My brothers and my mother were all dancers, outside of whatever else they did, like acrobatics, high wire, trapeze,” Donald O’Connor once said. The Hollywood dance icon knew inherently why a dancer is like a circus performer: because both create physical illusions by subverting gravity and harnessing momentum. During his classic and clownish “Make ’Em Laugh” routine in Singin’ in the Rain, O’Connor abandons himself to pratfalls and klutzy collisions with consummate grace and timing. Conversely, a hundred years earlier ballets used a system of wires to enhance the ethereal nature of their fairies and sylphs by making them literally fly. Today, contemporary choreographers increasingly incorporate circus techniques into their dances, along with moves from extreme sports and gymnastics, as a way of pushing physical, political, philosophical, and high/low cultural boundaries.
Streb/Ringside, a popular New York-based company, sends performers crashing through glass, dangling from harnesses and flying through the air dodging metal objects with split-second timing. Artistic director Elizabeth Streb views these moves not as a series of audacious tricks, but as a rigorous exploration of the nature of spatial and temporal dimensions, the aesthetics of grace, even the treatment of gender. Either way, it’s compelling theater that has drawn audiences from kids to dance cognoscenti. On the other coast, and at the other end of the cultural spectrum, “clowning” as dance evolved as a frenetic off-shoot of hip hop in L.A., in the aftermath of the Rodney King riots. Featured in David LaChapelle’s film RIZE, it took off when reformed drug dealer Thomas Johnson set out to heal ravaged South Central neighborhoods by getting kids into freestyle dance; they donned clown makeup instead of gang colors and started entertaining at neighborhood birthday parties.
Locally, Sally Rousse, a dancer with the James Sewell Ballet, has been experimenting with aerial work for almost a decade, relinquishing the bravura aspects of circus for a more meditative take on anti-gravity. Her 2002 dance/theater work trickpony, with aerialist Chelsea Bacon, explored autism and the workings of the “savant” state of mind. Risa Cohen, another local dancer, learned circus skills to make her choreography more accessible and exciting; she views aerial work—which covers everything performed on apparatuses above ground, including the trapeze, “silks” (swatches of suspended fabric), and diabolical-sounding contraptions like the German Wheel—as an exciting new direction for dance. “More dancers are looking for other ways to illuminate the stage,” says Cohen. “You can say a lot in the air. It opens up a new movement vocabulary for dance.” For modern dancers who usually work to ground themselves and release into gravity, aerial work offers another expressive realm. As an acquaintance of mine once put it, “Dancers are spatial carnivores. They can’t let all that space above them go to waste.”
Of course, mime and theatrical clowning schools like L’École Jacques Lecoq in Paris have long played a role in the style of physical theater companies, including our own Theatre de la Jeune Lune; on a more erudite level, there’s the team of gymnast philosophers tumbling through life’s absurdities in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.
So even as dance and theater nudge toward the center ring, contemporary circus increasingly takes cues from the sophisticated visual spectacle and dramatic gravitas of dance and physical theater. Just look at Cirque du Soleil, the hugely successful and influential troupe whose lavish productions include forays into Chinese philosophy, as well as New Agey undercurrents of alienation and nomadic souls. Pretentious? Peut-être. But also compelling, because the history and mise en scène of circus is chock full of highly charged analogies just waiting to detonate—especially when it’s a youth circus.
Under a permanent big top in St. Paul, high above the rapt audience, four teenagers maneuver through a web of bungee cords with the purposeful panache of Spiderman. They manipulate and support one another in dazzling visual designs and spine-tingling drops and rebounds, reality-based superheroes who, like the great arachnid himself, demonstrate that with power comes responsibility. All are students at Circus Juventas, a school and company that accommodates everyone from toddlers to teens. As performers they execute death-defying acts with aplomb, in an atmosphere that touts safety first and an awareness of one’s limits. As kids, they experience the high of finding their personal best while developing a powerful sense of esprit de corps.
“We don’t get the standard-type jocks here,” says Dan Butler, who with his wife Betty cofounded Circus Juventas in 1994. “We get the kids who don’t want to be part of the competitive sports world. Through teamwork they develop a sense of purpose, belonging, and self-esteem—you can’t do the bicycle-built-for-ten routine unless everyone shows up.”
