Marc Chagall and the Circus

 

"For me, a circus is a magical spectacle, a passing and dissolving like a little world. There is a disquieting circus, a circus of hidden depths. These clowns, riders, acrobats are imprinted on my sight. Why? Why am I moved by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I travel on toward other horizons. Their colors and their painted masks draw me toward other, strange, psychic forms which I long to paint.

 
Circus! A magical word, a centuries old entertainment parading before us, in which a tear, a smile, a gesture of arm or leg takes on the quality of great art.

 And what do circus people receive in return? A crust of bread. Night brings them solitude and sadness stretching on to the following day until evening, amid a blaze of electric light, heralds a renewal of the old life. For me, the circus is the most tragic of all dramatic performances.

 
Throughout the centuries, its voice has been the most shrill heard in the quest for the amusement and joy of man. Often it takes on a high poetic form. I seem to see a Don Quixote tilting at windmills, like the inspired clown who has known tears and dreams of human love.

 
My circus pitches its Big Top in the sky.
 
It performs among the clouds, 
among the chairs,
 or in the moon-reflecting windows.
 
In the streets a man goes by.
 
He puts out the lights and lamps of the town.
 
The show is over."


Marc Chagall, Circus (1967)

"Chagall saw circus folk as the perfect example of artists who desire to be loved and achieve their dreams. He identified himself with these people and the representations he made of them can be seen as self-portraits."

Chagall’s son, David MacNeil.
 

  "For him, clowns and acrobats always resembled figures in religious paintings... The evolution of the circus works... reflects a gradual clouding of his worldview, and the circus performers now gave way to the prophet or sage in his work—- a figure into whom Chagall poured his anxiety as Europe darkened, and he could no longer rely on the lumiére-liberté of France for inspiration."

Jackie Wullschlager

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 54

Why do we do it? 

Make up your mind for your intentions will be written on you for the Crowd to see. If so, why not write something beautiful something that will make them think: “There is no lie in this Showman’s Fire.”

Not doing it for the fame or the fortune, but doing shows to help people a bit, to heal them a bit, and to free them a bit. Small steps in the right direction will get you there in the end.

Imagine reading that and knowing it was true…

Joseph Carey Merrick - The Elephant Man

Joseph Merrick - The Elephant Man

"The showman—speaking as if to a dog—called out harshly, “Stand up!” The thing arose slowly and let the blanket that covered its head and back fall to the ground. There stood revealed the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen. In the course of my profession I had come upon lamentable deformities of the face due to injury or disease, as well as mutilations and contortions of the body depending upon like causes, but at no time had I met with such a degraded or perverted version of a human being as this lone figure displayed."

"From the intensified painting in the street, I had imagined the Elephant Man to be of gigantic size. This, however, was a little man below the average height and made to look shorter by the bowing of his back. The most striking feature about him was his enormous and misshapened head. From the brow there projected a huge bony mass like a loaf, while from the back of the head hung a bag of spongy, fungus-looking skin, the surface of which was comparable to brown cauliflower. On the top of the skull were a few long lank hairs. The osseous growth on the forehead almost occluded one eye. 

The circumference of the head was no less than that of the man’s waist. From the upper jaw there projected another mass of bone. It protruded from the mouth like a pink stump, turning the upper lip inside out and making of the mouth a mere slobbering aperture. This growth from the jaw had been so exaggerated in the painting as to appear to be a rudimentary trunk or tusk. The nose was merely a lump of flesh, only recognizable as a nose from its position. The face was no more capable of expression than a block of gnarled wood. The back was horrible, because from it hung, as far down as the middle of the thigh, huge, sacklike masses of flesh covered by the same loathsome cauliflower skin."

Sir Frederik Treves description in The Elephant man and other reminiscences of his first encounter with Joseph Merrick.

Thoughts surrounding a poem

Joseph's hat/mask

A man should be measured by the soul, but perhaps not from his soul alone. The man with the noblest and loftiest ideals but a temper uncontrollable enough to cause grief and harm to those it might fall upon is but a flawed soul. Man’s actions springs from his mind so through action a soul enters the world and the persons biography becomes the manifestation of their souls.
The biography of Joseph Merrick stands like a lighthouse. He was a man nature gave nothing to guide calloused minds of common men towards his inclusion in the human race, demonstrated so aptly in the famous words screamed out at the mob in David Lynch's 1980 movie.

