, Circo Americano, Circo Moira Orfei. Italian circuses were the ones regularly visiting my country. I am fortunate that my parents were taking me to see the shows. They were also bringing me posters from the stores after the circuses had left. This is how I started my collection at a very young age.”

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Now, Jovan lives in Canada. He has a family and works as a graphic designer. The conversation, though, quickly returns to the topic of posters: “As I said, most of the circuses that visited Belgrade were from Italy. I guess this is why my collection has an Italian focus. These were my first items. Only later, I learned that some of the most mesmerizing posters had been drawn by great Italian artists such as Renato Casaro, Mauro Colizzi, Franco Picchioni, Bruno Napoli among others. I keep collecting circus posters from elsewhere now but I am still more interested in the European circus culture. The Internet has given me the means of expanding my collection and also I love the idea that I can make it available to many people. This website is my museum.” In today’s Internet-connected world, circus icons and video snippets of acts serve the function of the posters as enticers and memorabilia. This forms, though, a fluid stream of images that somewhat mimics the ephemeral existence of the circus. Websites come and go. YouTube films or other recording systems offer vicarious experiences that palliate to some extent the elusive nature of circus performances. But circuses continue to plaster colorful printed posters on walls and to advertise their shows in store windows, thus perpetuating the means of promotion that had appeared with the industrial revolution. However, there are now rich networks of social websites that include artists and their admirers who all share information in the form of brief messages, emoji, and visuals. There is no need here to frame the word “friends” by quotation marks. Participating in various ways in the circus culture creates real bonding. In spite of the lability of the medium, the constant and abundant flow that streams through it saturates our desire to see our friends, learn what they are up to, and hear about their latest moves. Wherever one lives, he or she can feel that they are a part of the circus universe. Our eyes are avid for images, and all this stream quenches our thirst and feeds our imagination. We love to see where each one is and where they go next. Through Facebook, I have been in contact for some time with Shane Smart, the scion of a celebrated British circus family who currently works with his Friesian horses in an Italian circus that is touring Tunisia. Like many of his friends, I relish the comments he regularly makes about his horses and the pictures he posts almost every day. I could fly at any moment to the city where he is performing and recognize by name each one of the six “boys,” as he calls them. We have all congratulated him on his new red jacket that makes such a vivid and brilliant contrast with the shiny dark coat of the Friesians, and on the way he tastefully decorates his horses’ flowing manes. We have a quasi-intimate knowledge of Spirit, Kratos, Smokey, Zeus, Achilles, and Aramis. They are so beautiful when he takes them for a walk, a run, or a ride on the beaches of Gabes at sunset. We even hear his voice when he encourages them with affectionate “good boys,” or calls them to order.

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FIGURE 7  Four posters from Jovan Andric’s collection with his own comments: (a) American Circus—What’s the first circus I’ve ever seen? I was four years old, it was an Italian three-ring circus, Circo Americano in Belgrade (Serbia) on a rainy April day in 1978 while the circus was on tour in Serbia (ex-Yugoslavia). My grandfather had brought me to see the show … I still recall its blue tent, with raindrops falling on our heads through a small hole. Vividly remember watching an Indian act where they were aiming at balloons while riding on horses … what great memories. Poster artwork by Renato Casaro. http://www.circus-collectibles.com/ poster/detail/800. (b) Circo Medrano (Casartelli family) poster from the circus’ Serbian (ex-Yugoslavia) tour from 1975. A classic artwork by Renato Casaro. One of the very first posters I recall seeing as a child. The poster artwork features the gorilla “The biggest in the world”—the circus main event at the Medrano’s traveling zoo. http://www.circus-collectibles.com/poster/detail/579. (c) Circo Moira Orfei—The poster motif inspired by the famous “fight of the century” … Cassius Clay vs Joe Frazier. I saw them for the first time at the famous Italian circus Moira Orfei in Belgrade, Serbia in 1977. Philip Breen as the “clown” vs Skippy or Yoyo—the kangaroo. Easily my favorite poster motif of all time. http://www.circuscollectibles.com/poster/detail/962. (d) Circus Nock—It could easily be categorized as one my top three posters of all times—exclusive artwork by Mauro Colizzi. I was in love with this motif from the day my uncle brought the circus program for me from Switzerland in 1980. http://www.circus-collectibles.com/poster/detail/790

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FIGURE 7 continued

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FIGURE 7 continued It is hard for us, now, to imagine a disconnected world where circuses appeared once or twice a year in the city square and were gone a few days later or even the next morning. For the general audience, there was no way of knowing where they had gone. Posters and a ring of sawdust were the only proof we had not dreamed. They were the only magic traces left on the path of elusive circuses. They were the icons that our imaginations treasured and worshiped in secret.

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June 1935. Trip to Belgium. Friends drive us. We chat about this or that. The landscape runs on both sides of the car. We try to hide the fact that we look intensely for any signs that a circus is around or has been in the cities and villages we cross. Suddenly, just after the border, a big poster surges on the left. These are our friends, the clowns Fratellini—Francois between the sweet Paolo and Albert—who welcome us with their large smiles. We feel at home. We are again in our circus homeland as we would be in any country in the world where we would find a big top on our way. We do not disclose our excitement to our friends. This would be improper. I am feeling guilty, though, that we have to simulate indifference … but this is what society demands: it is taboo to love so much out of one’s caste. [my translation] (J. and M. Vesque in Bouissac 1978b:27) The text you just read is translated from the diary of Marthe and Juliette Vesque, two sisters born to a French upper-middle-class family, respectively in 1879 and 1881. The Vesque sisters, as they were known, devoted their lives to the circus. Until their death, in the mid-twentieth century, they produced many thousands of drawings and writings that chronicle the circuses of their time.

Two sisters in love … Two sisters in love with the circus is the most appropriate characterization of Marthe Vesque (1879–1962) and Juliette Vesque (1881–1949). They have left an abundant graphic legacy that documents the circuses of their times with more ethnographic precision and affectionate attention than anybody else anywhere in the world. The circus had impressed them at an early age. I found in their archives an undated letter that their mother addressed to their father. Apparently, she was on vacation with their daughters in a seashore town of Normandy during the summer in the later years of the nineteenth century. The children had lots of fun last evening. There was a Hercules [strong man] and his wife. The Hercules looked really miserable. He was rather short and skinny. He worked with weights of twenty pounds. At the end, he had his wife lie down on the ground and placed one hundred and sixty pounds on her chest and belly. Then, he put several weights of forty pounds, I believe, in a barrel and lifted the barrel with his teeth, which were beautiful I must say. After that, he performed a rather violent trick: while his wife was still lying on the ground he threw up in the air three weights of forty

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pounds and let them fall down, one close to her head and the other two right near her ears. It was so close that anybody would have been scared to death in the situation of the woman. The children watched the show until ten of the evening. Marthe told me that this kind of exercise made her afraid. Juliette, who first was reluctant to watch, did not want to leave. I must confess that at times I myself looked away. It was too much. Even some men in the crowd were shouting: Enough! Enough! [my translation] (J. and M. Vesque in Bouissac 1978b:24) This vivid snapshot of nomadic travelers plying their trade on a beach or a square opens a window on the immemorial display of skill and danger that attracts sedentary populations. It also reveals the impact it had on the two little girls who had been taken for a walk in that summer evening. Incidentally, we can note that the mother implicitly reassures her husband that the Hercules did not seem to be much of a man but she could not refrain from noticing the beauty of his teeth. This provides us with a hint of the ambiguity of the fascination that even conventional families felt for the social margin represented by these performers. The athlete and his wife are credited with extraordinary strength. The actual weight of the dumbbells is not questioned by the gullible spectators. Such information feeds their appetite for the wonderful. We find more testimonies in the archives of the Vesque sisters that the impact of the circus on their life was secretly deeper than can be imagined. In a handwritten notebook, probably dating from their later years, Juliette recounts a childhood memory. The writing is obviously traced by an aging hand struggling to remain steady. It is all the more remarkable as it is still loaded with fresh emotion. Again a departure, desperation [probably referring to a circus leaving the place where they lived]. It reminds me of my first experience of this kind of pain. I was twelve … hardly. That circus was Ginnetts. I had seen it for two days and I had understood it [this literal translation from the French misses somewhat the love connotation of the expression she used]. I had surrendered to it the bigger part of myself … and it was taking it away … I thought of killing myself; I certainly would have done so if the thought of causing so much pain to my father and my mother had not stopped me. I was fixing, though, the verandah below the window of our bedroom. Under these transparent panels I could see the stone steps of the porch. Throwing myself out of the window, I would have broken the glass and crashed on those hard steps. I thought that I would have thus put an end to my sorrow. [my translation] (J. and M. Vesque in Bouissac 1978b:24)

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Marthe and Juliette studied graphic arts and became professional artists in a world, parallel to the circus, in which they were born and had to make a living. First, they decorated vases, cups, and plates at the celebrated china factory of Sèvres. Then, they were employed by the Museum of Natural History in Paris to produce scientifically precise drawings of plants and animals to document the variety of the fauna and flora of the world. These were important full-time jobs in an era that had not yet been drastically changed by electronic photography and automation. Their true life, though, started after work and in their days off, when they could rush to a circus with their pencils, brushes, and notebooks. There were a number of permanent circuses in Paris at the time and, in addition, nomadic shows were regularly visiting the outskirts of the capital. They also traveled to other French cities that maintained permanent circus buildings or accommodated visiting circus companies. There are many indications in their writings that they were both fascinated by the unique beauty they saw in circus acts and obsessed by the tragic feeling that these ephemeral miracles were totally engulfed by the destructive flow of time. They were determined to rebel and resist with their limited means: the power of the pen and the brush. From the point of view of their humanistic philosophy, grabbing the sublime beauty of the circus from the fangs of time, so to speak, became their existential imperative. The metaphor here is not an exaggeration: it is inspired by the brief philosophical reflections that are occasionally found in their notes and diary. While the circus was the focus of their dedication, they fostered a broader perspective on life. In one of their small, portable notebooks we encounter the pencil sketch of a barn in the midst of some bushes and trees, on the border of a field. The top of the wall, at the right angle, shows finely chiseled stones. They reproduced the design as precisely as possible. Across the piece of paper runs a handwritten sentence: “this barn will be demolished soon to build a road.” Then we notice a musical score on the side of the page with a comment: “while we are drawing, a farmer is whistling this melody as he mows the grass with his scythe.” Catching elusive moments of beauty was indeed for them a deeper commitment than a mere, blind fascination with the circus. Obviously, their attitude resonated with the consciousness of circus artists who, more than any other professionals, hold an acute sense of the precariousness of their artistic life. They treasure scrapbooks with clippings of old newspapers in which their acts are mentioned. At a time when photography was not the democratized activity of today, traditional circus artists kept religiously, and still keep family albums with century-old pictures. It is not surprising that the Vesque sisters had bonded with many men and women who illustrated, as exceptional artists, the circus of their time. The two sisters were intensely visual. They observed again and again the same acts when a circus was nearby. The smallest details were recorded. They

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were making notes to themselves such as: “think of counting the buttons on the jacket of the equestrian in the Guérinière act of Cirque Rancy.” Their work is the most complete archive of the circuses they were given the opportunity to attend. They lived for the circus and for their art. There is a drawing with a moving handwritten note by Juliette, dated the year of her death, that shows a window open toward a garden. The perspective indicates that she was inside the house, probably on her bed. The note reads: “That is the last drawing made by Juliette Vesque.”

The encounter Encountering the works of the Vesque sisters has been one of the most significant events in my life. It occurred through a series of coincidences and unexpected circumstances. In the 1960s, I spent many hours in libraries that were holding circus archives. The Bibliothèque de l’arsenal in Paris had a rich catalogue of nineteenth-century publications and numerous hefty volumes of clippings. The British Museum was still richer in circus-relevant holdings. I had met in London Ray Toole-Stott, the author of a celebrated four-volume circus bibliography (Toole-Stott 1970), and Anthony Hippisley-Coxe, a former diplomat in love with the circus who had published in 1950 an enlightening book, A Seat at the Circus, that I considered to be an inspiring model of informal ethnography (Hippisley-Coxe 1950). I had talked in Earl’s Court with old Harry Nutkins, who was a living encyclopedia of the English circus culture. I was also given an opportunity to pore through the American circus collections of Harry Hertzberg that was housed in the old Municipal Library of San Antonio in Texas. This research allowed me to reconcile the imperative of a budding academic career with my passion for the circus. Compared to the excitement of real circus life that I had experienced in my late student years, this bookish research was a pale substitute. Successive generations of publications on the history of the circus repeat or update the same anecdotes. The journalistic clippings are equally frustrating because they usually do not provide information beyond the fact that a particular artist performed in a particular circus and that the act was outstanding and well received by the audience. What I was interested in knowing was what exactly the acts consisted of. Too much was taken for granted in these casual reports. Compared to the endless hours spent in bees wax-smelling libraries, the work of the Vesque sisters was a revelation. July 1967. Here I am in a small windowless room, hidden in the basement of the Trocadero Palace in Paris, just below the ground floor of the Museum of French Monuments. I had to cross the first hall full of plaster models of medieval cathedral portals and historical fountains. I had been entrusted with

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the key to a side door beyond which a flight of narrow stairs took me down to the locked cell where the legacy of the Vesque sisters had been deposited. A dozen or so large cardboard boxes had been piled up there by the movers who delivered them. The only furniture was a collapsible metallic chair. No table. A single electric bulb hanging from the ceiling. Nobody yet had opened these boxes. As soon as I had pried open the one that was closest to me, I realized that I had found the Grail. How I had reached this point is a simple story, an anecdote involving chance and strategy. Striving to reconcile my love for the circus with my earnest quest for learning with a view to secure, someday, an academic position, I had written a thesis on the textual and iconographic evidence of trained animals in Roman amphitheaters (Bouissac 1958). This had been completed within the framework of the classical Latin department at the Sorbonne. A year later, I became attracted to ethnology. A decisive moment was my discovery of a few sentences by the celebrated French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in the introduction he had written to the collected works of Marcel Mauss, one of the fountainheads of modern sociology and ethnology. The topic of this introduction was the “technology of the body.” Lévi-Strauss concluded his text with these remarks: “All techniques, all behaviors that have been learnt and transmitted are based on synergies of nerves and muscles which create true systems that are consubstantial with their sociological contexts. This is true of the most basic techniques such as the production of fire by friction or of stone tools by knapping. This is still more true of more complex constructions that are both physical and social such as the various gymnastic traditions, for instance the Chinese gymnastics, so different from ours; or the visceral gymnastic of the ancient Maori of which we know almost nothing; or the breathing techniques of the Chinese and the Hindus; or also the skills of the circus which constitute a very ancient legacy of our culture, whose preservation is left to individual chance callings and family traditions” [my translation and emphasis] (Lévi-Strauss 1950). This paragraph opened for me an agenda and a mission that was to include a dedication to circus and more generally on gestures research. In the following year, I regularly attended Lévi-Strauss’s seminar on Pueblo’s myths and rituals. I eventually confessed to him my deep interest in, and my previous experience of, the circus. His enthusiastic encouragement to pursue this line of research was beyond my expectation. He subsequently provided all the needed supports to secure research grants that would allow me to spend my summer vacations in libraries holding special collections and in circuses. In 1967, shortly after I had arrived in Paris, as I paid my usual visit to my mentor’s office that was located then near the Musée de l’homme, he prompted me to contact his friend Georges Henri Rivière, the founder and curator of the Musée des arts et traditions populaires. He had heard that the museum had

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received a donation that should be of interest to my circus research. My first phone call led to an appointment the next day in the late afternoon. However, since at that time the museum would be closed and there was only one entrance to the building, I was instructed to throw pebbles toward the third window of the second floor on the esplanade of the Trocadéro. This was the office of Georges Henri Rivière who promptly appeared at the window and gestured to meet him around the corner in front of the door. The silver-haired sexagenarian was courteous and helpful. After a few welcoming words, he declared that he would make things easy for me but he warned me that the documents had not been unpacked and catalogued yet. He hoped I could start this task immediately. He also apologized that the place was not very comfortable but the museum was due to move later to a brand new building close to the Jardin d’Acclimatation. In the meantime, I could start the next day if I wanted. I soon got the key to that cell. Here I am, in the midst of July, sitting in the small windowless room, poring over the files and notebooks that the heirs of Marthe and Juliette Vesque have piled up in these old battered boxes of various sizes, some apparently in the state in which the surviving sister had left them. They have been dumped there with little care. I have no choice but to start with the one that is the closest to me, not too far away from the electric bulb hanging from the ceiling. The place is fairly cool but there is no ventilation: “fresh” air is coming from the stairway. I have to leave the door open. The excitement of the discovery, though, makes me oblivious of these material conditions. The first task is to find out what kinds of documents are in the boxes and to mark the boxes accordingly. After weeks of work, I could tentatively identify a set of hefty manuscripts, another set of completed colored drawings in various stages of completion, and what was obviously their preparatory sketches and notes taken on the fly during the performances they attended. There were also items that could be best characterized as miscellanies: printed pamphlets, admission tickets, invitations, letters, and countless shards and pieces whose sole value was that they were in a way or another associated with the circus. Each set numbered in the hundreds, if not in the thousands. The preparatory documents first caught my attention and I devised a plan that I submitted to GHR. Georges Henri Rivière preferred indeed to be referred to by this acronym. He agreed that the finished colored drawings were definitely outstanding documents for both their ethnographic and artistic qualities and that they should be published in the future. However, when I showed him the myriads of little sketches, some miniscule, some on old envelops, others on yellowed scrap pieces of paper, or even on sheets of toilet paper, he concurred with my suggestion that these should be the first to be classified, catalogued, and conserved. This was going to be my task for the years ahead. Then, the museum would have moved to its new building, still under construction,

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Avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, close to the Jardin d’Acclimatation that was next to the Bois de Boulogne. From these samples, it was possible to reconstruct the process that had led the Vesque sisters to produce the astounding colored images that represented in exquisite detail hundreds of circus acts they had observed. When going to a circus show, they carried in their handbags bundles of small pieces of cheap paper no larger than their hands and, once they were in their seats, they discreetly held these unobtrusive improvised scratchpads on their knees. With little lead pencils—some of which could still be found in the boxes—they were quickly doing sketches of the artists, their animals, their props, their attitudes, and their movements as the acts were unfolding in the ring. It is impossible to identify at first sight the people and other relevant objects that are outlined on these rough drafts. Sometimes, a hardly decipherable word is inscribed on the side of a sketch. The two sisters were working in parallel as it appears from similar versions of the same profile, prop, or trick. The second stage consisted of using these crude visual mementoes to produce more elaborate drawings once they were back at home. Then, upon successive viewings of the same acts, they started adding details: corrections of postures, gestures, acrobatic movements, style and color of the costumes, structure and design of the props, and, at times, musical indications in the form of scores or names of a familiar piece of music or song. However, this stage was only a transition toward still more informative images. Messages to themselves are often encountered on these intermediary drawings: “Think of noting the number of buttons on the jacket of the equestrian”; “Does that trapeze artist have blue eyes?”; “What is the exact shade of this pinto horse’s coat?” They were not driven by the desire to render a visual impression of an act, as many circus painters are wont to do, but instead by the urge of recording as precisely as possible the appearance, demeanor, and acrobatic movements of clearly identifiable artists. The third stage of the production process was to compile all the information relevant to each act in larger bound notebooks in which both drawings and texts were collated together. The final move was to represent on a single, rectangular surface of a high-grade paper sheet the most significant moments of an act or the most representative instants of an artist’s performance. These images were selectively drawn from the notebooks and further refined through additional observations of the acts. Many were presented to the artists as a token of their admiration. A large set was carefully packed in one of the boxes. The production of these visual records had been a lifelong labor of love. The Vesque sisters were not known to have a family life beyond their regular working hours as graphic artists and their intense involvement with the circus world. From their own account, this was fully absorbing. It was also a selfreflexive endeavor. Among the many texts they carefully handwrote and

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collected in a bound file marked Rédactions contemporaines, an expression that could be approximately rendered in English as “Day-to-day stories,” we find a lively account of their drawing sessions both outdoors and in a Parisian circus: Memories: sketching circus tents while getting sunburnt; sketching under bursts of wind that tear apart our sheets of paper and blow dust in our eyes; sketching in the cold weather of November or March which forces us to make a run from time to time in order to warm ourselves up; above all, sketching in anguish when watching acrobats as we dread an accident, always possible, bound to happen one day or another. We are trying to catch each other’s eyes … they are up there, high under the top of the circus, getting ready for their trapeze act; we stand on the last upper row, almost on the same level as they are, nervously holding our notebooks and pencils. Our eyes meet. I understand. He means: “Ah! You are there! Are you ready?” I nod in reply: “Yes!” Suddenly, he soars in space … one, two seconds … it is finished. The audience bursts into a thundering bravo. He lands back on the platform, acknowledges the applause, and glances at us: “Done?”—“Yes, done!” During ten minutes, the same scene is repeated five or six times. Our pencils get glued to our perspiring fingers, and the paper gets damp with the sweat of our hands. At last, the end. He dives in the net. We rush to meet him behind the curtain while the spectators still clap their hands. He asks: “Were you able to do anything? It’s going fast; isn’t it? May I?” Timidly, as he puts on his bathrobe, one of them leans towards our sketches, actually kind of hieroglyphs. Then, “good bye” or handshakes. They go back to their dressing room. [my translation] (Bouissac 1977: 112–113) This text does not refer to a particular act. Like its beginning, it portrays the conditions under which Marthe and Juliette completed their work. They have left dozens of aquarelles showing circus tents in their urban landscapes, with all the trucks and fences around the lot, and variously piled up equipment as they were seeing it from a distance. Some circuses look brand new; some others are weathered and ill-kept. These images are not fantasy pictures but the true, harsh reality of these nomadic tents. The second part of the text describes how difficult it is to create an accurate graphic version of a flying trapeze act. They were making contact with the artists, something that became relatively easy after they had acquired some notoriety among circus folks who could admire their finished drawings. This was a time when the photographic techniques had not reached the efficiency and flexibility of today’s recording tools. Then, artists had to pose for the photographers, but catching the beauty

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of a human body soaring toward the bar of the trapeze or the hands of the catcher was beyond the reach of the cameras. Early cinematography produced only jumpy, fragmented motions. The Vesque sisters were determined to meet that challenge with their modest pencils and sketchpads. They needed the cooperation of the artists who often checked and corrected their rendering of attitudes and movements. Like in the typical scene above, they had to position themselves in the most favorable place so that they would have a lateral view of the act as close as possible to the level of the trick. Here, the artist (obviously the flyer in a flying trapeze act) cooperates. He wants to make sure that they are ready with their pencils before he leaves the platform. Afterward, they meet in the backstage while the perspiring team put their bathrobes on to protect themselves from the cold following their intense physical efforts. At this stage, there is not much to show them, only indecipherable strokes penciled on small sheets of paper. But, they will persist and come back again and again to watch this act as long as they perform in Paris or the vicinity. Naturally, drawings cannot record the motion itself. However, it is possible to capture the dynamic of a body if it is portrayed at the very moment when gravity will bring it back to a resting position. The Vesque sisters were experts in picturing the anticipated trajectory of an acrobat, sometimes outlining with very fine dots the ballistic curves that guide our perception. Tellingly, Ray TooleStott reported a conversation he had with the celebrated tightwire walker Con Colleano whose elegance and artistic perfection brought him to the attention of the Vesque sisters. This artist is often represented in their iconographic works. Discussing their treatment of some of his tricks with Toole-Stott, Con Colleano stated that he was shocked when he realized their drawings’ accuracy: “They are incredible! I did not think it was possible to catch as they did with such exactitude the contraction of my muscles when I aim at the wire with my right foot on the way down after my forward somersault” (TooleStott, personal communication). They were, indeed, keen observers, paying attention to the most minute detail of the equipment they were able to closely examine. In a note bearing the date of July 13, 1924, the day they visited the Zoo-Circus, a famed traveling show of that time, they wrote: “Eldid’s apparatus is lying unattended on the ground. People just walk around it. We take time to closely look at it. The platform at its end is pierced with holes and reinforced with steel.” Eldid was an equilibrist who performed extraordinary feats of balance on a bicycle that was resting on a small platform at the top of a high pole. Perusing the many drawings and watercolors they produced educates our perception of circus acts. After years of poring over their sketches and paintings, I can now discern details I might otherwise have missed among the flow of information that overwhelms us when we are attending a circus performance. Like the posters that impress our senses and our imagination

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with the force of sacred icons, these images create templates of symbolic circus types in our minds. We recognize crouching tigers, prancing and rearing horses, flying trapeze acrobats, tumbling clowns, equilibrists on unsupported ladders, female equestrians, and many other stereotypical figures of the circus that are packed with emotions. The work of the Vesque sisters adds a degree of subtlety that allows us to perceive what makes each artist unique. They seem to have been able to see through the personalities of their models in action and to convey by their drawing both their physical and moral elegance, or lack of it, as well as the challenging demands of their acrobatic arts. Spring 1969. The museum has moved to its new premises. GHR has retired but keeps an office there. The new curator, Jean Cuisenier, is very supportive of my work on the Vesque archives. I pursue my task under the watch of Edith Mauriange, head of the iconography department. My first sabbatical leave will be entirely devoted to sorting out the Vesque legacy. Every morning, the Paris metro takes me to the station Les Sablons, a short walk from the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires. GHR has made sure that the premises would be built not only as a display facility for the collections but also as a place convenient for research. I take my seat at a wide table from which I can see trees through the shaded windows that protect the drawings from the corrosive action of the sun. Every morning, once I am ready at the table, one of the boxes I had cursorily examined the previous year is brought to me. I extract a layer of documents and spread them in front of me. They come in all formats from postage stamp dimensions to folded-in quarto sheets, some in pencil, others in watercolors. Occasionally, they are bound together with a thin ribbon, or stuffed in envelops. Most of them bear the name of the artists whose glimpses of the acts have been thus recorded. In the absence of any inscription, it is usually possible to identify to which set they belong. My first task is to place in large envelops all the documents that pertain to the same acts or artists with a temporary coding system. It is truly a titanic work that I will pursue, summer after summer, for several years. Eventually, the Institut d’Ethnologie of the Musée de l’Homme [Ethnology Institute of the Museum of Man] will publish in 1976 two tomes of micro-fiches under my editorship: Le cirque en France de la Belle Epoque à la fin de la deuxième guerre mondiale [The circus in France from the Turn of the Century to the end of the Second World War]. This publication includes eighteen large notebooks of forty to fifty pages each, in which full pages or double pages are devoted to particular artists. This is where the Vesque sisters had gathered all the details they had recorded step by step. These pages offer a mixture of colored drawings, still in sketchy forms, and handwritten explanatory notes. It is possible to follow through the hundreds of preparatory drafts the successive stages

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FIGURE 8  A sample of the Vesque Sisters’ contribution to the ethnography of the circus of their time. The drawings and written comments document an animal comedy presented by Chas Baron. The trainer puts a cat in a box and places a plate of food on a table. A dog, whose head was first concealed in a lion’s mask attached to the fence, gets out of its hiding spot as soon as the trainer has left the ring, and eats the food from the plate. The dog, then, goes and picks up the cat from the box and deposits it on the table in front of the empty plate before returning to hide behind the lion’s mask. The trainer comes back and shows anger toward the innocent cat as he believes that it has eaten the food. However, the cat “talks” to the trainer’s ear and it is obvious to the audience that the cat explains what has really happened. The dog is reprimanded by the trainer (reprinted from Paul Bouissac 1973).

that led to the notebooks. There is, in addition, in this published work, an analytical catalogue and 722 supplementary iconographic documents (Bouissac 1978a). As noted above, Marthe and Juliette Vesque also produced numerous signed sheets of fine quality paper on which they represented a selection of movements and attitudes pertaining to an artist or a troupe. They used to make at least a copy of each for the artists. These were the ultimate stage, a further visual elaboration based on the materials recorded in the notebooks.

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Educated perception: The lens of graphic art Munich, February 26, 2016. I am sitting on the first row at the Krone Bau in this friendly Bavarian city. All my Facebook circus friends have been buzzing about the second winter program of Zirkus Krone. They all flock there to catch this program that they consider the best in years. No less than six former Golden Clown winners of the Monte Carlo Festival and the twenty-seven lion and tiger act of Martin Lacey Jr. are performing there. I cannot miss this. It will never be repeated. In the wake of the refugee crisis and other events, the international political situation dramatizes the sense of urgency as instability and conflicts undermine our confidence in a stable world. Carpe diem is the motto of the day. The ephemeral circus is all the more beautiful and precious. The solemn Nikolai Tovarich, in his red tuxedo, opens the show. The first act starts on a low key: six small grey donkeys are released in the ring and frolic around, bathed in a soft light. After a few seconds, a man joins them riding an appaloosa horse. No cracking of the whip. No call to order. Dressed in the stereotypical outfit of an American West ranger, he rises and stands on the back of the horse that has stopped in the center of the ring. The music evokes a Western movie. He performs some lasso tricks from that upright position. He dismounts and sends the horse backstage. The donkeys come toward him. He talks to the animals. He looks laid back and relaxed. The donkeys start trotting around him along the ring fence. They pirouette; they go two by two, then three by three. A long pedestal has been brought into the arena. The donkeys put up their front legs, side by side facing the man. Now he gently rewards each one and prompts them to walk around again; he entices them to stop and to lie down. A brief pose: the man sits down next to one of the animals and rests his head on its neck, the brim of his hat pulled down on his eyes as if he were to sleep under the sun. The image lasts a second or two. The act concludes. No triumphal exit. A humble bow to acknowledge the warm applause. The trainer and presenter is Marcel Baldini Kraemer. I put a star next to his name in my program. I can’t help thinking of the Vesque sisters. They would have loved this act, so graphic, so subtle in colors. I can imagine them struggling to catch the man’s slightly hunched posture, his slow gestures to prompt the donkeys to go through their paces, and eventually form a line in front of him to receive a reward from his hands. I actually end up seeing this act through their eyes, like images neatly drawn and colored, if these instants were lifted out of the flow of time. All the colors complement each other from the brownish grey donkeys to the spotted coat of the horse. The beige and natural leather hue of the man’s outfit that does not look like a stage costume. I can imagine visually with great precision the moments that the Vesque sisters would have frozen

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in time on one of their vivid composite drawings. My familiarity with their works has educated my perception of circus acts. It helps me discern both the details and the composition, and recreate these icons almost at will in my memory. Marcel Baldini Kraemer comes back to the ring in the second part of the program with two bisons and a pinto horse. Once again time stops: after pirouetting and trotting around, the bisons climb on two low, round stools while the horse canters, winding its way several times around the bisons before rearing as a hint of wildness before exiting. In contrast with the donkey act, the accompanying melody suggests an American-Aboriginal theme such as those that have become a familiar musical code of North American exoticism in the film and television industry. Once again, the act unfolds with poise and calm. The man does not try to upstage his animals. Bisons are fairly rare in the circus. There is a palpable sense of surprise among the audience when their massive silhouettes enter the ring. Marthe and Juliette Vesque were not uncritical circus fans. They have preserved glimpses of the acts they considered worthy of their recording efforts. Their notes occasionally make disparaging remarks about the lack of standards in some performances or the vulgarity of the demeanor of some artists. Their graphic work is an anthology of the circus arts of their time. There is a lesson to be learned: today’s circus, like any other form of art, needs its critiques. The function of enlightened esthetic approaches is primarily to explain and comment on particular acts. These can be done both by visual means such as photography, video, film, or drawing, and in written form. Occasionally, the critiques must not shy away from negative evaluation. These circus performances are not different from musical compositions or painting masterpieces. They have depth and structure. They result from choices on the part of the artists and trainers. The two acts by Marcel Baldini Kraemer that have been introduced above are good examples. This personable trainer manages to foreground his animals and to direct them in an unassuming way that enhances their natural gait and movements. These two acts—the donkeys and the bisons—are composed with a classical economy of means. There are no superfluous decorative elements. The manner in which all significant parts—from the choice and grooming of the animals to the selection of the cultural symbols, lighting, and music—are integrated within the program of actions achieves a remarkable semiotic synergy. These works of art are dynamic, though. They change over time while remaining consistent. It is interesting, for instance, to discover that the earliest version of the donkey act involved only four animals, and that, since I saw the bison act in Munich, Marcel Baldini Kraemer has added two more bisons to his act. Great artists are in a constant creative mood, if only because of the necessity to keep practicing and training. Nothing is acquired forever in the performance of the

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circus arts. This is why catching these felicitous moments that are kinds of ephemeral epiphanies and giving them a relative iconic permanence can be experienced as a mission that implies a measure of self-effacement in the service of their beauty. Such was the demanding task to which the Vesque sisters devoted their whole life. Their texts and drawings have become a part of the European heritage. They documented the circuses they observed during their life at a time when all the electronic recording devices we have now did not exist yet. Some important parts of their legacy are now available online. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg as the bulk of their work is still buried in the archives of the collections held by the Musée des civilizations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée [Museum of the European and Mediterranean Civilizations]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesque_Sisters

5 Great Expectations

Rites of passage

M

 unich, August 28, 2016. Circus Voyage is due to perform this Sunday afternoon in Trudering, a suburb of Munich. My friend Sascha Grodotzki does not work for Zirkus Charles Knie any longer. The promised phone call he was expecting last fall never came. Some people are prone not to stand by their words. He is now an administrator for this traditional family circus that is famous for its many animals. The posters, true to reality, show elephants, tigers, giraffes, a hippopotamus, zebras, various breeds of horses, goats and geese, and even a “mermaid.” On my way from the bus stop, I wonder whether there will be enough spectators for the performance to take place. The heat wave is hardly bearable. I am relieved to see that I am not the only one in front of the ticket seller; not a big crowd, though. I meet Sasha under the entrance awning. His parents happen to be visiting him today at his new job. “You are lucky. We have just 50 spectators. There will be a show. This is our minimum. Otherwise we refund the tickets or reschedule them for the next days.” This is circus business. “Times are difficult, mainly for animal circuses. And this hot weather does not help! Also, we are rather far from the city.” The performance goes on as planned. The side walls have been lifted enough to allow drafts to give us an illusion of coolness. At the intermission, we all rush to the beverage booth to grab bottles of water. Surprise: my Facebook friend, Simon Preissing, suddenly emerges from the backstage. Simon shares many circus pictures day after day. He posts selfies with all the best artists and trained animals of the day. He attends show after show not only at the Krone Bau in Munich but also in other German, French, and Swiss cities on weekend trips. He lives a short train ride from Munich. This month, Circus Voyage welcomes his casual help when he is free.

