Wheel of Death
Thursday, April 5, 2007

Glenn Collins of the NYT tackles the so-called Wheel of Death. One of the pioneers of this act was Elvin Bale, who starred in Ringling in the 1970s and was later crippled after flying over the bag in a canon act in Hong Kong in the 1980s. In a wheelchair, he plays a central role in my year in the circus, described in UNDER THE BIG TOP. With animals being run from the ring and clowning a dying art in America (and no longer a way to sell tickets), circuses may be back to selling risk.

“We take all the safety precautions we can,” said Nicole Feld, 29, who is producing the new show with her father, Kenneth. “But the wheel is a calculated risk.”

It has justified its billing. In 1994 a 20-year-old, Neville Campbell, was performing in the act at the Blackpool Tower Circus in Blackpool, England, when he lost his footing and fell 15 feet to his death.

The new act, performed after intermission, is officially called the Wheel of Steel this year because, according to Mr. Feld, Ringling’s chief executive, “We want people’s dreams to come true in this show, so why emphasize the negative?”

But circuses have hardly shied away from using the D-word to promote other attractions to ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages. Consider the Globe of Death (where motorcyclists roar upside down within a steel-mesh ball) and the Dive of Death, where performers slide headfirst down a chute or wire, stopping inches from the tanbark. Then there is the Cirque du Soleil’s death wheel, permanently installed in Las Vegas, with five performers in five whirling cages.

The Ringling wheel is so dangerous because — as Mr. Nock and Mr. Wallenda cheerfully explained on a recent afternoon — a safety net would be too narrow to prevent injury, and protective harnesses and wires would be impractical since the performers have to be unfettered to race atop the wheels — literally as fast as they can run — at a speed of nearly 20 miles an hour.

“Circus fans have come to expect the Wheel of Death, and it looks especially scary when they are running on top, high up in the arena,” said Erin Foley, the archivist of the Circus World Museum in Baraboo, Wis.

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"I May Be the Only Person on the Face of the Earth Who Loves the Smell of Dung"
Thursday, February 22, 2007

When I was in the circus, a priest came to the lot on the opening day in Deland, blessed the tent, and held a service for all the performers. Periodically during the year, a chaplain would pitch up on the lot and sort of hang around. Maybe there would be a service, nothing major. The far more noticeable religious activity was the competition among two different evangelical pentecostal Bible study groups to recruit different members. One was started by the family of wire walkers, the other by a branch of the trapeze artists. I attended one of these, complete with tongues, and the scene is described in UNDER THE BIG TOP.

I was thinking about this today when my brother sent me an article from that Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a circus chaplain. (The author, John Blake, wrote a wonderful piece about me a few years ago, calling me "a modern-day Indiana Jones.") Says retired priest Newell Graham, who has seen The Greatest Show on Earth 26 times, "I may be the only person on the face of this Earth that loves the smell of dung."

The current chaplain, the Rev. Jerry Hogan,travels at least 60,000 miles annually, performing baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals.

"You see people take their gifts to extraordinary levels," Hogan says, "and it reassures your faith, whatever that may be, that there is something more to life than what we readily experience."

Hogan is assisted by two Roman Catholic nuns who not only travel with the circus, but also help put the shows on. Sister Dorothy Fabritze criss-crosses the country with Ringling in a truck that hauls a chapel. She pulls the show's curtains, steering the entrance and exit of each act.

The constant travels remind her of biblical journeys: Abraham moving to a new land; Moses leading his people out of Egypt.

"They've taught me a lot about leaving from one place to another, letting go and trust," Fabritze says. "A trapeze artist has to have a lot of trust. The performers are trusting the crew to get things in the right place in the right time. So there's a lot of family values, a lot of trust in what we do and that's, of course, scriptural and spiritual."

Graham says he admires the efficiency of the circus so much that he's driven to towns just to watch the crew unpack railroad cars. It puts him off when people refer to a chaotic situation as a "circus."

"Trust me. There is absolutely nothing chaotic about the circus, in front of the footlights or behind the footlights," he says. "If many churches worked as smoothly as the circus, they would be spiritual powerhouses."

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