“I!… am!... Not!... An animal.”

He acts, speaks and lives as a human being even when humanity shuns him. He did not ask to be born this way, but into this world he came. But still in this misery his humanity found its way through the severe physical deformities, through the torture and abuse by exhibitors and so called friends. Inside the Elephant man resided a soul that could not be crushed by all the worlds hardships. A poem from his autobiography adapted by Joseph from Isaak Watts' "False Greatness" expresses his feelings about himself and his formidable appearance with grace and burning beauty.

Cardboard church created by Joseph.

“Tis true my form is something odd,
but blaming me is blaming God;
Could I create myself anew
I would not fail in pleasing you

Was I so tall, could reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with a span;
I would be measured by the soul,
The mind’s the standard of the man."

Never could the poet Isaac Watts even in his wildest imaginations, if indeed the ‘father of English Hymnody’ had a wild imagination, just how fantastically apposite his words would become for a  man deemed by his contemporaries to have been “Gods foulest creation” or “Natures grossest mistake.” To the point that today a google search for "False Greatness by Isaac Watts" brings up Joseph Merrick's version rather than Watts' as the first hit.

Never has there been a man more adept at making us behold the durability of the very essence of humanity. With the troubled and deprived life this brave soul led, he should be a reminder for us all that no matter how much deprivation of those things most often imagined as necessities for human happiness should we let it bereave us of upstanding and heroic dignity.

Still from Lynch's movie

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 53

Barnum and General Tom Thumb

 “This is a trading world, and men, women, and children—who cannot live on gravity alone—need something to satisfy their gayer, lighter moods and hours, and he who ministers to this want is in a business established by the author of our nature. If he worthily fulfills his mission and amuses without corrupting, he need never feel that he has lived in vain.”

P T Barnum 

Butterfly Circus

A tremendous circus short film. Winner of the first ever Clint Eastwood Filmmaker award and several others. It is a beautifully written, and realized film. Inspiring and truly about the heart of circus, not just a love story set in a circus setting which often is the case with circus films.
It is apparently on its way to become a feature film so keep your eyes out.
Here is their website.

A Child’s dream – The art of the Circus poster

“The circus of the present day is judged by the quality of its paper."

W C Coups promotional Carny Cash

"I believe I ordered the first three-​sheet lithograph ever made… This was considered a piece of foolishness; but when I ordered a hundred-​sheet bill and first used it in Brooklyn it was considered such a curiosity that show people visited the City of Churches for the express purpose of looking at this advertising marvel. How things have changed!”

W C Coup –

Sawdust and spangles, stories and secrets of the circus (1901)

“One of the most beautiful and artful of the posters is “The Barnum & Bailey Greatest Show on Earth:  a Child’s Dream,” 

an 1896 lithograph that depicts a child in bed surrounded by a Bosch-like wreath of circus performers.  The poster dances toward nightmare, with clowns riding ostriches, bears with clown collars standing on one another’s shoulders, a monkey riding a harlequin in a makeshift rodeo, all printed in the rich, fermented colors of a Max Ernst painting.  Collage couldn’t do this:  there’s something both innocently disturbing and disturbingly innocent here, with a text banner at the bottom reading:   

  

“This smiling face is multiplied a million times a year.  Whereas the children’s friend this wondrous show appears:  with sunny gleams of fairyland, with scenes of merriest glee, with cute and cunning animals for either side of the sea.”

"The language is arcane, the imagery antique, but there’s a mysteriousness that transcends purpose, and gives this poster a nostalgic fervor “fine art” doesn’t usually muster.  It’s serendipity:  you the gallery-goer stumbling upon an accidental connection between circus and Surrealism, Barnum & Bailey and contemporary art (the “street art” of Banksey or Shepherd Fairey for instance) that tries to use the forms of advertising (text, printing, hyperbole) but can only come up with thematic irony at best, self-aggrandizement at worst."

"Shadow boxes become poetic theaters or settings wherein are metamorphosed the element of a childhood pastime.”  Joseph Cornell.

 "The sincerity involved in trying to sell the dream to the child gives this poster its enigmatic power, and somehow allows this simple, humble poster a way out of kitsch and into dream.  

