«Eros and Death»

Alienness in the circus

by Thomas Oberender

For many years now I have been listening to Terence McKenna’s voice. On YouTube you can find numerous recordings of his lectures detailing his experiences with hallucinogenic drugs, with academic cross-references to cultural history, anthropology and art. It was in this context that McKenna developed a particular way of looking at the circus. In his lecture »The Secret That Can’t Be Told”, he describes his experience with DMT as an encounter with the archetype of the circus. The lively creatures he meets while tripping, their playfulness, their magical impact, their otherworldliness, remind him of a wide variety of circus characters.

For McKenna, circus is a complex emotional structure. It magically draws children and at the same time touches adults in a childlike way. I am reminded of my first encounter with a travelling circus; it had set up camp on a large wasteland near an open-air swimming pool in Jena, away from the residential area. A site near the River Saale, surrounded by meadows and a sports field, suddenly sported old-fashioned wooden caravans with a large tent set up beside them. When my parents took me to an afternoon show, I entered a strange world where for a little extra you could see exotic animals in the smaller tents between the performers’ caravans. It smelled of damp sawdust and hay, candy floss and sweat.

Kids love circuses, says McKenna. Because of the clowns, because of the costumes, the animals, the colourful spotlights and the strafing starlight from the lit-up mirror ball on the inside of the tent. The circus is the petite woman in her glittering costume, spinning around without a net high up in the big top, holding on by her teeth. For McKenna, this image consolidates the superimposition of death and Eros that characterises the circus. In her tight, star-studded costume, this acrobat risked her life in the big top. In her unreal beauty she toyed with death for a few minutes, at once vulnerable and virtuosic.

Right alongside the attractions in the main tent are the sideshows that so fascinated McKenna, something I experienced 20 years ago in a traditional Tokyo fairground theatre – a presentation of obscure phenomena, Siamese twins, the childlike old dwarf, the wolf woman with a beard and furry back. All of these bizarre examples of what life can be, and which were celebrated with a great degree of spectacle in this tent, are circus: ruptures in normality. To McKenna, the circus performers, the characters in the carnival and sideshow are all aliens; life that exists alongside the community of the recognisably human, which expands, exceeds, examines our idea of what is human-like.

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  • All these creatures who play with animals and dangerous things, who breathe fire, defy gravity, build pyramids with their bodies, twirl through the air and possess seemingly superhuman strength and abilities – all of this is rupture, the experience of an encounter with aliens. For McKenna, the circus that arrived in the small Midwest town where he grew up equated to an »alien invasion”.

  • As an adult I encountered Cirque Nouveau, a form of circus that had evolved out of popular culture to move towards high culture – a circus without animals, an arena for the magic of objects and stories. I see this as still belonging to the tradition that McKenna describes. This reformed circus of French origin, which saw itself as an art without limits, without text, without training prerequisites, sought to dissolve traditional circus turns in the flow of narrative but still – at heart – thrived on the risk inherent in its acts. And the performers of Cirque Nouveau playfully transgressed limits of the humanly possible to practise an art of wonder, of danger and attraction, of laughter and dazzling situations. The circus of my childhood appeared on the outskirts of our residential area like a spaceship in wood and tarpaulin, magical and raw, and the tickets to this brightly coloured realm were sold at a hatch in the ticket wagon, which you reached via a small staircase. Once inside, everything was still ordered and strict, yet in a different way. Visitors were allowed to enter as guests, but they were not allowed to penetrate the tents with their enclosures, rows and corridors, their bright places and the places that remained in darkness. Where did all this come from? Who were these people? And weren’t they still to be seen in Cirque Nouveau?

  • From today’s perspective, these childhood memories of the circus feel like they occurred several centuries ago. But perhaps this also comes from the fact that performers and acrobats retain, and indirectly generate, a palpable social boundary around them, within which they have gained very special freedoms – in their virtuoso play with objects or with each other, with other living beings, with us. Very rarely are they all-rounders, like actors or dancers; instead, they specialise in one thing – cutting daring figures on the trapeze or making people laugh without words. And beyond the art they present, in these delimited spaces of the tent or the arena they create a self-referential world before the eyes of all that seems to be preserved in its own tradition and its own resources. And this too is the alien in the circus, the invasion from somewhere else, which makes it so unapproachable and so attractive at the same time to this day.

