Circuses: Brown Lake

Imagine a circus being performed in an operating amphitheater. It seems a bit clinical, but that’s more or less what has been happening since the Great Moscow Circus arrived in Manhattan last week. Americans accustomed to the fanfaring, drum-rolling, three-ring mesmeric confusion of the P. T. Barnum tradition are asked to crowd in close and watch single acts performed in a small single ring. Whole tiers of the high seats at Madison Square Garden are deliberately left unsold. There is no parade. There are no spangled multitudes. There are no barkers, and even the soda-peanut-popcorn hawkers are forbidden to hustle during the acts. Intimacy is the effect the Russians want.

The result is a stunning and memorable show. There are no distractions to hide mediocrity. The Russians put an individual out there on the dirt floor of the ring, spotlight him, and, presumably, he either excels, or next January—after the circus completes a tour of Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee and Minneapolis—he will be selling astrakhans in the GUM store.

Strength & Grace. The troupe is small and select, a circus minimus with only 63 performers chosen from 7,000 who tour Russia in multiple subdivisions of the state circus. The performers are young, graceful, good-looking, and built like red bricks. Mixing biceps and ballet, with an orchestra adding swatches of Tchaikovsky and Khachaturian, their show might well have been called Brawn Lake.

Six Russian gymnacrobats begin their act by holding themselves in the air at arm’s length from vertical poles while they spin around in circles, smiling. An alpine aerialist climbs a high wire 45° steep with two women standing on his head. Four girls in sequined lavender bikinis dance on a big coffee table, going through motions that could be called sexnastics.

Stilts & Filler. Two packs of savage short-haired dogs, Pavlovingly trained by Victoria Olkhovikova, line up every night to play soccer. They head the ball expertly, smash into one another, knock over nets and goal posts in canicidal scoring rushes, spill out of bounds by the yelping dozen, and engulf helpless photographers in their wild, uncontainable scrimmage. A man walking on 8-ft. stilts steps onto a springboard; two men jump onto the other end of the springboard, and the stilt man arcs into the air, 25 ft. up, slowly turning over in a backward somersault, landing perfectly on his stilts.

All these separate acts are interspersed and punctuated by the subdued gesturing of Oleg Popov, who is celebrated as one of the world’s great clowns. A thoroughly trained circus performer, he can walk the tightwire or the slack wire; he is both animal trainer and juggler. He takes no pratfalls, and he is not the sad flopsy-mopsy fopsy that most U.S. clowns make themselves, but it is difficult to see why he is so renowned. Hailed as a star, he is really little more than a mildly engaging filler.

Ursa Major. As for animals: no elephants. No tigers. No lions. No giraffes. No orangutans. Bears.

Big bears. Little bears. Black bears. Brown bears. Mamma bears. Great strong hammer-sickle thick-coated rocket-powered Soviet bears. They eat 700 Ibs. of lump sugar a day and some day their teeth will fall out, but meanwhile they have been so well trained by Valentin Filatov that they are the essential stars of the Soviet circus. They roller-skate, ride bicycles and scooters, and hang from whirling trapezes. Three of them draw a troika. Two of them fight, wearing boxing gloves. They hook and jab at each other’s noses with grizzly accuracy (of course, a bear’s nose is a big target). They drive motorcycles in the dark, turning the headlights on and off and stopping for traffic lights along the way. They are so intelligent that they are painful to watch. It makes an American think of all those snobbish slobbish fat brown blubber-bottomed freeloading Yellowstone bears, who have yet to lift paw or claw for their country.