The Circus
Leaves Town
Ladies and gentlemen, children
of all ages, say goodbye to the
‘Greatest Show on Earth’.
The air inside of a 25 foot cannon is hot and smells like metal. It’s dark and loud, and the moments before a launch - even for an experienced human cannonball like 32-year-old “Nitro” Nicole Sanders - are filled with real fear.
“There’s no feeling comfortable with it,” she says.
The cannonball act is deceptively simple: a cannon large enough to fit a human inside its bore “shoots” an acrobat high into the air, and she lands in a net or an airbag. The mechanics of the cannon are a closely guarded secret, but it works with a combination of hydraulics and air pressure - there’s no gunpowder. The only explosion comes from some fireworks lit for show.
The flight of the human cannonball at Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus is over in just under three seconds, but the preparation takes days.
It's up to the human cannonball to control her flight, to use her muscles in order to fly properly, to tumble safely, and land without injuring herself. Any mistake - if the cannon isn’t warmed up enough or Sanders’ footing is off - can cause a bad flight and an even worse landing.
A 14-year-old girl named Zazel was the first to be shot out of a cannon, in 1877 London. In the 140 years since, the act’s safety has been vastly improved but never perfected. One circus historian estimated that 30 human cannonballs have died in performance accidents. The most recent death occurred in 2011.
Like Zazel, Sanders is an acrobat and an aerialist by training. She is terrifically fit - each muscle must be pulled taut for the moment of launch. She can’t gain or lose too much weight, or else risk throwing off the cannon maker’s calculations with potentially disastrous results.
On 7 May, in a downtown arena in Providence, Rhode Island, Sanders rides into the centre of the floor atop the bright red and gold cannon. In her civilian life she is tattooed and favours an all-black wardrobe, but in the show she’s dressed head to toe in a glittery silver jumpsuit. She grins and high-kicks and flourishes with her arms towards the sold-out crowd.
As soon as she slides down into the mouth of the cannon, the smile drops.
Sanders pulls into herself tightly and calls out to her shooter, Boris, that she’s ready.
The ringmaster counts down from five, and with the cracking sound of fireworks, Sanders is launched high in the air, cresting at 40-feet and travelling roughly 66 miles per hour at a G-force of about seven, which is enough to knock out a fighter pilot in flight.
She throws out her arms like wings, releasing two fistfuls of glitter.
She turns in mid-air, touches her fingertips to her toes, then falls on her back into the airbag. This is when the adrenaline hits, as the crowd roars its approval.
Just like she’d envisioned, everything goes perfectly. It is her 596th shot.
It may also be her last.
After 146 years, these are the final performances of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey Circus, an American institution that was slowly brought to its knees by a combination of evolving cultural tastes, bad luck and political enemies that left it no longer financially viable for its parent company, Feld Entertainment.
So, in addition to ignoring the 104-foot expanse of floor between the cannon mouth and the airbag, Sanders has had to force herself to stop thinking about the fact that she’s facing unemployment, the loss of her home, the disbanding of her tight-knit circus family, and the end of her dream job.
I’m scrambling, kinda, to try and see what I want to do. This could be the end of my circus career.”
Life in
Three Rings
A week earlier, the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey train clatters into Providence at dusk, making its final journey with passengers from the circus’ penultimate performances in Hartford, Connecticut.
As soon as the silver cars stamped “GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH” come to a halt, Ivan Vargas, a sixth-generation circus performer from a long line of trapeze artists, clambers down into the muddy gravel.
“I learned to walk on the train, my parents were living on the train when I was born,” he says, looking up and down the desolate train tracks.
Here we are now, I just took my final train run.”
They call it “the city without a zip code”. Sixty-one cars and a little over a mile long, the Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey train is still the primary residence for most of the 107 performers and crew on the Red Unit, one of two remaining touring shows. There are 32 coaches divided into apartments of varying sizes, with as many as 16 people per car sleeping on narrow bunks. The youngest children sleep in the same car with their parents. Some of the families even keep cats and dogs.
