A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo .
On the way of the Showman: Lets Play Zirkus
Let’s Play Zirkus
Last year I created a childrens and family circus with my friend Søren Østergaard who is also the the Zirkus Director and the main attraction of Zirkus Nemo. As the Zirkus season is drawing to an end I have been reflecting on our creation and have jotted down some thoughts and feelings about what I have done.
What’s in a name?
The circus is called Zirkus Barnly. Barnly has two meanings in Danish. Barn means child. Ly means shelter. Ly is often combined with other words skovly – forest shelter, husly – house shelter. So in a way, Barnly means child-shelter or a place where children can find shelter. Where they will be taken in as they are, without questions asked.
But when you pronounce the word Barnly it is homophone, (sounds exactly like,) barnlig, which means childlike. This is the core of Barnly. A celebration of the childlike, not to be confused with the derogatory childish. In our canvas chapel play is the name of the game and the highest wisdom.
The Outside
A blue and white striped canvas tent in a green grass field, tall beech trees, on the edge of the sea. The white and blue wooden picket fence around the circus delineates the showground. Each detail is beautiful and real, each vehicle, from the beautiful kiosk car, the wooden toilet wagon, or the large Zirkus portal every one has to walk through, to the big top, made from genuine canvas not plastic.
The concept of the Zirkus is simple. The children arrive and gets to play at the outdoor circus ring which is filled with circus equipment. Then later they all enter the small big top where the adult players of the Zirkus Barnly troupe presents their circus play, the show. The children recognise the adult Zirkus people from outside, where they got to meet them in play. Kids play Zirkus outside. Adults play Zirkus inside. Then the line is blurred as the children are invited into the inner ring to become stars of the Zirkus.
The show starts with a parade. The four performers march to the Zirkus Captain’s vocalised rhythms. The Zirkus parade ends with the Zirkus Captain’s silver marching cane transforming into confetti. Thus the magic has arrived in the big top and the show can begin.
At the end of the show, for the finale, a throw of confetti turns back into the Zirkus Capain’s silver marching can, it’s again time for the parade. At this point every single child, who wants to, are in the ring throwing, kicking, and juggling a multitude of balloons. This is a beautiful image, the ring full of children playing with colourful balloons. Then the children are invited to join in the Zirkus Parade. We parade around the inner ring together and then march out of the big top, making sure the adults join the parade as we leave the tent to continue the circus play in the outdoor circus ring.
It’s simple but that is merely the surface. When we prod and peek through the velvet curtains and beneath the canvas walls we see that there is something deeper, more arcane and mysterious at work.
Zirkus Barnly, an esoteric account
The children arrive to the sound of an organ grinder in a red and gold uniform. The showground is separated off from the rest of the world with a blue and white picket fence. Separating it from the profane everyday, making the inside Hallowed Ground, a sacred space. Where different rules apply. An intellectual decompression chamber where everything is symbolic and fun.
To enter the showground the Way goes through the portal of Initiation. The Circus gate is a whole wagon. To get to the inside you must ascend four steps. The esoterically inclined might contemplate, and imaginatively ascend the four kingdoms, Mineral, Plant, Animal, Human. Once on the top level, the human realm, there is a roof and the roof is too low for an adult to walk through the portal without bowing their head. You must bow to enter. A random detail? Or a subtle push to show reverence, and humility, make yourself smaller as you enter sacred ground. A reminder that, lest you become like little children, you shall not be allowed to enter the Kingdom. The little ones walk through the portal with no obstruction, natural inhabitants of both worlds.
Inside on a raised platform stands a ShowMan dressed in white with faint lines of black, crossing his outfit. He is calling on the people to come join them. The moment is now, the place is here, the experience is calling you. He is wearing a black hat. Black and white, hero and villain, innocence experience. The keen observer might notice a colourful bird feather breaking the black of the hat, the only colour beyond the black and white, a spark, a broken symmetry. It is merely a spark since we are still on the outside.
Below ShowMan is the Outside circus ring, or stage. It is a large blue ring mat with a red five-pointed star at its centre. The children pick up the circus props/toys and have not played for a full minute before: Look at me!
Zirkus is about seeing and being seen. And the ShowMan in the white suit looks at the children. He steps off his pedestal and walks amongst them, he sees the children. As they look up from whatever feat they are trying they meet his eyes filled with sparkling enthusiasm. He studies them striving to really see them. Who lives in there? Where are they going? He watches in reverence and joins in the play.