It’s the same alchemy Joseph Cornell employed when building his shadow-box paeans to lonely glamorous hotels:  what is publically fashioned as luxury and thrill becomes a secret you keep in order to return to a paradise that really isn’t there, on Earth at least.  Cornell’s shadow-boxes, like many of the posters in “The Amazing American Circus Poster,” depict life as transient and full of moments you can only capture through fantasy, an encyclopedia of cotton-candy mysticism, seediness transcending into longing, and longing melting into trance."

"These posters still mirror desires and excitements that become renditions of what we often forget we need:   

spectacle, absurdity, delight.”

Keith Banner - The American Circus Poster

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 52

"The rise of modern showbiz began during the seventeenth century, alongside the beginnings of a decline in the power of the Church. It was no coincidence. Prior to that time, the people's entertainment was despised and repressed by the ecclesiastical authorities. Their attitude did not change, they just gradually lost the power to enforce their prejudice. What was it about the medieval jugglers, minstrels, acrobats and rope-dancers that the Church found so objectionable? Did the churchmen suspect that these merry pleasures were the left-overs of an older religion, the remnants of ta once powerful and ancient magical tradition?"

"In order to penetrate the mysteries of showbusiness, we must begin somewhere near the beginnings of human culture. For modern showbiz is, in reality, a huge disguise. It is not as it appears to be..."

Rogan Taylor

Carnival Lullaby

All the world has gone to bed

and the fairground lights gone dead.

Little child its time to sleep,

the night is no reason to weep.

The strongman is drunk and passed out,

nuzzling the sea lions snout.

The Siamese twins called Ying and Yang

slept before the church bells clang.

Sleep my child don’t be afraid.

Rest your head on the pillows brocade.

If you sleep to night I promise true

the world will still be there for you

Don’t believe what the mad jester said,

dear child you’ve been mislead.

The world will go on without end

even if you sleep my friend

For the night is a time for dreams

when nothing is what it seems,

carousel horses flies through fairy floss clouds

high above the crowds

Sleep my child don’t be afraid.

rest your head on the pillows brocade.

If you sleep to night I promise true

the world will still be there for you.

 

The Happy Sideshow

From the now defunct Happy Sideshow website...

"The Space Cowboy, Shep Huntly and Captain Frodo had been talking about a name and wanted one that could describe the awesome energy that was created when we performed together. It became evident what it would be during the Lizard festival for the total eclipse of the sun in 1999 in Cornwall, UK, where the dudes were booked to perform and Tigerlil was along for the ride. After arriving and doing solo shows for two days the management called a meeting to tell us that there was no chance the festival was going to make it financially. There was not enough paying custumers. This meant none of the performers would get paid. A lot of the performers and bands cracked the shits. There was a whole lot of shouting, threats and bad vibes all around. At which point Captain Frodo raised his hand and asked the flustered organizers:
"If we all decide to stay and entertain those few thousand people that are here, will the ecclipse still be on?' This broke the ice.

The birth of The Happy Sideshow
photo by Tigerlil.

The three boys decided against doing solo street shows and in a collaborative evening with Howard Marks, The Happy Sideshow was born in a cabaret big top in Cornwall during a total ecclipse of the sun.
From then and for the next four or five years the Happy Sideshow consisting of Tigerlil, the Space Cowboy, Shep Huntly, and Captain Frodo toured the world with their sideshow revival under the slogan "The coolest, Slickest, and Happiest Sideshow on Earth!" The hyperbole was right, as the Way teaches us - with theater less is more, but with sideshow less is not enough.


From the archives of Carnival Cinema comes an almost complete performance of a show called "Torture for Fun." The show was filmed in Stockholm, Sweden in 2003 during Circus Cirkors circus festival called subørb.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 51

People love mystery. In performing magic there are two types of mystery involved.
On one level is the Great Mystery, the magical experience, the uncanny, the other, the mysterious deep feeling of experiencing something unknown and unfathomable.
The other level is more superficial, it is the technical question of how something was done. A whodunnit murder, a puzzle, or a card trick are all mysteries seeking to be solved.
A magician, or indeed any Showman, should ask themselves what level they are encouraging their audience to experience their performance on. A performance at its best can function to symbolically awaken us to other realms of experience.

Ask yourself what you are expressing with your acts.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 50

A Showman relishes reactions. Genuine reactions, not mere polite applause. He often values the reactions over the show itself. For in those moments of true response his art simultaneously becomes meaningful for him and the individuals in the Crowd, in this unity lies all the power and all the glory.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 49

When you have developed a skill try making it more meaningful than pure demonstration. If you have the crowds attention why not say something that matters.
Think of your act symbolically. Let it point to something greater than "I can sit on a can."

