My senses are overwhelmed by the nostalgic, sickly-sweet smell of mulched grass and the sound of eerie tinkling circus music that I can’t help but associate with Tim Curry in a retro clown suit.
In the depths of a particularly cold winter I have been invited to spend a week with the circus. Having spent some time researching the history of the circus and its place in the modern world, I toyed with the various options that might be open to me – from the modern spectacle of Cirque du Soleil to the retro-vintage charm of Giffords Circus – and made the decision to approach only the older, more traditional circuses such as Zippos, Circus Fantasia and Billy Smart’s. I wanted to re-experience the nostalgic circuses of my childhood – the classic circus music, the clowns, the flying trapeze and the big top tents – and to understand their evolving place in today’s world.
Dating back to 1934, this particular circus, once famous for its travelling elephants, now relies solely on human performers to entertain the crowds. Although the reason for this shift was never officially confirmed, the removal of the lion tamers and tigers leaping through flames was undoubtedly a reaction to the changing public sensibilities and an increased concern for animal welfare, especially the aversion to wild animals being kept in cages and used to entertain.
The big top is alive with kids running and screaming, waving flashing lightsabers and tugging on the sleeves of their wearied parents. To my left is a long ‘Burger and Tea’ bar, manned by two young girls with heavily made-up faces.
As promised in an email exchange with the circus manager, a striking denim-eyed man waits to greet me next to the popcorn vendor. Seemingly aggrieved at having to entertain me, he nods wordlessly and beckons for me to follow him, leading me straight past the audience to introduce me to the performers backstage. We pull the curtain back, and I bump straight into a wall of rock-hard flesh with white teeth, silver sparkly shorts and a black mohawk.
‘Hi, I’m Alex,’ the grinning young man says, extending a hand illuminated by the blue lighting that floods the backstage area. Wow. I look around me to discover three more equally chiselled torsos waiting backstage, stretching, jumping and shaking out their bodies.
‘These are the Flying Aces,’ my guide announces, introducing me to the trapeze act as they gather around me to shake my hand.
‘Are you pumped about going on?’ I ask them, immediately regretting my choice of word.
Alex jumps in: ‘Shit, yeah. I love the trapeze.’ He smiles with an enthusiasm that consumes him, like a Border collie puppy. ‘This morning we had a disastrous fall during rehearsal, but I couldn’t wait to get back up there! I love falling, I love catching, I love all of it!’ His eyes sparkle as he talks and I can’t help but grin, enchanted by his zest for life.
After a few more minutes of soaking up the electric energy backstage, I am led to a seat in the front row as the bell sounds to summon the beginning of the show. It opens with a parade of all of the performers, juggling, jumping over giant skipping ropes and clapping along to live music. The clown buffoons around at the front of the ring, making the kids scream with laughter and the adults smile reluctantly.
A solo trapeze artist takes to the ring for the first act, performed on a giant swing hanging thirty feet in the air. Her face is fixed with an unrelenting smile, her eyes reflect the different coloured lights and her painted-on eyebrows give an impression of permanent surprise. Her act is polished and meticulously delivered, culminating in an extravagant spin down to the ground, supported only by a rope at the nape of her neck. The first half continues with a juggling act, a full set from the clown and an acrobatic act by a man dressed as a fireman, who clambers over spinning ladders.
After a break for a cup of tea and some candyfloss, the second half welcomes the Flying Aces, soaring through the air, tucking into triple somersaults before being caught by their feet and launched back up into the altitude. The tent is filled with an aura of power and strength, and the boys look like they are having the time of their lives. After each swing they shout, ‘Aaaayyyy!’ at the top of their voices and beam down at the audience.
After the Flying Aces there is another short act from the clown, a young hand-balancer who shoots a bow and arrow into a balloon with her feet, and a final display by an acrobatic troupe: big, burly, dark-haired men who catapult tiny women into soaring somersaults using teeterboards before stacking themselves onto each other’s shoulders like human Jenga. I find myself holding my breath until each woman lands safely. After each successful catch they all shout, ‘Hey!’ and throw their hands up into a V shape to encourage applause. For some reason it makes me laugh every time.
I am so impressed by the energy, discipline and strength it must take to pull this off, and find myself cheering along enthusiastically with the crowd as each of the acts parades back into the ring to take a bow.
