Acrobats, fire dancers fuel circus craze
Lisa Leff

SAN FRANCISCO—The DNA Lounge was a real circus the night The Mutaytor came to town. The band looked like a bunch of clowns. Young contortionists folded their limbs like fortune cookies above and around the stage. There were no complaints from the 500 or so cognoscenti who paid $20 each to watch acrobats and aerialists on ropes perform to a live percussive beat.
Once a month, the techno dance club hosts the Bohemian Carnival, an informal gathering of troupes from the Bay Area’s underground circus scene and a bellwether of a subculture trend taking hold in a city near you. “People are ready to be entertained on a much more visceral and darker level. There is this hunger to see something fancier,” said Mutaytor front man Buck Down, explaining why the group made clown costumes, fire spinners and jugglers part of its trance music act. “It pushes a button, and it’s a very primal button.”
Inspired by Cirque du Soleil and possessed of an advanced sense of the absurd, young adults who got their first taste of trapezes, tightropes and red noses at Burning Man or other indie art festivals are joining a growing number of small, alternative circuses with Big Top dreams. San Francisco, with at least 15 groups, appears to be the American center of the nouveau circus movement — a form that owes more to buskers and burlesque than Barnum and Bailey and already has swept Canada, Australia and parts of Europe.
Los Angeles, home of the Mutaytor-affiliated Cirque Bezerk, the Stilt Circus and the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque, also has a thriving indie circus scene. Seattle boasts a few companies, including Pure Cirkus, whose novelty is performers getting strung up with hooks piercing their flesh. St. Paul, Minn., and Grand Rapids, Mich., also have homegrown troupes. “There are always people who see themselves outside the cultural box. Circus hits those archetypes really well,” said Cypher Zero, who founded a New York-based aerial acrobatics group and two years ago opened the city’s first dedicated circus school for adults, the New York Circus Arts Academy.
Explaining what separates the urban circus subgenre from a traditional circus or the stylized drama of Cirque du Soleil can be difficult. Unlike Ringling Bros., there are no animal acts. The big top’s trademark three rings are abandoned for compact spaces where dancers, bands and acrobats do their thing simultaneously, or open-air venues where stilt-walkers and aerialists suspended from oversized sculptures mingle with the crowds. “I think of it as ‘omnitainment,’” said Robbie Kowal, a San Francisco disc jockey and music promoter who helps put on the Bohemian Carnival. “There are very few firsts left in music. The answer is visual stimulants.”