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 48

Develop and foster real relationships.
Cherish your family.
Seek perfection and beauty of course.
But remember good shows are no consolation for a lonely life.

From the Illuminated mind of MS Shep Huntly.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 47

You set the pace of your onstage reaction patterns. If you slow down it is easier to think.

If you slow down its easier for the Crowd to read you and they feel smarter than you. Which is good for a clown.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 46

Your ideas ripen and grow when you least expect it. In times of rest and in good conversation great ideas grow. Carry a notebook! The wording that flows so well when asked at a party is often gone by the morning.

Circus Baobab

The first africa acrobatic circus created in 1998 in Guinea-Conakry a country in West Africa. With some help from the late great Pierot Bidon from Archaos fame. A circus road movie from an amazing team of acrobats and circus folk traveling through Africa with all that entails. Building their stage and flying trapeze rig from tree trunks, using old truck tires for mini tramps, high energy drumming, dance and acrobatics. Awesome music, awesome experiences and awesome reactions from the crowds as they drive their trucks through village streets and fill arenas.
Grass roots circus for the people. A phenomenon that changes peoples lives.

See Laurent Chevallier's full documentary here.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 45

When you are three quarters through a long season and the crowd is small imagine the show is the first or the last. Make it special in your mind.

Lesson provided by MS Shep Huntly.

Shaman Showman - part 3

The Shaman-Showman's Obligation

Wikipedia tells us: Shamanism is an anthropological term referencing a range of beliefs and practices regarding communication with the spiritual world. There is a lot of research done by anthropologists and religious historians like Mircea Eliadethat explores this line of thought. Daniel Pinchbeck defines Shamanism as “A technology for exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness in order to accomplish specific purposes: healing, divination, and communication with the spirit realm.”

Personally I don’t believe there is any need to postulate a spiritual world as a separate realm of existence to explain phenomena in this world. I believe the answers to our questions and mysteries lies firmly rooted in reality. Explanations given along supernatural lines only complicates things and raises more questions then it answers. In my writings I am treating the shaman as a guide for an exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness or an altered experience of reality. Lessons learnt in this state of mind does not teach us about the spirit world but about ourselves and our place in the real world.

I believe the shamanistic tradition and experience has been important for humans for the same reasons as religion. The beneficial traits of these traditions has worked to strengthen unity, binding communities, finding meaning in complex things by providing answers to unexplainable things, and it exists throughout the world, most likely because it’s positive effects are real, regardless of the ultimate veracity of the teachings. I will get back to these underlying positive effect in another post.

Blogger Tai Carmen describes the shamanistic state eloquently in a great post on her blog: “A systematized disorganization of the senses via trance states induced by intoxicants/hallucinogenics, music and/or dance, with the goal of personal transformation/liberation from social constraints, and communion with a divine or supernatural principal. ”

The tools of the trade seems to be drums, chanting, and also demonstrations of supernatural skill. All employed to bring the participants a state of ecstasy. A word whose original meaning came from the Greek word Ekstasis, which means ‘standing outside oneself.’ He who stands outside himself would be able to see himself from the outside.

The mindset of the participants is described as a trance, but perhaps for those that can’t or won’t reach the full ecstatic state themselves watches the shaman as a representation of themselves. They watch the shaman as they watch themselves. He becomes man’s representative, the symbolic human.

A Showman Shows Man - Man. For a Showman, the altered state is the mindset of the Crowd. Their minds connected watching time slowed down and controlled by the Showman as he draws them into a symbolic reality, and leads them into Ekstasis in its original meaning, standing outside oneself to be able to watch and understand oneself.

Shamans are keepers of secret knowledge, they explain unexplainable events and increase the odds of survival and the moral in the group. They are the mediators between the spiritual or altered experience of reality and the real world. In this symbolic world order they find hope of control over stochastic processes in the real world.

The shaman manifests our dreams and collective imagination. They give hope. Hope of healing, hope of direction when lost and so on. Through his role as an outsider, a wounded healer, someone who has suffered and learnt, one who have gone out on the ice and lived there alone for many months until he could finally hear the voice of the Universe, have certain obligations to fulfil.

