How a riding master’s circle of sawdust in Georgian London grew into the big top, the flying trapeze and the theatrical spectacle we now call contemporary circus.

The circus is one of the few art forms whose birthday we can name. It happened in London in 1768, when a former cavalry sergeant roped off a circle of ground and charged the public to watch him ride. Everything that followed, the tents and the trains, the trapeze and the tightwire, the clowns and the calliopes, the velvet darkness of a Cirque du Soleil arena, descends in a more or less straight line from that circle. And yet the skills at the heart of the circus are far older than the circus itself. People have been balancing, tumbling, juggling and defying their own anatomy for as long as there have been crowds willing to gasp. The history of circus arts is really two histories braided together, the ancient story of the performing body and the modern story of the institution built to display it, and the tension between the two explains almost everything about where the circus finds itself today.

Before the ring

Long before anyone thought to sell tickets, acrobatics belonged to ritual and festivity. Egyptian tomb paintings from the Middle Kingdom, some nearly four thousand years old, show female dancers arched into backbends and tumblers caught mid flip, evidence that the handspring is at least as old as the pyramids’ later neighbours. In Han dynasty China, courts were entertained by the so called hundred entertainments, sprawling programmes of pole climbing, plate spinning, rope walking and contortion whose direct descendants still tour the world today as Chinese state acrobatic troupes. China can fairly claim the longest unbroken acrobatic tradition on earth.

Rome gave us the word but not the thing. The Circus Maximus was a stadium for chariot racing, a vast oval of speed and gambling that had little to do with tumbling. The true Roman ancestors of circus performers were the funambuli, the rope walkers who strung their cords across amphitheatres and public squares, and the jugglers and animal trainers who worked the streets. When the empire fell, these skills did not die; they scattered. Through the medieval centuries they were kept alive by jongleurs and travelling entertainers who moved from fair to fair and castle to castle, juggling, tumbling, walking ropes strung between church towers, welcome everywhere and respectable nowhere. For a thousand years the acrobat was a wanderer without an institution. What the eighteenth century supplied was the institution.

A riding master’s circle

Philip Astley was a strapping ex sergeant major of the light dragoons, six feet tall with a parade ground voice, who left the army with a white charger and a gift for trick riding. In 1768 he opened a riding school on the south bank of the Thames near Westminster Bridge, teaching in the mornings and performing feats of horsemanship in the afternoons. His crucial discovery was geometrical. Riding in a circle generates centrifugal force, and Astley found that a ring of about 42 feet in diameter gave a standing rider the ideal balance of lean and momentum, tight enough to keep the force steady, wide enough to let the horse canter freely. The 42 foot ring became the international standard, and it remains so today. A ring in Monte Carlo, Moscow or Sarasota still measures what Astley’s sawdust circle measured, one of the most durable technical specifications in the history of entertainment.

Astley was also the first to understand that horsemanship alone would not hold a crowd for two hours. He hired acrobats, rope dancers, jugglers and a clown to fill the gaps between equestrian acts, and in doing so he invented the variety format that defines the circus to this day. Curiously, he never used the word. It was a rival, the equestrian Charles Hughes, who opened the Royal Circus nearby in 1782 and attached the old Roman name to the new art form. The name stuck, the format spread, and by the turn of the century Astley himself had planted amphitheatres across Britain and in Paris, where the circus would take root as a beloved fixture of French popular culture. The circus was born urban, housed in permanent buildings. It took the New World to set it moving.

The big top crosses America

The circus reached the United States quickly. In 1793 the Scottish equestrian John Bill Ricketts opened a ring in Philadelphia, and President George Washington, a superb horseman himself, attended and reportedly enjoyed it enormously. But America was too big and too thinly settled for permanent amphitheatres, and so American showmen made the decisive innovation of the tent. From the 1820s, canvas big tops let a circus fold itself up overnight and follow the frontier, and the travelling circus became a distinctly American institution, arriving in town at dawn with a parade down Main Street and vanishing two days later.

The scale of the thing grew astonishing. Phineas Taylor Barnum, already famous as a museum showman and master of publicity, entered the circus business in 1871 at the age of sixty and soon branded his operation the Greatest Show on Earth. In 1881 he joined forces with James A. Bailey, the quiet organisational genius of the pair, and the following year Barnum bought Jumbo, an African elephant from the London Zoo whose name passed into the English language as a synonym for enormous. Meanwhile five brothers named Ringling, sons of a harness maker in Baraboo, Wisconsin, started a modest wagon show in 1884 and built it with legendary discipline into the Barnum outfit’s great rival. The Ringlings bought Barnum & Bailey in 1907 and in 1919 merged the two into Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, the combined shows that would dominate the American imagination for generations.

What made this golden age possible was the railroad. The circus train, sometimes a hundred double length cars carrying more than a thousand performers and workers, hundreds of horses, elephants and big cats, and the acres of canvas and rigging of the big top, was a marvel of logistics that armies studied. A tented city rose on the edge of town before breakfast and was gone by the next morning. For a child in rural America in 1910, circus day was the single most spectacular event of the year, the one morning the whole exotic world arrived at the end of the street.