There is a single, six-table “Pie Car” with a fully functional kitchen staffed 24-hours-a-day when the train is in motion. Performers can shimmy down the razor-thin hallways that connect the cars, order a slab of meatloaf or a slice of pie, and watch the only continuously functioning TV.
There is a shop car and a generator car, and 19 flatbeds filled with vehicles, costumes, equipment and tiger toys.
The train is followed by a caravan of RVs and trucks ferrying the animals - seven camels, three ponies, 18 tigers, 12 poodles, plus horses, snakes, and goats.
The production members hail from 13 different countries including Mongolia, Hungary, Russia, China, and Chile. All the show’s music is performed live, so a full band travels along, as well as a lighting and pyrotechnics crew, a team of veterinarians, vendor and concessions workers, the costume and wardrobe staff, the pie car chefs, interpreters and - at certain times - even a travelling circus ministry.
By the time it pulls into Providence, the train had travelled 50,000 miles and visited 83 cities in the two-year tour, titled Circus XTREME.
Vargas, 26, whose family is originally from Mexico, was born in between Sunday performances. His father - a trapeze artist - attended the birth while still in costume. Vargas was two years old the first time he got on a trapeze, and 14 the first time he performed in a Ringling Bros show, as an acrobat. When he turned 18, he became a clown, with his own train car room.
To me it’s the best way to travel across the country. You take your small apartment with you. You step out on the vestibules and watch the country go by.”
Ringling Bros is the last American circus that travels by rail, a tradition that began in the 1830s. In 1872, the showman Phineas T Barnum loaded his brand new circus on to the rails for the first time. By the time of his death, Barnum and his partner James Bailey had grown the show into a multi-ringed kaleidoscopic extravaganza of exotic animals, acrobats and strongmen, contortionists and sword-swallowers, and the train had become as iconic as the circus itself.
“They would literally shut towns down when they arrived. Months in advance people knew it was coming,” says Janet Davis, a professor of American studies and history, and author of The Circus Age. “Schools cancelled their classes, factories shut their doors.”
Five Wisconsin brothers named Ringling bought the Barnum & Bailey circus after its founders died, and in 1919, Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey debuted as a single show.
Life on the circus train in the early days was exciting, seedy, and dangerous.
“Love always seemed on the mind of circus folk, although given the cramped quarters, liaisons often took place in lumberyards, warehouses, or even, in extremis, ditches,” wrote photographer Loomis Dean, who travelled on the train as a circus employee.
Terrible, unimaginable things happened in [the labourers’] cars, everything from fights to killings.”
Courtesy of Circus World Museum
This was also the heyday of the freakshow, invented by Barnum and perpetuated by Ringling.
“Long, long before we thought about the animals being exploited it was common to exploit people like African Americans and differently abled people,” says Beth Macy, the author of Truevine, the story of two African-American albino brothers from Virginia who were snatched from their home and placed in the circus.
Ringling purchased them in 1923. The brothers were first marketed as “Barnum’s monkey men”, then, after their blonde dreadlocks grew out, “Ambassadors from Mars”. It took 13 years for their mother to rescue them and bring them home.
In 1956, the last of the circus-owning Ringlings, John Ringling North, announced that the circus would no longer perform under the canvas big top, nicknamed “Big Bertha”, but in brick and mortar arenas.
It was a cost-cutting measure, but also seen as punishment for workers who’d attempted to unionise. Hundreds of “canvasmen” who set up and tore down the big top lost their jobs overnight.
About a decade later, Irvin and Israel Feld - music promoters who worked with Chubby Checker, Fats Domino, and Paul Anka - bought the circus for $8m (£6.2m) with the help of investors. One of Irvin’s first acts as owner was to end the freakshow.
Throughout its changing owners and acts in the constant pursuit of the new and novel, the one thing that remained constant was the train.
Ivan Vargas, like generations of circus kids before him, first lived on the train with his parents, and attended school in the travelling classroom that set up amongst the dressing rooms at every stop along the tour.
He had two teachers, one to shepherd him through grade school, another for high school, along with the other handful of children who spent 11 months out of the year on tour with their parents. He was not allowed to perform unless he went to class, which often took place in between shows.