From BBC's Human Planet

From the TV series Human Planet I learnt that on coral islands where it is possible to fish within a lagoon as well as out on the open sea, fishermen are more superstitious about fishing out at sea. This means there are more rituals connected to the open sea variant. This is because added risks. Random uncontrollable processes like bad weather and dangerous prey increase risk of injury and death. The open ocean is a treacherous place and the beasts pulled up can be dangerous. The more random the process, the easier it is for us to become superstitious. Situations of gravity, such as open-sea fishing, or big game hunting would all bring on a desire to control the outcome, to gain an advantage and security in a very uncertain situation.

BF Skinners superstitious pigeon

 In risky circumstances where randomness is unavoidable normal pattern recognition no longer suffice and as demonstrated nicely by B.F. Skinners famous superstitious pigeons, our minds makes sense of unrelated events and outcomes. The pigeons belived that their actions such as wing flapping and turning was an important part of receiving food. The fact was that the food was delivered completely at random with no reference to the pigeon’s actions. When food was delivered the pigeon remembered its last actions and attributed it to the food delivery. And hence persisted to repeat the half turn, the wing flap and so forth it had done immediately before the food arrived. The pigeons quickly developed a set of beliefs to make sense of the randomness.

Minds were made to make sense of things and it is so eager to do so it often makes sense out of things that have no sense at all. Mistaking events following each other in time for causality, that the first event is linked to the next. Like linking a successful and injury free hunt to correctly following a groups rituals. If the ritual was executed and the ensuing hunt was successful and injury free it would be attributed to the ritual. The tribe now have ‘proof’ that the ritual worked. Once this thought pattern occurs it can be very difficult to escape. To the point that if someone did die in the hunt, the question would not be whether the whole system was wrong, but what alterations must be done to the ritual, which bit was not done well enough, which part of it failed. In this way a simple superstition can become a complex set of instructions meaningful within the community’s belief system.

Minds makes sense of things that have no sense at all.

Superstition aside, as I mentionioned earlier the veracity of the beliefs seems to be unimportant. The benefits from following religious practices and rituals are all equally helpful. We have yet to find one type of prayer that gives 100% return of your prayers. All rituals and spiritual traditions has similar outcomes so the important thing about them is that something about them ‘works’ for us as humans.

The shamanistic ritual before the hunt becomes a time for focus and for unification of the hunters and through them the whole tribe. It changes the mindsets from I to We and in that there is immense power. We are social beings, together we are invincible, together we will prevail, and together we shall grow. This is the obligation of the Shaman Showman.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 44

When a Showman understands the role of the audience, a new freedom will fill him. Exhibitionism withers away when the Showman sees the audience not as judges or censors or even as delighted friends but as a group with whom he is sharing an experience.

Beyond the Mat

This is an awesome documentary about wrestling; the sport, the craft, the risks, the wrestlers, the passion, and the spectacle. Wether you love wrestling or don't get it this story will interest you.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 43

The most important thing is that you know that you want to be there and

that you trust the Crowd wants to be there.

They are the audience you are the performer. Step up, be the Showman. Let them be the crowd. Guide them, they want to follow, but are afraid to come with you unless they feel safe with you as a guide.

Shaman Showman - Part 2

Mythopoeic nature of Wrestling

Wrestling and Shamans

(Read part 1 here.)

Perhaps shamanism is like Pro-wrestling? As a kid you think it’s real then at some point you learn the whole thing is a masquerade. It is theatre in a square ring.
All the spectators suspends their disbelief, pretending to watch sport, whilst it’s actually theatre, sports-themed theatre of the simplest sort. Very powerful stuff though.
When an older boy decides to expose the lie, or initiate you into the true knowledge concerning the reality of wrestling, I hope they do it gently. As the house of childlike beliefs shakes and falls, you want the insight broken to you in a way that allows you to transcend the broken reality by picking up the pieces and stack them back up into a new foundation. A foundation of understanding and rationality.
Wrestling isn’t real but it's still awsome and this teaches us that wheter its real or not is not the point, the point is the story, the action, the hotdogs and soft drinks, the girls in the skimpy outfits, and the massive warrior wrestlers.
Real or not it still speaks to thousands.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 42

It is necessary to become a part of the world around us and make it real by touching it, seeing it, and smelling it. This is valid for stage and life.

Shaman - Showman

Roald Amundsen and the Shaman

Roald Amundsen, polar explorer and hero.

One of Norway’s relatively unknown heros is Roald Amundsen. ”Who?” You probably think, and that’s my point.

