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Peering behind the big top
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The Witte Museum's latest hit is a real circus at times and an intimate portrait at others. Either way it truly is work putting on the greatest show on earth
Imagine traveling 11 months out of the year and spending the bulk of that time either on stage or in sprawling impromptu villages with an equally haphazard circus family.
Circus Folk: Secrets Behind the Big Top, showing at the Witte from October 24 through February 14, reveals the microcosm of families, superstitions and regulations that made the circus a reality in its prime. It also is testament to those seduced by romantic notions of show business, those looking for a second chance and those who knew nothing else but life in a traveling road show.
"What we decided to do was to talk about circus people who put the show on," said Brown Foundation curator Bruce Shackelford. "People talk about the entertainment, but they don't talk about the people that did this and lived this lifestyle. It's a way of living and people just see the show, but not the people that make the show possible. That's what we chose to show and we called it 'Circus Folk' because that's what they called themselves."
The exhibit is broken into four distinct chapters that include life in a traveling village, the intricacies and bonds of the circus family, the athleticism needed to be a performer and finally the rules and superstitions of the circus itself. Each piece lets a patron into the often private moments that were reserved for players and workers of the lowest order called "roustabouts."
The Hertzberg Collection, which comprises the exhibition, is readily considered to be the largest collection of circus fare in the country. Its arrival to San Antonio's Witte Museum has also led to a series of public programs to accompany the exhibit. They begin with "Clown Alley," a presentation explaining everything from how performers choose their stage name and their face to lectures by experts in the history of the circus and its performers.
"It takes a special person to want to go through this," Shackelford explained. "This was a very strenuous life. The height of it ran from the late 1890s to the early 1930s; those circuses moved everyday and the first people would arrive at four in the morning and erected the tent and then the performers would arrive. By midnight, the last of the people were leaving and they would be on the train to the next stop."
Due to rigorous travel schedules, rules were put in place to maintain the hierarchy within the circus world. That included some traveling shows prohibiting members from getting married during the season. Other regulations included calling a clown by their stage name only when dawning full costume and make-up. Like any sub-culture, circus folk adopted a special brand of superstition. They included only photographing elephants with their trunk pointed up for good luck.
For its obvious entertainment value, performers sometimes suffered from medical anomalies that made them marketable. A prime example was Tom Thumb, a sufferer of dwarfism and El Paso native Jake Erlich, an 8'6" giant that suffered from a tumor that precipitated great height. Arguably the most famous case was Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins that were staples of the circus prior to modern medicine.
"Much of this work was done by 250 people including a band and there was a group of people that supported them and set them up and you're talking over 1,000," said Shackelford. "In total, the circus was 1300 to 1600 people when most people only saw about 200 of them. It's no surprise to me how close these people got considering it was very close quarters everyday. The rules were not the same for everybody. They varied depending on who you were from the top performers at the apex and roustabouts at the very bottom."
Circus Folk: Secrets Behind the Big Top comes at a point when the Witte Museum is coming off a prolific 2008-09 season. Following nationally reviewed exhibitions like Our Body: The Universe Within, The Genius of Leonardo: Machines in Motion and Playing with Time, they boast 400,000 visitor yearly according to their Annual Fiscal Year Report. For now, the Witte can add this as another heavily anticipated exhibition.
For more information on the Witte Museum's Circus Folk, visit http://www.wittemuseum.org.
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