The circus is certainly a part of the technological history of our country. In 1879, "The Great London Circus! Sanger's Royal British Menagerie, with Cooper, Bailey & Co.'s Famous International Allied Shows" advertised the first major popular demonstration of the dazzling electric light. For the September 26 performance of the show in Rockford, Illinois, the circus bill talked of "Creating a spectacle of most entrancing loveliness, ravish beauty, and supernatural splendor; transforming the very earth into a Paradise of Bliss, and carrying the imagination to the Realms of Eternal Heaven. It brings to the soul of every human witness a sense of imperishable ecstasy and enduring charm, and it gilds every object within a radius of two miles, animate and inanimate, with a subdued enchantment that realizes in every intelligent person the silvered dreams of beauteous fairyland." Bailey called the electric light "Heaven's own gift to earth of lightning." It illuminated far more than his 420,000 square feet of canvas; it illuminated the imaginations of the American people and created a thirst for electricity in the home. In 1897, there were three movie theaters in the entire United States: one in New York, one in Chicago, and one in the Ringling Brothers Circus, a black tent which showed the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. The year before, and twenty years before the horseless carriage was commonly seen on the streets of America, the Barnum & Bailey Circus paraded a Duryea automobile. But of all the technological wizardry invented and popularized by the circus, it was the logistical system of rail travel that had perhaps the most far-reaching implications. When the Barnum & Bailey show toured Europe at the turn of the century, the German army were eager students of the circus's methods of loading and unloading flat cars rapidly and with maximum efficiency. The American army quickly followed suit, and soon the two most powerful military forces in the world were both modelling their entire transportation systems on the highly organized methods they had learned from the circus.

The circus has also been made an intrinsic part of our very language, providing us with words which we may no longer even associate with the circus. A jumbo-sized object, used to describe anything larger than expected, is perhaps one of the best examples of circus linguistic influence. The word "jumbo" comes from the nickname of the oversized African elephant displayed from 1882 to 1885 in the Barnum & Bailey Circus. That lovable "ponderous pachyderm" sent Americans into a tailspin of Jumbo-phoria that would put 1989's Batman craze to shame. "White-Elephant Sales," used to describe items reduced in price because no one wants them, are so-named because of the nineteenth-century "White Elephant War" between Barnum & Bailey and a rival circus, from which the public came away with the belief that all white elephants were hoaxes.

"Rain or shine" is now a common expression in our language, but we can trace its origin to advertising in the era when circuses first played under canvas big tops. Some of us can remember our father impatiently clapping his hands to get us to hurry into the car at the beginning of a family outing: "Let's go! Let's get this show on the road!" he used to plead. Or conversely, when his children got a little too rambunctious in the car near the end of the trip, and he wanted us to calm down, he would warn, "Hold your horses, now! We'll get there." The first expression clearly comes from the anxious call of the circus manager at the end of a long day of performances and packing, eager to get his wagons rolling towards the next stand in the next town. But "Hold your horses"? Why, we wondered, was Dad worried about our horses? We didn't have any horses! Once again, the expression derives from an old circus call: "Gentlemen! Hold your horses! The elephants are coming!" It was intended to protect onlookers or passersby on horseback, when the elephants were about to bring up the end of a circus parade. Horses tended to panic at the sight and smell of an elephant in the early days of the circus; so when elephants were nearby and the warning call was heard, wise horse owners held on tight to the reins, soothing their mounts' excess anxiety.

When a politician announces his candidacy for office by "throwing his hat in the ring," he is following in the shoes of Woodrow Wilson, who did so literally in 1916: Wilson began his bid for reelection when the Barnum & Bailey Circus came to Washington, by throwing his hat into the center ring. One final example here also has its source in a political candidacy. When Dan Rice was parading his circus through the streets, while seated atop the leading bandwagon, he shouted down to his friend Zachary Taylor, "Come on up here where the people can see who's going to be their next president! Get on the bandwagon!" In the course of the next chapters, we'll find many other examples of how the circus has insinuated its way into our daily language.

The circus has become the preoccupation of many of the world's finest businessmen, artists, and craftsmen. Some claim that it is merely a commercial enterprise, designed only to take as much money as possible from the wallets of its spectators. Most circus folks would say that is patent nonsense. Certainly the circus is far more than a commercial entertainment business. While some contemporary American circuses are strictly commercial self-supporting organizations, others are not-for-profit corporations, designed primarily to serve as non-commercial "artistic" enterprises.

However it is organized or described, the circus exists primarily for the display of the performer and the amazement of the audience. Its function as a money-maker ranks only after those essential ingredients. Performers, owners, technicians, and workers do what they do not because they want to get rich, but because they choose to amaze—despite the difficult lifestyle imposed on them by that choice, and often despite incredibly low financial returns. No one whose primary motive in life is to make money stays long with the circus.

In its own way, then, the circus lays claim to being an art form which demands to be treated with the same attention, love, and respect as our literature, fine art, music, and theatre. It certainly does not deserve the haughty dismissal of a public which thinks of art as only something to hang in a gallery or ponder from the comfort of a velvet-upholstered arm chair. Some of the best creative minds in the world have failed to come up with any consistent definition for what or why art is, and no such lofty attempts will be made here. At any rate, for most circus folk, such questions are irrelevant. If the circus is art, it is food for the soul of the common man, as Peter Schumann of the Bread & Puppet Theater suggests: "It is like good bread, and green trees." If it is art, it is cheap, and primitive, and soothing. And if it is art, it is unlike theatre art, which is a representation rather than a presentation. Theatre by nature pretends to be something it is not —"truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion," as Tennessee Williams contends in the opening to his masterpiece, . The circus, on the other hand, is a direct presentation of the truly unusual, the best of genuine human and animal behavior: truth without artifice or pretense.

Artists and craftsmen have always been a part of the circus, and in return the circus has provided the subject matter for many a fine artist and artisan whose imaginations have grown preoccupied and fascinated with its scope and colorful appearance. Fine model craftsmen have spent entire lifetimes capturing the essence of the circus in their work. An entire organization, Circus Model Builders International, exists to serve the 1,500 members for whom building model circuses is a profession or a major hobby, and they publish a bimonthly magazine called . Among the many superb models on public display in the United States is one which took sixty years of labor by William Brinley to create and which includes more than 3,000 hand-carved objects. It's now on display at the newly reopened Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The largest such display is the impressive three-quarter-inch scale layout of Howard Tibbals, now on exhibit at Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin. One-eighth-inch scale circus models have been known to take over the garages and basements of hundreds of hobbyists around the country.

From its earliest beginnings, the circus has been a subject for treatment by prominent artists fascinated by the human truths it could reveal. Alexander Calder's elaborate wire and metal sculpture Circus resides at the Whitney Museum in New York. Many paintings by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Matisse's , Auguste Renoir's , and Georges Seurat's and underscore the fascination of artists for the surreal qualities of the circus. The painter Fernand Léger wrote that "The ring is freedom. It has neither beginning nor end." Pablo Picasso was perhaps the most famous artist of the circus; he was frequently to be found in the audience at Paris's Cirque Medrano, and several of his paintings, especially during his early Rose Period, center around circus themes: , and .

The circus has often been treated in the literature of the world by writers who have become fascinated with its process. Ernest Hemingway once claimed, "The Circus is the only ageless delight that you can buy for money. Every thing else is supposed to be bad for you. It is the only spectacle I know, that while you watch it, gives the quality of a truly happy dream." On the other side of the globe, the great Russian writer Maxim Gorky wrote of his feelings after experiencing his first circus: "I don't know exactly what the circus gave me. Except that I saw people risking their lives while being beautiful, for the enjoyment of their neighbors. But I think that's enough." In fact, circus imagery is a major part of the works of some of the world's greatest writers and philosophers, including Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Friedrich Nietzsche, John Steinbeck, Booth Tarkington, and Mark Twain. And circus themes surface in short stories by such well-known American writers as Stephen Vincent Benet, Paul Gallico, O. Henry, Evan Hunter, MacKinlay Kantor, Alice Lide, Jack London, Katherine Anne Porter, William Saroyan, Mark Van Doren, and Thomas Wolfe."The smell of the sawdust, the crack of the ringmaster's whip, and the ancient jokes of the clown, and the wonderful linguistic performances of the lemonade man," wrote O. Henry, "are temptations that most of us strive to resist in vain."

Much less ambitious popular entertainment media arts have also used the circus as a subject matter extensively in their work. Those of us who as small boys and girls used to listen to the radio will remember the adventures of Tom Mix, Clyde Beatty, or Sky King. Sky King? Yes: Kirby Grant, one of many cowboy heroes who used to travel with the circus, worked as Sky King for the Tom Packs, James Bros., Gatti, and Carson & Barnes circuses. In the early days of television, does anyone remember , which starred future "Monkee," Mickey Dolenz? Or Don Ameche's , or , or the long line of circus performers who amazed and delighted Ed Sullivan's audiences?

Finally, the circus has not been ignored in popular film arts. Some of the many landmark movies which have treated circus themes and stories include Charlie Chaplin's (1928); Tod Browning's cult film, (1932); the Marx Brothers' (1939); Walt Disney's (1941) and (1960); Cecil B. DeMille's (1952); Ingmar Bergman's (1953); (1956) with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis; Rodgers & Hart's musical (1962); (1964) with John Wayne; Federico Fellini's (1971); and most recently Wim Wenders' (1987).

Before we leave this brief introduction into the nature of the circus and its impact on us, let us be clear about two things that a circus is definitely not. First, a circus is not a carnival. Carnivals are commercial interests; they exist without artistic goals, primarily to make money. Also unlike a circus, they are not a show, and they are not meant to be a display of excellence. Except for special event audiences and side-show crowds eager to see the rare or the forbidden, there are no spectators. Carnivals are mostly a series of activities in which ordinary people are meant to be engaged as participants. On one side of a booth or ticket stand are the Ferris-wheel riders, the balloon-poppers, bell-ringers, ball-throwers, and thrill-seekers—all of us eager to engage in any activity which might distract us from the mundaneness of our daily lives. We all spend a large portion of our waking hours securing our own and our families' safety and security. But since we can't "play it safe" all the time, we tell ourselves that we need and want the illusion, the pretense of risk that a carnival can offer. It's a very different kind of entertainment from the circus, which presents us not with illusion but many times with the real risk of the performer. Meanwhile, on the other side of the carnival booth and ticket stand are a lot of people eager to take our money from us. Crooked or clean, carnivals provide most of the amusements on the midway at American state and county fairs. They are popularly viewed as at least as good a way as any state-sponsored lottery for Americans to risk and lose our hard-earned money, and a lot more fun. The biggest of American carnival troupes, the giant Strate show, still travels on rail (the only self-contained amusement company outside the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus to do so). Indeed, carnivals are a huge industry, but they are not circuses.

Second, there is a popular misconception that the circus is just for the kids. In the coming pages, it will become clear that circus is not "children's entertainment." It is entertainment for "children of all ages," for the child in each of us. Nothing can so warm the cockles of an adult's heart as a child's face, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, gathering into his consciousness a new awareness: "So this is what I am. So this is what I can do." There is complete acceptance in his face of what he sees. No immediate questions or doubts ensue. But years later, the images he takes in as a child will haunt his memory.

Without life experience, we can't fully appreciate the circus as children. The adult can be much more responsive, because he or she has already decided: "I'm not, and I can't." Those kinds of self-limiting convictions and preconceptions are what allow circus acts to make such a stunning impact on us. When we see performed in front of our very eyes what we had thought to be an impossibility, our convictions become questions: "If she can, could I?" and "Can I be ...?" And sometimes, just as in the aftermath of a religious miracle, our questions generate new convictions. The flight of an acrobat, the personality of an elephant, or the antic of a clown is the stuff of dreams, and it is our dreams that define who we are. The circus is one of the few places on earth where we normal human beings can complete the line, "I wish it were possible to ..." or "I wish I could ..." The circus offers the undeniable proof that "It is possible," and that "I can."

The business of defining ourselves and what we are capable of has preoccupied the hearts and minds of mankind since we first walked on two feet and concluded that we were somehow different from other animals. We will see that that search for definition is the business of the circus as well. And we will come to recognize that that business is vital and necessary for the health of our society. All this is certainly far removed from the seedy status the circus is often mistakenly accorded as a distant, impoverished relative of the entertainment industry. In fact, during the coming chapters, we may well be brought to the realization that in the circus lies the ultimate metaphor for the human condition. As American poet Vachel Lindsay wrote in 1928: For every Soul is a circus. And every mind is a tent, And every heart is a sawdust ring Where the circling race is spent. Vachel Lindsay. (New York: Macmillan, 1929) 8.

When, where, and how did the circus come about? The answer is much less specific than history books would indicate. The roots of the circus can be found in virtually all civilizations. We are often asked to accept the notion that the tradition of circus began in Rome, which is patently absurd, as we shall see. Some say that circus comes from ancient Greece, because it is Greek art and literature that provides us with some of our first records of circus-type acts. In the fifteenth century, the European Renaissance, despite plenty of competing evidence, began to attribute the origin of all things civilized, whether art, politics, or recreation, to the classical Greeks. Scientists, artists, and men of letters traced the evolution of civilization down through the Roman Empire to their own time, ignoring that unfortunate period of barbarianism known to us as the "dark ages." Despite clear evidence of other cultures with alternate traditions, arts, and scientific knowledge of their own, Europeans preferred to think of themselves as "the unique inheritors of the only genuine and truly special civilization known to man" and all that. Our own inherited western tradition of circus has fallen victim to the same prejudice, and it merits another look.

Our modern circus is a genuinely international art form, and any attempt to assign its origins to a single cultural tradition is misleading. If there is anything the circus teaches us, it's that people are pretty much the same the whole world over. Eventually, more balanced and internationally oriented archeological and historical studies may convince us that circus-type arts developed independently in most civilizations and were rapidly shared between them. In the meantime, we need no history books or time capsules to develop some healthy skepticism of single-origin theories.

There are three logical considerations that lead us toward a more intercultural explanation of circus origin. First, circus-type stunts are a universal expression of an individual's freedom to challenge the physical, social and political restrictions of his or her culture, wherever they existed. Secondly, demonstrations of superhuman skills are usually perceived by the more "normal" elements of a given society as extra-human, capable of being performed only by God-like men and women, or with the intercession of the Gods. Thus certain types of performances that we now associate with the circus developed as a part of the religious ritual of various tribal cultures all over the world. Finally, those individuals who were skilled and independent enough to perform these stunts did not always have the sanction of their family or tribe. They generally became nomadic, whether they went by choice or they were driven out. They would have carried their skills and traditions freely across all political and cultural borders. This movement between disparate civilizations alone makes it extremely difficult to assign the origin of any single circus tradition to a particular locale. So before we begin to identify geographical origins, let us take a brief look at each of these more universal explanations for early circus performance.

The urge to triumph over commonly accepted limitations, far from being exclusive to any one civilization, lies within the nature of the human animal. Paradoxically, we are driven both by the desire to remain safely within our limits, and by the urge to challenge our limits. When the cave boy was told by his mother not to go outside of the cave entrance because the lion would attack him and carry him off, he undoubtedly listened at first. But this prehistoric Gunther Gebel Williams also set about devising schemes first to exert his mastery over the lion, and then to show all his friends and other members of the tribe that it could be done. And when the cave girl was told she couldn't climb trees because she would fall, she undoubtedly hesitated only briefly before she climbed the tallest tree she could find and swung on a vine to its neighbor, astounding her audiences then every bit as much as Dolly Jacobs astounds circus audiences today.

We all find that we must ordinarily live from day to day within the limits imposed on us by parents, teachers, employers, and leaders of all kinds. It's easier, after all, to stay indoors and on the ground, to keep house, to bring home the bacon, and to do as we are told. Such conformity earns us rewards from the authorities, because when we play out our given roles in the social pecking order, and perform duties within our expected limitations, it's generally safer for everyone ... up to a point!

At the same time, however, we all delight in those who can find ways of demonstrating to us that expectations and limitations are not so final, not so inviolable after all. Just in the last century, mankind has climbed Mount Everest, dived to the depths of the ocean, flown to the moon, circumnavigated our little world in a mere fraction of Jules Verne's "impossible" eighty days, and defeated dozens of medical plagues. Yet everyone said it couldn't be done! Well, none of it would have been done if someone hadn't been driven to challenge his or her apparent limitations and risk performing outside the norm of expected human behavior. On the most basic level of human physical capability, everyone also knows you can't hang by your hair, or walk on a rope, or stand on a finger, or juggle seven hunting clubs in the air at the same time, or bend over backwards and look forward between your own legs, or balance your dinner plate on a stick, or put your head in the lion's mouth and live to tell the tale. "None of it can be done!"

Oh how we chuckle and wink when we have the opportunity to see it all being done after all. And as we sit comfortably on the side lines, how we love to laugh in the face of the most trying circumstances: circumstances which by rights ought to be making us either afraid or depressed. Watching a performer who can break out of expectations and limitations is our revenge on all of those who have ever told us, "You can't ...!" And so it has always been.

There is an alternate response to the chuckle and the wink, however, when we see someone do something we believe to be impossible. We can react with fear and amazement, convinced that some supernatural force is at work. It leads to the second multicultural source for circus performances. God-like stunts, which challenge our perceptions of what humans are capable of, put the performer in the powerful position of claiming God-like powers. These powers may be useful to the culture in curing sickness, in defeating death, or in exorcising evil spirits. In this manner, a shaman or witch doctor can make himself absolutely indispensible to the welfare of his society.

Anthropological evidence suggests that "circus"-like stunts have been a part of social and religious ritual in hundreds of widely separated cultures since the dawn of man. In a routine paralleling the origins of modern sword-swallowing, an Alaskan Eskimo shaman could swallow eighteen inches of a smooth stick. Native American shamans commonly engaged in clowning, violent acrobatics, sleight-of-hand magic, and Houdini-like escape acts to convince their audiences that they had unique psychic powers on which the future survival of their civilization might rest. In the South Pacific, an ancient "fly-away," not unlike Jaqueline Williams' stunning climax to the Andrews trapeze performance in the 1988 Cirque du Soleil or the hair-raising conclusion of Sacha Pavlata's cloud swing act with the Circus Flora, is commonly practiced by young men entering manhood. These tribesmen for centuries have been proving their worthiness by leaping from a high tower in trance-like states which assure them of the protection of the gods. Their fall is broken inches from the ground by vines secured to their ankles, a primitive but effective bungie cord. In India, the ancient mystical traditions of sitting on swings of sharp stakes, contorting the body into unbelievable shapes while in a trance, and charming dangerous snakes all suggest protection by supernatural forces, and they remain a part of the national heritage. The domestication of elephants, with the blessing of the Gods, to perform useful "tricks" has been going on throughout Southeastern Asia for thousands of years. In Cambodia, we know that something resembling a circus existed at least eight hundred years ago. Temple carvings in the city of Angkor illustrate one such performance before a large crowd. There are jugglers, a trained monkey act on a perch pole, equilibrists, musicians, and even a high wire act with flaming torches. Charles Philip Fox, (New York: Bramhall, 1959) 36.

The manipulation of fire is one of the most commonly used demonstrations of God-like powers, with separate traditions in many different cultures. Fire-walking appears in ancient India, and it is an ancient tradition which today remains a major annual tourist event in northern Greece. In America, it is currently undergoing renewed popularity among radical spiritualists. Fire-eating, such as is practiced by ringmaster Brian LaPalme with the Roberts Brothers Circus, Red Johnson with Culpepper-Merriwether, John Strong III and others, is an ancient art, a powerful demonstration of man's domination over his environmental and human limitations. Any man or woman who can perform these kinds of activities paradoxically inspires in us both awe and fear. Thus it is that the performer who defies human limitations gains a considerable power over mere mortals, because the rest of us define ourselves by our very limitations. Once we see those limitations transcended, our definition of human potential grows. A simple circus-type stunt becomes associated with the universal quest for identity: Who are we, and where do we fit into the universe? Mystical superhuman power is an essential element of man's common search for selfhood, for an understanding of whatever limits there are that define us as human beings.

The third and final argument for a multicultural explanation for the origin of the circus lies in the fact that circus people have always been nomadic. After all, if they can cross the barriers of human physical capability, why shouldn't they also cross political and cultural boundaries? "Home" would have represented all the restrictions, limitations, and expectations which he or she was dedicated to challenging. Over the ages, thousands of people really have "run away to join the circus!" As any of them will tell you, the challenger is usually given plenty of incentive to leave home. A limited number of shamans and medicine men could be accomodated within any one group of people, and these priests would not have been particularly tolerant of rivals exhibiting the same "magical" superhuman skills. What's more, that young cave boy demonstrating his control over ten lions in front of the family cave may have been impressive, but he was, after all, ignoring more productive duties like bringing home the meat. He was challenging authoritative traditions cherished by the warriors and shamans, and he must have been a tremendous emotional and mental strain on his parents and friends. Part of their fascination with him, after all, was the fear that at any minute he could lose control and the result would be a shared wholesale slaughter. It was a fear which could not be sustained indefinitely. As for the young woman who spent her days swinging through the trees instead of playing it safe and performing her more conventional obligations, she too must have become a constant source of aggravation and frustration for her community. Neither of these prehistoric performers played their expected roles, and neither was long welcome in the cave. As impressive as their demonstrations of skill may have been, tribal leaders, both secular and spiritual, would have encouraged them to leave: "If you must behave like that, not in my cave, please."

One of the most intriguing paradoxes of the circus, to which we will return over and over in this book, is that while we flock to see circus performers, we then want them gone. We need to be amazed and impressed by them, and to identify with them, but then we need to reject them. Circus people will tell you that they don't feel welcome or at home among "towners." Both they and we prefer them to be outsiders. We may want them to come into our towns and show us what is humanly possible, but we don't think we would quite want them to stay. They would only confront us with the extent to which we are content to live within our own more traditional limitations. "Their presence is too painful a reminder of the compromises we have made, thank you very much." Challenge, after all, has its place, but challengers are both frightening and dangerous to a way of life that has been carefully designed within the safe boundaries of the known world.

Animal trainers, jugglers, acrobats, clowns, dancers, contortionists, and rope-walkers from many different civilizations and cultures all over the world, all rejected by their own people, thus found themselves wandering freely and widely in search of new audiences who would be impressed with their skills. They brought with them performance traditions that had been developed independently in dozens of different civilizations in which they had outworn their welcome. They could perform their deeds only until amazement inevitably gave way to fear, and familiarity bred the usual contempt. Then they had to move on once again. Thus, they were no more likely to be members of the civilizations for which they performed than they are today. Instead, we know in many instances that they were exotic strangers, "barbarians" from some foreign land. In the great Roman circuses, for instance, the legendary animal trainers were not Roman but Egyptian.

Wherever groups of such performers banded together to perform their stunts for the amazement and amusement of a rich man, an emperor, a pharaoh, or a king who was eager to impress his court or his subjects, or for an audience of ordinary people gathered on a village green, there was circus. It may not have been called "circus," but surely it has existed all over the world for thousands of years.

