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Lords of the ring
Faced with the proliferation of blockbuster movies and Broadway musicals, the American circus has managed to hang on to its audience. The question is, how?
BY CHRIS WRIGHT


Beneath the tent of the Big Apple Circus, a tightrope walker named Pedro Carrillo is skipping rope on the wire. You’d think walking the thing would be enough. The three-quarter-inch cable upon which Carrillo hops is raised 30 feet above the ground — the equivalent of three stories. Directly below the wire are a pair of small mats and an airbag the size of a kiddie pool — safety devices that cannot, surely, instill a rock-solid sense of security in the person teetering above them. A couple of times, as Carrillo seems to lose his footing, you find yourself gripped by the urge to look away, and then find that you can’t. This, of course, is all part of the game.

"The element of risk is part of what makes [Carrillo’s act] something you cannot take your eyes off," says Big Apple public-relations manager Philip Thurston. "The sheer audacity of the performance." As audacious as his act may be, Pedro Carrillo — "one of the best in the world," Thurston says — has performed the routine a thousand times, and though many in the audience wince as he wobbles up there, the danger involved would appear to be more a matter of illusion than reality. At least, that is, until Carrillo falls.

At moments like this, the world seems to lose its sense of time. Although the incident is over in a second, you nonetheless have ample opportunity to take stock of the situation, to consider the possibility that Carrillo could miss the pads altogether, to envision the splintered spine, the blood-filled eye sockets, the head jerked to the side with a sickening crack. You recall the many tales you’ve heard about crumpled acrobats, mangled trapeze artists. Then there was that film you saw as a kid, the one where the tightrope walker falls to his death — thud — watched by the weeping lover, the shrieking audience, the mournful clown shaking his head as if he knew this would happen all along.

At the Big Apple, as the tightrope walker goes hop-hop-slip, there is no audible reaction from the crowd, only an interminable pause that is somehow consolidated into a single blink, and the dull silence of disbelief. There is no thud, either. Miraculously, Carrillo has managed to grab the wire on his way down, and to hang on. Even now, giddy with relief, you find yourself wondering what kind of strength you’d need to be able to do that. Then the show continues as if nothing happened. And maybe nothing did. "The thing is, you might see him do that at every show," says circus historian Bob Kitchen. "Sometimes it’s staged and sometimes it’s not."

So which is it? "I honestly couldn’t tell you," says Thurston. "The only man who knows is Pedro himself." As for Pedro himself, he has this to say: "What we’re doing is very dangerous, and the reality is that there are no illusions, no special effects. Sometimes the thing that goes up must come down." He adds, "I was glad I was able to hang on." A few days after Carrillo’s near miss, another tightrope walker, Ernando Amaya of the Ringling Bros. Circus, in New York, falls from a wire set at about the same height, landing on a pad and suffering injuries to his back. "I’m very lucky," he tells friends from his hospital bed.

While no one wanted to see Amaya hurt himself, his near-catastrophic fall could not have done any harm to Ringling Bros. ticket sales. The uncomfortable reality is, in the circus’s ongoing attempt to fill seats, the occasional slip is not such a terrible thing. The fact that it was even suggested that Pedro Carrillo may have staged his own mishap illustrates this point. In order to survive, the Big Apple Circus in particular must maintain a certain degree of nail-biting drama.

Compared to outfits like Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s, which, in some form or other, have been around since the 19th century, the Big Apple is a newcomer to the circus world. Founded in 1977 by Paul Binder and Michael Christensen, the one-ring Big Apple is also much smaller than the three-ring extravaganzas that have traditionally dominated the US circus field. In this sense, it has much more in common with the intimate shows that have long flourished in Europe. "Being up close is the big selling point," says Bob Kitchen, a member of the Circus Fans Association of America. "It’s a classy show."

Binder and Christensen first hit on the idea of bringing a Euro-style circus to the US in the mid 1970s, when they performed a two-man comedy-juggling act for the Cirque de Paris. "We saw that this was a wonderful theatrical form that was not at all represented in America," says Binder. "I said, ‘Gee, this is something I really should bring home.’" Whether the European model would catch on in a country where larger-than-life showmen like P.T. Barnum still set the standard, however, was very much open to question. As Binder says, "It’s been a long and difficult road to make this what it is."

The thing is, the Big Apple must not only vie with bigger, flashier shows like Ringling, which features elephants and tigers and motorcycle daredevils. Circuses in general have to compete with more up-to-date entertainments. "In the past, this was the only show in town," says Kitchen. "There was no TV, no movies." All the same, the circus still manages to attract people like Kitchen, who says he has attended 300 performances in all. And he’s not alone. In many of the cities the Big Apple has visited this year, says Thurston, it has set records in revenue and attendance. In a culture saturated with blockbuster movies and Broadway musicals, it seems odd that such an archaic form would even survive, let alone flourish. "There’s a certain mystique," Kitchen says. "It’s hard to put your finger on, I guess."

For Kitchen, a 66-year-old retired science teacher from Fall River, the sensual swirl that surrounds the Big Apple circus — the garish costumes, the upbeat music, the profiling clowns, the dancing camels, the grinning jugglers, the sexy acrobats, the tumbling showgirls — provides a touch of drama and romance that might otherwise be absent from the life of a high-school teacher in a run-down New England town. "It’s kind of a fantasy-type thing," Kitchen says. "It’s an escape. You go see a show, you see people doing these odd and difficult things, and you forget about everything else."

It’s this yearning for the fantastical, the desire to escape humdrum reality, that lies at the heart of America’s longstanding love affair with the circus. On a damp, raw Sunday afternoon, crowds trudge across the drab parking lot of the Bayside Expo Center with a palpable sense of expectation. Inside the tent, they cheer as the trapeze artists soar and guffaw while Grandma the clown prances around the ring in her (that is, his) flamboyantly fake-looking wig. For all the physical prowess and professionalism on display, there is something hokey about the affair. The circus, after all, is a place where the three-mile grin, the clucked tongue and the jerked thumb, are perfectly acceptable modes of communication — and this must be part of the attraction, too.

Then, of course, there’s the ever-present sense of peril, the terrible but tantalizing possibility that the trapeze artist could miss her mark, that the tightrope walker might, just once, fail to grasp the wire. No digital special effect, no matter how accomplished, can match the buzz generated by the prospect of real blood being spilled in real time. "People are jaded," says Al Stencell, president of the Circus Historical Society. "They know that car chases are done by graphics on computers, and they feel cheated that someone didn’t risk his life doing that. They want Clint Eastwood to at least get a little grease on him. But live, people appreciate that."

Bob Kitchen, meanwhile, seems a little uncomfortable with the suggestion that possible death or disfigurement might increase his own enthusiasm for the circus. "I don’t know if that’s a part of the attraction for me," he says, "but it’s an underlying thing, the fact that people are doing these very dangerous things." He goes on to recount — in tones that, while not quite gleeful, are not quite mournful either — some of the accidents he’s seen. "I was at a performance and someone fell off the trapeze. Ended up with some pretty bad injuries," Kitchen says. "One fellow was shot from a cannon, overshot, and ended up on the cement. That guy’s in a wheelchair today."

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Issue Date: April 16 - 22, 2004
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