Sometimes Vargas wondered what it might be like to join the ranks of the “townies” - circus slang for non-circus people.
I thought about how I would fit in being in a public school or going to a prom,”
Ivan breaks down at the close of the final performance
He continues, “but it never crossed my mind that I want to leave the show to go experience this. To me, I would never trade in the circus for anything.”
He was married for a time, to a Ukrainian performer who came onto the unit in 2008. They fell in love as an 18-year-old Vargas introduced her to American malls and movies along the train route. But after she got her dream job with Cirque du Soleil and left the tour, the young couple who fell in love by spending 24 hours a day together on the train were unable to sustain the relationship on two weeks a year together. They divorced a year ago.
We live so fast, it’s the way that it works.”
“I’ve known people who literally come from different backgrounds, different cultures and countries, they don’t know each other. By the end of the tour they’ll be married and have a child already.”
In the summer of 2016, for instance, Moroccan high wire walker Mustafa Danguir married Russian juggler Anna Lebedeva in a ceremony performed at the centre of a wire the width of a human thumb. The groom rode in on a camel, the bride did the splits at the “altar” 30 feet in the air.
Vargas also witnessed signs that not all was well with the circus. The rise of television, movies, the internet and mobile phones has been siphoning off Ringling’s audience for decades, and the brand sustained irreparable damage during the animal rights movement that began in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Feld Entertainment has famously done battle with groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, winning a $25m lawsuit against a group who claimed Ringling’s elephants were being abused.
However, they’ve also been investigated and had to pay hefty fines to the US Department of Agriculture over various animal mistreatment allegations.
Legendary Ringling Bros big cat and elephant trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams
Public opinion on captive exotic animals shifted, and changes in local laws were making it increasingly difficult to bring the elephants to different markets - cities and then entire states like California and Rhode Island banned the use of bullhooks on elephants, a tool the circus claims is for guiding and training, and which animal rights activists say is an implement of torture. The city of Asheville, North Carolina, banned the display of any exotic animal in its municipally-owned arena.
Vargas was a clown on the Gold Unit, a third arm of the travelling tours of the circus, the year before Feld shut it down in 2015. The number of people in the remaining two units, Red and Blue, started to shrink. And in each city, the performers were met with crowds of angry animal rights protesters, and smaller and smaller audiences.
In 2016, Feld yielded to public pressure, and the last 11 elephants on tour were transferred to a Florida preserve owned by the Felds. Vargas’ father and 65 others lost their jobs as elephant caretakers. (Some, like Vargas’ father, stayed on to care for the other animals or went to work at the Florida facility.)
In the year since the elephants left, Feld says circus attendance dropped precipitously.
Vargas also witnessed signs that not all was well with the circus. The rise of television, movies, the internet and mobile phones has been siphoning off Ringling’s audience for decades, and the brand sustained irreparable damage during the animal rights movement that began in the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Feld Entertainment has famously done battle with groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, winning a $25m lawsuit against a group who claimed Ringling’s elephants were being abused.
However, they’ve also been investigated and had to pay hefty fines to the US Department of Agriculture over various animal mistreatment allegations.
Legendary Ringling Bros big cat and elephant trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams
Public opinion on captive exotic animals shifted, and changes in local laws were making it increasingly difficult to bring the elephants to different markets - cities and then entire states like California and Rhode Island banned the use of bullhooks on elephants, a tool the circus claims is for guiding and training, and which animal rights activists say is an implement of torture. The city of Asheville, North Carolina, banned the display of any exotic animal in its municipally-owned arena.
Vargas was a clown on the Gold Unit, a third arm of the travelling tours of the circus, the year before Feld shut it down in 2015. The number of people in the remaining two units, Red and Blue, started to shrink. And in each city, the performers were met with crowds of angry animal rights protesters, and smaller and smaller audiences.
In 2016, Feld yielded to public pressure, and the last 11 elephants on tour were transferred to a Florida preserve owned by the Felds. Vargas’ father and 65 others lost their jobs as elephant caretakers. (Some, like Vargas’ father, stayed on to care for the other animals or went to work at the Florida facility.)
In the year since the elephants left, Feld says circus attendance dropped precipitously.