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“I help with the horses to take them to the ring for the show.” Simon radiates happiness. He belongs to the circus, even if it is a temporary job every day until he has to go back home in time for dinner. After the summer, he will study at a professional school that forms administrators in the entertainment industry. His agenda is clear. Ultimately, he wants to join the circus, like Sascha did, as a life project. However, he is obviously attracted to animals more than acrobatics. Becoming a lion trainer is a long shot. When you are not born in the circus, though, you have to find a way into it, and providing a service that most circus folks cannot readily afford is the best shortcut. Simon is personable, courageous, and dedicated. What circus owner in his right mind would turn down this young man’s help? Later he will have all the needed social skills to negotiate the renting of lots with city bureaucrats and promote the show with the local media. I empathize with Simon’s happiness. Flashback: Sixty years ago, at around the same time of the year, I was in a night train from Paris to Morlaix in Brittany. I was due to join the circus in the morning. The day before, I had terminated my rental of a tiny student room at the top of a building on Rue de Rennes. The circus lot was a short walk from the station, on a lower level, along the river, not far from the monumental viaduct that straddles the city. I stood there for a while with my small suitcase, looking down at the red and white trucks that had arrived during the night. A few tents had already been erected. Elephants and horses were being led there from their huge vans. Two giraffes were pacing their enclosure. Further down, men were starting to build the big top. Another team was busy setting up a fence around the circus to keep the local children away. Dozens of them as well as some adults crowded the place, trying to get close to the animals. Now, in the distance, I could recognize Henri Dantès, the heroic lion trainer, who was opening the front panels of his cages and checking the wild cats while fending off the few kids who had managed to invade the lot. From this elevated position, all the scene looked like a toy circus, but, that very same day, it would become my true home. With trepidation, I walk down the slope. Where will I find Monsieur Firmin who had told me, a month ago, to look for him when I arrive in Morlaix? Here he is, with his large fedora, hands in the pockets of his raincoat, calmly overseeing the setting up of the traveling zoo. “Good morning, Sir. Here I am. What should I do?”—“Good. Go to the office truck when it opens to register. Arbrick!” A short, wiry, Algerian man who was directing the placing of the van of the rhinoceros turns toward us. “Take him to a bunkbed in the first elephant truck. I think there is one free. He will work in the menagerie.” It seems that I am in. These men are straightforward and congenial. “Arbrick will tell you what to do. But I don’t want to see you close to the cage of the young tigers. Show him which one it is.” Monsieur Firmin disappears in his luxurious caravan that is being hooked to electric and water outlets. Arbrick is a kind and witty man.

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He calls me “Monsieur Paul.” He is from Kabylia, in Northern Algeria. He tells me that he used to present the polar bears some years ago. I put my suitcase on the upper bunkbed in a small cabin attached to the huge trailer that is used to transport three elephants. Now I am handled a shovel and a rake. “Clean the rhino cage. Put the manure there. And bring in fresh straw. Come to see me when you are done.” Cleaning a rhino cage is not the easiest thing to do. You have to outsmart the animal that tries to fight the rake with its horn. You have to attract it to one corner and rush in the opposite direction to quickly remove the dirt before it catches up with you. A bale of straw looks neat and pretty but it is heavy to carry. Arbrick tells me how to safely lift and handle that weight. The office is open. Name and home address. Date of birth. I will be accommodated and fed by the circus. Three meals a day in the kitchen tent. The salary is minimal. However, if I stay until the end of the season, I will receive a bonus. I could not have dreamed of a better deal. Now back to work. Every morning, I will have to give water to six tigers, the older ones, after cleaning the rhino. These tigers only, not the others. Then, my task will be to help build the large enclosure for the two giraffes and to provide them with a bucket of carrots. But I must be careful with the male, which sometimes kicks with its front legs. A circus on tour is a village on wheels. Quickly, everybody is aware that I know the boss and that he looks after me. I learn that the young tigers always try to play and catch whatever passes in front of their cage. If they catch you through the bars, they don’t let you go. They have strong and sharp claws. You need experience to care for them safely when you water or feed them, or clean their cage. As the day passed, I got advice from all sides. That day went fast. I had never worked physically as much in my life. I helped put up the gate to the zoo; the awning had to be stretched between heavy poles; painted panels had to be fixed to stand the wind and rain; they depicted the heroic capture of a hippopotamus on a river in an African landscape; I tried to crack a joke about Le Douanier-Rousseau, the famous naïve painter of the previous century; nobody got it; they did not know who had painted the panels; actually we did not have any hippopotamus in the circus that year. Now, my duty was to control the admission tickets at the entrance until we closed down before the circus show started. I had to help carry some props in advance. Like most of those who did not have a specific task during the performance, I joined the circus folks to watch the program from the top of the highest row of the cheapest seats. Henri Dantès’s lion act was not to be missed. “Here we call him Hans,” someone told me. Another sign that I was in. Soon, it was time to dash back to take down the monumental portal of the zoo entrance and bring the equipment to the truck; then, after the intermission, we had to quickly

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dismantle the steel fence as it was the first trailer that would move to the next town during the night. That night, I slept like a stone while the elephants were being loaded, impervious to the rocking and rumbling of the animals and the noise made by my three roommates when they returned from pulling down the big top in the middle of the night. Work started early the next morning with hot coffee, bread and jam in the kitchen tent that had been erected before the first convoys arrived. It was raining. The ground was muddy. After three days of circus life, my feet were hurting badly. Arbrick noticed. He brought me a pail of water and handed me a tin can full of salt: “Take that, Monsieur Paul; soak your feet in salty water for twenty minutes.” It worked. A new day could start. Until we reached a large city, weeks later, this was to be my daily routine. We were on a city-a-day tour. Why am I doing all these punitive chores? This was a despondent thought that visited me in the mornings. I had only a few minutes to shave in front of a half broken mirror and I felt lucky when I could find a public shower close to the circus lot before I had to stand in front of the zoo entrance even on days when the visitors were rare. That circus was still run on the basis of early twentiethcentury technology. Profit was maximized by changing towns every day. The show was great and the big top was packed most of the evenings. Once you are a part of it, the circus quickly becomes the center of your existence. The towns you visit are mere backdrops that you have no time to remember, let alone visit. What counts is the current design of your village that changes as it must be adapted to the lot: where are the elephant tent; the horses’ stable; the tigers that I am allowed to water; the boss’s caravan; the dressing room truck; the kitchen tent, and so on? Why am I doing all that mindless work after years of challenging studies? That’s it. Tomorrow morning, I will go to the office truck when it opens and tell them that I quit. I will forget about the bonus. I am thinking of several excuses. So, that is my last day. I will do my chores as usual but I know it is the last time. 8:00 p.m. The weather is warmer. People are still queuing in front of the big top. The music signals that the evening show is starting. I rush to see the beginning, sitting on the wooden bleachers at the top in the cheapest section, pressed on both sides by the other workers, some artists, and some people who have managed to sneak in without a ticket. We are all intensely watching Hans who takes real risks with his roaring lions; the beautiful and dignified Eva Tovarich in the sculptural hand-to-hand balancing act she performs with her husband and daughters; now come the Francini, the two iconic clowns with their purposely failed magic act. It does not matter we have seen it all, like the six Norwegian horses that follow. Time to rush to pull down the entrance and dismantle the fence. After all, I am not going to leave the circus tomorrow morning. Now, it is where I belong.

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A sense of belonging When one visits a circus for the first time, all the tigers and lions look alike as do the elephants and horses. You cannot tell one from the other. Quickly, though, you learn their names. After a few days, if you are told to bring extra water to Prince or to Domino, you know which tiger it is. If you have to take Haifa to the ring, you go to the right horse. They are all as different as people are. You also learn their life history from bits and pieces of anecdotes that come as side remarks or jokes from those who have long been in that circus. The animals also know who is who. Arbrick warns me: “When you see Domino jumping to her feet, it is because Monsieur Firmin is coming. She recognizes his hat from a distance in the crowd before we can see him. She loves him. Better know when the boss is around. If he sees you doing nothing, he always finds some work for you.” Several times, I decided to leave the next morning and changed my mind when I was feeling the warmth and excitement of the show in the evening. I had worked in the circus for hardly more than a week when Monsieur Firmin asked me: “Can you teach my daughter in the morning before you come to control the tickets? We have no time for school in the circus. I mean basic things like math and writing, all the things that kids learn at school. My wife will pay you extra.” My secret goal was to become a lion trainer, but the prospect of being admitted every morning to the caravan of the boss who was a famous wild cat trainer could not be turned down. After all, I had studied hard so that I could teach others. It was easier for me to do so than to lift bales of straw or tear off admission tickets. I started my new chore the very same day. Luck smiled again at me the next morning. The entrance to the zoo was manned by three persons: the cashier, seated behind an open counter; a young man who worked at the menagerie like myself but had been tasked with enticing the public into paying the entrance fee through a loudspeaker; and the ticket controller who was tearing off the ticket stubs and letting the people in. Monsieur Firmin came as usual that morning, checked that the awning was well secured, and that everybody was there. He listened a moment to the speaker who enumerated the animals to be seen inside and started again from the beginning when he arrived at the zebras at the end of the list he had memorized. Monsieur Firmin shook his head, grabbed the mike, handed it to me: “You are a professor, you, you must know how to speak.” I declined politely. I was rather shy then. I had never spoken in public through a loudspeaker. “Give it a try!” I did. I got a high doing this. I have never been shy since then. That day, I became almost instantly the official zoo barker, the one who could spill out incredible stories such as the whole narrative of the

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capture of the hippopotamus after days of trekking in the jungle and an epic battle with cannibals and crocodiles. The circus folks were coming to listen to me and had a good laugh. Many among the public smiled but were buying tickets. From then on, I was spared the cleaning of the rhinoceros because I had to be ready as soon as the gate to the zoo was open, right after my lesson in the boss’s caravan. Memories are like Russian dolls. We remember what we remembered at the time we remember. I am there standing with my mike next to the cashier. The public line up, handing their money. They don’t want to miss the lions that are going to devour their daily bleeding meat thrown to them by the fearless “dompteur.” It will happen any time now. Then, the shower of the elephants will take place. It is an absolute “must see.” It is a hot day in August. I let in a couple of kids who obviously cannot purchase a lawful ticket. I am on that side of the fence. I am empowered. Local people look at me as one of the circus. Memories within memories: August 1946. The circus where I now work has set up its tent in my hometown. This is just after the Second World War. My father is back from Germany where he had been kept as a prisoner of war for the last five years. The family struggles financially. The posters are impressive. The trainer Firmin Bouglione stands in an imperious pose, surprisingly dressed in a business suit, next to a giant tiger surrounded by lions, leopards, black panthers, and pumas: “Peace in the jungle. Five species together for the first time in a cage!” My parents decide to take my sister and me not to the circus but to see the installations from the outside. The tickets for the show would be too expensive for the four of us. I am happy, though, that we walk toward Place Francheville, the large market square next to the bus station, where cattle and horses are traded once a month. From a distance, the blue tent is imposing. As we approach, the wind brings waves of music. Here we are, now so close that we clearly hear familiar circus tunes and the applause of the audience. We stand next to the fence to have a look at the backstage where the animals are kept. Some horses are being brought back to their tent. Men unscrew the red and white plumes that were decorating them for the show. They are given water. This must be the intermission. Many spectators coming from the circus fan out in the zoo and stand in front of trailers and trucks of which we can see only the back. They must be looking at the wild animals. We walk along the fence hoping to see something from the other side of the square. The view is blocked by what must be the tent of the elephants. There is a mountain of bales of hay and straw next to it, and, closer to us, a pungent heap of manure. Turning the corner, we now face the main entrance, all lit up, with huge banners showing jumping lions, crocodiles, rearing horses, flying acrobats, clowns. The gate is closed and guarded by rough-looking men in uniforms. Back at our point of departure, the show is going to resume. People rush back to take their seats inside. A burst of fanfare signals the beginning

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of the second part of the program. Suddenly we can see polar bears running through a tunnel toward the ring. My father lifts my sister in his arms. I climb half the fence. There must be eight or ten animals. They look huge and so white. A little man dressed in a blue costume runs along the tunnel behind the last bear, hitting the bars to prompt the animal to run faster. They all disappear within the circus. People clap their hands inside. The time has come for us to walk back home. I do my best to hide my distress. As Arbrick comes by to say hello to the cashier on his way to dinner, I ask him: “Arbrick, when you were presenting the white bears, what kind of costume did you wear?”—“A blue uniform, with a naval officer’s cap. I looked a bit stupid with that but this is what the boss wanted.” The following year, I was able to join the circus almost at the beginning of the season. I was assigned a better bunkbed in the cabin attached to the trailer of the giraffes. This was a promotion. I was now sharing the space with the trainers Henri Dantès and Michel Matrossof. I still had to give a hand to help set up the zoo every morning, but, as soon as we were open for business, my main duty was to entice the people who had gathered in front of the entrance gate to purchase admission tickets. I had developed a liking for showman rhetoric and I enjoyed performing the task creatively. My boss loved the way my lies sounded credible. Actually, they were not straight lies. There were truly many extraordinary animals inside the fences. My words embellished reality through invented stories and epic descriptions. Most of my audience were not really duped when I announced the giant tarantulas that were trained to ride wild horses. I elicited complicit smiles and struck many conversations, if not instant friendships, with local circus fans. This went on month after month for several seasons. In the winters, I joined the team of controllers at the Paris Winter Circus that belonged to my boss and his brothers. Eventually, I got tired of juggling several low-paying jobs while completing my studies. An opportunity arose to take up a teaching position at a Canadian university. I told myself: “Why not?” Anyway, I had learned that I would never be a lion trainer.

Utopia When they heard that I was going to Canada, the Bouglione brothers asked me to investigate the possibility of taking their circus overseas for a tour and their wives asked me to bring back some mink coats that they heard were so much cheaper over there than in Paris. When I returned to France for the summer vacation after my first year of university teaching, I did not bring back mink coats but a map of Canada. It was obvious that the main

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cities where a large tent circus traveling by roads could make money were too far apart compared to European countries. A few years before, the circus had undertaken a short-lived, disastrous tour in Brazil: not only distances were overwhelming but also the state of the roads had been a constant nightmare. My tentative investigation, though, had indicated that there might be opportunities for a smaller circus to perform as part of a larger traveling fairground. Such companies, which they called “carnivals,” had profitable summer and fall seasons. I was told a circus would be welcome as it would beef up their business as long as the show would not be too long so that the visitors could also spend their money riding merry-go-rounds, gambling for teddy bears, and succumb to the enticements of the fortune tellers and other displays of fake wonders. That summer, I spent time with the circus, still employing my rhetoric to convince the crowd to visit the zoo, and reviving my bonds with the animal folks. Among them was a young trainer I had befriended during my earlier stint at the traveling zoo. I had been told that he had joined the circus at the age of 14, brought there by his father, an army officer, who could not manage his son’s energy. After a two-year probation, Monsieur Firmin had eventually answered his desire to become a trainer and mentored him in the art of dealing with wild cats. That summer, I discovered that Gerard had matured after doing his military service as a dog-master and spending a season presenting his boss’s tigers in a Spanish circus. He was ambitious and kept asking questions about Canada. While sipping beers after the show, we often toyed with the crazy idea of creating a circus of our own in Ontario where I lived and worked. The following summer, the idea had taken hold of us and we spent many hours making plans, devising an ideal program based on some animals he believed he could train during the winter until the late Canadian spring would allow us to hit the road and try our luck. Another friend, who liked to go by the name of Sarti, was eager to join us. He was versed in electronics but had also acquired some amateur magician’s skills. Now, we had another act and he agreed that he could also do some clowning with me as the ring master. He would be responsible for the audio system and the lighting. None of us, though, had any money to start with. Sarti was still a student. Gerard was surviving on his meagre circus pay. I received the monthly salary of a junior teacher, which did not amount to much. Never mind. We were young dreamers. We had experienced, first hand, the excitement of life in a very successful circus. It was hard work but we could witness every day that this was the shortest way to freedom, fame, and affluence. We were going to take over Canada’s world of entertainment by promoting the high standards of the European circus tradition. Our old friend Dimitri Maximov, a former circus composer and conductor who was now the regular cashier at the Bouglione zoo, started to write the music for the acts we described to him as we were

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imagining them. He was doing two versions: one for a smaller band, the other for a larger orchestra. Of course, we would pay him generously later. Toronto, a day in September 1964. I am anxiously waiting for Gerard at Union Station. He had arrived by boat the day before in Montreal after a weeklong crossing of the Atlantic. He sounded cheerful when he phoned from the train station to let me know when his train was due to reach Toronto. Here, on the platform, my own elated state of mind is interspersed by moments of anguish. Can we make it? It is truly a huge peak to climb with no real experience and much less money. Here he is. Broad smile. A small battered suitcase. His “Perpignans” are attached to the handle. He brought his own two special wood and leather whips that are traditionally made in the French city of the same name. We celebrate. The time has come to get to the job. We agree that we first need a place, then build cages, then buy lions, in that order. The week before his arrival, I had negotiated a loan with the bank where my salary was deposited every month. The manager was very excited by this unusual request from a university teacher. He thought, though, that there was a potential for success. I showed some spectacular photographs of Gerard presenting the Bouglione tigers. The colleague who had sponsored me told the banker that he was prepared to invest later some of his savings in our venture. The loan from the bank was the equivalent of more than my half-year salary. I had become three months earlier a permanent member of the faculty. The loan was secured. For the next six months, it was like riding two horses at the same time, jumping back and forth from my teaching duties to the hard work of building a dream. Sarti had joined us and had landed an audio technician job in a nearby university for the winter. Our dream was contagious. Colleagues and friends were ready to help. Nothing more exciting had colored their lives since the first time they had visited a circus in their childhood. As soon as Hector, our extravagant lawyer, had done the paperwork to provide our circus with a legal status that allowed us to sell shares, more money started feeding our bank account. The lure of owning a circus, even a small part of it, was irresistible. After seeing Gerard training the lions, they were convinced they had hit the jackpot. It had taken, indeed, less than a month to establish a credible base near a small hamlet called Utopia, about 100 kilometers north of Toronto. Things had unfolded as planned: Hector had located an abandoned farm with a large tobacco barn that we rented for a modest sum; we had bought a secondhand house trailer; Gerard, who was a skilled carpenter and welder, had built spacious cages at a “do-it-yourself” workshop. We had purchased, from a New York private zoo, two grown lions and two adolescent cubs. I was bringing pounds of fresh meat every evening after my classes. Often, friends were happy to give me a ride so that I could sleep or mark papers during the trip.

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They loved to help feed the lions after having watched Gerard practice new tricks with them. We had become a hot item of conversations in an otherwise quite sedate city still under the spell of Puritanism. My colleagues visited Utopia during the weekends with their children. Our greatest hit was Malika, a 200-pound “lioness” with which Gerard was wrestling bare chest. Malika was actually a male lion that we had rescued from a small private zoo south of the border. It had been neutered and declawed when it was purchased as a cub by a wealthy New York family to entertain their children. As long as it remained no bigger than a large dog, it had perfectly met their purpose. It was endowed with a friendly and playful character. Eventually, it ended up in the hands of an animal dealer. The lion had welcomed our attention and responded enthusiastically to Gerard’s advances when we approached its cage. The price asked was within our means. Since castrated lions do not grow a mane, we decided to cast it as a female. Malika was most of the time in a playful mood with Gerard. Its huge teeth were noticed with awe when our visitors admired the young man and the “lioness” wrestling on the ground of the enclosure. I knew how to frame the action with an exciting narrative. Then, two baby Himalayan bears, Max and Mylord, came into our care. They grew up fast on soups, beets, and cereals. Gerard had a great rapport with Mylord that soon could ride a tricycle to reach a carrot dipped in honey. That winter, life in Utopia was a never boring story. We did not know what was to come next, but, step by step, our show was making progress. On a sunny Sunday morning, as I arrived with the load of meat and grocery for the week, I found the caravan empty. Gerard was nowhere to be seen. I panicked. A laughter came from above: high in the tree that stood in the yard, Gerard had fun with Mylord, chasing each other from branch to branch. These were pre-Internet times. Postal services and landline telephone were the only way of communicating: “Hello! Do you have lions for sale?— No, but we have anteaters and boa constrictors.—Sorry. We are looking for young lions.” “Hi! Are you still looking for lions? We have a fully trained fiveanimal act. The trainer died of a heart attack. The widow wants to sell.” Gerard was tempted but the price was too high and I was reluctant to expose Gerard to older, unknown lions that, after all, might have killed their trainer. How could we know for sure? They were in California. I was the senior member of the team. We had a telephone installed in the barn in case of emergency during the training sessions. Soon we received a grown-up lion with a full mane and fiery but straight temperament. It was a bargain from a bankrupt safari park. This lion turned out to be a perfect match for Gerard’s own character. In no time, Cesar leaped through a hoop, jumped over its trainer, and stood up on its hind legs. It was not the kind, though, that you could wrestle with. More investment money poured into our account.

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A Sunday, February 1965. A very cold night, deep below zero temperature. A beautiful night sky. No moon. All the stars crystal-clear twinkling above my head. I am on duty at the circus tonight after a day of updating the books for our accountant and occasionally visiting the barn to make sure that everybody was all right and fed. More straw for the lions. Water for the bears. Gerard is taking his day off, meeting some date in town. Sarti is busy somewhere else. The barn is warm. All the animals are quiet, sleeping or watching each other from across the central alley. A feeling of pride and terror, like reaching a cliff. Lonely. A heavy moral burden. My associates have trusted me. We went so far. Will our good luck persist? The day before, we had made a little show for potential, small-time investors: Gerard had put two lions through their pace; Mylord had demonstrated its cycling skill and run up and down its slide; the four Shetland ponies did trot in a circle and pirouetted upon command. To conclude, Gerard had wrestled with Malika that did not work with the other lions of which it was afraid. People were impressed. I was not short of stories. They promised to buy some shares for their children. It was hard to sleep that night, with the weight of the unknown on my chest. In the early morning, I would have to rush to the university for my first lecture of the week. Gerard would resume his training, waiting for my nightly visit, bringing fresh meat for the lions and dinner for us. From time to time, my former student Natacha was driving me and cooked a Russian meal. She loved the circus, and the idea of the circus, which allowed her to briefly escape her British husband and her boring suburban life. The last move of the vision was the purchase of a tent with some rows of bleachers, the building of a steel arena, and the securing of two or three tractors and trailers for transporting the animals and equipment. As we had some assets and a contract with a traveling carnival, it was easier to borrow the needed money. We would be on the road soon enough, as soon as the temperature warms up in mid-spring. We would have to pay 20 percent of our income to the owner of the traveling fair but they would provide us with electricity, water, space, and advertising as part of their attractions, and occasional manpower. It was up to us to entice the crowd to buy an admission ticket to our show, which should not last more than one hour, or for a quick visit to the animals between the shows. With four animal acts, including Malika, and a fledgling magician, we were a bit short. My introductory talks could not be too long. People pay to see action, not to listen to stories. We tried to find a female acrobat who could dance and work on a vertical rope but the candidates we auditioned were used to pole dances in seedy clubs and were not ready to join our type of shoestring circus. Max, a retired trapeze artist from Florida who performed a mock bullfight with two dogs adorned with horns in addition to some traditional clowning, joined us on the promise of a modest fee and the payment of his fuel. The program was 50 minutes at the most. “Perfect!” said the owner of the carnival.

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Circus or die Our premiere was to take place on May 5 on the fairgrounds of Brampton, a medium-size city in Southern Ontario. There was no time for a dress rehearsal. In fact, except for Max’s torero outfit and Sarti’s oversized clown jacket, we did not have any costume to speak of. Gerard was performing bare-chested with the white riding pants and black boots he had brought from France. I was wearing my regular teaching suit. The music was a couple of vinyl records with typical circus music that Sarti started and stopped on our old turntable in front of the mike whenever I was through with my introductions to the acts. Our model was the program we were used to with the Bouglione circus. There, the cage act was always coming first. Gerard presented the two lions that were sufficiently trained to make a decent show: roaring Cesar and silent but giant Huli that, at the end, raised on its hind legs against the steel arena well above the trainer’s head. The circus was full. The audience was impressed. They had never seen a lion act at such a close range. Then, it took a very long time to dismantle the steel arena. Some men in the public jumped to help us. I was killing time with epic stories. My strong French accent was a part of the exoticism. At long last, the clowns entered the ring. Max had a few tricks and Sarti was not a bad improviser. Gerard came next with the four Shetland mares that I introduced as Judith, Rama, Blackie, but I had forgotten the name of the last one. Never mind. The rhesus monkey that was tied up to Judith’s mock saddle won the day. This got more laughter than the clowns. Sarti managed quite well his transforming of a white rabbit into a dove thanks to the trick table he had constructed in the winter. Mylord on the tricycle was a hit. Max and his dogs that were wearing bull’s horns was the only truly seasoned circus act. The public left the tent happy and we kept chatting with them until Gerard joined us after securing the animals in their quarters. All wanted to shake his hand. He was the kind of circus icon that lives forever in people’s imagination. Natacha was acting as a glamorous hostess who looked as if she had been born in this circus. Now, we had enough cash to meet the expenses of the week to come. We were planning two shows a day. We had learned a lesson from that first performance. The tent was rectangular. Our little zoo was at one end. We decided to keep the steel arena up at the other end, next to the lions’ wagon. The ring was in the center of the tent with the seats arranged on three quarters of the periphery. The cage was close enough and offered good visibility under the spotlights. From now on, the lions would be the last act in the program, just after Max and his dogs. A double climax. A few days before our departure from Utopia, we had received the visit of a well-known journalist who had been lured by the newsworthy oddity of

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a university professor running an animal circus in which his colleagues had invested money. Frank Rasky had been thrilled by the bout of wrestling with Malika and the ambition of these three unlikely partners who were bold and crafty enough to build a circus from scratch. Before leaving the barn, he asked: “Do you have a slogan or a motto?”—“Circus or die” I said. He wrote it down with obvious delight (Rasky 1965). We were in our third week of traveling when the carnival owner brought us with a grin of triumph a copy of the main national monthly magazine that featured an article on “The Professor’s Wonderful Circus.” Frank Rasky’s prose and the double-page photograph showing us with our animals in front of the lion cage had such an impact that shortly afterward we received a congratulatory letter from a wealthy retired couple who offered to buy some shares in our company. Our lawyer Hector handled that while we were absorbed by the challenges of the life on the road with thirty animals including the dove and the rabbit, trucks that were less than optimal, roads and distances that were hard to manage, and unpredictable weather.

FIGURE 9  A photo by Kenneth Elliott featured in the article “The Professors’ Wonderful Circus” by Frank Rasky, published by Maclean’s on June 5, 1965

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July 1965. We have reached Timmins, the most northern city on our route. A light snow fell in the morning. Then the sky cleared up. I have spent the night in a nearby motel. As I walk toward our blue big top, I feel the pride of our achievement: a real circus in the palm of my hand. Gerard stayed in the caravan to be close to the animals. He wants to practice with the lions in the morning. Sarti prefers sometimes to sleep in his car, a station wagon that holds the audio and electric equipment. Max’s van is behind the tent. I see him walking his dogs in the distance. I paid him the two weeks we owed him. The show, yesterday, went very well. We never had so many spectators and they were ecstatic. Today we will buy beef tenderloins for ourselves and the lions. I do not know that this moment of bliss is not meant to last much longer. Circus life is a day-to-day affair. Nothing can be taken for granted. After a series of profitable dates, bad weather, muddy locations, long distances, and truck breakdowns took their toll. In addition, Gerard and Sarti did not get along too well. I used to joke that my act was to keep the peace in the jungle. The trainer had a strong sense of his centrality and resented the caustic humor of the amateur magician who was reluctant to dirty his hands. Sarti knew that we could have made it without his act but not without his car and the equipment he had provided. The three of us were supposed to receive an equal number of shares in the company as the payment for our daily work. Gerard thought that it was unfair. His secret dream was obviously to go it alone with a lion act he could market in North American circuses. The tension that had brewed for some time flared up one day after the show. We had performed for a dozen kids and their parents. Sarti took off the same evening. The carnival’s boss could see that we were struggling. He suspended the payment of our percentage until better days. His people gave us a hand. Max had not been paid for two weeks. One morning, I found a note that had been put under the door of the caravan. Max had decided to return to Florida. I had no choice but to go and spend a few days in Toronto to try to raise more investment money. Gerard was going to keep running the circus as a simple sideshow of the carnival and secure the means of feeding himself and the animals, and pay for the occasional helpers he needed. We still had the basics. It was only a matter of time until we would get back in full business. All the way in the night bus to Toronto, I figured out various schemes. The bank was prepared to lend more funds as long as my colleagues would sign up to guarantee the loans. This worked out. In the evening, I got a phone call from Gerard. A tornado had torn off our tent and twisted the steel arena. The animals were sound and safe. So was he. We needed time and a place for him to repair the damage. Gerard would not quit that easily. Neither would I. Hector found a free lot next to a gas station on the main trans-Canada highway. Two days later, whatever was left of our circus was parked there. Gerard first sewed the torn canvas, then straightened and welded back the

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cage. The new loans would allow us to join the carnival again but not as the full circus that once was. Our earlier benefactors who had been impressed by the magazine article came to our rescue by donating what we thought would allow us to regain our footing. I clamored the wonderful news among our investors. But, in view of our recent setbacks, some got cold feet and chickened out. They demanded the reimbursement of their loans. Circus was a risky business, they had discovered. The time had come to wind things up. Not an easy task. I refused to consider bankruptcy. I had signed up for the purchase of the tent, the trucks, and the house trailer. I would pay back the banks with monthly instalments. The dream came to a crashing end. Gerard drove the lions to the compound of another trainer in Florida. I negotiated the wintering of the bears in a Quebec zoo but never claimed them back. The ponies found a home in a local riding school. I never heard again from Max or Sarti. A few years later, I met some guys from the carnival of which we had been a part. They told me that each time they visited the towns where we had performed, people were asking them about Gerard and Malika, Cesar and Huli, and the bear Mylord. They missed us. We had made a small difference in their lives. But I had learned that I would never be a circus director again.

The circus of the century I soon discovered that my loss had a silver lining. In the Canadian banking system, paying up your loans rather than going bankrupt establishes your credit. Failing is not stigmatized and is considered a part of entrepreneurship. In spite of the motto of the defunct dream, “circus or die,” I embraced another popular imperative: “never say die.” After all, the earlier slogan was not meant to be taken at face value. It was but a publicity posture that had been improvised on the spur of the moment for the benefit of a journalist. Now I could construe my circus venture as a hands-on experiment in circus ethnography. My French mentors were supportive. I received grants to pursue research on circus history and the cultural meaning of this institution. Most of the following decade was devoted to the works of the Vesque sisters as I explained in Chapter 4. The urge to do it again, though, had not vanished. Once, I unexpectedly met Gerard who was presenting the lions of a German circus in Holland. He had seasoned under the harshness of circus life but his enthusiasm was intact. For several days, we relived our Canadian experience over some pints of Dutch beers. He wanted to quit this circus. He was scared of one of the lions: “It is waiting for an opportunity to attack me. I feel it. I cannot talk to anybody about that. I just want to stop.” We evoked Cesar.