In the Nile Valley of Egypt, acrobats and balance artists are depicted on wall paintings that date to 2500 BC. As long ago as the Sixth Dynasty, around 2270 BC, we have evidence of an early clown: We know from a tomb inscription that the nine-year-old Pharaoh Pepi II wanted to be entertained by a Sudanese dwarf "that dances like a divine spirit" more than he wanted all the gold and silver of Sinai and Punt. One of the largest "circus parades" known to man took place in Egypt in the third century BC, when Ptolemy II mounted a day-long procession involving hundreds of wagons and chariots, drawn by thousands of animals of every variety. Large wild animal parks, similar to our modern day zoos, were apparently common both in Egypt and in the Far East. They contained fabulous collections of exotic wild animals, which seemed to be completely domesticated and trained to obey the commands of their owners, according to travellers whose recorded observations have survived to our own day. Marco Polo himself observed Kubla Khan's great zoo at "Xanadu" in the thirteenth century.

In fact, China has a long and venerable tradition of circus-type performers, who travelled throughout the vast provinces and earned respect in the Emperor's courts. We know there were court jesters as early as the Chou dynasty, which began around 1027 BC. The tradition of Chinese acrobatics that is making such an international impact in the contemporary circus goes back at least to the Han dynasty, two thousand years ago, when the "Hundred Entertainments" included rope dancing, juggling, balancing on balls, and pole climbing. On a tile which was excavated from a Han tomb is a drawing of an acrobat balancing a stack of bowls on his head while standing on one hand. And in another tomb is a large mural illustrating three girls cavorting on a rope suspended over four sharp sword points.

Over a thousand years ago, a special school was established by the T'ang dynasty for the purpose of training and organizing acrobatic dancers and musicians. The "Pear Garden," which was established in 714 AD, must have been one of the first theatrical schools in the world. Many traditional acrobatic tricks, such as the art of spinning plates on bamboo poles, were developed and taught at this time. >From the Sung dynasty which followed come stories of performers who juggled everything from clocks to children with their feet. Eventually, the Chinese classical theatre of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would develop from the groundwork of the Pear Garden. The white-faced clown was to become one of the four basic types of roles in classical Chinese Drama. "Lotus Drama" had developed by the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century, and it included such circus elements as jumping through hoops lined with swords and turning somersaults on a ladder. Eventually, acrobatic skills were to become an integral part of Chinese drama and opera.

Many histories trace the roots of the modern circus to the circuses of ancient Rome, and the result is misleading. It is true that Rome first gave us the word circus, but Roman circuses were certainly something very different from what we know as circus today, and in fact they had little if anything to do with the derivation of modern circuses. They began as chariot races, a tradition the Romans had acquired from Etruscans, Greeks and Egyptians. One of the early Roman "circuses" was the Circus Flaminius, which was not even a built structure at all and had no permanent seating. Evidently it was only a relatively small and confined rectangular space, which was eventually surrounded by many temples and which was traditionally used for horse and chariot racing. On the other hand, the Circus Maximus, the largest structure in ancient Rome, was an elongated horseshoe-shaped amphitheatre, over a third of a mile in length. The Latin word circus means round, or around, and the word was evidently used for such disparate and odd-shaped places and events because horses and chariots raced "around" the turning posts.

As Rome aged, going to the circus became the single most popular form of entertainment. In the second century AD, Juvenal wrote in his , "The people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now concerns itself no more, and longs eagerly for just two things—bread and circuses." The Latin word circenses here would be more properly translated as "races." Nonetheless, the "circus" rapidly evolved into much more elaborate games than mere chariot races, eventually ballyhooing the wholesale slaughter of animals and human beings among their featured events. The Emperor Augustus, for example, claimed to have staged 10,000 gladiatorial combats in his career. And when the Colosseum was built in Rome in 80 AD, one hundred days of games were dedicated to its opening, during which over 4,000 tame animals and 5,000 wild animals were slaughtered. The new amphitheatre was even designed to permit flooding so that full sea battles could be fought to the death, for the enjoyment of the public. Such events were hardly anything like what we go to the circus for today.

On the other hand, the Colosseum did exhibit some concepts that would later be incorporated into the modern circus. Its oval shape allowed 50,000 spectators to surround the spectacle from seats close to the action. On hot sunny days, a huge canvas, stitched together with colorful patches, was stretched from poles over part of the arena, to create shade for the public and add to the festive mood. This velarium, as it was called, is our first record of a "big top."

Nonetheless, for all the major festivals, spectacle on its grandest scale was staged at the Circus Maximus, which seated 150,000 spectators, one sixth of the entire population of Rome. By comparison, the New Orleans Superdome can accommodate only 95,000 people, and the record attendance in a Barnum & Bailey tent was a mere 16,728, set in 1924 in Concordia, Kansas. George Speaight, (London, Tantivity P, 1980) 137. Twelve Colosseum arenas would have fit inside the 1900 by 259 foot arena floor alone of the Circus Maximus, and after it had been remodelled by Augustus, Dionysius of Halicarnassus called it one of most beautiful and admirable buildings in Rome. It is little wonder that we are mistakenly drawn into attributing the origin of the modern circus to this spectacular building.

Festivals and holidays took up half the Roman calendar, and for each holiday a circus was held. So circus fans could indulge in their favorite habit to their hearts' content. The biggest circus event was the Ludi Romani, games held annually over a ten- to sixteen-day period in the middle of September to honor the god Jupiter. Elaborate and spectacular circus parades were held to promote the festivities and lead the populace to the Circus, and Dionysius has left us a detailed description of one he witnessed: legions of young men on horseback and on foot; charioteers; athletes; dancers in scarlet tunics and bronze belts, with swords, helmets and spears; flute and lyre players; satyrs, mimicking the warrior dancers; incense burners; floats carrying images of gods, and thousands of sacrificial animals. The great circus parades of the last century in America would have been dwarfed by such a procession.

The chariot races immortalized on screen in William Wyler's were held in the Circus Maximus. It's possible that Lew Wallace, who wrote the original book in 1880, was inspired by imitations of the ancient Roman chariot races that he had seen featured by the huge early American circuses. In the original, each race was seven laps around the course, for a total of about five miles, and lasted approximately fifteen minutes. Few or no rules restrained the chariot drivers from seeking to win at all costs. Drivers were culture heroes, the Roman equivalent of our sports heroes and movie stars, and the best were worshipped by tens of thousands of fans.

We know that these races were interspersed with other entertainments as well. In addition to the criminals and Christians who were condemned to die by some spectacularly gruesome means, there were acrobats, runners, gladiators, boxers, wrestlers, elephant and camel races, trained animal exhibitions and animal fights, and lots of equestrian events. A Roman post-riding event exhibited standing riders astride two horses, a skill often exhibited by equestrians in modern circuses. In still another form of racing, riders reined two horses together, and leapt from one to the other, perhaps at the end of each lap. H. H. Scullard, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981) 185. And in the "Troy Game," another equestrian event, two squadrons of noble Roman youths paraded before the audience and performed a complicated drill and a sham battle. Scullard, 184.

Many of these events do seem to have a remote connection to the circus as we know it. However, it can't be denied that the grim blood-letting of the Roman circus spectacle was even more fascinating to the public, and it was not to be a passing fancy. The slaughter that typified the Roman circuses continued for over four centuries. All around the Mediterranean, wherever Roman influence was felt, ancient Greek theatres were converted to permit more elaborate staging of spectacles, and new amphitheatres and circuses were built. Evidence suggests that up to seven new circuses were built in the fourth century alone. John H. Humphrey, (Berkeley: U Cal P, 1986) 579. Elaborate chariot races were held not only in Rome, but in Spain and the Northwest and eastern provinces. Humphrey, 541. Only with the full Christianization of the Roman Empire in the fifth century did the circuses begin to disappear. Not only were they suppressed as being morally depraved, but the leisure class which had supported such activities could no longer afford them. And finally, when the Roman Empire collapsed altogether under attack by Attila the Hun and the Visigoths in 455 AD, the institution, the place, and the word circus disappeared from public use altogether. For the next thousand years, the Circus Maximus and the Colosseum, and other structures like them all over Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, served only as stone quarries for newer and less ambitious building projects.

The Roman parades, the chariot races, and the less bloodthirsty events of the old Roman circuses have often been recreated, albeit in scaled-down versions, in the opening spectacles and stunts of modern circuses from the Franconis in France to the Ringlings in America. In 1890, Imre Kiralfy staged a gigantic "Nero Spec" for the Barnum & Bailey show, featuring sea battles, chariot races, triumphant marches, casts of thousands, and of course a conflagration scene. P.T. Barnum and his partners built the first Madison Square Garden in New York to house just such a performance. Only since the staging of such events, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, has it become fashionable to attribute the source of the modern circus to Ancient Rome.

On the other hand, in the heyday of Rome there were additional forms of public entertainment, along side of the circus. One of them proved to be just as popular, far more enduring, and much more deserving to the title of ancestor to the modern circus. While Pompey was promoting his bloody circuses, he was also building the first permanent theatre structure in Rome in 55 BC. Others soon followed, most notably the Theatre Marcellus, in 11 BC. It was the home of comedies, Atellan farces, tragedies, and the mime shows. While the latter were originally used as encore pieces to more formal theatrical presentations, gradually they became so popular as to drive out their theatrical competition. Roman mimes very probably had inherited their comic traditions from the Dorian colonies in Sicily. They bore no resemblance to the silent pantomimists we have come to associate with the contemporary word mime. In fact they seem to have much more in common with the modern artists of the circus. Small companies of men and women called histriones performed as acrobats, dancers, clowns, and actors for audiences gathered at the theatre, on the streets, and at private dinner parties. In the , Petronius describes one such dinner party in approximately 80 AD:

Finally the acrobats arrived. One was a silly idiot who stood there holding a ladder and made his boy climb up the rungs, give us a song and dance at the top, then jump through blazing hoops, and hold up a large wine-jar with his teeth.

Only Trimalchio was impressed by all this: art wasn't appreciated, he considered, but if there were two things in the world he really liked to watch, they were acrobats and horn-players. All the others were not worth a damn. Titus Petronius, (trans J. P. Sullivan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974) 66.

Mime performances were largely improvised little playlets, usually farcical, combined with all kinds of acrobatic stunts. Some of the mime companies were not so small, and approached the size of a full modern circus troupe. One troupe in the third century, for example, had sixty members, including rope walkers, trapezists, jugglers, contortionists, sword swallowers, fire eaters, stilt walkers, animal trainers, flute players, and of course, the clowns.

Their little playlets were usually much bawdier than modern clown acts, although some of the more risqué contemporary acts have probably come close to their old models. The clowns operated then much as today's Auguste and tramp clown work together in the circus, as straight man and stupidus, as the Romans called the poor fool who served as victim. The stupidus, or sannio, was usually a talented leader in the mime troupe. One such was Genesius, who was martyred in the Colosseum in 303 AD. Although he became the patron saint of the theatre, he was more of a circus man than an actor. Typically he would have worn a patchwork cloak and a long pointed dunce cap which were the uniform of the mimic fool, and which in all likelihood are the direct ancestors of the pointed cap and polka dotted suit that were still being worn by early twentieth-century circus clowns.

In later mime performances, trained animal acts were also featured. According to Plutarch, for example, an unusually talented dog appeared in the leading role of a farce which required it to be poisoned, play dead, recover, and greet the audience. Lou Jacobs used to do a similar routine with "Knucklehead," and "PeeWee" in later years, with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, "shooting" instead of poisoning the dog, who was disguised as a rabbit. Bears also acted in Roman farces, and there are even reports of elephant rope-walking during the period of Nero's successor. C. Suetonius Tranquillus, (trans. Alexander Thomson, M.D. London: George Bell & Sons, 1899) 404.

The continuing tradition of women being involved as full participants in mime activities, including at the managerial level, is particularly noteworthy. Unlike their counterparts in the formal theatre, mimes, clowns, jugglers, rope walkers, and acrobats had never been limited to male participation, even in Greece. Theodora herself, who was to become Empress of the Eastern Empire in the sixth century, was a mime in her youth. Allardyce Nicoll, (New York: Cooper Square, 1963) 85. It's very hard to account for this continuing lack of chauvinism in the mime tradition, especially when we consider that the theatrical profession would remain an all-male bastion from the Greeks through the English Elizabethan age. Some have suggested that the status of both women and mimes was so low that it didn't matter. If women chose to perform as mimes, it was not considered surprising that they should choose a low life comparable to prostitution; the phenomenon was so insignificant that it merited no social restrictions. Another less demeaning explanation lies in the fact that itinerant players, then as now, came from many varied and worldly cultural traditions. Some of the best mimes in Rome were not Roman; they came from Greece and Syria. This allowed them to cast a skeptical eye on regional religious and social laws and limitations, to which the more formal established theatre had to adhere. The mimes, the genuine "circus" people in the modern sense of the word, were, after all, in the business of violating limitations and expectations, just as we have suggested their ancesters had been since the dawn of social interaction. Perhaps because they were not associated with the norm of Roman society, mimes were not expected to conform to the social customs which restricted the role of women.

Historical traditions notwithstanding, we suggest that when Rome fell, the mimes did not! The reasons are similar to those which permitted women to participate in the art: mimes were outsiders by nature. Unlike the charioteers and gladiators, they were not associated with any particular arena; they were not cultural icons, nor were they saddled with particularly Roman values. With no "establishment" role to play, they adapted, first to Christianity, and then to the Visigoths, because they were and are most of all survivors. Besides, the new "barbarians" could hardly have been all that much more barbaric than the Romans had shown themselves to be in their circuses. As they moved into the medieval ages, then, mimes and other popular performers simply had to readjust to more self-employment than they had been accustomed to in the golden years of Rome. That practice of adaptation, of adjustment to the times, still continue among circus people today.

The medieval age was clearly anything but "dark" for Western popular entertainers. Walls tumbled, new trade routes with the East were established, and armies marched, helping to provide a further mix of cultural traditions. Arabs and Vikings invaded Europe, and the Crusaders invaded the Holy Land. And wherever trade routes developed, so did the roads on which circus people travelled. In fact, bankers and mountebanks were the two parasites that accompanied every big medieval trading fair. The two words both derive from the French word banc (bench), upon which the money changers and entertaining promoters stood to deliver their pitches. It was a period rich in opportunities for adding exotic new material to the repertories of the small bands of mountebanks, minstrels, troubadours and jongleurs. They travelled widely throughout Europe, just as their counterparts were travelling about Asia Minor, North Africa and China. There were new influences, such as the arrival in Europe of Chinese plate spinning, but the minstrels were essentially the same kinds of people who had performed the Roman mimes, doing variations of the same kinds of things, if under a new name. They were often accomplished poets who sang songs of courtly love, but they also served as ringmasters. They either presented or themselves performed as sword-swallowers and balancers, magicians, acrobats, jugglers, curers, contortionists, actors, jesters, puppeteers, and trainers of horses, goats, pigs and various less likely animals. The itinerant troupes played for the public on town squares, gathering their audiences like the Pied Piper. Sometimes they were paid by the mayor for their efforts, and at other times they had to pass the hat. Or they played in banquet halls for the rich lords and kings who were eager to keep their subjects happy.

Persecution of the players on moral grounds was not unknown; but so long as they represented no political threat, and their humor did not grow too blasphemous, they were tolerated and even employed by both church and state. There was at least one ecclesiastic fraternity of fools founded by the church, for instance, to combat the fear of death during the Black Plague; the Company of the Fool of Arrau, under the patronage of St. Sebastian and the Virgin Mary, presented masquerades and parades designed to lift the spirits of the people. The annual Feast of Fools, sometimes even featuring a parody of the mass, celebrated by a "Boy Bishop" or the "Lord of Misrule," was held in many parts of Europe up to the sixteenth century. During those January festivities, no custom or high officer in church or kingdom was immune to mockery. At a time when very little was being written down, when the average man did not live past forty and life was difficult in the extreme, the fools, troubadors, and minstrels managed to amaze people and make them laugh and feel good; and the people loved them for it, even when they got fleeced.

In our examination of the roots of the modern circus, a second medieval practice merits just as much attention as the travelling minstrels. With the age of chivalry also came increased emphasis on horsemanship, to which the period owes its name. Horses eventually were to provide the core around which the circus would be reinvented. Knights in shining armor rode highly trained steeds into battle and against dragons, whether real or imagined. When at peace, they competed on horseback in the lists, in jousting tournaments that were almost as full of pageantry as the old Roman circuses. Educated horses that could do tricks were frequently on display by the minstrel troupes, and eventually at the country fairs that grew to be so popular particularly in England and France. Perhaps the most famous of such animals was a horse named Morocco, owned by an Englishman named Banks. Morocco could dance, count, distinguish colors and people, return gloves to their rightful owner, whose name had been whispered in his ear, and even climb the steps to the steeple at St. Paul's cathedral. Wayne Franzen's horse Tonto is among those still performing some of the same tricks today. By 1600, the tradition had already been established that a highly trained horse spoke for the prestige of its owner. The smarter the horse, the more people would pay to be entertained by the animal, and the more impressed they would be with the talents and skills of its owner. The enterprise was not without risk: Ben Jonson reported that both Morocco and Banks were burned at the stake for practicing witchcraft by the pope in Rome.

Among all the activities that we would call circus-related today, it was horsemanship that most caught the public fancy in the eighteenth century, and in several generations the English were to develop it into a fine art. Legendary high schools of horsemanship were being formed all over Europe, including Vienna's Spanish Riding School in 1735. A number of prominent English riding schools had been established by 1760, which gave popular exhibitions of trick riding. Among the first equestrian stars of the era was a young Sergeant-Major just discharged from His Majesty's Light Dragoons. Philip Astley had a reputation for superb horsemanship and bravery against the French in the Seven Years War. In 1768, he and his wife advertised a demonstration of horsemanship in a little field called Halfpenny Hatch. It was located on the south bank of the Thames, where people had congregated for restriction-free popular entertainments for centuries.

The Astleys conducted neither the only nor the first of such exhibitions, but the young veteran displayed showmanship and panache, as he gallopped around the ring. His stance with one foot in the saddle and the other on the horse's head, swinging his sword around his head, earned him instant fame. Even more importantly, Astley was also an entrepreneur with an extraordinarily fine business sense. In order to bring his audiences back on a regular basis, he quickly added variety to his performances, including our old friends the clowns, the tumblers, the rope walkers, the dare devils, and the illusionists. He created an educated horse demonstration, reminiscent of Morocco. He was responsible for developing the "Tailor's Ride to Brentford," an act combining clowning and horsemanship which survives in many variations to this day. Astley played Billy Button, an inept little tailor who is determined to ride to the village of Brentford as quickly as possible in order to cast his vote for a popular underdog of a politician named Wilkes. The problem is that he can't even get onto his horse. When he finally does succeed in mounting, the horse won't move, but then it gallops off so fast he is thrown off again. The act concludes with the horse chasing the clown around the ring.

With his talents for riding, clowning, and business, Astley successfully developed his little equestrian variety show into an entertainment empire. He first built a covered grandstand for his riding ring, and then in 1779 he built the first indoor ring, Astley's Amphitheatre Riding House. Now he could have night performances, as well as full protection from the elements. Rapidly expanding his enterprise, he began an ambitious touring program, and built several new amphitheatres around the country. Astley also performed in the first known circus tent in Liverpool, in 1788, but curiously he rejected the idea of canvas after only one season. Speaight, 43. It is not clear why it would be left for the Americans to establish the tradition of circus tents a half a century later. It is likely, however, that at least some of the hastily built amphitheatre-circuses that were built in the next twenty to thirty years were wooden structures with canvas roofs, an inexpensive way to span a large center ring. Many were considered temporary, or even portable circus buildings, that could be moved to other locations and reconstructed.

Since performances at the new theatres and other such interior structures now had to be lit with candles or oil lamps, they were prone to frequent fires, and Astley's enterprises were no exception. Back in London, he stubbornly went through many amphitheatres destroyed by fire. He rebuilt each one bigger and more elaborate than the last for the staging of bigger and more elaborate entertainments and displays of exotic animals. His Royal Amphitheatre, originally built in 1804, combined a forty-four-foot diameter circus ring with a separate raised proscenium stage. Such amphitheatres signaled the invention of the dubious art of hippodrama, combining horsemanship with legitimate theatre. Shakespeare's was staged at Astley's, for instance, in 1856, undoubtedly adding a completely new dimension to Richard's famous battlefield cry, "A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!" Shakespeare, , V,iv,7.

The forty-four-foot ring diameter, with a subsequent minor reduction to forty-two feet, or thirteen meters, has become the industry standard dimension for the circus ring. It was probably determined by Astley to be the smallest practical size for circling horses. It must have also been influenced by the economics of engineering a roof over such a span, since his ring was at least 25 percent smaller than it had been in his outdoor riding school.

Philip Astley built nineteen amphitheatres in his lifetime, including many on the European continent. The circus has never recognized national boundaries, but it is a significant tribute to Astley's diplomatic skills that in a time of almost perpetual war between France and England, he was a favorite of both the French royal family and the revolutionary citizens. Defying a bureaucratic law which prohibited the staging of any two spectacles at the same time on any permanent stage, Astley stubbornly resorted to mounting a portable stage on horseback and parading his circus through the Parisian boulevards full of cheering throngs. His eventual Paris amphitheatre was never closed, even during the Reign of Terror: he was asked to leave France only when she officially went to war with England. He returned in 1802, and Napoleon soon threw him in jail when he declared yet another English war. With the help of French circus friends, Astley escaped to England, but he later returned once more to rebuild his Paris properties.

When Philip Astley died in Paris in 1814, the family business continued with his son. John, named "the English Rose" by Marie Antoinette, had begun to ride in his father's entertainments when he was five. He survived until 1821, when the Paris Astley's was taken over and later renamed the Cirque Olympique by Antonio Franconi. Franconi had operated the amphitheatre in Astley's absence during the wars. His descendents became one of the premiere circus family dynasties of Europe. In 1845, it was Victor Franconi who would build Europe's first new outdoor hippodrome, which restaged huge Roman-type spectacles and races, and Henri Franconi who would bring his mobile hippodrome to New York in 1853.

Back in London, Astley's amphitheatre was taken over in 1823 by Andrew Ducrow, the "Colossus of Equestrians," and the brother of the clown John Ducrow, who had created Mr. Merryman at Astley's. It remained in operation under various owners until it was closed in 1893. Speaight, 35. During his life, Philip Astley had invented no new circus skills. But he did combine all the elements that we have come to call the circus into a single entertainment. More importantly, he created an industry that spread throughout England and Europe like wildfire. For that he is traditionally credited with the title of "Father of the Circus." However, "circus" was a name he himself was never to use. Audiences simply went to the "Amphitheatre," or to "Astley's."

