Freaks
& Fire
The Underground Reinvention of Circus
J. Dee Hill, with photography by Phil Hollenbeck
NEWSFLASH:
Don't miss the author when she makes an appearance with the Yard Dogs
at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on May 10! Or catch
her on the rest of her tour with the Yard Dogs!
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Freaks
& Fire |
The Underground Reinvention of Circus by J. Dee Hill and Phil Hollenbeck….Hill's text and Hollenbeck's photos perfectly capture the raucous wit and energy that enable these postmodern circus tramps to transcend their low-budget roots.”—Texas Monthly Freaks and Fire is a free-falling leap into the world of radical circus. Beyond the historical confines of Ringling Bros. and scorning the big-budget schemes of Cirque du Soleil, these tightly knit troupes focus on bringing audiences thrills spun around an ideological center. From the sick-out shockfests of the infamous Jim Rose Circus Sideshow to the anarchic burlesque of the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus to the obscure but elegant puppetry of the Cloudseeding Circus of the Performative Object, Freaks and Fire brings readers into the diverse and all-consuming world of circus as commentary, lifestyle and play. The only book to chronicle the rise of the alternative circus, Freaks and Fire gives us much more than just the show as spectacle. By examining the role of the freak in society and the re-emergence of the tribe, it also gives us a snapshot of society itself, of the larger audience vaudevillians seeks to dazzle and challenge. An insider's view of the scary, sexy backstage world of performers on the anarchistic fringe, Freaks and Fire follows a dozen touring troupes letting us in on why they perform and how they make ends meet. "Not for the nervous of stomach.... An engaging social history of a dirty and dark corner of a world of homogenized entertainment."—Men’s Health J. Dee Hill is a freelance writer living in Dallas, Texas. She has served in the past as Southwest bureau chief of Adweek magazine and as a foreign correspondent based in Prague, Czech Republic. Hill has been a featured speaker at universities and museums on circus art, advertising and culture. Hill is also a performing fire dancer whose love of alternative art forms motivated her to begin writing Freaks and Fire. Commercial photographer Phil Hollenbeck is editor emeritus and co-creator of Rough magazine, a publication of the Dallas Society of Visual Communications. He also lives in Dallas, where he travels in his own “art car.” BarGarr Letterpress is located in McKinney, Texas and on the web at bargarrletterpress.com. |
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Excerpts from Chapter 6: Bantu Mystic Family Circus
It was
not until midnight that the full Bantu Mystic Family Circus made a thunderous
entry to the accompaniment of large, handheld tribal drums. Monkey men,
their torsos painted with brilliant markings of white, red and black,
faces obscured by strange masks, gamboled around the drummers. A flock
of white-garbed dancers, leather-wearing butoh dancer crocodiles, grandmother
owls draped in feathers and shawls and other exotic creatures followed.
Multiethnic faces of black, brown and white blended with the multi-specied
aspect of the crowd. The room erupted into a single joyous jumping.
And almost as suddenly, the drums died away. In the ensuing hush, one
could actually hear the shifting of polyester costume fabrics and clicking
of beads as hundreds of San Francisco hipsters sat down in a giant circle.
The audience and performers joined in a series of ohms in different tonal
ranges, creating a ceremonial stillness and focus. Yin and yang, the four
directions, the five elements and the eight natural forces were invoked,
and homage paid to the radiant multiplexity of the Ten Thousand Things.
Tekeba Bantu, the African-American/Native American storyteller and co-founder
of the circus, paced around the circle in a robe and turban, carrying
a large rattle. “Now my children, may I have your attention please,”
he began, with poetic phrasing. “This is an ancient story, told
thousands of years ago./ I am an ancient teacher, and a jojo/ And I want
you to walk through this window/ Through time, to meet a young man: Yambo
Yate.“Yambo Yate!” The crowd, engaged, repeated the name [yam-bo
ya-tay] loudly among themselves, as if relishing the sound of a great
joke or a great mystery…
“It’s really about generating a culture, whether it be an information culture like Bindlestiff, or whether it’s an economical or ecological alternative like Mystic Family,” adds Paradox. “With Mystic Family the evolution feels like it’s about meditation and the mystical ways. Who are the elders still teaching the mystical ways? How do we link up to learn the different systems like magical systems of alchemy, magical systems of cabbala, and magical systems of astrology? All of those things we can play with and embody because there’s value in them. They wouldn’t be as old as they are if there wasn’t value in them. It’s like vaudeville, the way Bindlestiff goes ‘there’s value in 1940’s America.’ And I think every circus family has its kung fu style or a form. What I want Mystic Family to be about is learning the forms that teach how to live in harmony, how to live in unity, how to live in song, and how to tap into creation collectively.”
The phenomenon
of alternative circus performance can be seen as the theatrical dimension
to one generation’s wholesale rediscovery of the concept of the
tribe. Their position is reminiscent of the strolling players in Ingmar
Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal”. In the film, the traveling
circus performers, with their innocence and play, are the only survivors
of the plague, represented as a sort of disease of the human spirit incarnate
in the Crusades. Circus, the tribal entertainment, eludes the modern world
with its malaises and plagues. This is not mere regression or a rejection
of modernity. (After all, not many of the “modern primitives”
want to be without their cell phones or Internet access.) Rather, it is
an attempt to embrace the root, to continue to hold tribal affiliation
as a foundation upon which more complex means of relating can be built…
A return to tribalism is taking place – but reinvented from the
perspective of the holon which follows it, that is to say, without the
ethnocentrism, without the fear of outsiders, without irrational taboos,
without the many flaws which flowed from the original form of tribal affiliation.
Tribes are sought that sustain the individual, in all his or her peculiarities,
while preserving access to global consciousness.