Bodies in flight

Behind the spectacle stood the performers, and the nineteenth century was their laboratory. On the evening of 12 November 1859, at the Cirque Napoléon in Paris, a young gymnast from Toulouse named Jules Léotard let go of one trapeze bar in mid air and caught another, and the flying trapeze was born. He had rehearsed the act over his father’s swimming pool, and he performed it above a runway of padded mattresses, the safety net still lying some years in the future. Léotard became one of Europe’s first athletic celebrities, inspired the song about the daring young man on the flying trapeze, and gave his name to the one piece garment he wore, which is why every dancer and gymnast on earth still carries a small tribute to him in their kit bag.

That same year, 1859, the French funambulist Charles Blondin walked a rope stretched over the gorge below Niagara Falls, and wire walking entered its heroic age. On the wire the circus found its purest image of human daring, carried through the twentieth century by dynasties like the Wallendas, whose seven person pyramid remains one of the most audacious acts ever attempted. Aerialists, meanwhile, made the top of the tent a stage of its own, and stars such as Lillian Leitzel, spinning by one wrist high above the Ringling rings in the 1920s, commanded fame and salaries that rivalled Hollywood.

And then there are the clowns, the circus’s oldest and strangest artists. Modern clowning descends from Joseph Grimaldi, the Regency London pantomime star whose whitened face and painted features created the template, and whose nickname Joey is still what circus people call a clown. Later in the nineteenth century came the auguste, the red nosed bumbler in oversized shoes who exists to ruin the elegant whiteface clown’s every scheme, a double act of order and chaos that is essentially the entire history of comedy compressed into a sawdust ring. In the Depression years Emmett Kelly’s melancholy hobo Weary Willie showed that a clown could break hearts as easily as win laughs. Clowning, more than any other circus art, is acting stripped to its skeleton, and the great theatre directors of the twentieth century studied it closely.

The lights dim

The decline, when it came, arrived from several directions at once. The movies, then radio, then above all television meant that the circus was no longer the only spectacle that could reach a small town, and by mid century the economics of moving a canvas city by rail had turned brutal. In 1956, John Ringling North gave the last Ringling performance under the big top and moved the show permanently into arenas, declaring that the tented circus was a thing of the past. The romance survived the tent, but something of the magic went with the canvas.

A deeper reckoning concerned the animals. Performing elephants and big cats had been central to the American circus since Jumbo, but public attitudes shifted steadily through the late twentieth century as audiences grew uneasy about how such animals were trained, transported and confined. Years of protest, litigation and changing municipal law followed. In 2016 Ringling retired its elephants to a conservation centre in Florida, and in May 2017, after 146 years, the Greatest Show on Earth gave its final performance and closed, its owners citing declining attendance and the loss of the elephants among the causes. For many observers it read as the death of the circus itself. It was not. In September 2023 Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey returned to the road as an entirely animal free production built around human performance, acrobatics, aerial acts and stunt riding, a big brand making the same wager the rest of the circus world had already made.

The new circus

That wager had been placed decades earlier, and it was placed in French. In the 1970s and 1980s a generation of performers in France began stripping the circus back to its human essentials, discarding the animal acts and the three ring sprawl in favour of a single narrative thread, original music, theatrical lighting and design. The movement came to be called cirque nouveau, and it was nourished by a new institution, the circus school. Annie Fratellini, heir to a famous clowning dynasty, opened a pioneering school in Paris in the 1970s, and in 1985 the French state founded a national centre for circus arts, formal recognition that circus was not a trade inherited in the wagon but an art that could be taught, like ballet or violin.

The idea crossed the Atlantic and found its most spectacular flowering in Québec. Montreal’s École nationale de cirque, founded in 1981 as the first professional circus school in North America, began training a generation of artists just as a troupe of stilt walkers and street performers from the village of Baie-Saint-Paul was looking for a bigger stage. In 1984, with a grant from the provincial government to mark the 450th anniversary of Jacques Cartier’s arrival in Canada, the street performer Guy Laliberté launched Cirque du Soleil. It had no animals, no ringmaster in the old sense and no three rings, only human bodies, costume, music and story, and it grew into one of the largest live entertainment companies in the world, resident in Las Vegas and touring every continent. Montreal, in turn, became the global capital of the form, its national school drawing students from dozens of countries to a campus in the Saint-Michel district that it shares with the TOHU circus arts centre and Cirque du Soleil’s own headquarters, a whole city quarter built on the premise that circus is a serious art.

Today the descendants of cirque nouveau play in opera houses and on Broadway as readily as under canvas. Companies from Australia, France, Québec and beyond treat the circus act the way a choreographer treats a dance phrase, as raw material for meaning, and universities publish scholarship on circus the way they long have on theatre. The acrobat who spent a thousand years as a wanderer without an institution now graduates with a diploma.

Why the circus survives

Read in one sweep, the history of circus arts is a story of repeated obituaries, each of them premature. The circus lost its buildings and took to the tent. It lost the tent and took to the arena. It lost its animals, its trains and for a moment its greatest name, and it answered by rediscovering the thing it had possessed all along, the trained human body doing what appears to be impossible at a distance close enough to hear the performer breathe. That is an experience no screen has ever reproduced. Film can show us anything, which is precisely why it cannot show us this; the whole meaning of the trapeze lies in the fact that the flyer is really there, really falling, really caught. As long as audiences gather in the dark to watch a human being step onto a wire, the oldest of the performing arts will keep finding new ways to begin again.