Twenty years after his apprenticeship with Charles Hughes, a Scotsman named John Bill Ricketts arrived in America, an experienced, accomplished performer and horseman. He set up in Philadelphia "at very considerable expense" an outdoor riding ring he called a "circus" at the corner of Twelfth and Market streets, which he opened on April 3, 1793. We now call this enterprise the first complete circus in America, because it incorporated the elements of clowning, music, acrobatics, and horsemanship. In his program, Ricketts promised that he would dance a hornpipe on horseback, throw a somersault backward, and leap from the horse to the ground and with the same spring remount with his face towards the horse's tail. His May 15 notice gives us a hint of the full flavor and extent of the circus:

This day, at the Circus in Market, the corner of Twelfth Streets. The doors will be opened at 4, and the Performance begin at half past Five o'clock, precisely Will be Performed—A Great variety of EQUESTRIAN EXERCISES,By Mr. & Master Ricketts, Master Strobach and Mr. McDonald, who is just arrived from Europe.

In the Course of the Entertainment, Mr. Ricketts will introduce several New Feats, particularly he will ride with his Knees on the Saddle, the Horse in full speed; and from this position Leap over a Ribbon extended 12 feet high.

Mr. Ricketts, on a single Horse, will throw up 4 Oranges, playing with them in the Air, the Horse in full speed.

Mr. McDonald will perform several COMIC FEATS (Being his First Appearance in America).

Seignior Spiracota will exhibit many Surprizing Feats on the Tight Rope.

The whole to conclude with Mr. Ricketts and his Pupil in the Attitudes of two Flying Mercuries; the Boy pois'd on one Foot on Mr. Ricketts' Shoulder, whilst Mr. Ricketts stands in the same Manner with one Foot on the Saddle, the Horse being in full speed.

Those Ladies and Gentlemen who wish to embrace the present Opportunity of seeing the Exercises of the Circus, are respectfully informed, that Mr. Ricketts intends closing it for the Season within three Weeks from the present Time, as he is about to take a Tour to some other Parts of the Continet.

Tickets sold at Mr. Bradford's Book Store, Front street, and at the Circus. BOX 7/6—PIT 3/9.

As Philadelphia was the nation's capital, President George Washington is traditionally thought to have been in attendance at one of the first performances, hours after he had signed a declaration of neutrality at the onset of new hostilities between the French and the English. The two men later went on recreational rides together and soon became good friends, sharing among other things their uncommon love of horses. In fact, Washington ultimately sold his favorite white charger, Old Jack, to Ricketts for $150, for display at his circus. Mildred and Wolcott Fenner, eds., (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1977) 15. Gilbert Stuart, famous for his portrait of the "Father of our Country," also painted John Bill Ricketts, the "Father of the American Circus," as he has come to be called, and his portrait now hangs in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. George Speight, (London: Tantivity, 1980) 112. Like Astley in England, Ricketts' "Circus Father" title comes not from having invented anything new, but from popularizing circus skills and arts and establishing the business of circus entertainment in America.

Ricketts' circus expanded rapidly, although "circus" was still a term reserved for describing the place, and not the event. He and his younger brother, Francis, and their small company were soon joined by other acts. They included Master Long, the popular clown Mr. Sully, John Durang, the first American-born clown, and other riders, acrobats and rope walkers. In 1795, he built his most famous "New Amphitheatre," containing both a riding ring and a stage, on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, just behind Independence Hall. Drawings suggest that it was a round white wooden structure that may have had a canvas roof. It was probably typical of the same kind of buildings apparently being hastily constructed in England which saved expense and provided at least some degree of mobility.

Many Americans, emerging from the Revolution and a temporary law banning all theatrical and ring exhibitions, were eager for escapist entertainment. However, many others were not so enlightened as President Washington, and they were convinced that the theatre and the circus could be lumped together into a common den of iniquity and sin. In fact, to escape various prohibitions of one kind or another, theatres frequently played circus acts, and circuses frequently included brief skits and melodramas. In 1796, for example, only months after she had arrived in the country, America's first elephant made a "grand triumphal entry" in Nathaniel Lee's on stage at The New Theatre, which was just across the street from the Ricketts' circus. Conversely, both Ricketts brothers were frequently forced to present and sometimes appear in theatrical productions as a matter of necessity.

Many Philadelphians, who only totalled about 60,000 people, would have never attended such "immoral" demonstrations. Clearly, potential audiences were too limited to support a full-time circus, and to make matters worse, the city was frequently a victim of outbreaks of yellow fever. As a result, in search of new audiences, Ricketts instituted an ambitious touring program as soon as he arrived. He traveled up and down the East coast, from Quebec to Charleston. On at least one occasion he even framed two units of his show to tour separately, although that plan was not especially successful. In his eight-year career, he built at least twenty circuses, located in every major eastern American city, including several amphitheatres in Philadelphia and New York.

Ricketts was almost immediately imitated by competitors from both England and France, who opened similar shows, and sometimes employed his performers. One such was a Swede named Philip Lailson, who built a permanent domed amphitheatre only several blocks from Ricketts' Chestnut Street circus. However, Lailson's fancy ninety-foot-high dome collapsed for no good reason in 1798; some undoubtedly said it was God's justice. None of the competitors was as energetic and stubborn as America's first circus owner, but even he could not sustain for long his enthusiasm for circus in the New World.

Ricketts' luck changed dramatically in 1799, when both the Greenwich Street amphitheatre in New York and his remodeled Philadelphia amphitheatre burned down. Financially ruined, he nonetheless struggled through several more touring attempts, and even tried to play in Lailson's collapsed amphitheatre. Finally, as his friend John Durang described him, "out of heart at doing business in this bodge way," Ricketts and most of his company set sail to try their luck in the West Indies. C. H. Amidon, in , XIX:3 (May-Jun, 1975) 16. Luck proved to be no better there, for en route he was kidnapped by French privateers. Rescued, the circus played for several months throughout the islands; several of the company died, probably from the same yellow fever that would kill one hundred thousand British troops in the region by 1802. Amidon, 17. When his brother Francis went to jail for deserting his new native wife, John Bill Ricketts had had enough. "The Father of the American Circus" sold his horses and set sail for England. He and all hands were lost at sea, a final twist to the pattern of ill luck that had plagued his last years. Francis was eventually released and returned to America to tell the little-known story of his brother's Carribean adventures, and as late as 1810, he was a clown with the Boston Circus.

In the meantime, while the French were killing each other off by the thousands, and the British were rattling their sabres, Americans were basking in their neutrality and independence. It was a time for expansion, of both frontiers and ideas. In that regard, it wasn't only circuses and theatres who were competing for the two-bits Americans might be willing to pay for entertainment. For some time there had also been an established tradition of importing strange-looking animals that could be exhibited in cities and towns for a fee. By the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, lions, camels and polar bears had all been exhibited singly in Boston. On April 13, 1796, Captain Jacob Crowninshield brought into New York harbour America's first elephant, an unnamed two-year-old Asian female. The enterprising ship's captain sold her to a Mr. Owen at the Bull's Head Tavern for what at the time was the stupendous sum of $10,000. Owen must have felt he could make a lot of money by displaying her; if the morality of the stage was questionable, and the ring was guilty by association, certainly no one could object to paying for simply viewing one of God's largest creatures, could they? Documents show this elephant on the stage in Philadelphia later that year, and for at least the next ten years she was led up and down the coast, on exhibit from Boston to Charleston.

In the first half-century following 1793, when Ricketts had arrived in Philadelphia to open a circus, Americans moved rapidly westward. Within thirty years, there were several small but significant circuses touring the new world with two or three wagons, some horses and a clown. New circus troupes, eager to search out new audiences away from the crowded competition in the East, were never far behind the settlers. Early circus troupers had to be a rugged bunch of pioneers: roads west were little more than widened trails when the first circus wagons challenged them. Much easier for travelling were the great waterways, the Ohio and the Mississippi. In 1825, when the Erie Canal was opened connecting the Hudson River at Albany to the Great Lakes, entrepreneurs and ordinary settlers began to flock westward in even greater numbers. By mid-century, there were dozens of circuses, small and large, crisscrossing the country and playing wherever new populations justified a performance. Within the context of this brief historical perspective, we can only touch on a few of their names, in order to suggest the relationships between them and to show just how fast the American circus developed. By 1849, for instance, Joseph A. Rowe's Olympic Circus had already gotten all the way around Cape Horn to San Francisco, where it played to gold rush audiences at gold rush prices: Admission to box seats was set at $5.00, compared to 50¢ back East.

Edmund and Jeremiah Mabie, from Flatfoot country in Putnam County, New York, had started their first circus in 1841, with the help of Nathan and Seth Howes. After six years of touring from New York, they paused for a rest one day in Delavan, Wisconsin. So struck were the brothers by its beauty, as well as the practical consideration of establishing a midwestern base for new territories, that they bought a four hundred acre farm there, and the circus stayed. The word spread, and by the next spring, other entertainers were moving in. Their loose living habits rapidly earned Delavan the title of the "wickedest town in Wisconsin," an ironic description for a place just founded in 1836 as a temperance colony and named for an internationally famous prohibitionist.

Somers, New York, may have been the "cradle," but Delavan's reputation as the "home" of the American circus was earned by the twenty-three circuses who called the town their home. In fact, the two towns would engage in a modern battle of words in 1966 over which one was entitled to issue first day cancellation for the American Circus commemorative stamp. That brouhaha was eventually settled when Somers, the earlier "birthplace," won the privilege of re-cancelling covers flown in from Delavan, the official site. Among the residents of Delavan in 1870 was Dan Castello's Circus, managed by W.C. Coup. Castello, who was a talented equestrian and one of the most popular song-and-dance men in America, had started with the Mabie Brothers, and he had extensive experience in travelling shows around the country. His partner was on the train on May 10, 1869, the day that the Golden Spike was driven joining the Union and Central Pacific Railroads in Promontory, Utah. Castello's became the first circus to cross the continent by train. New towns had been founded all along the new railroad tracks as they stretched across the country. In 1872, it was W.C. Coup and Dan Castello, recognizing the value of the new territories and the potential for travelling farther and faster, who persuaded P.T. Barnum that their circus should be placed on brand new specially made circus railroad cars. Other circuses had been travelling on the rails for several years, but the Coup-Barnum enterprise was the first to move its entire circus, including all the annexes and a parade, to daily rail transportation, on April 18, 1872. They used Pennsylvania R.R. cars at first, but later in the same year they ordered their own specially-built flat cars.

W.C. Coup had had earlier experience with Barnum, the Mabies, and Yankee Robinson, of whom we shall hear more. By 1870, Coup was perhaps the most forward-thinking man in the industry. In addition to his historic train initiative, it was Coup in the first place who proposed the union with Barnum's name that would evolve into "the Greatest Show on earth;" Coup who insisted on expanding to two rings; and Coup who proposed Barnum's New York Hippodrome, the precursor of Madison Square Garden. Yet outside the world of the circus, his name is virtually unknown. After he split from Barnum, he failed at several subsequent enterprises, more from bad luck and high principles than lack of talent, and he died in Florida in 1895, a pauper. His body was brought home to Delavan.

Delavan today is just as proud of its circus heritage as Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Somers, New York. Not to be outdone, it too has an elephant memorial in the center of town. This one is a colorful, fibreglass, standing representation of the Mabie Brothers' notorious elephant, Romeo, who was reputed to have killed twenty-five horses and five trainers. Delavan is also the home of the International Clown Hall of Fame.

The Ringling Brothers Circus grew rapidly, along with other American circuses. They were entering the age known as the "heyday," or the "golden age" of the American Circus, something short of a half-century of progress which ended abruptly with the 1929 stock market crash. Ringling's winter quarters in Baraboo is now the site of the Circus World Museum. We have seen in both Somers and Delavan that circuses tend to attract more circuses by seducing neighbors and relatives into the business, and now Baraboo was also to become a circus capital. In 1890, when the Ringlings were finally ready to put their show on rail, their five cousins bought all their old wagons and established a second Baraboo circus, which eventually became The Gollmar Brothers' "Greatest of American Shows."

At the end of the century, The Ringling Brothers' World's Greatest Shows went head to head in a bitter competition with its chief rival, the Barnum and Bailey Circus, which was solely managed by James A. Bailey after Barnum's death in 1891. The boys from Baraboo had by now been joined by their two remaining brothers, and their management expertise together was legendary. They may have argued loudly in private, but there was never a public disagreement between them. Traditionally they wrote down very little about their day-to-day decisions, and most Ringling deals were made with verbal agreements. Any decision affecting the circus was made by consensus, and once it was made, all five brothers worked hard to bring the plan decided on into effect. In this case the plan was to overtake and acquire the legendary Barnum & Bailey Circus. Taking advantage of Bailey's five-year European tour, they were able to achieve the status of the biggest and most popular circus in America.

Finally, in 1907, a year after the death of the popular "Mr. Bailey," they finally gained control over the Barnum & Bailey Circus and its other interests at bargain prices. For a while, they continued to operate their several shows separately under their own names. John Ringling insisted their show would never leave Baraboo: "The members of our company have invested a quarter of a million dollars in homes that cannot be duplicated in the state of Wisconsin." Lentz, 60. Nevertheless, The Ringling Brothers Circus remained in Baraboo only until 1918, when the three remaining brothers elected to combine the two biggest shows, creating The Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc., the title which it retains today. From 1918 until it moved to Sarasota, Florida, in 1927, the "Big One" was winter-quartered in Barnum's Connecticut barns. Bridgeport was thought to be a better location from which the brothers could keep tabs on what had become nothing less than a circus empire. Thus did Bridgeport and Sarasota join the select community of American circus cities. Sarasota in particular later became a major capital, when other circuses seeking warm climates for their winter quarters settled in the vicinity. Nearby Gibsonton, or "Gib'town" as it is affectionately called by circus people, became a retirement home for hundreds of ex-circus performers. However, relations between the big Ringling show and its host city were from time to time strained, and in 1960 winter quarters were moved 14 miles south to Venice, Florida, where they remain today.

Before we turn our attention too far away from Wisconsin, however, a word must be said about a phenomenon much overlooked by most American circus histories: the role of the black man.

There were early isolated examples of black performers in the circus, like James Sandford and Robert White, who had both appeared with Aron Turner's Circus and then with Barnum in 1836. Minstrelry became popular in the late 1840's, but early groups such as the Virginia Minstrels, the Kentucky Minstrels, and the Original Christy Minstrels were white men performing in black face. These touring shows were played in big city theatres, in tents, and on show boats like Spalding's. With song-and-dance, lectures and short playlets, they purported to show "life on the plantation," that is the "amusements" of negro slaves. But with few exceptions, prior to the creation of the Original Georgia Minstrels in 1865 by Charles B. Hicks, there had been no blacks in the mainstream of the American entertainment industry. Henry T. Sampson, (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1988) 5. It wasn't until after the Civil War that black managers like Hicks, Lew Johnson, and Henry Hart established popular and successful minstrel shows with well-trained black actors and bands. By the 1880s, the old format of minstrelry was growing tiresome; the playlets grew longer, and the specialty acts opened up opportunities in the shows for acrobats, wire-walkers and jugglers. This new direction bridged the gaps between minstrelry, burlesque, vaudeville, and the circus, and paved the way for Ephraim Williams.

The "Wild West" show was a uniquely American part of circus history that developed early in the "golden age." In May of 1883, Buffalo Bill Cody opened the Wild West, Rocky Mount and Prairie Exhibition in Omaha, Nebraska. His show was a huge success and would eventually make three tours to Europe. The last one ended in 1906, when Annie Oakley shot the cigar out of Kaiser Wilhelm's mouth; she later commented, "I wish I'd missed that day." John and Alice Durant, (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1957) 133. But Annie, the "Little Sure Shot" who hated guns, rarely missed, and she was one of Buffalo Bill's prime drawing cards. Her most popular trick was to shoot holes through the pips of playing cards thrown into the air. A circus ticket with a special hole punched in it denoted free admission, and to this day, a free pass is called an "Annie Oakley."

"Buffalo Bill's Wild West" always called itself just that. The word "show" was never attached to the end of it, because the "West," a noun, is what he was presenting. The Wild West included huge demonstrations, usually in the open air, of horsemanship, the pony express, cowboys and Indians (including old Sitting Bull), shooting skills, the attack on the Deadwood stagecoach, and of course, the spectacular presentation of the veteran Pony Express rider, army scout and Medal of Honor winner himself. Later the Wild West staged a more international riding exhibition entitled the Congress of the Rough Riders of the World, featuring three hundred riders in various uniforms, charging around the arena, hell-bent for leather. It may not have been pure circus, but audiences loved it, at least in the beginning. Buffalo Bill's Wild West was soon imitated by Pawnee Bill's Wild West, featuring Gordon Lillie, an Indian interpreter, by the new Wild West unit of the Adam Forepaugh circus dynasty, and by the 101 Ranch Real Wild West. Gradually, circuses and wild wests became inextricably intertwined: Pawnee Bill's show included an incongruous herd of elephants, and Buffalo Bill's included a circus side-show in the 1890's. And for a period in the 1920's, it was common for many circuses to have a "Wild West" feature in the concert, an after-show which always followed the "blow-off" at the end of a circus performance. Contemporary circuses such as Flora and Big Apple continue to commemorate the tradition of the "Wild West" with old west themes and western acts like the impressive lariat work of the "cockney cowboy," Vince Bruce.

It was Miller's 101 Ranch Wild West that gave a down-and-out Buffalo Bill Cody his last job before he died in 1917. There is a postscript to the old scout's story. Just a month after he died, Congress stripped him of the Medal of Honor he had earned in 1872 as a civilian army scout, in a retroactive decision to restrict eligibility to enlisted men and officers. But in July of 1989, after 72 years of argument, his grandson was finally successful in persuading the army that the famous scout was worthy of our nation's highest award, and his name has been restored to the honor roll.

When the Ringlings acquired the Barnum and Bailey enterprise in 1907, they also acquired full control over the Forepaugh-Sells Bros. Circus, which Mr. Bailey had combined in 1896. George L. Chindahl, (Caldwell, ID: Caxton, 1959) 108. By 1910, the Ringlings controlled three of the top five circuses, all but Hagenbeck-Wallace and Sells-Floto. At this time, about the midway point in the golden age of the circus, there were at least ten large railroad shows and more than thirty smaller wagon shows on tour. Chindahl, 150. Many of the smaller shows were regional operations, such as Mollie Bailey's circus in Texas, but there were other huge circus operations as well.

John Robinson's Ten Big Shows claimed to have been founded in 1824, although 1842 is a more likely beginning, and it was operated under four successive John Robinsons. Old John frequently had to point out that his circus had no relation whatsoever to "Yankee" Robinson's show, or to the circus operated by his adopted son, James Robinson, a champion equestrian of the day known simply as "The Man Who Rides." Durant, 85. Before it was retired in 1930, the John Robinson name was thought to be the oldest title in the circus business, with somewhere around a century of continuous use. During the Civil War it was called the "Hog Show," and it freely crossed back and forth across the Mason–Dixon line. Although Old John was loved in the South, he nearly got himself killed on several occasions when he talked a little too openly about freeing the slaves.

The Robinson show and others like it are closely associated with the whole frontier spirit of a rapidly expanding America. Life in the circus was always an adventure and a challenge, and it could be downright dangerous. One day in 1875 in Jacksonville, Texas, for instance, Robinson circusmen were challenged to a pitched battle by townspeople, out to destroy the circus. Perhaps they were out to seek revenge for losing all that money at "games of chance" with the last circus that was in town; on a grift show, games of "chance" didn't necessarily have anything to do with chance. The traditional circus call-to-arms "Hey, Rube!" produced guns, stakes, knives, and clubs, and the "Battle of Jacksonville" left six or seven dead and dozens injured. Richard Prince, , (reprint in [XIX:2, Apr 20 1989] 18).

As everyone knows, shootings were commonplace in frontier America, and circus men were frequent victims. The famous clown-manager William Lake was murdered in the ring by a gunman, leaving his circus in the very capable hands of his widow. Along with Mollie Bailey in Texas, Agnes Lake was one of the two most successful female circus managers in the country; some years before, it was she who had made James Bailey the general agent for the old Robinson & Lake show, thus launching his career. She was eventually remarried, to the famous gunman Wild Bill Hickok, who would also be shot to death. As often as not, for self defense, circus men were armed. Even band members occasionally carried pistols tucked into their belts underneath their shabby blue serge uniforms. Circus band man Earle M. Moss once described a not untypical frontier circus audience he witnessed as late as the 1920s: During the show, some of our male customers would become carried away during the performance, partly because they happened to like the performance and partly on account of too many visits with the bottle. On such occasions they might whip out a .38 and pointing up their pleasure with a "rebel yell," perforate the top of the tent with a couple bullet holes. Generally, some of their compatriots would follow suit. Some times, it would sound like a rehearsal for the Battle of the Marne. At such times, Uncle Ernie would barge in under the sidewall with hat in hand, admonish the crowd, saying 'Shoot, pshaw, now folks. I want you to have a good time, but shoot, pshaw, you're making a lot of holes in my little old tent; if it rains, we'll all get wet, I'm afraid, so if you don't mind, I'd appreciate it it if you'd put away those shooting irons until you get outside my poor old tent. Thank you kindly, gentlemen.'" Earle M. Moss, (reprint from 1972 in , [XVII:2, Apr 20, 1987] 20).

The John Robinson show was among several to become part of another major circus dynasty that would soon challenge Ringling supremacy. The American Circus Corporation had its roots back in 1884, in Peru, Indiana, usually pronounced by circus people as Pee-roo, although the natives use the more conventional Puh-roo. "Uncle Ben" or "Colonel" Wallace, the owner of the largest livery stable in Indiana, had acquired the remains of W. C. Coup's Circus, sold at auction in Detroit, and the menagerie of a circus which couldn't pay its feed bill. The animals included a lion, a black bear, a wolf, one deer, two goats, two hyenas and a camel, and the Miami Herald duly reported in true circus fashion that the new "Wallace & Co.'s Great World Menagerie, Grand International Mardi Gras, Highway Holiday Hidalgo, and Alliance of Novelties" was a show which was "second in size only to that of P.T. Barnum." Al G. Field, the talented black Virginian who would become one of the country's top minstrels when he wasn't traveling with the circus, was Wallace's head clown and equestrian director. The Wallace, or Great Wallace, or Cook & Whitby show frequently had to use different titles because it was so well-known for its grift operations. When Ben bought the great German wild-animal trainer Karl H„genbach's show in 1907, it became the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. Three years later it was travelling on about forty-five railroad cars, compared to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey units at eighty-four cars each, one indication of their relative size. Also by 1910, the John Robinson show was travelling on forty-two railroad cars. The Sells-Floto Circus had about thirty-one cars; the Gollmar Brothers had twenty-four, and Al G. Barnes had ten. The total number of circus railroad cars across the country was then approaching seven hundred.

Circus owners are a varied lot indeed. Some were born into circus families. Some ran away with the circus as youngsters and worked their way up through the ranks of ticket takers and candy butchers. Others are entrepreneurs and businessmen. And still more see themselves as creative artists, sometimes even serving as headline performers. There are owners who never miss seeing a performance of their own shows, and others who never leave winter quarters.

