Paul Binder is phoning from a trailer next to a tent in a soggy field on Long Island. Outside, rain is falling.
“It’s going to be like this for several days,” he said. “I was just watching the Weather Channel. In this business, you get to be a big fan of the Weather Channel.”
Binder’s business is the circus. As co-founder and artistic director of the Big Apple Circus, one of a handful of small-scale, U.S.-based traveling circuses (and which opens its red and white big top in Chicago June 11 for 10 performances), he is tied to earth, wind and rain in a way, he said, that “is like living in the 19th Century.”
Which was, he went on, just about the last time that Americans could enjoy classic circus the way it originally was – up close and personal.
“In our show,” he said, “no seat is more than 50 feet from the ring. That makes all the difference. It’s what circuses were like here until about 1860 when Barnum and others figured out that you could make more money with a bigger tent, more rings. It’s the American way — bigger is better, right?
“But in getting bigger and bigger, circuses lost the closeness that humanizes the virtuoso moments, what you might call the tricks. When I hire acts, I look for a virtuoso performer who has the theatrical ability to make contact with an audience. A performer looks you in the eye and suddenly does a double somersault. That moment isn’t about some special effect or light show. It’s about the performer and you.”
In the European tradition
Each tour of the Big Apple Circus has a theme. This season’s is “The Medicine Show.” Doc Pitchum rolls into a small town in an earlier America and offers an elixir that will cure what ails you. It’s a con, of course. Well, maybe not. The townsfolk soon are turning into acrobats, magicians and other performers; and, if what was ailing was the funny bone and the sense of wonder, Doc proves to be a godsend.
“America got the short end of the stick with the demise of smaller circuses,” Binder said. “But the tradition continued in Europe. There’s probably no one in Switzerland, for instance, who doesn’t remember, as a child, the time the circus came to their village.”
Performers kept their art alive by passing it down in the family. The Big Apple’s elephant trainer, William Woodcock, is an example. His father left home at 16 to join a circus and became an elephant trainer. His mother’s family were the Ortons whose Orton Bros. Circus opened in 1853. When Woodcock was a boy, the family joke was that he would run away to join a home.
Binder’s wife’s family, the Schumanns of Denmark, are now in their sixth generation of equestrians. Katja Schumann Binder is one of the main performers in the Big Apple Circus and is joined by her 80-year-old father, Max. The Binder children also are in the show. Katherine, 12, does an acrobatic turn; Max, 10, sets a black-light sequence in motion.
Binder got the idea for bringing classic, intimate circus back to the U.S. while in a juggling act in a Parisian circus with partner Michael Christensen (co-founder of Big Apple and now its creative director).
“It was great to be in France and be an artiste,” Binder said, “but I wanted to live in the U.S.”
So, like his elephant trainer’s family joke, Binder ran away from the circus and came home. In this country, there were a few smaller shows like the Kelly Miller Circus, founded in 1938 and based in Oklahoma, and San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus, started in 1974 (now the New Pickle Circus).
He decided to make his circus a not-for-profit performing arts organization dedicated to the “preservation and advancement of classical one-ring circus in America.” He sought out donations and foundation support.
In 1977, the Big Apple Circus became the performing arm of the New York School for Circus Arts, a not-for-profit community organization. Other aspects of the school are a Circus Arts in Education program based in a performing arts school in East Harlem and a Clown Care Unit that puts “Doctors of Delight” into hospitals in New York, Boston and Washington 50 weeks a year. Also, the circus offers special performances such as the “Circus of the Senses” for blind and deaf children.
Other not-for-profit circuses now include the all-puppet Pan-Twilight Circus based in Rhode Island and the L.A. Circus founded in 1991.
As a community-based show troupe, the Big Apple Circus tries to be sensitive to the community’s concerns, one of those being the humane treatment of animals.
“First of all,” Binder said, “we employ the best and most humane trainers. Also, we use only animals — horses, dogs, elephants — that have had a working relationship with man.”
The promotional material for the Muttville Comix Troupe, an act within the circus, notes that its canine performers “have been rescued from shelters around the world.”
One day you’re sitting on death row, the next, show business!
Not a money-maker
“Being a not-for-profit community organization was the only way we could have quality performers,” Binder said. “With purposely small audiences, we’d otherwise have to charge huge ticket prices. As it is, we’re scraping by, but we’re alive. What we did was an experiment based on a plank and a passion,”
A book about the Big Apple called it “The New American Circus,” but Binder cautioned that the economics of small-scale circuses make it unlikely that his show is leading a trend, that the one-ring circus will become a growth industry.
“Every day’s a challenge,” Binder said, “but, every day, I’m surrounded by amazing people. I remember several years ago, when we were playing Lincoln Center, something like 28 inches of snow fell overnight. Tom Larson, who is our performance director now, was in charge of the tent then. He and his crew climbed up on top of the tent to sweep the snow off so it wouldn’t collapse. He was up at the very top, the snow in his face, the wind howling around him. He yelled down, `Just think. We’re the only people in the world doing this right now.’ “