The audience leave, smiling and talking excitedly about their favourite acts. I leave with them, weaving my way through the caravan site, jogging to keep up with my guide, who shows me to my home for the coming week. He points at what can only be described as a long, terraced caravan with six entrance doors and says, ‘You’ll be staying here, in the bunk wagon.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, searching my memory for the name of this man, who has pointed me wordlessly around the site like the ghost of Christmas yet to come. I turn around to ask him, but he is already halfway on his walk towards the caravans on the other side of the big top. How does this man walk so fast? I begin to wonder if I’m in some kind of creepy dream.
I open the middle door of the bunk wagon and I can’t help but hope that this is all a dream as I take in the six-by-four-foot room, containing a metal and foam bed crammed next to a small cupboard with a sink built into it. The room is like a giant freezer, with no heater in sight and a small window at the back that appears to be jammed open.
I drop my bag of clothes for the week onto the floor, unpack my sleeping bag and pyjamas onto the bed and prop my toothbrush against a bottle of water that I place into the sink. I sit on the bed, shivering, and take in the fibreglass box that surrounds me. This place feels more alien than anything I have done so far, and perhaps more so because I don’t feel as if I have much of a role here, so all I can do is observe. I haven’t had time to learn any circus skills – well, I did have one flying-trapeze lesson in Hyde Park a couple of weeks ago, but I’m not exactly feeling… er… performance-ready – so I can’t join in the way I was able to with the apple polishing and the Battle of Cheriton. I suddenly feel very alone. Perhaps I’ve gone a little bit too far out of my comfort zone this time, I think to myself, hoping I can at least last the week.
Looking at my watch I see that it’s only half nine, so I drag myself back outside again to explore, resisting the urge to curl up in my sleeping bag and have a little cry.
Emerging from the door of the bunk wagon, I walk back towards the big top and bump into a young member of the Flying Aces, who had shaken my hand earlier.
‘Hi, I’m Lucy,’ I say with forced confidence. ‘I’m the one hanging out with you guys for a week to learn about the circus. Can we have a chat?’
‘Sure.’ He smiles shyly and beckons for me to follow him.
He introduces himself as Tim, a twenty-two-year-old originally from Liverpool. Tim seems very young to me and a little fragile. Handsome, with dark hair, brown eyes and sharp features, he invites me into his van, where we sit in the front cab to escape from the biting cold outside.
‘I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by everything,’ I confess to him. ‘I guess it’s just because I don’t really know anyone yet, though.’ I shrug, and gesture back towards my new home, ‘I’m staying in the bunk wagon over there. Do you know if anyone else lives in there?’
‘Oh yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s where most of the ring boys live. They do a lot of the repairs and maintenance around the site. The room on the far left is where the cook lives.’ He points back at the edge of the bunk wagon. ‘He makes Polish food for the ring boys and they sort of keep themselves to themselves, really.’
‘Where do the performers live, then?’ I ask.
‘Oh, they’re all in their own trailers’ – he waves his hands in the air – ‘scattered all around the site. They’re all pretty well equipped, linked up to water and electricity and stuff. Some of them have dogs too’.
‘Do you remember how you felt when you first arrived here?’ I ask him, desperately seeking a kindred spirit, or trying to excuse my own sense of feeling so out of place here. Probably both.
‘Well, most circuses are very family-orientated,’ he explains, looking at the floor and kicking at invisible stones with the black shoes he wears for the opening of the show, one of which has a band of masking tape covering up a hole. ‘Everyone knows each other. They all rock up in their massive trailers as a statement of who is making the most money. Everyone is competing and worried about whether or not they are going to get another season. So I turned up as an outsider and wasn’t allowed to stay in a trailer with everyone else. I ended up sleeping in the back of my van on a mattress. If you aren’t from a circus background, the circus families don’t accept you. They call you a “private” – that means anyone who isn’t “from circus”. As far as they are concerned, you are coming from the outside and taking their money.’
Tim goes on to explain that school was tough for him; he had a problem with anger and was regularly expelled for fighting. He didn’t finish school and decided to move to America when he was sixteen years old, finding work in a bar at a resort, appropriately called Club Getaway. After a stint learning and teaching wakeboarding, it was the trapeze that was to be his saviour, the only thing that could keep his focus and make him want to achieve something. Now he has built a career for himself, and his family has become closer as a result. They are proud of him.
He talks about why it is difficult for him to date other circus performers, explaining that it’s important for the children of circus families to be in a position to look after their older members when their bodies can no longer keep up and they are forced into retirement with no work-related pension or social security. ‘So the last thing they want is for their daughters to end up with a ring boy without a home of his own, or a private like me who might persuade them to leave the circus.’
