PALMETTO, Fla. — At one end of a makeshift arena, on a spotlit and smoky podium, Alex Stickels cranks up a full-set drum solo. Soon, his cymbal-crashing improvisation finds a pronounced beat, echoed by an intense Argentine drum circle rising above a large cylindrical platform below him. As fiery-clothed percussionists prance in unison, a group of Ethiopian performers joins the fray, waving and crisscrossing fire poi props around the perimeter and merging ball-and-cord skills into a feverish tap dance.
Several acts later, the entire oval-shaped rehearsal space has become a brightly lit, primary-colored obstacle course. Instead of unified claps and stomps, BMX bikers squeak their brakes and shred their tires, pulling off midair somersaults, zooming down ramps and bouncing off trampolines, spinning their handlebars in midair before realigning them in the nick of time.
Not present at this final dress rehearsal for the new Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey tour, which kicks off Sept. 29 in Bossier City, La.? Animal acts. After years of settling expensive lawsuits with animal rights groups, working around various state regulations and spending more and more to operate its specialized mile-and-a-half-long train, Ringling phased out its elephants in 2016. In January 2017, CEO Kenneth Feld stood in front of acrobats, clowns and animal trainers, and announced that, after 146 years of touring, the circus would officially shut down for good.
Six years later, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey is on the cusp of a comeback.
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“The greatest thing always about Ringling has been that we have a blank piece of paper,” Feld says. “It is the greatest creative opportunity.”
This time around, the show’s tempo is snappier, and the performance space, previously constricted by three rings and poor sight lines, has been updated to a “360-degree experience” with a large, circular, LED-lit stage and multiple video boards. There are new spins on tried-and-true classics, including a multinational triangular high-wire act that uses three connected tightropes, a Ukrainian comedy trio built around pratfalls and balancing acts, and the Double Wheel of Destiny, in which performers ride and hop between two simultaneously rotating spheres.
In charge of Ringling’s modernization is Giulio Scatola, a longtime performer and creative director who had spent the last decade in Las Vegas working in cabaret and Cirque du Soleil — and had never seen a Ringling show before. After a wide-ranging casting call, Scatola organized in-person auditions in several locations over the globe — Las Vegas, Paris, Buenos Aires, Ethiopia and Mongolia — to evaluate talent up close.
“What we wanted to ask was, ‘What is inspiring out there?’” says Scatola, who also scouted circus festivals and cabaret shows. “How can we do a traditional flying trapeze, but have it be completely different?” In this case, the Flying Caceres answered the call with a crisscross act, combining nine aerialists who swing, leap, flip and catch each other from four different platforms.
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The show has also changed structurally. Instead of a ringmaster, Ringling opted for three emcees, or “show guides,” whose job is to interact with audience members — leading them in participatory songs, acting out skits with the comedic players, and providing context and audible amazement during acrobatics. In between acts, Jan Damm, one of the three show guides, works in some kid-friendly sight gags, attempting a dance-off with a robotic dog named Bailey and pulling off “Rola Bola,” his signature cylindrical balancing act. Another guide, Georgia native Lauren Irving, sings “Proud Mary,” the song she performed in her virtual audition, along with Rihanna’s “Diamonds.”
End of carouselUnlike Cirque du Soleil, “which is magical, but everything is introspective, very abstract and mystical,” Scatola says, the goal of this circus, which features 75 performers from 18 countries, is to simply create excitement and promote unity. “Ringling, for me, was celebrating joy and bringing the world together,” Scatola says. “We’ve created some moments within the show that I think will wow kids but will also wow parents.”
Share this articleShareAnimal acts aren’t the only thing missing: Clowns, a former Ringling staple, have also been removed (a victim, perhaps, of changing cultural attitudes that now see them as scary rather than funny). Scatola thinks fans will still recognize the “clowning” taking place within Trio Equivokee, which brings a modern twist to juggling and miming. “They don’t have to have a red nose, big wig and big shoes to do clowning, [but] it’s physical comedy,” he says. “What’s important is the action.”
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The spectacle, which clocked in around two hours with an intermission, has come a long way since Ringling announced its shutdown in 2017, “the most emotional, toughest day of my life,” Feld says. The circus, which his father had acquired in 1967, had been a family institution and a way of life for hundreds of performers and employees zigzagging the country by rail. Now, in this streamlined version, transportation consists of taking buses and flying commercially between cities (while equipment is trucked to various destinations). “Ringling has always changed,” Feld says. “In a lot of ways, we were operating with a 146-year-old business model.”
Will it all work? The Feld company conducted market research on its loyal fans and took ideas from its own family entertainment lineup, which includes Disney on Ice, Marvel Universe Live and Monster Jam, to create the new circus. It invested in a more immersive experience, including multilevel stages, directional speakers and two video boards to capture the TikTok audience’s attention with shots such as a tightrope artist’s feet in close-up from below. But “as much as we know about audiences from our touring properties, you never know,” said Chief Operating Officer Juliette Feld Grossman. “Are they going to engage? Are they going to laugh? Are they going to clap?”
Ryan Henning, a former Ringling elephant trainer who now owns a touring camel company, says he has mixed emotions about the revamp. “The circus environment is one of the most unique environments to experience how man and animal can work together and build a relationship,” he says. “It wasn’t just about showcasing the animal.”
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Circus Vazquez, a traveling tented circus based in Texas, eliminated its own animal acts in 2019 in response to the public’s distaste and growing red tape. Since then, the biggest challenge for circus co-owner Ramon Vázquez has been supplying the same wonder and thrills that his former tiger and elephant acts had conjured. “Nowadays, we have to find more interesting, more dangerous acts that have this awe, so people can have that emotion again,” he says. Nevertheless, Vázquez notes that he hasn’t lost his audience. “People are starting to value the humans in the show more than the animals. … I’m sure [Ringling] is going to find their crowds as well.”
One act isn’t changing. Skyler Miser, who closes out the revamped show by soaring through the air at 65 mph as “The Human Rocket,” was practically born into the circus. Until she was 6 years old, her father, Brian, toured with the company as a human cannonball, then leased the family’s cannon to Ringling until its shutdown.
Miser remembers “crying so bad” at the last performance, in Providence, R.I., thinking she would never get to follow in her parents’ jet stream. Then, five years later, her family got a call. “They knew how important the cannon was to Ringling history,” she says of the Felds. “They knew they had to bring it back.”
There’s at least one upside to the changes, she says: The show “smells a lot better without the animals.”
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