Authors: Catherine Bush
Along with her ticket to the circus, she was handed a program in Danish, largely inscrutable, but there were photographs, in grainy black and white, of the child performers forming human pyramids and airborne in front of a crowd of children squatting on what was presumably an Ethiopian hillside.
As Sara took her seat in one of the raked rows, musicians filed to a cluster of instruments and amplifiers in front of a raised and curtained stage. Not children but late teenagers. A hush fell over the audience as one of the young men settled the strap of a saxophone across his shoulder, another took up an instrument that resembled a lyre, yet another cradled a long-necked, single-stringed instrument and shook out his other arm, which held a bow, and an older girl, willowy and slight in a loose white costume, curved a cordless mike into place over one cheek.
When the curtains parted, the young woman began to sing, her sinuous voice rising, the wail of the saxophone rising with it, above the pluck and vibration of the strings, a pulse starting. Across the stage lay a row of blankets, humped forms beneath them, all still, until the one in the middle began to stir, limbs in a bright-blue leotard protruding, limbs that then shucked off the blanket to reveal an elfin boy, who soared into a backflip. The blankets to either side of him shifted, rose up, and were tossed off as two other boys, clad in yellow and red, tumbled into somersaults, and beside these, two more forms lifted their blankets upward and were revealed to be girls, in looser white outfits, like that of the singer, bodies balanced on forearms and chests, legs arced back above their heads, blankets dangling and twitching from their feet.
There wasn’t precisely a story, although the three boys who’d come from beneath the blankets seemed to be on a journey in which they encountered groups of other performers, who were eager to show off to the boys what they could do, as were the boys, in turn, so that an air of lighthearted one-upmanship passed back and forth. There was some comic miming: one of the boys disappeared and had to be searched for. A trio of girls helped. Jugglers appeared, and stilt-walkers, two slim earnest boys atop tall wooden legs. The boy in blue reappeared on a unicycle, arms waggling, chased by the boys in yellow and red, then by an older, menacing boy on stilts. The music was fervent, propulsive, at moments almost a lament. Some of the children seemed as young as eight, or ten, and others were teenagers, one of them tall and strutting, with the wisp of a moustache. All of this Sara imagined describing to her lover, David.
A fleet-footed flock of boys rushed into sight and rippled across the stage in barrel rolls, bending at the waist and diving into the air. Boys climbed atop the shoulders of other boys and sprang into somersaulting dives. A row of four boys held out their hands to three, who hoisted themselves upon the shoulders of the first row, then two more climbed atop those, toes curled around the shoulders of the boys below, and the boy in blue was lifted into place atop the pyramid, the boys at the ends of each row holding their arms out while the other boys gripped the legs of those above them, the tower wobbling yet intact, the boys’ faces alight with exhilarated concentration, the boy in blue grinning at the top. To a shower of applause, he toppled forward, caught in the arms of two girls.
More girls shook their shoulders in a dance, a host of tiny braids tumbling around their ears, then arched into backbends and again formed a human pyramid; atop a row of three, two, an older girl balanced on arms and shoulders curved her torso and legs so far around that her feet dangled like hands beside her head. There were perhaps sixteen performers in total, although it was difficult to count, all the bodies in motion, their energy infectious, their agility so beguiling that Sara was caught up, entranced. Two boys entered carrying flaming torches and began to toss them back and forth. What she felt from them: such pleasure, such excitement.
The music, like the performance, reached a crescendo, sound and movement, the female vocalist’s voice sailing high as if soaring among the bodies and pressing them onward, and the saxophone offered its own fevered surges. Two solemn, almond-eyed boys dragged out a span of thick rope and, from either side of the stage, began to turn it like an enormous skipping rope. The tall, moustached boy held a match to it and flame licked its way along the span, leaping along it as the performers began to hurl themselves over the flames, one after another, the blue boy, after a series of speeding backflips, hurtling over the burning rope last to land, still grinning, arms outstretched.
Applause erupted as the children bowed, sweaty, breathless, the flaming rope extinguished, before they, too, began to clap, and two boys slipped into the wings and tugged a man into sight.
