This article brought home the source of one of the appeals of leading pop artists like Madonna, or Kylie Monogue. In their own special ways, their acts are circuses, extravaganzas that endeavor to entertain at every level, especially the visual.
The special Cirque du Soleil style is filtering down to nightclubs. This is a great development!
SAN FRANCISCO -- The DNA Lounge was a real circus the night The Mutaytor came to town. The Los Angeles-based band looked like a bunch of clowns. Young contortionists folded their limbs like fortune cookies above and around the stage.
The 500 or so cognoscenti who paid $20 each to watch acrobats and aerialists on ropes perform to a live percussive beat weren't complaining. 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.
..."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."
...Dream Rockwell, who founded the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque two years ago, also has built her troupe more around amateurs than seasoned professionals. The company, whose members range in age from 4 to 53, appeared in a circus-themed music video with the electronica band Panic! At the Disco, which won MTV's video of the year. It also did a commercial for Farmer's Insurance and has been hired to entertain at the official Grammy Awards post-party in February.
"I wanted to start something where it was possible for people who were unusual, who didn't have the right training or the right body or the right look (for Hollywood) to achieve their dreams," said Rockwell. "Every child has some kind of strange fantasy to grow up and join the circus or carnival and run away."
Their avant-garde sensibilities aside, the small urban circus groups are actually part of a rich tradition, according to Janet Davis, a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin who studies the role circus has played in society.
"We tend to think of subversive youth culture as being indicative of trangressiveness and all that is edgy," Davis said. "Yet 100 years ago, the circus was a place where gays and lesbians found work. The whole idea of the female impersonator or the strong woman, this kind of bending of traditional categories. That tradition is still very much alive and has carried over."
Downs, of The Mutaytor, said the underground circuses may be edgy, but their art is as mainstream as it gets.
"So much of what is considered indie and cool is predicated on, 'I know something you don't. This is predicated on something that is old as dirt," he said. "Take the most terminally unhip person out there, take your grandmother. They get clowns. They get circus."
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