  • If today we talk about state circus schools and the need to fund venues, about the lack of professional circus criticism in the media and the need for circus studies that create a language for this art, this contemporary view is combined with a highly vivid connection between circus art and the pre-modern world, something it shares with the harlequin as Rudolf Münz relates in his important analysis, or the world of the carnival and fantasy art. They are arts of social transgression, arts of physical otherness. Today, when we talk about aesthetic developments that are moving the circus closer to dance and performance, about attempts to take it out of the arena and onto the stage, we are still talking about artistic practices and traditions that are based on a pre-modern understanding of life, art, the world. The body plays a different role in this world, so too intuition, the willingness to sacrifice and a practical, scarcely encoded knowledge that is transferred and transformed through observation, practice and imitation – all of this preserves a different connection to things, to one’s own body and other species.

  • The inhabitants of this world change their forms, they seduce, amaze, enchant – but without sweetness; the hazard and exertion is always too present for that. Their bodies look like ours, but they achieve the impossible and at the same time elude us. And at the end of the show, after the performers have presented all their tricks, closed the box office and swept up the sawdust, they move on again. And every kid, says McKenna, wants to travel with them.

  • But why is this world so attractive to us? The presence of the circus is a celebration – to place someone or something in the centre of an arena is to make that manifestation meaningful and visible. The ones presenting their skills there could be us, but we could not do what they are presenting. The circus performer represents and negates us at the same time. And not with text, not with the plausibility of a well-plotted narrative, but with the credibility of danger, the magic of accomplishment, the focus on the mastery of body and mind, time and correlation. Circus attractions are like the sugar you use to soothe babies. We have an instinctive craving for that »sugar”, for that glitter and flash, for that fear and relief; the same sensation we felt as small children enraptured by the incomprehensible pleasure of being thrown up in the air and caught again, almost defenceless in our response. In the poetic world of body artists, this enchantment never ends.

  • The circus, says McKenna, is carnival – it inverts the world, its values and rules. The anonymous girl becomes a princess and the powerful are shown in their weakness for all to see. All of this still resonates in the circus, in variety shows, in booths resounding with laughter, in the hazardous skill of performers possessed of a different knowledge and ability for cheating time and logic with even greater precision and logic than we generally think. The circus doesn’t just think about things, above all it thinks about the effect that they can have on the eyes and brain of the viewer. Its magic is based on intuition and skill and at the same time on discipline and a knowledge of human nature. But ultimately it remains »magical” because in some secret way it is based on knowledge that does not reveal itself, and it is precisely this knowledge that attracts us – the notion of this special ability that is preserved in families, in strict rules, in pleasure and prosaic diligence, in the ability to present something to others, to citizens and guests, that they can witness without believing, marvel at without understanding. And this is precisely the insolent craft of the harlequin, the fool at the carnival, whose alternative logic prevails, if only for a few days.

  • The circus is populated by strange lifeforms and lifestyles which appear playful, enticing and unpredictable. And in a way the work of acrobats and performers is also pre-modern in the sense that the life of one depends on the other, and they provide each other with security in the truest sense of the word. As a spectator, you feel this particular form of cohesion among performers. Outwardly they smile as if nothing could be easier than what they are doing – the clowns, jugglers and tamers of dangerous animals, the women in glittery costumes and stuntmen on motorcycles. And yet they do the impossible, they test and transgress boundaries – something that every child understands and does all the time and, we suspect, every alien too. Just one step sidewards, this distance is very close at hand. It is the distance of play without purpose, of self-absorption, and it is completely different from the everyday faces and skills of adults we encounter later on.

  • This circus world, at once hermetic and spectacular, preoccupied the painter Max Beckmann all his life, in Pierrot Picasso recognised a different outlook on life, whose contemporary face is the horror clown, the Joker. This film character also represents the outcasts who seize their own freedom, for that which entices and menaces us, Eros and death. When these characters leave the world of the circus, chaos ensues. That continues to attract young people, children and artists.