Tall, he ducked his head so that his face was hidden beneath his red baseball cap, as if he were bashful or wished to reduce his height. Not obviously Ethiopian: he did not have the distinctive look of the Amhara, anyway. A muscled, supple-limbed, pale black man in a white T-shirt, who pulled off his cap to reveal cropped hair and a radiant and dimpled smile. He held up his hands to applaud the children before opening his arms to the audience and taking a deep bow himself. The children and teenagers crowded close to him, flushed and quivery, as if drawn to him, and he in turn vibrated in their presence, his gaze alight. He pressed his hands against his jean-covered thighs. After motioning to the audience to quiet themselves, he began to speak. In English. A young blonde woman, holding a microphone at the side of the stage, translated his words into Danish.
Thank you, he said, thank you so much for coming. His lilting voice unfurled itself, and Sara thought she heard the hint of an accent, although she couldn’t place it.
We are so very thrilled to be with you on our second tour to Europe. We have travelled very far in five years. In five years the world knows of us, and we are happy to show the world what we have achieved in this time, to say this is what is coming out of Ethiopia, not starving children, but this energy, this accomplishment.
There was a touch of self-consciousness in the way he used his voice, as if he were playing an instrument, yet his warmth and combination of fervour and charm overtook whatever was manipulative. He breathed out a generosity that made him the kind of man you felt compelled to watch.
He waited for the young woman to translate his words before continuing. We have taken some of the traditions of Ethiopian music and dance and wedded them to circus. There is no tradition of circus in Ethiopia. Five years ago when I came to Addis as a teacher, I had no idea to create this. We began with nothing and made one show, and there was such enthusiasm that now we have a circus and a circus school, and other circuses are forming in other towns, and in other parts of East Africa, an entire movement. We work with children of the street, but this is not all we do. We work with all children who come to us, who wish to study circus, and we have a great amount of support from the NGOs, the non-governmental agencies, who love how we go into communities to perform and bring social messages to people through our shows and offer children this opportunity for self-affirmation and self-discipline. What I wish is to show children what is possible, create a magic, for children, for everyone, to transform things, to say this is what a circus can do and what children can do, wherever they are in the world. There are flyers about us in the lobby, and there is also a donations box if you wish to give more to our projects. We are grateful for any support.
He used his hands as he spoke, his flexible fingers shaping the air. Where was he from? Sara puzzled through what had to be his bio, in Danish. Raymond Renaud his name was.
Canadisk
. Canadian.
Fra Montreal.
A shift occurred in the nature of her curiosity once their shared nationality was revealed. Yet there was his placeless accent and occasionally odd diction. How, she wondered, had he come to be in Addis? His age was hard to determine: he looked young but not too young, perhaps close to forty, and therefore around the same age or slightly older than she was.
And the children, the performers, what was it like for them to be in Copenhagen, so far from Addis Ababa, breathing in the cool air and the smell of the sea, and already at this time of spring living through the great expanse of a northern twilight. How much did they see or get about in the places where they travelled? There were, yes, sixteen of them, plus the musicians. It would be expensive to tour a group like this. They were performing three shows plus two daytime performances for schoolchildren, funded, to judge by the logos in the program, by various levels of various governments.
Please tell all your friends, the young woman said, in English and Danish. The children were making their way offstage, the man — their founder, director, leader — stood out in his white shirt, guiding the performers like a shepherd, one hand briefly hovering between the shoulder blades of one of the younger boys.
In the middle of the next week, back in Toronto, Sara pulled open the door of a Queen Street art gallery, shaking off a skitter of rain, to find herself in the path of her old friend Juliet Levin and Juliet’s partner, a photographer, on their way out of the clamorous opening of a show of pinhole photographs. Max, leather-jacketed and feline, had his arm around Juliet, gamine in a pink coat and shiny boots that ran up to her knees. Juliet had the same nervous prettiness and slant to her posture, as if she were rushing into a wind, that she’d had since their university days in Montreal.