Through shared play he also discovers which of the young acolytes have the greatest magic potential were they to be invited into the Inner Ring, the Inner Sanctum, on the inside. The Outside Zirkus Ring is mirrored on the Inside. As Outside so Inside.
The Inner Ring
Charged with Zirkus play from the outside ring, they enter to behold the adults play Zirkus in the Inner Ring. The Inner Sanctum, where the real fuses with the strange and symbolic. Where all play and imagination from the outside comes alive in a new way. As the carnival barker might have put it: Alive on the inside.
Reality conforms to the will of the ShowMan, who is fueled by the great power potential catalysed through him by the energy, enthusiasm, and anticipation of the circle of human beings, young and old.
The Inner Ring is a low red wooden circle of ring boxes painted with yellow stars where the grass is covered with sawdust. Again the four kingdoms can be glimpsed, the mineral, through the metal, rock and glass props, the sawdust and grass from plants, there are actual living animals in the ring performing unusual acts. Pigs dance through a tunnel and a rabbit performs a leap of faith. Finally, of course, the ShowMan as the representative of man dancing as a symbol of total freedom in the altered symbolic space of the circus ring.
The ShowMan enters through the red velvet curtains dressed in black tails and a blood-red turban adorned with an animal skull and a large white feather. He initiates the parade round the Inner Ring and then asserts his magical will through the performance of the ancient mystery of the cut and restored rope.
He pulls from his magic table a red velvet bag with a wooden handle. Perhaps a standard off-the-shelf magic prop but in the Inner Ring, it is a ring of crystallised imagination which creates, at its centre, in the bag, a relaxed field where reality, as we know it, breaks down into a playful space of almost infinite potential. Through his Great Work, the Magus ShowMan has constrained the imaginative force into three dimensions, a limitation giving the magic bag the ability to transcend the common limitations of time and space. Thus making the magic bag larger on the inside than the outside. A three-meter long wooden pole is pulled out of the apparently tiny interior.
The children scream, shout, and stand up, but never step over the ring boxes, even though it would be very easy. No one tells them they can’t, but the power of the circle is implicitly understood, respected and not broken.
All the Inner Ring’s impossibilities are of course enabled by the sympathetic field generated as the children encircling the Illuminated ShowMan in the centre of the sawdust arena. When he speaks the intention, we all incant the magic words: Shakka, Lakka, Boom! Focusing the Crowd’s will, it becomes real in the ring.
This is the lesson wordlessly passed to the children. On the Inside, through the right work, anything is possible. What the Showman says you are, you become, if you will it. The word made will, made real. A boy becomes a snake charmer and a girl a magician.
The concluding magical presentation is when the Magus makes an invisible egg float in the air. A young girl, who is brought up to help by virtue of having such a powerful imagination she can see the invisible egg to help make it levitate. Channelling her imaginative powers she commands the invisible egg to float and eventually it does. There are minor mishaps where the ShowMan’s tie levitates instead, and the adults in the Crowd who have trouble believing must be convinced. The Magus covers the invisible egg, now floating in the air, with a red silk veil so the Crowd can see its form as it flies around the Inner Ring. The Crowd sees the material (world) being draped over the super-sensible invisible egg. Some in the Crowd, many of the adults, still can’t see the invisible egg but by now many of the children claim to see it.
Then the Child and the Magus decides to help make the Crowd see, since after all, seeing is believing. The child breathes on the ShowMan’s hand and imagines the kind of egg she would like to show the Crowd. She breathes again. The Crowd calls out the magic words. Thus a chocolate egg, the symbol of Easter, new life appears in the ShowMan’s hand. The Childs imagination becomes real. She lays an egg. A kinder egg. A child’s egg. (Kinder is German for child.)
Together, with the breath of life, she breathes existence for the invisible egg, birthing it into physicality, helping those who can’t see, see. Making the invisible visible. For such is the nature of little children, still close enough to the miracle of birth, not entirely materialised themselves, still little soulful spiritual beings, eyes wide open, hearts on their sleeves. Ready for anything. To them the world is so filled with strange things, that who is to say that in this place of beauty and magic, a pig can’t dance, or an invisible egg can’t float in the air?
The finale is all the children in the ring together with a multitude of balloons. Balloons bounce from one child to the next, trying to throw and hit them all the way up to the canvas roof. A bobbing sea of hands with ballon planets and moons circling and sailing, waxing and waning.
The ShowMan stands atop his upturned bins and talk to the adults as the kids are playing circus in the inner ring.
“Here they are, the stars of tomorrow. The ones who can see invisible things. The ones who can imagine invisible things and then make them real. As long as we have them, there’s still hope.”
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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