  • In his lecture »The Secret That Can’t Be Told”, McKenna describes the director Federico Fellini as an artist with a profound grasp of the alien in this ancient art form, who in his films repeatedly turned to the personnel and the dreamlike visual idiom of the circus as a means of access to another, parallel world and dimension of human life. Films like »Juliet of the Spirits” and »I Clowns” are like dream games, somnambulist journeys into papier-mâché worlds with flame-tongued floral decor. For McKenna, Fellini was an impresario, a master of ambivalent effects and collector of different faces, whose work constantly raises questions – who is this »I” who inhabits us? Where does the spirit with which we think come from? What are the forces – forces that we cannot clearly see or address except in the circus, where they appear before us as a magical connection to objects and other living beings – that define us? Only he shows the human as companion of things, which play with it as much as he with them, which applies to animals as well.

  • In a TV interview, Federico Fellini (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAxcqnY5uB4) talks about his attempt to see the film set through the eyes of the actors, in the mirror of the costumes, and describes his efforts to develop a »detached eye” in his work. This detached, free-floating awareness, equivalent to a non-human eye, views life much like a camera. Another aspect of Fellini’s search for an artistic view of the world is linked to his experiments with LSD, which gave him a different relationship to the existence of colours, but also the unusual experience that – as Fellini says – the hallucinogenic drug renders reality objective. Under the influence of LSD, he experienced reality as innocent, pure, of sacred beauty. But this more intense »reality” only develops this sacred beauty because we do not ascribe meaning to it. So it remains innocent. But as soon as you cease ascribing meaning to reality, something Fellini worked hard to do on set, you cease to understand reality – and suddenly it can appear monstrous. This experience can make you a saint or a lunatic. His characters embody this oscillation. And it is natural to see something of the sacred beauty of the circus in these descriptions as well, their oscillation between Eros and death.

  • Fellini depicts trickster figures such as clowns and magicians in his films. In every circus performance, a slight shift of our gaze reveals a myriad of mathematical patterns, when we watch the movements of the jugglers’ balls, clubs or pendulums, or the choreographed bodies of people and animals, the loops and reflections in the acts of the clowns, their rituals absurd and at the same time immutable – all of this engenders and attests to a matrix of life which is ordinarily concealed. These structures are omnipresent in the circus, they creep into civil life in the middle of the day like only a dream or intoxication can. We sense this, even if it is only those things and beings in the arena that have access to the matrix.

  • From the Baroque to the Classical period, there was a time in European theatre when the roles for which plays were written were fixed. It was a stable structure which lasted many generations, one that presented its heroes more as types than individuals. These types and the skills associated with them were passed down the generations in families of the commedia dell’arte, something you also see today in Noh and Kabuki theatre. And the old, pre-modern virtuosity of the circus, in which every performer still has their speciality, retains something of this very special knowledge of the body: vertical silk, partner acrobatics, partner trampoline, floor acrobatics, juggling, dance trapeze, mouth balancing, aerial acrobatics, trapeze, and multicordes, handstands, vertical rope, hand-to-hand, swinging trapeze, Chinese pole, equilibristics, rope ladder acrobatics, trapeze swing, banquine and other forms of (group) acrobatics. In the circus there are types that also survive in comics, but which have disappeared from the theatre. The virtuosity of the circus can also be compared to virtuosity in classical music, which retains the matrix of the score, the prescribed technique which is the basis for developing that thin layer of the highly personal.

  • I recall a production of »Woyzeck” directed by Wilfried Minks at the Schauspielhaus in Zurich, which included a cloth acrobat. She performed her act for us at the rehearsal and it was breathtaking. But when the director suggested a minor change, the performer responded with nothing but courteous silence, because, in contrast to actors, doing it differently would simply have taken several weeks of practice. This experimentation seems to be easier in another form of the circus. It corresponds to a society of singularisation with status accorded to individuality and authenticity. Today, this form of circus combines with looser forms of performance which are more concerned with original creations than types and traditional acts. Today this is associated with such terms as object manipulation, dance, performance, happenings, choreography and artistic research. But even here you can still sense the old matrix knowledge, the ability to make reality – in the Felliniesque sense – an object, or to regard it as such. And it is thanks to this gift that the circus inspires our awe at its aesthetic of risk, its magical superimposition of Eros and death, the sacred and the lunatic.