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Gerard was beaming: “Ah, that one! What a good lion. It was already fouryear old when I started training it.” In these conversations, I learned things that had happened in Utopia, which I had not been told at the time, like the day when Cesar escaped from its cage and locked itself in the workshop instead of running toward the highway. “I never told you. You had enough problems finding money. That was another stroke of luck.” Now, Gerard had a new girlfriend in Gouda. She had a small house in the city center. There was an empty store on the ground level, enough space for training a couple of bears. The large balcony on the back of the house could house their cage. They could work in circuses as an independent act. He knew where to buy young bears cheaply. I had to hold myself in order not to run into a new hare-brain venture. That year, I visited him again. The brown bears were there but Gerard and his partner were being sued by the neighbors and the city for creating a nuisance and operating a trade without a license. Too bad I had to return soon to my teaching. He was sure I could have talked the right people into allowing him to pursue his dream. Paris, July 1976. I am sipping a drink at a terrace on Boulevard SaintGermain with my partner and a young German we had met by chance the week before. Georg was an assistant curator at the National Gallery in Berlin. He was doing research on some contemporary artists in France. I was not short of circus anecdotes. He never had enough of my stories. I could not stop either recounting episodes of my Canadian saga. He laughed when he heard that the first time we had landed a one-day contract to appear with the bear Mylord in a local show, we had to make up for the fact that the animal was not yet doing much. It could walk on its hind legs for a few steps to reach a bottle of milk that had been vaguely shaped in the form of a trumpet and hold the bottle up while drinking. The trick, then, was to time that movement with some actual music from a wind instrument. Our attempts at synchronizing the sound from the vinyl record rarely matched perfectly the bear’s gesture. For the bear-on-wheels trick, the trainer had to push and carry it a bit on the tricycle. We needed lots of honey to focus its attention on the props. When it was walking upright, though, Mylord was spectacularly elegant. Himalayan bears sport a triangle of white fur on the upper chest under their chin. Gerrard kept saying that it would look good with a grey top hat. “Well, I said, let us rent one!” Sid Silver was a formal clothes rental store in downtown Toronto where men about to be married used to find a proper tuxedo with various accessories. I had noticed some top hats in their shop window. I went there: “Good morning Sir. I would like to rent a formal top hat for the weekend.—No problem. What is your size?—Well, it is not for me. It is for a friend up North who is getting married. He has a big head. Bigger than mine.—This one should do.—Fine. I will bring it back next week. Thank you.” This was quite cheap. I rushed to Utopia. We made two very small holes on each side of the hat and

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threaded through a fine string that was securely tied under Mylord’s chin. The bear instantly looked like a million dollars. This was circus. The audience loved it. The fee we received from the show producer amply paid for the rental of the hat. Later, that summer, we visited our friend in Berlin and discovered the impressive National Gallery that had been designed by the celebrated architect Mies van der Rohe. Entering the museum, I was in awe. The structure of this harmonious inner space conveyed a sense of cosmic immensity; yet it did not feel forbidding, almost welcoming like a holy place. “That would be perfect for a circus!” Everybody laughed. They thought I was joking. I am not sure I was. Georg had an innovative mind. He curated cutting-edge artistic installations. This was before the Berlin Wall fell. Germany provided ample funds to promote the cultural life of the city. Artists were flocking there from the rest of the country and abroad. In the evening as we were enjoying dinner and conversation with a group of friends, Georg asked: “Do you have any idea for our next Festwochen? We are now making plans for the next one in two years from now. We are not sure what the theme should be.” I said nothing but, at night, I drafted a blue print with the National Gallery in the center and arrows pointing to satellite activities. This was just a dream, an irresistible drive toward a new mirage, like an optical illusion floating over my horizon. It did not take long for me to present my idea to Georg. The theme of the festival was to be “the circus,” a combination of exhibitions and performances. Clowns and acrobats had inspired famous painters, from the Impressionists to Picasso. Georg added Calder to my tentative list. A set of the best works could be displayed in the museum he curated. This probably would be the first exhibition of such importance and magnitude. We might include the drawings of the Vesque sisters that had never been shown in public. There were also many collections of posters that could be tapped for a rich display in another gallery. Urban spaces could be open to street entertainers. A small traditional family circus either from Germany or elsewhere could be allowed to set its tent in the vacant lot next to the Symphony Hall that stood across from the National Gallery. The center piece of the festival, though, would be a unique artistic creation: “The Circus of the Century” that would take place in the National Gallery itself, blending acrobatic skills, contemporary painters and sculptors, and avant-garde composers brought together for a limited edition of eight or ten performances. Georg was ecstatic. Within a couple of weeks, he had convinced the organizing committee of the Festwochen to endorse the project. A new circus vision had landed on my lap. I was assured that the budget would match the needs of this ambitious project. Free from economic constraints, my circus imagination could run wild.

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Back to the beat of Utopia I spent the following month devising an artistically credible and realistic program. This was my Diaghilev moment. I had always claimed that circus was an art in the full sense of the term. Bragging rhetoric, gaudy colors, unimaginative music were part of the folklore of the circus, not its essence. Streamlined bodies swinging on trapezes, female equestrians espousing the rhythms of cantering horses, deft jugglers commanding orbiting spheres with their hands or feet would be better served by the best visual artists and composers of their time than by the specialized costume and music industry that was perpetuating circus as low-brow entertainment. The Soviet circus had shown the way by introducing classical scores and dramatic staging in some of the great acts through which they were peddling their ideology in the West. My take was definitely elitist. The National Gallery would be the jewelry case for this unique performance. September 1976, Berlin. I am back. Georg can’t wait to hear about my plans. We have exactly one year to complete the project. He had given me a budget to scout around for circus talent and contributing artists and musicians. We had pooled our connections in these two widely different worlds. There were some constraints: The National Gallery Hall was spacious but not immense; its height was sufficient for hanging a solo trapeze but not a large apparatus that could accommodate a troupe; animals should be excluded except perhaps a dog or a horse. The acrobats selected should be responsive to some degree of innovativeness and agree to cooperate with the graphic artists and composers we would assign to them. I had done my homework. Now I describe the whole program as if it was unfolding before our eyes: You see, we have limited the audience to 300 seats, arranged around the ring except for the artists’ entrance. We start. There is a total blackout. Then, suddenly, the ring master, dressed like the announcer in the film Cabaret: “Ladies and Gentlemen! The Circus of the Century!” He is pushed away by two roaring Harley Davidson motorcycles that have been decorated by Eduardo Paolozzi, the Scottish sculptor and painter from London. Six or eight young men and women surge and tumble in a 3-minute charivari, jumping over the machines as they run around the ring. The music, entirely percussion, would be composed by Charles Boone from California. I have his letter agreeing to that. One bike leaves the ring. The other accelerates and all the acrobats climb and form a pyramid and stretch out their arms with a loud shout as they disappear. “Wow!”, says Georg. “It will make a lot of smoke and gas smell?—Sure, this is part of the show. Motorbikes are the wild beasts of modern times. We cannot have the smell of lions and elephants!”

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The percussions continue: A charismatic gypsy presents his freestanding ladder act, a classic he once was performing on sidewalks in Paris, but, this time, the ladder is in glass. We will have to commission it from a factory. It will have to be made light and unbreakable. He wears a black leotard and a silk white shirt. At the end, his salto is impressive. A relaxing melody follows, sensuous, like in a striptease bar. Eddie Windsor, in a smart blue suit, a perfect gentleman demeanor, announces his gorgeous partner Lola. Surprise! Lola is a female basset hound. She walks slowly toward the table that has been brought in the ring. Douglas Kossmayer, the real name of the trainer, gives orders to the dog but cannot manage to make her do anything. He has to lift her to get to the table top. She hangs half way, supported by her front legs resting on the ledge. It is a great humorous act, the result of excellent training. I have seen this act in the Moulin Rouge in Paris. He expects to hear from you. Huge success. It has class. Perfect for the Gallery. Now come three brothers antipodists and icarians. They juggle with their feet but they don’t use their usual circus props: the new objects are beautiful, light wooden sculptures made by your friend Ursula Sax. We went together to her opening last year. She has also agreed to redesign their “trinka.” This is the name of the special platform on which the catcher lies down on his back with his legs up. The whole act forms a moving, articulate sculpture within which the bodies are encapsulated. They wear leotards whose color combines beautifully with the light birch wood of the props. The music is created by a Gamelan band from Java. From time to time, Georg takes notes in his pocket diary. “How much will these artists cost?—Well, I am not sure. You will have to negotiate a contract with each of them directly. Some will not be very expensive. But they all will need to have things in writing well in advance. Normally they work for circuses. They expect more money for festivals. For the antipodists, you also have to plan at least a week in a studio with the sculptor so that they can practice and the props can be adjusted. The musicians should be there too. You understand it is a team work, a unique synergy that has never been attempted before.—So, what comes after the three brothers?—A clown act. We must balance the program.” “Pierre Etaix and Annie Fratellini are French celebrities. They run their own circus. I have seen their act that is a surrealistic parody of a magic act. It is subtle and elegant. Last week, I went to Albertville in the south where they were performing. I invited them for lunch in the best restaurant of that city. We discussed this project. They like it. Performing in Berlin is very attractive to them. You will have to settle the contract with Annie. It will provide a wonderful moment of humor and poetry. We can hire the act as it is. No need for extra artistic input. It is very creative by itself. At the end they play music, a delightful end.”

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The vision moves me to tears. Georg listens intensely. I put my elbows on the table. I lower my voice. Georg pushes his beer aside. “Now, after a brief blackout, the speaker will announce Carmelita Miazzano. The music is an arrangement of Kurt Weill tunes. From darkness a white horse surges into the ring. The rider is a naked woman. No saddle. No reins. She holds the mane of her mount. She presses its flanks with her thighs and knees. The horse delivers all the repertory of classical allures and steps. This act is imbued with pure German expressionism. She has a great personality that radiates from her whole body. She claims that she once saved this horse from a fire and now can obtain anything from him. It is not a beautiful horse either, but it too has character. They will have to practice days in advance for the horse not to be spoofed by this unusual setting.” Georg is concerned: “Where shall we keep the horse?—She will probably come with her other horse and her father who has a dog act. They can park their trailer and the small tent for the animals near the gallery where there is still a vacant lot.—What about the hooves? There will be a special floor in the ring but the horse will have to cross all the way there on the floor that is paved with marble.—No problem. There exists rubber ‘shoes’ for the hooves and the horse can climb a few stairs.—Is it the last act?—No. Let me finish.” Chris Christiansen comes next. This is a fantastic juggling act. We contacted an engineer who is trying to figure out how to make the balls emit crystalline sounds when they travel in space. His leotard will be painted by Hajime Kato, a Japanese painter in Paris. I know him well. His wife loves this idea of designing aerodynamic shapes on the body of a juggler. In the second part of this act, he juggles with a single large white ball. It is sublime. It will be the Zen moment of the program. Georg writes down a few more notes in his diary. “The final act is the great aerialist Gerard Edon.” I spread a few photographs on the table. Georg is silent. I suspect he wonders how to hook the trapeze in the Gallery space. Will they have to ask Mies van der Rohe’s permission? “The scaffolding for the trapeze will be built from the floor. It will be self-standing. No need to drill holes in the walls. It will not be as high as usual for this act but it is extremely impressive, the best available today. He has worked in the greatest circuses in the world. He balances stood up on the bar while the trapeze swings and he even keeps his balance frontally. We have asked an engineer to see whether they could make a bar that would make a big eight, the sign of infinity, instead of going in a circle as he does now. Perhaps a moving weight inside the bar would do the trick. This is only an idea. It does not matter if it is not feasible. I had lunch in Paris with the French composer Bernard Parmegiani who creates electro-acoustic music that gives the illusion that clouds of ethereal sounds travel in space. He is enthusiastic about this project. We will have a swarm of such sounds following Edon as the trapeze

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swings.” Georg nods in approval. He is dedicated to innovative art. My dream is progressively becoming our common hallucination. I have been given free reign. I don’t have to bother about raising a budget. We drink to our success on a patio under the star-studded sky of West Berlin. Over the next few weeks, Georg had translated the project into German for his colleagues who were in charge of administering the festival. I had sent him a summary of the program with the addresses of the circus artists, painters, and composers who had given their agreements in principle. They were expecting official invitations and contracts. The strict timetable had to be respected if there were going to be any chance of success since most circus artists will have to work out their commitments for their next season around the dates of the Berlin’s Festwochen. After a month, no contract had materialized. I kept phoning Georg. There were delays. Everything will be fine. We have a budget. Now every day brings bad news. The antipodists will be performing in Norway. Others know by experience that when contracts are slow to arrive, it is not a good sign. They lose faith. I lose face. The dream unravels. I need clarification from the organizers. They assure me that I should not worry. I soon discover, though, that they had understood that I would produce and deliver the show in time myself. Lost in translation was the fact that their hands-on involvement in the preparation of most of these acts was meant to be their responsibility. The Circus of the Century would not be a part of the festival. Writing the letter to inform them that the project was over was a personal tragedy, a sore memory that still haunts me. Now, I knew that I would not be the Diaghilev of the circus either.

The grand international snail circus Reflecting upon these ventures that have illustrated my life with stressful but meaningful episodes, I can look back to my childhood games. The countless miniature circuses I was wont to create with clay have now become cosmic dust. The characters I was forming from the clay I collected in the fields and which had to solidify in the oven of our kitchen before I could paint them in bright colors still haunt my dreams. There were prancing horses I adorned with little feathers from the chicken coop. The master equestrians were clad in red tuxedos. The acrobats could safely hang from the strings I tied up from twig to twig. There was always a swinging trapeze and occasional casualties when my daredevils had lost their grip and turned into a heap of broken parts. I was fond of fashioning lions and tigers with their trainers. After the shows I was giving for my sister and the mildly interested rest of the family, the animals were returned to the match-boxes I had transformed into brightly painted circus cages and wagons.

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The closest to the real thing I came when I was in my very early teens was the “Grand International Snail Circus.” We were living near a park in which snails abounded in the wet seasons. I had noticed their extraordinary diversity of sizes, shapes, and colors. Some had stripes like zebras. Others were grey and massive like elephants. There were tiny black and white ones. Medium shells of all hues could be my horses through adorning them with red or blue plumes. If one puts a snail at the bottom of a vertical string, it clings and climbs surely, albeit slowly. With a bit of help a light snail can move from a trapeze bar to another. I created special nets to save their life should gravity takes its toll. It was a slow motion circus and my spectators never had the patience to watch the complete program. Never mind, the artists were returned to their match-boxes after the show and could munch on lettuce leaves with which I provided them in abundance. Unfortunately, that circus too enjoyed a short career. The snails tended to escape and the day when my grandmother found dozens of them in her bathroom, I had to retire them in our garden. My snail circus, though, was never picketed by angry animalists.

6 The Ethnography of Memory

Remembering

R

emembering past events may be considered to be a very individual, subjective phenomenon. Indeed, in reflexive moments our inner speech helps us relive episodes of our life, either blissful or dramatic. Upon second thought, though, we realize that, most often, memories are shared. They are never as vivid as when we communicate with others the narratives that define our personal history. We are moved by various motivations to re-enact in words significant events in our life. Sharing positive ones enhances the pleasures we experienced in the past. We often edit, more or less consciously, the details of these narratives to make them more sharable, more attractive in view of what we assume will interest our partners in these dialogues. Sharing traumatic memories brings solace by producing some narrative distance and attracting others’ empathy. As time goes on, our memories become more social than individual. Often, our friends remember things we have forgotten, or rather they remember the stories we told them as we remember the ones they told us. Personal memories are fragile. We eventually skip details that others recall. Do we remember faithfully the actual events or do we re-enact the last tales we shared? Nothing seems to be more pleasurable to humans than the collective evocation, re-construction, and maintenance of the past that provide some continuity and meaningful consistence to our life. This chapter is about circus memories. Not the kind of published biographies and autobiographies that are by necessity frozen in time and molded by stereotypical narrative patterns, but rather memories in the making through genuine conversations over the last few years with women and men whose lives were and are the circus itself. Behind the timeless colorful icons that populate the collective imagination, the circus creates a rich fabric of memories through which existences are forged and destinies accomplished.

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The capital of nostalgia When I turned seventeen, my grandfather, who was then struggling to master English for no other reason than the sake of learning, decided to send me to England during the summer. Through a student exchange program, we were matched with a compatible business family in Wigan. My first experience of British exoticism was exhilarating. On the first Sunday of my sojourn at 77 Mossy Lea Road, in suburban Wrightington, Mister Jones took me with his two daughters for a picnic on the windy coast of Lancashire. The highlight of the ride was a stop-over in Blackpool to admire the tower, the beach, and the painted two-dimensional trees cut out of plywood that had been erected along the road, facing the sea. I was told with awe that at night the electric bulbs that adorned the trees were lit up and that Blackpool’s illuminations were famous all over the United Kingdom, even beyond as they had been imitated in India’s Brindavan Park. I returned often to Wigan and was eventually taken to the Blackpool Tower Circus, which then featured, each summer, the best acts from England and the continent. With the expected arrogance of a young Frenchman, I bragged for years afterward that if an architect had been entrusted with the task of building the ugliest seashore resort possible, undoubtedly the result would have been Blackpool. September 2008. On my way back from a conference, I have decided to spend a few days in England. I must do something else than the usual visits to the London pubs and museums. Why not returning to Blackpool? I brush away the idea. I have not been there for more than three decades when I visited the clown Charlie Cairoli shortly before he died. Going back would be chasing melancholia. The night has passed. Now, I am at Euston Station, buying a return ticket to Blackpool. As fifty years before, I have to wait for the local train in Preston. Nothing has changed: the color, the smell, the tea and raisin scones at the booth on the platform, and the rain gently dribbling on the tracks. Local families are going to the beach for the day, hoping for a ray of sunshine. It is a short ride: I am still puzzled by the name of the first stop, Poulton Le Fylde. Then, some people get off at Pleasure Beach, and I find myself at the terminal, Blackpool North, in a brand new station that has been built in the meantime a few blocks from the old one that was across from the bus terminal. I remember the way to the Clifton Hotel whose most expensive rooms face the sea. The crumbling Edwardian wooden flight of stairs leads to a faded ballroom. The huge windows are dirty. Mist floats in the distance above the water. The rain has stopped. I will take a walk on the North Pier across the road. You now have to pay fifty p to access the pier. I am the only visitor at this late hour on a rainy day. Walking on this bridge to nowhere, I am suddenly

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flooded with emotion. My former caustic attitude to Blackpool melts away. Tears come to my eyes. Blackpool is beautiful in the declining light of the day. I notice for the first time the cast iron sculptures that adorn the sides of the pier. The damp beams of the walkway lead to a vintage merry-go-round and some closed booths that have seen better days. On my left, in the distance, the tower bears witness to that city’s past glory (Bouissac 2013a). For over a century, the Blackpool Tower Circus has been a hot spot of the trade. For international artists, doing a season there was a consecration. The most famous equestrians, wild animal trainers, acrobats, and clowns have performed in Blackpool. Circus fans were traveling from the continent to watch the circus’s summer program. In the 1960s and 1970s, I regularly visited Charlie Cairoli, one of the most creative clowns of his generation. The town then had not yet fallen victim to the cheap flights to Las Palmas and Majorca. Charlie was heir to a long tradition of European clowning. He had moved to Blackpool just before the Second World War with his father, the French whiteface clown Jean-Marie Cairoli. As Carletto, he was playing the auguste role in the team. At his father’s death, he took over the act, hired a partner, and quickly became the resident clown who would be the star of the show for more than thirty years. The main part of the audience were regulars coming there from the dull industrial cities of the English Northwest and Scotland for their week-long summer holiday. Charlie had to produce new gags every year to keep them and their children laughing. He had to be relevant and be in tune with their daily problems and current values. He was a kind and generous man. Having settled in Blackpool with his family, he was a public figure who proudly displayed his photograph with the Queen granting him an award. I visited him almost every year, watching the show several times. Often, we had a pint and a pizza on the Promenade with Charlie’s wife Violette and his son Charlie Junior. He was relaxing after his intense performance. He could not let the rhythm slacken. Twice in the matinee and the evening, he had to carry the public from one burst of laughter to the next until the final explosion of mirth. They loved him. People were waiting for him when he was leaving the building to sign a program or kiss a child. I can still hear his grave voice: “You know … I cannot repeat the same gag even after a long time. When I do that, there is always someone who tells me at the door that they remember that trick from ten or fifteen years ago when they had come to the circus with their parents. It is hard work to prepare a new season and, also, you can never be sure that the gags will work. You have to try them live.” It is night. The illuminations are blinking. Bands of noisy revelers are crowding the road along the sea. “You know … before the war, I performed in a German festival and I received a prize watch from Hitler. When the war started, I went there at the end of that pier and I threw the watch into the sea.” Now, Charlie leans on the table. His voice is toned down. “You know

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… they are lovely. The other day, a woman brought me a cake when I left the circus. It was to thank me because she just has to tell her little boy that he will make me cry to stop him from being naughty.” Ever since I was a teenager, Blackpool has been now and again a stopover on my life journey. Despised by the elites, the town is identified with the popular culture of the British working class. It was not built like Brighton or Southport by landowners who cashed in on the new fashion of seashore resorts in the late eighteenth century. Here, there was no master plan. The coastline that is now the promenade was dotted with farmers’ and fishermen’s houses. The long sandy beach attracted workers and their families for a week holiday in the summer months. Simple lodging and catering answered their needs for basic facilities. There was only one rough road linking Blackpool to the inland. But the place became a dream land for those who were toiling all the year in the dreary industrial cities of northwestern England. People were saving the cash that would allow them to indulge in unrestricted fun either in the sunshine on the beaches or, when it rained, in affordable indoor entertainments that were soon built by entrepreneurs. There is still a crude joke that claims there were always more people leaving the town than had arrived as many women had become pregnant during their short sojourn there. Sunny days are rare in Blackpool and you have to make up for it. When the railroad was constructed, millions of holiday makers flocked to Blackpool every summer. The hospitality and entertainment industries were prompt to meet the demand. The iconic tower with its monumental ballroom and a gilded circus embedded within its base, and the nearby epochal Winter Garden helped define the unique character of this gaudy cradle of popular culture. The whole sea front, dubbed the Golden Mile, was a non-stop fairground that spilled into the beach. Now the economic tide has subsided. Blackpool has been for decades on artificial life support. Busloads of pensioners still haunt decrepit Victorian hotels. They venture on the piers to sip tea, wrapped in blankets on rented beach chairs. On weekends, loud clubs attract crowds of young men and women from the region. The night sounds like a drunken jungle until dawn. Blackpool still lives by her own rules (Bouissac 2013a).

Remembrance Remembrance is more than memory. It is the ritualistic re-enactment of the past. It resonates in the whole body in a kind of trance that reawakens old sensations and feelings. When I meet Charlie Cairoli Jr., the memories we share take hold of us. He insists on keeping the “Jr.” after his name. He performs under the same makeup as his father. Occasionally, he plays the

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same gags with the same props in traveling circuses or summer camps that include shows in their program of activities. Often, people from the audience come after the performance to tell him how relieved they are that he is still alive and well. They had heard he was dead. The new resident clown in Blackpool tries in vain to create his own legend. His name sounds like a cheap ice cream brand. I don’t go to the circus there any longer. Remembrance can be painful. Charlie Cairoli, the father of Charlie Jr., was not emotional about his own father, the celebrated whiteface clown Jean-Marie Cairoli (1879–1958). In those days, the whiteface clown could kick and hit the hapless auguste in order to draw laughter from the crowd. Some clowns were subtler than others. Charlie often told me that he gave his children the freedom to decide what they wanted to do with their life. “My son went to school. After that, he worked in a factory for several years. Now, he is in the act because he made that decision.” In traditional performing families, kids were indeed trained to work in the show at an early age, willy-nilly. They were a basic economic resource for their parents who, in the past, would age without the social net provided by modern civil society. A life on the move has no time for school. As resident clown in a stable circus, Charlie could break away from the tradition and follow his sense of fairness. “We were used by our parents. We had no say. They claimed they loved us”? Charlie answers his own question with a gesture expressing both doubt and anger. “Even now … look at the two sisters who do the aerial act in the program this year. They are beautiful young women and good artists. But their parents keep them under close watch. They are not allowed to go out and date. The parents are afraid that they could fall in love, marry, and leave the act. It makes me sad.” In the ring, with his bowler hat, his well-tailored suits, his tongue-in-cheek dignified demeanor, and his whimsical smile, Charlie Cairoli embodied the perfect gentleman-clown for several generations of Blackpool vacationers. Later, television brought him national and international fame. Without his red nose, after the show, the locals would recognize him and greet him as the good fellow he was. His clown persona, though, would keep inspiring the happy dreams of his public and already belonged to the legend of the circus.

Visiting Brenda When, still a university student, I started working for the summers at Cirque Bouglione that was then touring France at the fast pace of a city a day, I made friends with the elephant trainer and his wife, Julio and Brenda Häni. He was from an old circus family that had its roots in Alemannic Switzerland.

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She was from Blackpool and had joined the circus at a young age as a dancer and swimmer in aquatic shows. We were chatting from time to time. She was thrilled that I was familiar with Wigan and her hometown. The social environment of a gypsy circus on tour was rather challenging for me, after years of studying classics and philosophy. The Hänis were the only people around with whom I could have a genuine conversation. I admired Julio’s humane and deft handling of the six elephants that were then on the program. When it was raining, the visitors to the menagerie were rare and we sometimes played chess under the tent on bales of hay close to the rumbling animals calmly chewing their fodder. Brenda performed in the act as the main dancer who entered the arena straddling the neck of the lead animal. Later, she would hang upside down by a leg from the elephant’s mouth for a full walk around the ring. When I returned for my second season, there were only four elephants left. Poncho and Taboo had been sold by the circus owners. In the following years, the Hänis moved on to other circuses. I kept in touch with my friends and once visited them in Scotland where the British “Sir Robert Fossett Circus” was on tour. Julio had been hired to train six young elephants and presented with Brenda an educated horse act. Their son, Mario, had been born ten years earlier and was going to school in Blackpool. After Julio’s untimely death, Brenda and her grown-up son continued working with elephants and horses in various circuses. My friend was tragically left alone when brain cancer claimed Mario at the peak of his life. She now lives in a beautiful house surrounded by a resplendent flower garden, kept vibrant most of the year by the showers that typically alternate with sunshine in Blackpool. When I came back to Blackpool after thirty years of absence, my first visit was to see Brenda. We hugged in silence and shed some tears. We both have aged but we share memories as vivid as life itself. The daily life at Cirque Bouglione was intense and eventful. It was the first time in my life that I had to work physically, helping to set up the front of the traveling zoo, cleaning the truck of the rhinoceros, building the giraffes’ display enclosure and feeding carrots to these two peaceful animals, carrying metal fences into place to keep the public from coming too close to the tiger cages, removing manure and forking in fresh straw, making sure that my chores were completed before I could wash and shave between two trucks while the other workers finished readying the zoo for the visitors. Most of the days, I would then climb into the boss’s luxurious caravan to teach his young daughter the basic curriculum after her mother had driven her through the early steps of wire walking. My main task, though, was to stand in front of the menagerie entrance next to the ticket seller as soon as the place was open for business. Holding a cracking microphone, I had to entice those who were hanging around in front of the circus to buy an admission ticket to see the animals. My boss loved my rhetoric, fed by a full decade of advanced schooling, and admiringly claimed

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FIGURE 10  Brenda Häni, Blackpool, July 2016. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

that I could sound credible while telling lies worse than their own. I had a way to fuel the business on slow rainy days by arguing that it was a unique opportunity to visit the zoo because the place was less crowded, the tents provided safe shelters, and the animals were alert and interactive rather than asleep like usual. But as soon as the sun was shining, I would instantly reverse the argument and urge them to come and now admire the majestic beasts awaken by the light of the sun. Since Julio had to stay close to the elephants’ tent, the Hänis’ caravan was generally located just behind the zoo and Brenda would use our entrance to go shopping in the city. This would be for me an opportunity to chat with her and practice my English, and impress the crowd at the same time. As soon as she had moved on, I would declare that this beautiful and fragile girl was actually a fearless woman who entrusted her leg to the enormous teeth of a giant elephant that carried her around upside down in the ring during the show. The Cirque Bouglione was owned and run by three brothers in the patriarchal, rather than bureaucratic, mode. The public appreciated its informal, congenial gypsy atmosphere, as did the artists who had been hired for the season. For me, being inside the fences was a dreamland experience even though I slept in a bunkbed on a straw-filled mattress in a small cabin attached to one of the trucks that transported the elephants. I had to share that space with three other workers. But the day was long and sleeping was easy while

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the convoys moved every night to reach the next town in time. This intensive tour required two teams of workers: one to start setting up the circus at the first break of dawn, the other to pull it down in good order as soon as the show was over. July 23, 2014. I am back in Blackpool. I just had lunch with Brenda at her home. From the large windows I can admire the garden. Brenda agrees: “Yes, it is a beautiful house and a gorgeous garden. But I am always so sad, so lonely. My sister comes to spend time with me every week when she is in town. You see, it is Mario who bought the house with me after his dad passed away. And he did all the decoration and the garden.” I recognize some of the ceramic horses and elephants that were displayed in the Hänis’ caravan. They now stand on the mantelpiece and on shelves with photographs of Julio and Mario. We look at her album. “This is with the Bouglione elephants. Julio was wearing a colonial outfit. Here it is at Fossett’s just after the cowboy act. This is Trigger. He was a lovely horse. You know, I did all the costumes myself.” Our memories overlap enough for my empathy to be genuine. “Brenda, if you agree, I will write about you in my book and about what circus life is like.” We turn the pages. “Look, here I am ‘la femme cannon’. That was in France. There was a craze at the time for ‘lady cannon balls’. Most circuses had one on their posters. The Bougliones had rented out their machine to another circus and one of the dancing girls had been convinced to do the trick. We were there too with the elephant act which had also been booked by that circus for the season. I could see that the girl was scared to death. She kept drinking whiskey and making signs of the cross before the cannon act. She was not falling properly in the net and the boss was afraid that she would seriously hurt herself. Mr. Sampion [one of the Bouglione brothers] offered me the job. It is not that easy because you have to position yourself while you are propelled by the cannon’s compressed air. It was a powerful boost. The explosion was just a fire cracker for the show. But I was a good swimmer and diver. I could control my movements and safely land in the net. It took only a few seconds but there was a lot of drama in the staging. Anyway, I was paid twenty pounds a day for that. That was quite a bonus. You see, my father was making then fifteen pounds a week!” Brenda was not born in the circus. Her family lived in Blackpool, where her father worked as a motor mechanic. Her mother’s father was a photographer at a time when taking a picture was not a trivial event. Brenda started early to work in a show. But it was not a dramatic escape. Circus is no stranger to the people of that city. It is a part of its heritage and livelihood. “I was fourteen. I had just finished school. One day, my father said: Look, Brenda, the circus advertises in the newspaper for swimming girls for their water show. I was good at swimming. Our coach kept telling me that I could do competitions. I went to audition and I was hired on the spot. You know,

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the circus ring in the tower has been engineered. It can be lowered and filled with water at the end of the program for aquatic displays. I did that for a while. One day, the elephants from Circus Knie had been booked for the season and they were short of a dancing girl for the act. They had one but she was terrified by the animals and she had to quit. That is how I started working with

FIGURE 11  Brenda and Julio Häni: Haute école, the dancer and the horse. From Brenda Häni’s archives.

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FIGURE 12  Brenda: the cannon ball lady at Cirque National. From Brenda Häni’s archives.

FIGURE 13  Brenda and Baby: gracefully posing for the audience at Cirque Bouglione. From Brenda Häni’s archives.

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FIGURE 14  Brenda and Baby: a daring act of trust. From Brenda Häni’s archives.

elephants. And it is how I met my husband who was a trainer with Circus Knie from Switzerland. The horses and elephants then went to work in a show in Denmark. After that, the Bougliones hired Julio because they liked his way of training and handling the elephants.”

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FIGURE 15  Brenda and Baby: in the mouth of a gentle giant. From Brenda Häni’s archives.

Remembering the elephants When you start working in a circus, you soon learn the names of the animals. It is easy because you then realize how different each individual is from the others within the same species. Horses point their ears when they hear

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their names. Tigers may or may not look at you in puzzlement depending on whether your voice is a close match to their caretaker’s. Animals indeed recognize those who interact with them every day. I probably soon became synonymous with carrots for the giraffes under my care. I was communicating with them through repeated clicks of my tongue. Because of the German accent of the trainer, I was never sure whether the name of a particular lion was Thompson, Samson, or Simpson. But I knew which one it was when I was told to give it water. In my first season at Cirque Bouglione, the elephants were Baby, Jenny, Poncho, Taboo, Mabok, and Taki. They were lined up in that order under the tent. Baby was the highest and the lead animal in the group. The last two were younger and smaller. I never saw Julio Häni hit his elephants. But, one day, in Brussels, Taki had been reluctant to perform her tricks as usual. Once the elephants were back under their tent, Julio brought Baby in front of her junior and ordered her to knock her down. Taki was obviously afraid and fell under the hit she received from her elder’s head. Taki performed well the next day. This is the way things work in nature. The matriarch enforces her rank and maintains order for the sake of her age, strength, and experience. From the moment they are born, elephants are hard-wired to follow their mother and, later, their leader as they grow up in a herd in which every individual has to know its place. It is a matter of survival. Strong and smart individuals become leaders, often on the path of their high-ranking mothers. In a circus elephant herd, the trainer holds the position of the matriarch. Julio had a deep understanding of his charges’ natural behavior. He was always calm and self-assured. His voice was not harsh but commanding. Elephants have rather poor eyesight but their hearing is much more sensitive than ours. I had countless opportunities to admire his poise, when, during my second season at the circus, he was leading the four remaining elephants toward the big top before their act. They had to be in place with all their show trappings ten to fifteen minutes, waiting for the moment when they would have to enter the ring. Julio was standing at a spot and had the four animals facing him like the spokes of a wheel of which he was the hub. He was talking to them, probably making sure that they would not be distracted or spoofed by some unexpected outside event. Then, the circle was slowly unfolding when the music for the act started and they followed him to perform their tricks in the circus arena. Watching this simple backstage interaction always made me feel that the elephants were behaving quite naturally. Indeed, slowly walking behind a leader is the way elephant herds safely progress through the savannah. “Yes, you are right. Julio was very good with the elephants. He always let them walk at their natural pace. They are so slow and graceful. I don’t like acts when trainers make them run. It means that they are pushed too

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hard. Elephants only run when they are scared. I never saw Julio holding them around him as you say before the act because I was already dressed up for the show, waiting under the tent at the artist entrance where I would climb on Baby just before the act started. She was lifting one of her front legs to help me reach her neck where I would be sitting when we entered the ring. She was massive but very calm and docile. No, I was not afraid. Did I trust her? Yes, but only ninety-nine percent. You always have to be on your guard even if there is a good relationship. You are at the mercy of these huge animals. You feel that they are paying attention to every detail around them. They obey verbal orders. But you sense that their mind is active and you cannot know what they are thinking, what they are going to do. It has always been fine for me with the elephants. I think they really liked me. They often surprise you. When we were at the Cirque d’hiver, in Paris, one of the elephants had an eye infection. She was called Punchy. The vet came to examine her. He asked what her weight was. I think it was almost three tons. He did some calculations and prescribed twenty-eight pills a day. There were nice blue pills. Probably it was an antibiotic. So, Julio went to buy one of these long French loaves of bread at the nearby bakery. He removed the soft part in the center of the bread, added a few pills, put back some of the soft part, then again a few pills, and so on. We brought that bread to Punchy. She started eating it, slowly, as if she really loved that fresh bread. We were happy that our trick had worked. But, then, she put her trunk in her mouth and spit out the pills. We counted them. There were exactly twenty-eight pills. She had done what we do when we eat cherries. We extract the stone with our tongue and spit it out. They are so smart and so sensitive. After that we had to crush the pills and mix them with some soft food. With time, you get very involved with them even if you know that they are very different from you and can be unpredictable at times. I cannot forget them. In the circus, your life depends on them and their life depends on you. Sometimes you find that the bond is stronger than you could imagine. When we were at Robert Fossett’s circus, Julio trained six young Indian elephants. They were about three or four years old. They were Dumdum, Sara, Emma, Vindula, Mahalia, and Minnie. Dumdum was a lovely animal. About ten or twelve years after I left the circus to take care of my aging mother, the circus came to play in Blackpool. I went to see the elephants. As soon as Dumdum saw me, she trumpeted and started making squeaky noises of excitement and pleasure. I came close to her and she wrapped her trunk around me and caressed my neck and my arms. She was trying to hold me close to her. I suddenly became so scared. Perhaps she was going to kill me because I left her or because she did not want me to leave her again. I went away. I still feel bad about that.”