Just so you all know, I’ll briefly introduce my childhood hero. On december 14 1911, Amundsen and his team were the first men to reach 90 degrees south - the geographic Southpole! To make the story even more exciting the quest for the Southpole had been a race against an English man called Captain Robert Falcon Scott. So if he won why don’t we know his name?

Captain Scott was quite a hopeless case. He brought horses and tractors to take him to the pole. The tractors never started and the horses died of exposure before the expedition set off towards the pole and Captain Scott’s team reached the pole finding a tent with a swaying Norwegian flag. In the tent was a guest book, with Roald Amundsen’s name first. With broken spirits Scott began the return journey but succumbed to fatigue, partly brought on by scurvy. The tragedy of Captain Scott ecclipsed Roald Amundsens acheivement.

Reaching the Southpole was not Amundsens first polar triumph. A few years earlier in 1903, and this brings me to the point I am making, Roald Amundsen set out on an expedition hoping to find the North West Passage. Which had been sought by the English for four hundred years. They sailed to Gjøahavn on King William Island and spent twenty three months there. During this time Amundsen studied Inuit way of life and collected etnographic material.

I found this quote on a blog about Amundsen’s encounter with an Inuit Shaman. This will be a perfect introduction to my thoughts and ramblings on shamans.

Amundsen and his men at the Southpole

”Roald Amundson passed the winter in the Arctic Circle among the Inuits.  He lived with the tribe’s shaman.  After months of watching the many sleights of hand and minor tricks the shaman used to hold the tribe’s attention with his magical power, Amundsen finally asked him: Didn’t it bother him that all his ‘magic powers’ were nothing but  cheap parlor games?  The shaman smiled. He replied, ‘My magic power is not in my tricks. My real power is that I have gone out on the ice and lived there alone for many months until I could finally hear the voice of the Universe. And the voice of the Universe is that of a mother calling after her beloved children. That is my real magic.”

Inuit Shaman. Look at those sweet hands.

This brings us to shamans and my interests in them as proto Showmen. Roald Amundsen experienced a shaman performing slight of hand. To his tribe the shaman was a powerful healer and communicator of secret understandings. What did the tribe see in their shaman’s prestidigitation? What can we learn about the Showman from studying the Shaman? What can we learn about his craft and the deep meaning presented in his performances that will benefit our own shows? How did it all start?

Whether because of his understanding of ice and polar knowledge taught to him by shamans or not, the expedition found and sailed through the North West Passage in 1906. Becoming the first ship in history to travel successfully through it. Adding another feather to my polar hero, Roald Amundsen’s hat.

(Read part 2 here)

Shanghai Circus School Doco

I went to a circus school in 1996. I paid for the three-month course with money I had made performing with Dad and doing street shows. Let me just say Circomedia was nothing like the Shanghai Circus School.

The kids in this PBS documentary are pushed to the edge and beyond. The results are extraordinary, pinnacles of human achievement in body control, but so I would hope, for the sacrifices and struggles are great. But in the end when you have mastered your craft, created your art and overcome the obstacles the triumph of the Showman makes it all worth it.

The documentary is hard to watch sometimes, but these kids are amazing. The kid in this picture fights hard, they push him, but man, the results are unbelievable.

Hope you all enjoy this glance of the work involved in becoming an Acrobat. 

Thanks to Circobat over at the Kicking Sawdust blog for putting me onto this.

Watch the documentary on youtube by clicking here.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 41

Everything that happens on stage is part of the show. The act, the mistakes, the random interactions from the crowd are all part of the Crowds experience. Each opportunity missed is a brick in the fourth wall. Sealing you off from the crowd, driving them out of the moment. Enjoy your mishaps, they make you more human, and the performance more real.

The Showman's Guild?

I was disappointed with what I discovered when I began researching the Showman’s Guild. I very quickly found an organization with that exact name. It was all so easy, too easy... so mundane and plain. No secret symbols, no secret knowledge just a regular trade organization. 

In the National Fairground archives I got a good insight into the nature of the Showman’s Guild’s and it’s history.

The formation of ‘the United Kingdom showman and Van Dwellers' Protection Association’ in 1889 was and still is the decisive and important event in the history of travelling showpeople as a community.

In 1917 the Showmen's Guild of Great Britain, as it became known, was recognised as the trade association of the travelling funfair business and acquired the right to stand as representatives for the business at both local and national levels; a position it still occupies to this day.

