Damn everything but the circus!…The average ‘painter’ ‘sculptor’ ‘poet’ ‘composer’ ‘playwright’ is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown’s mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.
E.E. Cummings, Staging Modern American Life: Popular Culture in the Experimental Theatre of Millay, Cummings, and Dos Passos, Palgrave Macmillan, 25 October 2011, p. 60
“Damn everything but the circus!” Yes.
Because what else demands that kind of total-body commitment, that absolute surrender to the moment when failure means actual physical consequences? Not the gallery opening where everyone’s sipping shitty wine and nodding at squares on walls. Not the poetry reading where the worst that happens is someone coughs during your metaphor.
The circus is the last honest thing we’ve got. It’s the place where pretension gets you killed, where you can’t fake it through another verse or brush stroke, where the body becomes the only instrument that matters and it better be tuned or you’re eating sawdust. Those aerialists wrapping themselves in silk aren’t making statements about the human condition, they ARE the human condition, suspended thirty feet up with nothing but friction and nerve keeping them from the floor.
And Cummings knew it. The painter can bullshit about intention. The sculptor can revise. The playwright can rewrite act three. But that person orchestrating twenty lions? That person leaping through the hoop from the galloping horse? They’re working in real time with real stakes, and the audience knows it, feels it in their gut, that primal recognition that this could all go wrong right now.
San Francisco gets this, or used to. The don’t have lions or horses but The Circus Center keeps this flame burning in a city increasingly scrubbed clean of anything with an actual edge, anything that might leave a bruise or a callus. This isn’t performance art, it’s just performance, stripped of the academic safety net, the theoretical framework. It’s humans doing impossible things with their meat and bones because that’s what we’ve done since we figured out we could throw ourselves higher than we should.