Feeling a lot better after my conversation with Tim, I invite myself to the local pub with some performers from the Netherlands National Circus, who gather noisily outside the big top. I introduce myself to a lofty Dutch clown, a Mexican dancer who gets swung around in circles by her hair, and a Moroccan acrobat who swings under the belly of galloping horses. They explain that they have come for the weekend to watch the show and visit the various performers, or artists as they call them, that they have crossed paths and made friends with over the years.
When we make it to the bar, I order a pint and plonk myself in the middle of the rowdy group at a long table. I feel as if I am on a night out with a bunch of celebrities and tell every bartender and passer-by who will listen that these are real circus performers, looking on proudly as the boys juggle with limes they have stolen from a display on the bar.
Towards the end of the night I win a ‘down-in-one’ pint-drinking competition with Eddie the Polish electrician. He beams at me, as if this is the most impressive thing he has ever seen, yelling incomprehensible words at me and clapping his hands. I swell with pride, decide that this may just be the most impressive thing I have ever done, and promptly do it again. Eddie buys me a quadruple vodka shot in appreciation, reassuring me that ‘it’s normal’ and pointing at his own glass to prove it.
‘What’s your problem then?’ the lofty Dutch clown asks me, interrupting a sudden wave of nausea.
‘What do you mean, problem?’ I stammer, affronted.
‘Well, why else would you have come to live with the circus?’
When I wake up the next morning – with my shoes still safely on my feet where I left them – I decide to spend the day exploring the giant clown’s question: why do people join the circus?
I spy Alex and Craig from the Flying Aces returning from their practice in the big top and invite them to join me for lunch to continue my investigation. I have to stop myself telling the waitress that these guys are real circus performers as she serves us our burgers. I still find them so exciting. Be cool, Lucy, be cool.
‘How do people react when you tell them you are in the circus?’ I begin, looking up from my burger at Alex.
He thinks for a while, circling his finger around the rim of his Diet Coke. ‘It varies,’ he decides. ‘If I tell people I am in the circus, they think that’s awesome. But the general perception is that the circus is full of freaks. If they know me first, they are OK with it, but they would still judge all of the performers they haven’t met.’
Craig nods in agreement. The manager of the Flying Aces, Craig is thirty-one years old and originally from Brisbane. His blond hair hangs in tight curls around his face, framing intense light blue eyes and an angular nose. He describes his upbringing as ‘relatively normal’; his mother was a teacher and his father worked in property. At school he enjoyed maths and went on to read business studies at university with the aim of getting into a ‘Big Four’ accountancy firm after graduation. Although he didn’t succeed in this straight away, after two years in a second-tier firm he was offered a job by Ernst & Young, the third largest professional services firm in the world.
While working for EY, Craig found a contemporary circus across the road and started going along to the odd training session. From there he began having trapeze lessons and instantly fell in love. He trained every free hour he could, and within the year he had handed in his notice to EY to take a shot at going professional.
‘I had just missed out on being resourced onto an interesting fraud project and got put on a dull audit instead,’ he tells me. ‘That was the straw that broke me, really. I wanted to live to work, not work to live. If I would have been put on the fraud project, I might still be an accountant.’
Craig’s experience feels understandable to me, a relatable white-collar access point into this alien world. I admire his bravery at leaving behind the life that was expected of him and diving headfirst into the prejudice-ridden life of a circus performer; from sitting in an office every day, in a safe and secure job with ‘prospects’, to becoming a trapeze artist, experiencing the world through the window of a tiny caravan.
My research continues over the course of the day, via continued interviews with other artists and ring boys as they drift in and out of the big top for practices and rigging adjustments, and I begin to pull together an idea of what it is like to have a career in the circus. Each artist is employed on a freelance, seasonal basis, as opposed to what I had previously assumed was more of a family affair of continuous employment. The average wage for an artist who is just starting out is around £300 per week, plus a contribution towards petrol, and free electricity and water. The ring boys earn £225 per week to work from 9 a.m. until 10 p.m. six days a week, as well as food courtesy of the in-house cook, utilities and accommodation in the bunk wagon.
There are two shows every day, and three on a Saturday. Most of the artists also train for up to three hours every day to maintain fitness and strength. This means that days off are rare, if ever, and the schedule is gruelling. It can also be difficult for artists to find jobs, and worry about where the next job might come from is never far from their minds. A season with this circus can last for nine months, but others are far shorter, and the timing is often difficult to manage, leaving long periods with no salary coming in. Employment from season to season is never guaranteed, and many artists will hop from circus to circus as an opportunity presents itself in relation to their personal brand and networking ability.
