That Old Feeling IV: A Tale of Two Circuses

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What the 131st lacks in intelligent dazzle, it makes up for in bulk and an ingratiating earnest of good will. Derek Jeter lookalike Jonathan Lee Iverson is your ringmaster — your singmaster, since he croons more often than a Broadway leading man. A team of acrobats perform somersaults into a "cloud of fabric," the world's largest shower curtain. Bello Nock, the star clown with a preternaturally tall orange pompadour, doesn't expend all his energy trying to get laughs. He's an exceptional actor-acrobat, riding a motorcycle on a high wire and climbing a 60-ft. street lamp that, when he gets to the top, sways perilously to either side. (So far as we could tell, he wore no wire to break his fall, should he fall.) The engaging Bello almost forces me to reconsider my sweepingly pejorative definition of "clown."

My seatmate Mary Corliss had dreaded the animal acts, so distressed was she by the proscriptive news reports. Yet she was quickly won over by the docile flair of the elephants and the others. Nine tigers, trained by Mark Oliver Gebel (son of '70s-'80s Ringling star Gunther Gebel-Williams), roll over on their backs, sit on their haunches and beg; Gebel gets it done more with coaxing than whipping. Then there's the parade of animals, which Iverson describes as "a fabulous four-legged fantasia," comprising eight zebras, six camels, two dromedaries, two oxen, four llamas and four horses.

The llamas are about as coordinated as dancers in a London musical; the zebras huddle together shyly, like nervous third-graders before their first recital. But the sight of all those creatures — trotted out for no better reason than to impress us with the world's most diverse chorus line — prove oddly touching. Ringling is valiantly attempting to erase decades of sophisticated showmanship and progressive enlightenment. This is not entertainment the way it should be; it is entertainment the way it was. The Ghosts of Circus Past materialize and genuflect before you.



Cirque, of course, is the no-animal circus. Doing without the beasts makes moot any questions of humane treatment — except of the performers, who are obliged to achieve the physically impossible 10 times a week. But nobody going to love a show because it lacks something bad. Cirque's initial genius was to lend the enterprise an ethereal glamour. The creative team finds the ideal artistic complement to the physical skill of its performers. It dresses them to resemble a fantastical aviary, caresses them with New Age music, surrounds them with subsidiary creatures out of a Fellini dreamscape. And whereas a Ringling-style circus is heavy with the weight of its creatures, its real and metaphorical baggage, Cirque is buoyant: the performers levitate and, with them, so do their rapt audiences.

Yes, sigh, Cirque also has clowns. Worse: mimes. To most tastes, mimes represent all that is primitive and pretentious about circuses and Cirque. I confess it wouldn't break my heart if the company tried, just once, to be a no-mime circus. Still, the clown segments are (1) sometimes funny and (2) taking up less time in each new show. Since Cirque's founding fathers began as mimes, we can grant them this indulgence in return for the magnitude of their achievement. Cirque rescued the circus tradition from the tatters, then masterminded its own transcendence. Today it is hardly a circus at all; it has become its own unique and precious genre.

William Yushak, a connoisseur of theme parks and other extravagant entertainments, saw Cirque's "La Nouba" and called it "a demonstration of amazing skills that have absolutely no practical use." Exactly. That is why it's an art. The glory of circus performers is to overcome the petty boundaries of the body and achieve something both impossible and beautiful. Like the zoo parade in the Ringling circus, it is a demonstration whose only aim is to astonish the grateful spectator.

When the company's magnifique water-show "O" opened at Las Vegas's Bellagio in 1998, the art dealer and film director Arne Glimcher was in the audience. He provided an appropriate overview: "Modern art is stagnant right now. Movies and the novel haven't given us anything new in ages. Pop music died about 30 years ago, and Broadway with it. The only place where artistry lives and thrives and astonishes is right here. These people have created a thrilling new art form, and they keep topping themselves."