The final blow was delivered on 14 January, 2017, late one night after the last in a “six pack” of performances in Orlando, Florida. Posters printed in English, Portuguese, Ukrainian and Mongolian had gone up earlier in the day announcing a mysterious, mandatory all-staff meeting.
There was speculation amongst the performers that the two units might be folded together, or that the rest of the animals would be leaving the tour. So when Feld Entertainment executives delivered the news that the circus was shutting down completely, it landed hard.
“You watched hundreds of people burst into tears at the same time,” recalls ringmaster Kristen Michelle Wilson, Ringling Bros’ first female ringmaster. She had just given up her job, apartment and car to join the circus four months earlier. But the show had to go on. “The next day, we came in and did two more shows.”
The five months leading up to the final performances haven’t been easy. Feld set up career counsellors at each stop. One by one, performers who found new gigs dropped off the tour. Foreign performers without new jobs will lose their work visas shortly after the final show, and the Felds are covering plane tickets and reimbursing mileage for road trips home.
But it’s not all bad. The last days of the circus found screaming animal rights protesters replaced with sold-out crowds and teary fans. Well-wishers post themselves along the train tracks, sometimes waiting hours with hand-painted signs, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ringmaster waving from the vestibule one last time.
For Vargas, the end of the circus is the end of the only way of life he’s ever known. On their day off before the start of performances in Providence, he heads to the local mall after a cursory and futile effort to pack up his train car. Over milkshakes and tater tots at Johnny Rockets, he says he couldn’t stand seeing the removal trucks and dumpsters lined up beside the train.
I needed to do something normal, I just want to walk around and kind of be a person.”
He wanders around with his 18-year-old cousin Tristan, the sole member of the final class of Ringling Bros and Barnum & Bailey high school. Tristan will graduate that evening at the end-of-tour cast party, dressed in a red cap and gown with the circus insignia on it.
They bump into other clowns, a BMX rider, some of the crew, the tiger trainer and his seven-year-old son, Gunther, named after the legendary Ringling Bros big cat and elephant trainer Gunther Gebel-Williams.
In their street clothes, they all look just like ordinary people.
The Final Curtain
That Sunday, the performers wake up and log on to social media to mark the last day in the circus.
“Worst. Day. Ever,” writes band trombonist Megan O’Malley, along with a picture of her completely empty room on the train.
“The final time putting on my RBBB Circus Xtreme makeup,” Ivan Vargas captions an Instagram photo of himself.
The Red Unit gathers for a final circus mass, and a prayer from Circus and Travelling Show Ministries’ Father Francis Cancro:
Bless with your holy light concession workers, floor crews, transportation crews and office workers and all who make the world of the circus a reality by their labour.
Bless those who manifested beauty through the use of their gifts and talents as they walk, run, jump and fly across the sky. Send your angels as their protection.
Circus alumni begin descending on Providence, including dozens of retired clowns and showgirls. Brian and Tina Miser, married cannonball coaches who mentored Sanders, arrive with their 13-year-old daughter. Skyler has already been shot out of a miniature, 8-foot cannon built by her father. She will never realise her dream to become a Ringling Bros cannonball.
Chimgee Haltarhuu, a former acrobat with the Mongolian State Circus, flies in from her home in Minnesota where she now teaches a circus school. She wants to personally thank Feld Entertainment chief executive Kenneth Feld for hiring her in the ‘90s. The decision whisked her and her 5-year-old son out of an abusive marriage in Mongolia, where there were no resources for victims of domestic violence. Haltarhuu now makes yearly trips to Mongolia to run free circus demos to start a conversation with village women and children about abuse.
Chimgee Haltarhuu with the coach of the current “Mongolian Marvels””
Ringling saved my life,” she says. “We built a good life. I have a house, I have a good job and a good husband, so I’m really happy.”
If attendees of the last-ever pre-show - when ticket holders are allowed onto the arena floor to mingle with the clowns, contortionists, dancers and BMX bikers - were paying attention, they might have noticed their hosts struggling to maintain their cheery disposition.
