DISCOVER YOUR REAL POTENTIAL
The new Ringling show, “Out of This World,” produced by Alana Feld, 36, will have its premiere on Thursday in Los Angeles. But it first stopped in this dusty Central Valley city for a test run. Would new elements — an ice floor, an elaborate narrative, a smartphone app — make audiences forget to miss the elephants? Or would the Greatest Show on Earth prove a little less grand without its prancing pachyderms?
The show, which requires 56 railroad cars to transport, incorporates technology in new ways. A free app has features like push notifications designed to engage the audience before the show and during intermission. Toy swords, telescopes and blasters sold in the arena aisles and corridors before show time change colors during the performance, based on the story line. (Everything turns green, for instance, when Queen Tatiana emerges.)
Sensors that create computerized spotlight effects are sewn into costumes, in particular those worn by stunt skaters from China, who zoom across the ice on stilts. “Nothing can replace the elephants,” Ms. Feld said. “This wasn’t about trying. This was about creating a new genre of circus, with acts seamlessly transitioning from floor to air to ice.”
And if anyone misses the elephants, which first joined the circus in 1882 when P. T. Barnum added one named Jumbo to his lineup, there is always the concession stand. Feld sells $16 snow cones in plastic cups shaped like elephants. They sit on yellow, red and blue drums with their trunks and front feet held gamely in the air. The hinged head tilts back to reveal pineapple, cherry and raspberry-flavored ice.
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Illustration by Laura Braga.
Susie Armitage works at BuzzFeed and tells her experience about fear:
In circus, fear can hold you back, but it’s also very real and very useful. Make a mistake when you’re seriously high off the ground — a wrong wrap, a missed catch — and you could wind up paralyzed, or dead. It helps to be brave, but this is not a good activity for people who jump first and ask questions later.
In circus, fear is obvious and easy to dissect. It’s about self-preservation, rooted in the awareness of possible pain. Of course I cringe when I’m about to hang my entire body weight from one elbow or ankle. Of course my heart races when I climb above a certain height, or when I’m trying to remember if I wrapped the fabric behind my back just once, or twice — because it will make a crucial difference on the way down.
The great thing I’ve learned about fear, though, is that you can train yourself to touch it. I will never be someone who isn’t afraid of anything, who truly doesn’t give a fuck. But when I feel nervous about telling someone what I really think or asking for what I need, I try to picture myself up in the air, head held high, ready to drop.
Photograph by Angela Kohler.
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