I'm with Arne: "Mystère" and "O" are the great theatrical experiences of the decade. They impoverish by comparison all shows of their kind and any other — including, a bit, Cirque's traveling tent shows, which have to be portable, more compact; they can't match the spaciousness and splendor, the total wow-osity of the superproductions. Also, defections in the creative team (Ste-Croix left Cirque to form the equestrian show "Cheval-Thé âtre"; regular director Franco Dragone was occupied with "La Nouba") left "Dralion" in the hands of Guy Caron, who had been with the troupe since the beginning but had not directed his own show. So I was a little anxious about "Dralion." Had the magic evaporated? How long could Cirque ring beguiling variations on an increasingly familiar format? Could the company go out of fashion and, worse, run out of ideas, like any overworked organism in middle age?

Pas de sweat, as they say in Québec. "Dralion" is Cirque's most accessible and enchanting touring show. And, in case you're wondering, the clowns are OK: since the mood is mostly helium-light here, they don't break it; they ride the bubble of good feeling — especially in a sequence late in the evening when they gaily parody some of the more stately acts that have gone before. That's a Cirque first.

Earlier editions have sported a Russian or French accent; this one is primarily Chinese, a blend of Mainland acrobats with the company's theatrical legerdemain. Of the 52 on-stage artists, 41 are from China, and most of these are under 25. "Dralion" (the invented word rhymes with scallion and is a blend of dragon and lion, sacred icons in the Chinese bestiary) has the old elegance but a fresh and youthful spirit — and, given that several of the acts feature eight to a dozen girls and boys performing tightly timed exercises, team spirit. As they bend their wills and stretch their bodies, undulating houris observe them; Violaine Corradi's score essays Arabic themes. The concept straddles Asia and Asia Minor: It could be an evocation of a Chinese troupe giving a command performance in the court of old Persia.

Now and then, "Dralion" celebrates individual virtuosity. In an astonishing solo turn, the strong, lithe Ukrainian Viktor Kee performs slow, sinuous aerobics while juggling three balls, then five, then seven, dropped down to him by a guardian angel on a wire 30 feet above. He tosses and catches three balls in each hand as the seventh ball rolls down his back and settles at the base of his spine. And at the end he vanishes behind the swirl of a lady's robe — a magical end to a few minutes of body sorcery. "Simply as a dancer, as an artist of movement," David Lerner, a longtime aficionado of the ballet, says of Kee, "he can do things Nureyev and Baryshnikov couldn't. Things they can do, he can do better. And they can't juggle."

The Chinese girls juggle each other. One girl stands on the head of a second girl who stands on the shoulders of a third — who is standing on a sturdy light bulb! Vaults from a teeter-totter create a chain of emerald-clad elves, one on the shoulders of the next, that can be five girls high. The men keep busy too. They balance tall bamboo poles draped in filmy fabrics. In a tribute to the art of lion-dancing, four "dralions" (one man piggybacked on another inside a colorful costume) climb onto a large ball, hold on for balance, then roll up and down a teeter-totter — like Bo the Ringling elephant, but even prettier. Together the boys and girls synchronize horizontal dives through three vertically-piled steel hoops. All these routines comes off as inspired improvisations on schoolyard activities. They raise playtime to gravity- and expectation-defying art.

At the end everyone joins in to jump rope. One girl executes cool maneuvers on her own; but she is also skipping a large rope held by two pairs of pals, one stacked on the other. Eventually a three-high stack is jumping within their own rope and the larger one. Another trio lies prone; they manage to raise themselves just as the big rope comes under them. Corradi's music, as propulsive and infectious as "Da Doo Ron Ron," explodes into an urgent, giddy international cacophony (bagpipe, violin, do gu and yao gu!) while the three sets of rope dancers accelerate, each group doing its own thing in perfect communal rhythm. It is a climax of precise frenzy, innocent ecstasy: a vision — and more, a heart-and-gut understanding — of what popular art can be.

This is the circus I dream of running off to join. I'll even sweep up.

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