The Circus

I’m not talking about the figurative circus in my house right now with all of the dog issues, etc., but about the real circus.  I don’t recall ever going to a traditional big top circus, although I may have at some point in my childhood.  I don’t care to go to the real circus, because their animal practices tend to be sketchy, but I find circus stories fascinating and Cirque du Soleil amazing.

I just got back from Las Vegas where I saw “O” and Love.  Love is set to Beatles music.  It’s a great show, but it didn’t seem to me to be up to Cirque standards (I had also seen Cirque’s La Nouba in Florida a year or so ago).  They did some cool acrobatics, but a lot of it was about the music and dancing.  “O”, on the other hand, was unbelievable.  The stage is a giant swimming pool, so there’s a lot of diving and stuff on top of the trapeze, contortionist, and other acts.  It was amazing.  If you’re going to Vegas, go see it.

I also saw Le Reve, which is not a Cirque show, but in the same spirit.  It also takes place in water (and the air), but has more of an artistic twist.  So rather than just being entertaining, there were parts of it that were darker and more infused with emotion.  But the music was good and there were lots of incredible acrobatics, too.  The strength and concentration involved in these shows is breath-taking.

For a great circus story, I recommend that you read Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.  It’s just an all-around wonderful book about an old man remembering when he ran away with the circus and served as their veterinarian.  Everything about this book worked so well – the story, the characters, the setting, even the flashback aspect of it.

Another entertaining, though far stranger, book is Geek Love by Katherine Dunn.  This is a book about a family of circus freaks.  Hard to describe in a way that captures the strangeness of it, but definitely worth reading.