Why would anybody want to own a circus? Everyone knows that its a very tough business. The short historical list of people who were successful at running or owning their own shows suggests that a lot of pain went with the job. Plenty of owners, including P.T. Barnum, made fortunes, only to lose them again. Many, like Dan Rice, the circus-owner clown who wanted to be president, died as forgotten alcoholics. Yankee Robinson, the boom-or-bust pioneer owner who gave the Ringlings a boost at the beginning of their career, died broke. At least for these and many other men, there was always a chance for economic success. That had to be enough, and in many cases success was irrelevant anyway. Consequences, and the possibility of failure were not part of the equation when the enterprising Gilbert Spalding began his circus career. He took over the management of the Nichols Circus because they had defaulted on a personal loan and were behind in their payments for paint he had sold to them. He was a bored pharmacist with little to lose. The great Philadelphia meat and horse dealer, Adam Forepaugh, like P.T. Barnum, needed a little humbug in his own life; and he and recognized that his circus audiences needed it too. Using his own first name to justify the inclusion of biblical references in his advertising, he allowed himself to challenge the anti-circus prejudices of the church with a smile. Despite his deceptive claims, his circus was neither religious in its thematic approach, nor was he reputedly very "Christian" or honest in his relationships with his employees and audiences. A ruthless businessman, nonetheless he created one of the largest and most successful circuses in the world.

For all these men, the norm, the mundane, the ordinary, were simply not acceptable. The fun of owning a circus was in the process, in the game itself, and not in the final score. D. R. Miller would rather have a patron tell him how much he enjoyed the show than hand him a thousand dollar bill. No false sense of permanence, stability, or security lulls circus owners into the business. They continue to feel that circus enterprises last as long as they last, and then they're over; that's all. Only a handful of today's shows have been around or expect to be around for more than twenty years.

The allure does not always come from potential fame, either. As we saw in the last chapter, Coup and Bailey deliberately chose to remain modestly out of the limelight, despite the fact that both were the great driving forces behind Barnum's circus enterprises. In his day it was Bailey's circus; every major decision and order was his to make, yet few outsiders ever saw him. Many modern owners too are rarely seen by the public, content to remain quietly in the background.

For both the loved and the hated, the winners and the losers, money was never the issue either. It's true that in the last chapter, we saw enormous fortunes being made by the likes of Seth Howes, Jerry Mugivan, John Ringling, and many others. But these people were aggressively enterprising individuals, and there were undoubtedly easier, cheaper and less stressful methods for them to earn their fortunes. Clearly more to the point is that circus owners and managers were men and women on the fringe, on the edge of the socially and culturally acceptable, and they thrived on a sense of adventure, risk, and the unusual. What was most important to them was having a good time, living their dreams.

The great Sells-Floto Circus is a good example of a show which was created for the sheer fun of it all. It was started by two publishers with the , who whimsically named the show after their sports writer, Otto Floto. In 1906 they hired Willie Sells, adopted son of one of the original Sells brothers of circus fame, to be their general manager. Sells took the show on tour for only one season and then left, but his name remained as a perpetual part of the show's extended and more impressive title.

All these men were possessed of a positive spirit in the face of adversity that they were determined to share with the public at large. They wanted people around them to have fun, so that they too could have fun. Such is the ambition of contemporary owners as well. To a person, when asked why they were prepared to accept all the risks of putting a modern circus on the road, they replied, "It's fun."

Obviously there's an element of nostalgia to it all, a joy in recreating a time from America's past when values were clearer and simpler. But it's more than that, too. Contemporary circuses exist in a contemporary world, and they have value to us only when they can speak to us in our world. Owners and designers of the modern circus experience recognize that. They want above all to teach us that the imagined boundaries of our lives, the ones that prevent us from having fun, are only illusions. They want to demonstrate to us that despite all the pressures, dangers and demands we face from society and the modern world, life is still full of wonder, and joy, and fun. It is just the kind of spirit that the circus has been and will always be so well equipped to convey. Fourteen-year-old Matthew Colbert, travelling with the 1989 edition of Vermont's little Circus Smirkus, sums up the driving philosophy of most circus owners simply and honestly: "I like to see people laugh. That's hard enough."

At least three of the big tented shows of today have the scope and polish to make their audiences feel what some of the giants of the golden age of the circus must have been like: The Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus, the Carson & Barnes Circus, and the Circus Vargas. They may serve as examples of the kind of large tented circus which emerged directly from our historical traditions, and which is still successfully operating in contemporary America. The backgrounds and approaches of their owners and managers are typical of those found throughout the business since it first began.

The Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus carries one of the oldest names in the circus business. Winter-quartering in Deland, Florida, it has earned the nickname the "I-95 Show," because it travels primarily up and down the east coast along Interstate 95. It's an old-fashioned, three-ring circus, presented, as their 1989 program states, as "a continuance; a salute to the oldest purely American form of entertainment…in the time-honored tradition of an era gone by, under a rope and canvas arena larger than a football field." In its eight months on the road, the Beatty-Cole show claims to present 486 performances, seven days a week, traveling across 10,000 miles in seventeen states, with 170 performers and staff in 78 vehicles. of the Clyde Beatty Cole Brothers Circus.

Since the stroke of midnight that ushered in 1982, the show has been owned first by John W. Pugh, joined several months later by E. Douglas Holwadel. When bought from Florida State University, Beatty-Cole was in shabby condition, both artistically and financially. In what Holwadel calls a real "sweetheart" deal, they acquired the circus and $600,000 in bad debts for $2 million, payable over twenty years at 3% interest. , Mar. 22, 1989. Just the year before it had been appraised at $2.5 million and donated to Florida State by Jerry Collins, a multi-millionaire dog track owner and the last survivor of a triumvirate that had owned the show since the mid-1950s.

Soft-spoken, articulate, and always nattily dressed, Johnny Pugh glows with a look of professional competence. He provides the vital practical experience, and the expertise in the logistical and performing operations needed on the Beatty-Cole show. He is the son of "Digger" Pugh, a British show business entrepreneur who produced theatrical and variety shows throughout England and the Continent. Johnny got his first stage contract when he was less than a year old, and in August of 1988 he passed his fiftieth anniversary in show business. He first came to America as a boy in 1942, and he appeared with the Cole show before returning to England with his family during the war. When he came back to the Cole Show in 1948, all of ten years old, he appeared in a center-ring trampoline act with the great clown, Otto Griebling, and remembers being terrified as a boy by Zack Terrell and his unpredictable cane. Following a three-year stint with the Mills Bros. Circus, he returned to England and worked in the television and film industries. He appeared at the Palladium with Benny Hill. During the filming of Burton's and Taylor's , he was Richard Burton's double, and the man in charge of the elephants; only later did he discover that he and every last one of his elephants had been left on the cutting room floor. Once again back in the U.S.A. in 1961, he went to work for the Beatty-Cole show, and has been there ever since. He likes to say that's longer than anyone still active in the circus has worked on any one show. In 1964 he broke his leg while working on a trampoline, and began to shift his focus from performance to the front office; within two years, he was the manager, and by the time he became a co-owner eighteen years later, he was thoroughly experienced in every aspect of circus operation.

His new partner, on the other hand, was brand-new to the field. Doug Holwadel was a Vice-President of Marketing with the Santee Cement Company, in South Carolina, and he traded on the New York Stock Exchange. He led a stressful life, and three operations for cancer led him to seek a change. Since he had loved the circus all his life, when Johnny offered him the opportunity, he jumped at the chance to buy in, helping to raise the $200,000 in working capital needed to put the show back on the road so it could start earning income. Three years later, he joined the show on the road as the booking agent, and brought with him his marketing techniques and business expertise. He introduced computers and streamlined the whole operation, helping to cut costs and identify prime audiences. He likes to say that he left New York's Wall Street in a Brooks Brothers suit, and he is still wearing it. He approaches prospective lot leasers — mall owners who might perhaps be expecting a circus owner to be someone in cowboy boots and a gold chain — as though he were closing a real estate deal, in his Brooks Brothers suit and a button-down oxford shirt and tie. He takes his time and seeks no immediate answers. "If they give you an answer off the top of their heads, they haven't thought it through clearly," he says.

The enterprise and the partnership have been successful in returning the Beatty-Cole show to a state of fiscal and artistic good health. Johnny Pugh is fiercely proud of the turn-around he and Doug have managed to pull off in only a few short years, and he plans to extend his records by remaining actively involved on the lot for many years to come. Despite the new stresses inevitable in running a circus, even Holwadel's cancer has been in remission. He says he has never felt better in his life, although he still finds it impossible to sit still during a full circus performance. The two owners often take turns traveling with the show, although Johnny finds it hard to stay away. They remain good friends, and their different styles, areas of expertise, and backgrounds complement each other to serve well the famous names and long tradition their circus carries.

The Cole goes back to William Washington "Chilly Billy" Cole, who was born in 1847, the son of an English clown and contortionist. In 1871, the same year that W.C. Coup was persuading Barnum to get into the circus business, the Cole & Orton Circus was founded, and was later among the first to play in small Western towns. By 1884, the W. W. Cole show was traveling on thirty-one railroad cars out of St. Louis, Missouri. From that show the modern Beatty-Cole circus measures its lineage, celebrating its centennial year in 1984. One of the most widely respected names in the circus business, Cole sold his popular and successful show in 1886 and became a partner for a while with Barnum & Bailey. Ten years later he rescued a financially insolvent James Bailey on his European tour. One of the circus' most successful entrepreneurs, "Chilly Billy" left an estate of $5 million when he died in 1915.

W. W. Cole's great-great-nephew, James M. Cole, represents a separate line of the Cole name in circus history. Born in 1906, he saw John Robinson's circus when he was a boy, and dreamed of owning his own. He began by working for the shows of the American Circus Corporation until they were sold to the Ringling empire. In 1938, he started his own indoor circus, a "school" show operating in high school gymnasiums along the back roads of New York and Pennsylvania. "Mr. Cole," as he is affectionately called by friends and strangers alike, operated the little Cole All Star Circus for short winter tours every year for fifty years, "taking the circus to the kids in the gym," as he says. It is still operating successfully, now under the aegis of his former ringmaster, Billy Martin. In the summers he operated the James M. Cole Circus under tent, and managed a variety of others over the years. Why? Because he "enjoys being around people, loves seeing them have fun, a good way to be if you own a circus," he says. Joe Kelly, " in (reprinted from Utica (NY) Dispatch, March 23, 1987). When he retired to Sarasota, Florida, in 1987, he had become one of our oldest and most widely loved premier circus showmen. Like so many circus men, Mr. Cole can look back and smile on a long and fruitful career, living out a boyhood dream and adding to our rich circus heritage.

Meanwhile, the "Cole Brothers" title itself was created in 1906 by Martin Downs. The title was subsequently used by a variety of people before the big depression. In 1935, Jess Adkins and Zack Terrell revived it, and with equipment from the Christy and Robbins shows they built it back to prominence. It featured for their first three years a young wild animal trainer named Clyde Beatty. Beatty had already appeared in every major circus of the day, and had almost been killed by his powerful lion, Nero, in 1932. In 1939 the Cole Brothers show became the last circus to abandon the tradition of the horse-drawn circus parade. The circus was acquired in 1957 by the Acme Circus Corporation —Frank McClosky, Walter Kernan, and Jerry Collins—who merged it with the Clyde Beatty title they had rescued from bankruptcy just the year before. McClosky and Kernan had only just been fired from the Ringling show in 1955, and they were eager to provide their former employer with some competition.

In the meantime, Beatty had been performing in circuses bearing his own name and others throughout the '40s and early '50s. It was Beatty's show, under the new management, that became the last to leave the rails in 1956. Following the merger, Beatty remained a featured performer in the combined show until his death from cancer in 1965. The following year, Art Concello came on as manager, and almost succeeded in duplicating his old Ringling solution and sending Beatty-Cole into Madison Square Garden, which would have doomed it as a tent show. However, Jerry Collins and Frank McClosky, one of the last of the old school of circus showmen, prevailed. The show survived under canvas, albeit meagerly, until 1979, when McClosky passed away. In 1981, on Johnny Pugh's advice, Collins gave his circus to Florida State as a tax write-off and thus set the stage for its recovery to one of the largest and healthiest tented shows in modern America.

Another huge tented show leaves Hugo, Oklahoma, every March. The gigantic Carson & Barnes Circus plays only one-day stands in small towns across America, mounting two performances and raising and tearing down its five-ring big top every day for 240 days. In 1988, moving on eighty vehicles, the 200 men and women on the tour traveled 18,000 miles, through twenty-eight states, border-to-border and coast-to-coast. They carried with them a large collection of animals: thirty-seven horses, a rhinoceros, a giraffe, a hippopotamus, a liger, lions, tigers, llamas, camels, a moose named McDermott, and most crucial of all, twenty-three elephants.

In fact, the show's owner, Dory R. Miller, is one of the biggest elephant lovers in the country, possibly owning more of the animals than any other single American. His favorite bull is Barbara, who was named after his daughter and who has been with the show for almost forty years. As a young "punk," Barbara was a frequent escapee. Spooked by a falling pole in Prairie du Chien back in 1977, she decided to take a long stroll through the Wisconsin countryside, pursued for miles through back yards, corn fields, and a nursing home by her handler and a large crowd of troubled officials and onlookers. Unruffled, Miller grumbled, "If so many people hadn't chased her, she wouldn't a' run so far!" He excused the feisty Barbara's second escape with "Youngsters have to have a little fun while they're growing up, don't they?"

Dory Miller is a living circus legend, who with his wife Isla celebrated fifty years of circus ownership in 1986. No other owner alive today can make such a claim. D. R., as he likes to be called, has been involved in more than 24,000 performances; that's over 12,000 set-ups and tear-downs in over 12,000 towns. Joe Wallace Cooper, in LIX:2 (Mar-Apr, 1986) 11. He is responsible for training and launching the careers of many younger circus managers and performers, and for importing from Mexico some of the finest aerial acts ever to appear in American circuses. D. R. can still be found at performances, settled into his lawn chair by the back door at center ring, topped with his baseball cap, and with a bag of Red Man tobacco always at hand. His small lanky frame is alert to everything that happens in the big top, as he nods his approval of the performers, or occasionally registers his dissatisfaction with a sidelong spit of tobacco juice. "We sometimes don't got the best," he says, "but we got the biggest." He obviously loves every part of the circus world he helped to create, and his crews and performers love him too. They are all his family. Carson & Barnes really is a true family show: D. R.'s daughter and son-in-law, Barbara and Geary Byrd, are co-owners of the show, as is Isla; and his grandchildren Kristin and Traci are performers.

In his 1985 route book, General Manager James K. Judkins, wrote of the effect of D. R.'s absence from the tour due to a hospitalization: The entire season was clouded with the fact that they were not here. If you think about it, D.R. and Isla really didn't have to do anything. Others easily took over the miriad of chores that D.R. and Isla attended to. It's not what they did, it's who they are. It is their presence. Isla can make you feel good just by laughing. D.R. can see more sitting in the tent with his eyes closed than most can with binoculars. Just knowing he is in the tent causes everyone to do their best. He can straighten out a problem by just addressing it. Having the Old Man show that he was interested in the situation was enough to clear it up. One of his scowls could sober up even the drunkest soul, or at least make him head for his sleeper. He would say good morning to a Big Topper that everyone else forgot. Compliment the cookhouse people, when others might complain. Check on a new baby. Smile when he parked you in the morning. Tell a joke, that wasn't funny but would cheer you up. Straighten out the camels. The Old Man could make your day. Years ago D.R. wasn't the Old Man. Obert was. It took D.R. nearly 50 years to become the Old Man. Nobody is in any hurry to assume that title, and for now it belongs to D.R. Carson & Barnes Circus,

D. R. first entered his father Obert's circus business in 1924, when he was eight years old. When he wasn't working the sideshow platforms, he was a trick pony rider, or the calliope driver, and eventually he was known for his wire act. In 1939, he and his brother Kelly and their father started a small dog-and-pony show called the Miller Brothers Circus, which grew into the Al G. Kelly-Miller Bros. Circus. Kelly-Miller was where the great American truck circus was developed: The spool truck, the seat wagons, and an impressively efficient logistical system for "high grass" operations were all originated there. In 1942, at the invitation of a local circus fan and businessman, the circus moved to Hugo, in the Red River Valley of Oklahoma, where it has been quartered ever since. Hugo then joined the ranks of Somers, Delavan, Baraboo, Peru, and Sarasota, taking on the role of still another Circus City, USA. Since that time, it has been the home of at least one and sometimes as many as five circuses.

Even during the war the Kelly-Miller show prospered, thanks to the efforts of Isla and Kelly's wife Dale, who moved the show while the boys were away. The ladies drove the trucks and rigorously followed the 40 mph rule, reputedly holding to that speed in the city, in the country, and on the lot — saved on gas, clutches, and shifting, and everyone else learned to stay clear!

Kelly died in 1960, and Obert in 1961, leaving behind them a morass of estate taxes and a greedy Uncle Sam. In 1962, the ship carrying the circus to Canada caught fire and sank off the coast of Nova Scotia. No lives were lost, but it was the final blow to a show by then plagued with financial and legal worries. Still, D. R. would not cry "Uncle!" He gathered the remnants of the old show and others and invented a new name he and his family picked out of thin air, uninfluenced by anyone ever named Mr. Carson or Mr. Barnes. He mounted the current Carson & Barnes Circus, and turned it into what is today one of America's greatest circuses.

D. R. is justifiably proud of his career, his accomplishments, his elephants, and his circus. He was once introduced to Kenneth Feld, the impressario of the Ringling show: "Oh, Mr. Miller," said Mr. Feld, "you're the fellow with all those elephants." "That's right, Mr. Feld," said Mr. Miller, biting off a characteristic plug of Red Man, "and I've got a circus to go along with them, too." Cooper, 12.

Both the Carson & Barnes Circus and the Beatty-Cole show lay claim to being the biggest circus under the big top. Still, a third major American circus enterprise calling itself the "largest" and "greatest" tented show touring America today was owned and operated by Clifford E. Vargas before he succumbed to cancer on September 5, 1989. Actually, Vargas was fully equipped to play indoors as well as in a tent, although he preferred to use his new Canobbio 150 by 300 foot big top. The three-ring circus traveled mostly in the West, spending over half its touring season in California, where it was based. It moved on twenty-three trucks, two of which were reserved just for the elaborate wardrobe, and carried twelve elephants. Its members were proud of the quality of their show, and they claim to have been fiercely loyal to their dedicated and energetic manager. Vargas was involved at every level of his show, which seems to be a common factor in most of the successful circuses on the road today. "I don't sit behind a desk. I'm right out in the circus all the time. And I don't ask anybody to do anything I can't do myself," he told the in 1976. Vargas was completely devoted to re-establishing the positive values of our circus heritage, "a return to the rich tradition of the circus as it once was in America," as he said, although it's difficult to say whether it's a return or an evolution. His emphasis on quality rather than quantity, and his high level of energy and zeal made him one of the more important forces in the industry. The Circus Vargas headlined talented performers and brimmed with patriotism and energy. The "Let Freedom Ring" spec which closed the 1989 edition, with performers glittering from the center ring in red, white, blue and gold is an example of the lush excitement marking the Circus Vargas' production values.

Cliff Vargas was another in that rare circus breed of men who managed a show for over twenty years. Born and raised in California, he got into the circus business originally as a young man, by stumbling into the back door of the Chicago Shrine show. Seduced by what he saw, he did promotional work for them for a while before he returned to California and began his own promotion company. In 1972 he bought the Miller-Johnson Circus with which he had been associated, together with the contracts that went with it, for $250,000. It was a small outdoor tentless show, with some trucks, props, ring curbs, and seating. California weather made a tent the first priority, and since that time the show has grown steadily in size and quality. With the elaborately sequined 1989 edition, the Circus Vargas celebrated the twentieth anniversary of Vargas' association with it. As of this writing, it is unclear whether the Circus Vargas will survive the death of its dynamic owner-manager, or whether in another decade it will have become one of the thousands of circuses that have faded from memory.

There are probably two dozen relatively small old-fashioned tented shows currently traveling throughout the United States and Canada, and hundreds more in Mexico and Central and South America. They play in the outlying fields, the parks, and the recreation grounds of very small towns, and sometimes in the bedroom communities surrounding our cities, but never in the cities themselves. The circuses may be as small as the modest companies of performers with one-man bands, who, like the two Liebel Family Circuses, play on the midways at county fairs and town festivals. The Liebels' origins, incidentally, go back to sixteenth-century Europe, and their red unit plays in a stunning one-hundred-foot round tent, with four center poles topped by an unusual ornamental steel arch arrangement. Small top circuses may range up to the three-ring affairs which are big enough to create their own events, like the Olde Tyme Circus, taken out by veteran animal trainers Alfred and Joyce Vidbel for the first time in 1984. The Vidbels are quartered in the Catskill Mountains of New York, and their enterprise is popularly known among audiences along its central East Coast route as "America's Finest Family Entertainment." Some little tops are more impressive than other little tops: they may have more daring acrobats, more stunning jugglers, funnier clowns, cleaner set-ups, friendlier staff, or more elephants. But all of them are exhibitions of real skills, not illusions; and all contain the elements of humor and challenge to human limitations that give their audiences such a fun and honest perspective into what we are and what we can be. It is always a wonderful surprise to discover the friendliest clowns or the most impressive balancing acts ever seen in a little family circus, where they are sometimes least expected; and yet we get surprised all the time. To describe each of those circuses thoroughly would take up several books. Here we can take a brief look at only four shows, who must represent for us small circus in America. At the same time, we mean to suggest that there may be twenty others, equally deserving of our attention, and we expect that American audiences will continue to seek them out.

In 1974, Wayne Franzen was a twenty-seven-year old Wisconsin high school teacher who loved the circus. His life-long dream of owning a show finally won him over on June 6, when he took out the Franzen Brothers Circus for the first time. "Brothers" is an invented part of the title of so many circuses because many owners evidently feel it has a traditional family appeal. But in this case there really was another Franzen brother originally involved. Neil left the show after only three months of its first tour, having discovered that more money could be made with less work in almost any other line of employment. Wayne has been the driving force behind every aspect of the show. He began with a little 40-by-60-foot tent, a herd of goats at liberty, a horse named Tonto, a spool truck made from a converted potato truck, and a corn crib for a lion cage.