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A love story When I met D Alex [sic] in the context of fringe cultural events in Toronto, he was a music student at York University. In addition, he was juggling three demanding jobs: part-time piano tuner, watch-repair technician, and percussionist in avant-garde concerts. In our first conversation we discovered a common involvement with animals, deeper that a simple interest in zoology. His family owns a zoo in South Carolina and he was brought up among zebras, giraffes, lions, tigers, apes, crocodiles, and exotic birds. I asked: did you have elephants? “We had one, Donna. When she died, she had been in our zoo for twenty years. She was a lovely animal. My dad was so sad that he decided not to have elephants any more. Her death was too painful for him. I think he is still mourning her, years later.” Donna had probably come to the zoo from a circus that could not keep her for some reason. I know by experience that when a circus goes out of business a pressing problem is securing safe havens for the animals. D Alex’s dad had soon formed a deep bond with this animal. Elephants can be endearing when they are good-natured and well treated. On January 16, 2017, I got this message from D Alex: “My father told me that he met Donna when she was eighteen and he had never really known an elephant before. He recalled having no understanding of this type of creature, that she seemed like a giant wall in contrast to the physical communications he was accustomed to with other animals, and that this was very daunting. Over time, however, he came to understand that she was in fact “like a billboard” in terms of the clarity and magnitude of her ability to express herself. He spoke of the imperceptible rumbles that she could communicate through her whole body, of the extreme depth of their color and subtlety. Early in their relationship he became upset with her playful refusing to offer her trunk in assisting him dismount, and he shouted at her. He noticed that she was crying, and never spoke to her in such manner again, suddenly realizing how sensitive she was. She was famous for having a strong dislike of women with blonde hair. She died when she was in her forties. Someone across the zoo called to say that she was lying down. My father rushed over and she died after a brief exchange, a small gesture with the tip of her trunk. Larry, a keeper who had known her since her arrival was especially stricken by her passing, and he and my father are still unable to speak of her.” I tried to learn more but some memories are too painful to be made into storytelling. I should have arranged a visit to the zoo and engaged the owner in a friendly conversation. Asking questions by phone sounds too much like an interview. This book is not based on interviews. Donna’s memory is not a trivial anecdote.

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Nomads The most inspiring book on wild elephants is undoubtedly Cynthia Moss’s Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family (Moss 1988). It concerns the nomadic life of African savannah animals but there is a sufficient behavioral overlap with the South Asian species for the information gathered during this longitudinal study to be considered mostly relevant to both. The latter have also been observed scientifically, most interestingly by Raman Sukumar in Elephant Days and Nights: Ten Years with the Indian Elephant (1995), and similar conclusions have been reached after more than ten years of study in both cases. Continuous monitoring, though, is more difficult to achieve in the forest environment that is typically the habitat of South Asian elephants. Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss’s research was conducted in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park (Poole 1997). There, the open plain is relatively negotiable for all-terrain vehicles. The elephants apparently came to consider as a non-threatening part of the landscape the Land-Rover that was following them or standing nearby while they were feeding or resting. Focusing on a few families—groups of related females and their calves— the researchers gave them names for the sake of keeping track of who was doing what, not for interacting with them like in the circus. The Moss project used names starting with the same letter to indicate the group to which individuals belonged. Each elephant has a particular shape and character that can provide a cue for identification purposes such as Split-ear or Slo, which were both members of the “S” family. Observers can recognize them easily after a relatively short period of time. Sukumar called one of the matriarchs he monitored Meenakshi, the name of his father’s mother because this poised elephant reminded him of the calm authority of his grandmother. The wealth of information about wild elephants that has been yielded by these long-term studies casts a revealing light on the life of the domesticated animals we encounter in the circus. In this artificial environment the females of a circus herd are not usually related but they develop selective relationships with each other as they grow up and age, in a way akin to those in a wild group. Observers of wild elephants have noticed that unrelated or possibly distantly related animals also form temporary groups that have been termed “extended families” or “bond groups.” But the leaders of these herds are always older females that hold sway over the other females of all generations and their subadult sons. The matriarchs are those who make decisions regarding the paths their herd follows in search of food and water. They assert and enforce their rank when dissent occurs. Circus trainers have to take into account the hierarchy their elephants form and they sometimes encounter problems caused by the rivalry between two

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individuals. Nowadays, circus elephants are not continuously chained but roam freely in large spaces enclosed by light electric fences similar to those used for cattle. But, occasionally, some individuals or sub-groups have to be kept apart from the main herd by an extra fence. Whenever possible, their trainer leads the animals to lakes or riversides for mud baths, or to nearby woods where they feed on leafy branches and bushes. Like circus folks, wild elephants are always on the move, in search of resources along their path. These are not, though, pure random wanderings. The matriarchs’ memory guides their movements. Elephants do not lead an idyllic existence spent in the mythical Garden of Eden. Predators such as crocodiles, lions, and hyenas prey on the young ones. Fires and droughts take their toll and periodically decimate the elephant population. Local herdsmen spear them on occasion. Nowadays, poachers are an additional threat verging on extermination. Nothing illustrates better the elephant condition than Cynthia Moss’s recounting the tragic story of a herd whose matriarch tried to escape a devastating drought by leading her emaciated family a long way to a location where, decades ago, a lake used to lay before urban developers dried it up to build houses. Long-term memory can be a liability in an unstable environment. Often, circus folks lament that this or that country, this or that town used to be fertile grounds for their trade when they could pitch their tent on the market square in the center of the cities they visited. November 1992. The jeep of the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysuru, then called Mysore, is negotiating its way through the teak jungle of Bandipur National Park in Karnataka, a South Indian state. Kikeri Narajan, an anthropologist from the institute, is escorting us to a settlement of Jenu Korubas, the honey gatherers, a nomadic tribal population. Since immemorial times they have been roaming the forest in synchrony with the elephants, doing their best to avoid too frequent encounters. They keep track of their movements, setting temporary camps out of their way. Kikeri Narajan has been working for a decade with these forest nomads, studying their language and way of life. The Indian government was then implementing a policy aimed at settling them in permanent villages built on the periphery of the forest and making them literate in their own language for which Dr. Narajan had been tasked with devising a script. Numerous elephant stories come up in our conversation. The driver follows a track that was formed over the centuries, probably more, by the elephants themselves as they periodically move across vast swaths of land to feed on seasonal fruit or other wild plants, at times making forays into cultivated fields to raid the crops. This is the end of the monsoon. We learn that the herds have now moved to the luscious hills of the western Nilgiris. The Jenu Korubas feel safer but there is always the risk of encountering rogue bulls. They excitedly tell us that the day before a big tusker crossed the path toward the eastern part of the forest. They ask us to drive

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carefully. Elephants are unpredictable. The casualties caused by poachers make them still more aggressive toward humans. Elephants, like circuses, have no home. They belong to the road. They may revisit old places they remember for the resources they afforded in the past. Circuses, like elephants, have no history. They survive thanks to memories that are only a few generations deep. Their resources of knowledge must be continuously updated. When a matriarch is shot dead by poachers, or dies of natural causes, her herd loses the mass of data accumulated over five to seven decades. But others have learned from observing the older individuals’ behavior and new memories have been formed. It is a never-ending process attuned to their more or less stable environment. The traditional circus was grounded on an oral culture. Until very recently, and still to a great extent, circus skills were transmitted from one generation to the next. The circus folks I knew when I entered the circus world were mostly illiterate. They were men and women of my parents’ age. Their genealogies were hazy. Some remembered their grandparents in the form of anecdotes from a time when the human span of life was much shorter than today. It is symptomatic that socalled circus historians rely on the scarce information provided by the families with which they interact. They repeat all-purpose anecdotes. All the narratives sound alike. Nomads have no solid archives, only stories. Often, the elephants with which they shared their lives haunt their memories. As the time to catch my train back to London is approaching, I tell Brenda that I had always wondered how it feels to hang by a leg from the mouth of an elephant that carries you around the ring. Brenda tells me that the hold is firm but soft because elephants have huge molars in the back of their mouth but in front there are only gums. She remembers when Julio trained the new act with the Bouglione elephants: She was making a split with her feet on the heads of two elephants facing each other and making a step backward. Then, she was swung back and forth by their joined trunks. Next, a very spectacular trick consisted of lying down on her back at the center of the ring while Baby was ordered to get down on her knees over Brenda’s body. To conclude, she was hanging upside down by one of her thighs from Baby’s mouth for a full walk around the ring. “One day, we were practicing the act in the Cirque d’hiver, in Paris. We noticed that Mrs. Castilla was watching us with our boss. You know, she was the owner of Circo Americano. It was a big Spanish circus. She was here to book a tiger act for the season. After she saw us, we heard her say: ‘I want the elephant act too’. But the Bougliones refused because this act was for their program that year. ‘Well, she said, if I can’t have the elephants I won’t take the tigers’. They all walked away arguing. The next day, I met our boss on my way to the circus: ‘Get ready, Brenda. Tomorrow morning you leave for Spain’. We had a wonderful year there. You know, this is circus life, always on the

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move. We spent years with the Bougliones but in the 1960s business was not so good for circuses in France. In the middle of the season, the brothers got together and summoned all the artists under the tent. They had decided to cut all our salaries in half. Those who would not agree could leave. Julio decided to go. We worked some time at a small circus we had met by chance on the road. They had an elephant which we could present better than they did. We also had a good lasso act. Before the Bougliones, we had worked five years in Italy with Circus Togni. In the late sixties, we were hired by the Sir Robert Fossett Circus in England. They had bought six baby elephants. They needed a trainer and Julio was available. These were lovely years and I was closer to home and to our son Mario who was in school in Blackpool.” Memories. July 1967. After my yearly visit to Charlie Cairoli in Blackpool, I board a bus to Scotland. The Fossett Circus has pitched its tent on a field in the outskirts of Dundee. I arrive in mid-morning on the lot. Julio is teaching two young elephants to kick a large rubber ball. They seem to learn fast. To kick something out of their way is a natural behavior for elephants. It is also a playful thing to do when they are young. Here, they get a reward every time they aimed the ball at each other: encouraging words and pieces of carrot or apple. I am back in a circus where I can feel at home. The smell of elephants, their rumbling and squeaking, the slow movements of their trunk and ears, as they munch on hay and leafy branches, convey an earthy sense of inner peace and serenity.

The demise of the elephants In the midst of its 2016 season, the Ringling, Barnum and Bailey Circus scrapped the elephants from the programs of their two traveling units and retired them in a Floridian sanctuary where they could be seen, during the day, to roam freely in a vast fenced area. This was meant to placate the aggressive animalists who had been boycotting and picketing the shows for years, and, by the same token, removing the elephants from the program was a way to cut the costs of transporting the two herds from city to city. The move would also spare the considerable lawyers’ fees due to the litigations repeatedly initiated by animal-defense advocates. In many circuses in the world, ideological and political pressures from a virulent minority prompt some companies to follow suit. Not all submit, though, and some trainers and circus owners successfully counter these attempts by displaying obvious signs of considerate and lawful treatment of their animals within the necessary constraints of domestication and local legislations. But there is a general feeling of despondency among circus folks that elephants are a thing of the past. Simultaneously, poachers

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and ivory dealers in Africa and in Asia keep driving the two surviving elephant species toward extinction. In addition, demographic expansion leads to territorial encroachments that bring humans in conflict with these nomadic animals which need vast areas to roam in search of food and are prone to raid crops. Indeed, the species cannot survive in spatially restricted niches because nomadism is essential to their survival in natural conditions. In circuses, elephants have to be constantly fed enormous amounts of hay, leaves, and fruits, and they produce a considerable quantity of manure that must be shoveled and carried out of their tent as well as, at times, taken from the ring where they perform. Their digestive system is indeed characterized by a low efficiency that forces them to lead a wasteful way of life. They have to eat for twelve to eighteen hours a day and must drink 100 to 200 liters of water. Most of the time, they are in search of prime feeding spots that they temporarily devastate before moving on. Ecologically, their role in dispersing seeds contributes to the long-term maintenance of their range but this mode of life is bound to make them vulnerable to climate fluctuations such as droughts and to bring them into conflict with pastoralists and horticulturalists. Elephants have also been, and are still occasionally, a prize target for hunters as they can provide an abundant source of proteins. In the South Indian continent and in sub-Saharan Africa traditional cultures had devised ways of trapping and killing elephants for their meat or for their ivory. They were also found amenable to domestication and have been used for millennia for war as well as for work. The advent of gun-totting colonizers and trophy hunters further put their existence in jeopardy. Nowadays, the highly profitable ivory trade, combined with the availability of powerful automatic weaponry, has generated uncontrollable commandos of poachers whose aim is to exterminate as many tusk-bearing elephants as possible in order to maximize their gains. Wardens assigned to the protection of elephants are themselves often the victims of the poachers. Sadly, these majestic and powerful animals seem to be marked for a tragic destiny. They are an evolutionary dead end, the last representatives of the Proboscidean order (trunked animals) that have all gone extinct. Their huge skeletons in totality or in part can be admired in museums of paleontology. Mastodons and woolly mammoths were still roaming the earth during the Stone Age when they are believed to have been slaughtered for food by hunters. The archaeological record indicates that their disappearance occurred four to six millennia ago. The same fate fell earlier upon the pygmy elephant species that once populated some islands such as Crete and Flores for instance. In historical times, North African elephants, which were of intermediate size, were domesticated and exploited for sport and warfare before they vanished from their original habitat. But hunting and exploitation are not solely responsible for this extinction. Specialists such as Ross MacPhee

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(American Museum of Natural History) (MacPhee 2007) and Christopher O’Kane (Oxford University) (2013) point to other causes in addition to human intervention. They observe that insular habitats spell their demise in the long term. Elephants cannot survive as a species without huge, unrestricted expanses of fertile lands. Whole populations succumb to inbreeding or to the inability to adapt to changing environments or circumstances if they are locked into an island or its equivalent such as a sanctuary. There is evidence that the woolly mammoth disappeared from Alaska’s St. Paul’s island when rising seas drastically reduced the supply of fresh water, well before any humans spread to this area (Barkham 2016). Preventing circuses from presenting elephants will not save these last remnants of a long lineage but is emblematic of their cosmological demise. To date, all the species that competed with Homo sapiens for space and resources have been submitted and tailored to human needs, or eliminated from the face of the earth. Even apes and monkeys are believed to be on the way to extinction. Only the demise of the human species itself could again make available the expanse of lands and abundance of vegetation in which elephants can survive and evolve. Vivek Menon, from the International Fund for Animal Welfare and a leading force for the conservation of the Asian elephant in India, emphasizes the need for corridors that allow elephants to migrate over long distance from one protected area to another. But he also suggests that cultures can promote positive attitudes. Considerable efforts have been deployed in the West toward this goal. For instance, the movement “Save the Elephants” that was founded by British zoologist Iain DouglasHamilton sponsors research such as the one undertaken by the University of Twente in the Netherlands. The scientific monitoring of elephant herds is conducted over several-year periods of time to observe their behavior and their response to environmental and human challenges. Enlightening research has been published by Festus Ihwagi and others concerning African elephants in Kenya and Somalia (Ihwagi et al. 2015). The preservation of elephants seems to appeal strongly to people’s feelings and imagination. Their presence in circuses has always been an irresistible magnet. When the Ringling, Barnum and Bailey circus discontinued their traditional display of elephants, they lost a sizeable part of their regular audience and, soon after, decided to close the circus. From Indus Valley Civilization seals to the modern circus posters, elephants have haunted humans’ visual cultures, but the prehistoric representations of mammoths on the walls of caves and the statues of the Hindu god Ganesh that are worshiped in South East Asia bear witness to a much deeper and broader fascination. Humans and elephants have indeed entangled destinies. Biologists have pointed out commonalities shared by these two species: mobility, nomadism, large brains, exceptional memory, dexterity of the extremities of the trunk comparable to the primate fingers, range of emotions,

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and advanced sociality, among the most obvious and well-documented behavioral competencies. Adaptability is another significant quality as it is demonstrated by the observed fact that some wild elephants in Africa are modifying their feeding habits from diurnal to nocturnal as poachers tend to hunt them during the day. These overlaps provide a robust ground for both cross-specific communication and the psychological affinities that can create lifelong bonding with their keepers. Humans, though, usually have the upper hand and have developed the skills that enable them to control elephants that are disproportionally bigger and stronger than them. But there is more: paleobiologists claim that the two clades (proboscideans and hominins) have followed similar evolutionary trajectories. In both lineages, many branches have gone extinct. This natural pruning has left elephants (both the African and Asian sub-species) and humans to exploit the same ecological niches. This accounts for the possibility of domestication as well as the conflicts arising from an uneasy coexistence when farming and urban development encroach on elephants’ ranging territories. Elephants can live as long as humans but their maintenance and reproductive cycles are slower. This is why saving them from extinction is a daunting challenge at a time of skyrocketing human demography. By providing close encounters and interactions with tame elephants, the circus is the best rampart against indifference toward the demise of wild elephants. Let us hope that they will remain present in circuses at least as long as their future on our planet is uncertain.

7 A Sense of Gravity

Fallen pyramids

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n January 22, 2017, the Gerlings troupe was performing their high-wire act for the 41st International Circus Festival of Monte-Carlo when one of the acrobats lost his balance and triggered the collapse of the nine-person pyramid. A cry of horror rippled through the audience. Instantly, videos of the accident were posted on Facebook. From a lateral angle we can see a man climbing to the shoulders of the last bearer standing on the cable and attempting a hand stand when an out-of-control oscillation causes him to lose his balance and tip over. Another video, from a frontal point of view in the axis of the wire, shows the staggered fall of the whole troupe like a house of cards. The balancing poles fan out as their tips reach the ring in succession. Besides a broken wrist, nobody was seriously injured in spite of the fact that there was no safety net. This has not always been the case for this kind of act. In the annals of the circus, the celebrated Flying Wallendas suffered tragic casualties along successive generations of their iconic funambulist displays. The last one, Karl, born in 1905, fell 100 feet to his death in Puerto Rico in 1978 when a sudden burst of wind knocked him off the wire. Other members of the family met similar tragic deaths. This acrobatic specialty is indeed a high-risk one. It consists of walking on a cable stretched between two standing platforms at a sizeable height above the ground. A small error or an unexpected disruption can amplify the natural oscillation of the wire with catastrophic consequences. The Gerlings’ apparatus is set at 5 meters above the ground so that their last trick, which involves the cumulative height of four persons, has sufficient head room to proceed under a circus tent. Some other similar acts are performed at higher altitudes, notably in circus buildings, sport arenas, or outdoors.

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High-wire acts come in various versions. Solo or duo acts are frequent. They feature running and dancing on the cable, skipping rope, riding a bicycle, jumping over an obstacle, balancing on a chair, or standing on a partner’s shoulders. Often but not always, a long pole is used to secure a better management of gravity by extending the function of the arms in regulating the balance. This is the rule when the act is performed by an eight- to twelvemember team with the view of achieving more complex feats of balance. The Gerlings’ act includes twelve persons. They first perform in solo, duo, or trio a daring repertory that includes rope skipping, jumps over up to three bodies huddled on the wire, proceeding with someone standing in balance on the walker’s shoulders. But the number of individuals forming this troupe makes possible the challenging construction of so-called pyramids. This geometric metaphor retains the triangular shape of its geometrical model but is far from implementing its three-dimensional stability. It is more like a triangle perilously resting in balance on one of its edges. The Gerlings are famous for their eightperson pyramids. http://youtube.com/watch?v=z0x6nvzBQfI&sns=em The way funambulist pyramids are constructed is not easy to describe because their oddness defies discourse as well as gravity. Let us proceed step by step by describing acts of increasing difficulty. Two funambulists holding balancing poles support on their shoulders a rigid bar parallel to the cable on which they walk. As they are close to the platform from which they will progress ahead to reach the other side, another acrobat takes a position standing on the bar, also holding a balancing pole. We can call this the firstdegree pyramid. Now, the same figure is repeated by three additional members of the group so that there are two first-degree pyramids on the wire. The two acrobats standing on the bars now add another bar that they support on their shoulders. A seventh person takes a position on this bar, thus forming a second-degree pyramid. Walking the length of the cable while keeping the construction stable would appear practically impossible, even with the help of the balancing poles. But this is not all: an eighth person proceeds to climb this construction to reach the shoulders of the one at the top, thus adding a fourth level at the tip of the pyramid. It is obvious that crossing over from one end of the cable to the other demands absolutely perfect synchrony following the vocal signals of the leader as he proceeds on the cable. Every member must step up as smoothly as possible while negotiating their own balance within their sphere of gravity. The slightest individual error is bound to amplify and affect the whole construction with catastrophic consequences. More than a metaphor, the funambulist pyramid is an extreme demonstration of exemplary, indeed vital, social harmony, a matter of life and death.

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February 8, 2017. As I login to my Facebook, a photo of Nick Wallenda catches my attention. Tragedy struck again. “Today I almost lost my sister. Most have already heard the news. She was at the top of the pyramid, and the pyramid collapsed. She was over forty feet above the ground. She suffered a badly broken hip, fractured shoulder and face. We are not even sure that it is the extent of it. Every time the doctor or nurse gave us an update there was more. Some of the others were injured much worse and one cousin may still be in surgery with internal injuries. Others suffered broken bones. Some were uninjured. Pedro said Circus Sarasota will open on schedule, and it should. My Skywalk in St. Pete [St. Petersburgh, Florida] will go as scheduled on Saturday. Rietta did a show only hours after my grandfather was killed in San Juan in 1978. My grandfather did a show in Detroit the next night after two were killed in 1962. Rietta will be back. Doctors said several months.”

Flight of desire A flying trapeze team embodies another example of vital cooperation. The name of this specialty may sound somewhat strange. The trapeze does not fly. Its accelerated swinging provides the propelling energy that enables an acrobat to escape gravity long enough to be caught by the forearms or the ankles by another acrobat before he or she swings back to the trapeze, grasps it, and returns to the platform from which he or she departed. The timing must be as precise as clockwork lest the acrobat crash to the ground. Failures, though, are less tragic because the risks are so high that the safety net is a compulsory part of the apparatus. The minimal unit of a flying trapeze act includes a flyer and a catcher, and a firmly anchored metallic framework that makes the conjunction of the two securely possible. The tricks are physically demanding and recuperation is necessary between them. This is why a flying trapeze act involves usually one catcher and several flyers who take turns to “fly” to the catcher, each one executing a different trick. Conjoining maximum swinging amplitude and speed of self-controlled movements, flyers can perform various kinds of somersaults in the air before they are grabbed by the catcher when gravity pulls them down. For the spectators, a flying trapeze act seems to unfold smoothly, even if it is frequent that challenging tricks such as the triple somersault repeatedly land the acrobat in the safety net rather than in the grip of their catcher. This is why, for the sake of a happy ending, the last trick is traditionally an impressive double passage—two flyers crossing each other in the air—that very rarely fails. But there is more to a flying trapeze act than meets the eyes.

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Luzern, October 27, 2015. Zirkus Nock has pitched its tent in the outskirts of the city. I am here to see the show and meet Gaston, a traditional clown who happens to be the nephew of my friend Brenda Häni. As usual, I have planned to attend both the afternoon and evening shows before moving the next day to Fribourg where another Swiss circus is performing. At the matinee, the attendance is sparse. The program is rewarding, though. In particular, a remarkable flying trapeze act is featured in the second part. I always experience a feeling of deep fulfilment after seeing a great act, that is, an act that embodies a flawless synergy of high physical achievement, artful choreography, and charismatic demeanor of the artists. Such acts are a true epiphany, the unfolding of perfection nested in a lasting moment of grace in the rough daily flow of time. For the evening show, I picked a seat that would allow me to watch the flying trapeze act from an optimal situation: laterally and at a distance that enables a panoramic angle of vision. This act will come in the second part of the program. The intermission will last about twenty minutes. Time to grab a sausage and a drink. Walking around, I notice a tall and handsome young man who peddles snacks to the public. In spite of his drab circus-hand uniform, he does not seem to have been born to sell popcorn in a circus. “Hi! Where are you from?”—“Brazil”—“Rio?”—“No, Sao Paulo”—“I think I recognize you from the show”—“Yes, flying trapeze.”—“Oh! Great act! May I make a selfie with you?”—“Sure!”—“Look!”—“Very nice. Can you send it to me?”—“Here is my card.”—“Thanks! Please send the pic to my FaceBook messenger.” A family with a horde of noisy children wants popcorn. I take a few steps back. Hungry spectators line up now, counting their coins and grabbing their paper bags of buttery and flavorful popcorn. The music resumes under the tent. Intermission time is up. “Excuse me, I have to go. We work in the second part.” The man scribbles his name on a piece of popcorn bag. “Here is my name. I am on FaceBook. Send me the pic, please!” I am now friends with Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella. The troupe is called The Regio. A personal point of entry is necessary if one is to get a deep understanding of such a lofty art as the flying trapeze. It is always the high point in a program. The artists have a sense of being the aristocrats of the circus. They tend to look down on animal trainers and clowns. Their act commands respect, admiration, and a higher price than most. The audience follows as a ritual the building of the net that extends beyond the borders of the arena, rising on both sides above their heads along the axis of the swinging trapezes. There is a sense of anxious expectation. The men who just now were cranking up the cables to ensure that the net had the required tension to safely respond to a fall promptly disappear in the backstage only to suddenly surge back from behind the curtain in their flashy leotards with their female companions. As the music and the floodlights mark the glorious beginning of the act, the

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flyers briskly climb the rope ladders that reach the narrow platform from which they will depart. In the meantime, the catchers ascend another rope to take a place on the trapeze from which they will grab in turn their partners. The Regio is indeed a double flying trapeze act. Their apparatus includes two trapezes and two catchers parallel to each other. Tricks are alternately performed in succession, a design that makes it possible to sustain a faster pace since there is no dead time while the acrobats recuperate between their exercises. The beginning of a flying trapeze act always involves warm-up exercises by each member of the troupe because their muscles have to be prepared to sustain the powerful stretching caused by the catching at high speed. These first exercises consist of swinging once back and forth, and reversing the placement of the hands on the bar on the way back so that they reach the platform frontally. Although the trick is minimal and purely functional, the vision of aerodynamic bodies crossing the air above the ring is esthetically pleasing. Gravity seems to be elided, if only because the distance and the music prevent the spectators from hearing the breathing and the cracking of the joints. At the same time, they project toward the audience wide smiles that convey a sense of happiness and enjoyment. The underlying “flying” metaphor completes the illusion. The substance of the act is a succession of tricks of increased difficulty. When an acrobat releases his or her grip from the swinging trapeze bar and is propelled in empty space toward the catcher, there are only fractions of seconds during which some fast movements can be completed. As the swinging reaches its maximum, a narrow window of time opens for performing a somersault or a twist before being caught by the arms or the legs. The timing must be so perfect that a successful flying trapeze act unfolds like fluid clockwork in the eyes of the audience. Falls in the net occur but they have been practiced and they are usually negotiated with grace. February 25, 2016. Circus Krone presents an outstanding program in its permanent building in Munich. Among this florilegia of contemporary circus acts, The Regio are prominently featured. The view in the Zirkus Bau is unimpeded by the poles and hanging wires that are a part of a tent show. I can take in the flying act in its full scope. The flyers, four women and two men, and two male catchers are in white leotards decorated with some undulating swirls of light blue. The Brazilian popular music lends its spirited and sensual rhythms to the choreography of the act. Between the tricks, the artists do not simply stand waiting on the narrow high platform from which they grab the trapeze in turn and leap into space. They keep dancing on the spot, switching places, marking the tempo, gesturing and smiling toward the audience. The whole act’s dynamic beats at the same tempo. In the air, they are all flawless, each one according to their specialty. But one of them stands out. I am struck

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FIGURE 16  The Regio. The flyer, Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella, pirouettes in space before being caught by the catcher, Sandro Regio. Photo credit: Edgard Marcondes.

FIGURE 17  The Regio. Triple somersault by Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella. The “flight” is an elegantly controlled fast fall toward the catcher’s hands after performing the three somersaults in space. Photo credit: Edgard Marcondes.

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FIGURE 18  The Regio. Marco Aurelio Rauter Tartarella, intensely focused on the catcher’s helping hands. Photo credit: Alexander Leumann. by Marco’s elegance when he “flies.” The star, though, is the other flyer who executes a perfect triple somersault before the traditional “double passage” that concludes the act. At the end of the show all the artists are lined up along the exit to greet the spectators as they leave the building. They shake hands with those who congratulate them or they sign the programs, which then will be treasured as a magic grail by circus fans. I exchange a few words with Marco. We will meet the next day for lunch with his partner in a nearby Italian restaurant. Flying trapeze troupes are created and managed by an entrepreneur acrobat, either a flyer or a catcher, who cooperates with some family members or hires other competent individuals. The necessary equipment is a sizeable investment that includes a heavy net with its supporting poles and a constructible metallic framework, plus an assortment of cables, pulleys, cranking devices, and, naturally, trapezes. The transportation and maintenance of these props add to the costs of running a flying trapeze act. An important part of the trade is the securing of contracts with circus companies and the negotiations involved in the payment of the fees to the individual members of the troupe according to their relative competence and their importance to the marketability of the act. In the Flying Regio, catcher Sandro Regio is the leader. The others are on his payroll: the extra catcher—since it is a double trapeze act—and six flyers including the triple somersault star. Couples are often hired as part of the team

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as they are usually more economical than the salary of two separate individuals. This description applies to the state of affairs when I saw the act in March 2016 in Munich. The composition of a flying trapeze team may vary over time. Indeed, the rather complex social organization of a flying trapeze troupe requires efficient human leadership and business management. The act must be able to survive unexpected disruptions at least for the duration of a long-term contract. Accidents, temporary impairments, interpersonal tensions, and conflicting interests can jeopardize the harmonious dynamic that is publicly displayed in the show and fixing the problems must be done, so to speak, on the fly. February 29, 2016. Restaurante Vi Vadi is a congenial Italian place located at walking distance between the circus and my hotel. Marco introduces his partner, Laetitia, who is also Brazilian. I immediately recognize her as one of the flyers in the act. I had noticed her poise, charm, and smile during the performance. The vibes are good. I forget about the book I plan to write. No recording device. My notebook remains in my pocket. They probably feel that I am not an invasive journalist but a true lover of their art. I can’t help stating my admiration for Marco’s elegance in the air. “Yes, he is very elegant!” I still hear the loving warmth of Laetitia’s intonation approving my remark. It is actually true. I have never seen an artist who streamlines his body dynamic so perfectly when negotiating gravity. We share bits and pieces of our lives. Like me, they were not born in a circus family. Marco studied at an engineering university in Sao Paolo. As a young man, he had dreamed of the circus without really contemplating an acrobatic career. However, he regularly practiced in an athletic center. Progressively, the lure of the circus grew in him. He joined a circus training school and learned the basics of the flying trapeze. Sandro Regio knew him and, one day, called him: he needed a new flyer for the act to replace the one who had left. He could not do the trick for which he had been hired. Then, months later, one of the women in the troupe became pregnant. A replacement was urgent. Marco suggested Laetitia whom he had known since his circus school days. Now they are both working with the Flying Regio in one of the most prestigious circuses in the world. I raise my glass to their success. Laetitia is not too comfortable speaking English but Marco is eager to communicate his dedication to his art. “I feel such a pleasure when I step into the ring and climb the rope! I can’t wait for our act to start. I feel so sorry for some other artists I know. They do that just as a job. For them it is like going to the office or the factory. They only put a smile on their face when they are in front of the audience. They dream of working as bartender or waiter. Not always travelling. Good tips. A little apartment in a big city. I never felt sorry that I had left that kind of life. Sometimes it is hard. I can do only the double [somersault]. I practice to do the triple. But it is difficult because I need the net. It cannot be set up easily. It has to be built specially after the show. And other artists also want the ring to practice their acts. I hope, I know I will succeed.”

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A few years before I met Marco and Laetitia, I had observed another flying act, the Costas. One of the trapeze artists, Adrian Ramos, a Mexican who was fluent in English, had served as an interpreter for my first interview with the Portuguese clown Cesar Diaz at Zirkus Charles Knie in 2014 in Frankfurt. The Costas also were Brazilian. The leader of the troupe was a flyer who performed the triple. It was an excellent act but a smaller group than the Regio. Adrian’s mastery was definitely outstanding. Watching him, my first thought was “this man flies like he breathes.” He was not thin, but full and muscled. He was like swimming in the air, through gravity. At my second visit to that circus, the following year, Adrian was absent. I was told that he had strained his shoulder and had to take some time off until he could return to the act. I met him again in 2015. He told me then that he was going to leave the Costas and create his own team. He had disagreements with the leader of the troupe. He had secured a contract in Italy. Adrian came from a famous Mexican family of flying trapeze artists. He had many contacts in the world of aerialists. He wanted me to know that he was not a newcomer. He had far-reaching roots in the circus artist world. As a matter of principle, in my research, I do not ask questions of a private nature such as business matters or family life. My focus is on the artists as artists, that is, as creators who produce, or participate in a valuable act. How their existence is molded by the constraints of the trade and the demands of their discipline; their role models and inspirations; their struggles to achieve their artistic goals; the kind of existential meaning they derive from their art. But Adrian spontaneously offers information as he realizes that being written about in a book is a way to memorialize his achievements and honor his genealogy more solidly than through a superficial interview for the media. We kept in touch through Facebook. Adrian created the Flying Ramos. The act performed in Italy, then was featured in the 2016 Christmas show at the circus of the Europa Park in Rust, southwestern Germany. The last I heard from him, this contract was finished: “I am near Paris now, at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, because I stopped the trapeze. Now, I do a strap act with my wife. You are welcome to visit.” Copenhagen, September 1, 2016. When I found out that Circus Dannebrog was there about the time when I was due to visit Circus Voyage in Munich, I did not hesitate and worked out a brief detour to my route. The Flying Regio were the highlight of the program. Marco and Laetitia promptly responded to my message and insisted to meet me in front of the circus shortly before the show. My schedule was tight. I thought I had identified on the city map the square where the circus was located. It was, simple enough, called Circus Square, Circusplads in Danish. When I told the taxi driver that I wanted to go to the Circusplads, he replied: which one? There is one indeed in almost every district of the city, witness to a past when circus was a most popular urban entertainment. But he knew where Circus Dannebrog was located, quite a distance as I found out.

