Een fijn -engelstalig- artikel.
Momenteel ontbreekt het mij aan de tijd om hier uitvoeriger op in te gaan, maar ik wil jullie het onderstaande artikel niet onthouden.
En omdat links nogal eens de neiging hebben om na verloop van tijd ''dood te lopen'' ..... plaats ik nog wel even de onverkorte platte tekst.
Roll up, roll up! Bring back the traditional circusA new initiative to transform circus in Britain threatens to strip the Big Top of its intoxicating magicI gasped, I laughed, I howled, I cried. Last week, the National Centre for Circus Arts was launched by culture minister Ed Vaizey, promising to transform circus in Britain. But the trapeze artists that opened the show didn’t swing in a Big Top, but in a converted warehouse in Hoxton, London’s cutting-edge, art-galleried East End. There wasn’t a bulbous red nose or speck of sawdust in sight. And the party food wasn’t candyfloss, but croissants.
This is new circus – sanitised, safe, publicly subsidised. It brands itself as the future of this two century-old art, yet looks enviously back to the fantastical spectacle and physical prowess of the past. But that past was not present at the launch. Not a single traditional tented-circus proprietor was invited.
Yet tented circuses are the soul of Britain’s circus industry, with around 40 still touring the country. For a few nights, village greens, muddy fields and abandoned car parks on the edge of our small towns are transformed into magical, exotic worlds. Each week during the winter, more people queue up to see the custard-pie clowns, liberty horses and the Globe of Death at Zippos Circus than can fill the Royal Albert Hall.
It is this circus, in a red-and-white-striped tent – not a hipster-filled neck of London – that countless children still dream of running away to join. I was one of them. As a child watching the circus on my local recreation ground, I’d marvel at men walking on stilts and wobbling on the high wire, clowns squelching, white horses teetering on their hind legs. I didn’t want to do anything in the circus – just be in it, part of that sparkly, secret circle.
But it wasn’t until my thirties that I eventually became a shimmering, frothy, feathered showgirl. Knowing it would soon be too late, I ran away to join the circus.
In the late Eighties, I left my toddler with her father (they would later join me) and headed for Italy, where I signed up to Circo Americano. The largest big-top circus in Europe, it was family-run and founded in the Sixties by Willy Togni, one of the greatest elephant trainers. I’d never done anything like it before. But circus is a very welcoming community; they’re used to runaways and misfits. It’s what gives it its pulse, its heart. As for the required circus skills, I learnt on the job.
My transformation from middle-class, middle-aged mum began in an old railway carriage that served as the dozen circus girls’ dressing room. Inside, the smell of powder and perspiration was heady. Gallina, the Russian hula-hoop artiste who set her hoops on fire, practised splits against the side of the battered lockers as we smoked cigarettes and squeezed spots. We laughed at Gallina rehearsing her smile and waving in the mirror, greeting her own reflection enthusiastically, as if seeing it for the first time. We helped paint on each other’s showgirl faces. My narrow mouth is like a long scar, but Valia, the Bulgarian elephant girl, drew me the lips I wanted. They glistened and pouted – scarlet, luscious, full. It took more than one hour to get ready for five minutes in the ring.
There was an intimacy with the other artistes that no other working environment can match. We shared costumes. Mine had someone else’s name written on it, and that someone else was four inches shorter than me. The thick fishnets (more robust than normal tights) already had darns in them, and my toes poked through the feet. They smelt of the woman who had been a showgirl before me.
In the intoxicating, sweaty rush of the dressing room, we saw each other’s flaws and shared each other’s aches and pains. Gallina’s scars – burn marks in bands around her stomach from the fiery loops – were rubbed with cream. We helped sew the holes in her tights where the flames kept melting them. We knew she’d soon look perfect. The harsh lights of the ring hide many things: the tear in our lurex costumes, the bald spots on my ostrich-feather headdress, the ladder in my fishnet tights, the sequins missing from my tassels.
The spectacle of the ring also hid our fear. Circus people don’t just rely upon each other to help put on their make-up and repair their costumes, but also for their life. Holding the safety rope, timing cues, co-ordinating the high acts all depend on someone looking out for you. You trust that person completely, because they’re circus like you. It puts team-building adventure-camp away weekends with your work colleagues into perspective.
Circus folk are cavalier about their casualties. They insist it’s safe to swing on a trapeze 30ft above the ground with no safety net. They are adamant that the tightrope strung across the roof of the top is as secure a place to stroll as a sidewalk in Sevenoaks. In truth, they are terrified. Everyone knows someone who has been seriously injured or died. Shortly after I left the circus, one of my friends fell from a trapeze. She was 31. She came from a circus family and had been working in the circus since she was born.
Traditional circuses still carry on in that family tradition. But they also welcome and train those who escape to join them, like me. Zippos Circus has an Academy of Circus Arts, of which I’m a director. It’s the only tented circus school in the country. Students don’t only learn how to juggle, but how to pitch a tent and sprinkle the sawdust. They may not get a BA degree in circus arts, but they become some of the finest artistes around.
They also learn that tented circus life isn’t only dangerous, it’s also very hard work. Twice a night, seven days a week, we pulled on our costumes, the Russian band struck up – ta ra! – and we paraded into the ring. We were travelling all the time. I packed up my 11ft caravan and towed it from small town to small town, always the stranger but always among friends. We lived in conditions that would appal those who will go to the National Centre for Circus Arts. We had no mains gas or electricity, no running water. There was one shower between more than 50 circus artistes. I stank. My fishnets could do somersaults all on their own.
The new breed of circus claims to tick the diversity box. But next to my caravan were parked trailers for the Chinese acrobats, Italian clowns, Moroccan tumblers and Kenyan limbo dancers. There was also a 4ft-tall clown. Our audiences were not, as you often find at Cirque du Soleil, the opera crowd. They were local people, of all and every kind, and of all and every age. No one’s too young or too old to enjoy a circus. They hollered, catcalled, whistled and applauded throughout each performance. It is audience participation of the most meaningful kind.
It happened at each new pitch, like a fleeting dream. A ramshackle small crowd of local kids would stare on as we built up the Big Top and transformed an unpromising patch of ground into a world of wonder. Then, within days, this world was gone. There would be nothing but swings and slides left again on the green. Even the holes left by the giant tent pegs were filled in. We were always careful to leave no trace. As if we were never there.
Perhaps, one day, we won’t be. Because if all the money and support continues to go into circus produced in the middle of cities, where the whiff of the performance ring is replaced by the smell of the sushi bar next door, then the competition is unfair and too tough.
But in the meantime, tented circuses still travel around Britain, enthralling and delighting. I may have hung up my fishnets, but traditional circus hasn’t thrown its top hat into the ring. The Greatest Show on Earth can still be found on a green near you. The show goes on.
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www.circusspace.co.uk and
www.zipposcircus.co.ukEn de link naar het artikel:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/thea ... ircus.html
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