THE BALLOON MAN

Three Rings to Rule Them All
How the circus grew from an equestrian sideshow to a high-flying, death-defying art form.

 

Courtesy Collection Jacob-William, Tohu Cite´ des Arts du Cirque,Montreal, Canada
Under the Big TopDetail from an 1880 Spanish lithograph depicting 'artists of the equestrian circus'—in this case a riding master (left) and a varied collection of clowns.
from: online.wsj.com
By JUDITH FLANDERS
March 22, 2013
Book Review: The Ordinary Acrobat
By Duncan Wall
Knopf, 322 pages, $26.95
When John Major, who started his career in a bank, became British prime minister in 1990, newspaper articles recounted his father's early days as a music-hall performer. Mr. Major, the wits quipped, was the only person who ever ran away from the circus to join a team of accountants.
Duncan Wall is the anti-Major: Born in Milwaukee, the son of accountants, he fell in love with the circus on a trip to Paris as a college student. This was not your usual red-hatted extravaganza but a particularly French form of "new" circus, with acrobats who quote Proust. The Midwestern boy had preferred Disneyland, but the theater-major adult was now hooked, and by dint of a Fulbright scholarship he returned to enroll in Paris's École Nationale des Arts du Cirque. Since then he has continued his academic love affair by teaching circus history and criticism at Montreal's École Nationale de Cirque, Canada's main circus school.
In this chronicle of the circus past and present, Mr. Wall delightfully revisits lost celebrities of the 19th century: Mme Saqui, the French rope-dancer, in her white tulle skirt covered in blue-spangled stars; Isaac Van Amburgh, the American animal trainer who was reputedly the first man to put his head in a lion's mouth; and William Wallett, an English clown who wowed Paris with Shakespeare burlesques. ("Is this a beefsteak I see before me?") He visits the great circus venues of the past, including Paris's Boulevard du Temple, which in the 19th century was the home of the Théâtre des Funambules, famous for acrobatic pantomime. (It seems an opportunity missed not to mention the film "Les Enfants du Paradis" (1945), in which Jean-Louis Barrault depicted Baptiste Debureau, the great mime of the early 19th century.) And he puts into context how the contemporary art-and-entertainment spectacle that is Canada's Cirque du Soleil came to be the phenomenon it is.
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