I am an anti-circus circus pro.
My dad was in the press and he got free tickets to the Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey Circus and to Disney on Ice. I was afraid of clowns. I started doing magic shows for money when I was 11. At age 15, I found old programs from the circus and pulled them out to enjoy the artwork. There was an ad in each one for Clown College. I decided that was for me. Thought I needed to get good at everything: juggling, unicycling, balloon animals, cartwheels, etc.
I didn’t get accepted into Clown College. I’m not bitter. I swear.
My performances gained more than magic and were eventually juggling, comedy, and contortion solo shows. I performed on the street for my crowds doing my stuff. Loving it. Getting paid more than I would have in my first year of the circus and living free.
After my first year on the street, I toured with Brooks & Dunn’s Neon Circus and Wild West Show Tour. It was huge. The highest grossing country music tour ever. We played in giant arenas and Amphitheaters in 41 cities.
It was amazing to have these huge churning crowds gather together and see eachother celebrating this common thing. I loved that.
I didn’t love performing for 15,000 people at a time. It just becomes an ocean of roar. Connecting with the front row is detrimental to the experience of the person in the 50th row. The person in the 100th row can’t see what’s happening without a TV screen. No matter how good the sound was, the sound was bad. I heard Brooks & Dunn’s new hit all summer on stage, but didn’t recognize it in the fall when I heard it on a juke box.
It seemed like the big shows left some to be desired by the bands too. They would occasionally sneak off to a country bar at night and play a surprise show after their big ones. Those nights were epic!
My conflict
As you can see, I appreciate giant gatherings for the energy; but the big shows, even in 2001, were kinda lacking. Now, we have more technology that gives us more of what we individually think we want. Our instagram feed is custom entertainment. Netflix is just for us. People aren’t looking so much for mass-appeal shows as they are looking for personal experiences.
Cirque Du Soleil kept growing. It sucked to be one of 1500 ticket buyers and sit half-way back, but going to THE Cirque was a good story to tell. Then, they added more shows. A lot more shows. I count 47 from the Wikipedia page? Each has a seperate name, but who cares… We still call them each Cirque Du Soleil (or whatever mispronunciations you choose). It’s not as special to go to one. The conversation changed from “it was an incredible night like nothing I’ve ever experienced” to “there was this one act that was incredible” to “it’s pretty cool.”
Circus skills presented in a small crowd are intense. At Scot Nery’s Boobietrap, the biggest crowd we’ve had is 400 people and it’s amazing to see someone risk their life almost just for you.
There’s something about small circus, though. It’s cool to see it small because it’s made for something big. The reason circus acts could do Boobietrap is because they make a living (and pay for their equipment and training) by doing big shows.
Under capitalism, big circus has to get as big as it can get until the audiences start rejecting the generic. Before the pandemic, that was already happening to Cirque. Ringling was already closed. Now Cirque is applying for bankruptcy protection.
Things get old and die
I am not shy about my stance on history. Tear down all the statues. We don’t revere the actions of the past by putting them on a pedestal but by burying them under a better future.
In high school, I made a geocities website dedicated to the history of PT Barnum who I thought was awesome. He was not. His greatest virtue was that he was a liar, he bought at least one slave, abused animals, and most likely burned down multiple shows including living caged animals. You can watch the PBS documentary on him if you can stomach it. For some reason it tries to say all this stuff was cool.
The circus has done a lot of animal abuse and people abuse and has been used to manipulate people for a long time.
We don’t need to give circus CPR if it isn’t what people want – just like we don’t need to save the horse carriage industry.
Go forward
The new game is taking all the powerful experience of what circus was to people, and making a new powerful experience using as much of the carcass of old circus.
I’ve wanted for years for Cirque to go small and special again. Make 500 ticket experiences that are completely different from other Cirque shows. Bend the possibilities of what can happen live.
The CDS brand wasn’t to me about people in weird costumes doing ambiguous stuff to alien music with some big stunts. It was about making wonder and exposing what’s possible for humans to create. There are a lot of ways to express that.
We can reinvent the circus. Or we can keep trying to play tennis with Jello.