Travels with the Serbian Circus

The circus you read about as a child

The one full of laughing, lovable characters, their biggest crime a little ‘untidiness,’ their caravans so colourful, their lives so pleasantly (not threateningly) exciting.

The questions you ask yourself

The thing that makes you want to run away with them

That they wake up in a field, ride through the countryside, that they don’t go to school, that they wander through day and night in an unregulated, idiosyncratic rhythm.

The circus you read about as an adult

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus. The misery of the clowns that culminates in a sociopathic breakdown in the ring, an abusive Ape-man, the abused Ape-man’s wife, anthropomorphic animals, a weeping tiger. The common thread in adult-circus-novel representation is tawdry glitter, unwashed charm and behind-the-curtains horror. But there’s also a playing on the edge of wilderness, of becoming a creature or a thing, of tightrope-dancing on the very borderline of reality and fantasy.

The circus you visit

It looks a lot like the adult circus literature, but worse.

The circus you ran away with

It wasn’t a circus at all, really, because wherever they go these days, you’re nowhere near. I haven’t been to the circus since I was a child. Cirque du Soleil did some rebranding and re-invigorating of the genre, but they’re the posh cirque, not what the Serbs call Cirkus. 

I’m talking about that collection of day/night/street/club entertainers that work in seasons. Tourist season, marriage season, corporate event season, Dubai carnival season. Work-time and idle-time are equally intense, in this world. A rollercoaster relationship with a Serbian performer brought this world to my doorstep, literally. A relentless hopper over the line between art and street, he introduced me to his family, their dog, and his little circus tribe, all in one big colourful bounce into a new playground. There was a mutual adoption.

Somewhere in the era of the neo circus, as we call it

You can be bored and cynical about events, party trends, theme-driven cliches, but eventually you can get bored with your own cynicism. You start craving honesty, ordinariness, awakening. You get pleasure out of watching a bunch of children chasing soap bubbles. An old woman hiking up her sari, vigorously joining in the race to be the first to kill the bubble. The one bubble that escapes, floats off into space; ridiculously beautiful, defiantly other-worldly, a tiny spaceship joining the stars.

When there isn’t a wave of ostentation blocking your view, you can see the production of joy and wonder, which is a lot easier than you would imagine.

Thinking back on the Serbian circus

One of the greatest imports from my little microcosmic circus was the giant butterfly stilts. It’s a miracle that they came to India at all, that they were allowed into check-in luggage, that they transited half-way across the world without being battered or bruised.

One of the things I loved doing at events was watching Serbian stilt walkers setting up the butterflies. It involves taking a pair of pliers, hammering out the metal, attaching the wings together with tiny screws, finding the straps, laying everything out on the ground and then waiting. All done in methodical calm, in patience, in preparation for a few rounds of pure physical discomfort. These wings have been created out of so much recycled material that they would give goosebumps to green activists.

In Serbia, I rail about the passivity of Serbians. In India, I love their stoicism in the face of near-violent crowds, iPhone-touting kids and the complete non-availability of basic facilities, including changing rooms.

The lonely, two-member circus

When the rest of the Serbian tribe went back home to recover, there was just two of us left, alone. One Indian (F) and one Serbian (M).  We continued to make scattered forays across the country, doing a thing here and another thing there. We did tons of gluing, pasting, cutting, painting and cursing the blazing hot sun as it beat down on us. We complained about hotel rooms, wedding party food, flights and the lack of help. Two people alone, hunting tailors, materials, making and fighting is the kind of company that’s desperate for a crowd.

I guess this is why so many things are done in communities. The dancing community, the ganesha-statue-making community, the wedding-banner community, the weaving communities. Because, firstly, some things cannot be done in ones or twos. Simply the scale of those things might force you to look for help. Secondly, people outside your community might not want to help you; they might think it’s dirty, or gross, or weird, or boring, or too painful. In India, community borderlines are fortressed. Moated. Landmined.

In the Serbian circus, informal communities form in a very simple, organic way. You don’t chat with your driver on the way to Croatia in a van full of equipment because you’re cool, forward-thinking and not into that whole caste thing. You do it because he’s sitting next to you. Work is interactive, wild, playful, uncensored and untainted by notions of purity.

Serbian memories

In this lonely period, I missed one Serbian (M), sitting and tooling into the night to make a couple of new pois and touring local hardware shops on his first trip to Bangalore. I missed another Serbian (M), who shot around on his unicycle through the Chennai bus stand, joining in the chorus of city-calling, earning himself some spontaneous friendships for that extra marketing effort.

