The circus is a family affair, and Circus Flora, our town's exciting circus, showed it off brilliantly both inside and outside the ring as it opened a June-long run last night at its tent next door to Powell Hall in Grand Center. The show, "Ingenioso," takes some of the Don Quixote tales and wraps them in circus language and costumes. Sometimes it simply ignores the Man of La Mancha, but no matter. The talent is solid, the evening moves smoothly and is more exciting and dramatic than it has been in the last couple of years.
But family and children, in an accidental combination of births and the well-known, inexorable passage of time, are a constant presence.
Clown extraordinaire and charming Sancho Panza, Giovanni Zoppe, introduced his eight-month-old son, balanced on his hand and wearing a red hat identical to his father's. Fierce equestrian Sasha Alexandre Nevidonski showed off his son, Leo, and aerial ribbon standouts Andrew Adams and Erika Gilfether also had a newborn son on display. Time has made its own impact on the Arches, the young tumblers who were skinny, scrabbly children in the early 1990s,when they first drew cheers. Now, the originals have grown into highly attractive young men and women, and some are ready to begin careers of their own. Hentoff's daughter, Elliana Hentoff-Killian was two weeks old when Zoppe, as Nino the clown, introduced her to circus audiences. Now she's part of a team, the Elliare Duet, paired with Claire Kuciejczyk-Kernan in aerial balance and dance on the lyra.
It's impossible to discuss Flora performers in terms of "better than," because I was like any other kid at the circus, and we all sat spellbound in the tent, our eyes wide with wonder, our hair (for those who have some) practically standing on end with excitement.
Julien Posada is thrilling on the slack wire, with a flamenco beat; Adams and Gilfether, as Adamo, are exciting and work in perfect harmony; Jenny Vidbel leads, in delightful style, a dozen white Welsh ponies and a few sheepdogs through a variety of tricks; Vince Bruce, grizzled and gnarled enough to have ridden the range with Will Rogers and Tom Mix, on a pair of gorgeous paint horses that might have been ridden by Tonto, makes his whips crackle like July 4 firecrackers, and twirls a rope in the style they made famous; Nevidonski rides his black horse as if he were Alfred Noyes' Highwayman, galloping along the road that "was a ribbon of moonlight. . . up to the old inn door."
The Cossack Riders, Omar Chinibekov, Sergey Latokhin and Elexey Bashaev, thundered around the ring while one of them achieving the feat of clinging to a galloping horse while crawling down one side, under its belly and up the other side. And the Pages, seven fliers, mesmerized the audience with their trapeze work. Willy, Jill, Mercedes, Anthony and April Page teamed with Eric Craft and Vanya Ponce for the usual flips and soaring exchanges which were glorious no matter how many times one sees them.
No circus is complete without clowns, and Zoppe is a remarkable clown who also works the trapezes, the swings, handles animals, including the only egg-laying rooster in the Western World, and gets involved in a funny, intricate, choreographed Indian-club throwing routine with the Arches, the veteran ringmaster Cecil MacKinnon, a talented, witty performer who has been with Circus Flora its entire 24 years.
Circus! Like dance, it needs no spoken language to entertain and instruct. I've had two chances to run away with a circus, and I still wonder what might have happened. . . .
Circus Flora, through June 27 on the Powell Hall parking lot, Grand Center
–Joe