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I am happy to meet my friends. The weather is gorgeous. They look quite hyper with their mobiles. It seems that all the artists are playing Pokemon Go between the shows. Marco takes me to a seat from where I will see well the trapeze act. “Now, I try the triple at every show. I still have to work on it. Stay after the show, you can see me practice.” Indeed, at the two performances that day, Marco failed three times in succession. The circus is now empty. An acrobat needs to occupy the ring to rehearse the staging of his act with the spotlights. The technician must follow the dynamic of the movements lest the lighting be out of synch. It takes many trials and errors. It must also match the music. Marco and Sandro, the catcher, patiently wait. At long last, the ring is free. They bring the heavy net and unfold it with the other members of the team. They don’t hook the corners to the pylons that hold the tent up. The net is an autonomous apparatus with its own poles and ropes to anchor it from stakes they have solidly hammered into the ground. Cranks and pulleys provide the right tension that will respond optimally to the impacts of falling bodies. Everything is in place. The practice can start. It is important that Marco succeed. The man who was doing the triple in Munich has left. Now Marco stands on the plank holding the trapeze bar. The catcher takes his position. A shout. A second shout follows. The two men are in synch. Marco swings several times to reach maximal height, until his feet hit the canvas of the tent. The other catcher observes from the orchestra platform. I am seated just across in the middle of the benches. Marco attempts the triple and fails. I can see that there is more than one-foot distance between his arms and those of the catcher when he passes him in his fall. He has to quickly position his body in order to safely land in the net. All this occurs on the scale not of seconds but fractions of second. Marco climbs back. The process will resume in a few minutes. I get my mobile and will try to catch the moment during the second attempt. The observer cautions Marco about his timing and gives him some advice. He will now try to make it. Marco misses again. There will be more practices this evening. I have recorded three failures. But the gap gets shorter. I remember Marco telling me in Munich: “I hope, I know I will succeed!” I have to catch the last bus to the hotel. We will meet tomorrow with Laetitia for lunch at Tivoli Garden. It is a quiet place at lunchtime in August. We have to meet early because there is a performance scheduled in the afternoon. Here comes Marco: “Sorry, Laetitia could not join us. She has to prepare herself long in advance because she must be ready with her make-up and costume when the public arrives. Our act is later. I am not part of the welcoming cast. I have time and my make-up is faster to do.” Indeed, the welcoming artists who line up the entrance tent and attend the food and drink kiosks must look like perfect images, circus icons. It is a part of their contract. Marco used to sell popcorn when they worked at Circus Nock. I can’t help telling my friend

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the story of my first visit to Tivoli, years ago. I had fun gambling on their coin machines when I hit the jackpot. First time in my life. The bell rang and tokens kept running down in the tray. I had a heap of them, rushed to the wicket to get my money. Oh! No! This is not for cash. The smiling girl at the window congratulated me: “now you can buy one hundred ice creams or take twentyfive rides on the rollercoaster with those tokens!” Marco does not gamble. But he takes risks. He almost made it last night after I left the circus. He explains that success depends on the strength and timing of the “whip,” the sudden muscular energy that creates the momentum for the body to turn fast enough on itself three times as gravity pulls it down. He has to practice more because the man who was doing the triple has left to form his own flying trapeze troupe. The circus environment is a very fluid condition: constant travel with frequent unraveling and re-composition of the teams, a dynamic that remains unseen by the public. Marco must be ready for the next season with the great Circo Medrano in Italy. The Regio already advertise the triple. “It is not easy to hold a team together. In the act, everybody cooperates and does his or her part. In daily life, it can be different. Conflicts of interest, jealousy, personal rivalry take a toll on the life of the troupe. I am happy now working there with Laetitia. But I hope to get a better deal when I do the triple every time. In fact, my dream is to create later a duo trapeze act with her. It would be great to be on our own.” “Circus life is hard sometimes. The Flying Regio have two acts. The four women perform an aerial routine in the first part of the program. We assist them from the ground. Lots of efforts. Sometimes things don’t go right. Once, I hit my arm hard on the bar of the trapeze because of bad timing. I also dislocated my shoulder. It took time to recover. Often, it is difficult to cope when the public is too small. This season, there have been many shows in Denmark with only a third or a quarter on the capacity. Last year, in Switzerland, we had to perform once for only twelve spectators. The boss wanted that. And you have to smile and look happy. Circus life!”

Life on the wire “Arriving at home. Opening the door. Realizing that you are not the same.” This is what François Bouvier wrote on Instagram in January 2017 when he returned to his parents’ after a long circus tour. The picture shows a typical row house in Gatineau, the Quebec town where he was born. Taken at night, under the drab streetlight that forms a halo around the closed door, the photograph conveys a sense of claustrophobia and predictability. It reawakens in me the despair I felt when I returned to my parents’ house, which once I

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called my home, after my first season of traveling across France with Cirque Bouglione. Suddenly, the locked horizons of domestic life felt more oppressive than protective. The pettiness of the daily dramas, the routines of the meals and the chores, and the lack of questions about my circus experience were hardly bearable. My escape had been kept secret from the neighbors as if I had soiled the family’s petit bourgeois reputation. I now fostered a heavy sense of alienation and an irresistible desire to regain my true identity by fleeing again into the venturous night. François’s family, by contrast, was supportive when he eventually decided to enter an acrobatic career. He felt, though, that he had to prepare them by talking first for some time about becoming a ballet dancer. When the circus issue came up, their concern was whether he would be able to earn a living as an acrobat. In the popular imagination, circus remains an unfamiliar, disquieting land, on the precarious and unruly side of society. But François had very early dreamed his life in this realm when he saw Saltimbanco one of the first spectacles of Cirque du Soleil. He kept watching a YouTube of Molly Saudek, an American tightwire dancer, who was performing in a red dress. Nothing could then distract him from this goal. His idol was famous for her perfect somersaults on the tightwire. He was haunted by other icons of the genre, the great Con Colleano and Brian Dewhurst whom he could watch again and again on videos. Traditionally, for many, a circus existence could be nothing but a lifelong regret, the nostalgia of an unknown country. How to make the drastic move from dream to reality? How to leap through this wall of fire? For them, there would be only from time to time the burning contact with the magic of the ring and all the phantasies teeming in the backstage. But for François’s generation legitimate circus schools offer opportunities to acquire an acrobatic skill and attempt to make an artistic career. The public perception of the circus has changed, mainly in Quebec, the cradle of prestigious Cirque du Soleil. It remains, though, for the artist, a parallel existence. It is almost impossible to communicate the transformative power that is experienced when one crosses over. For François, life on the wire is not a metaphor. It was not an easy step, though. Five years of study and practice at the Ecole Nationale du Cirque in Montreal: dance, ground acrobatics, contortion, hula hoop, somersaulting, tightwire walking. Students acquire their skills from professionals under the supervision of health advisers. Their curriculum also includes a broader knowledge in addition to circus history and esthetics. François Bouvier is now one of the notable artists in his specialty. February 7, 2017. François is back in Canada after a new stint with NoFit State Circus in London. We decide to meet briefly in Ottawa, close to his home town of Gatineau. I treasure his friendship and his willingness to share his experience with the readers of the book I am writing. He has a new

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contract for the summer with a burlesque show in Germany. He performs his acrobatic repertory in a variety of styles: traditional and contemporary circuses, cabarets, and burlesque. Through his costumes, music, and demeanors, he embodies several personae: the carefree urchin of the NoFit State Circus, the cross-gender twink who dances with high heels on the wire, or the rough and tumble stuntman of the Thrills Circus. His website provides examples of these various characters, each demonstrating the same acrobatic skills embodied in a different staging: www.bouvierfrancois.com Our conversation goes on spontaneously, branching out, digressing, returning to his experience as an artist and moving to the challenges and constraints of a circus life. He does not have a professional agent who would find and book contracts on his behalf. He can be contacted directly. The Annie Fratellini prize he received in 2015 at the “Cirque de Demain” [Tomorrow’s Circus], an international competition for young talents in Paris, gave him the visibility that is needed to start a career in the trade. Now, he is not a beginner anymore. Many can walk and dance on the tightwire, but performing a back somersault takes you to a higher league. It adds drama to the act since the ring master can stop the music, build up the suspense by requiring silence from the audience, and call attention to the difficulty of the trick. François, though, prefers his salto not to be staged this way. His seven-minute act normally unfolds without drama. He does not use the traditional props of this

FIGURE 19  François Bouvier: live on the wire. Photo credit: Einar KingOdencrants.

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FIGURE 20  François Bouvier: the cabaret version of his persona, performing with high heels on the wire in a variety show produced by Stephan Masur. Photo credit: Christian Rätzel.

kind of act such as a sword or a hoop with daggers that evoke extreme danger. The somersault comes naturally, so to speak, after a necessary moment of concentration and preparation that captures the attention of the audience. “I don’t always have my way. Last year, I was hired for a summer circus show in an attractions park. The theme of the program was the thrill of danger. It included a ‘Wheel of Destiny’ and a ‘Globe of Death’. After the first rehearsal, the boss came to me: ‘your act is bad. Wrong costume, wrong music. I want the somersault. I want extreme circus’. Sure, I could come in, climb to the wire, get ready and perform the salto. No, he wanted the full act and be able to make a dramatic announcement to build up the spectators’ anxiety before my salto mortale. I thought of quitting on the spot. But we came to an agreement. I did a four-minute version of my act. It is usually possible to adjust to the staging vision of the director.” François keeps fond memories of his first season in a traditional circus with a modern twist in 2014 in Switzerland. The formal contract he had received from Circus Monti, several pages in both French and German, reassured his parents who were still leery of this kind of career. The YouTube videos that can be found on the Internet show François doing his tightwire act with the concluding back somersault. The human and artistic atmosphere that prevailed in this circus comforted his own sense of self-assurance and belonging in

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a community that transcends political and cultural borders. After years of studies and practice in a national circus school, this was his rite of passage, his crossing over the fortress of sedentary life into the fluid but resilient time and space of the circus. François still relates professionally and emotionally to Cirque Monti. It is indeed a symbol of the passion we have encountered again and again in this book. Circus Monti was created by an individual who loved the circus since his childhood. Guido “Monti” Muntwyler (1932–1999) founded his own company in 1985. The traditional Swiss circus families, which have been in business for several generations, joked about how few years, or months Monti would survive in competition with their own companies. But, for thirty years, Monti prospered by visiting every year the same fifty villages during its eight-month tours. When Monti later decided to play only larger cities, the news came as a shock in these villages that had grown used to experiencing “a kind of second Christmas” in the spring or the summer. When the circus visited Adelboden, one of these alpine villages, for the last time, local people made signs and banners that read: “How sad it is for the last time!” The part circuses play in the life of people resonates more deeply in their psyche than common secular entertainments. It is an event akin to a ritual, a kind of religious celebration. As we reflect on what the circus means for a tightwire walker whose existence depends on dancing and leaping on a 7-meter-long cable 2 meters above the ground, François is straight forward: “I am never sure I will succeed in doing my salto. I live in a kind of open time in the sense that everything is unpredictable … the wire, the work. Of course, I plan things. I practice my somersault every morning three to five times if I feel that my level of energy is up to it. Sometimes I can do just one. It is not always easy when I am on tour. I have to set up the wire and to put it down.” Right now, he has only a two-month engagement for a cabaret show in Germany, but not until July. Other opportunities might come up, though. “Last year, I was hired in Montreal to perform six minutes for the monologue of Hamlet, ‘to be or not to be.’ Louis Patrick Leroux had created a multimedia adaptation of this famous monologue. It was called ‘Hamlet on the Wire.’ I was the visual embodiment […] with other artists.” I liked that. What next? I want to go to Greece to work in refugee camps. I could help give hope to these people. I could make shows for them and also teach them my acrobatic skills. The young ones are desperate. I am trying to organize a trip there with other artists.” François’s dedication to such a cause is not inspired by religious feelings. It is a purely humanistic commitment. He tells me that he was brought up by parents who both had done this kind of volunteer community work when they were young, although not through the circus. They belonged to the generation of Quebeckers who managed to free themselves from the centuries-long political and cultural power of the Catholic Church in this Canadian province.

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This emancipation was called “the quiet revolution.” They just quit taking the priest seriously. François represents the second generation. He is guilt-free. Like most acrobats I have known, he owns himself. He does not project the impression of a divided self. When he says that his training and constant practice make him live like a monk, he merely refers to the discipline and routine it implies. His reward is the ability to play with gravity on a wire under the gaze of empathetic spectators who can hardly believe that what they see is possible. But there is more. The fascination of the audience is not purely technical— admiring the acrobatic feat. It is also sensual. François plays out a range of gender variations depending on the context in which he performs. He draws from a repertory of costumes and demeanors that contribute to create a fluid persona from the delicate but straightforward young man to the borderline transgendered tightwire walker who seems to dance his life away on the cable in red high heel shoes. What next? The ultimate goal of a tightwire walker is what François calls “the royal flush” by analogy with the winning series of the highest cards in a poker game. This is the top of the art: the flip, the back somersault, and the front somersault. The latter is the most perilous because the acrobat loses the visual contact with the wire until he/she gets to land on it. Only a few can do it. François shows me the recorded performance of this “royal flush” by Julien Posada: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEHeF2A7qoY I intimately sense that this achievement is the goal of his life.

Hanging high by the heels Mysuru (Mysore), India, December 1984. The Central Institute of Indian Languages is sponsoring a workshop on interdisciplinary research. My seminar on circus ethnography has attracted a mixed group of young scholars in cultural studies or anthropology. In our chats during the tea breaks, I endeavor to gather some leads for the fieldwork I plan to undertake in some Indian circuses after the seminar ends. My topic is not intimidating and the conversations are devoid of formality. Toward the end of my stay, three men joined me for a drink. I ask them if they personally like the circus. “When we were students we would go every day to the show if there was a circus in town.” I am delighted to have come across circus fans. I jump to the inquiring mode. Before I can utter my initial question, one of them volunteers: “You know, in India, women wear long saris, down to their feet. In the circus, we could watch lots of girls’ legs and thighs!” Not the kind of information I was

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expecting. Not as irrelevant, though, as I first thought. In my further inquiries in the field, I discovered that indeed Indian circuses featured a large number of young female performers. For sure they were not dressed provocatively compared to American and European standards but they were usually wearing very short skirts that were compatible with their acrobatic specialties, mainly when they are working on riggings 5 to 10 meters above the round. In today’s traditional circus, the body of aerialists is indeed totally exposed. They wear the minimal outfit of swimmers that offers the details of their anatomy to the gaze of the audience. The kind of training they undergo creates a harmonious musculature. Their gender is nevertheless underlined. Some couple act out passionate interactions while performing on a trapeze or with straps. However, the seriousness of their tricks, high above the ground, endows them with utmost dignity. They confront death in a kind of innocent quasi-nakedness. This is particularly true of female solo artists. Watching them conveys a deep sense of gravity. Sandy Sun, the French trapeze artist we met in the Prologue, is on the phone. She is willing to share the early memories of a child on her way to being the great trapeze artist she became. We continue the conversation we started two years ago. Now we are friends, not on Facebook, though. At eight, during a school farandole, her spontaneous choreography was noticed. Her natural talent stood out and attracted praise. She then discovered that the truth of her inner self was an urge to challenge her body and to explore its limits. At ten, she always chose elevated narrow paths, like the edge of the sidewalks or the tops of benches and fences. She was fascinated by anything dangerous. She fancied that she was walking 1000 meters high, with the abyss on both sides. Once, she tripped and fell down. She remembers that her first thought was: “I am still alive! I thought I was dead!” This was a liberating experience, the dawning of a sense of invulnerability. At school, she loved physical exercises, games involving keeping one’s balance in actually risky positions, anything that would test her capability to resist the force of gravity. She obscurely knew that acrobatics was to be her life. She was not held back by her family. This eventually led her to one of the first traditional circus that, in association with a theater, had started a school of mime and acrobatics for young people in Paris. Thus, her career started. “Actually, I was not particularly attracted to the circus. I studied mime while training to develop strength and balance. At the time, I was also writing avantgarde plays and performed them as one-woman shows in ‘café-théâtres’. You remember, they were popular in France at the time. I also kept training at the circus school and took up the trapeze. I guess it appealed both to my sense of physical extremes and to my drive to offer myself to an audience. I don’t know if you can call that a desire to be watched. For me, I experienced it as a form of generosity, even altruism. The act I developed was appreciated by the public

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and also by circus people who could understand the risks I was taking. I could sense that I was giving something of myself which was making people better. I did not feel separated from them when I was hanging upside-down held by my heels alone gripping the bar of the trapeze. I even managed a suspension by a single heel. I could sense the intense, silent attention of the public. I felt in harmony with them, a kind of empathetic fusion. This is difficult to translate into words.” Even for someone as articulate as Sandy Sun, it is a challenge to explain the emotions she experienced when she was performing for an audience. Many artists have voiced to me the same deep feeling of accomplishing one’s existence in the gaze of an unanimous public. Sandy expresses this psychological, or rather moral mood as “giving herself to them,” like “giving birth to a poem,” but at the same time receiving a surplus of being. It is a communicative experience through which one is transformed, accessing a high degree of common existential awareness. This inner experience is not restricted to aerialists. In Chapter 8, we will meet the clown Gaston who compared the effect of enthusiastic applause to rain falling on a dry land. The deep meaning of the circus can probably be found in this ephemeral and elusive existential fusion that is profoundly felt by the artist and the spectators alike but remains mostly ineffable. This is the implied leitmotiv that runs through my conversation with Sandy. We review the various moments of her life. We evoke the circus characters we both have met, albeit with a time gap since I was already in the midst of my academic career when she entered the circus. We have, though, quite a few friends in common. Her trapeze act was unique, at odds with the standard model of the time. Her bodily calligraphy, rather than choreography, was well served by an original music made of bursts and pauses. In 1980, she received the Golden Medal at the Cirque de Demain [circus of tomorrow], an international festival in which young artists compete. For long, Catherine Dagois kept her civil name. But acquiring an artistic identity usually requires the choice of a stage name. At this point in her life, she was involved in creative writing, used to play with words as a discovering path rather stereotypical expressions. She toyed a while with “Lolita Lotasternlein” but one day suddenly she came up with “Sandy Sun.” That was it! She would be Sandy Sun! “At first, I was very marginal in the circus. Then, I started getting contracts with some reputable companies. Cirque Jean Richard, for example. They made me work with a partner. That was a new experience. We had barely any time to practice. It worked well but I soon got back to what I wanted: a solo trapeze act. The Tiger Palast, in Frankfurt was a different style, more cabaret than circus, but there were very good artists in the program. I became known in the circus world. Once in the trade, you have to find work. In 1982, I was in

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FIGURE 21  Sandy Sun, hanging from the trapeze with a single bare heel. Confident but fully aware of the risk, Sandy says: “Entering the ring to perform is like going to the front.” Indeed, the battle with gravity is never won in advance. Every performance is a new fight. Photo credit: Kathleen Blumenfeld.

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FIGURE 22  Sandy Sun. Balance on the lower back with great split. Photo credit: Kathleen Blumenfeld.

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FIGURE 23  Sandy Sun gave a name to the acrobatic figures she created. Here: “Nô Theater.” Photo credit: Jean-Noël Ferragut.

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Italy with Circo Nando Orfei. It was a Fellinian experience. Lots of extravagant characters around! A big circus with a 1600 people capacity. I was taking risks. The bar of the trapeze was a bit too high. This is where I fell on October 13. A seven-and-a-half meter fall! It took me two years and a half to recover from a spine fracture and a cranial trauma. I resumed working with my act in several circus company from 1985 on. Hard work. Constant travelling. This is when I perfected my act and created a new style of aerial choreography. It was different from the routines which were being done at the time. I don’t want to brag but, excuse me, it defined a new artistic standard for solo trapeze. In 2005, this is when I decided to escape the hardship of the industrial circus and I started to spend time counselling and training young people who wanted to learn trapeze and embrace a circus life.”

8 To Laugh or Not to Laugh

Funeral games

D

 ecember 31, 1985. On my way back from my mother’s funeral. Two days to chill in Paris. I meet a friend in a bookstore on Boulevard Montparnasse. She is shocked to hear that I am going to see a circus tonight. People associate circus with clowns, laughter, and fun times. For me circus is a serious matter, a ceremony, a dive into deep time. It is not incompatible with mourning. What is now marketed as secular entertainment was, once upon a time, performed for the gods or the dead. Funeral games were mostly athletic competitions, displays of acrobatic skills to honor the deceased. Joking was not taboo. There is evidence of such rituals in Sumerian and Mycenaean societies as well as in ancient Ireland four millennia ago. The Theatre Zingaro is the new avatar of the marginal Cirque Aligre, a loose company of street artists who used to perform on the Paris sidewalks in the early 1970s (Riggins 2003). One of them, Bartabas, turned out to be an efficient leader. His equestrian shows have become a beacon of the new cultural landscape. Usually, the audience is immersed in an unexpected, uncanny experience. The address is not a public square but a street number in a popular district of Paris. From the metro exit, I have to wander in derelict, poorly lit streets. I can see in the distance some people sneaking into a low gate that is ajar. There must be a yard behind this entrance. I have to stoop to enter the place. No wicket. The payment is made to a lady who might also be the fortune teller. A few wooden steps take the visitors inside a trailer, at the end of which they have to enter another trailer and proceed in the opposite direction. Then a third trailer that is obviously used to transport horses leads to the end of the maze, inside the half-darkness of a big tent. I feel the warmth of a familiar home. Wafts of burning incense and mulled wine. The horses are not

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far. They neigh from time to time. The caravans have been parked in the tent at various angles, alternating with rows of bleachers. We are not in the land of law and order. Subdued Gypsy music comes from two sources. One melody fades away as the other starts. They just overlap briefly. Four turkeys and six geese wander in the ring while a dapple horse slowly pulls a harrow in a circle in the sawdust followed by a man who guides it. From time to time the geese cackle and the turkeys respond. Attendants in formal black and red uniforms, with white gloves, lead the spectators to the bleachers area or to the small tables that surround the ring. They do not smile. They behave like undertakers. From time to time, they ring a little bell that hangs from their sleeves. Two of them ceremoniously sprinkle water on the sawdust behind the harrow. The orchestra that was hidden on the side of the tent starts playing Hungarian Gypsy music. I can see a cello, a bass, a xylophone, a guitar, and an accordion. The drums are in the back. The attendants pull in a chariot as if they were horses. It carries a huge kettle of mulled wine. The attendants bring trays of glasses of the beverage that they offer with formal gestures to the audience. At the same time, a young girl dances in the ring. She is followed by another woman who puts a little dog through its paces. A carpet has been unfolded for the dog to walk on its hind legs, then front legs. It sits down on a stool. At a signal, it jumps on the woman’s shoulders. She extends her arm and the dog reaches her hand and makes a hind leg balance before doing the same with its front legs. At the end, an attendant brings a glass of mulled wine to the woman. Real action starts with a black horse that surges from the portal. It runs wild. No harness. Bartabas is dressed in black leather. No makeup. He confronts the animal who attacks him. No smile. The man shouts what sounds like an alien, barbaric language. At times, he has to run into the audience’s space. Eventually, he takes control of the animal, makes it run in a circle and change direction on command. All the way, Bartabas shouts. The horse lies down. Then, it raises its body to stand up but the man stops it halfway. Now, the horse is seated on the ground. Bartabas sits down between its front leg, face to face with the animal like a trainer ready to put his head in a lion’s jaws. The black horse vanishes in the backstage. No formal announcement. A white horse canters around the ring. A young man, dressed in a green skirt with a tricorn hat adorned with small bells, performs classical equestrian acrobatics. He is soon joined by a juggler who handles four balls, then jumps on the horse and juggles with three flaming torches before spitting fire high above the ground. The music becomes more strange. Rubbed strings. Deep drums. Staccato rhythms. A bay horse appears under the spotlights. It is ridden by a bird of prey, a falcon perched on a stand fixed to the small saddle. The horse performs various gaits under Bartabas’s orders: Passage, piaffe, counter canter, Spanish

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steps. The horse exits. The attendants build a high wall of empty glasses on a wooden narrow platform across the center of the ring. They add a row of glasses full of mulled wine at the top. The bay horse returns at high speed, mounted by Bartabas, and jumps over the wall of glasses. A heavy work horse follows. The attendants ride it, making parodic poses and mimicking classical equestrian acrobatics. The pretentious master of ceremony is the most ridiculous. A leather-clad woman enters cracking a whip. The attendants are the targets of her precision aims such as cutting into two pieces a sheet of paper they hold in their hands. This is a common act that is usually performed by a man dressed as a cowboy with female assistants. The gender inversion is played out. A woman riding a tall mule, with two large drums on each side of the saddle, announces the last act. She hits the drums in rhythm and the percussion instruments of the orchestra amplify and continue the sound pattern. This will be the accompaniment for Bartabas riding a dancing horse that appears walking backward and performs a succession of strange gaits and odd movements. He holds a long wooden lance above his head. To conclude, he “beheads” a dozen candy floss balls that the attendants raise at the top of sticks, then catches in his lance the rings that were hanging from the portal. A firework explodes and pours its cascade of smoking ambers from above the arena. At the same time, a black horse draws into the tent a scaffolding on wheels holding three big church bells that the attendants ring by pulling their ropes. The deep vibrating sounds fill our chests. I hear the bells of our church that were tolling for my mother when they took her away to her resting place in the family grave.

The laughter industry At the time of this performance, the producers of Theatre Zingaro were the maturing middle-class teenagers who, a decade earlier, had escaped the conventions of their bourgeois families by thriving as street entertainers in the emancipatory context of the early 1970s in France, more specifically in Paris. Their originality and inventiveness rather than truly acrobatic skills had given media prominence to their transgressive antics. They had formed a company that traveled to festivals where they illustrated the performing arts’ contrived marginality. They had accumulated a symbolic capital that helped them secure cultural grants. The imaginary circus and its mode of life were their inspiration. However, to many, they represented the authentic spirit of the circus at a time when the traditional circuses were losing their attractiveness through the

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perpetuation of worn-out routines and lack of re-invention. They had hard times competing with the rise of television. By contrast, these improvised street performers were getting the attention of the new media. Some in the Zingaro team might have taken riding lessons in their middle-class childhood but they had not acquired the equestrian skills that had made famous some traditional circus dynasties. They were truly reinventing the primal circus, resurrecting a form that eschewed the wild animals and clowns that had become the staples of the modern shows. Exotic predators had for long been exhibited on their own in fairgrounds before they became a part of the modern, entrepreneurial circus in the industrial era. Similarly, comedy had its own special domains and traditions in fairs and marginal public space. The iconic Joseph Grimaldi, who is often celebrated as the eighteenth-century prototype of the modern clown, always performed on stage in London and elsewhere. Horsemanship and acrobatics were the backbone of the immemorial circus. Typically, the spectacle of the Theatre Zingaro was not meant to make people laugh. The only touch of humor was the staged riding incompetence of the pretentious master of ceremonies. The early modern circus also presented touches of slapstick comedy through the awkward “un-horsemanship” of a member of the team impersonating a peasant or a bourgeois. A glance at the colorful posters, mostly from the mid-twentieth century on, shows the new prominence of the clown in the marketing of the circus. Laughter is supposed to be irrecusably the index of happiness. The clown face, with its aggressive chromatic range, is meant to evoke irrepressible laughter. In its many forms, it claims “circus is fun!” This mask, though, frightens many children at first sight, even some people for the rest of their life. Its meaning must be learned. The shock it creates must be overcome. It maintains only a tenuous link to the familiar and reassuring patterns of a human face. It is an overpowering code. It is a part of becoming a fullfledged member of the Western Euro-American culture. The standard image of the clown’s exaggerated makeup, which originated in the promotion of three-ring circuses, has been multiplied and plastered far and wide on circus wagons and city walls. It is made to be seen and understood from a distance. It is a visual equivalent of the canned laughter that producers of audio- and televisual shows broadcast at the very moment when audiences are expected to burst into laughter according to the script, whether actual people laugh or not, whether they just smile or are puzzled because they do not get the joke or simply think it is not funny. Modernity has fostered an industrial culture of laughter that has been adopted by the entrepreneurial circus as its main symbolic dimension. This should not be taken for granted, though, but provide matter for reflection. There is no doubt that some circus clowns make us laugh or, most of the time, make us smile. The best of them create in us a kind of unexplainable elation that is not always easy to account for because of the

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obvious irrationality of their performed behavior. We are often puzzled by the impact of the circus clowns’ antics on our emotions. We laugh before our mind can switch to its explicit thinking mode. They may also cause irritation or boredom when we realize how simple-minded or repetitive their gags are. This chapter will explore the conundrum of laughing. Exploration, though, does not guaranty that we will find the end of the tunnel nor that we will manage to exit from the maze. In spite of countless philosophical speculations and empirical studies, a unified theory of laugher remains indeed elusive. Nowadays, no traditional circus, either large or small, no circus festival would dare to present a program without at least one clown. In many cases, it is a nostalgic gesture: an echo of long-gone celebrities who illustrated the epoch when the public was flocking to the circus to see famous clowns such as Footit and Chocolat, the Fratellini brothers, Charlie Rivel, or Grock, to name only a few. These were the European glories of the circus ring. Dialogues were not their main resource. Gesture and props were the backbone of their slapstick comedy that could trigger laughter across borders. What they were doing, though, was not haphazard falls and tumbling. They performed skillfully crafted scores of movements that were exquisitely timed to shatter the spectators’ expectations. They mastered the rhythms of their epoch and could entrain their audience from gag to gag until their triumphal exit, playing popular tunes or familiar marches with their sparkling wind instruments while banging their huge drums. There exist only written accounts and a few drawings of the performances of the erstwhile Joseph Grimaldi who thrilled the Londoners of the late eighteenth century. But some star clowns from the early to mid-twentieth century were filmed. Today, when their acts are projected on screens, we wonder why, once upon a time, they made people laugh. These acts seem to be so mechanistic, so predictable, so redundant that we watch them as historical documents rather than involving experience. We do not laugh even if we appreciate their ideas. For instance, in one of his famous stint, Grock wants to play piano but the stool is a bit too far from the keyboard. How to solve this problem? It is simple. With the help of his partner, Grock pushes the grand piano toward the stool with strenuous efforts. Let us note that these were clowns for adults. Over the twentieth century, we have witnessed a progressive infantilizing of clown comedy. Children have become the choicetarget of the pratfalls and the practical jokes. The traditional sexual contents have been mostly erased, except in their more covert versions. A venerable and rather complex clown scenario named “the bees” or “the honey” has been reduced to a water-spitting fight between clowns who pretend to be bees and wear insect-like oversized antennas on their head. The queen bee wears a crown. The narrative context that could be observed in the midtwentieth century is now skipped. The pillow-fight model has been turned into

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an all-purpose recipe to make children scream. This movement toward childish games has reached a limit with the immersive mode of clowning. Spectators, either adults or children, are enticed to step willy-nilly into the ring and made to “play” with a clown who turns them into objects of ridicule. Some people appear not to mind this free use of their involuntary comic talents. Others deeply resent such exploitation and stop going to the circus for fear of being picked on by an abusive clown. In some countries, at some periods of time, the fear of clowns takes epidemic proportions. As a social species, we live under the gaze of the members of our group. We read attitudes and intentions in the subtle configurations of their face. A mask or disfiguring makeup deeply unsettles the regular flow of reliable interactional information. Not only do they introduce uncertainty in the course of conflict or cooperation, but they also remove personal responsibility by hiding the identity of agents. There is a wide spectrum of clown makeup but they all convey some forms of anxiety because they all shield individual identities and potentially afford them impunity. Ultimately, with a range of intensities, they are both physical and moral monstrosities. Traditional and modern circus clowns perform gags and utter words that quite systematically break the rules that define normality, civility, and responsibility. By necessity, their social status is ambiguous and they symbolically embody deviance and perversion in films, novels, and occasional fictitious rumors that spread through cities and countries. While it is true that, sometimes, imaginary beliefs coincide with reality, circus clowns are by and large primarily artists; that is, their performing identities and actions are crafted with the purpose of providing entertainment to their audience and securing a livelihood for themselves and their families within the framework of a long-standing tradition. They need to conform to the constraints of this tradition while, at the same time, asserting their individuality and originality, values that sustain their marketability. Their studied spontaneity and their staged misfortunes demand a rigorous training. Their art is unforgiving. When there is no more laughter, the clown dies.

Eppur si muove The prophets of the circus’s doom have proclaimed again and again during the last few decades the end of the clowns who were the gods of the ring, a kind of “Gotterdammerung” on the comic, if not cosmic, stage. In Chapter 9, we will encounter the laments of professionals as well as their struggle against the forces of gloom. Will they follow the elephants where nobody laughs anymore?

