Greatest Show; Giant Loss
These are tearful times under the big top. The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus, whose clowns and animal trainers and aerialists have been entertaining Americans for 146 years, is closing. It billed itself as “the greatest show on earth,” and to many of its fans, no marketing pitch has ever been truer.
Jason Zinoman, a critic for The Times, became one of those fans while growing up in the 1980s. “Nothing compared in scale or spectacle,” he wrote. “I was hypnotized by the flamboyance of the lion tamer Gunther Gebel-Williams and terrified for the soaring acrobats tempting death. Everything seemed huge and sparkly and full of danger.”
There is still plenty of sparkle and danger, but there are no elephants, the longtime stars of the show before being removed last year under pressure from animal rights groups. Ticket sales, already declining, have slipped more. The show cannot go on. The last performance will be in May.
“The company has faded over the decades,” Mr. Zinoman wrote, “its grandeur eclipsed and its animal acts seeming fusty, but make no mistake: Something irreplaceable will be lost when Ringling closes up its tent for good — a tradition of inspiring awe that connected parent to child, generation to generation.”
The connection even runs through individual lives. Dom Yodice of New York has been going to the Ringling circus for nearly half of its life, and nearly all of his. He is 70 and has seen the show more than 100 times. It was not easy to learn it would end. “I ran the full cycle of emotions — sadness, anger, frustration,” he said.
But he has more than memories to keep. In the 1970s, he started work on a scale model of the circus. He’s still working on it. “I can clean out my basement, put up my model and go down there and look at it and imagine I’m really there,” he told The Times. “It sounds crazy, but that’s what I’ll have to do. Live off my imagination.”
Gary Payne, head of the Circus Fans Association of America, says he has been to 300 Ringling shows. He took the news hard too.
“I cried like a baby,” he said. “I know we’re mortal and we have a life span. I buried my mother. I buried my father. I buried my best friend. But to me, the circus has always been the elixir of youth. When I visit the circus, I’m 5 years old again and I have no life span. That immortality has been destroyed.”
Perhaps such pessimism is premature. Perhaps it’s too soon to give up on the magic of youth. Perhaps Mr. Payne needs to visit Amy Cohen’s school in the upstate New York town of Ithaca.
Ms. Cohen runs Circus Culture, where more than 150 students learn juggling, trapeze and more. Some are infants. The practice space is open 24 hours a day. They take circus seriously.
Ms. Cohen also runs the American Youth Circus Organization, which supports hundreds of circus teachers in the United States. The group has commissioned a study of how circus training might help children, physically and mentally.
“There’s circus as an art form and circus as a life tool,” she told The Times. “They inform one another. But they have specific paths.”
Maybe it’s too soon to know which path Zoe Dutcher is on. Maybe not. Zoe has been doing contortions since she first saw the Cirque du Soleil at age 3. Now she is 9 and working on acrobatics at Circus Culture.
“My dream is coming true,” she said.