The Circus!

Went to the circus in Las Palmas – the Gran Circo Mundial. It was an odd mix of great acrobatic human acts and a number of animal acts that were, to be honest, terrible. It opened with the standard full-cast song-and-dance number a lot of circuses have. It’s designed, I think, to take the audience from the real world into the fantasy realm of the circus. It did not do the job. The mis-timing was impressive for the few simple dance steps, and many of the people weren’t putting much energy into it, not even smiling (and trust us, they were supposed to). They looked like a tired cast near the end of a long run of shows, which is exactly what they were. On to the acts.

Grubnuts extraordinaire, but happy nonetheless.

First, some of the good. One guy did great aerial stunts with two long ribbons hanging from a wire, which he wound around his arms and legs – imagine the rings in gymnastics, but more fluid and impressive. We saw the first motorcycles-in-a-cage act either of us has ever seen, and it was amazing. Three guys on motorcycles zipping around inside an iron sphere maybe 20 feet in diameter, crossing paths, doing loops, spins; it was fantastic. A juggler who did all sorts of things, including juggling five full-size soccer balls in various ways. A contortionist doing all kinds of crazy poses. Oddly, this slow, elegant performance had a campy, anticlimactic ending – she used her feet to shoot a balloon with a bow-and-arrow.

And some of the bad. An act with two seals doing various poses, holding balls on their noses – this one might have been good if the people with them had any charisma or crowd skills. A horse act that we kept thinking we just didn’t get, but it seemed like much of the audience didn’t get it. This one was really awful, and went on for much too long – horses awkwardly “dancing” to music; one stretch of about five minutes was the horse dancing with a woman. Really, really dumb, and though it maybe would have been impressive to horse aficionados, I can’t imagine it ever being in a circus in the US. There was a really old-school-circus act with a guy who brought a bunch of alligators out into the ring, and basically said, “OOH, look at the scary alligators!” Really, that was it. It was easy to see why this sort of thing has gone out of style in most circuses – maybe it had some impact 50 years ago, but it certainly doesn’t now.