Somewhere outside of Chennai, we worked on an event in a resort and one of our team hung the butterflies on the balcony of our cottage for easy access. I’ve always had trouble distinguishing hotel rooms and cottages (I guess you’re supposed to). This time, however, recognition was immediate, and from quite a distance away. And what a wonderful way to recognize a temporary home. The one with the butterflies.

One time when I was in Serbia, a movie crew that included a former Bond lead was auditioning for extras. I went for the audition, not because I can act or have ever wanted to act in a movie. I just went along. Everybody went. The partner, his family, his neighbours, friends, the dog if they could just get him out of the gate. As we walked to the city center, I realized that we had collected enough people (everyone dressed weirdly because that’s how you get noticed) to make something like a parade. And I realized that this was the event. Not the Bond or his movie or his crew. Or even the audition.

I thought about all these things in India, when the two of us were alone, walking or flying or climbing ladders or trying to carry unreasonably large things.

Indian memories

Once, we stayed at a small and horrible hotel in Dwarka, a sort of suburb in New Delhi, with sticky floors and dark rooms and food made out of unrecognisable things – we entertained ourselves by coming up with possible ingredients – mud? Water and plaster? Sawdust? Stone?

On our way to the event, we stopped outside an apartment block – a part, the event manager tells us, of one of the biggest apartment colonies in – Asia? India? Something massive. A forest of buildings. Occupied and unoccupied. On the fringes of this dark grey mass, I looked across at an empty plot, bordered by a (grey) compound wall. I had this curious feeling of being on the edge of some wilderness. The only homely sight was the black-painted phone number of a key-maker who had found a strategic advertising space. Otherwise, the apartments looked distant, forbidding, and the landscape so strange, lost – the very edge of nothing, the place after the end of the world. I wondered whether this plot was so unwatched, so ignored, that it had almost become unreal.

And as we travelled on out of Delhi, into Noida, then into Greater Noida, we found more and more of them, apartments without people living in them, rising like trees out of empty landscapes, dark and ghostly in the night, with one single light in a thousand windows to really reinforce that shiver of solitude.

Travelling three hours across evening and night, cars come back and forth, carrying Very Rich People, Caterers, Event Managers and their Paraphernalia, which in our little cartel included us, The Russian Girls, and The Russian Musicians. 

There’s more of course – tent-builders, flower deliverers, camera persons – we even had vanity vans to keep our things, this time. Vanity-van-drivers parked their chairs outside their charges.

I watched the guests going in and out – it’s not really a stream, more like a trickle. What do they wear? Lurid shades and glimmers of chiffon, polyester, nylon, all creating a friction in the skin, bringing humidity from the air, burning a little, making a bright note of irritation in everyone’s smile. Men in suits that all look a little too tight at the crotch, armpit and shoulders. Hampering movement. Women in high-heeled shoes. Nobody gets to move freely. 

We are in three-clawed metal stilts and hoods covered in leaves and flowers and we move the least; we only circuit between cigarette breaks and phone-checks, but we pile onto the buffet in the end and we realise that our social circuit is neither small nor big, but random, fragmented – we are tied by work and untied beyond it.

What the neo-circus does when it’s on its break

There is a special face you make when you are traveling through people. You are not gazing in wonder at landscapes. The best English word for it is gawping. You catch yourself doing it when look, for example, through a bus window at a tiny collection of homes very close to the street. Intimate details of people’s lives are spread out in the open, before your face. Clothes hanging, kids bathing, cooking fires being lit, people resting. 

You also gawp when you are a traveling entertainer at an event. You are not party to the activities and energies, and neither are you a distant observer. You are an official and accepted gawper.

Sometimes, when a grand birthday party is at its peak, a slide-show appears with photos photoshopped into backgrounds of lurid flowers awhile italics flow messages around them. I watched a full slide show once. It was pure, unadulterated gawping.

The child and the adult

When I was a child I read about the storybook circus and all I wanted then was this censored, circumcised and prettified circus life, with its bright caravans, but mainly for the way it went in and out of places, never stopping for long enough to get stuck, a neverending voyage. 

Now, having made a tiny foray into the fringes of modern animation-entertainment, I find that it is not so much places that you see. In fact, you barely see them, only out of windows on the way from your hotel to the venue. It’s more like traveling through people, watching how hierarchies align themselves automatically wherever you go, and moving in and out of them, walking around the foundations, getting a worm’s eye view and a bird’s eye view of everything.

It makes me rethink my notion of the caravan itself. A S Byatt in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye describes glass as a thing to be seen and to be seen with. This is something like what the neo-circus entertainer/performer is. An ephemeral, almost transparent and yet brightly-coloured entity. Something like a soap bubble.

Author: Priyadarshini John

Travel partner, maker and performer: Kristian Al Droubi