After the final show of the day, the artists practise religiously for an hour, along with all of the children who were born into the circus. Most of the people here are very young, and I learn that ‘real life’ starts much earlier in the circus, as people are often professionals before they are eighteen. This is entirely alien to me, being from a generation that rarely graduates before the age of twenty-two, taking gap years and staying on to complete master’s degrees to delay the onslaught of the real world for as long as possible. It feels old-fashioned, nostalgic perhaps, but I am curiously envious of it; of knowing who you are and what you will do from such a young age; of feeling like you belong somewhere.
So why do it? For the flying-trapeze troupe, I get it. The thrill of performing death-defying acts every day, the adrenaline. It’s enough to make you put up with the mud, the politics and perhaps even the uncertainty. Others choose this career for the freedom offered by life in the circus: the freedom from bureaucracy and taxation; the freedom from the monotony of ‘regular’ life; perhaps even the freedom from the paralysis of choice. And some are born into this life, growing up in its cocoon as the only way of being they have ever known, so the question for these people is, why stay?
For the next couple of evenings, I decide to spend the second half of the performance backstage, and notice a stark difference between the young trapeze artists, who diligently warm up before each show, and the Romanian acrobat troupe, who sit around smoking backstage right up to their cue. They are old hands. After their stint here, they will go to Portugal for a Christmas show, where they will be part of a 6,000-person circus performing up to six shows a day.
There are currently three children travelling with this circus: the two-year-old daughter of two acrobats, who practises the hula-hoop and already speaks three languages; and two more who practise clowning, hand-balancing and foot-juggling every night. During the day they go to school via an online portal.
‘What if they decide they don’t want to be in the circus?’ I ask the clown as we sit and watch his children practise after the show, rubbing our hands to keep warm in the chill of the evening. He fixes his gaze straight ahead. ‘That’s OK,’ he says. ‘It won’t upset me. I just want to give them the options my parents gave me. It’s good for their bodies to practise, and it teaches them self-discipline.’
As I emerge from the big top at around ten thirty, I notice Ivan the acrobat sitting under the awning outside his caravan, watching the rain. He invites me into his cosy caravan for a whisky while we listen to the birds tap-dancing on the roof. I am pleased to be somewhere warm; having been flitting between the big top and my freezing-cold room for the past five days, I didn’t think my bones would ever thaw and was beginning to develop a nasty cold.
Having grown up in Eastern Europe, Ivan has a compact, muscular physique with an energetic glow. As we discuss his life story he seamlessly moves through a spectrum of emotions, from nostalgia, through ecstasy and anger.
‘I loved my childhood,’ he says. ‘Times were hard, and food was rationed, but it taught me so much about family, community and value.’ He smiles and shakes his head, his eyes lighting up as if about to burst with joy.
‘Ha! Value. Value. Value. My father wanted me to play football and make money. But I loved horses. So my mum brought me to a riding school where I learned to ride, and we would make gymnastics on the horses… The first time I walked into a circus it was the most incredible thing.’ His eyes widen, and his face opens into an enormous grin. ‘The smell of the elephants and horses – it was there, in the walls. I was fourteen, and I fell in love with the circus.
‘I got invited to join a troupe as a Cossack rider. I got given a huge black horse. I would practise with my horse all day, every day.’ He sits up in his chair, positioned to rein back a galloping horse. ‘He would go faster and faster, and my hands would bleed. He was so strong.
‘I worked with horses for nine years, then we took the show on tour. From Romania to Rio de Janeiro – whoa! I went with my girlfriend from back home, but we broke up. Of course, we broke up. You go from Bulgaria to Brazil, and you see all those bouncing asses!’
He laughs.
‘But I have lost a bit the passion for circus,’ he says, his voice soft and his body deflating to a smaller size. ‘I am at the end, but it’s hard to let go. It feels safe, and I am afraid to go out of it, but it doesn’t fit me any more. I am terrified by the idea of normal life. Waking up early, driving to work and sitting at a desk for eight hours. Doing something I don’t want to do for eight hours a day! That scares the shit out of me. The thought of it chokes me. So, I don’t know what will come next.’
Ivan pours us both another whisky and sits back on the floor, announcing that now it is time to meditate together. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me: his caravan smells of incense, and every surface is covered in spiritual paraphernalia.