From those small beginnings, the Franzen Brothers Circus has developed in fifteen years into one of America's favorite little shows. Its new bale-ring two center pole Scola vinyl tent is small, focusing attention on its single ring. It would accommodate well over 1,000 spectators, but Wayne frequently chooses to set up only one side for seating. Now quartered in Florida, with an office in Wapakoneta, Ohio, the circus travels throughout the Midwest and East on thirteen trucks. To control costs, everyone in the small company doubles up on jobs, and Wayne remains involved at every level of show management, from truck driving to performing. In fact he is the most prominent performer, opening the show with his full cage act, and later reappearing with his elephant and Tonto, the educated horse who has been with him from the beginning. He also appears on the aerial ladder, but it is the animal acts with which he is most closely associated. It is highly unusual for such a small show to have a full cage act, with six tigers and two lions, but that was Wayne's dream from the beginning. Raised on a Wisconsin dairy farm, he has a natural feel for working with animals. He prefers to work with each cat, goat, dog, horse, elephant, camel and llama singly in the training process, feeling that they all thrive on the personal attention. It is clear that Wayne thrives on it, and his love for the animals pervades the atmosphere of the whole show.

The other three little tops that are to serve as our representatives for small circuses in America are three-ring affairs. Two of them, the Roberts Brothers and the Great American shows, are quartered near Sarasota, Florida, still the most popular circus haven in the country, as it has been since the Ringling Brothers & Barnum & Bailey Circus moved there in 1927. The third one, the Kelly-Miller show, is based in Hugo, Oklahoma.

The Roberts Brothers Circus is a genuine family affair. It is run by the charming Doris Earl, and her two sons Jeff and Robert T. Jeff is the vice president and secretary, who manages the show, and Robert is the president, remaining in Florida to run the main office. Doris is the treasurer, and frequently travels with the show as a candy butcher. The Earl boys were raised in the circus; Doris and her late husband took the Robert G. Earl show out as early as 1964, when Doris was a featured aerialist. Now, the Earls are on the road from March to October, playing up to two hundred stands with two shows per day. They travel from Florida to Maine and back, and for three of the seven months of their tour they are in Pennsylvania. They know they'll never get rich in this business, but they love it; and they're proud that after years of hard work, they've paid off debts and are beginning to show some profits.

Roberts Bros. moves on about twenty vehicles. It carries no wild animal or cage acts, but there are a variety of ponies, llamas and small animals, and one elephant, Lisa, who they have leased from D. R. Miller since the show began. Their tent is about 70 by 210 feet long, small enough to fit on the ball fields of back-road America.

Once again the whole tone of the show is determined by the active presence of congenial owners. It's clear that everyone on the lot likes everybody, and that carries through to ringmaster Brian LaPalme's personable appeal to his audiences. Not only is LaPalme the ringmaster, the magician, and one of the country's most impressive fire eaters; he also runs a popular cook house, although his cohorts often accuse him of preparing meals by blowing on the food with his "volcanic breath." It's a small troupe, and everyone pitches in to help with the big jobs. The tear-down takes little more than an hour, and when they've gone the lot is so clean it's difficult to tell that the circus has ever been in town. Of course, they've had some help from the armies of happy local youngsters who hang around to pick up trash. In return they get all the hot dogs and popcorn they can eat from the concession stand, which is the last truck to pack up and leave.

The Great American Circus is also quartered in Sarasota, Florida, and it plays exclusively in the eastern half of the United States, covering 246 dates and an estimated 15,000 miles in 1989. It's a small show, traveling on about ten trucks of its own with seventy-five people. The new incarnation of the Great American has developed into a tidy little three-ring show, featuring several elephants, including four baby Africans, a lot of dogs, and some very nice acts. No longer is Tiny Tim featured "Tiptoeing through the tulips," and the new red-topped blue and white vinyl tent, which can seat over 2,200 spectators, gives a unique, warm, reddish glow to all the performances. Circus people always look as though they have long and fascinating stories to tell, but the wonderful group of characters assembled for this show could undoubtedly keep us enthralled for hours. They range from the 24-hour man, feisty David "Spider" Alton, a former Ringling employee and ex-prize-fighter weighing in at 91 pounds, to the quiet and personable business manager, Rod Ruby, an ex-Methodist minister.

The Great American and the title to the now defunct Circus USA are owned by Allan C. Hill. He runs his entire operation from phone banks in Sarasota and doesn't often travel with the show. Allan has been close to the circus all his life. He is the son of Bill Hill, once boss canvas man and general manager for Hoxie Tucker's circus; his mother was a third-generation aerialist and equestrienne. Allan has never been a performer, but he was raised as a candy butcher, and quit school after the eighth grade to stay with the circus. He joined the Hoxie Brothers Circus as a promoter in 1972, after a stint in Vietnam had earned him a bronze star. In three years he quadrupled the market for Hoxie by instituting a new up-to-date telemarketing system he still uses today, and in 1983, Allan was able to buy the show. Hoxie's second unit became the Great American Circus. In the winter of 1989, his Children's Theatrical Group toured "Santa's Magical Circus."

The Kelly-Miller Circus is quartered in Oklahoma, under the shadow of its giant sister, the Carson & Barnes show. In fact, the two shows spring from the same roots, and D. R. and Isla Miller are part owners of this one too, along with Lorraine Jessen and David and Carol Rawls. When the Big John Strong tent show went out of business in 1983, it was acquired by the Millers. Because the Al G. Kelly-Miller Bros. title had been retired since the old show became Carson & Barnes, it was decided to resurrect it for a new show using the Strong equipment as its nucleus. David Rawls became its manager, and the title was later reduced to Kelly-Miller. It travels primarily throughout the South and the Midwest.

The Rawls family is a good example of just how thoroughly one circus family can provide talent for many different circuses. David manages Kelly-Miller, and his wife Carol is the Artistic Director. In 1989, their sixteen-year-old daughter, Sasha, is an office assistant, and six-year-old Kelly is an occasional performer. David is the oldest son of Harry E. Rawls, a respected circus veteran who has worked with the likes of Jimmy Cole and D. R. Miller. He helped to launch the new show and serves as its contractor in Hugo. Bobby, his second son, used to be the manager of the Beatty-Cole show, but he has given up life on the road and now owns the AAA Sign Shop in Mead, Oklahoma, making a career as a talented circus and sign painter. His creative work appears on the Beatty-Cole, Carson & Barnes, and Kelly-Miller circus lots. A third brother, Chris (Harry C.), took over his management job, and Chris' delightful wife Maria is now the Beatty-Cole office manager. The fourth brother, Michael, is Concessions Manager, and the youngest, William is the newest announcer for Kelly-Miller. Three sisters have opted out of circus careers.

With three generations of Rawls involved, Kelly-Miller is proud to call itself a family circus. David is a knowledgeable circus businessman, trained by D. R. Miller, and he is eager to promote his show as friendly, responsible, clean family fun. It travels on thirteen show-owned vehicles, and another thirty or so private trailers and campers. There are sixty-five to seventy people on the tour, including what seems like an army of small happy children. One of them, ten-year-old Dora, is an amazingly accomplished contortionist and equilibrist, and a reminder of the true paradox of "children of all ages." One summer day before a show in Frederick, Maryland, she borrowed a friend's bike to play with. As she wobbled precariously past a circus fan, as tremulously as any other uninhibited little girl with no balancing skills whatsoever, she was overheard to say, "Oh, oh! I don't know whether I remember how to ride a bike!" Yet a half hour later she was perfectly balanced on a tiny platform in the center ring, gracefully bending over backwards and through her legs to drink a cup of pink lemonade placed on the floor in front of her.

Kelly-Miller carries a full menagerie tent, open as a sideshow attraction for separate admission, and stocked with three elephants, three camels, three goats, one llama, the requisite snake, and one tiger. The declawed tiger was acquired for humane reasons, and is a non-performing pet, kept in an over-sized cage and lavished with love. David no longer believes in carrying wild animal acts because of safety concerns for both the animals and the public, not to mention skyrocketing insurance rates. The blue and gold, three-ring, four-pole main tent is a new Italian Scola Teloni design, housing a talented and dedicated family of performers. David Rawls and the company were to have a unique opportunity to combine the best of both the tented and indoor circus worlds by setting up their entire big top and back yard inside the Lansing, Michigan, Civic Center for the 1989 Labor Day weekend Riverfest celebration. However, when the Center discovered how many holes they were going to drill in the floor, it was decided to place the tent conventionally outdoors.

Each of the four representative circuses discussed in this section has a unique contribution to make to the American circus scene, but they have much in common. They must all sink or swim on the income from the red wagon alone, and they are at the mercy of the wind and the mud. Nonetheless, box office receipts are up in all four shows, a sign of renewed interest in the circus experience which is encouraging to their owners and managers. Increasingly more common for them all are old-fashioned "Straw Houses," the traditional name for sold-out shows, when straw was spread out in front of the seating for over-flow audiences. None of them would choose another line of work, despite all the headaches of salary-juggling, booking, transportation, insurance hikes, and local regulations that make modern circus management so difficult. Although Franzen's single-ring one-sided presentation breaks with some preconceptions of what circus is, all four shows are expressions of a genuinely American folk art form, steeped in the traditions and lore of the American frontier spirit. At the same time, they have modernized their operations with trucks, computers and telephone communications which allow them to improve their connection with the people of contemporary rural America.

"The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, Inc." remains too long a title for most of us to wrap our tongues around. It's interesting to note that even today, over seventy years after the combined show was created, it gets informally abbreviated to "The Ringling Show" in the midwest, where the brothers had a strong reputation, and the "Barnum," or "Barnum & Bailey Show" in the East. Whatever it's to be called, there is little question that it has been the king of the indoor circuses since its last canvas tear-down in 1956. Its history was outlined in the last chapter, and few circus-goers need any introduction to "The Greatest Show on Earth."

Since 1969 there have been two units of the Ringling circus, the Red and the Blue, traveling at any one time in North America, and then in 1988 the special international "Gold" third unit was created to play under tent in Japan. The two arena units travel for eleven months of the year, and return to quarters, now located in Venice, Florida every other year. In less than one month they mount a completely new show, with a new theme and new acts, and they're off again. Every year brings a new edition out on the road for a two-year tour; in the middle of the tour, everyone gets one two-and-a-half week vacation. So the year 1990, 120 years after Messrs. Coup and Barnum went into business together, embraces both the second year of "Gunther Gebel-Williams' Farewell Tour" for the Red Unit's 119th edition, and the Blue Unit’s new 120th edition of the Big One. The New Blue Unit show features the best of a fine Italian circus, the Circo Americano, that Kenneth Feld purchased in its entirety in 1989. His father had carried out a similar coup once before, when he bought the entire German Circus Williams in order to get Gunther Gebel-Williams as his headliner. This time, Flavio Togni and his family, the fourth generation of another of Europe’s oldest circus families and twice the winners of Monte Carlo’s Golden Clown Award, make their American debut. Flavio presents liberty and high school horse acts, a mixed horse and elephant act, an elephant ménage, and a rhinoceros-panther-leopard act.

The Ringling units are the headliners in an entertainment empire which also includes five Disney ice shows, the Siegfried and Roy Magic Show, and a variety of live entertainment special extravaganzas. The statistics are impressive indeed. By their own estimates, Kenneth Feld productions are seen by some forty million people every year. In an average year, each unit of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus travels over 14,000 miles, to thirty-nine cities, over a forty-nine week period, giving an average 535 performances a year. Each unit carries around 250 performers and 100 animals, depending on the particular year. Each unit travels with almost one hundred animals, including twenty-one elephants and thirty-two horses. Each week, each unit consumes twelve tons of hay and 5.5 tons of meat, and hauls away 210 cubic yards of trash. Every year, one of the two circus units travels within one hundred miles of 85% of the American population, and business is booming.

Its sheer size and Las Vegas show-quality have led some old-time circus fans to think of the Ringling enterprise as fostering size and quantity over quality, form over substance, profit over art, and glitz over talent. There have always been critics who rightly or wrongly level such charges against the circus, and especially against the new directions instituted by Johnny and Henry North. Johnny died in 1985, while the affable Henry Ringling "Buddy" North still serves as a vice president of the Corporation. It's true that when Kenneth Feld's father and uncle took a big chance and finally bought the show from the Norths in 1967, they thought they could make money. Profit was quite naturally the primary goal among these seasoned show businessmen, and they were outrageously successful: Irvin and Israel Feld assumed a $1.7 million debt and bought the circus for a bargain $8 million. They revitalized its presentation and doubled its size. Four years later they sold it to Mattel Toys, Inc. for $50 million. But they weren't through with profit yet. Mattel had no idea what to do with a show earning them major losses, and sold it back to the Felds in 1982 for only $22.8 million. "The good Lord never meant for a circus to be owned by a large corporation," said Irvin. (March 19, 1982).

Ironically, the Feld enterprise is today the largest entertainment corporation in the world, and it is still raking in enormous profits. Son Kenneth took his own firm hold on the reins when Irvin died in 1984, and he vehemently denies any allegations by his critics that he may not be sufficiently interested in the true art of the circus. He insists that his life-long dream remains "to create the best...to present the finest...to enliven...to enlighten...to entertain!" Feld is a passionate, devoted and tireless businessman. He is a generous supporter of any enterprise seeking to expand awareness of circus arts, and supports the efforts of both the Circus World Museum, in Baraboo, Wisconsin, and the Circus Hall of Fame in Peru, Indiana. He oversaw the creation of the "Ringling Readers," an innovative new series of publications designed to encourage children to read. Most importantly, he strives to produce every new edition of the circus to top the last one, seeking a unique combination of displays that will both preserve circus traditions and experiment with new ideas. The Ringling show can afford to pay its acts top dollar, and they can afford to seek out the best acts from all over the world. The great tramp clown, Emmett Kelly, when he and the show were still on good terms with each other back in 1954, wrote: "You can troupe all over the world, and you can listen to applause in far-away places and you can read flattering publicity from hell to breakfast, but when you open with Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Madison Square Garden, New York City, you have 'arrived.'" Emmett Kelly, (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1954) 175. Among performers and audience alike, there is no question that the same incomparable prestige still prevails for "The Big One."

However, "The Big One" is far from the only major circus currently playing indoor dates in the United States. The Shriners have established an annual tradition of sponsoring circuses ever since the Mystic Shriners' Yankee Circus in Egypt was produced in Detroit in 1910. Almost everyone has heard of the Shrine Circus, but Shriners don't actually operate circuses, except for some concessions and amateur clowning. Circus committees of local Shrine Temples simply lease the services of professional circus promoters, who put together a show for them from available circus artists; or they may hire a complete circus to perform under the Shrine name. Some circus producers like Paul V. Kaye, George Carden, George Hubler, Tarzan Zerbini, and Tommy Hanneford play the majority of their dates under Shrine sponsorship. Shrine-produced circuses are no small enterprise. Taken all together, they employ more people, attract more audiences, and play more performance dates than any single circus possibly could.

The Zerbini and Hanneford enterprises may be used as examples of the extreme flexibility with which indoor arena circus producers operate. They are perhaps the biggest and the best known, and they both can keep several units on the road at the same time. They can provide employment for performers in a virtually year-round operation, putting off-season unemployed acts together into entire circus performances on demand. They will play in arenas and coliseums, in the open in stadiums and race tracks, and under canvas. They will play under the Shrine name or under their own: The Tarzan Zerbini International 3-ring Circus, and the Royal Hanneford Circus.

The Hanneford name must be one of the oldest in circus history. In 1621, young Irishman Michael Hanneford toured rural England with an early menagerie, and in the next century an Edwin Hanneford participated in a juggling contest before King Edward III. The current Royal Hanneford Circus was just created by Tommy Hanneford and his wife "Struppi" in 1975, but Tommy figures that his sister's daughter Nellie is at least a seventh generation circus artist. "Royal" came into the title originally as "Royal Canadian," when the old Irish show was touring in England, and Edwin's family posed as Canadians in order to avoid British antagonism. The modern Hanneford show is based in Osprey, Florida, just south of Sarasota. It can be split into two units as necessary, and about 80% of their dates are played under the Shrine name. Beginning in 1990, at least one of the Royal Hanneford units is expected to play in one of the new European-designed cupola'd tents.

The Royal Hanneford Circus is reknowned for its clowning and horse acts, which developed out of a long family tradition. A nephew of the famous "Poodles" Hanneford, Tommy grew up along with his brother George and sister Kay Frances on the Downie Bros. Circus. As soon as he was old enough to walk, he worked on his father George Sr.'s bareback riding act. In the mid '70s, he was himself "the Riding Fool" of the Hanneford Riding Act, and he still serves as equestrian director for its newest incarnation. His wife Struppi, who was famous not only as a rider, but in a trained tiger act and as the trapeze artist "Tajana, Goddess of Flight," now works in every phase of circus production with Tommy.

John "Tarzan" Zerbini's popular nickname stems from the sensational entrance to his own wild animal act that he developed in 1960, when he debuted as "Tarzan Zerbini, Lord of the Jungle." Standing on the back of an elephant, he thundered into the arena dressed only in a loin cloth, grabbed a rope "vine," and swung over the bars of the steel cage, to be confronted with a variety of "dangerous" cats. His more contemporary shows may include variations such as the substition of a tuxedo for the loin cloth, and a pink cadillac convertible for the elephant.

Zerbini was born into a French circus family, and came to this country in the 1950s to appear with the Mills Brothers Circus. He subsequently went on to work for the old Dobritchshow, one of the top Shrine shows in the country. In the late 1970s he was finally able to mount his own show by purchasing the assets of Hubert Castle's International 3-Ring Circus. He now operates two circus units, and occasionally a third, based in Webb City, Missouri, which tour throughout the North American continent each year. The two indoor shows, a western and an eastern unit, are 3three-ring affairs, and the third is a European-style single-ring circus that plays under canvas. The Canobio new-style round tent seats around three thousand people, and Tarzan likes to use it whenever he can. The tent unit travels with a fleet of fifteen new company-owned Freightliner tractors. Tarzan performances are growing rarer, as he and his wife Elizabeth frequently wing back and forth between units supervising operations. Elizabeth's father, Joseph Bauer, who was once a world-class perch-pole artist and is now a major circus producer himself, also works with the show, and his son Joseph Dominic Bauer does both ringmaster and "Giant Space Wheel" duties. Tarzan and Elizabeth's lovely and graceful daughter Sylvia, the ninth generation of the Zerbini circus family, is a frequently featured aerialist on the single trapeze and Spanish web. The Zerbini Circus style betrays its owners' European backgrounds, emphasizing fast-paced, strong acts in a no-frills format, and deemphasizing the big production numbers that tend to predominate in big American shows.

There are of course dozens more small circuses who make it their regular practice to play indoor dates around the country. They operate all year round but more often in the winter time, thus avoiding the summer tent season and assuring a better pick from available talented performers who are committed to the summer tours. George Hamid, Jr., another old and respected name in the circus business, operates his popular Hamid-Morton Shrine Circus for a spring tour in the East and Midwest, opening regularly at the Roanoke, Virginia Civic Center. From the big Circus Gatti to the little shows like Jimmy Cole's All Star and the Century All-Star Circuses, indoor circuses are big business. If we were to include all indoor Shrine circuses and the many small "school" shows that play short tours in high school gymnnasiums for less than one season before they reorganize under a new name, our list would undoubtedly amount to over a hundred contemporary circuses.

Any look at the whole spectrum of circus in contemporary America must include the school tops that may be helping to create tomorrow's circus artists. We are not referring here to those dozens of tiny circuses mentioned above that play around the country in school gymnasiums. Our concern is for a new circus phenomenon that is growing in both numbers and quality. Circus schools offer training grounds to future artists, as well as periodic exciting and energetic performances, which American audiences would be well advised to seek out.

Until recently in most of the world, and still in the United States, the most reliable supplier of each new generation of circus professionals has always been family on-the-job training. Some circus people are out to change all that. In order to understand where Americans are on the scale of circus education, let's take a brief look at the rest of the world. The most famous circus school in the world is in Moscow, which since 1930 has offered a demanding four-year curriculum in circus arts. The three hundred or so students range from fifteen to twenty years old when they are admitted; only seventy-five of them survive each year's final examinations. The school's sense of the aesthetics of circus art, combining harmony of gesture, beauty of performance, and strength of feeling, as well as the quality of its graduates, has had a major influence on virtually every circus in the world. There are now two other such national circus schools in Russia. Nearly all the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, North Korea, and Cuba all have schools based on variations of the Moscow model. In China, each of the 130-odd State-run acrobatic troupes serves as the equivalent of a circus school. In France there are three big circus schools. In Spain, Los Muchachos is the International Boys Circus, a whole self-governing village of 2,000 boys ranging in age from four to the late teens. It was founded like "Boys Town" in this country, as a refuge for runaway and homeless boys, but its Circus Training School attracts applicants from all over the world to its five-year course. And in much of the rest of Europe and Latin America, where the circus is a revered tradition, circuses provide plenty of on-the-job training opportunities. Wherever circus people are valued for their artistry and not dismissed as social parasites, there is encouragement for young people to learn the skills.

The current trend in American circus schools stems in part from the scarcity of talented American circus artists. To the casual observer, the number of Americans who are genuine stars as aerialists or animal trainers is surprisingly small. It is true that circus is an international field; American circus artists are in higher demand in Europe and the Asian countries than they are here, while American audiences have more interest in seeing exotic acts from Russia, the Balkan states, Mexico, and especially China. But the fact remains that we see very few American acts. There may be a somewhat nationalistic reversal of that trend in the offing, instigated by Chinese reluctance to tolerate the kind of defections that followed the massacre at Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1989. Travel limitations imposed by restrictive governments seem to make it a good time for American producers to tap into an American talent supply.

But where exactly is that American talent supply? As long as there are so many state-supported acrobatic schools in China, where circus is the most popular mass art form, there will be superior Chinese acrobats. As long as Russia teaches, funds, and reveres its circus arts, there will be superior Russian performers. And as long as truly talented Mexicans have the incentive of a far superior pay scale for performing in the United States, there will be superior Mexican aerialists. But in this country, we offer neither the training nor the financial incentives to prospective circus artists. Only a few major circuses can generate a pay scale that encourages American performers. Certainly few olympic athletes would consider the daily drudgery of circus life when they can get much higher pay by sponsoring sneakers on TV. Circus is still a dirty word when it comes to legitimate career concerns, and few non-circus families would ever think of encouraging their children to become circus performers. With no formal American circus training available, the result, quite naturally, is that there are very few first rank American circus performers.

The best of the North American circus training schools is located in a renovated train station in downtown Montreal, Canada. The National Circus School was established in 1980 by Guy Caron, who would also later direct the big school of circus arts at Chalons-sur-Marne in France. He is the former artistic director of Canada's Cirque du Soleil, and is for the most part responsible for the abundance of genuinely talented young artists that become Soleil performers. In the brief decade of its existence, the school and its students have won major international recognition. Over two hundred students, both beginners and professionals, may enroll in a four-term variety of courses including mime, dance, commedia, trick cycling, trapeze, juggling, acrobatics, circus history, French language, and philosophy. The school is recognized by the Quebec Ministry of Education as a "private school of public interest," able for the first time in the world to grant a degree in circus arts. Also available are individual courses and workshops, and special programs for children. But its chief goal is a thorough professional training for future circus artists, and it has the firm support of city, provincial, and federal governments.

