Circus

• 1. Introduction

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  A circus is a company of performers, and for 250 years it has gathered an unlikely crowd under one roof. Clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze artists, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclists all share the same bill. Each one is a master of a single craft. Together they make something stranger than the sum of their parts.

  The word itself comes from Latin circus, borrowed in turn from the Ancient Greek kirkos. The early Christian writer Tertullian, in his book De spectaculis, claimed the first circus games were staged by the Greek goddess Circe in honor of her father Helios, the sun god. That is one story of where the circus began. Historians disagree sharply on the rest.

  Who first put these acts in one ring, and why a ring at all? How did a man riding horses in a field become known as the father of the modern circus? And how did a tradition built on animals and big tops reinvent itself, more than once, until lions gave way to pure human artistry? Those are the questions waiting in the ring.

• 2. The Man On Horseback

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  Philip Astley was born in 1742 in Newcastle-under-Lyme, England, and he became a cavalry officer before he became a showman. On the 4th of April 1768, he set up the first modern amphitheatre for the display of horse riding tricks in Lambeth, London. He did not invent trick horse riding, nor was he first to bring acrobats and clowns before the English public. He was the first to put all those acts into a single show.

  Astley rode in a circle rather than a straight line, as his rivals did, and that choice shaped everything that followed. He performed his stunts in a ring 42 ft in diameter, the standard size used by circuses ever since. The dimension was not arbitrary. It was the minimum diameter that let an acrobatic rider stand upright on a cantering horse to perform tricks. Astley called the arena a circle and the building an amphitheatre. The name circus came later.

  In 1770, Astley hired acrobats, tightrope walkers, jugglers, and a clown to fill the pauses between his equestrian acts. By chance he had landed on the format the world would name a circus. Andrew Ducrow followed him, his feats of horsemanship doing much to establish the traditions later carried on by Hengler's and Sanger's celebrated shows.

  The Royal Circus opened in London on the 4th of November 1782, founded by Charles Dibdin, who coined the term circus, with his partner Charles Hughes, an equestrian performer. That same year Astley built the Amphithéâtre Anglais in Paris, the first purpose-built circus in France. Eighteen more permanent circuses followed across Europe. In 1793, Astley leased his Parisian circus to the Italian Antonio Franconi.

• 3. Rome Or Lambeth

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  George Speaight, a circus historian, drew a hard line through the past. The Roman performances "may have taken place in the great arenas that were called 'circuses' by the Romans, but it is a mistake to equate these places, or the entertainments presented there, with the modern circus." For Speaight, the circus begins with an Englishman in a London field. Others trace it much further back, to the time of the Roman Empire.

  In Ancient Rome, the circus was a roofless arena for horse and chariot races, equestrian shows, staged battles, gladiatorial combat, and trained animals. For re-enactments of naval battles, the arena was flooded with water. The buildings were not circular but rectangular with semi-circular ends. The lower seats were reserved for persons of rank, with state boxes for the giver of the games and his friends. It was the only public spectacle at which men and women were not separated.

  The Circus Maximus stood in the valley between the Palatine and Aventine hills, the first circus in the city of Rome. Built during the monarchy and at first made entirely of wood, its final stone version could seat 250,000 people and measured 400m long by 90m wide. The Circus Flaminius and the Circus Neronis followed, the latter notorious through the Circensian pleasures of Nero. A fourth, built by Maxentius, left ruins that helped archaeologists reconstruct the Roman circus.

  Those who defend the longer lineage trace a chain that does not break at Rome's fall. It runs through the Hippodrome of Constantinople, which operated until the 13th century, then through medieval and renaissance jesters, minstrels, and troubadours. After the Western Roman Empire fell, the great arenas emptied. Itinerant performers, animal trainers, and showmen took their place, travelling between towns and performing at fairs such as the Bartholomew Fair in London.

• 4. Crossing The Atlantic

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  John Bill Ricketts, an Englishman, carried the first modern circus to the United States. He had begun his career with Hughes Royal Circus in London in the 1780s before sailing from England in 1792. The first circus building in the US opened on the 3rd of April 1793 in Philadelphia, where Ricketts gave America's first complete circus performance. George Washington attended a show there later that season.

  In the first two decades of the 19th century, the Circus of Pepin and Breschard toured from Montreal to Havana, building circus theatres in many cities along the way. Victor Pépin, a native New Yorker, was the first American to run a major circus in the United States. The houses of Purdy, Welch & Co. and of van Amburgh spread the form wider still. In 1825, Joshuah Purdy Brown became the first circus owner to use a large canvas tent for the performance.

  Dan Rice was the most famous pre-Civil War circus clown, popularising expressions like "The One-Horse Show" and "Hey, Rube!". The American circus was then reshaped by P. T. Barnum and William Cameron Coup, who launched the travelling P. T. Barnum's Museum, Menagerie & Circus, the first freak show, in the 1870s. Coup introduced the first multiple-ring circuses and was the first entrepreneur to move a circus by train.

  After an 1881 merger with James Anthony Bailey and James L. Hutchinson, and Barnum's death in 1891, the show travelled to Europe as the Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show On Earth. It toured from 1897 to 1902, impressing rival owners with its scale, its tent and train, and its blend of circus acts, zoological exhibition, and freak show. European circuses adopted the format at the turn of the 20th century.

