Has the Big Top got smaller, or have we just got bigger? Mark Gevisser took a nostalgic trip to the circus
`IT’S just not what it used to be,” said a man, an unimpressed toddler in the crook of each arm, as he left the tatty confines of the rather modest Little Top that is this season’s Boswell-Wilkie Circus at Bruma. He was nonetheless beaming with pleasure, for if circuses are purveyors of nostalgia, then he had proven to himself, by sitting through one and a half hours of desultory performance, that things were in fact better when he was a kid.
I feel the same way myself: that Big Top at the top of Milner Park was so, well … big. Now, instead of the dozens of bodies connecting and disconnecting miles above my head in the terrifying free verse of trapeze, there was one lycra-clad man running around the tired old Wheel of Death like a technicolour hamster in the treadmill of its nightmares. Now, instead of a zoo-full of wild and exotic beasts, there was one mangy baby elephant, a couple of dozen poodles on mescaline, and some reptiles on valium.
So powerful is the nostalgia of the circus that even my colleague Reedwaan, who remembers having to sit in a tightly segregated little enclosure and not being allowed on the pony-rides at intermission, gets misty-eyed at the bad old days of apartheid when Boswell-Wilkie was a grand and thrilling affair.
Has the circus got smaller or is it that we have got bigger? It’s not just a case of perspective — the tent is much smaller: “We traded in the big top long ago,” explains circusmeister Robert Wilkie. “Now we go in for the European approach. Something much smaller, much more intimate.”
And cheaper. For the circus, that great working-class entertainment, is dying. Millenarian gloom settles, like sawdust, on the sequins. The gestures are empty — many grandiose and unearned bows — and there’s an echo to the tinny fanfare. But, even as this tinges the experience with pathos, it makes it pleasurable too. For you are a pioneer as well as a diehard; part of a small band of gypsies at the frontier of the suburbs while, for miles around you, nuclear families sit bathed in the blue light of the television that is killing this very art.
Everyone at the circus seems to feel nostalgic. Wilkie, for example, runs the circus with his wife Karen. He doubles as the po-faced elephant-trainer; she as the demonic hula- hooper. He seems far too sweet and fresh-faced for the rough ringtop world.
“It’s just not like the old days,” he says, although he is only 32. “You don’t have circus families anymore, with skills passed on from parents to children. And you don’t have people doing it for the love of it, mucking in even when they don’t have to.”
Now, he says, sweeping a hand across the ramshackle caravans, “they’re just doing it because it’s a job. I call them circus yuppies.”
But the performers claim they are doing it not for the money, but for the thrill of being on the road. Mark Allen, of the Wheel of Death, is one of the more experienced locals in the troupe. He is charming, edgy and derisive of a society that discards circus-artists as freaks. “Why did I join the circus? Do you blame me?” he asks, gesturing out at the suburbia against which the circus caravans are encamped, like a psychedelic laager. “We are gypsies of a sort,” he says. “Upgraded gypsies.”
He, like many of the performers, romanticises the camaraderie of life on the road. Boswell-Wilkie, even though it is in dire straits (not helped by the loss of R1,5-million it incurred from the failure of the Chinese National Circus earlier this year), still manages to visit over 160 locations across South Africa each year. “Of course we should be subsidised,” says Wilkie. “Is there any other company in this country that brings live entertainment to as many people as we do?”
The circus’ most loyal audiences, he says, are coloureds and Indians. Africans are still very unfamilar with it — “they see it as witchcraft”. Even though one of the most entertaining acts in this year’s circus is a troupe of acrobats from Tanzania, there is very little to tag the circus as African.
In fact, the most significant manner in which South Africa is represented is through the relationship between the races. The way the Tanzanian troupe — introduced as the “Tanzanian Boys”– comes on to stage is fascinating: two black men in overalls, while clearing up the previous act, shimmy into a dance and strip down to wild Afro-tie-dyed attire. It’s a lovely moment of mistaken perception (is Wilkie playing with preconceptions that black people can only be sweepers and cleaners?); but it also suggests African performers can only be introduced into the ring as workers.
One way or the other, the circus needs new life, new audiences. New acts. Take a leaf out of the Mongolian book. This year’s circus is as much Mongolian as it is South African: the troupe of five from Ulan Bator comprises almost half the entire company. Three of the troupe are pre-pubescent female contortionists, and there is something both mesmerising and appalling about the dance of dislocated limbs they do. But in their pigeon act, one sees the reason for circus arts: the discipline and beauty, both balletic and gymnastic, all the more breathtaking because of its shabby surrounds, as a woman, a girl and a few dozen pigeons create a sylvan pastoral in the sawdust.
Compare this with the crocodile number that gets top billing. A Cleopatrine woman called Safah swans round the ring taking bows while a supporting crew heaves five amphibians on to stage, discarded in inanimate heaps around the ring. To more tinny fanfare, the ringmistress announces in monotone: “And now Safah will attempt to put her head in the crocodile’s mouth.” The beast’s jaws are wrenched open. Safah lowers her head. Safah raises her head. The beast’s jaws are wrenched closed. Safah bows grandiosely.
It’s just not what it used to be. I loved it.