Jessica Carleton has never done a back handspring. She’s watching her acrobatics instructor quizzically as he demonstrates, arching backwards and then flipping his body around, landing on his feet.
“One and two! Now your turn,” he says, placing his hands near her legs for support.
She laughs, shrugs at the small group that has accumulated around her and gamely raises her arms overhead. On one, she leans back. On two, she lands on her arms, then flips the rest of her body over. There is a smattering of applause as she looks up, surprised. She has landed on her feet.
Carleton isn’t running away to join the circus. The Communication junior is among 15 Northwestern students who have decided to bring the circus back to NU — reviving a 24-year tradition last seen on campus in 1932.
“Circus is becoming cool again. We’re not just carnies anymore,” says Medill senior Francey Grund, who co-founded the group with Communication freshman Matt Sheelen.
Sheelen, Carleton and two other circus members are at the Circus Factory in Chicago on a Tuesday night, learning the basics from members of Chicago’s Midnight Circus. It’s Communication sophomore Davora Sides’ turn to do a back handspring, and acrobatics coach Nyangar Batbataar is reassuring her.
“Jump and arch,” he demonstrates. “One and two.”
Sheelen and Grund began planning an NU circus in the beginning of Fall Quarter. Both had experience in circus arts: Sheelen is a clown who performed professionally in high school with friend and current Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey clown Ryan Combs, and Grund is a 13-year veteran of Circus Smirkus, an international youth summer circus.
Grund had met Sheelen at a performance of Circus Smirkus but was surprised to hear from him in the fall. “I got a message on my answering machine — ‘Hey, this is Matt, do you want to start a circus?'” she says.
At the time, neither were aware that the NU circus was once an extravagant tradition. From 1908 to 1932, students organized a campuswide circus with animals, acrobatics and a midway. “We’re bringing it back and making it better than ever,” says Sheelen.
Sheelen and Grund’s ultimate vision is to have a full-fledged performance with stunts, jugglers, acrobats and aerial routines, perhaps on the lakefill. But for now, they are focused on recruiting members and training a team of students in the fundamentals of circus skills — basic movement, tumbling, juggling and lifts. They plan to have a showcase at the end of Spring Quarter and then spend the summer lobbying for funds from donors and attracting new members.
“Until we have our show, we want everyone to be part of the circus,” says Sheelen. “As long as they’re enthusiastic and motivated, we’d love to have them. Right now we’re concentrating on giving them the best instruction that we can.”
Circus Factory classes are a mix of warm-ups, tumbling and team-building exercises. As the students gain skills, they’ll start creating their own routines.
“A lot of circus feels like you’re doing the impossible, and it feels really good to do that,” says Sides, who attended a circus summer camp during high school. “On the flying trapeze I’ve done a trick — you actually fly out, get caught by someone else by the legs and they return you back to the original bar. The timing and the precision and the trust — it’s so beautiful to see it all happen.”
Although Sheelen, Grund and Sides had circus training before the fall of 2003, other circus members are novices. Carleton’s first encounter with circus arts was in the fall with an NU class in conjunction with the Lookingglass Theatre Company. “It’s totally new to me,” Carleton says. “(Instructor Batbataar) tells you you’re going to do things that you’ve never even dreamed you can do. They know you better than you know yourself.”
Communication sophomore Nathan Drackett was also part of the Lookingglass program before he joined the circus.
“The (Lookingglass) workshop was when I found out that I could actually hold someone up there, that I could lift them in the air,” he says. “In the very beginning it was really scary. I didn’t know I could do that — but once you do it a couple times, it’s not scary.”
Drackett says teamwork is the most rewarding element of the circus. “You have to depend on other people. You have to be aware of everyone else and know where they are.”
The performers are not without obstacles. Grund dislocated her shoulder this summer and won’t be able to physically train with the circus until March.
And after a hip injury during his sophomore year of high school, Sheelen was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition that makes physical movement taxing at best. Clowning has become his method of dealing with the pain, he says.
“The only time my pain ever goes away is when I’m clowning or acting,” Sheelen says. “If the pain can go away when I’m clowning, what’s a better motivation than that?”
Batbataar, their acrobatics instructor, is a native of Mongolia who joined the Mongolian State Circus at age seven after it came to his school for a performance. “I fell in love with the circus,” he says. “After that, I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about was the circus. My mom gave me money to buy bread at the store, I spent it at the circus.”
Batbataar has been with the Midnight Circus for six years and has his own circus, Blue Sky International Youth Circus. He started work with the NU circus in January. “They want to do it. I can tell,” he says. “I don’t know how to explain it — they want more, more, more stuff. I’m ready to teach them.”
Students are trained by a bevy of Midnight Circus staff, as well as Jeff Jenkins and Julie Greenberg, the co-founders of Midnight Circus and co-artistic directors of Circus Smirkus. Sheelen and company also plan to train with Evanston’s Actors Gymnasium, a circus and performing arts school.
Training new circus performers is like “building a house,” says Jenkins. “You can build a big, fancy house but if the foundation is weak, it will crumble easily. The Russians have a saying: ‘You can either lift weights, or you can be strong.’ We’ve been working on getting them strong and flexible. Everyone wants to come in and start flipping and flying right away, but these guys have discipline.”
Successfully carrying out a circus on campus will be a difficult feat, says LaVahn Hoh, a circus historian and professor at the University of Virginia.
“They need to determine what is going to be the philosophy of it — what they are going to try to accomplish,” Hoh says. “The circus today is probably the most expensive art form that’s out there. It’s going to take a lot of money, but it’s also going to take a lot of interest and enthusiasm on the students’ part.”
Grund and Sheelen say their love of circus arts — and realistic planning and training — will come to fruition in the next few years.
“Part of loving the circus is wanting to draw everyone in,” Grund says. “That’s why the shows are so fun, because for the audience, you become part of the circus for two hours. It’s not like a play, where there’s a wall between actors and the audience. In circus, it’s for you. It’s for the audience.
“I figured we had nothing to lose and we had a circus to gain. It would be cool to come back in 10 years and see a purple-and-white big top on the lakefill.”
