Although the Gamma Phi Circus of Illinois State University and the Flying High Circus of Florida State University are the only major circuses sponsored by four-year colleges today in the United States, college circuses were chic in the early 1900s.
Northwestern’s own circus began in 1908 as a YWCA fundraiser outside of the old Willard Hall (now the Music Administration Building) and then moved to the once-huge Patten Gym. Performed every spring until 1933 (with the exception of 1918 because of the United States’ entry into World War I), the weekend-long circus featured acts by fraternities and sororities, gymnists, trapeze artists and even the occasional elephant, according to records from the University Archives.
The circus was “the biggest burlesque-cum-carnival-cum-fundraiser that anyone could imagine,” writes Jay Pridmore in his book “Northwestern University: Celebrating 150 Years.”
A parade, huge acrobatic productions and a midway with sideshows and booths were all elements of the circus, which in 1930 cost about $12,000 but took in over $20,000 in revenue. Proceeds were donated to the YMCA and the YWCA.
Planning for the circus took the entire school year. Besides the two figureheads of the circus, a male “Circus Solly” and a female “Circus Sally” who led the proceedings much like today’s Dance Marathon emcees, hundreds of students raised money, planned acts and rehearsed for the circus.
The 1921 Syllabus described the annual circus publication, sometimes called the “Surkuss Solly” and sometimes the “NU Barker,” as full of “juicy bits of scandal, sorority secrets (and) campus politics.”
The last NU circus was in 1932. It was cancelled because “planning the event took too much time from the real purpose of the University,” according to NU’s Web site.
LaVahn Hoh, a professor at the University of Virginia and a circus historian, said that college circuses in the early 1900s were an effort to mirror the immensely popular circuses that toured the United States at the same time.
“The circus really was the Internet back then,” Hoh said. “It was the computer screen of today — it brought everything to your home town. Students were trying to emulate what was going on in the world.”
The downfall of most college circuses accompanied the downfall of the professional circus, which happened in the 1940s, Hoh said. “I think that the reason that many (college circuses) ended is that the interest and the impetus for the circus really had started to wane by that time,” Hoh said. “By the time we get into the 1940s and the ’50s, we start having TV and radio. The interest and the backing for (the circus) just disappeared.”
The rebirth of the circus in America as a smaller, more intimate art form happened in the early 1970s and includes groups like Cirque du Soleil, said Jeff Jenkins, co-founder of Chicago’s Midnight Circus and co-artistic director of the international youth circus Circus Smirkus.
“Circus was really all but dead in the late 1960s,” he said. “The new circus movement started out as a group of people who came from other genres — acting, cinema, dance, gymnastics. It’s a vision of making the circus more intimate, more accessible, more artistic.”
That means more emphasis on creative physical movement and less on the elephant-and-tiger show seen in Las Vegas and in the touring Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, he said.
According to Jenkins: “You’ll always see the dog acts, some cat acts. But the elephants and the giraffes and the crocodiles — they’re on their way out.”