After twenty minutes of awkward silence, me trying not to sniff too loudly as we both sit cross-legged on the floor, Ivan stands up to announce the end of our ritual and returns to sipping from his clay mug as the rain continues to hammer on the roof.
‘Man. Living in a caravan connects you to the earth,’ Ivan muses. ‘I know where my water comes from, where my electricity comes from, where my waste goes. It’s a more natural way of living.’
This resonates with me. I often think about how alienated most of society is from the source of what we consume. I have no idea how water gets to my tap; I just expect it to be there. My waste goes either in the bin or down the toilet, and electricity comes from the plug socket. Beyond that, I really have no idea what the chain looks like.
‘I remember when I saw a caravan for the first time,’ he goes on, ‘it was bigger than this, but I remember thinking, “How the hell can people live here? It’s so small. You’ve gotta be kidding me.” So I can understand what private people think when they look at us now, but I love it here. It’s nothing, but it’s everything. You can have a massive bedroom but, fuck it, you just go there to sleep.’
On my final morning with the circus, I take my usual seat in the big top to watch the performers practise. The circus is calm and quiet during the day. The artists keep themselves to themselves as the ring boys mill around fixing things, and the big top keeps to a strict schedule of practice times. This morning it is the turn of the Flying Aces, and I sit watching them rehearse, singing and trading banter across the top of the tent, just as I would have done across the desks with my colleagues in the City.
I am still enjoying their slick and professional performance, despite having already seen the show more than ten times. Sometimes things go a bit wrong – a trapeze flyer falls into the net or the hand-balancer misses the target with her bow and arrow – which is enough to keep it real and remind the audience of how challenging these feats really are.
The circus is much quieter for this afternoon’s performance. There are fewer than a hundred people in the audience, and the clown is trying desperately hard to get them to interact. I look across at him trying to sell some spinning lights during the interval with no one around to buy them, circus music relentlessly tinkling in the background. It feels a bit like a last-ditch attempt to keep beating the heart of a tradition that could have died years ago.
‘Twenty years ago the circus coming to town would have been one of the most exciting events of the year; everybody would come,’ the clown tells me as we watch his kids practise after the final show that evening. ‘In Portugal all of the small circuses like this one are finished now. Only the big names are left.’
The consensus here seems to be that this country has lost its appetite for this old-style traditional circus, a trend mirrored in most developed countries, where there is now a myriad of other entertainment to choose from.
Craig believes that the Flying Aces have an increasingly difficult time impressing the kids who come to see the show because they are so desensitised by a culture of CGI and special effects.
‘I once heard a kid shout, “Spider-Man does that all the time,” after Alex had executed a perfect triple spin,’ he tells me. ‘So now we’re competing with Spider-Man!’
Television, gaming and streaming on the internet all offer the public the means to entertain themselves in their own homes. So perhaps we are all a bit less willing to put in the effort to venture out and see a circus. It feels a bit sad, the decline of this type of circus in the face of modern technology; that years of tradition can be replaced by a five-second YouTube clip. But there will always be people out there who are nostalgic, and hungry for the more traditional things in life, and it is here I believe that the circus will always have a place. Perhaps this is behind the surge in popularity of purposefully vintage circuses like Giffords, whose shows have repeatedly been selling out since its inception in the year 2000. I have no doubt that circus will survive, in one form or the other, but most of the artists here agree that to do so, it needs to modernise and adapt to the changes in wider society rather than rail against them.
‘Circus families cause a lot of problems,’ Ivan had said to me the previous night. ‘They are too rigid and want to keep things the way they have always been. So maybe, in this way, circus deserves his fall.’
The place still feels alien to me, even after six days, but the people here have been nothing but kind and welcoming. It is clear that circus is another world, with rich histories and customs, seemingly frozen in time, and my mind has been blown by the all-consuming dedication the performers put into their art.
The circus packs up to move to its next location as I find myself unexpectedly and slightly humiliatingly sobbing into my soggy sleeve on my drive back to London the following morning. I am sad to be leaving new friends behind, but mainly I’m feeling sorry for myself because I have a bad cold and am exhausted to my core at having to make so much effort every day to connect with people who have such very different lives from me and who, quite understandably, have no real reason to welcome me into their world. I am realising that simply inserting myself into a community doesn’t automatically mean that they will accept or welcome my interest, and I wonder at my naivety that this has come as a surprise. This is harder than I thought it would be, and I don’t really know what I’m doing most of the time. I have learned so much about this distinct and complex world, but I am a ‘private’ and can never be otherwise, so it’s not the world for me. I don’t have the talent, for a start!