Unlike my daughter, I’m not a huge fan of the circus, but one of the most thrilling live performances I’ve ever seen involved a family of seven, a wobbling human pyramid, and a high wire.
This was in Sarasota, Florida, once the winter home of the Barnum and Bailey Circus. Sarasota is still home base for a vibrant community of circus performers, who hone their new acts in the off-season by performing in the non-profit Circus Sarasota.
The combination of world-class talent and an intimate tent made for an excellent night of entertainment, even for a grumpy non-circus-lover like me.
I was swayed, but not bowled over, by the Chinese acrobats; the trained animals; the Mexican daredevils on their two giant counterbalanced hamster wheels.
But as much as I admired the skill and artistry of these performers, none of the acts really touched me until the Flying Wallendas waved to the crowd from the rigging, and then, slowly, with utter concentration, deployed themselves, one by one, on the high wire: four men forming the bottom of the pyramid, wearing poles supported by shoulder harnesses; then, two more Wallendas atop those two poles, with a third pole stretching between their shoulders; and finally a steely little Wallenda atop that pole.
That made seven Wallendas — actually, six, plus a close family friend — trembling on a two-inch cable, sixty feet in the air, without a safety net.
I remember the sounds they made as they climbed over and atop each other: a series of coordinated grunts; the occasional terse, “Ready!” followed by a sharp, “Go!”
And then, when the pyramid was complete and stable, their balancing poles waving slowly like the whiskers of a prowling cat, they began to work their way across the wire, inch by magical inch.
I had seen wire walkers before, but the power of this performance was in the coordination, the absolute trust the Wallendas placed in each other as they wobbled forward. It put me in mind of wartime: a family, facing oblivion, risking everything in a desperate flight across the abyss.
I had never felt such palpable peril in a theater. Everyone felt it, especially when the wispy girl at the top of the pyramid starting doing balancing tricks.
On a chair.
I couldn’t believe it. Tricks!
It was a pivotal moment in the performance. What had been a metaphor of solidarity and survival became a gesture of defiance. Defiance of gravity; of rationality and common sense; of death.
Death always hovers around a wire-walk, even when there’s a net. Mortal risk is what makes it so thrilling. Part of the psychology of every performance is the audience’s unconscious hunger for — and horror of — a fall. As Charles Dickens put it, attending a wire-walk by the great 19th century acrobat Chevalier Blondin, “Half of London is here eager for some dreadful accident.”
Blondin was a huge international celebrity, famous for his 17 successful wire-walks across the Niagara Gorge. But mere walking wasn’t enough for him. His crossings came to involve tricks on stilts; carrying his manager on his back; launching fireworks from a wheelbarrow; and, most impressively — and utterly French — stopping halfway across the wire to cook, and then eat, an omelette.
Perhaps some of you were watching recently when another Wallenda, 33-year-old Nik, made a spectacular nighttime wire-walk over the Niagara Falls. Even though Nik Wallenda’s crossing didn’t involve stilts or omelettes, it actually surpassed Blondin’s achievements in many ways. It was the first walk across the roaring falls themselves, with their turbulent, swirling winds and blinding overspray, as opposed to the calmer and narrower gorge upriver. Because of the great distance and lack of anchoring points along the way, a giant steel cable had to be used without the usual stabilizing rigging, which made the wire buck and sway.
And while the enormous crowd that showed up on both sides of the falls for Wallenda’s walk may have been comparable in size to the hordes that watched Blondin, Wallenda carried an additional burden: tens of millions of television viewers watching his every move.
Nik Wallenda’s Niagara Falls wire-walk was a great triumph, instantly securing his place in the pantheon of all-time death-defying acts. Watching him disappear into that hellish black cauldron, only to re-emerge, unscathed, reminded me of another great wire-walker, Phillippe Petit, who, in 1974, secretly strung a wire between the unfinished World Trade Towers and then spent forty-five thrilling minutes cavorting nearly 1400 feet above the streets of lower Manhattan.
If you haven’t already seen it, I highly recommend the film Man on Wire, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2008. Narrated by Petit himself, the movie offers an insider’s view of one of the most daring and giddiest capers of the 20th century. The World Trade Center was still a restricted construction site when Petit snuck in with two teams of colleagues, one in each tower. Getting caught would have meant arrest and possibly prison. (After his wire-walk, Petit was arrested, but then immediately released by a sympathetic judge.)
Phillippe Petit’s mischievous pursuit of pure wire-walking art was in some ways the opposite of Nik Wallenda’s studiously legal, corporation-endorsed, live-broadcast performance. But the inspiration for both men seems to have been similar.
Nik Wallenda says he was inspired to cross the Niagara Falls when he saw it as a six-year-old. Petit says that as a youngster, he saw a photograph of the half-built World Trade Center in a magazine in a dentist’s office, and knew he had to walk between the towers.
In both cases, the ambition was to risk everything in order to be seen performing against an iconic backdrop. In 1974, the Twin Towers seemed as solid and everlasting as the Niagara Falls.
Today, we know better.
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 28 June 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