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Luzern, late October 2015. I am sitting among the sparse audience of Zirkus Nock. This is a rainy autumn day. The circus is set up at Allmend, quite a distance from the city, almost at the end of the bus line. I enjoy most of the acts that include the Flying Regio, one of the best flying trapeze acts of the decade. I am here to meet the clown Gaston. I have admired his talent for many years as he performed in major European circuses and festivals. I never talked to him, though. I am rather shy and I know how artists feel when they are harassed by circus fans. I usually make a move if I have a project that might contribute positively to their career or to their personal sense of existence. The prospect of “being in a book” is generally valued by circus artists whose ephemeral art does not leave any durable traces except occasionally in newspapers that are hardly less ephemeral than their performances. Most of the artists I have encountered keep scrapbooks in which clippings are collated and faded photos are kept in envelops. These memory treasures, though, happen to get lost or destroyed in the hazards of a nomadic life. My friend Brenda Häni still laments that all the photos and clippings of her early circus life were destroyed by an elephant that had managed to drag her bag through a gap in the partition that separated its trailer from the storage cabin and had spent the travel to the next city reducing her memorabilia to smithereens. The last time I had met Brenda in Blackpool to record some of her memories for this book, she told me: “Paul, you must go to Switzerland and see my nephew Gaston. He is such a good artist and lovely man. I am sure you would enjoy meeting him. You know, he will retire soon.” So, here I am. Brenda phoned him that I would come to Luzern. At the intermission, I ask an attendant to give him my card and let him know that I am in front of the popcorn stand. He quickly appears. We hug as he knows that I am close to his family. It is a long-overdue encounter. He has to quickly return to the back because they have to get ready for their main act in the second part of the program. We can meet the next day after the afternoon show for a coffee in his caravan. He will have time and we will give a phone call to Brenda. The second viewing of a circus program is always more enjoyable than the first. The clown act of Gaston and his partner Roly is a jewel of precision, like a Swiss watch. It is the traditional scene in a restaurant where a hapless customer is served by two goofy waiters. It is slapstick comedy at its best. It compares to their advantage with the prototypical Laurel and Hardy knockabouts that inspired them. Spontaneously, I laugh with the audience when Gaston extracts a revolver from his pocket and shoots the fly that the client finds in his soup. I am still beaming when I knock at Gaston’s door after the show. “One minute, please. I have to change.” Gaston appears in his everyday clothes. He has quickly taken off the greatly oversized trousers and jacket he sports in the ring. He has not wiped off his makeup since the evening show will be

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in a couple of hours. It is a very subtle change of his natural features. His eyelids and lower lip are whitened. The face is colored in a discreet peach-like hue with light touches of red on the cheeks. It does not come through as a monstrous mask. It is a deeply human, expressive face. The talcum powder that he had blown after applying the makeup softens the contrasts to prevent an exaggerated shining effect under the glare of the spotlights. Gaston starts preparing the coffee. My first thought is to spare him this trouble. “Let us go to the restaurant, on the other side of the field. It is just a five-minute walk from here. I would like to invite you.” Gaston turns toward me, his eyes wide open, he looks shocked. “Like that! With my make-up! We never do that!” I feel I have broken some unwritten rule. It is not the first time I experience the uneasiness of inadvertently crossing the line that runs across the double identity of circus performers. A few months earlier, I had met Hubertus Wawra, the Master of Hell Fire, in front of Circus Flik Flak in Dortmund. We had agreed to have a drink nearby after the show. The whole program was provocatively staged in a prison setting. Acrobats were wearing jail uniforms. Attendants dressed as guards shouted orders. There was a dramatic backdrop of metallic gates and iron bars. Hubertus performed his pyrotechnic stunts. At the intermission, I wandered while drinking a beer among the public under the entrance awning. “Time is up! Go back to your seats!” A stern-looking Hubertus in jail guard uniform rushes among the crowd, shouting orders through a megaphone. Obviously, the intermission is over. I approach him to confirm the place of our meeting later that evening as if continuing the friendly conversation that we had earlier. I get a fierce glance in return. He lashes in anger, “Don’t you see that I am working?” Gaston pours the coffee and takes a plate of sandwiches from the fridge. “My girl-friend prepared that for us before going to the city to do some shopping.” The caravan is warm and cozy. Gaston is relaxing after the show. I mention the success of his act that afternoon. People really laughed again and again. I wonder, though, why there were not more spectators. “It is not a good season. The circus is less popular. It is hard to work with small audiences. The public is so important for us. When there is big applause, we feel like a dry land when it suddenly rains. It is our lifeline.” This is the last year Gaston is working in a nomadic circus. He has decided to retire at the end of the season. “At my age, it has become too hard to cope with this constant travelling. There are some good days, of course. But you often have to struggle with the wind, the pouring rain, and the mud to walk to the tent. My partner Roly also wants to retire although he is younger than me. We will do contracts for Christmas shows or festivals. The rest of the time, I will stay in my house in Arbon near lake Constance. You must come to see me there one day.” Gaston was born to a circus family. As a child and a young man, he was part of their ground acrobatic act. He cannot imagine life outside the circus.

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FIGURE 24  Gaston Häni: the man. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

FIGURE 25  Gaston, the clown. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

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Munich, March 1, 2016. Gaston and Roly are the stars of the third winter program of Zirkus Krone. They are featured on posters all around the city. Large ones are displayed in public places, next to major brands such as Siemens or Toyota. Smaller ones are stuck in shop windows. Roly appears as a rotund, cheerful, perhaps not so smart character but nevertheless selfassured. Gaston conveys an impression of irremediable helplessness, no discernible emotion, but a readiness to play his part even if it does not turn out to be as he expected. Things happen to him. He is an embodiment of the ultimate human condition, a visual echo of Buster Keaton or Laurel. Roly is his Hardy. Gaston is lodged in a hotel, not far from the circus building, on Mars Strasse. We are due to meet for lunch the next day with my photographer to make some snapshots for this book. But tonight, I am at the circus. The restaurant act is the main course in the second part of the program. I have decided to record it in writing as precisely as possible. It is a difficult task because I keep laughing with the audience. It is so absurd that I wonder why. It will take three more attentive viewings to reach a reasonable account of what occurs in the ring during the ten minutes or so of the act. There are four actors. They all interact like bearings in a precision mechanism. At the same time, they are deeply human. Their faces communicate as much as their gestures and pratfalls. It is a symphony of signs, a synergy of correlated acting. Props are in the game too. There are hints that they are also driven to play tricks, like autonomous agents rather than automatic forces. The framework of this scenario is the common script of “eating at a restaurant.” As a part of the contemporary culture, we know how to behave and what to expect when we decide to go out for dinner. As clients of a business that provides a service according to some rules we are supposed to be treated with respect, if not with deference. Most professional waiters are skilled servants who anticipate an optional tip in addition to the price of the meal. There is a formality, almost a ritualistic performance attached to this experience. The headwaiter oversees the proper unfolding of the interactive process. He or she acts as a Master of Ceremony. The waiters are performing their function under the double authority of the customer and their own supervisor. The clowns’ interpretation of the cultural script tears off the script at the seam of the social process. As “waiters” they subvert the rules by overdoing them and, thus, revealing their absurdity. A political version of this subversion is “working to the rules,” a protest that perturbs the system of political and economic oppression more than going on strike. The rules can fulfill their functions only if they are followed with some degree of flexibility, in other words, if the “slaves” cooperate with their own servitude. In everyday life, many clients expect absolute submission on the part of the waiters and are often abusive. Many waiters are resentful of the

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treatment to which they are exposed at times without being able to fight back. The whole restaurant experience is distributed in contemporary capitalistic society along the spectrum of micro interactive processes that prescribe our social roles and constrain our spontaneous freedom. Keeping this in mind, let us follow an episode of the act performed by Gaston and Roly who are the two waiters under the supervision of an authoritarian ring master. They are dressed in the typical outfits of high-class restaurant waiters, dark suits with long white aprons. Their costumes, though, are exaggerated caricatures of the norm. Their eagerness to serve is obvious to the extreme. As soon they have poured the soup in his plate, the client complains that there is a fly in it. Gaston quickly pulls a revolver from his pocket and shoots the insect. Roly checks the result and notices that the fly is still alive. Without hesitation he finishes the job by violently crushing it with his palm, splashing the liquid all around the table. Gaston immediately pours more soup in the plate with the ladle. This is done with a perfectly straight face, and the expected formal gesture and attitude. Gaston is unflappable, whatever catastrophe he causes or witnesses.

FIGURE 26  The classy cast is in place, ready for the action: The Maître D’, the guest, and the two waiters. Note the white table cloth and the flowers on the table. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

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FIGURE 27  The goofy waiters suffer mishaps of their own: Gaston steps on a mop that hits Roly between the legs. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

FIGURE 28  Any problem? Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

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FIGURE 29  Gaston serves the soup. Roly protects the guest. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

FIGURE 30  The dish of noodles gets stuck on the guest’s face. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

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Most of the successive episodes of the restaurant scenario are syntactic variations that articulate the same meaning. Democratization and market economy have construed the customer as the ultimate ruler. The client is always right, as the business saying goes. Whoever enters a restaurant of some standing expects to be treated like a king and commands, for a while, the attention of a host of servants. The professional interactions involve nevertheless some underlining tensions fed by more general social cleavages. A comparative approach will help realize that we cannot take the restaurant scene for granted, nor the gags at face value, as if they were mere nonsensical slapsticks. I once observed the restaurant scenario performed in a small Indian circus, the Great Udaya Circus, in Feroke, Kerala. It was obviously an imperfect attempt at imitating a European clown act that had been seen on television. It was not making people laugh much. They appeared rather puzzled. By contrast, the clown Raja had elicited lots of mirth in his previous stint that consisted of a boxing match with an aggressive goat. My assistant, Mahesh Mangalat, then a graduate student in theater studies, explained to me that the very idea of a restaurant is alien to Hindu culture. Traditionally, only the wife is entitled to cook the food for her husband and the family. It is well known that this rule sustains the institution of the Dabbawala, men whose role is to go every day to homes and pick up warm meals sealed in tin containers that they bring in time to office workers. There is a strong taboo about eating food that has been prepared by a member of a lower caste. “If we go to a restaurant here, we have to make sure that the cook is a Brahmin,” Mahesh said. Indeed, a month earlier, I had participated in a conference and the organizer had invited everybody to a dinner in the garden of his house. The only person busying himself with mixing the ingredient and handling the tandoori chickens was a distinguished young scholar. I was finding that strange and offered my help. The host declined and told me that this young man was a Brahmin and he was handling the cooking so that everybody could safely eat the food. In view of these cultural constraints, it is hardly possible to imagine what a successful equivalent of the restaurant scenario would have looked like in Hindu India. Munich, March 5, 2016. Lunch with Gaston at the Italian restaurant Vivadi. He is the guest and the people here have not seen his act. Nobody could guess whom they are serving. I am alone experiencing the irony of the situation. I am facing a friend who is ordering a meal and a drink from a respectful waiter. It erases the image of the performer. The virtual presence of the clown, though, haunts my conversation. Gaston is very comfortable in his two personae and we go back and forth between the current events in his life and his experience of performing at Zirkus Krone. Two things bother him in the show. At the end of the program, he is required by the management to come and sing next to the ring master, Nikolai Tovarich, who sports an impressive voice. It is a

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traditional German song. Gaston is not a singer. He feels embarrassed and out of place, or out of role. He feels it is incompatible with his clown status and personality. Most of the time, he pretends that he is singing, just moving his mouth. In his eyes, this is demeaning. He is an individualist at heart. But there is more. The direction expects all the artists to bow to the audience. Gaston resents having to do what he calls the “compliment,” a term used to refer also to the curtsy made by a horse that bends one of its front legs before leaving the ring. This is a way of treating the public like virtual royalty to which artists must display at the end of the show their ultimate submission. Clowns do not bow. He has demonstrated with his partner Roly an absolutely insolent disrespect for the rules that control society. The restaurant was used as an emblematic symbol of the social order. Obviously, Gaston appreciates being able to share his “shame.” How do they dare to force him to do that? Hierarchies are insensitive to the nuances of what it means to be a clown in the full sense of this singularity. Gaston reminds me that he belongs to a long dynasty of circus artists that included acrobats and the celebrated Russian clown Andreff who was his uncle. His grandfather had five daughters. The family once had their own circus that toured Europe. As a child and a young man, Gaston was part of a ground acrobatic family act in which he performed as the comic character. Then, he became a full-fledged clown, Gaston, who is now a star of the circus legend.

Measured mirth Gregor Wollny does not look like a clown, not even as a performer. When he crosses the ring, one may think that this lanky man has walked there by mistake, perhaps a traveling salesman who bought a ticket late after a bad day and tries to reach his seat on the other side without realizing that the show has started. He carries a little beat-up suitcase. He wears a suit that has seen better days but remains within the professional norm of expected conformity with his ordinary tie and hat. Nothing flashy. As far from a circus costume as the jacket and pants of the person seated next to you in the bus at the peak hour when everybody goes to work in the morning. Gregor Wollny’s face expresses a kind of resentful resignation, a studied lack of interest in the world around him. It is a mixture of being both laid back and angry, but not violently. Whether in a circus arena or on a stage, Gregor Wollny sets a brisk tempo through his gait and other body motions when he appears. Discreet background music helps set the rhythm. Whatever he does, including unremarkable tricks, is followed immediately by a hand gesture meaning: “Please, don’t bother! No

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applause! This is nothing!” Some other times, he encourages people to clap their hands after he has performed a still less remarkable “feat.” He embodies a constant questioning of the performer–audience relationship. His props are common objects, usually quite small and undistinguished, coming straight from a bargain store. His masterpiece consists of interacting with a wooden folding ruler of the type used by carpenters and other construction workers. Although there may be occasional variations in his day-to-day performances, Gregor Wollny follows the score or script he has established. It is possible to get a precise idea of this act by watching a performance recorded on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf5rLmLxawA On my second visit to Cirque Bouffon, in June 2017, Gregor performs his signature act. The articulate ruler can be either maintained straight or folded to form various geometrical patterns that evoke other artefacts or animals. He generates a rapid succession of unexpected figures with which he interacts by his gestures and facial expressions. Despair, triumph, irony, sarcasm, embarrassment, self-pity, tenderness, playfulness selectively and appropriately tag every sign that springs out of this creative cornucopia. The fisherman’s rod becomes a funambulist’s balancing pole; slightly displaced toward the lower part of his body, it evokes the Brussels’s legendary Mankenpiss; with four right angles, it frames Gregor as a living portrait hanging in a museum; the top side opens up and creates a swinging trapeze; it instantly takes the form of an umbrella; then, it is a sword that triggers some fencing postures; a Christian cross comes next; Gregor carries it on his shoulder as if he were Jesus; he makes a few steps bent under the weight but quickly starts walking backward; by a sleight of hand, a giraffe springs to life and ambles as if it were in a savannah; but wait a second: Gregor extracts from his pocket a baby giraffe made of a much smaller ruler, which follows its schematic mother; suddenly, he puts the baby back in his pocket and the big giraffe is transformed into a dog that he holds on a leash; the dog lifts its leg to relieve itself on its master’s pants; but it wants to move on and drags Gregor out of the stage. By manipulating a trivial tool, Gregor Wollny generates a fast-forward series of images for which he creates instant narratives loaded with emotions. The speed and tempo of the performance keep his audience laughing because he never lets them anticipate his next move. The above examples show that the art of clowning is alive and well. It is a productive language, both reinventing the tradition and generating novelty. To the post-modern prophets of post-mortem gloom who clamor that, nowadays, the clown is a mere nostalgic exercise, we can oppose the words of Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Eppur si muove. When, forced by the Catholic Church authorities to recant his claim that the earth was revolving around the sun rather than the reverse, he reluctantly complied but he is credited for having uttered those words that mean “And yet it moves!” thus

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intimating that the Inquisition order would not prevent the earth from revolving around the sun. Gaston and Roly might be recycling a traditional slapstick comedy sketch, but they do so with fresh gusto and the audience laugh their heads off. Gregor Wollny triggers the same effect by exploring new paths and inventing novel tricks without the usual props inherited from the commedia dell’arte. With many others, these artists, irrespective of their generation, keep the art of clowning robust and productive. In response to their art, collective, healthy laughter fills their audience with irrepressible euphoria. In the traditional circus, a clowning career is often an option for acrobats who have reached the limits beyond which it is no longer safe, let alone possible, to perform demanding physical tricks. They are schooled by their peers and their elders. Some circus families carry a legacy of clowning and have spawned several generations of comic artists. However, some people have made the decisive leap of joining the circus to become clowns. In the United States, the Ringling, Barnum & Bailey Circus founded a clown college in 1968 and produced numerous artists until 1997. Similar training institutions have been created in most countries over the last five decades. Youths are driven through a curriculum that includes mime, acting, dance, basic acrobatics, and the skill of inventing gags. They eventually construct and inhabit a character that becomes their persona and embrace a life of travel and performance. In some cases, the path to clowning is more dramatic.

Coda: anatomy of a clown Philippe Goudard’s studies in medicine in France overlapped with his increasing interest in the circus. At twenty, he was trained in mime, commedia dell’arte, dance, acrobatics, and acting. At twenty-one, he had already created a company and performed on stage. For a while, his medical career ran parallel to his occasional involvements in the world that truly fascinated him. The lure of the circus, though, eventually took hold of him. With his medical knowledge and experience in the background, he joined The National Conservatory of Circus and Mime in Paris. This was a new, high-profile institution jointly founded by a circus director (Alexis Gruss) and a well-known actress (Sylvia Montfort). At twenty-three, he performed an aerial act in the program of the then-popular Cirque à l’ancienne—Gruss [old-fashioned circus—Gruss]. In a family circus, a young student in acrobatics, even if this person happens to be a medical doctor, is expected to take part in the everyday chores from building the tent, carrying the props, and taking care of the horses. He thus gained the harsh backstage experience that, later, would give him an edge not only for managing his own entertainment company but also in his research in medicine of sport and emergencies.

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Philippe Goudard’s profile is a unique entanglement of medical, academic, playwright, and circus expertise that bears witness to the force with which the magnet of circus life can impact a human being and give form to a rich artistic and philosophical destiny. Forged on the hard anvil of the traditional circus, Philippe soon emancipated himself from its constraints and gave free reign to his creativity. With MariPaule Barberet, he founded a company which for many years would tour over thirty countries, producing successful spectacles on stage and in tents. Their new avatars Motusse and Paillasse were the two clowns who entertained appreciative audiences with original creations. Philippe Goudard, a.k.a. Paillasse, keeps offering solo clown performances that he juggles with his other endeavors as university professor and director of the center for circus research that he founded. He illustrates with particular acuity the emergence of a new form of clowning with original performances that he calls Anatomie d’un clown [anatomy of a clown] (Goudard 2005). This is a rich paradigm on the contemporary scene. The last decades have been marked by this genre of clowning whose aim is to make us smile and think rather than unreflexively laugh. Philippe Goudard is emblematic of this subtle art that profusely draws from the legacy of the commedia dell’arte while transmuting it into a form of embodied philosophy, acting out with humor the dilemmas of the human condition. The following videos document his past and ongoing contributions to the immemorial art of self-derision enlightened by an irrepressible human optimism. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BpivczVVKU http://philippegoudard.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/echelle.mov In this quintessential clowning, the action is decontextualized. What is the purpose of these ladders that cannot fit together to form a practical tool? What is this helpless man trying to reach? Does he attempt to grasp the meaning of life itself? The self-standing ladder cannot rest on any solid support. He aims upward but does not reach anything. Perhaps, there is nothing up there. Or, perhaps, it is the “nothing” that humankind keeps chasing? Paillasse trespasses the limits beyond which clowning becomes the philosophical language of the absurd.

9 Lives under Siege

An uncertain future

M

 unich, February 27, 2016. Zirkus Krone presents its second program of the winter season. My Facebook friends have for weeks posted enticing bits and pieces of videos that they commented with enthusiastic emojis. I could not resist using up my bonus miles for flying to attend the last two performances of this program. It is by all accounts probably the best one that has been produced during the last twenty-five years, if not more. The ring master is the celebrated Nikolai Tovarich, an imposing embodiment of the genre. His friendly deep voice and red formal attire command respect. The whole show appears to be orchestrated by his ritual gestures: introducing the artists; stepping forward in full attention when aerialists perform risky tricks, and, should the unexpected happen, ready to break their fall with a shoulder push to prevent a direct hit on the ground; and often at the end of an act blocking their exit and inviting them to return to the center of the ring to acknowledge and enjoy the persisting applause. I am always queasy addressing circus folks at the end of an evening show. I know they are tired and can’t wait for their supper. When the public leaves the premises, they line up on both side of the main exit, smiling and shaking hands with their admirers as if they were old friends. I must try not to be one of those. Waiting until the last moment, I present Mr. Tovarich with a dedicated copy of my last book and mention that I am preparing a new one. Would he be willing to meet me the next day in the circus bar, at the end of the show? Zirkus Krone, February 28. We are now toasting the show with peerless Bavarian beer. The conversation moves from perfunctory comments on the artists to a more serious dialogue. “In my twenties, I worked during the summers in Cirque Bouglione. There was then a wonderful acrobat doing a

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hand to hand act. Her name was Eva Tovarich. Was she a relative of yours?—It was my mum.” The ice is broken. We argue about the exact dates. Shortly before Eva Tovarich performed in the trio I had witnessed, “The Tovarichs” were a world-famous eight-person strong acrobatic troupe that had been featured in the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris among other prestigious venues. We now talk from the heart. The ringmaster loses his self-assurance. Bitter nostalgia takes over. “Now we are under attack. Soon they will paint black stars on circus folks’ backs like it was done in the past for the Jewish people. They hate the circus because of the animals. They put up barriers everywhere. Before, we were loved by all. We could travel the world. We were the circus nation, always on the move. Now, they restrict our freedom. Some cities bar us from performing. The only thing they cannot take away from us it is our memories. That, they cannot take away from us.” It is moving to hear the voice of such an imposing man briefly break down. I tell him about the new book I plan to write. “It will be my small part of resistance, a very small part,” I confess.—“No, don’t say that. The power of the pen is important.” The time to leave has come. The bar lights have been dimmed. Nikolai Tovarich has to check a few things inside the building before driving home. We will meet for lunch in a couple of days. The theme of decline and the expression of despair are pervasive in the circus world of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, mainly among older artists. In 2016, Christian Hamel, the editor of Le Cirque dans l’Univers, a French magazine, dispatched a personal letter he had received from Hector (Maurin) Rossi, a celebrated clown. This was a handwritten message of thanks for the prize that he and his partner, the whiteface clown Yann Rossi, had received from the association of circus fans that sponsors this publication. The recognition of their excellence in performing the traditional art of clowning in the form of the iconic duo that emerged in the nineteenth century coincided with the sixtieth anniversary of the first performance of Hector Rossi in a circus ring. The letter, dated from Saarbrucken, March 19, 2016, alludes to the family and friends who are gathered for the occasion, “chatting about this and that, happy to see each other after a long time, remembering things from the past! All were raising the same question: what will happen to our profession, our circus?” The author goes on to thank the passionate friends of the circus whose moral support, fortunately, keeps encouraging and re-motivating the artists who devote their lives to maintaining the high standards of their tradition. “Today, the circus is in danger.” Referring to the iconic clowns, the letter asks: “How many of us will survive the next decades?” Then, Hector Rossi evokes the first time he stepped into a circus ring in 1956 with his grandfather Ettore, “au cirque de Noel in Toulouse” (in a Christmas circus show in the Southern French city of Toulouse) (Christian Hamel, personal communication. Translation mine).

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The Rossi family is emblematic of the professional artists who, in the course of their life, illustrate the various skills that are taught across generations while they crisscross the world. In an interview of Yann Rossi, published in Star News on April 14, 2004, John McConnico reports his conversation with the whiteface clown of the duo “The Rossyann” who then performed at Circus Arena in Copenhagen. Tellingly, the title of the article reads: “French clowns sad about declining art.” Yann was born in 1967 in France. At seven, he started his acrobatic training with his mother. Then, his father taught him music and he learned how to play several instruments. He performed in the ring for the first time at nine in the family’s antipodists act. At eighteen, he became the whiteface partner of his brother Maurin (Hector), taking up the role of his grandfather Ettore. In the Star News interview, Yann Rossi voices his fear that their tradition might be in danger of disappearing. “Twenty-five years ago, there were many more circuses than today. There were many good circuses. Now, there are too many distractions, too many artists, not enough circuses on the road.” Yann evokes his four-hundred-year-long family history, pointing out that the children started their training very early, at five or six, even earlier. “Now, maybe, we are near the end of the line. Life on the road, the circus is a life in itself! I was born in a clinic, yes, but in truth I was born in the circus.” For those who were born in circus families, the love of the circus way of life is deeper than the infatuation of those they fascinate. It is an experience that has molded their existence and their rapport with society and space. To the “life is a circus” slogan, they reply, like Yann Rossi, “circus is life itself.” Circusborn artists may fantasize about sedentary living and they may yearn at times for the security and predictability of the urban utopia, but the value of “hitting the road” and “traveling the world” is deeply rooted in their very identity. Some never retire and keep living in their caravans, following their grown-up children and doing chores. Those who can afford an apartment or a house surround themselves with mementos of their nomadic lives. The true life they remember is elsewhere. The world remains a perpetually moving landscape.

Are the clowns a mere sign of the past? The Rossyann promote their act through a website in which they offer glimpses of their talents: brief extracts of classical scenarios such as “the ghost” or “the plates” as well as their musical virtuosity in which they interpret their repertory while quickly moving from one instrument to another or produce music through unusual objects that have been modified for this purpose. For example, a jacket worn by Hector has been laced with various devices that he

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activates in sequence to play a recognizable tune. This anthology of tricks can be found on the Internet at www.rossyann.com. As I log in and click on each image to watch the few seconds of gags they have put online as teasers, I cannot help being moved. I have seen the same tricks performed again and again by so many clowns that it has become pleasantly familiar, albeit mildly boring. I note the particular excellence of “the plates,” a number in which the auguste Hector displays his dexterity by juggling with china plates only to ruin everything at the last moment when he savors his triumph but inadvertently breaks the plates. Then, I admire their musical skills although the popular tunes they play bring me back decades earlier. It is still enjoyable, though, in the sense that I perceive and appreciate details of their multimodal interpretation of the traditional scores, somewhat like the experience of a concert of classical music during which it is always possible to discover new aspects through the personal rendering of a pianist or a conductor. In this case, though, the score refers more broadly to the sketchy comedy narrative, the traditional scenario they embody at each performance by following the successive steps that lead from one gag to the other until the act concludes. Ranting about the decline of the circus is not a recent phenomenon among traditional clowns. In 1983, anthropologist Kenneth Little spent a season at Circus Knie in Switzerland in order to complete some fieldwork for a research in circus ethnography. He was employed as a helper for a comedian named Pic who performed a humorous act with soap bubbles. His task was to prepare in time the precise watery mixture that would produce the required quality of bubbles. Another performer, though, captured his attention: the whiteface clown Pipo. In the ensuing publications, Little reports and reflects upon the many conversations he had with this clown as well with others (e.g., Little 1991b). Let us consider the most precise account of his experience, an article published in the journal of the Canadian Anthropological Society, Culture (Little 1991a). At the outset of the research, Little takes his distance with a scientific approach that would pretend to objectively describe “a native point of view.” He engages instead in informal conversations and endeavors to make explicit his goal that ultimately is to uncover the meaning of the circus, in particular the comedy acts that are performed in the ring by Pipo and his two partners. The question does not make much sense to the clown who soon starts making fun of the anthropologist, thus triggering a self-examination that deconstructs the authoritative status of the inquirer. In a nutshell, the situation could be summarized as follows: “Who are you to ask such questions? I am the circus. I know what it means and you do not. Your questions are really funny.” As a consequence, the anthropologist loses the self-assurance of a well-meaning scholar, respectful of the contemporary ethical rules that regulate interactions with human subjects. Pipo the man, Philippe Sossman Jr., is an elegant and

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articulate mind. The clown Pipo puts the anthropologist off balance by not playing according to rules which are not his and to the creation of which he had no part. His attitude implies the reverse question: what is the ultimate meaning of your own academic trade? Pipo, though, is keen on sharing his own views with Little. Circus artists, most importantly those born in the circus, feel deprived of a voice. Media celebrities are treated as cultural icons and worshipped as oracles, while clowns, trainers, and acrobats are hardly mentioned by name in newspaper reports. Whatever they may try to convey to the occasional journalist who interviews them is reduced to a few stereotypical metaphors and images. A prominent topic in Pipo’s conversations with Little is the decline of the art of the clowns. He complains that most teams, as duos or trios, repeat worn-out “entrees” (comedy sketches) and gags, and offer mere nostalgic experience to their audience. There is a lack of care for perfecting the details, getting genuinely involved in the art rather than being perfunctory. This betrays the absence of motivation when your targeted audience has become children instead of appreciative adults who also enjoy highbrow arts as was the case in the previous century. For the latter, you perform mere simulations of the past. But there is more. At the same time, the true clowns’ identities become alienated by the trivial multiplication of the stereotypical images that are spread in the culture of spectacle consumption. “There is a marketing commodification of the sign ‘clown’ […] Circus performances and productions are caught in an economic and cultural industry crossfire” (Little 1991a: 81). There is now a plethora of improvised or semi-professional clowns who have been hatched by countless clown schools. Pipo’s response is to resist by “being truly circus,” a move that may mean going out of the circus and performing elsewhere, as Pipo did with his partners, because “the circus was shit.” In the conversations, Pipo returns often to this mantra, a kind of selfinjunction: “going inside.” This both puzzles and troubles the anthropologist whose own identity is thus put in jeopardy. Pipo’s imperative is to refuse compromising and escaping. This is not an option for anthropologists, even post-modern ones. Circus identity is at the core of the conversations between Little and Pipo. The former takes for granted that his own way of formulating his anthropological questions can rely on shared basic assumptions, if only because Pipo is fluent in English as well as in several other languages. The problem is that the overlap between the two men’s identities and knowledge is only partial. This manifests itself in the most hilarious way when Little raises the question of why the whiteface wears symbols of femininity. He points out the precious fabric of the clown’s costume, his silken white stockings, fine ballerina slippers, bright-colored garments with pearls, hourglassshaped attire, red-lip and mascara-underlining makeup, elegant gestures and

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postures. These characteristics are for the North American anthropologist signs of female fashion, hence womanhood. It hints at effeminacy. This is a squarely ethnocentric point of view. In his own culture, males are supposed to wear formal regular tuxedos, drab business suits or casual apparel, the legacy of Protestant puritanism by contrast with the refinements of the aristocratic cultures they displaced. In other specialties circus artists emphasize athletic masculinity with their functional outfits often similar to Olympic gymnasts. Then, why is the whiteface so “feminine,” if not effeminate, through his choice of costume? Pipo reacts expectedly to Little’s questions with laughter. Suppose an anthropologist raises the same issues with a Spanish torero, who wears the same kind of “feminine” garments; or, worse, asks a Hellenic soldier, a Scott or an Irishman the reason for their womanlike dress or skirt; then, the anthropologist might trigger more than a laugh. The reaction might even be more consequential if the same issue were raised about the liturgical ornaments of a Catholic or Anglican priest or bishop, or even about a Roman Pope in full attire. Pipo’s costume, like all that of whiteface clowns, is consubstantial with his performing identity, an identity grounded in his family history and the tradition of an art in which he thrives to excel. This costume has emerged progressively over the centuries to become the circus itself. To counter the current decline of the circus, Pipo is determined to “go inside,” that is, to resist from the core, not look for ways of compromising. This costume is sacred. You slip into it, like in a bag (sac, in French) to perform a ritual. It has often been claimed that when a culture is investigated by anthropologists, it is a sign that that culture is either dead or dying. Pipo’s resistance shows that circus is still alive, albeit under threat. Interestingly, Little appears to have ceased to do research and publish on circus as a focus of his academic career after this experience. Perhaps, Pipo taught him a lesson.

