A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo .
On the way of the Showman: Dinosaurs and Circus
Dinosaurs and Circus
Over the next few posts I’ll be exploring circus and showmanship through the lens of natural history, biology and evolution. Strap yourself in for a fusion of ideas combining two of my deepest passions. By contrasting the two I hope to create interesting and illuminating insights.
As a general rule I find mashing two things together can be quite useful to generate new and interesting viewpoints. I also think that often the greatest gems are the bits which at first seems to be starkly contradicting, yet upon closer pondering connections can be made which make the discoveries the most rewarding. New ideas are most often a recombination of two, or more, old ideas. As I have played with the analogy of circus and life I have found it to be surprisingly rich and rewarding. Whether you enjoy it remains to be seen. What the two share and how they diverge, stimulates a creative look at what circus and showmanship is and can be.
There are already a few hints and links in this direction made by folk much smarter than me. For instance in 2009, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins drew this parallel when he chose to call his book, on the evidence for evolution, The Greatest Show on Earth.
Today’s topics are circus, dinosaurs, mass extinction, birds, and hope.
Is there trouble?
I visited a circus in Denmark boasting “Biggest Circus in the North,” and that probably was the case, if you considered the size of their tent. I think it might have been about 1500 seats in the big top, but 1300 were empty. Situations like that seems to augur a imminent demise. If the takings are down and expenses are up it doesn’t take more than a season or two to knock a circus out for the count, no matter how many bums on seats and smiles on faces it’s had in the past.
Switzerland’s oldest circus, Zirkus Nock folded their canvas for the final time in 2019. In Denmark Cirkus Benneweiz, always a giant amongst the traditional circuses, closed up shop in 2015. The year after, in the USA, Big Apple Circus filed for bankruptcy. The year after that, Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey closed down, after having been “the Big One” and the actual “Greatest Show on Earth™” for 146 years. In Sweden, Cirkus Maximum closed in 2018. Even Cirque de Soleil, the modern day “Big One,” has not been immune to the troubles, with 400 lay-offs in 2013. The new Big One cited too rapid expansion leading to loss of quality as one of the reasons for their troubles. They seem to have stabilised by now, but it looked scary for them too for a while.
The reasons for the industry decline are many. Issues most cited seem to be: waning interest leading to lower ticket sales as well as a feeling that travelling circuses no longer are appreciated but merely tolerated in certain places. Increased expenses on everything from insurance to lot rental, as well as image problems. A big component of the latter can be found in the use of animals. Animal rights activists targeting circus for their alleged animal abuse has lead to a very real threat to the livelihood of people as well. Clowns, acrobats, aerialists, roustabouts, advance men, riggers, to name a few, are all affected by the attacks. The thankfully rare, but none the less awful deadly accidents in the ring have also had their impact.
The Big Ones, and traditional circus in general, have been shaped by and superbly adapted to the markets and the environments they grew out of, but things are changing, the climate is changing, and not all of them have been, or will be, able to adapt in time.
Dinosaurs
The dinosaurs, who stomped around the entire globe for a hundred and sixty-five million years, were constantly adapting to the small and sometimes large changes the environment threw at them, yet even these superb adapters eventually disappeared. Circumstances outside of their control brought them down. Changes too big and too quick to overcome. 67 million years ago a giant asteroid smashed into the Yucatan Peninsula. At the same time there were gargantuan volcanic eruptions that melted a hole in the earth, half the size of current day India, the so called Deccan Traps. The immediate damage and all the environmental upheaval these events created, became too much for the dinosaurs to handle.
For a long time this was thought to have been the end of it for all the dinosaurs, a complete mass extinction. But a theory, first floated about 160 years ago, has gone from a mere suggestion to fact. The theory was that birds are dinosaurs.
A veritable army of palaeontologists all over the world, many in China, are finding phenomenal fossils and generating amazing research which accumulatively has proven beyond a doubt that birds are dinosaurs. Not just related to dinosaurs, but actual dinosaurs.
One group of dinosaurs, the theropods, that’s the group including T-Rex and Velociraptor, had a surprising amount of bird features. They walked on two legs, they lay eggs, and they had feathers. Even some of the large tyrannosaur species had feathers. Which came first? The chicken or the egg? The egg, and it was laid by a feathered dinosaur mum.
Some of the theropods began shrinking in size, and eventually their feathers were adapted from their probable uses of insulation and display into feathers for flight, turning them into flying dinosaurs. These avian dinosaurs, as they are technically called, survived the cataclysm. They were, and still are, the birds. Supremely successful, even with the current environmental pressures, there is an estimated 10,000 species of birds alive today. Which means dinosaurs walks amongst us and fill our skies, they’re screeching at our seashores and pecking at the crumbs beneath our cafe tables, they are everywhere.
Is Small the New Big?
When even The Greatest Show on Earth folds its canvas for the final time, something is afoot. The environment is changing. Big Ones are disappearing. We are perhaps in the midst of an extinction event. (I admit its on a significantly smaller scale than life’s Big Five, and the sixth which we are currently in, with humanity playing the role of the asteroid.)
After a mass extinction, lots of gaps opens up in the environment. There will always be new niches to fill. Creative performers and producers will, by design or accident, discover or create and become the next big thing. The rise of the latest Big One. Maybe the next big thing isn’t even a big thing, maybe its small, warmblooded and adaptive.
The circus shows that were truly thriving during the summer season in Denmark, 2019, were the ones that have managed to tweak the format. Zirkus Nemo, run by a highly charismatic clown performer, making comedy and clowning (albeit not in the traditional sense) the core of the show, with a few acts interspersed. Almost a complete opposite of a traditional program. The other show is an outright commercial outfit called the Flying Superkids. It’s a supremely successful circus featuring child and young adult performers. Nemo and the Superkids sold every seat available, going against a trend of decline in Scandinavian circus.
Circus Oh La La in Switzerland, aims hard at an all adult audience and tailor their material to the slogan, “Crazy, Sexy, Artistic”. They also just finished a bonanza season. Along with Flic Flac in Germany, with their motorcycles and rougher punk ethos are just some examples of shows with their own twists who are thriving amidst a decline. Also Big Apple Circus, which filed for bankruptcy in 2016, was subsequently sold and is back on the road, smaller and leaner, employing 100 instead of 544, according to 2018 CEO Gregg Walker. In Las Vegas, Spiegelworld just opened their third show. Small and adaptable and decidedly adult is their niche. By comparison, if all three Spiegelworld shows sells out, the combined audiences could almost fit inside the frequently less than half full Soleil shows.
The analogy is not perfect. Since there also are some great exception to the decline in the great old school circuses like Circus Krone in Germany and Cirque d’Hiver in Paris. Yet the picture it paints is of interest, at least to myself, and in the end that’s who I am writing these columns for.
If we are living in a Great Contraction it could be an exciting time for small companies. The Theropod-style dinosaur birds that survived were small. This is a time for adaption. For new twists on old formulas.
I saw that on the 15th of July 2019, Gravity and Other Myths’ (GOM) show Out of Chaos won a Helpmann Award, this is one of the most prestigious awards for performing arts in Australia. Maybe GOM, one of the small and adaptable survivors, will be the fast, smart feathered Theropod bird which will become the ancestor to 10,000 new species of circus.
See you all along the Way
Captain Frodo
Master Showman, dad, husband.
Currently performing in Opium at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
(And Carnival Cinema Co-Founder)
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