Although claims for earlier organisations can be found in the pages of the World's Fair and other publications, these were usually temperance or charitable foundations more concerned with the moral and spiritual salvation of the showpeople than their everyday business and way of life! The incentive for the start of the van dwellers association was the proposed legislation by George Smith, a self styled expert and evangelist from Coalsville. He believed that his mission was to reform and educate all members of the itinerant community in the United Kingdom, whom he referred to as:

“Dregs of society, that will one day put a stop to the work of civilisation, and bring to an end the advance in arts, science, law and commerce that have been making such rapid strides in the country.”

This no doubt had been an important organization, but it was far from what I had hoped to find. As I perused the available information I didn't want it to be true. I was after was a secret brotherhood of showmen which sat on powerful knowledge about the showman’s craft. Not an organization which lobbies politicians, and contests and gets showmen exempt from regulations. I had hoped to find a secret society that would have the key to make my performance as meaningful as I had found uncle Certini’s shows. This was when I was about 17 or 18, still in school and at that point I felt silly for having believed the ramblings of a mad old magician. I was disappointed and through that I realize how much I wished for it to be true. It turned out I had found a trade organization when I wanted a secret society. At that point I thought I gave up.  But little did I know, it would all come back to haunt me when I least expected it.

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 40

 The Crowd’s ever watching eye brings meaning to our craft.  You are there for them. Let them know how grateful you are for their attention.

Nepals Lost Circus Children + Mary Ellen Mark...

An investigation into the trafficking of Nepalese children to work in Indian circuses. A darker side of circus is exposed and explored by film maker Sky Neal. It follows the Esther Benjamins Memorial Foundation as they rescue children from circuses they have been sold to and taken to a refuge run by a woman called Shailaja CM. They are doing some great work to rid circuses of this archaic and abominable method of recruitment.

See the 25 minute documentary right here.

This is of course not the only side to Indian circus. My first exposure to Indian circus was through Photographer Mary Ellen Marks book 1989 called Indian Circus. I am lucky enough to have a copy I bought from Reg Bolton at a circus festival in Tasmania one year.

Mary Ellen Mark, ‘Twin Brothers Tulsi and Basant’ 

Lessons from the Way of the Showman - 39

A Free Showman can Free the Crowd.

Whispers of the Showman’s Guild

The first time I heard about the Showman’s Guild was from my Dad’s uncle Certini. He was a Norwegian magician and the one who got my father into doing magic. As often happens the Apprentice became a very different magician to his Master. 

Certini was a manipulator. He made cards, coins, thimbles, and lots of cigarettes, appear and disappear at his finger tips. Dad was always more interested in the shows as events and happenings than in the practice of slight of hand. Dad worked miracles with mechanical marvels and electro engeneering from his own workshop rather than producing endless streams of coins. But the main difference seemed to be more of a feeling. As you watched Dad you got pure escapism, perfect entertainment, whilst with uncle Certini there was a different intent. Although he did standard gentleman magic, by his presence, poise and intense presentations each coin that materialized in his empty hands seemed symbolic. Like it was one thing but meant something much more significant.

On rare occasions when I visited uncle Certini he talked about a secret brotherhood of showmen, called the Showman’s Guild. He talked about how the Illuminated Showmen had a different mindset, and different goals to most magicians. This kind of talk didn’t seem so strange to me since I was also part of a secret brotherhood of magicians. I mean the Magic Circle of Norway wasn’t a secret society as such, but it certainly was a society with and about secrets. What made the Guild different was partly my father’s reaction to uncle Certini talking about it. Dad always tried to end the conversation and get onto more practical matters.

Life Death

Uncle Certini had bad nerves I was told. He sometimes had to travel to rest them at a sanatorium in the Fjordlands. Dad later told me that he believed there was a connection between uncle Certini needing to rest his nerves and his preoccupation with the Showmans Guild. I was never so certain.

A product of mental instabilities or over active imagination, this all piqued an interest and a life long research project into first of all trying to establish the reality of this obscure organization, which proves to be most difficult, then puzzle together the tenants of their teachings which they called the Way of the Showman.

Through snippets found, quotations interpreted, reviews found in old news papers and most of all the hand written notes from uncle Certini’s inheritance I’ve got a fair outline of the societiy’s secret history and the goings on in this most singular initiatory Guild.