The circus under fire May 2017. The circus world is abuzz with the news that the legendary Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus is going out of business after 146 years of producing outstanding spectacles in North America. A year earlier, its directors had decided to discontinue the presentation of their numerous iconic elephants as a part of their three-ring programs. The animals were retired and sent to a conservation park, where they remain on display free of the circus routines and trappings. For several decades, associations for the defense of animals had harassed this high-profile company for alleged cruel treatment of their trained elephants. Litigations and counter-litigations

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added to the costs of operating the show on its traditional scale. The decision to remove the elephants from their traveling units was meant as both an economic and a public relations move. This victory was celebrated by the animal defenders while the attendance at the circus performances steadily declined. An American circus without elephants is not a real circus any longer, whatever other wonders might be advertised. From a business point of view, the loss of this powerful symbolic capital translated into a serious loss in profitability. Kenneth Feld, Chairman and CEO of Feld Entertainment that owned the circus, explained that rationale in a Facebook post announcing that the last show of their first unit (Xtreme) would take place on May 7, 2017, in Providence, Rhode Island, and that the second unit (Out of this World) would give its last performance on May 21 in Long Island, New York. Some European circuses have taken similar measures in recent years in an effort to placate the aggressive hostility of the “animalists,” as circus folks call the militants who picket their lots and call for a boycott of their shows. Although circus entrepreneurs abide by the laws regulating wild animal husbandry, the pressure to ban circuses that hold animals of any kind keeps mounting. This movement has fostered with a quasi-religious fervor a culture that demonizes the circus as a whole. For instance, a French association hostile to the circus compiled and published online on April 29, 2016, a list of all the circuses in France with the names of their owners (www.cirquesde-france.fr) and the places where they were performing under the title “Où sont-ils” [where are they?]. Thus, a category of people is indiscriminately denounced as guilty of the crime of being who they are, whether they hold animals or not. Even small family circuses complain that many townships ban circuses from performing in their city or village. A rhetoric of discrimination has emerged. This has happened for several decades in England and the movement is gaining momentum in Germany and Switzerland. Associations created for the defense of animal rights raise large amounts of money from well-meaning citizens who are moved by stories and pictures that are, more often than not, fake. Genuine examples of abuses are the exception, not the rule. Thanks to these financial resources, these associations campaign through the media, lobby politicians, and organize systematic harassment of circuses, trying to interfere with spectators who line up in front of the ticket sellers. They aggressively display outrageous drawings or pictures of tortured animals, and their loud protests attempt to discourage people from attending circus performances. It is irrelevant to them that most circuses nowadays scrupulously respect the animal welfare regulations that are the law of the land. They express a passionate hostility toward the circus, the kind of irrational behavior that only sectarian religions can inspire. The high visibility and vulnerability of circuses provides an easy target for militants who are inspired by various ideologies

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such as veganism, animal rights, or animal liberation. It is obviously more convenient and safer to protest in front of a circus that has set up its tent in a city or a village than to organize demonstrations in the countryside or in peripheral zones to object to the industrial mistreatment of animals in slaughterhouses, pig farms, and other institutions that systematically abuse animals for profit. In the meantime, wild elephants are being exterminated by heavily armed poachers in India and Africa. Wild species in America are bred to be sold to hunters’ associations so that the animals can be released in front of hunters to be shot. The same “industry” exists in some African countries where “heroic” millionaires can safely kill a male lion for a hefty fee. Circus folks who, for the most part, not only take good care of their animals but also have developed personal relationship with them since they were born resent the blind hostility of these self-appointed warriors of the animal cause. This scapegoating undermines their morals and ways of making a living as performers. Ironically, if not tragically, the actions of the “animalists” do not improve the conditions of life of animals that are often seized and shipped to locations where they are handled by incompetent people who eventually decide to euthanize them when they discover that it takes lots of specialized knowledge and money to care for them. In circus life, strong bonds are formed between humans and animals often across generations for both. Countless anecdotes, now supported by photographs and videos, show trainers sleeping close to their charges when they are sick or anxious because of having been moved to unfamiliar locations. These men and women are deeply hurt by claims that they torture their animals and feel frustrated that their foes simply ignore the evidence. It is common nowadays, when circuses pitch their tent in fields close to cities, to see zebras, camels, and elephants peacefully grazing within electric fences similar to those that are used for sheep and cattle. When the circus handlers appear and call them, these “wild” animals can be seen walking toward them and enjoying friendly physical contacts with humans they know since they were born. This is a way of life that “animalists” want to destroy in the name of an astract ideology that pushes to the extreme the transformation of the legal status of animals that has occurred during the last century (Bouissac 2013b). There are more continuities than differences between humans and animals. We share the same basic physiology and engage in similar social behavior. We experience common affiliative and antagonistic emotions. The everyday life in a circus provides strong evidence of the dense network of signs that sustains uninterrupted interactions among all the living members of the community. Exchanges of meaningful communications constantly occur through all the senses that humans and animals have in common, including the understanding of some words and a sensitivity to the meaning of intonations. Conversely, trainers and handlers of circus animals are attuned to their rich

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repertory of vocal productions and demeanors. Sascha Grodotzki told me that one of the elephants of the circus where he works as an administrator is wont to throw some dirt at him when he walks close to her enclosure. This elephant is credited as having a deep liking for her trainer, Alois Spindler, and it is believed that she is jealous because she often sees the two men together discussing at length the day-to-day issues that are the fabric of circus life, including how to manage the “animalists” who harass the spectators and upset the animals with their noisy agitation. Unfortunately, circuses have to cope with more than noise. Ideological extremism can push some people to cross the red line. There have been cases of arson or attempted arson meant to destroy trucks and tents. A troubling case occurred in France on April 10, 2008, when seven exotic animals were poisoned, on the assumed ground that “animals are better dead than alive in a circus,” as the animalists sometimes proclaim in their leaflets and websites. On May 12, 2017, the French national newspaper Le Parisien reported that a truck of Cirque Zavatta was set on fire and two of their horses were poisoned. Harassment through legal prosecutions is no less damaging for small family circuses that cannot afford expensive lawyers to defend themselves. The law, though, is on their side as long as they respect animal welfare regulations that most European countries have established. Recently, in Switzerland, a circus that was taking exemplary care of their lionesses was nevertheless sued because it was claimed that they “humiliated” their animals by making them jump through hoops in front of the audience. The case was dismissed because evidence that the lionesses were feeling humiliated was too hard to provide.

Resistance and resilience August 6, 2017. Zirkus Krone is due to perform in Cottbus, a large city in central Germany. Today, they publish in their Facebook page photos of their advertising panels that had been destroyed during the night. They were not mere paper posters but colorful boards with large painted letters and images that had been pulled off their supports and broken apart. The day before, a peaceful protest was organized by the animalists who shouted slogans and held signs. This morning, the circus officials express their dismay: “Freedom of speech: Yes! Vandalism: No!” This destruction is typical of the relentless attacks by a well-organized, self-righteous minority of individuals who have taken upon themselves to defend animals not only by trying by all means to put circuses out of business but also by campaigning against meat consumption and the keeping of pets. The intensity of their emotions resembles the kind of passion we observed in religious wars.

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Most modern, democratic countries have established appropriate laws that regulate animal husbandry. It is illegal to mistreat the species humans breed for work, entertainment, or food. Special legislation applies to circus animals that must be provided with adequate space and veterinarian care. Regular inspections are conducted and occasional abuses are repressed. Zirkus Krone is exemplary in this respect. The enclosures they build on every lot for their lions and tigers exceed the norms prescribed by law. Visitors can witness the positive relationship that exists between the animals and their keepers and trainers. However, some people are so possessed by the idea that animals should not be used in any capacity by humans as a matter of absolute principle that they are blind to these facts. They are often inspired by charismatic leaders and some of them, at times, are prone to breaking the law in the name of what they consider to be an ultimate cause that overrides all other considerations. The issue of animal welfare is a global phenomenon that indicates profound changes of attitude toward at least some kinds of mammals that can be intuitively construed as sentient beings and with which humans can empathize under certain conditions. This political movement represents a sea change with respect to the long-standing ethos of Western cultures that considered animals as predators, pests, or commodities that were denied any kind of moral stature. Numerous associations now exist whose stated mission is to act on behalf of assumed animal rights. Like church organizations, they often enjoy an official “charity” status that exempts them from paying taxes. They are free to assign large portions of the donations they receive to cover administrative costs and to invest surplus funds in an endowment or in real estate properties. The most prominent of these associations is PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), whose website https://www.peta. org provides ample information on their philosophy, history, and worldwide accomplishments. Sociologists and anthropologists in the future will undoubtedly be interested in studying the development of this cultural revolution and the formation of its various organizations on a global scale. PETA is particularly fascinating in this respect because of its origin and outreach. It is the brainchild of co-founder Ingrid Newkirk who keeps inspiring the devotion of her followers and their commitment to her visionary mission. At the time of this writing, the PETA website includes a prominently posted document that purports to be Ingrid Newkirk’s last will. It is worth reading in its entirety. Let us consider the first suggestion she makes concerning the disposal of her body after her death: “While the final decision as to the use of my body remains with PETA, I make the following suggested directions: (a) That the ‘meat’ of my body, or a portion thereof, be used for a human barbecue, to remind the world that the meat of a corpse is all flesh, regardless of whether it comes from a human being or

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another animal, and that flesh food are not needed.” The directions go on with respect to her skin, her limbs, her organs that she assigns to ten different locations in the world in a dramatic gesture of all-encompassing empathy with the suffering of animals. The logic of all this is rather confused but it is the sort of prophetic discourse and graphic self-immolation that mesmerize disciples and may breed violent intolerance. Animal welfare legislation is rational and ethical. This will, by contrast, is the kind of text that inspires cults and sects. It is irrational and excessive, suggesting a sacrificial post-mortem dedication to a supreme cause extended to the whole planet. The symbolic imagery is enhanced by the evocation of ritualistic cannibalism whose logic is hard to grasp but which is loaded with religious connotations. It is no wonder that circus folks, who have spent generations caring for their animals that they consider as part of their extended family, have difficulty coming to grips with the radical attacks from the “animalists.” The circus trade is vulnerable because it is confronted by the unmanageable passion of a small minority that is supported by immense financial resources and the mastery of contemporary social media. PETA’s website includes, on each page, highlighted buttons that urge: “Donate.” June 16, 2017. Circus Voyage has pitched its tent in the outskirts of Braunschweig, in Lower Saxony. My friend Sascha is now officially the administrator and public relations man for the show. As soon as I show up on the lot, we resume our conversation from Munich, the year before. All is well. Or, rather, it would be so without the animalists who keep harassing the circus and pressuring some cities to deny the permission to perform on their territory. It is quite challenging for Sascha to secure good places where the circus can play for a length of time. With over seventy animals including elephants, giraffes, a hippopotamus, zebras, camels, lamas, and a large number of horses and ponies, moving to the next port of call is a complex operation. The latest city was easy to book because the local administrator is fond of circuses. This kind lady had made things easy. Sascha had arranged a publicity event with one of the elephants visiting a nearby sports center. The journalists and photographers were present. The circus director brought the elephant as planned. As soon as the animal approached the pool, she started drinking and spraying herself with water. The lady enjoyed the scene and cracked what she thought was an innocent joke addressed to Sacha’s boss: “Well, your elephants are thirsty. You must not give them enough to drink!” The man took great offence and shouted abuse back in anger. In one minute, Sascha’s hard work was ruined. He was told not to apply again to visit that city. This was sad but understandable: circus folks are on edge. In another city they had visited a month earlier, Sascha had to deal with a new kind of devious harassment. The circus had settled for a few days, quite legally, in a field near suburban houses. Suddenly the police showed up. They

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were concerned about the circus’s hippopotamus. Sasha and his boss were puzzled. The animal was as usual resting in its large tank of water after a walk around its enclosure. The officers were satisfied but showed them a letter that had been purportedly written by the circus director to warn the inhabitants of this area to stay inside because the hippopotamus had escaped and could be very dangerous. The letters had been delivered during the night and had greatly alarmed everybody. It turned out that the letter was a fabrication and that the signature of Alois Spindler had been forged to lend credibility to this fake information. Circuses try to fight back in good faith for their livelihood and traditions. Not only do they care for their animals, physically and emotionally, but they also follow the legal standards of animal welfare to the letter. They are confronted by a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, they have enthusiastic audiences that often give them standing ovations at the end of the show; on the other hand, they are routinely denied the authorization to perform in many cities and villages because of the administrative decision of a few individuals who have embraced the animalists’ cause. It is symptomatic that, frequently, a long line of people can be observed queuing in front of a circus’s wickets to purchase their admission tickets while a dozen or so protesters shout slogans and display offensive signs showing tortured animals. As a response, trainers open more than ever to the public their practice sessions. Investigative journalists occasionally come to their rescue by publicizing this kind of evidence and, more importantly, by revealing the financial side of the animal defense associations that are not all equally devoted to the welfare of animals and even have claimed, at times, that their mission may entail to humanely euthanize the circus animals they are empowered by the law to take away from their keepers.

Flashback Late October 1964. Our winter quarters in Utopia, Ontario, are now ready to comfortably accommodate some animals. The first two lions are installed. The time has come to look for bears as the Canadian winter is fast approaching. We have heard that the best place to purchase bear cubs is the Catskill Game Farm, a vast zoological park in the Appalachian Mountains. I am free from teaching during the weekend. Sarti will stand guard at the barn and take care of our budding menagerie. We drive through New York State to its southeastern corner. The Catskill hills are spectacular at this time of the year. Our contact meets us at the gate and promptly leads us to the bear den. Surprise! At least fifty bear cubs about one-year-old or less are moving around, playing

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and mock-fighting in a vast circular enclosure dug in the ground. A young man guides us through this unusual flock. The animals know him and let him push them around to make way. Gerard looks at the bears intensely and tests their reactions to his gestures. “This one!” “This is Jimmy—says the young man—he is my favorite!” He hugs the bear before we bring it to the crate. “I am sad to see him leave but, you know, I prefer to see him go with you. Here, they breed bears to sell them to hunting clubs after they have grown up.” We are shocked. “Yes! Hunters go out with their guns during the weekends to shoot some bears for fun. Of course, in the Appalachians, you may trek for a full week without encountering a single bear. So, they drive some bears in a truck ahead of the hunters and release them in the forest to make sure that the hunters have something to kill!” This would have been Jimmy’s destiny. This sweet bear stayed in our care for over two years and was eventually donated to a natural animal park in Quebec when our circus went out of business.

A goldfish that made the news Obviously, confronting powerful hunting associations and the gun lobbies that support them would be too dangerous a game for most of those who harass family circuses, and even for the inspirers and organizers of the animal defender movements. Nevertheless, some disciples of the animal cause sometimes demonstrate courage, if not recklessness, and do not shy away from promoting their ultimate radical program. They frame their actions within the agenda of a cultural revolution that calls for the demise of the legacy of the Neolithic achievements, notably the exploiting of species that can provide food and services. They brandish banners advocating veganism and they occasionally picket, albeit more timidly, slaughterhouse and commercial outlets. On November 18, 2017, half a dozen militants were standing in the way to the entrance of the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto, Canada. They were holding large handwritten signs proclaiming: “Don’t eat fish! Fishes are sentient beings; they have emotions!” As the weather turned much colder, they soon disappeared. The fishmongers at the market did not seem to feel threatened. The powerful fish industry is much less vulnerable than family traveling circuses that are the favorite targets of the “animalists.” However, in rare occasions, there is place for humor. Cirque Bouffon, the contemporary circus we met in the Prologue, was performing in Muenster during the second international conference for Zirkuswissenschaft in June 2017. The show was innovative, moving, and breathtaking. At the beginning, when the spectators were reaching their seats, they could see, standing in

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the center of the ring on a pedestal, a goldfish that was swimming in its glass bowl. Later in the program, a tightrope walker proceeded with his balancing act holding the bowl in his hand. The fish looked lively and unperturbed. It would also play a part in the clown act that followed. During the party that took place in the tent after the show, the circus director told us with glee that when they performed in Stuttgart, a few weeks earlier, they were visited by the police who required to see the goldfish. They had to investigate the circus because a group of animalists had filed a complaint on the grounds that this circus was abusing a goldfish in the most inhumane conditions. They were sorry but they said that they may have to seize the animal. The circus gladly complied and the goldfish was brought to the officers who realized that it was a plastic lure whose automatized motions gave the illusion of a live fish. Everybody had a big laugh and, the next morning, it made the news in the local press and television. This free advertising was welcomed by the circus that did excellent business in that city. Everybody wanted to see the fish of contention!

The bane of ideologies From the dawn of human evolution to the way of life of modern days, the destinies of people and animals have been inextricably entangled. The two cannot be observed or conceived independently of each other. This is obvious as far as mere survival is concerned. It is no less evident when we consider the prominent place of animals in the symbolic domain of mythical narratives, religious rituals, and philosophical speculations. Through the history of human cultures, animals have often been the victims of ideologies. Massive slaughtering such as hecatombs, the public sacrifices of a hundred oxen that were practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, were meant to placate or thank the gods. The ritual killing of animals of one kind or another is still an important part of some religions. Medieval Europe, obsessed with witchcraft, associated cats with the Devil. This prejudice lasted until the eighteenth century. In The Great Cat Massacre, cultural historian Robert Darnton (1985) recounts that still in the 1730s, cats were periodically rounded up in Paris, thrown into large bags, and burnt alive in bonfires. During my childhood in Southern France, some farmers were wont to crucify owls on the doors of their barns in order to protect their cattle and themselves from delusional curses. When an owl was heard at night near a house, it was believed that someone in this home was soon to die. The routine killing of these nocturnal birds was believed to keep death at bay. The same superstition is endemic in North America, where the whip-poor-will’s uncanny song at night is also considered a sinister omen.

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Even ideologies that purport to foster a positive attitude toward animal life often bring to them pain and destruction. The popular Buddhist ritual called “fang sheng” in Chinese consists of releasing, as an act of mercy, animals that are kept captive or destined to be slaughtered. This is supposed to bring the faithful good karma. This religious practice dates back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC to 220 AD). The Times of India reported on May 10, 2016, that more than 300 foxes and raccoons had been released in the suburban areas of Beijing without the authorization required by Chinese laws that specify that the environment in which they are set free must be suitable to the animals’ survival. These were animals that had been raised in captivity and were kept as pets. People complained that this custom was wreaking havoc in their backyards and surroundings. With globalization, this ritual has spread to some part of Europe and the Americas. In September 2017, the British press reported the arrest of two London Buddhist monks, Zhixiong Li and Ni Li, who had released in the Channel off Brighton several hundred crabs and lobsters that were destined for seafood restaurants (Sherwood 2017). Bringing alien species into new habitats usually causes ecological disasters such as the extinction of local species if the newcomers adapt to, and prosper in, these novel environments. The damage is not limited to other animal species. Local wild plants and cultivated crops can also fall victims to such unnatural invasions. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has warned that the release of a popular decorative mollusk, the Golden Apple Snail, which is a native of South America, could irreparably ruin Yunnan’s fragile ecology because of its strong adaptive and reproductive capacity coupled with its voracious appetite for rice stems and blades. This long-standing ritual was sporadically practiced until it was recently revived by Hai Tao, a champion of animal rights. There is no doubt that the devotees of this cause are well-meaning people who act out of a desire to serve other living beings with which they feel in sympathy. The animalists who strive to liberate lions, tigers, and elephants from what they consider unhappy conditions are not usually acting out of a religious feeling such as securing good karma; they rather see themselves as morally superior persons who are able to empathize with all living beings. However, as the proverb says, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In Asia, a criminal industry has emerged to serve those who want to practice the annual liberation ritual at the prescribed time of the year: hundreds of thousands of wild animals (birds, snakes, rodents, monkeys, etc.) are captured every year and sold to people who have no pets or do not want to lose the animals they own. Many animals die or are injured in the transactions, and those that survive are often routinely recaptured to satisfy the demand if they are not promptly killed by the local species with which they compete for food and mates.

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In the same vein, costly, high-profile liberations, or even “repatriations” of apes or felines to Africa, may be experienced by the “liberators” of circus animals as a very virtuous, if not heroic, behavior. These actions, though, have little meaning beyond their self-serving fallacies and media impact. Most of the time, they have unintended consequences that are detrimental to the wellbeing of animals that were born and raised in the circus environment and were accustomed to its daily routines. Many had formed bonds with their caretakers, similar to the relationship many humans have with their house pets. Like all ideologies that promised utopias but generated disastrous “cultural revolutions” and their killing fields, the abstract principles that fuel the advocates of animal liberation often end up in mass euthanasia as the organizations themselves acknowledge.

10 Where Is Home? The Circus’s Endless Odyssey

Time travel

C

 onstantinople, December 1321. The winter is mild on the Bosporus. Byzantine astronomer and historian Nicephorus Gregoras walks to the window of his spacious library. The narrow street below leads to a market square. He contemplates the morning crowd that streams down toward the banks of the channel where boats download their bounties and merchants peddle their ware. Life is comfortable in the capital of the empire. Its double fortifications and its moat make it one of the most secure in the world. The population relishes all sorts of entertainments. Nicephorus Gregoras notices a group of mountebanks that proceed through the crowd with their bears and monkeys, sounding their drums. People start following them. Undoubtedly, they will stop somewhere in the square ahead and perform their tricks. This thought brings back to the historian’s memory a spectacle he had witnessed years before. They had made strong impressions on him and he had gathered information about them through the servants who had reported the gossip heard in the crowd. He should record it in his account of the history of the city as a part of the life in the empire he chronicles. The images are still vivid in his mind. He now turns back toward the inside and starts dictating to his scribe: “Recently, that is, during the first decade of the fourteenth century, we saw in Constantinople a group of nomadic people numbering about twenty, talented in acrobatics and juggling. They originally came from Egypt, but then, as they followed a circular path from east to north, they travelled over Chaldea, Arabia, Persia, Media, and Assyria. Then, turning toward the west, they wandered through the Caucasus, Colchis and Armenia and, farther, through

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lands populated by all the tribes which are found in the area, reaching as far as Byzantium, and in each land and city they presented their artistry that was amazing and full of magic. Yet, it had nothing to do with magic, but rather it was the result of skill, inventiveness, and long practice.” Back to the window, Nicephorus Gregoras sees in the distance the crowd that now surrounds the mountebanks who capture their attention and set up their props. He remembers the performance he saw some ten years ago. Why not describe it in detail? He gestures toward the scribe: “Now, let us speak at least briefly about some of their tricks. They placed two or three ship masts straight up on the ground. On both sides ropes were fastened so that the masts would not lean toward one side. Then they pulled a rope from the top of one mast to the other. They also wound a rope around the masts from top to bottom so that they created spiral steps to climb up. One of the men, after he had climbed to the top with the help of these steps, stood on his head on the top of the mast; he put his head on the tip and stretched his legs toward the ground, then he alternately spread his legs and put them together. Then, with a short jump, he grabbed the rope hard with one hand and remained hanging and, from this position, he circled and whirled around the rope several times, spinning his legs in rapid succession up toward the sky and down toward the ground like a wheel.” Nicephorus Gregoras stopped to take his breath as if the spinning gesture he had made while describing the trick from memory had exhausted him. He squinted in an effort to find the right words to report exactly the next movement he remembered: “Then, instead of using his hands, he grabbed the rope with his calf and hung upside down. And again he turned and swirled around in the same way. Then he stood straight up in the middle of the rope, took hold of a bow and arrows and shot at a distant target. From that position he shot with the greatest precision, as no man could manage even if he were standing on the ground. Afterward, with closed eyes and with a child on his shoulders, he walked through the air along the rope from one mast to the other. And that was what one of them did.” As if he were dizzy at the mere thought of it, Nicephorus Gregoras shook his head and his eyes met those of the scribe in which he could read a hint of disbelief. At this moment, he heard a horse whining down in the street. His hand ordered the scribe to get back to writing: “Another man performed on a horse. He whipped it into a trot and, while the horse ran, stood straight up on it, now on the saddle, now on the horse’s mane, now on its back, and he kept changing feet as if he were flying like a bird. Then, he got off while the horse was running, grabbed it by the tail and after the next jump he was suddenly back on the saddle. And while performing this stunt, he did not forget to keep urging the horse on.”

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Nicephorus Gregoras was speaking so fast in excitement, trying to convey the speed with which these feats of horsemanship had unfolded under his eyes that the scribe signaled that he could not keep up. A servant brought a steaming beverage and, while the historian calmed down, images flocked again to his mind: “Another man placed on his head a two-foot pole, on the top of which he put a vessel full of a liquid; then, he walked all around for a long time while balancing the vessel.” “Another man placed on his head a long pole, almost as long as the ship masts, around which a rope was wound, thus creating a sort of steps. A boy climbed up and down while the man was walking around. Still another man threw a glass ball high in the air and caught it when it fell sometimes with his fingertips, sometimes on his elbow, and then again with other parts of his body.” The scribe was in awe. Nicephorus Gregoras addressed him as an aside, not to be recorded: “They did much more, one after the other. I cannot remember every detail. You wonder how this was possible? I saw it. I don’t think it was as easy as it seemed.” Then, a gesture signaled that the scribe should resume his writing: “Since those performances were risky, they lived dangerously. Often, someone fell and died. I heard that when they left their homeland, they were more than forty, but hardly twenty arrived at Byzantium. We ourselves saw one fall from a pole and die. Collecting money from the spectators, they travelled around the world both to earn money and also to perform their art. After leaving Byzantium, they travelled through Thrace and Macedonia, and reached Gadir in Spain. They made the whole world a stage for their theatre.” Nicephorus Gregoras is not only a historian but also a theologian and philosopher. Reflecting upon the stunts he just remembered, a thought occurs to him and he dictates the following as a kind of conclusion: “What they did was remarkable but ultimately useless. Their skill and energy did not produce anything practical. It was hard work for nothing but causing awe, and their actions vanished without trace. What does drive these people to roam the earth? Desire for money, undoubtedly; perhaps also the love for their art and way of life.”

Ports of call The circus has no home (Croft-Cook 1941). This mode of life both fascinates and frightens sedentary populations as much today as it did in the fourteenth century, and probably long before, in a past that left no tracks. The nomadic existence feeds sedentary folks’ fantasy of freedom and, at the same time,

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arouses their anxiety of being placeless. In addition, nomadism is a nightmare for nation states that are obsessed with controlling identities in terms of place of birth and physical address. Of course, in modern times, many successful circus artists have secured real estate properties to which they return periodically or in which they retire, but their very life always depended on being constantly on the move. In an interview published in the French magazine Bretagne Circus, William and Stanislas Kerwich, the owners of Cirque Royal, answer the questions of Christian Battaglia (Battaglia 2017). As usual the family’s oral history starts with the grandfather, an equilibrist and contortionist, who married an equestrian from a legendary lineage, the Zerbinis. One of their children was Armand Kerwich, whose wife was from another circus that toured North Africa. This is where they ran their own show until the Algerian war prompted them to move to France. I met them in 1957 when I worked at Cirque Bouglione. Armand presented a stunning solo aerial act, balancing on a trapeze. Dressed as a sailor, he first acted out as a drunken member of the public who interfered with the show while a female acrobat was being introduced by the ring master. He soon stepped in and grabbed the rope that he ascended in a way that was not inconsistent with his assumed inebriated state. Upon reaching the trapeze, he suddenly stood upright on the bar, keeping his balance without holding the trapeze’s ropes. Then, he performed a series of daring feats, including standing on a chair, and concluding with kneeling down frontally on the bar without the help of his hands and catching with his mouth a lit cigarette he had placed there. Returning to the upright position, he triumphantly blew a cloud of smoke that authenticated his achievement. The applause was all the more enthusiastic as he had generated a high degree of anxiety in the public. At the time, William and Stanislas were little boys playing and toiling with their siblings on the circus lot. The Bretagne Circus interview allows me to catch up with this family’s life story. They now tour the southern regions of France with a medium-size tent and a number of exotic animals and horses. The old question comes up. The two brothers, William and Stanislas, have learned everything from their elders: trapeze, acrobatics, animal training, including wild cats. At times, they have settled for a while, then traveled again to work as acrobats or with their animals in other circuses. Now they run their own show. The challenge of a nomadic life? Stanislas replies: “We are more circus folks than travelers: we travel because it is required by our profession.” There is a perceptible insistence to define a circus identity by contrast with the “lower” status of travelers. “Our profession is beautiful and very hard, but we enjoy a fantastic independence. For us, life on the road is not a choice; it is a consequence of our art.” It is an intense life. Sandy Sun once used a war metaphor when we were discussing her trapeze act: “For me, every time I stepped into the ring, it

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was like going to the front line. You don’t know if you will come back alive.” It is, though, a fulfilling existence. On December 11, 2017, Alejandro Rossi, an outstanding artist who performs Icarian acrobatics with his brother, posted on his Facebook page the following text: “Just cannot wait to work hard again, feel alive on the stage, the emotion of the audience is my passion. My everything is circus! Proud of me and my brother, of our career together, of our travel around the whole world!—Sweat—blood—tears! Life is a circus!” Make no mistake. Alejandro does not mean “circus” in the derogatory sense. He means that only in the circus does he feel totally alive.

A circus named Voyage Wednesday, June 14, 2017. After several weeks in Berlin, Circus Voyage has arrived in Braunschweig. Sascha Grodotzki expects my two-day visit with the photographer this weekend. “Voyage” is not a metaphor. This family circus is on the move most of the year with their eighty or so animals, not always sure of what will be the next port of call. Sascha is their new pilot, the “tournee manager.” He likes to work with these folks in spite of, or perhaps because of, their own way of life, at some distance from the constraints of the mercantile and bureaucratic society within which they reasonably prosper. He is keen on sharing his experience: “This is a very humane environment. A few days ago, I was quite upset because my mother texted me that she had serious problems at home with the house plumbing. Leaving the job, even for only the time it takes to drive to Bavaria and back, would disrupt my circus chores. I was hesitant to ask my boss for a brief leave. I just told him about my mother’s troubles. His spontaneous reaction surprised me: ‘Go home, Sascha. Come back when the problems are solved. Family first!’” This is Alois Spindler, the man that Sascha has learned to appreciate: I never saw him hit the animals. They seem all to like him. He is not fanatic about forcing them to perform extraordinary tricks. The sheer number of those which he presents in the ring create awe in the audience. The giraffes are quite a hit; the hippo just slowly walks to a pedestal and receives a piece of his favorite food; depending on the circumstances, he displays his liberty act with six or twelve horses; there are zebras and lamas; the four African elephants have a great relationship with him. They are not chained.” I ask Sascha how he feels with all this zoo around him. “Fine. Well …, the other day, the hippo had settled in front of the door of my caravan, munching some cabbage. I cried for help. The circus had a good laugh. I am only really scared of the geese.—The ones which swim in the water tank at the beginning of the show?—Yes! They often roam around the lot during the day and when they see me they rush to bite me. They seem to have fun doing that.”

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FIGURE 31  Alois Spindler. In a family circus, even the director plays his part in setting up the tent. Photo credit: Sascha Grodotzki.

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FIGURE 32  (a) Sascha Grodotzki: “In a circus, someone has to do the paper work.” Photo credit: Axel Biewers. (b)  Sascha Grodotzki: “Schakira is our female giraffe in Circus Voyage. She is 14 years old and very kind. I love to spend my free time with her and watch her long, beautiful eyelashes.” Photo credit: Alois Spindler.

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September 23, 2017. My cell phone warns me that someone has posted a picture on Facebook. It is from Sacha who is sharing with his friends a photo of the five white geese that have decided to install themselves in front of his caravan. Three are sleeping, their head under their folded wings. Two stand guard in front of the door. Poor Sascha is taken hostage. His comment (translated from the German): “The new way to lock me in the office! They just wait for me! Ready to attack as soon as I open the door!”

There is circus and circus There are two kinds of traditional circuses: the family circus and the industrial circus. During the last two centuries, entrepreneurs have noted the profitability of running a circus business because it requires a relatively low investment compared to modern industries. Attractive programs can be made up by drawing from an oversupply of low-cost artists. The idea of the circus itself is a sufficient symbolic capital that can be marketed like all other industrial products. Occasional stars may command higher fees and be featured on the posters but such expenses pay off through improving the competitiveness of a company. The same animals can perform economically for their lifetime under a variety of decorations and a great diversity of musical and cultural themes. These circuses are managed like a business with an obsession for maximizing their profits that can be very substantial. Contracts with highprofile artists and cities where the shows will take place are signed one or two years in advance. The schedule is very intense and constraining following a rational logistic. These circuses are, of course, subject to the unpredictable vagaries of the social and climate contexts such as economic crises, strikes, or unfavorable weather. When they fail, they quickly move to other branches of the entertainment industry because they are not committed to the circus as such. It would be against their capitalistic logic to scale down their operation in order to just survive until the storm has passed. The closing of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus in 2017 is a good example of this economic strategy. The owners were businesspeople for whom losing money is not an option. The capital can be put to work elsewhere. Sascha has worked for such a circus. He endured the cold pressure of a private entrepreneur’s circus. He knows from experience the difference now that he has been hired by a family circus. The nine men and women who come to bow to the audience at the end of the two-and-a-half-hour show of Cirque Voyage are members of a single family and some of their relatives or friends. The animals have been theirs for a long time. Many were born in the circus. They provide most of the second part of the program, presented by the owner and his wife.

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Circus families all over Europe have specific social identity. They form a rich network of traditional performers who proudly assert their genealogies and cultural heritage. They tend to marry within their clan or, rather, “corporation” or “guild” in the sense these words had in feudal Europe, that is, a group of tradesmen with similar business interests based on special skills for which they were holding a legal monopoly granted by cities or royal decrees. In Germany, for instance, they call themselves Komödiant [Comedian, Entertainer], as distinct from the Szhausteller [Show people] and the Puppet players upon whom they look down. Like all ancient guilds, they do not welcome outsiders. They long kept to themselves the techniques of their tricks. However, they had to adapt to the modern cultural evolution that tended to open their traditional trade to private artists and entrepreneurs who appropriated or rediscovered the “secrets” of their trade. Circus has now become largely mainstream and widely democratized but in an adulterated manner. They seem, though, to stay confident that the companies that can survive only with sizeable government grants are more fragile than their own resilient way of life. The new acrobats spawned by circus schools may be good performers. Family circuses occasionally hire them in order to beef up their programs. But in general, the spectacles of these new companies are more theater than circus, often performing acrobatic ballets on stage, catering to the elites rather than to the wider populations. Their productions are sophisticated, at times quite abstruse like innovative art is supposed to be. Some have introduced massive technological means and their cast includes more lawyers and marketers than artists. The sense of ritual, though, is absent. We can discover the deep meaning of the circus when we realize what we miss in these spectacular, but ultimately superficial, events. More importantly, these new artists are ephemeral and they tend to be individualistic. It is hard to imagine them founding dynasties that depend on their skills for survival across the centuries to come. Sascha is beaming with happiness. He belongs to the Voyage, on this infinite Odyssey. He respects the otherness of the family he serves. There are moments of stress and tension. They have their own virtues and values. He is a perfectionist. He recalls that the first time the show had to be canceled because there were fewer than fifty spectators, he felt depressed and worried that this was the result of his poor performance as an administrator. He sheepishly went to his boss to say sorry. The reaction was surprising and comforting at the same time: “Don’t worry. This is not a big deal. It is circus business!” Indeed, through good and bad times, the show must go on. This family circus can cope. There will always be better days. For the matinee, in Braunschweig, the people have answered the call of the circus. Almost half of the seats are occupied. Sascha ushers us, the photographer and me, into the dimly lighted tent and guides us to a loge from which there is perfect frontal visibility. Surprisingly, the ring has been replaced

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with a large circular tank in which five white geese leisurely swim, honking from time to time. In the center, a small platform stands above the water. It is topped by a fake rock. Just before the show is to start, a man carries a girl to the platform and installs her on the rock. Her feet and legs have been slipped into a mermaid outfit. She takes the pose of the famous statue in Copenhagen before a spotlight reveals her aquatic body. The music can start. From an aisle between the rows of bleachers, a dignified ringmaster pretends to read an ancient book to tell the audience a story about the mermaid. The staging takes hold of our imagination. We are eased into the unreality of the circus. A clown distracts us with his popcorn antics while the mermaid and the rock are carried back behind the curtain. Music. Bright lights. A young man dressed as a pirate is now standing on the platform. His rola-bola act—a succession of planks put on cylinders in order to create the most instable basis upon which the acrobat must keep his balance—is performed with energy and his occasional failures and recoveries trigger hearty applause. He is obviously a beginner whose youth arouses the sympathy of the audience. The clown returns and briefly improvises tricks with the geese that love the popcorn he holds in a bag. In the meantime, a new prop is brought to the platform. It is a metallic oval frame within which a young woman, introduced as Anastasia, develops a series of difficult, but esthetically pleasing, contortions. She projects a contagious smile that convince the spectators that she actually enjoys entertaining them, irrespective of the pains caused by bending her limbs and spine to form a kind of body calligraphy. After a quick change of props, an athletic young man displays feats of hand balancing. He looks serious and focused while he achieves daunting acrobatic figures in slow and smooth motion. The public follows his act with intense, respectful attention. Anastasia returns to execute aerial poses hanging from a net above a large, transparent tub of water. At times she plunges and the lighting reveals her streamlined body gracefully moving in the water. She emerges again to rise to the top holding her net, dripping thousands of drops that glitter under the multicolor spotlights. Back to her aquatic domain, she starts vigorously splashing the water, jumping up and down, wildly projecting high jets that delight the spectators even though those in the front row get a bit wet. The photographer steps back but I faintly hear the fast clicks of the camera. We will have great pictures of this act that is not easy to capture. Photographing circus artists in action is a major challenge: the rhythm is sustained; the poses are elusive instants; the spotlights interfere; the acts themselves can make you forget that you hold a camera. It is now the turn of Alicia with her feet-juggling act. She has traded her mermaid persona for a colorful leotard and, high on a pedestal, she keeps props rotating at the tip of her toes, concluding with a fiery cylinder that dramatically spurts flames. Thus, after water, earth, and air, fire completes the cosmology that was embedded into this ritual celebrating the human mastery of the elements.