Several American circuses now also provide specific training opportunities for interested youngsters to learn circus skills. The Big Apple Circus operates the New York School for Circus Arts, whereby disadvantaged youngsters at Harbor Jr. High School in East Harlem are taught a variety of circus skills and academic subjects. The Pickle Family Circus School in San Francisco offers periodic classes for children and adults. In St. Louis, the Circus Arts School serves about 150 youngsters in gym classes in several schools and YMCAs, out of whom has developed a crack performance team called the "Arches." Their instructors, Alexandre Sacha Pavlata and Jessica Hentoff, are aerialists with the Circus Flora, with which the school is closely associated. The idea is that teaching circus skills also involves teaching fear control, stick-to-it-iveness, trust, self-confidence and self-discipline. When emotionally troubled and economically strapped kids get good positive strokes and a lot of personal focused attention for three hours a week, they start to feel better about themselves. Circus skills are intended to combat the feelings of hopelessness and low self-esteem that lead to all sorts of abuses. "A kid who walks a wire can see what he can do with his life, dream to be something more," says Ivor David Balding, founder of the Circus Flora.

Several American communities have begun to share the feeling that circus training makes an excellent education for children who are not necessarily bound for circus careers. Fine Arts departments like the one at South Mountain High School in Phoenix, Arizona, and physical education departments like Eastmont High School's in Wenatchee, Washington, are developing basic circus skills courses. At least two communities, one in Florida and one in Indiana, have developed outstanding independent circus programs that operate in tandem with their public school systems.

The Sailor Circus in Florida is open to all students from Sarasota County schools who maintain a C average or better. Director Bill Lee identifies "the pursuit of excellence" as the school's governing philosophy, and he and his professional staff seek to engender in each student feelings of accomplishment and mutual respect. In October, the youngsters begin practicing a variety of performance skills in their own permanent circus building. By the end of March some sixty-odd students are ready to present their annual Sarasota Sailor Circus. Because many of the kids are from circus families clustered in the Sarasota area, it's not surprising that the show generates both a considerable talent among its performers and a considerable enthusiasm among its audiences. With a special dispensation from the Ringling show, ordinarily fiercely protective of its famous copyrighted title, the Sailor Circus calls itself "The Greatest Little Show on Earth." In 1989, it celebrated its fortieth year.

In the same year, the Peru, Indiana, Amateur Circus celebrated its thirtieth anniversary. It is the feature event of an Annual Circus City Festival held to preserve the heritage of the American Circus Corporation's residency in Peru. It also exists to serve youth, and it is an enormous community effort involving volunteers and professionals. Circuit Court Judge Bruce Embrey, who serves as one of three volunteer ringmasters, suggests that the circus teaches a sense of community and responsibility that is hard for kids to come by these days. "I've never had a circus kid come before me in court," he grins. In a week of frenetic activity capped by a two-hour circus parade, over two hundred young people from Miami County, ranging in age from six to twenty, put on ten performances. A spot is found for anyone who wants to work hard enough. A smaller group of fifty or so youngsters also perform as a road tour company throughout the region during the summer months. The Festival performances are held in the Peru Circus Building, which also contains a well-stocked small circus museum; it was adapted from an old lumber warehouse, and has a high, tent-like roof specially designed for the circus. The performances are the culmination of a year of preparation by the kids, under the guidance of head trainer Bill Anderson and his staff. Adults are involved only as trainers, staff and teachers, clowns, and in a magnificent sixty-piece circus band led by high school band director Tom Gustin. The kids do all the rest.

Other circus schools are privately-run operations, such as San Francisco's "Make a Circus," which teaches children in the audience circus skills as part of the show, or Camp Winnarainbow, a kind of counter-culture summer circus camp for California children. Much more comprehensive and thorough professional training is provided by Paul Pugh's venerable Wenatchee Youth Circus in north central Washington State. It has operated since 1952, with forty to eighty performers, high school-aged and younger. They sometimes tour up to 10,000 miles in the summers to pay their yearly expenses. Their extensive equipment is loaded into eight custom-built "circus wagons" and carried on a flat-bed truck. They carry no tent, performing in the open air, and their shows display every aspect of the traditional circus with the exception of animal acts. It is an ambitious and popular program, demonstrating professional quality in its youngsters and enjoying the firm support of its community.

Still another approach is taken by the Circus of the Kids, formed by Bruce Pfeffer in 1982. He was then was joined by Tammy Lutter, a fire-eater, clown, trick bicyclist, and elementary school teacher. Tammy had been spending her summers teaching circus skills at the French Woods Festival, a summer performing arts camp for children in upper New York State. Together, Bruce and Tammy developed a plan whereby they approach a school system and offer one and two-week circus training workshops to one or more groups of students in grades one through twelve. They bring in all the safety equipment and costumes, and can offer complete workshop programs in acrobatics, juggling, trapeze artistry, and clowning. The program also extends to workshops for parents and teachers. Part of the goal is to promote academics and responsibility, and Bruce has developed with associates at the University of Louisville an extensive syllabus, "Circus across the Curriculum," to go with the circus skills workshops. There are separate curricula with circus motifs in reading, creative writing, math, science, history and geography. Each one is broken into sections appropriate for students in kindergarten through high school. The workshop period is capped by a final "all-star" demonstration-performance for the public. In the summers, a longer and more extensive training program now serves as a part of the performance offerings at French Woods. The Circus of the Kids has reached over 50,000 enthusiastic youngsters since Bruce began it. The program has garnered some rave reviews from administrators, teachers and parents, who talk about their students' dramatic improvements in attitude, in capacity to trust, and in self-esteem.

The charming little Circus Smirkus, begun in 1987 by Rob Mermin as a summer camp program in northern Vermont, taps into the energy and idealism of its young performers. In July, twenty young people aged ten to seventeen show up at Mermin's farm for two weeks of intensive training in circus skills, and then they embark on an ambitious tour around the state, performing twenty-eight shows in nineteen days in eleven towns. Their teachers are caring professionals, like Irina Gold, former coach of the USSR Olympic gymnastics team and consultant with the Big Apple Circus. A non-profit enterprise, the Circus Smirkus was at first funded in part by the Catamount Arts Foundation, but it is now self-sustaining from contributions, tuition, and box office receipts, along with some corporate support. Mermin, who "ran away" for at least several blocks to the circus when he was a young boy, and then again more seriously when he was in college, wants to provide the opportunity for his performers to run away to the circus for at least six weeks in their young lives. He describes it as "a metaphor for stepping outside self-made boundaries, taking risks, accepting unforeseen challenges, and tasting the potential of our human spirit. First dreaming, then going for it!" Rob Mermin, Donny Osman, the circus' ringmaster and associate director, who is also the director of the Governor's Institute on the Arts, describes the primary value of the circus as "empowerment." Smirkus is a process of planting the suggestion that their students, and by extension their audiences, have a sense of power over their own lives, that they are free to dare and define their own limits, and that they may both offer and seek cooperation with others involved in the same quest. One look at the faces of these performers suggests that the Circus Smirkus is working. They are ordinary children, but they are also talented, intense, dedicated, supportive of each other, proud, determined, and full of joy. The true spirit of the show was amply demonstrated midway through the summer of 1989, when a tragic automobile accident resulted in the death of a much-loved counselor and the hospitalization of the severely injured Mermin for the rest of the tour. Hours after the accident, the kids gathered together to mourn. They hugged, and they cried; and then as a group they made a decision, and they took action to raise the level of their own, each other's, and their audience's lives. The next day, they performed, and they smiled. Few spectators knew how they suffered and how they grew, but they did both; and nowhere has the paradox of the true spirit of circus been more evident.

All of these school enterprises have in common that they are in one way or another geared towards at least one public performance by the students. Spectators fortunate enough to be in the audience have a unique opportunity to participate in a circus spirit that is greatly enhanced by the naive, wide-eyed enthusiasm and commitment of the young performers. None of them take their own new accomplishments for granted; emotions run high, and the excitement is catching. If the execution of an acrobatic trick doesn't always match the level of those who have spent their lives in performance, the energy, the determination, and the genuine expressions of joy often far surpass the professionals.

At the college level, there are a few courses in circus skills offered at Florida State University, New York University, and other campuses around the country, usually taught as part of the theatre department offerings. The Gamma Phi Circus at Illinois State is the oldest ongoing college circus program in the country. Celebrating its 54th edition in 1990, it was actually founded in 1929 by Clifford "Pops" Horton as an honorary gymnastics fraternity, but shut down for five years during World War II. Now with over one thousand alumni, Gamma Phi performs annually with about sixty members, all full-time students and faculty at Illinois State. The Flying High Circus, begun in 1947 by Jack Haskin at Florida State, is a one-semester, one-credit course in stage and aerial skills that results in completely self-supporting full three-ring performances under their own tents. In 1989, sixty-eight students performed in the Flying High, "just for the fun of it." Since 1960, the Flying High has also conducted a summer residency at Callaway Gardens in Pine Mountain, Georgia, and an ambitious road touring program which includes Europe. There is only one course on the history of the circus, taught at the University of Virginia. The Ringling enterprise has operated its famous Clown College at winter quarters in Venice, Florida, since 1968, and now has over one thousand alumni. It is actually not a college at all, but a purely professional training school, designed to add new faces to the diminishing pool of American circus clowns in the late sixties, with an incidental eye on its public relations value. Every American citizen might well benefit from completing its comprehensive psychiatric questionnaire-application, but the school is intended only for those seeking professional careers as clowns. Virtually every major American circus employs at least one graduate of Clown College. Its intensive program is only ten weeks long, and tuition is free. Out of the 2,000 to 3,000 yearly applicants, Clown College can accommodate at best only thirty men and women. They range from fresh high school graduates to older professionals seeking new careers, and approximately one third of them will be offered contracts with the Ringling show. Their final school performance is sometimes called the funniest final exam in the world.

Other clown schools springing up around the country, such as those in Houston, Atlanta, and the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse, provide only brief introductory or professional refresher courses. All such schools, of course, focus only on clowning, and pretty hastily at that. There is little opportunity for a comprehensive, substantive circus education anywhere in the United States outside the circus itself.

There is a noteworthy difference between all the American offerings, and the Canadian and European schools. With the exception of Clown College, the usually non-profit American circus school efforts are geared so far primarily as liberal arts education or as community service programs, rather than as professional training schools. Some of their public and private funding is undoubtedly predicated on the condition that they perform social service. Their goals are well-illustrated by the New York School of Circus Arts's boast that its students "discover that balancing commitments is as difficult as balancing on a wire, and that juggling responsibilities is as tricky as juggling oranges." While circus afficionados admit that the goal of educating committed and responsible citizens with circus training is certainly a commendable one, they worry that American circus schools don't necessarily provide the grounds for exceptional circus talent. On the other hand, they may be reassured that these schools do teach about the circus; and what's more, that we in the audience can learn from their performances to value all that the circus can be. Furthermore, exceptional talent does indeed emerge from the American schools. Competent and sometimes inspired students do in fact go on to professional circus careers. The Back Street Flyers, a black break-dancing acrobatic company trained by the Circus Flora's Sacha Pavlata when he was a master teacher with the Big Apple's New York School of Circus Arts, won a silver medal at the International Circus School competitions and went on to perform for three years with the Big Apple. Talented, eleven-year-old Lizzie Uthoff wowed Flora audiences in 1989, after only a few months of working with Sacha, and she shows considerable promise as an acrobat. And two veteran trapezists from the Peru Amateur Circus, young Chris Robinson and Peggy Matheny, took a third place bronze medal in the 1989 International Youth Circus Competition in Verona, Italy. These and other signs of excellence from American circus schools are no small achievements.

Circus educators are eager to find new and better paths for American would-be circus artists to achieve excellence. Pavlata, for one, hopes that in addition to its goal of lifting students out of the lost world of the ordinary, the Circus Arts School will become a major circus professional training institution, that will funnel its students into the major circuses of the world as readily as Canada's National Circus School is starting to do. The "Piccola Flora," a mini-circus performed by the Flora troupe's dozen or so children, which was instituted in the summer of 1988, is perhaps one step in that direction. But without a major shift in values that many Americans are unprepared to pay for, we will never have the training opportunities equivalent to those that create the magnificent Chinese acrobats. Here, the circus is not the established social institution that makes such excellence possible; and we do prefer after all to leave the responsibility for the pursuit of excellence up to the individual, and not to the state. So perhaps one or two outstanding professional circus schools on the North American continent are sufficient to accommodate the rare artist who will seek them out. But it's too soon to tell. Contemporary American circus schools are all young, and the 1990s will determine how or if they are to meet the needs of the American circus.

This brings us to four major "new-wave" circuses and one new "spectacular" that many critics have already been calling the circuses of the future. That may be an ironic label for at least three of these shows, who profess to be more interested in rediscovering the circus of the past; and all five of them are in one way or another based on traditional European circus performance formats. In 1988, Clive Barnes, long time circus fan and theatre critic for the , wrote a series of articles primarily on three of the circuses. His words have been widely quoted as heralding the beginning of a new circus renaissance. Be that as it may, during the end of the '80s the Pickle Family Circus, the Big Apple Circus, the Circus Flora, the Cirque du Soleil, and the Circo Tihany are redefining what circus is.

What the five shows do and how they are structured is new to American audiences. They are distinctly different from all the traditional circuses we discussed in the early pages of this chapter. For one thing, all five were created within ten years of each other from scratch, out of the sweat and hard work of contemporary dreamers. Secondly, all five have earned a considerable international reputation for excellence. Thirdly, they have taken a much more theatrical approach to the circus than their traditional colleagues, and have often been described as having "redefined the circus." Within that context, four of them are intimate one-ring circuses in which performers seem to be an integral part of a single theatrical performance, each act proceding logically from the one before in a loosely-structured story line. Fourthly, because they are different and have rejected traditional formats, they have sometimes been the objects of resentment or jealousy among some traditional fans. All five generate hot debate on what circus really is: Can there be a circus without animals, or without a death-defying sense of danger, or without spectacle, or with too much spectacle, or without circus music, or without even a ring? And finally, all but one of the circuses are non-profit operations that depend heavily on outside contributions from their own fans and grants from foundations, corporations and all levels of government. In some cases less than 50% of production costs are borne by ticket sales. Although these shows tend to have higher ticket prices than traditional circuses, no one would suggest that raising admissions any higher is any answer to the precarious state of circus economics. The Big Apple's Dominique Jando reminds us that the spiralling cost of Broadway musical theatre tickets has virtually eliminated ordinary middle-income audiences. The arts are expensive, the circus is especially expensive, and they both need supplemental income. Like musical theatre and opera, circus is extravagant by its very nature. The arts, including circus arts, have always been state-supported in some fashion in Europe, and we may have to get used to that idea here too if we want them preserved at all.

But despite their similarities, the five shows are just as different from each other as they are alike. Only Soleil and Tihany boast of being a brand new circus art form, and they have little in common. Only two of the shows, Big Apple and Flora, have animal acts. The five headquarters are geographically widely separated, reflecting philosophical goals aimed at very different audiences. And their approaches vary from intimate clowning, through death-defying high-tech, to Las Vegas spectacle.

The Pickle Family Circus, the oldest of the five in their present forms, was started in San Francisco in 1974. It travels mostly in the West, but it has made occasional side trips to Alaska and London, and most recently to New York, where in the summer of 1989 they were invited to appear at the International Theatre Festival at Stony Brook. Customarily, the Pickles play in parks and playgrounds under the open skies, with canvas side walls and no top, although they also enjoy the chance to escape California weather in indoor auditoriums.

The first thing spectators notice when watching Pickle is that the clowns are in control. It was founded by clowns, and it is designed and performed by clowns, and they are experts at the whole range of comedy, pathos, physical slapstick and especially juggling. Audiences don't take long to get the idea that they are participating in an event which is an expression of love, respect and support. It is being passed like juggling balls and clubs between company members and between the audience and the company. Entire silent conversations take place with juggling clubs. And yes, one giant balloon, maybe eight feet in diameter and probably the biggest juggling ball in the world, is passed among audience members, bouncing over outreached arms and laughing faces until it bursts and showers confetti all over the place. The feeling is one of belonging to the proverbial one big happy family, and of course that is exactly what is intended and what the word "family" is doing in the title. The approximately thirty troupers are not a biological but a social family. Fourteen of them perform, but everybody, from Judy Finelli, the artistic director, to Ranna Bieschke, the much loved road manager/massage therapist, to the kids, contributes to the family spirit. The audience is invited to share in it too. Every show is like a party: strangers in the audience talk to each other, and cast members sit down to chat with audience stragglers when it's over.

There is more to Pickle than clowns and family, even though traditional fans may search this circus in vain for "death-defying" acts or even one four-legged animal. Accidents and falls can happen in any circus, but no one here courts disaster or uses life-threatening danger to titillate audience palates; safety wires or nets are in evidence when deemed advisable. As for the animals, it's not that the Pickles have any bone to pick with traditional circuses and their animals, it's just that they themselves would prefer not to put animals in a truck and haul them around the countryside. Their interest lies exclusively with the two-legged sort.

There are acrobats, wire-walkers, hand balancers and trapeze artists, all demonstrating expertise and enjoyment. They perform with a dramatic flair which is inspired by a unifying theme, such as myth and folk tales. In fact, the second half of the shows is given over to a theatrical story, loosely told in the tradition of turn-of-the-century jugglers and set in a Parisian restaurant, the "Café des Artistes" in 1988, and the "Café Chaotique" in 1989. The real Pickle trademark, "the big juggle," comes at the end of the show: The entire company— everybody— juggles, and the air is filled with assorted crockery, glassware and pies moving in every conceivable direction. The flying dishes are accompanied by the sounds of frenetic shouting and laughter, and a dynamic five-piece jazz band.

There is youth and idealism and energy at the Pickle which can almost be classified as zeal. It is the legacy of Larry Pisoni, also known by his clown identity as Lorenzo Pickle, from whom the show takes its name. Larry and Peggy Snider were both members of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, one of America's top guerilla theatres in the late 60s, and their decision to found the Pickle Family Circus was perhaps as much a socio-political statement as an aesthetic one. It was an idealistic way to combat a decaying society with fun. There was to be no artificial division of labor and pay scale, no racism, no sexist use of scantily clad chorines, and no cynicism. There was to be an emphasis on community and social responsibility. The ideals remain valid today, as Pickle performers continue to devote themselves to sharing their art without undue concern for monetary rewards. Peggy continues as their executive director, after Larry left in 1988 to pursue a career as an independent clown performer. The Pickle Family Circus is now undoubtedly the only circus in the country featuring women as both executive and artistic directors, and for that matter even as boss clown. She wouldn't be called "boss" on the Pickle, but Queenie Moon can hold her own among the great clowns of all time.

There were (at least) two other future circus founders juggling with the lively San Francisco Mime Troupe in the early '70s: Paul Binder and Michael Christensen. The two became fast friends and developed a comedy juggling act which they toured through the streets of Europe and at the exciting Nouveau Cirque de Paris. Paul had never gone much to the circus as a child: "It seemed distant and smelly and seedy to me." (Jan 11, 1988) 58. But the French circus was different. With business degrees from Dartmouth and Columbia, he was as much a businessman as a juggler, and he now dreamed of bringing "classical" circus to America. On July 20, 1977, with a lot of help from friends, he and Christensen opened the first Big Apple Circus season, which would play to 45,000 people in New York's Battery Park. He became its artistic director and ringmaster, and Christensen became the popular Mr. Stubs, clown extraordinaire. The talented Katja Schumann, a member of the famous equestrian Schumanns who have operated circuses in Germany and Denmark since 1870, added grace and class when she made her first appearance with the Big Apple in 1981. She soon became the wife and partner of Paul Binder and mother of a new circus dynasty, and she continues as the prize-winning architect and performer of one of the best varieties of equestrian acts in the country.

Within ten years of its founding, annual Big Apple audiences have grown to well over a quarter of a million people. Its colorful round tent holds about 1,800 patrons. At the suggestion of Sacha Pavlata, then a featured aerialist with the circus, it was pitched at Damrosch Park adjacent to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where it has become a regular feature of New York's Christmas season. They have gained the corporate support of Exxon, Macy's, The New York Times Foundation, Viacom, Warner Communications, Columbia Pictures, several major banking enterprises, and many others. Big Apple's mission as a not-for-profit educational and performing arts institution and its charter with the host city for which it is named assure that the circus will be brought directly to the people in all five boroughs. It has also embarked on annual tours as far south as Washington, D.C., as far north as Shelburne, Vermont, and as far west as Cleveland. They travel the road with about 120 people, forty of whom are performers, two elephants, and Katja's horses.

The style, tempo, character and sensibility of this circus are strongly American, but its format uses the classical European circus for its model. The Big Apple defines classical circus as taking place in a "single, intimate ring with the surrounding audience interacting with both performers and each other." It includes "performances by acrobats, gymnasts, aerialists, clowns, trainers and animals. Animals as performers are central to the classic mode, and the respect for animals is reflected in their treatment as a part of the circus and in the presentation of relationships between humans and animals." Alan B. Slifka, in

Big Apple is also following the European trend called "new circus," which emphasizes theatricality rather than spectacle. "It evokes a wide range of feelings with the use of strong lighting and music." Hana Machotka, (New York: Morrow, 1988) 7. This results in an energy not unlike that of a Broadway show. The traditional ringmaster's intrusive announcements have become increasingly rare, as the high-quality international acts are left to speak for themselves. The performances are moved forward by a central thematic story around which they are loosely organized. The 1988-89 season featured an East-West détente theme called "The Big Apple Circus meets the Monkey King." It focused on the imagined adventures of a legendary comic folk hero from China's Beijing opera tradition. The détente theme was made extremely poignant at the end of the tour, when real events in Beijing's Tiananmen Square resulted in a series of traumatic defections, including six by members of the celebrated Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe appearing with the show. For the 1989-1990 season, the Big Apple brought back Barry Lubin, one of their original featured clown troupe, to headline a new story-theme called "Grandma Goes West." The show is a "loving tribute" to Buffalo Bill and his co-stars, Annie Oakley and Chief Sitting Bull. It has an "Old West" theme similar to one used by Circus Flora several years earlier, and incorporates several unique western-oriented acts, such as a superb "Pony Express Ride" by Katja Schumann, the marvelous lariat work of Vince Bruce, and a trained buffalo.

The Cirque du Soleil, the "Circus of the Sun," is a strictly Canadian enterprise, and some may question what it is doing in a book focusing on circuses in the United States. The answer is clear to anyone who has seen it on any of its tours through Canada's neighbor to the South: Since it was founded in 1984, it has had as much impact on contemporary American circus as any show developed and operating exclusively within the United States. Its success has been nothing short of phenomenal: In five short years it went from entertaining 30,000 to a half-million spectators annually; from 50 performances a year to 312; from 45 employees to 150, now including 35 performers; and from an annual budget of $1.3 million to $11 million. At the same time subsidies from the various levels of the Canadian government have fallen from 97% to under 10%. Proud Canadian corporate sponsors like Bombardier, Inc., Canadian Airlines International, Dominion Textile and La Laurentienne have eagerly participated in picking up the slack, and the necessarily higher admission prices have not kept happy audiences away. In 1987, the Cirque du Soleil was a finalist with the likes of Molsen Breweries and IBM Canada for a "Business of the Year" award. The business success of this ambitious enterprise has created some internal problems, as must inevitably arise when artistic and commercial interests vie for priorities.

