Duncan Wall - The Ordinary Acrobat: A Journey into the Wondrous World of the Circus, Past and Present

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Duncan Wall

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wall, Duncan.
The ordinary acrobat : a journey into the wondrous world of the circus, past and present / Duncan Wall.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-96229-4
1. Wall, Duncan. 2. AcrobatsBiography. 3. Circus performers
Biography. 4. CircusHistory. I. Title.
GV1811.W16A3 2013
796.476092dc22
[B] 2012038250

Jacket image: Montage with background photo art by Jules Chret
Jacket design by Jason Booher

v3.1

To my family

()

GROWING UP , I had no connection to the circus. My ancestors werent acrobats or wire-walkers; Im aware of no Gypsy blood.

I was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My mother and father both came from the Midwest, from Ohio and Iowa, respectively. After meeting in Chicago, as a pair of corporate accountants working three floors apart, they retreated to the suburbs, first of Milwaukee, then of Saint Louis, where I received the blessing of an upper-middle-class childhood. I attended a good public high school, where I captained the soccer team and edited the yearbook. When I didnt have practice or a meeting, I liked to lie on the couch and watch Saved by the Bell with my sister. On the weekends, I met up with my friend Sean, and we cruised around in his Nissan. If we scored some beer or met up with some girlswell, that was a pretty big night.

And the circus? It was around, of course, but I dont remember thinking about it, or even really noticing it. I saw one show in the sports arena downtown. What sticks with me most about the experience is the atmosphere. Built in the late sixties, the arena was battered and unattractive, and I can remember walking across the enormous asphalt parking lot with my father, hand in hand, past the rows of cars and the soot-stained trucks. Inside, we climbed the concrete stairs to our seats, which peered down on the three rings from a great distance. I remember watching the show with a mixture of confusion and boredom. The overweight acrobats wore out-of-style sequins. The tigers looked sluggish and distracted. Their trainer, a stocky man dressed like Indiana Jones, snapped his whip indiscriminately.

My father clearly had a soft spot for the circushe had insisted that we come. I didnt really understand why. I had video games with motion-capture graphics. I had blockbuster movies that filled screens as tall as my house. I had been to Space Camp and Disneyland. That was entertainment. The circus felt like some previous generations idea of fun, a tradition almost, like the Pledge of Allegiance, or the sweater my parents forced me to wear to church on Sundayssomething you did not because you wanted to but because thats what people had always done. The world had moved on, I felt, and left the circus behind.

And in these judgments I wasnt entirely wrong. As I later learned, I first encountered the circus at a historical low point. Founded by a British cavalier in 1768, the art, a combination of popular physical forms, had spread around the world like a virus. In less than fifty years, it infected every continent but Antarctica. During the nineteenth century, the circus was arguably the worlds most popular entertainment, as popular as cinema today. Circus performers were revered as celebrities. The biggest shows were famous brands, as familiar as Disney and MTV are now.

This golden period lasted through World War II, after which, plagued by economic hardships, such as the oil crisis of 1973, and the rise in mass media, the circus fell into precipitous decline. Troupes plunged into bankruptcy. Those that survived did so by slashing costs, importing acts from abroad, and trading their tents for arenas. By the late sixties, the art was a shell of its former self. The great days of the European circus are over, Jack C. Bottheim, a prominent member of Hollands Friends of the Circus, wrote in 1967. Even die-hard fans wondered how long it would survive. They expected the circus to limp along, scrounging by on nostalgia and manufactured pride, until the day whenlike vaudeville, like pantomime, like the wandering minstrels of the Middle Agesit would either pass quietly from the world or exist thereafter as a sort of museum entertainment, a reminder of how strange and simple the world had been.

But then, just when nobody expected it, the freefall came to a halt. During the seventies, the old circuses regained their footing. In France, a circus run by Alexis Gruss, Jr., an equestrian from one of the oldest families, was named the countrys national circus. In America, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus saw attendance rise by upward of 12 percent a year.

At the same time, a new type of circus emerged. I first encountered this new form while studying in Paris during college. I was enrolled in a special program for American students, and as part of our curriculum the program directors escorted us on a series of cultural excursions, chaperoned visits to local highlights we might have missed in our rush to the newest Irish-style pub. These were tasteful visits, designed to expand our understanding of France and its culture. We saw Molire at the Comdie-Franaise. We went to the Louvre and the Muse dOrsay. You can imagine, then, our surprise when the programs directrice, Madame Sasha, came bustling into the schools lobby one afternoon with a handful of flyers for the circus.

The circus? a girl from Ohio sneered. Is that, like, some kind of a joke?

Madame Sasha flashed an educators smile. Non, ce nest pas une blague. She arranged the flyers into a neat stack on a wooden table. But its not a regular circus. Cest un cirque moderne.

I can still hear the words: Cest un cirque moderne. Its a modern circus. The term intrigued me. The circus as I knew it seemed almost willfully unmodern, its resistance to change even part of its charm: the world changes, people change, but the circus stays the same. I took a flyer from the stack and examined it. The picture on the front was blurry and artfully composed. It was of a man in a white tank top and black pants, performing what looked like a break-dancing maneuver, his palms pressed against the floor, one leg shot out in front of him. A dozen white cubes littered the ground around him. It looked more like an advertisement for a band or a contemporary dance show than for a circus.