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FIGURE 33  Circus Voyage: rola bola creates the first emotions. Will the artist manage to keep his balance on the successive boards he adds on top of the unstable sphere? Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

FIGURE 34  Circus Voyage: harmonious balancing and contortions within a metal frame by Anastasia. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

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FIGURE 35  Circus Voyage: spectacular hand balancing by an impressive young athlete, Akim Weisheit. Slow motion in artistic body choreography. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

FIGURE 36  Circus Voyage: foot-juggling with fire by Alicia Spindler. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

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FIGURE 37  Circus Voyage: emerging from her aquatic realm, Anastasia projects a contagious smile of triumph and joy. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

The intermission gives us a respite. I rush to tell Sascha how we enjoyed the show. I did not have the heart of taking notes. I was totally engulfed in awe. Note taking will come later, when we return for the evening performance. The photographer is more reserved. This is his character. However, when we check the pictures he took during that session, I can see how deeply he empathized with the artists. Sascha welcomes my invitation to join us for dinner after the last show. The music signals that the second part of the program is about to start. Alicia opens the second part by an aerial act. Loops and a trapeze hang from a chandelier that is hoisted high under the tent. There, she defies gravity with grace and audacity until, in a dramatic move, she releases her grip and catches the bar with her feet. As she lands on the ground, generous applause greets her return to earth. During the intermission, the water tank was emptied and removed. The ring is now filled with fragrant sawdust. We can expect animals. Alois Spindler, with his signature hat, enters the arena with camels and lamas; then, six jay-black Friesian horses canter, weave their way in the opposite direction, pirouette, and finally form a line in the center of the ring to receive a gustatory reward from their trainer before being walked back to their stalls. A speedy white horse appears and quickly rears and proceeds toward the exit on his hind legs. It is noticeable that the animals are not nervous. Shouts and gestures prompt their movements. The discipline is not rigorously

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enforced. The clown Peppino performs some gags with the children in the audience. Soon, a massive horse enters the ring with a ballerina standing on its back. Alicia has donned a new costume. Now, she embodies the traditional female equestrian that remains a symbol of the earlier circuses. She maintains her balance while dancing, jumping, and keeping three hula-hoops rotating around her waist and arms. She is followed by a double dancing horse act. Peppino offers a rose to a lady seated in a loge. She gracefully accepts until she realizes that she holds only the lower part of the stem. The clown has kept the rose in his hand. During that gag, a tightwire walker apparatus has been installed. The ring master introduces Leonardo who quickly takes place on one of the small platforms that, at both ends, provide stable spots for landing between tricks. This gifted acrobat is a personable teenager. He does most of the classical routines of this specialty. It is possible to concentrate on his skill without anxiety because his relative safety is ensured by a mattress that has been placed under the cable and, for the riskiest tricks, someone stands guard close by so that his fall could be mitigated if he were to lose his balance. The audience is captivated by his clearing of various obstacles on the wire, his breathtaking skipping of a rope, his energetic leaping and bouncing, and, to conclude, his daring jumping through a hoop of fire that is held in front of him by an assistant. We enjoy a brief lull. The photographer is annoyed because it was too difficult to capture the final trick. He will try a better position for the evening show. Suddenly, the music sounds exotic. The turn of the large African mammals has come. Four elephants are presented by the director and his wife. Like for the horses, there is no visible stress. The animals are not required to push the limits of their natural capabilities. One of them repeatedly kicks a huge blue ball toward the audience. Children compete to catch it and send it back to the elephant. The audience love that game. Here comes a giraffe that lower its neck to pass through the artists’ entrance. Alois Spindler holds the animal with a long, loose leash. During its walk around the ring, some spectators are encouraged to offer pieces of carrot to the peaceful giant. This is not all. A massive hippopotamus slowly works its way to a strong pedestal that has been carried to the center. Once it has settled there, it takes only a fresh cabbage to entice it to open wide its huge mouth, showing its pink palate and large teeth. This cornucopia of animals has filled the circus with the pungent scent of nature that soon blends with the modern smell of gas when a motorcycle roars to the ring and madly starts making risky loops within the vibrating “globe of death,” a metallic sphere firmly anchored to the ground. Now, the ring master ushers in the artists who come to take their bows to the audience. Nine in all, they have provided more than two hours of a typical circus experience. I keep looking at the public, on each side of the tent. The most expensive seats are sparsely occupied but the bleachers are packed.

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FIGURE 38  Circus Voyage: the elephants learn fast how to play ball games. This one will drop the ball to the ground and kick it toward the audience. A kid will immediately launch it back and the elephant will kick it again. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

FIGURE 39  Circus Voyage: Schakira the giraffe expects a reward after following Alois Spindler around the ring. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

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FIGURE 40  Circus Voyage: The hippo takes its time but Diana Spindler can wait with a succulent cabbage in her hand while the audience admires the slow walk of this massive and docile animal, which eventually reaches the stool where it now stands. Photo credit: Zbigniew Roguszka.

While clapping my hands vigorously, I decide to stand up. A family does the same in another loge. Within a few seconds, the whole audience offers the artists a standing ovation. After the crowd has cleared the lot, Sascha drives us to the city center. We can relax in a spacious pizza restaurant. Once again, he expresses his pleasure working for this family circus: “It is hard work. I had to solve a problem yesterday. I had secured a date in a city that is usually good for circuses. Suddenly, I hear that my boss has received a phone call from another circus’s owner who wanted that date for his own circus. These companies compete for business but they share common values. The man had put forward the argument that Circus Voyage relies on family members for his show and can weather hard times. The other circus produces a bigger spectacle and has to pay every day the many extra artists he hires. My boss agreed. Next time, he may be the one who will ask for a favor. In the meantime, I have to get back to the phone to secure another town.” We raise our beers to toast Circus Voyage. We are outsiders. We don’t fully belong to their world. They are kind to Sascha. They truly appreciate his administrative skills. They simply tend to load him with too many tasks. Crises occur at times.

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“Last month, I was ready to go. Enough was enough! They improved my salary. But, what is more important, they said they truly needed me. This is not a cold business atmosphere. I was happy. I love this job. I like also their animals … except the geese!” Sasha has his own caravan that is also his office. Moving from town to town every few weeks is a constant source of headaches. The itineraries must be carefully planned. The two giraffes travel in a very high convoy that cannot clear all bridges. “In and all, we manage. When we are settled in a lot, things are a little quieter. It is a pretty good way of life. Except for a couple of extra circus hands, they need only the family to produce the show. When they wake up in early morning, they first go and feed the animals. Then, they can retire for breakfast in their comfortable caravans. Not much to do for them until the show. It is time for family chores and acrobatic practice. My boss is not a fanatic trainer who would be obsessed with new, let alone perfect tricks. His priority is to maintain a good, trusting relation with all his animals.” Sadly, it is now time for us to part. I feel nostalgic about my own circus experience. It was hard but so meaningful! I will remain in contact with Sascha through Facebook and Messenger. We hug. I tell him that I will devote a chapter to Voyage with the photos of the show we enjoyed. I feel sad also to have to conclude this book, but not before taking leave of my friends in an ultimate epilogue.

Epilogue The Show Must Go On

The story must be told

J

une 2017. Halfway in the year, the second conference on Zirkus Wissenschaft will soon take place at the University of Muenster. I am due to speak there on my interpretation of the circus as a primal ritual that celebrates the triumph of life daringly staring at death without blinking. Strangely, I feel uneasy, though, to be identified with a “scientific” endeavor whose object is the circus. It is true that I have published scholarly articles and volumes on this topic. However, the meaning of circus has always been for me more than an academic subject. This book has attempted to explore more deeply my bond with the circus way of existence and to honor the characters, skills, creativity, and human values of the artists I have encountered. Getting published, however, requires some measure of compromising with the commercial imperatives of a paper industry that is struggling to survive the digital age. The initial title of this book was Circus Alive with, as a subtitle, ritual, art, and awe. Strategically, my publisher decided to excerpt other words from my proposal and use a more conventional, albeit nicely ambiguous, title The Meaning of the Circus. To make sure that it would be pigeon-holed in the right library categories, a new subtitle was added including the buzz word “communication.” I managed to negotiate the inclusion of “experience” because this book is primarily about experiencing the circus. On the whole, I was happy to comply with the terminological imperative because the meanings of words are not carved in stone but are endowed with a perverse and polymorphic capacity for growing new dimensions and generating unexpected trans-senses, beyond genres

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and genders. It is my hope that through perusing these chapters, readers have been sensitized to new resonances and perspectives leading to a deeper understanding of the meaning of circus far remote from the scholastic constraints of a stale semiotic vocabulary. June 13, 2017. As a new opportunity to pursue my quest arises, I decide to pay a visit to Circus Krone that performs this week in Landshut, a short train ride form Munich where I landed the day before. Nikolai Tovarich will be there and will expect me in the afternoon in the circus bar that is always set up in front of the circus tent. We resume our conversation from March, a year ago. There is despondency in the air. It has been a hard winter. Health issues have plagued the circus. In the winter program, the clown Carletto passed away suddenly during the show. Now, the touring season is experiencing a slow start with bad weather and the constant harassments of the animalists. He wonders what will happen when the ailing current owner disappears. This year, Nikolai’s iconic role as ring master has been toned down. As we chat, I discover that he was only seven-year old when I was working at Cirque Bouglione in the late 1950s. I had not noticed him then although I was familiar with the acrobatic act of his parents and sisters who performed in that season’s program. During the relatively huge time gap between then and now, he enjoyed a brilliant career as a member of the family troupe and as an equestrian with his wife whose horses are the specialty. Would he be willing to open his archives so that we can document his artistic life as a conclusion to this book? This would give substance to his repeated lament about his sense of the decline of the circus: “all what we have left is our memories.” He often posts in Facebook old photographs of the Tovarich troupe across several generations. We agree that I will come again in two weeks with my photographer when the circus plays in Deggendorf. In the train back to Munich, I reflect upon the haphazard convergences and coincidences that make up the fabric of the circus life that ran parallel to, and inspired, my other life. At 23, I admired Eva Tovarich’s act when Nikolai was an invisible young boy playing around their caravan. Like most of the circus folks that season, I watched her act every day. It was a live sculpture that embodied the canon of human perfection. She was performing with her husband and two daughters but she was the one who elevated and carried all of them in stunning and elaborated feats of strength. Now, in my conversations with Nikolai, I learn that she had retired in the city of Benidorm, on the balmy Mediterranean coast of Spain. There, she had survived a violent attack by thieves. In her nineties, as her health was declining, she had warned her children: “Don’t bother to come down there for my funeral. The show must go on. Anyway, I have donated my body to the local Faculty of Medicine.” Ground acrobatics is the purest form of the circus arts. It involves the human body without any supplementary accessories such as props and costumes. Sometimes, a carpet or a low platform simply defines the area upon

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which the spectacle unfolds. The function of these added elements is to make the surface even and the act more visible from a distance. The artists carry with themselves all their spectacular resources: neuromuscular coordination, strength, and sense of balance. Etymologically, “acrobat” means in ancient Greek “the one who walks on all his/her extremities” with reference to the hands. Performing in the upside-down position is a rich acrobatic paradigm. Jumps of various kinds also belong to this repertory. These skills are the basis of solo acts but ground acrobatics has also evolved as a cooperative endeavor that requires the harmonious synchronization of two or more persons, either to form human pyramids or to build complex figures supported by a single individual. It is as much a matter of timing and the management of gravity as it is a display of muscular strength. These acrobats are usually minimally dressed and their body displays the kind of physical perfection obtained through regular training without exhibiting exaggerated muscular masses. Their performance is more fluid and integrated than in athletic competitions. Ground acrobatics, mainly when it is performed by a troupe whose members, incidentally, are often related, suggests the functional complementarity of the body politic. It can be perceived as a metaphor of social harmony since the successive configurations show a high degree of cooperation under the authority of a strong leader who can support the whole group, literally. Eva Tovarich was such a person. Deggendorf, July 1, 2017. Zirkus Krone is performing there as planned. A few days earlier, the legendary owner of that circus, Christel Sembach-Krone, unexpectedly died. She had succeeded her parents, years ago, and had run this traditional circus with authority and panache. Her circus remained the most important in Europe. Crippled by old age, she used to follow the show on the summer tours, watching the program through close-circuit television from her luxurious caravan. She had a passion for horses. In the course of her artistic career, she was the iconic equestrian who participated, year after year, in all the programs. My circus friends on Facebook are mourning and post beautiful pictures from their archives as a spontaneous memorializing gesture. Over the last five decades, I often visited this circus both in Munich and when it was on tour in major European cities. An image has remained vivid in my memory: her directing the coordinated evolutions in the ring of a giraffe and an Arabian bay horse named Al-Ghazi. As we approach the massive blue tent with our tickets and photographic equipment, Nikolai Tovarich waves to us from the entrance and guides us to better situated front seats. We hurry as the show is starting. I inquisitively gesture toward an empty loge that might be still better for our purpose. “No, sorry, this is reserved for the direction.” Obviously, the loge must remain vacant, whether or not the direction uses it. In the inner geography of the circus, this is a marked place, like the inner sanctum of a temple except that, here, it is the best vantage point to capture the whole arena within a single gaze. In spite of his

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impressive stature, commanding voice, and formal red tuxedo, I sense how the ring master’s authority is but a role programmed by the transcendent order of the circus itself, symbolized by the power of this spot that is empty most of the time.

A memory album In the context of the second decade of the twenty-first century, there is, in the traditional circus, an impending sense of doom. Does this signal the end of a generation or the demise of a culture, if not a cult? When Nikolai Tovarich voices his nostalgia for a world lost, he does not refer only to his own experience of the last forty years but also, and perhaps primarily, to the saga of his family. Often, he posts on his Facebook page old photos that show acrobats posing in front of the camera in their vintage performing outfits. Ground acrobatic acts are amenable to being thus frozen in time because the tricks consist of achieving a succession of stable, albeit challenging three- or four-person high constructions. “The Tovarich troupe was famous. They performed in all the major European circuses. I don’t have all the pictures here. I am sorry. I thought I had more. The others are still in my home in Munich.” We had agreed last month that I would come with the photographer that day in Deggendorf. Lots of things have happened in the meantime. Life on the road is like sailing on rough sea. Now that the afternoon show is over, Nikolai is guiding us through the backstage of the circus toward his dressing room in the front section of a trailer. It is the place where he stores some tuxedos of various colors, changes clothes, and applies some makeup before the spectacle starts. We climb in this cramped space, littered with discarded candy wrappers and newspapers. Out of the limelight, costumes and other props lose their vibrant qualities. They will come alive again in the ring but here, in the glaring sunshine coming through the open door, they hang from hooks or lay on the floor as lifeless shadows of their past splendor. Nikolai extracts two cardboard boxes from a jammed closet. The photos are mixed up with clippings, leaflets, and yellowed contracts. “See what you can use. I will have to go soon to my caravan. I will be back in half an hour to get ready for the evening show.” We have some time, though, for me to ask questions. “Who is this lady on the horse?—My wife. Her family, the Schicklers, had a big circus in Eastern Germany. They were seized by the Communist regime. They escaped with some horses during the night. They put rags on the hooves to mute the noise.—In the 1960s, I saw a wonderful high school act at Circus Knie in Switzerland by the Schickler sisters.—Yes, they were my wife’s sisters. My wife is also a great horse trainer. When Christel Sembach-Krone saw us perform, she said: “I want you in my circus. And we are still here now.—Who is this beautiful lady?—My mother, Eva Tovarich. That was before the war.”

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Pressed by time, I run through dozens of fading photographs that are stuffed in envelops or just piled up in no discernible order. When, day after day, the most urgent task is to face what comes next, there is no time for creating archives, let alone writing a history. Often, Nikolai told me: “All what we have left is our memories.” At this very moment, on the brink of time, our two memories briefly overlapped, just enough to fuse in a moment of empathy. Our paths have crossed in the circus kingdom that transcends borders and generations. As the photographer struggles to secure the tripod and desperately tries various angles to offset the glare on the surface of these images, I see in my inner circus the vivid acts that once were. Is attempting to memorialize them nothing but a futile gesture? Perhaps, but this tribute is all that is within my derisive power.

FIGURE 41  Eva Tovarich. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives.

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FIGURE 42  The Tovarich troupe. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives.

FIGURE 43  The Tovarich troupe. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives.

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FIGURE 44  The Tovarich troupe. From Nikolai Tovarich’s archives.

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FIGURE 45  A family moment: Nikolai Tovarich with his sister Francesca.

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Circus alive This power, though, must be used to the best of my abilities. There is hope that this human and artistic resource will perpetuate itself as the world undergoes profound, even dramatic, transformations. Adaptation is of the essence of the circus that has experienced for millennia periods of persecution and decline. In times of duress, private entrepreneurs may close their circus business and engage in other trades because the circus was for them a mere tool to accumulate wealth. Family circuses, by contrast, are the circus itself. They might go dormant for a while when wars and depressions rage but they flourish again when the spring of peace returns. Bob Hopkins’s film, Raggedy Rawney (1988), is indirectly emblematic of this extraordinary resilience. The storyline focuses on a young deserter who escapes the horrors of the war by stabbing his commander and fleeing dressed as a girl. He joins a Gypsy troupe that also attempts, with their horse-drawn wagons, to find their way out of the chaos of fighting armies. Is this meant to be the Second World War or a tragic anticipation of the wars to come in the Balkans? Or is it not perhaps the symbol of an ever-hostile world? This does not matter. For the nomadic folks who found themselves in the midst of dangerous surroundings through which they proceed by threading side roads and forest trails, this war is an alien affair. Their imperative is to carry through and survive, hoping to reach a temporary safe haven. This is the deep meaning of the saga within which the fate of the deserter is embroidered. This strong and moving film foregrounds the destiny of the travelers who foster in their deep-time memory a stock of body techniques, social skills, and illusions that keep fascinating us. Here, they may sell rags or weave baskets; there, they may cause our awe with their tricks when the situation is opportune. They perpetuate a way of life and produce inspiring performances that transcend political, religious, and cultural borders. Of course, not all circus families are acknowledged Roms but it seems that others have appropriated, and sometimes partly rediscovered, these treasures that give meaning to what humans can achieve with their strength, suppleness, will, and courage alone. Some outsider lineages have accessed, through several generations, the empowering status of belonging to the immemorial circus legend. They all embody a most precious human heritage. Geneva, September 5, 2017. I am completing my last trip to visit some circus friends who are performing in Switzerland before concluding this book. I have been a friend on Facebook with Michael Ferreri, an outstanding juggler I briefly met in Munich two years earlier. Now, Michael is one of the stars of the program of the famed Swiss Circus Knie. His fast juggling act has received many awards in circus festivals. We have arranged to meet for coffee at the circus bar before the show. Through Facebook, I have become somewhat familiar with his activities and values. Our second encounter confirms his

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direct and warm personality. He irradiates both self-confidence and modesty. As a true artist, he has taken the measure of his potential as well as his limits. Michael Ferreri embodies for me the present and future of the circus, the proof that the traditional circus is alive and well, not a leftover from the past. Where will you be next year?—In the United States, more exactly California, with Circus Vargas which tours only this American state. I worked for them already some years ago, in 2012. It was a good experience. They are a fine company. They present great shows—Will you return to Europe?—Perhaps, but Circus Knie is such a summit for an artist that … well, it is difficult to find a more prestigious place to perform in Europe—What about Cirque du Soleil?— Twice they offered me a contract but I turned them down. If I work there, I will be just “a juggler”. They will change my face with a make-up of their own invention … and I will be forced to perform in one of these extravagant costumes they like.—Yes, I agree. It is depersonalizing. It always makes me angry when I see their shows, with a stage full of busy actors and mechanistic props that interfere with the artists’ performances and personalities.—True. I want to be myself in the ring and relate to the audience. Michael Ferreri is indeed a great artist. We talk about the danger of becoming arrogant when one achieves some form of excellence. He adds that another juggler whom he does not want to name has been changed like that. He used to admire him but the last time he saw him, he realized that he had become full of himself. Michael’s achievements have reached the Guinness Book of World Records: 390 catches with 5 balls in one minute on November 13, 2016; 378 catches with 7 balls in one minute on August 20, 2017. His aim is now to combine a still higher number of balls and catches than what has been done to date. His latest attempt failed and he said so on his Facebook page. Typically, he does not mention in our conversation that he has been selected for the forthcoming 42nd International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo, the best recognition that an artist can receive, short of getting a Golden Clown, something, I am convinced, is within his reach. Ferreri is a stage name that was adopted by his grandfather, Miguel Jimenez Valenzuela, who did a hand-to-hand act in the 1930s, first with a partner, then with his brother Antonio. They were known as the Ferreri Brothers. Later, his grandfather performed a solo hand balancing act that was featured in many circuses, including in the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey circus during its European tour in 1962–1963. Michael’s father, Miguel Jimenez Gabriel Santos, who started performing his low-wire act at 13, enjoyed an international career that lasted forty-five years. Michael Ferreri, Michael Aluis Jimenez Santos, is at least the fourth generation of circus artists on his father side and the fifth generation on his mother side, the Buegler family who owned a circus in Germany. A quick search in Google images leads me to a brief footage of Zirkus Buegler entering a town with its caravan of horse-drawn wooden wagons from the time of the silent cinema. We see glimpses of the performance in open sky

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behind a mere wall of canvas: a female contortionist, then a man with a trained monkey. Circus memory rarely goes so far back in time. Actually, in a later message, Michael will confess that he had to phone his parents to provide me with this genealogical information. At 20, his strong sense of identity is expressed by the detailed account of his budding career, his day-to-day efforts to achieve excellence in his specialty. Fast juggling requires ceaseless practice. He started to learn juggling when he was 11 and presented his act for the first time at 13 in the program of the Norwegian Cirkus Merano. After a Californian tour with his father at Circus Vargas, he took part in the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain (Paris) in 2014 and received the Bronze Medal as well as the special prize of the Moulin Rouge. He was then 17, the youngest artist in the competition. More awards followed: bronze medal at the festival of Albacete; silver clown at the New Generation Festival of Monte Carlo; and, in 2016, the gold medal at the European Youth Circus Festival (Wiesbaden). I am now in my seat in Circus Knie, waiting for the show to start. I scribble some words on my notebook lest I forget some bits of my conversation with Michael. As usual, I am profoundly moved by the high artistic standard of the show. Circus Knie is an international reference. In the 1970s and 1980s, I conducted ethnographic research on the acts that were produced in this circus, as did my former student Andrea Semprini. The then public-relations man, Kris Krenger, kindly cooperated with our endeavors by arranging meetings with artists and providing ideal seats for our observations. The special issue of the journal Semiotica which I edited in 1991 features photographs taken during these performances. Kris Krenger is now retired. He appreciated the kind of research we were doing. I am now an anonymous spectator. I can enjoy the show fully, without the stress of completing some fieldwork under academic grants. Anyway, the first viewing has always been for the pleasure. Actual work started with the second and subsequent observations. Today, I did not need the support of anybody to get access to Michael. Facebook is my new research platform. Communication-savvy artists are prompt to accept genuine friendship invitations. At long last, I can watch in the flesh the act I have often admired when he shares his videos on Facebook. His own website, www.ferrerijuggler.com, is inspiring. Fast juggling adds brilliance to skill. The speed with which the white balls move through space up and around him hardly lets us see when and how he catches them. All the figures of this art are displayed in succession. The performance is so rich and brilliant that there is no need to rely on other props such as clubs and hoops to extend its duration. Every few seconds, a new ball is released from the top of the tent and enters the continuous stream until Michael Ferreri juggles eight of them. This is not all. The ringmaster pops in from the backstage and sends him a ninth ball. Michael first pretends to refuse this new challenge and kicks the ball back to the sender. This brief humorous moment makes us realize that he is now going to keep nine balls moving in the air without letting any fall to the ground. The virtuosity of the performance and

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the charisma of the artist combine to create a rare epiphany. I am moved to tears. I join the audience in clapping until my palms hurt. When I meet Michael after the show, in a spontaneous, unusual gesture, I kiss his hands. Whatever may happen through the hazards of history, the circus will always rise again because its meaning is deeply grounded in the most primal instincts, emotions, and values that define the human kind.

FIGURE 46  Michael Ferreri. Photo credit: Steven Ferreri.

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Bouissac, P. (2015). The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning: Rituals of Transgression and the Theory of Laughter. London: Bloomsbury. Croft-Cook, R. (1941). The Circus Has No Home. London: Methuen. Darnton, R. (1985). The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episode in French Cultural History. New York: Vintage Books. Goudard, P. (2005). Anatomie d’un clown. Montpellier: L’Entretemps. Goudard, P. (2010). Le cirque entre l’élan et la chute: une esthétique du risque. Les Matelles: Editions Espaces 34. Hippisley-Coxe, A. (1951). A Seat at the Circus. London: Evans Brothers. Ihwagi, F. W., Wang, T., Wittemyer, G., Skidmore, A. K., Toxopeus, A. G., Ngene, S. et al. (2015). Using poaching levels and elephant distribution to assess the conservation efficacy of private, communal, and government land in Northern Kenya. PLoS ONE 10 (9): e0139079. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1950). Introduction à l’oeuvre de Marcel Mauss. In Sociologie et anthropologie. Mauss, Marcel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France (XIII). Little, W. K. (1991a). A mutual parody of meaning in circus clown and ethnographic discourse. Culture 11 (1–2): 77–92. Little, W. K. (1991b). The rhetoric of romance and the simulation of tradition in circus clown performance. Semiotica 85 (3–4): 227–255. MacPhee, R. (2007). Mammoths in the insular Nearctic? Some constraints on the existence of a Pleistocene megafauna refugium in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Quaternary International 169–170: 29–38. Malot, H. (1878). Sans famille. Paris: Dentu. Mauriange, E. and Bouissac, P. (eds.) (1978). Le Cirque en images. J. et M. Vesque. Archives d’Ethnologie française 5. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. McConnico, J. (2004). Star News, May 2, 2004: p.11A. Moss, C. (1988). Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family. New York: William Morrow. Ohlheiser, A. (2017). PETA wanted a fake cat video to go viral. It didn’t exactly turn out as planned. The Washington Post. The Intersect. Analysis. June 7, 2017. O’Kane, C., Duffy, K., Page, B., and MacDonald, D. (2013). Model highlights likely long-term influences of mesobrowsers versus those of elephant on woodland dynamics. African Journal of Ecology 52: 192–208. Pelfrene, D. (2014). La musique au cirque, avec Laure Schappler, violoniste. Bretagne Circus 171 (October 2014): 52–55. Poole, J. (1997). Coming of Age with Elephants: A Memoir. New York: Hyperion. Rasky, F. (1965). The Professor’s Wonderful Circus. Maclean’s Magazine. June 5, 1965: 19 and 35–40. Riggins, S. H. (2003). The Pleasures of Time. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Ritter, N. (1989). Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer since Romanticism. Columbus, MO: University of Missouri Press. Sherwood, H. (2017). Why Buddhist “fangsheng” mercy release rituals can be more cruel than kind. The Guardian World News. Monday September 25, 2017. Siegel, L. (1991). Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sukumar, R. (1994). Elephant Days and Nights: Ten Years with the Indian Elephant. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Tait, P. (2005). Circus Bodies. London: Taylor & Francis.

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Tait, P. (2011). Wild and Dangerous Performances: Animals, Emotions, Circus. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tait, P. (2016). Fighting Nature: Travelling Menageries, Animal Acts, and War Shows. Sydney: University of Sydney Press. Toole-Stott, R. (1970). Circus and Allied Arts: A World Bibliography (1950–1970), 4 volumes. Derby: Harpur and Sons.

Websites mentioned in the text https://semioticon.com/circus-alive/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesque_Sisters www.circus-collectibles.com www.bouvierfrancois.com www.ferrerijuggler.com www.rossyann.com http://www.paroles-musique.com/paroles-Alice_Dona-Je_suis_Maladelyrics,p57559 https://www.peta.org/features/ingrid-newkirks-unique-will/ https://www.peta.org/features/2017-animal-liberation/

Index aerialists xiv, 105–26 Andric, J. 40–1 animals bears 76–7, 156–7 birds 25 dogs 18 elephants 90–104, 175 giraffes 175 goldfish 157 hippopotamus 155–6, 174, 176 lions 19 reptiles 25–7 rhinoceros 63 snails 81–2 Arbrick 62, 67 art (circus as) xiv, 20–1 artists Adrian Ramos 113 Akim Weisheit 172 Alejandro Rossi 165 Alicia Spindler 170–3 Alois Spindler 166 Anastasia 171 Annie Fratellini 79 Antares 19–20 Anton Mikheev 29–30 Armand Kerwich 164 Bartabas 127 Brenda Häni 87–96 Carmelita Miazzano 80 Cervantes 35 Charlie Cairoli 34, 85–6 Charlie Cairoli Jr. 86–7 Chris Christiansen 80 Con Colleano 54 Desire of flight 27–9 Eddie Windsor 79 Eldid 54 Eva Tovarich 64, 146, 183 Flying Costas 113 Flying Regio 106–14

Flying Wallendas 105–6 Fornasari 36–7 François Bouvier xviii-xxi, 115–20 Gaston (Häni) 133–41 Gerard (Debord) 68–76 Gerard Edon 80 Gerd and Marietta Koch 25–6 Gerlings troupe 105–6 Gonzalez, Jimmy xviii Gregor Wollny 141–3 Henri Dantès 19, 62 Julien Posada 120 Julio Häni 87–8, 91, 95–6 Laetitia Lapin 112–15 Marcel Baldini Kraemer 57–8 Marco Aurelio Tartarella Rauter 106–15 Max Bertei 71, 74 Michael Ferreri 187–90 Molly Saudek 116 Nikolai Tovarich 180–6 Paillasse 144 Pierre Etaix 79 Pipo 148–50 Roly (Gaston and Roly) 137–40 Rossyann (les) 146–8 Rudy Dockey 37 Sandro Regio 106–14 Sandy Sun xv–xvii, 121–6 Sarti 68–73 Shane Smart 41 Tovarich troupe 184–5 Berland, J. 6 Blackpool 84–6 Boone, C. 78 Bouglione, F. 62 Bretagne Circus 30, 164 circuses Aligre 127

INDEX Althoff 3 Amar 15 Bouffon xv–xviii Bouglione 62–3, 89–90 Bureau 11 Carl Busch 2 Charles Knie 113 Cirque d’hiver 19 Dannebrog 113 Knie 187–9 Krone 3, 109–10, 180–2 Monti 118–19 Ringling, Barnum & Bailey 101, 103, 150–1 Roncalli 35 Royal (French) 164 Vargas 188 Voyage 61, 155–6, 165–77 Zingaro 127–9 danger 19 Darnton, R. 158 death 19 Dona, A. 28 Fabian, L. 28 flying trapeze 107–14 funambulists 106 Goudard, P. 143–4 gravity 105–26 Gregoras, Nicephorus 161–3 Grodotzki, S. 2, 165–77 ground acrobatics 180–1 Hamel, C. 146 Hamilton. I. 103 high-wire acts 106 Hippisley-Coxe, A. 49 Hopkins, B. 187 Ihwagi, J. 103 Kato, H. 80 Kerwich, S. 164–5 Kikeri, N. 99

Lama, S. 28 Le Cirque dans l’Univers 146 Leroux, L.P. 119 Lévi-Strauss, C. 50 Little, K. 146–50 MacPhee, R. 102 Malot, H. 11 meaning xiii memory 66, 83, 86 Moss, C. 98 music 23–4, 32–5 Newkirk, I. 154–5 nomadism 4, 11 Nutkins, H. 49 O’Kane, C 103 Paolozzi, E. 78 Parmegiani, B. 80 PETA 153–5 posters 15–16, 40–5 Preissing, S. 61 pyramids 105–7 Raggedy Rawney 187 religion (circus as) 13 Riggins, S. 127 ritual (circus as) 12–14, 18 Riviere, G. H. 51 Sax, U. 79 Schappler, L. 30 Siegel, L. 6 Sukumar, R. 98 tightwire walker 115–20 Toole-Stott, R. 49 Tovarich, N. 145–6 Vesque J. 46–59 Vesque M. 46–59

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