• 5. Tents And Touring

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  The earliest modern circuses played in open-air structures with limited covered seating. From the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, custom-made circus buildings, often wooden, were raised with a center ring, varied seating, and sometimes a stage. The large tents known as big tops arrived in the mid-nineteenth century as touring shows overtook static venues. The first circus under a canvas big top took place in 1826.

  In 1838, the equestrian Thomas Taplin Cooke returned to England from the United States with a circus tent. Itinerant circuses that could be set up quickly were gaining popularity in Britain. William Batty's circus, between 1838 and 1840, travelled from Newcastle to Edinburgh, then on to Portsmouth and Southampton.

  Pablo Fanque was Britain's only black circus proprietor, running one of the most celebrated travelling circuses in Victorian England. He raised temporary structures for short engagements or retrofitted existing buildings. One such structure in Leeds, which he had assumed from a departing circus, collapsed. Many suffered minor injuries, and Fanque's wife was killed.

  Three innovators carried the circus across the world: the Italian Giuseppe Chiarini, and the Frenchmen Louis Soullier and Jacques Tourniaire. Their early travelling shows introduced the circus to Latin America, Australia, Southeast Asia, China, South Africa, and Russia. Soullier was the first owner to bring Chinese acrobatics into the European circus, after returning from his travels in 1866. Tourniaire was the first to introduce the art to Ranga, where it grew extremely popular.

  The American influence changed the modern circus in character. In arenas too large for speech to carry, the clown's old comic dialogue lost its prominence. Equestrian feats faded into the background, replaced by more ambitious acrobatic performances and exhibitions of skill, strength, and daring. These demanded immense numbers of performers and often complicated, expensive machinery. After World War II, as television arrived and tastes shifted, the circus declined. From the 1960s onward, animal rights activists pressed their criticism, and many circuses closed or merged.

• 6. Reinventing The Ring

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  In 1919, Lenin, head of Soviet Russia, wished for the circus to become "the people's art-form," with facilities and status equal to theatre, opera, and ballet. The USSR nationalised Russian circuses. In 1927, the State University of Circus and Variety Arts, better known as the Moscow Circus School, was founded, training performers with methods drawn from the Soviet gymnastics programme. When the Moscow State Circus company began international tours in the 1950s, its originality and artistic skill won wide applause.

  A shift in form revived the circus tradition from the late 1970s, as groups began to experiment with new aesthetics and to drop animals in favour of human artistry alone. This movement, called new circus or cirque nouveau, originated in the 1970s across Australia, Canada, France, the West Coast of the United States, and the United Kingdom. It leaned theatrical, combining character-driven acts with original music to carry complex themes.

  The pioneers came quickly. Circus Oz formed in Australia in 1977 from SoapBox Circus and an earlier troupe called New Circus. The Pickle Family Circus was founded in San Francisco in 1975. Cirque du Soleil, Cirque Plume, Nofit State Circus from Wales, and Ra-Ra Zoo in London all date to 1984, with Archaos following in 1986. Later came Cirque Éloize in Quebec in 1993, Sweden's Cirkus Cirkör in 1995, and Montreal's Les 7 doigts de la main in 2002.

  Cirque du Soleil became the genre's clearest success, the Canadian company whose estimated annual revenue exceeded US$810 million in 2009. Its cirque nouveau shows had been seen by nearly 90 million spectators in over 200 cities on five continents. A further turn came in 1995 with 'Le Cri du Caméléon', an ensemble piece by the graduating class of the French circus school CNAC, directed by Joseph Nadj. This contemporary circus avoids linear narrative for suggestive, interdisciplinary approaches, often building new apparatus around individual performers.

• 7. Inside The Show

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  A ringmaster leads the traditional circus performance, a figure much like a Master of Ceremonies who presents the acts, speaks to the audience, and keeps the show moving. The action unfolds within a ring, usually 13 m in diameter. Large circuses may run several rings at once, like the six-ringed Moscow State Circus. A circus often travels with its own band, whose American instrumentation has traditionally mixed brass, drums, glockenspiel, and the distinctive sound of the calliope.

  Performers were traditionally called artistes, though the term artists has come into regular use. The split runs deep. Some performers from multi-generational circus families prefer artiste and consider it higher in status. Some from the circus school route, taken by many newer generations, prefer artist as less pretentious. Their physical and creative skills are called disciplines, grouped for training into juggling, equilibristics, acrobatics, aerial, and clowning.

  Juggling is one of the most common acts in any circus. Aerial work includes trapeze, aerial silk, corde lisse, aerial hoop, and aerial straps. Equilibristics covers plate spinning and the rolling globe alongside tightwire, slackline, and unicycle. Clowns are common to most circuses and are usually skilled in many acts, with "clowns getting into the act" a familiar theme. Famous circus clowns have included Austin Miles, the Fratellini Family, Rusty Russell, Emmett Kelly, Grock, and Bill Irwin.

  Daredevil stunts and sideshow acts fill out the bill, from the human cannonball and fire eating to knife throwing, sword swallowing, and the strongman. Famous sideshow performers include Zip the Pinhead, The Doll Family, and the Australian Chayne Hultgren, known as The Space Cowboy, who performs blindfolded arrow catching and Tesla coil acts. The earliest animals were exotic creatures simply displayed in a menagerie. Isaac A. Van Amburgh entered a cage with several big cats in 1833 and is generally considered the first wild animal trainer in American circus history.