Big Top is a small but amazing world for circus stars

begins, Delbosq enthuses the audience with some stimulating crowd-work. “I spend 99 per cent of the two hours running, so cardio work is key,” he tells me beforehand. I realise he isn’t joking as over the next two hours he provides a backbone to the show, consistently handing props to performers and moving equipment in the background while keeping the audience amused.

This is undoubtedly a family event, but his entertainment between acts strikes a chord with the older generations too. There is a rare delight in watching adults become as enthralled as their children by the slightest of tricks, as Delbosq delicately pumps smoke rings out of a tin bin that slowly rise to the canopy.

Circuses traditionally consist of families and their descendants, like Delbosq, a 10th-generation performer. This isn’t always the case, as evidenced by Juma, a 23-year-old contortionist from Zanzibar. Meeting him before the show, he places his phone, keys and wallet on the ground, and with ease stretches his left arm behind his neck, twisting it down through his right armpit while his other arm twists back on itself and holds his head. He remains like this, smiling, while I try to comprehend how the bones now protruding from his left armpit haven’t broken. His performance during the show is no less bizarre.

Appearing from the back of a smokefilled stage, he spider-walks like Linda Blair in The Exorcist towards the crowd with his neck seemingly dislocated and his hands twisted backwards. Though unconventional, he looks at home here,