Sara kissed Juliet’s warm and perfumed skin and felt the press of Juliet’s lips against her own, one cheek then the other. They exchanged the usual phrases — how are you, it’s lovely to see you — while Sara scanned the room beyond Juliet’s pink shoulder for a glimpse of Soraya Green, the friend and fellow journalist whom she was meeting and to whom she was going to give the lowdown on the conference in Copenhagen.
Every encounter with Juliet carried a whiff of the past that had to be shucked off or contained. There it was, fainter than previously, yet not entirely neutralized. Juliet, daughter of a socialist doctor, had once told a story about going into a bar back home in Winnipeg and asking for a whisky sour only to find that the barman didn’t know what that was. In telling this story, she’d seemed to want to affirm how far she’d come from her place of origin. Juliet had been good to Sara. She had provided Sara with a place to live when Sara had nowhere else to go and had given her unwavering support in the months leading up to the trial, after Sara had been charged with theft and fraud. Juliet had offered of her own accord to stand as a character witness in Sara’s defence. One night, early in her stay in the apartment on avenue de l’Esplanade, Sara had walked into Juliet’s bedroom to find Juliet, wrapped in a wool cardigan and flannel nightgown and hockey socks, studying at her desk, and said, I did not steal that woman’s wallet or use her credit card. And Juliet had turned, her face bright in the lamplight, and said, I know you didn’t.
They had not become friends in the Feminism and Sexuality seminar in which they’d first met. Juliet had been one of the ones who took a lot of notes and didn’t talk much, and who hesitated when she did talk. Once, during that semester, a year and a half before the trial, they had run into each other filing out of a dance performance in a loft on Saint-Laurent. Going to see dance was something Sara did on her own. Not many undergraduates went off-campus to see shows, but she was older than most, four years older, and already had, to her mind, an adult life, and was in a phase during which she liked to sit in the dark, immersed in the fierce movement and physical conviction of the dancers’ bodies, feeling the sustaining heat of her still-secret relationship with Graham Finnessey deep in her belly and limbs. Most of the people she knew in political science, or historians, like Graham, weren’t interested in dance. She wore a sheepskin coat and tall black boots and felt alluring and vital as she strode through the Montreal streets. And there was Juliet Levin, with some friends, fellow fine arts or humanities students, all dressed in black, congregating near the door where the dancers would appear. How upright, beneath her silky sweater and skirt, Juliet’s posture was, how obvious her longing to be if not a dancer then mistaken for a dancer or someone like a dancer. In the gallery entrance, in Toronto, a trace of this moment still quivered in her.
We’re on our way out to dinner, Juliet said as Max bounded ahead of her through the door and into the street, while Juliet allowed herself to be borne back inside, along with Sara, leaving the doorway to a laughing couple on their way in.
Juliet sounded apologetic, as if she hoped to give the impression of wanting to chat for longer, even if she couldn’t.
I saw something in Copenhagen last week that might interest you, Sara said. The thought had not occurred to her until this moment. Although she and Juliet had not gotten together in some time, years in fact, there remained a sense of indebtedness in her toward Juliet for all that Juliet had once done, and simultaneously a violent longing to be free of this feeling. I was in Copenhagen for a conference and saw a children’s circus from Ethiopia founded by a guy from Montreal. They were performing, they’re great, they do a lot of acrobatics. They tour internationally and are involved in social outreach, mostly in Ethiopia, from the sound of it. It might be a good fit for your show.
For the past three years, Juliet had been a producer for a national television arts show. Yet now, at these words, she looked strained. The show’s been cancelled.
Oh, Julie, I’m sorry, I had no idea. What happened?
They want to reinvent it, they said. Make it more youth-oriented.
Are you definitely out of a job?
I don’t know yet.
Well, this could be something youth-oriented. He’d be telegenic, the circus founder. There’s the Montreal angle. And the kids. Maybe you can do something with it anyway?
Juliet nodded offhandedly and pulled a little black notebook out of her handbag. Do you have any contact info?
His name is Raymond something. Renaud, Renouf, something like that. And the circus is Cirkus Mirak.