But the Cirque du Soleil is no slouch in the artistic department either. Straw house performances in Chicago, Miami, New York, San Francisco, Washington and other American cities have earned it rave reviews. The brilliant young Guy Caron was the artistic director for the first five years of Soleil's existence, and is largely responsible for the show's unique approach. Performances are given in a 130 foot, blue-and-yellow round tent made by the French sail-manufacturer VoiliŠres du Sud-Ouest, which seats a relatively intimate 1750 spectators. They are marked by a polished, high-tech look and flow, complete with special effects, smoke and fog, dramatic lighting, colorful modish costuming, and a stunning mod-rock musical accompaniment. All of this is kept to an intimate level, however, and technology is never allowed to impress for its own sake. There is no pomp or pure spectacle, and there are no processions or armies of clowns and chorus girls. And to the dismay of traditionalists, there are no animals. "I'd rather feed three artists than one elephant," says founder and circus president Guy Laliberte. (May 2, 1988) 108. In fact, the presence of animals in this show would even be distracting to its real purpose: an exploration of the psychological and physical nature of the human being.

Despite all the technical wizardry, the human element is the real focus of the Cirque du Soleil. It is completely devoted to playing with the idea of what makes humans funny, and with exploring the outer limits of what humans can do. A heavily theatrical and intimate emotional approach has replaced the big production numbers of more conventional circuses. In the 1989 performances, the clowns' and acrobats' routines were framed by a dream-like transformation. In a swirl of magical smoke, a group of "ordinary" people wearing masks in a style suggested by the commedia dell'arte were changed into magnificent circus artists. But they eventually had to turn back into the ordinary people, happy for the opportunity to have dreamed, but disappointed that their dreams can't last. At the end of the show they go off to resume their less than demanding lives.

The Cirque du Soleil performers are mostly under twenty-five years old, and some are no more than children. They are gifted with the zeal of youth that has thus far kept the show fresh and energetic. When they move on, whether because of other ambitions, artistic or salary disputes with management, or sheer exhaustion, their ranks are immediately filled from Chinese and other international sources, and from the roles of the Canadian National Circus School, with new faces eager to participate in the dream. For the 1989-90 edition of Soleil, Guy Caron, the original artistic director, had been replaced by Gilles Ste-Croix, and 90% of the performers were new and fresh talent. In fact there is a constant struggle to find ways of preserving artistic freshness in the face of the demands of circus big business. LaLibert‚ likes to book shows as little as ten days in advance, just to help keep everyone flexible and avoid a sense of the routine. And improvisational rehearsals keep everyone guessing what the clowns will do next.

It is impressive how funny a single clown in a circus ring can be, and it is often embarassing to see how much he reveals about our own human nature. The variety of ways in which the human body can be made to bend, balance, fly, dance, walk, and cope with flying objects is disarmingly bewildering when demonstrated by these young circus artists. Part of our surprise as spectators at their display of talent comes from a deceptive sense of their ordinariness. They do not appear to be perfect, superhuman, muscle-bound or unusually beautiful: it is an unimpressive, ordinary-looking human body lifting that weight, leaping from that dizzying height, or dancing so gracefully on that thin wire. These circus performers don't strut or flaunt capes, and there is no razzamatazz build-up into super-star status for any of them. The youth and beauty and strength that they exhibit is not for self-aggrandizement. It is to make all of us young and beautiful and strong.

The Cirque du Soleil was created in 1984 by young Guy LaLiberte‚ when he was himself only twenty-four years old. Like Paul Binder, the Big Apple founder, he was a street performer who had spent some time travelling among circuses in Europe, and he too had a keen sense for business. The two men also share a common reputation for mincing no words when sharing their opinions of traditional American shows: "I hate traditional Circus!" Harriett Swift, in ( Aug. 6, 1989 [quoted in Circus Reports, Aug 21, 1989, 29]). he says, causing hundreds of traditionalists to gnash their teeth. Nonetheless, he stubbornly applied for and received a grant from the Canadian government to tour a new kind of circus in celebration of the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Quebec. Although plenty of American circuses and their imitators had toured throughout Canada in the past, the country had never had any strong national circus traditions of its own; Lalibert‚ was free to make up his own definitions of the genre. He found a name for his show by looking in a dictionary of symbols. He saw "'Soleil, sun.' It means youth, power, freshness. Everything was there." (May 2, 1988) 108. Michel Clair, in 1984 the Minister responsible for Quebec's participation in International Youth Year, agrees. Looking at the new circus for the first time: "Observe them," he said. "Are they not of the sun?" Cirque du Soleil,

The most recent of the four new-style circuses to come into existence is the Circus Flora. It is named after the baby elephant who is its star, and who was herself the namesake of Babar and Celeste's first daughter, Flora, in Jean de Brunhoff's charming "Babar" stories.

The Circus Flora is the brain child of Ivor David Balding, the son of a British polo player who came to America to sell horses. Another circus runaway, Balding dropped out of his freshman year at Harvard University in the 1950s to train with the Cirque Medrano in Paris on the advice of actress Eva LaGallienne. But it was the theatre that would capture his early career interests; during the '60s he was the highly successful Broadway producer of such plays as , , , and . Nonetheless, he found himself increasingly drawn to the circus, feeling that the reality of circus had the capacity to transcend the illusion of theatre. He began to produce several television circus specials, and he became the celebrated Jimmy Chipperfield's general manager for a European tour of Circus World. In 1980, Paul Binder hired him as a consulting producer for the Big Apple Circus, and he became involved with several Shrine circuses productions as well.

All this time, David was formulating plans to take out his own circus, committed to "reviving the circus as an art form." He began with a loan from his sister and brother-in-law, Sheila and Sam Jewell, who have found themselves enmeshed in the world of the circus ever since. While he was on a photo safari in Africa in 1984, Balding bought Flora, a three-year-old African elephant orphaned by poachers. He had her flown to the U.S. and designed his circus around her. "You can't have a circus without an elephant, a horse, a clown and a pretty girl," he said, "and that's the order of importance." (July 7, 1986) 127. The Circus Flora was invited to make its debut at Gian Carlo Menotti's prestigious Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina in 1986. A stunning surprise to the culturally elite audiences of the Festival, it was an immediate popular, artistic and critical success. In fact it was such a hit that it was invited back for a second appearance at Spoleto in 1988, the first production of any kind to be so honored. The following year Menotti issued an unprecedented invitation for them to appear at the 1990 Spoleto Festivals in both South Carolina and Italy.

Except for the special lighting effects, Circus Flora performances are for the most part recreations of the circus arts as they existed in the nineteenth century. They tend to range between comedy and the classical dangerous presentations of skill on horseback and in the air, and they are presented in an intimate setting. Even the costumes are authentic nineteenth century designs with heavy overtones of the commedia troupes. Performances are not only theatrical but narrative, and in a format which allows them to exhibit the best of European circus traditions in an American historical context. They begin always with a "come-on" or "charivari," the arrival of all the performers together, with a special appearance by the charming Flora. For every performance, the clown Yo-yo narrates the story of her fictional Italian family, the Baldinis, who have brought their circus and their elephant to tour America. In 1986, the Circus Flora "recreated" the arrival of the Baldinis in Charleston in 1810, suggesting they were the first European circus to come for such a tour. In fact, although early European circuses did land in Charleston, the Baldinis never existed except as a Balding creation. Coincidentally, though, there was an early American Flora: She was in 1827 the seventh elephant to be imported into the United States, and the first to travel with a menagerie. The 1988 edition of Circus Flora was called and included exciting troupes of Native American dancers among its features. Following the Baldinis as they moved westward into the new frontier from St. Louis in 1843, it provided opportunities for Flora to meet a friendly performing buffalo, and Yo-yo to meet an Indian guide. Finding the mountains impassable, the Baldinis returned to St. Louis and took a river boat to New Orleans for the 1989 edition, , which had a cajun theme. A pirate's theme takes over in 1990, as the Baldinis once more set sail for the West, and attempt to cross the isthmus at Panama.

Flora's single-ring performances are given in a red and white striped, light-tight round tent essentially similar to Big Apple's, Soleil's, and Zerbini's. This one is made by the Baches company in Bordeaux, France; it seats less than 1,500 people in a 120-foot round, but is somewhat higher than the others, at the request of Sacha Pavlata, now a full-time partner, Technical and Performance Director, and aerialist with the show. Its all-white interior also adds to the illusion of height. Seating keeps audiences no further than forty feet from the ring.

Among the thirty-five or so talented performers are some of the oldest and most widely respected names in the business: Wallenda, Zoppe, and Pavlata, among others. In 1989, after a year of hunting for a permanent home, the company offices moved into St. Louis' Grand Avenue Performing Arts Center. St. Louis thus became the third contemporary American City, after San Francisco and New York, to have its own resident circus. Impressed by both their performances and the obvious value of Sacha's circus-in-the-schools program, the city has given them a five-year lease on some vacant land. The 1989 performance tour was considerably abbreviated, as the directors and their supporters devoted their time primarily to establishing the credibility of the school, reexamining their goals, and struggling to solidify their financial base. St. Louis audiences have been enthusiastic, and if Balding and Pavlata are able to muster sufficient funding from private, corporate and public sources, there are plans for a permanent winter quarters, a school building, and an indoor performance arena. Balding claims the circus is now permanently in his blood, and he could never be drawn back into the New York theatre scene. Baby elephant Flora, on the other hand, who by the summer of 1989 was a gangly, strapping eight-year-old, began a series of ballet lessons from internationally acclaimed avant-garde choreographer Martha Clarke. She will make her New York acting and dancing debut in 1990, in a new theatre piece by Clarke at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival.

Before we leave our look at influential new circuses in the United States, with a slight overlap into Canada, we might do well to take a brief look at what is going on south of the Rio Grande. In Mexico, circus is big business, and people tend to take their circus arts much more seriously. There is a long-standing tradition of proud family circuses which are at least as fine as any in the United States. Many of the great Mexican flying families own their own circuses. Outstanding among traditional Mexican circuses are the the Circo de Renato, the New York Circus, the Circo Sventes and finally, the Circo Atayde, an arena and tent show with a polished appearance and a variety of outstanding international acts. If outstanding Mexican acts in some Mexican circuses like the Atayde are rare, it is only because D. R. Miller and others have lured them north of the border with the promise of better wages.

Much of the talk in the Mexican circus world centers around a unique, giant new show that has been touring there for several years and is anything but traditional. It recently moved from South America into Mexico, where it has been a huge success. For sheer size and spectacle, the already legendary Circo Tihany promises to give the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus a run for its money as it seeks to expand its routes with the "Circus Tihany Spectacular Celebrates America 'The Magic is Here' 1990 Tour" into the United States. Tihany is the brainchild of a Hungarian, Franz Czeisler, and named after the town of his birth. Czeisler has been a circus man for 40 years. He speaks eleven languages, performs sparkling magic tricks he personally learned from the likes of Houdini and Blackstone, and captivates his audiences with his infectious enthusiasm. The 180 people in his cast and crews travel on sixty-five trucks and trailers, and he uses two immaculate 200 by 240 foot Italian tents. It takes four full days to set them up, so the show hopscotches between tents from stand to stand. Stands are usually a minimum of ten days. Each tent holds almost four thousand people in luxurious contoured seating; there are no bleachers. There is no ring. Everyone faces in one direction, towards a massive 80 by 100 foot proscenium stage made with the elevated flatbeds of Czeisler's trucks. Two long curved stairways on either side, lit by crystal chandeliers, form the show entrances. It's a spiffy, Las Vegas-style production, with even the stage hands working in tuxedos.

Many would consider Tihany a tented theatrical extravaganza, and not a real circus at all. Czeisler can perhaps best describe it himself: My show is an original blend of the Las Vegas type extravaganza—embellished by hydraulic stages that go up and down, colorful dancing waters, and music hall dancers—with the traditional circus. In it, I have introduced and developed a presentation that has never existed under the big top anywhere. Yet it is one which is still rooted in the European circus tradition of excellence, and commitment to treating people with love and respect.Whatever it's called, Tihany is yet another example of the many directions from which American circuses might choose their future. Circuses must continue to evolve and change, just as they have for thousands of years, despite the protestations of traditionalists. Only the passage of time will reveal whether this or any of the four "new-wave" circuses is a passing fad, or the harbinger of a new epoch in circus performance that might compare favorably with Coup's and Barnum's 1872 circus enterprise.

Gone are the days when circuses arrived on the doorsteps of little American towns and announced a performance for that evening. Only a few years ago, an advance man could arrive in town, make all necessary arrangements and book a show for two weeks later. Today, most advance bookings are made five or six months—sometimes over a year ahead of when the circus will actually come to town.

Booking may be initiated either by the circus itself or by a town or sponsoring civic organization. Shrine sponsorship of circuses originally began as a fund-raising activity for the charities supported by the temple, but more recently, circuses have become a major income-producer for the annual operation of the temple itself. In 1986, according to a September 28 story in the Orlando, Florida , national Shrine leaders asked all 189 Shrine temples in North America to publish the following clarification in their circus programs: "Proceeds from this Shrine circus benefit Shrine operations only. They do not benefit Shriners hospitals for crippled children."

There are other equally effective but less ambitious forms of circus sponsorship as well. Local organizations, such as auxiliary fire departments, police units, schools, service clubs, and charities may contact a circus and ask to sponsor them, either for profit or for benefit performances. Just as often it is the circus that seeks dates that conform to its route schedule. The circus then plays under its own name and splits the ticket revenue with a local sponsor on a prearranged basis. The Pickle Family Circus views their role as fundraisers for the non-profit sponsoring organization as a major aspect of their responsible interrelationship with the audience and the community. Contracts can vary widely, from set fees to percentages and guaranteed minimums. For their "take," the sponsor usually, but not always, agrees to do some degree of advance publicity and ticket sales for the circus, so that everyone ends up happy.

Occasionally, circuses will play "cold dates," with no local sponsor. Some, like the Ringling show, prefer to operate on their own, relying on their own professional staff to generate all relevant contracts and publicity. In other cases, either local regulations or insurance worries may have kept sponsors from being interested. When it establishes its routing, a circus may find it convenient to play in a location where no sponsor is available. A cold date may be desirable, for instance, in a town strategically located between two sponsored dates. Where there is high audience potential anyway, and no restrictive local statutes, a cold date also generates more revenue for the circus, without the need for a sponsor split.

Some circuses preferring cold dates view their policy as a responsible step away from the "boiler-room" telephone tactics which encouraged the sale of bogus tickets for allegedly charitable purposes. Sponsors sometimes turned a blind eye to the professional high-pressure circus salesmen, operating from banks of telephones outside the community. The result was that very little of the money raised by such means went to the named charity. Instead it went quietly under the table either to the sponsor or to the circus. Boiler-room tactics are the logical extension of the old grift shows. As regulations have grown more effective, boiler rooms have grown more temperate and honest, but scruples continue to be questioned. As recently as 1988, a Maryland judge ordered Dick Garden, owner of the Toby Tyler Circus, to pay $1.7 million in civil fines and $615,000 in restitution to the state's handicapped and mentally retarded children, who were supposed to have been beneficiaries from several of his shows. Although the case was settled for only $20,000 in fines, Garden will not be permitted to raise "charitable" funds again in Maryland. (Aug 21, 1989) 12. Incidentally, for those who have always wondered, was a fictional novel written by James Otis in 1880, and popularized by the Disney film. There was never a real Toby Tyler. This and other circuses have been named after the book.

If where a circus plays is vital to its success, so is the very complicated process of making us aware of the time and place of performances. So too is the often-not-so-gentle art of persuasion that is designed to convince us that we, the public, can't live another day without the circus. Since 1893, that process has been called ballyhooing, a word which developed at the Chicago Columbian Exposition. It was an English mispronunciation of an Arabic expression used for calling sideshow performers out in front of the tent to do a free show to attract a crowd. Ballyhooing involves a lot of flamboyant language and exaggeration that are the legacy primarily of two masters at it: Barnum and Charles Ringling. It has caught the public fancy, and we are rarely offended by exaggerated circus claims made in the spirit of a challenging child: "I'll bet you a hundred million dollars that …" Said John Ringling: "There is no effort to deceive the public—but to express the hugeness of everything in figures that carry the idea. If we have fifty elephants, and say a hundred, it pleases rather than offends." John Ringling, in , SEP, 1919, quoted in Charles Philip Fox, A Ticket to the Circus [New York: Bramhall, 1959]) 46.

Ballyhooing also meant that anything goes in advertising a circus. Hot-air balloon ascents were once an integral, spectacular opening for every circus performance, because balloons could be seen for miles by thousands of prospective spectators. Coup & Barnum's "Professor" Donaldson once took off in a balloon over Chicago in 1875; he's still missing. Today, the bulk of such advertising is handled by the media. The Ringling, Beatty-Cole, Carson & Barnes, and other big shows or sponsors rely on TV spots and newspaper ads; smaller shows put more emphasis on radio. Everyone is eager for the free and more meaningful coverage that can be generated by feature newspaper stories related to the circus. And a picture of the advance clown with a handicapped child outdraws thousands of dollars' worth of paid advertising.

Wherever possible, posters and handbills are still a vital circus tradition. Some shows use stock posters, and others develop unique looks, styles, shapes and color combinations that identify a specific circus. Billing agents are responsible for "papering" towns, or putting up circus posters in store windows and on telephone poles where they will be seen by the most number of people. The success of P.T. Barnum's paper promotion of Joice Heth, George Washington's "nurse," as "the first person to put pants on the first president," established his genius at the art of ballyhooing. Madison Avenue virtually owes its beginnings to the "Shakespeare of Advertising," as he was sometimes known.

Modern billers have to contend with city ordinances against posting on utility poles, or regulations requiring paper to be removed before the circus leaves town. They may be limited to the walls of vacant buildings, store window fronts which can be traded for Annie Oakleys, and fences around construction sites. Gone are the days when circus paper completely covered window fronts and the sides of buildings, and when large banners, hung across main street, announced the arrival of a show. But billing is still an important way to ballyhoo the circus' coming to town. For an average stand on the Beatty-Cole tour, for example, Dick Smith has 400 pounds of posters ready for his billing crews.

Circus paper comes in sizes referred to as sheets. Their 28 by 42 inch dimension was originally determined by the size and weight of the lithograph stone that could be easily lifted by the printers. Every kind of bill was determined by combinations of sheets. Dates were printed separately on half-sheets, 21 by 28 inches, and 24 sheets made up a full 12 by 25 foot billboard. Panels for narrow window spaces were in half- and one-sheet sizes; one by 28 sheet "streamers," usually containing the show's title, were used for pasting over the tops of a long row of other signs. The biggest lithographs ever printed were for the W. W. Cole, the Forepaugh-Sells and the Buffalo Bill shows, consisting of one hundred sheets each, mounted on billboards of 15 by 60 feet. Charles Philip Fox and Tom Parkinson. (Boulder, CO: Pruett, 1985), 12. "Guttersnipe" referred to circus paper several feet wide by only a few inches high that was intended to go on rain gutters over store fronts; and "banners," for outdoor displays, were usually mounted on thin stiff cloth. The colorful old lithographs, offering a lot of printed and pictorial information, were designed for a more appreciative, slower-paced society than today's. Of the many major lithograph companies that handled circus printing, only one or two remain today. In the electronic age, the lithographs have been replaced by color TV. Today's circus paper is much simpler; in the tradition of video art, it is intended to provide the minimum necessary amount of information from only a casual glance.

Billing crews will now post or paper a town about a week before a circus is to open. In the old days of the giant railroad circuses, the major shows had from one to five advance "bill" cars, which would roll into town two to three weeks before the main show, attached to a regular passenger train. In 1923, John Robinson's bill car typically carried twelve billposters separated into two brigades, seven lithographers, a paste maker, a chef, and a car manager. Fox and Parkinson, 63. It contained sleeping facilities, storage for a month's supply of dated paper, ladders, brushes, tacks, and a complete shop for mixing glue and posting bills.

Circus paper was traditionally attached in one of two ways: It was either tacked up or pasted up. The tack-spitters were so called because of their dangerous-sounding cobbler's tradition of approaching their targets with a mouthful of tacks. They were very good at spitting them onto their magnetic tack hammers and driving them into place with one smooth blow. The practice was probably begun by the North Salem (NY) shoemaker and circus founder, Aron Turner. Earl Chapin May, (New York: Dover, 1963) 41. A good tack-spitter traditionally carried with him a loaf of bread; if he accidentally swallowed a tack, he would quickly follow it with a piece of bread, presumably to protect his stomach and bowels. A new and safer system for posting paper was clearly in order.

According to current scholarship, it was Van Amburgh that first used paste for bill-posting in Cold Water, Michigan, in 1855. May claimed that the system of pasting pictorial paper on locations open to the weather was ordered by Seth Howes. May. Bill-posters had their own language: any stand of pasted circus paper was called a "daub," but they never "daubed" glue on anything.

The billing crews had to be a tough bunch. They had to work in rain, sleet, or hail, along with the traditional mailmen, and sometimes they worked from high scaffolding and in high winds. On an average day, each man was supposed to post a "hod" of 300 to 600 sheets, covering up to 7,000 square feet of space. Added up, circus paper accounts for one of the major expenses of early shows. The 1911 Ringling show, for instance, allotted 914,000 sheets for the season, and the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus of 1934 posted a total of 101,108 sheets in Chicago alone. Under average conditions, a show might be expected to use anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 sheets per town, depending on the potential and the opposition.

Once the initial billing was complete, the job of the billing crews wasn't yet over. They were occasionally called on to engage in fist fights with rival billing brigades determined to cover everything with their own circus paper. Such tactics frequently launched full scale "billing wars." Circuses preferred to call them, more euphemistically, "opposition," but they could be ruthless indeed. Special opposition brigades were organized, whose whole purpose was a campaign of dirty tricks that would put Watergate to shame. Supplies of new paper might be intentionally rerouted to the wrong city. "Rat" sheets were printed to cast doubt on the morality of a rival circus, or the truth of its advertising. They were most likely to be libelous lies themselves, but they almost always got away with it because the printed slanders generated publicity for both shows. People would have to see them both to know who was telling the truth. Opposition crews might change the date and show title on rival circus paper. Some shows would bill a town with "Coming Soon" paper, even if they had no intentions of doing so, just to make trouble. "Wait Sheets" called for the public not to attend one circus but to wait for the "real" circus. At one time, the Ringling show was even called the "Wait Bros." because of its efforts to undercut any show preceding its arrival in a town. To the casual observer, the bright red bills insisted in big black letters, "Wait for the Big One!"