“We have kids doing things they never thought they could do,” adds Betty Butler. For instance, seventeen-year-old Gemma Kirby’s favorite act is the flying trapeze, the one least suited to her body type. “I’m tall for the flying trapeze. Most of the girls who do that act are small and muscular and have had gymnastics training, which I have not,” says Kirby, who explains that while flying and flipping through space, you need a finely tuned gymnast’s sense of “where you are in the air.” Kirby also had to overcome a fear of heights. “The first show I was in, I was up there hyperventilating. You need to totally trust your muscles, your catcher, your entire team.”
Trust is a key part of the drama that happens in the ring. During performances, the Big Top transforms into a highly caffeinated playground where rambunctious kids indulge in hyperbolic versions of childhood games, sibling interactions, and forbidden behaviors like playing with fire and swinging so high that you flip over the top bar of the swing set. There’s the “I double-dare you” frisson of danger and one-upmanship, but also the comfort and safety of belts, lines, and “spotters,” coaches or older children who hover nearby, ready to catch a falling flier or help a grade-schooler through a walkover.
Then there are the “rigger dads,” the parent volunteers who augment the team of professional riggers and coaches. They raise apparatus on pullies, tighten guywires, and move mats and equipment in and out. Dressed in black, the riggers and coaches shadow the kids like a race of mysterious, benevolent ninjas.
What’s interesting about this supporting cast, as it were, is how they also underscore the task-driven nature of Juventas’s very specific and highly complex circus routines. The aesthetic appeal lies in the intense focus of the performers’ bodies and their aerodynamic, seemingly effortless style. But there’s an emotional impact, too, intensified by the sense of serious play that defines Circus Juventas’s attitude toward learning and performing and makes it so alluring to audiences. Here one of the great paradoxes of parenthood is made patently physical, as adults lurk on the sidelines, pushing children into the maelstrom of life with one hand while strapping them in with the other. As theater it can’t be beat, not even by the burnished perfection of Cirque du Soleil stars flipping seamlessly through sophisticated routines, enhanced by high-end production values.
True, Circus Juventas, like Cirque du Soleil, presents circus as an art form rather than a string of spectacular stunts. This year’s main show, Atlanticus spins out a complex narrative about the lost continent of Atlantis that incorporates Plato’s dialogues, music, and dance (July 26–August 12; www.circusjuventas.org). But their performances also bear some resemblance to postmodern dance, a radical form that developed in the 1960s. Choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton wanted to get rid of the heavy symbolism and hyper-theatricality that they believed had encumbered dance, so that movement could be viewed afresh and on its own terms. They drew attention to ordinary people and pedestrian movement to demonstrate the beauty of the things most dance was trying to disguise, like effort and awkwardness. Attempting to break down the boundaries between art and real-life experience, they exposed the process of decision making by improvising in performance. Likewise, while Circus Juventas productions feature snazzy costumes, sets, and lighting effects, they also reveal the backstory by showing the mechanics of safety paraphernalia and other supporting infrastructure, as well as the misses and recoveries. Those rough edges, of kids publicly performing skills they are still attempting to master, are at least part of what gives the audience goose bumps.
It may sound paradoxical, but while circus celebrates excess, it also honors the dictum that everything extraneous to the task potentially gets in the way. Postmodern dancers often turned to sports as a model of task-oriented behavior because they wanted the clarity and focus that athletes bring to achieving a goal. In professional sports toned bodies moving gracefully, dangerously, powerfully are just the icing on the cake. Yet among many fans there’s a kind of subversive appreciation of sport as an art form. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty,” says the writer David Foster Wallace in a New York Times article on the tennis player Roger Federer. “The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with really is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
Perhaps we see this process of reconciliation most clearly in children—the determination with which they approach the job of exploring, understanding, and coming to terms with their bodies and the tangle of impulses, both physical and emotional, that animate them.
As Gemma Kirby observes, “You’re out there on your own, doing these crazy things.”