Trapeze Artistes
and other Acrobats under the Big Top:
Zones of Dismay,
Danger and Daring
Norman Simms
He floats through the air with the greatest of ease
The daring young man on the flying trapeze
His actions are graceful, all girls he does please
And my love
he has stolen away
So
sang Eddie Cantor and many a pop star of the early days of phonograph and radio.
In what came to be known as a “novelty number,” the radio and recording singers
picked up an odd piece of information and ran with it as far as they could go.
Such was not the staple of crooners, with their chansons d’amour, lyrics of longing and blues of betrayal, but of
comic artists, dialect specialists and representatives of migrants and
minorities.
Cantor’s
version of the song goes on for more than eighty lines, repeating the refrain
cited above five times before giving the concluding sixth version with significant
changes in the words. The long poem tells the story of a young man who takes
his teenage girl friend to the circus and watches with horror as she becomes enthralled
with the leotard-wearing acrobat sailing through the air, turning numerous twists
and making last-minute catches to a fellow artist or a carefully-timed second swing to which he
leaps. The betrayed young lover grows frustrated, plots his revenge and finally
rids himself of this impediment to his life’s happiness.
The
central object in the poem is the flying trapeze invented in 1859 and named
after a geometric shape by Jules Léotard. It was soon integrated into the repertoire
of festival, fairgrounds and popular music hall performers, collectively known,
along with other acrobats, tightrope walkers and jugglers, as the funumbules. After the 1830s, when only
selected theatres in Paris were licensed
to put on scripted dramatic performances, and other could operate so long as
what was staged was acrobatic and speechless-farce, the number of funumbules venues increased. Other
devices, routines, tricks and modes of display—electric beams, musical
fanfares, equestrian rides—expanded the repertoire of these smaller venues. Picked
up by P.T. Barnum, for example, the trapeze and its artists soon became a
spectacular part of the travelling circus in America. Audiences around the
world held their breaths, gasped in anticipated horror and sighed with relief
when one of the scantily-clad performers leaping through the air from one swing
to another did not fall down, either with or without a safety net below.
One
of the best moving pictures ever made is Les
Enfants du Paradis or Children of
Paradise. Paradise refers to the gallery (or second balcony), like the cheap
seats “among the gods” in London playhouses and in the popular theatres of
Paris. The film was made during the war
years of 1943, 1944 and early 1945 by Marcel Carné, though set in the France of
the 1830s. It was released in March 1945 as a two-part extravaganza and touted
as the French equivalent of Gone With The
Wind.
Before there were female trapeze artists
for rich, over-weight men and callow youth with no money to ogle at, however, there
were the ballet girls, as Edgar Degas well knew, “in tights and short
petticoats.”[1]
Urged on by their stage-mothers, these
young girls were as naïve as they looked and sought to become mistresses as
well prima ballerinas in their
careers. Less sophisticated were the
adolescents trapped in situations where they would be trained to perform tricks
in fairs and circuses, with no career paths opening before them, only
exploitation for a few years:
I was tiny as an insect, and they [circus performers]
taught me no difficult tricks, to dance on the tightrope and to perform. I was
beaten as if I had been a bit of plaster…[2]
Insofar as
an opportunity to advance their station in life, the high-wire or trapeze did
not offer somewhere secure or safe in any sense of the word. While the performers
looked down from their precarious positions high above the audience, where
children of all ages and classes and especially bourgeois families would nervously
laugh at what was going on, respectable members of the audience looked down on
these artistes as little more than
paid employees of the entrepreneurs. Even an inn-keeper’s wife has this to say
in dislike of such wandering players.
His wife was on the point of expressing her dislike to
all these tricks which endanger th necks when the person whom they had observed
as being superior to the rest, advanced towards them and after making a low bow
asked permission to remain there a few days. [3]
This
realization that the head of the company wanted to perform in such a small
village makes the inn=keeper and his wife lose their initial respect for him—as
well as the mere strolling players. This provincial snobbery against the
organizer of this small group of “mountebanks”[4] is,
to be sure, not the same as the concern Judit Frigyesi
shows for the actual perils faced by high-wire an trapeze artists.
It is close to what an acrobat might feel when walking
the high rope: one part of the mind is secure in the body’s ingrown sense of
balance, while the other trembles with fear of death.[5]
Besides
the two short stories by Guy de Maupassant discussed above, there is also an
interesting narrative from the anonymous Tales
of the Dead.[6] In
“The Death’s Head,” a group of travelling fairground players who include a team
of rope-men, that is, what we would call trapeze artists, tightrope or
high-wire walkers, jugglers and other balancing acts performed both at a great
height as well as on ground level. These acrobats do their actions at manifest
danger to themselves, something that makes them more awesome to the
audience. Others in the troupe depicted
in this narrative, there are also tumblers, jugglers, ventriloquists and
clowns. All may merge their talents in certain larger venues during their tours
in producing another type of show that inspires both fear and admiration, the
phantasmagoria.
Whereas young Marcel Proust found on the
beach, on the shoreline being built up with luxury hotels, casinos and other
bourgeois establishments a place of sexual and social release between the
cloying salons of Paris and the rest of modernizing France,[7]
there seems to be another privileged location for ordinary young men and women
in the modern world; under the Big Top of the circus, such as Ringling Brothers
Barnum and Bailey’s “Greatest Show on Earth.”
In Proust’s seaside scenes in A la recherche, a flutter of adolescent
females ride past on their bicycles, screaming with delight as they pass over
the heads of paunchy middle-aged bankers, provincial magistrates, and other
staid bourgeois characters. Young Marcel, the narrator of the great novel,
watches with envy and regret that he cannot join them. The vision of such
dynamic sexual energy stays with him throughout the rest of his life. It proves
to be, as well, a literary counterpart to the scenes that take place in the
great popular theatres and circus tents elsewhere at the same time. But instead
of the budding form of the young girls racing along the beach, under the big circus
tops there is a new enclosed vertical abyss, a space of twirling, swinging and
balancing acts, with ropes dangling from the very apex to the space beneath. Bodies,
young and lithe, seem to be in movement everywhere from top to bottom, bundles
of modern energy, and especially with the organic vibrations of energy suddenly
released from centuries of sexual repression and stigmatization.
[1] De Maupassant, “Virtue in the
Ballet” (Book League edition) p. 297.
[2] De
Maupassant, “Liie Lala” (Book League Edition)
p. 136.
[3] “The Death’s Head” p. 97.
[4] The Death’s Head” p. 182.
[5] Frigyesi,
Writing on Water, p. 126.
[6]
ed. and. trans not given (London; White, Cochrane and Co., 1813) p. 21. Orignal
translation into French: Fantasmagoriana;
ou recueil d’histoires d’apparitions, de spectres revenans, fantômes, &c.
Traduite de l’Allemand, par un Amateur, 1812, 2 tom, 12 mo.
[7] Hannah Freed-Thall,
“Proust on the Beach” Paragraph 45:1
(2022) 112-131.
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