Gentlemen's agreements beginning as early as in 1883 have always tried to reduce the billing wars to more subtle forms of persuasion, but there are still recent remnants of opposition to be found. In 1959, the Adams Bros. & Sells Bros. Circus used ten times its normal amount of paper crying "Why Pay More?" as it struggled against the larger Christiani Brothers Circus in Green Bay and Appleton, Wisconsin. Again in 1974, a public war of words in print broke out between the Felds' Ringling operation and the newly founded Circus America, both of which opened in Washington, D.C., on April 2 to packed houses. In 1983, almost four months ahead of their scheduled fall dates in Chicago, Ringling crews posted wait paper which was clearly aimed at a summer stand of the Vargas Circus: "Why Settle For: Paying more for less show and trudging across a dusty/muddy lot to swelter under a canvas tent in the hot and humid July/August heat while sitting on a hard bench?" Finally, as recently as 1988, in El Paso, Texas, a Disney ice show promoter was accused of posing as a Circus Vargas employee and stealing 100,000 Vargas free and discount admission coupons. According to the , he allegedly stole the coupons so people wouldn't know the circus was in town and instead would go to the Disney show. Fred D. Pfening III, in XXXIII:1 (Jan-Feb, 1989) 8. Clearly, billing wars and opposition are not entirely a thing of the past.

With all the circuses, large and small, still criss-crossing our country, most of whom keep their routings a closely-guarded secret, it is inevitable that they will run into each other and compete for the same audiences. But good circuses generate business and enthusiasm for other good circuses, and responsible owners don't object if they have been preceded into their territory by a good clean rival. Mutually supportive relationships have even begun to form, such as the one between the Pickle Family and the Cirque du Soleil, which resulted in a 1989 Soleil performance in San Francisco to benefit the Pickle. Pickle and the Australian Circus Oz have a mutually supportive arrangement as well, and Lorenzo Pickle found it possible to make a guest appearance with the Circus Flora in 1989. Such expressions of level-headed circus brotherhood were not unknown in the past, either, but they certainly didn't receive the exposure of the great billing wars. There is much more to be said about the fascinating world of circus advertising, but this is not the appropriate place. At any rate, the whole story has already been ably told in , by Charles Philip Fox and Tom Parkinson.

With the exception of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, today's circuses all travel in trucks. Before they leave their winter quarters, the list of preliminary preparations is long. They must obtain and meet the rules and regulations of all the various states governing the transportation of animals across state lines. Their trucks must be licensed in every state whose borders they will cross, and display Department of Transportation approval stickers guaranteeing that all fees have been paid.

Any manager knows that a reliable means of reaching the site of a promised performance is absolutely essential. Because circus people can't afford the inevitable loss of income and reputation resulting from a blown date, they must either own and maintain or lease a fleet of reliable trucks.

The size and nature of the fleet varies from circus to circus. At minimum, every show under canvas carries at least one self-contained generator truck, which provides all the electric power the circus will use. The constant noise from the generator trucks and the rapid-fire talk of the candy butchers and side-show grinders have always been associated with the atmosphere of the circus. Another truck which is included in all circus fleets is the ticket office, still uniformly called the "red wagon," even if it's in a modern white air-conditioned semi rig. In addition, there are usually concession trucks, canvas trucks, pole and seating trucks, dormitory trucks, animal trucks, and the cook house. The three largest tented shows in the country, Beatty-Cole, Vargas, and Carson & Barnes, travel with a total of twenty-six, twenty-three, and forty-two show-owned vehicles respectively. Smaller circus outfits like Wayne Franzen's and the Great American travel with only thirteen and ten. These figures do not include the many privately-owned motor homes and trailers where individual performers prefer to live, or the trucks that belong to complete acts that are leased by the circus. For example, flying acts and animal acts usually own their own vehicles and equipment. Privately owned trucks and motor homes can double or triple the number of vehicles that must be accommodated on a circus lot.

Increasingly, circuses seek to own similar model trucks to simplify repairs with uniform replacement parts. Clearly, among the most sought after and well-paid employees of the circus are reliable, safe and loyal truck drivers, able to maneuver onto some pretty inhospitable sites, and willing to carry strange cargoes and share the demanding hours of circus life.

Traveling by truck is a complicated process, and the Ringling show still finds it profitable to do their moving by rail, the only one to be doing so since the end of the railroad era in 1956. Starting in 1957, they too scraped by without their own train, moving like a regular truck show, except that the animal acts were shipped ahead via three railroad-owned stock cars. But in 1960, the Ringling show went back on the rail in fifteen of their own tunnel and stock cars, redesigned from old coach cars by manager and former flyer Art Concello. Since 1969, there have been two Ringling Circus trains crisscrossing the country, one each for the Red and the Blue units. In 1989, the red unit used forty-four cars and the Blue Unit forty-five, and the flat cars have grown to almost ninety feet in length; all their cars together are as long as any circus train ever, except for the big Ringling tented show trains in the heyday of the railroad circus. Of course, both contemporary units are strictly arena-based, so they don't have to undergo the old logistical nightmare of carrying canvas, poles, and canvas crews from town to town. In addition, some equipment still goes by truck, and many of the Ringling performers travel by motor home or truck, preferring to avoid the limited space, noise and confusion that go with life on a crowded circus train.

All major circus big tops are now made of long-lasting polyvinyl, except for the Circus World Museum's and Hanneford's, but fortunately no one talks of raising a "vinyl." Despite the Beatty-Cole Show's retirement of the last canvas three-ring big top in 1988, the word "canvas" is still used. It's relatively rare to hear old-time circus people use the word "tent," which they continue to call a "canvas" or a "top." Stuart Thayer suggests quite logically that the word "top" comes from "topped canvas," so-called to distinguish it from an open-to-the-sky arena with canvas sidewalls. Stuart Thayer, in XXX:5 (Sep-Oct, 1986) 30. Our use of the word "tent" may be frowned upon by circus purists; nonetheless, for clarity among non-circus audiences, we've slipped it in occasionally.

Circus big tops can easily cover a space larger than a football field. Size is usually expressed first by the diameter of the circular ends, and then by the number and width of the sections placed between the ends. Within the last half-century, in 1946, for example, one of the largest Ringling tents had six center poles joining five 60-foot sections with 200-foot round ends, making it a total of 500 feet long, and providing over 91,400 square feet of circus magic. The old Barnum & Bailey show had even larger tops: In 1886, they used 252-foot rounds with four 59-foot centers, making a tent that was 252 feet wide by 488 feet long (109,350 sqare feet); and in 1892, their top had 220-foot rounds and five 56-foot centers, making it 500 feet long (99,620 sq ft). Historian Joe McKennon reports that an even earlier Barnum & Bailey tent had eight poles and may have been 600 feet long, with a declared capacity of 10,000 spectators. By comparison, the big modern Carson & Barnes push-pole tent has 150-foot rounds, and center sections totalling 246 feet. It is thus 396 feet ("a full city block") long, and provides 54,600 square feet, or about half the space of the 1886 Barnum & Bailey big top. According to their press release, the Italian polyvinyl top is made by Scola Teloni, and it bridges a total of eight center poles. The new Beatty-Cole vinyl tent, made by Anchor Tents in Sarasota, Florida, has 140-foot rounds, and three 48-foot center sections. It is 283 feet long and has four center poles. And the Vargas tent, new in 1988, has 150-foot rounds and three 50-foot centers. While these contemporary shows are not as big as the biggest, clearly, the charge that the big tented circus is a thing of the past is wholely inappropriate.

One of the first trucks to arrive on a new lot, along with the cook house, is the stake driver. The innovation of the mechanical stake driver has all but done away with the "hammer gangs" of yesterday, and has considerably reduced the time and energy required to raise a big top. Stakes can number from a few hundred to thousands, depending on the size of the show. The old wooden bull and jigger stakes which secured the center poles could be as much as four inches thick and six feet long. Today's stakes are usually wooden for dirt lots, and steel for asphalt parking lots. Some circuses carry both varieties for flexibility, and others rely on steel pins for all conditions. The stakes are driven 24 to 30 inches into the ground. The number depends on their function: most are for the "stake line" which secures the edges of the circus top; other stakes are driven for extra tent strength and for high wire and other aerial apparatus.

Elephants have been used for over a hundred years to raise the big top, and they are still the most efficient and impressive power source travelling with the circus. Crowds often gather in the early morning to watch the elephants work, and few owners want to disappoint them. Most shows advertise the tent-raising as a special free event, and it's not unusual to see school busses lined up at the circus lot at 8:00 a.m. Elephant tent-raising has taken the place of the circus parade and the balloon ascent as a way of arousing anticipation and building audiences.

sideshows offered a wide range of strange entertainers and "monsters," human and otherwise. The entertainers included among others: magicians, contortionists, ventriloquists, Punch & Judy puppeteers, fortune-tellers and mind-readers, sword swallowers, snake charmers, strong men, tattooed men and women, knife and hatchet-throwers, and minstrels. There were fire-eaters, human blow-torches, and spectacular fire dancers like Queen Dora, a black side show artist. Almost any exhibit suggesting the extremes of human behavior was sought after by the sideshow entrepreneurs. The Sells-Floto show even tried to hire the notorious "cannibal," Al Packer, to appear as a "freak" on their side show. Packer had allegedly fed on five of his fellow prospectors in order to survive the severe winter of 1874 while trapped in the Colorado wilderness. He was perhaps wrongly convicted of murdering them, and served fifteen years in prison; but he had the sense to reject the Sells-Floto offer and end his days raising rabbits and tending his flower garden. Lloyd Grove, in (Jun 8, 1989) B2.

When the golden days of the sideshow ended, most performers made the transition to carnivals and fairs, as well as to the television variety shows like Ed Sullivan's and more recently and .

The word "monster," was initially a medical term derived from the Latin root meaning to warn; the word "monitor" comes from the same root. So "monster" referred to any creature different from the normal, about whom the public must be warned. There were some animal monsters, like giant gorillas and two-headed calfs, but for the most part circus "monsters" were all too human on the inside. They ranged from albinos and pinheads to wolf boys and alligator girls, from the world's tallest to the world's smallest, from the fattest to the thinnest, from the hairiest to the baldest. The grinders often called them "freaks," a word offensive to the performers themselves. The Barnum & Bailey sideshow performers staged the famous "Uprising of the Freaks" in London in 1898, to protest the use of the word, and they were successful in getting their banners altered to read "Prodigies." In his book on sideshow performers, Frederick Drimmer calls them "very special people," because they "carry a special burden and they carry it with dignity and courage." Frederick Drimmer, (New York: Bell, 1985) xv.

There are many reasons for the decline of the sideshow on American circuses. Times change, and the conscience of middle-America grew embarrassed by the whole idea of displaying human oddities for commercial gain. Our guilt at having been granted a "normal" body, whatever that is, added to our moral outrage, and we called for an end to the "inhuman" practices of the sideshow. Even the Soviet Union had laws against the display of odd humans. Not all performers would agree: sideshows were in fact one of the few ways in which society permitted them to earn an honest living. As Dick Best pointed out in Drimmer's book, people didn't hire alligator girls for receptionists, nurses, and baby-sitters. Drimmer, xix A second factor in the sideshow's demise was the impressive success of the medical community in preventing or correcting the extreme birth defects that people were paying to see, such as Siamese-twinning. Finally, society itself has made great strides in assimilating the casualties of birth and war into its mainstream. We still have a long way to go, but never before have so many "abnormalities" been accepted by the rest of us as normal variations on the human condition.

The main show is about to begin, and it will begin promptly as advertised. "STEP RIGHT UP, LADEEEZ AND GENTLEMEN! FOR ONLY ONE DOLLAR MORE . . . ." There may be one more stop we'll want to make just inside the tent, to buy seats in the "reds," the traditional reserved seats on the front or back side of the tent. The view from there is much better than from the blue seats in the general admission area around the ends, and for some shows, the reds are real chairs and not bleachers. We reach our seats just in time. As the lights go down, and unread programs are tucked away, a spotlight comes up on the "ringmaster" standing in front of the cage in center ring: "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, AND CHILDREN OF ALL AGES! WELCOME TO THE ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTIETH EDITION OF THE ..." Every word is crystal clear. Every syllable is stretched to three.

Instinctively, we know he's talking to us, and not to the kids. It's still another paradoxical expression, that: "Children of all ages." So much of the circus is lost on young children. What we are about to see is real, and not magic, but for children everything is still magic. They have no context with which to appreciate just how nigh-on-to-impossible many of these performances will be. We ought never to confuse a circus performer with a stage actor or a movie star, whose job is to present us with the illusion of reality and make us believe in it. The circus performer's job is to defy our preconceptions and present us with the real thing itself, and make us believe in that. How often have we seen at the circus a father cradling a wide-eyed young son in his lap, and pointing up at the flying frame: "Look at that. Now watch what she's going to do now. Wooow! Can you believe ...?" Of course he believes it; it's the father who is having trouble believing it and is much more impressed. The child addressed by the ringmaster is in the father, and not the son.

We just called that man with the microphone a "ringmaster," but is he really? In all likelihood, he is wearing a bright red jacket, a black silk top hat, white riding breeches, and tall gleaming black boots. It is the traditional formal riding habit of the old English equestrian schools, and this man is the descendent of the riding masters who were proprietors of such schools. According to Joe McKennon, the ringmaster is the man in charge of a one-ring circus performance. Joe McKennon, (Sarasota: Carnival,1980) 78. Stuart Thayer suggests that the title first came into use in the 1820s, to describe a kind of master of ceremonies and straight man for the clown. It was his job also to stand in the center of the ring and hold the leads for the bareback riders; he was always associated with horse acts. When the performances grew to larger two- and three-ring productions, the men who arranged and announced the acts, first with bells, and later with whistles, came to be known as "equestrian directors." They did not necessarily have to be oriented towards horsemanship: the great flyer, Alfredo Codona was an excellent equestrian director for the Hagenback-Wallace & Adam Forepaugh Combined Show in 1935.

Probably the most famous equestrian director in America was Fred Bradna, who spent forty years with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. He never once made an announcement, but his whistle governed the progress of the entire show. Conversely, his ringmasters, in charge of each ring, could make announcements; but they weren't allowed to blow a whistle. Today, large circuses often use the term "performance director," for an artistic personnel director who doesn't necessarily appear in the ring. Finally, the "announcer," who may sing and be covered with sequins, but who may not have any managerial, equestrian, or ring responsibilities, is the true identity of the man now before us, in the guise of a riding master and calling himself a ringmaster. On the other hand, just to further confuse the issue, one person often performs several of the roles, as does the very capable ex-clown Jimmy James for the Beatty-Cole show. The end result of all this blurring and mixing of jobs and incorrect usage, is that the word "ringmaster" is gradually coming into use as a general title for the emcee of any circus performance.

We don't mean to imply that the field is entirely limited to men, either. Among the several capable women in the role of "ringmistress" is Miss Charlie Hackett on the Royal Hanneford Circus. Charlie joined the circus as a clown in 1985, but was so convinced that she wanted to be a singing ringmistress that she had her voice surgically lowered to be more effective. She is following in the footsteps of Tommy Hanneford's mother Katherine, who performed as ringmistress in the center ring until she was ninety-three years old, and his grandmother, “Nana.”

If there are to be lions and tigers at all, the customary opening act for the traditional three-ring circus is the cage act in center ring. The self-supporting bars of the show cage, along with the tunnel cage or cage train bringing in the animals, are usually in place before the performance, because they take a while to set up. All other animal acts, with the exception of the elephants, are traditionally performed before the intermission as well, so they can be promptly fed and loaded following their final performances and on their way to the next stand. The elephants are traditionally the last act of the show, not only because they tend to require extensive clean-up behind them, but because they are often used in the tear-down procedures after the final blow-off.

We'll deal with all the animal acts, including the horses, around whom the modern circus was originally founded, in Chapter Eight. But for now, our concern is strictly with those performers who will in the next two hours, stretch our notions of what the human body can do. It must be borne in mind that most performers stay with any one show for only a year or two, before moving on to other shows. In this way, each circus maintains its freshness and vitality. Therefore, although contemporary acts discussed in this chapter were recently with the identified circuses as indicated, we use them here as examples. They may no longer be associated with the circus cited.

In his , George Chindahl identifies a bewildering two hundred or so circus acts. We can not possibly begin to cover them all in this brief chapter. In , Hovey Burgess simplifies our problem by dividing all the acts into three broad categories: vaulting, which includes leaping and flying; equilibristics, or balancing; and juggling. All three can be combined in a variety of ways, and all three can be done on the ground and in the air.

The aerialists are as good a place as any for us to begin, but before we do, one last brief note applies to all performers, on the ground or in the air, jugglers, vaulters, and balance artists. Every performer learns how to render a “style,” as part of his or her act. A traditional part of every circus performance, a style is the moment when the artist turns to the audience and gestures that it’s an appropriate moment to express appreciation for the trick about to be performed or just accomplished. They say to us in the audience, “This trick's hard; watch closely,” or “We did it!” Sometimes it happens in an unrehearsed, spontaneous fashion after a particularly difficult trick, and then it's especially hard to resist the resulting exhilaration that sweeps over performers and audience alike. On the face of the performer, a grimace of concentration changes to a grin of joyous satisfaction as he opens himself up to the audience, probably with a boisterous “Hey!” designed to outdo any earlier styles. He fully deserves our enthusiastic applause.

There is perhaps no other circus act which so captures the essence of what it is for a human being to exceed his limitations as does the trapeze. "I can do that," murmurs the mesmerized little girl far below, while the band plays the deceptively comforting strains of a waltz. "He makes it look so easy." But it isn't, of course. The job of some circus performers may be to take a basically simple and easily-executed trick and make it look daring and complicated. But it is the job of the trapeze artist to take an inherently dangerous and difficult trick and make it look easy. Flight dreams are the substance of our unconscious, fulfilling our wish for the unattainable like some kind of science-fiction film. The sight of a human body in mid-air, in total defiance of the restrictive laws of gravity, is a magnificent image. It's an image which often serves as a powerful metaphor reinforcing our defiance of all the other laws which hold us down to a mundane existence. No wonder that most of us who ever wanted to run away to join a circus, first wanted to be trapeze artists.

"He flies through the air with the greatest of ease. That daring young man on the flying trapeze." That song, written in 1868 by Gaston Lyle and George Leybourne, was modelled on a young man who revolutionized the art of the trapeze. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century, trapeze acts consisted of flyers leaping from one ground-based bar to another. Then young Jules Léotard hung two trapeze bars from ropes over the swimming pool in his father's gymnasium in Toulouse, France, and began to train. Nine years later, on November 12, 1859, at Paris's Cirque Napoléon, which is now the famous Cirque d'Hiver, Jules dressed up in a new skin-tight costume which now bears his name, and performed what he had learned. Both his tights and his flying act were an overnight sensation. Soon, single and double somersaults were being thrown by new flyers all over Europe and America. In 1870 a catcher was added on the second bar, which became known as the catch trap.

A triple somersault was considered an impossibility until a little Latvian teenager named Lena Jordan accomplished it in 1897. But by the following year she had grown too big to repeat it. It took twelve more years for Ernest Clarke to begin a thirty-year career of throwing triples into the hands of his brother Charles. Antoinette Concello, billed as the "world's greatest woman aerialist," and the Ringling show's future aerial director, was the first woman to perform the triple regularly. It is still only rarely performed, and has earned the legendary title of "the Big Trick." The effort now is to achieve the longest unbroken string of triples, a record held as of this writing by eighteen-year-old Jaime Ibarra. Ibarra established a new record of 118 consecutive triples, at Circus World Museum on September 17, 1989, breaking Martin Alvarez’ 1984 record.

In January of 1981, after years of effort, Tito Gaona was probably the first to succeed in throwing a quadruple backward somersault, but it was only in a rehearsal, witnessed but not recorded, and he was never able to repeat it. Miguel Vasquez completed one in August of that year in a practice, but not until July 10, 1982, in Tucson, Arizona, did he throw a successful "quad" in performance, into the hands of his brother, Juan. Since then, the quad has been performed by relatively few flyers. Ruben Caballero, Jr. has performed them on the Carson & Barnes show. Ricardo Morales was the youngest to throw the quad in 1985, when he was thirteen, with Carson & Barnes. But Vasquez is still the champion, with more than 1,100 completions to his credit since he threw his first. He has a 65% success rate, according to the 1989 Ringling program. The quad is often called "the Biggest Trick," both because flyers dream of accomplishing it and because of its difficulty. The flyer's body is moving at about 70 mph, fast enough so that he may momentarily black out; it is up to his catcher to be there at the right time and make the catch safely.

Despite the publicity surrounding the quad, and the importance of any "trick," the way in which it is executed is just as important as the trick itself. Trapeze artistry is about much more than records and speeds and somersaults. It's about style, precision, grace, timing and joy. It's about discipline, love, trust, and the fluid ease with which a flyer meets his catcher in that weightless state at the top of his arc. Often even a busted attempt can result in a graceful fall. In fact, learning how to fall into the net properly on the back or rear end is the first step in mastering a trap act; falls must happen constantly in the learning process. Other moves are just as challenging as multiple backward somersaults. Pirouettes, whirling the body in an upright position, and forward somersaults can be extremely dangerous, because the flyer can't see his target until the last minute, although they are often unappreciated by an unaware public. Passing leaps involving two flyers in the air at the same time, both returning on the same bar, are spectacular tricks. Dismounts into the safety net often involve diving twists and turns and floating double layouts, which can easily result in serious injury if the flyer lands on his feet or head and some bad cuts and bruises if he lands on his front. A difficult rebound from the net to the catch trap makes a stunning finale to an act.

The Valentines, the Eagles, the Wards, and the Concellos were among the many talented flying troupes of the early twentieth century. Art Concello born in Spokane, Washington, of Portugese extraction. He and his wife Antoinette, who grew up in Vermont, together with their catcher, Eddie Ward, Jr., made up the Flying Concellos act, featuring two triple artists. They headlined the Ringling show soon after Alfredo Codona's injury and retirement in 1933. As much a businessman as an artist, Concello would eventually own every flying act in the country, rescue John Ringling North from financial disaster, and take over the managerial duties of the "Big One" after North's return in 1947. Among the many talented flying families working today are Gaona, Vasquez, Luna, Rodriguez, Rodogel, Neves, Tabares, Ybarras, Ramos, Alejandros, and Caballero—all great names, all Mexican and South American, and all following in the footsteps of the acknowledged greatest, Alfredo Codona himself.

To the traditional vaulters, balancers, and jugglers which have made up ground acts in the circus must be added an array of performers that used to be a part of the sideshows, but have migrated into the main tent. Among them are the magic acts, which can seem so out of place to circus purists because they are based on illusion rather than the presentation of reality. Nonetheless, magicians and circuses have always had close ties. They travelled together in the old days, and shared the same audiences. Houdini himself appeared in the circus on occasion. Franz Czeisler, the head of the spectacular Circo Tihany tented variety show, is an accomplished magician who features magic in his performances. Big John Strong has virtually mounted a circus of magic, and magic acts are featured in the Great American, Franzen, Roberts Brothers, and Circus World Museum shows, among many others.