They might have noticed that Ivan Vargas’ make-up is pooling in milky droplets on his chin. They might have seen that after the camel trainer cheerfully asked the audience to return to their seats, she rushes backstage in tears. Scattered all over the cavernous dressing room areas, performers are finding private corners to try to compose themselves. Outside on the floor it is impossible to tell anything is amiss.
The Danguir high wire act is flawless. The Mongolian contortionists beam as they hang upside down from the backs of their camels. The audience gasps as an acrobat jumps rope 50 feet above the arena floor as the Wheel of Steel spins below his feet. Sanders’ lands safely, cradled in the huge black air bag one last time.
Then comes Taba Maluenda’s tiger act. A burly, bald Chilean with a scar across one cheek, Maluenda is one of the only performers with his own microphone. It picks up a sob that escapes his throat as the 13 tigers watch curiously from their perches. He summons one of them down and buries his face in her fur.
It’s their last time working together - though he’s raised some of the tigers since they were cubs, they don’t belong to him, and Feld is not disclosing where they are being sent. Maluenda thanks each tiger by name as they exit the caged ring.
These guys put food on my table for 13 years.”
Then he turns to his 19-year-old daughter Tabata, an assistant in the act who is standing on the other side of the cage door. She’s been on the Ringling Bros train since she was seven.
“Tabata, I’m sorry for papa stayed and took care of these animals and forgetted about you,” he says. “That’s never gonna happen again - papa love you.”
At the end of the act, he gets down on his knees and kisses the arena floor.
As ringmaster Wilson closes out their final show with a rendition of Auld Lang Syne - an old, tour-ending tradition - the rest of the circus children come running onto the floor. Some clamber onto the trampolines with their acrobat parents, others are inconsolable.
“We never say good-bye in the circus life, all we say is we’ll see you down the road,” Wilson booms into the microphone for the final time, doffing her glittering top hat. “So ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, thank you. We’ll see you down the road.”
The End of the Road
Monday morning in the train yard after the final performance is quiet, and there’s a sweet smelling breeze wafting off of a nearby bread factory.
Parked all along the train are little cars, giant moving trucks, a pick-up truck whose bed is stacked with a unicycle and an APPLAUSE sign. Adam Craig, the owner of the pick-up, is driving his son Stephen, one of the clowns, back home to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
“If his career never went any further, to have done this would be the exclamation point on anybody else’s career,” says Craig, a granite countertop fabricator. “I remember how exciting it was the first day that we came out and saw the train.”
A little girl walking a teensy chihuahua on a leash steps down from her train car. She’s followed by her mother, Irina Prostetsova, a second-generation circus dog trainer from Moscow who’s been with Ringling Bros for five years.
Out of her big baggy costume, Prostetsova is dressed casual but chic. In the show her blonde hair is gelled straight up, now, it’s swept softly to one side of her face. For her, there is nothing to cry about today.
It was my last performing day. I’m not a performer anymore. I took not one costume, not one prop, nothing.”
Prostetsova has been performing in circuses since she was 11 years old. Her father and her brother also trained dogs for the circus. She was an acrobat as well. She married another circus performer, Alex Emelin, and together they and their 12 poodles came to the US to join Ringling. A year into their contract, Prostetsova and Emelin divorced.
Despite the fact that they were in the worst throes of the break-up, they continued performing and travelling together with Ringling.
Now, three years later, she says she and Emelin are friends again, but the end of the circus is the first time she’ll be able to live away from her ex-husband.
“It’s a good thing,” she says. “Finally, I can start my new life.”
She’s enrolled in a beauty school. She and her seven-year-old daughter Valentina are driving to Georgia, to close on a townhouse in a tiny city about 45 minutes from Atlanta. Prostetsova’s father and mother are joining them from Moscow - her mother has ALS, and is paralysed, a perilous condition in wintry Russia.
Prostetsova and Emelin found homes for all 12 of their standard and miniature poodles.
“No more performing for dogs,” says Prostetsova. “Guys gonna sit on the couch, and just go to the park, and just enjoy the life.”
Her greatest hope is that Valentina does not become a circus performer. Maybe, she says, she could be a dentist.
Prostetsova, Valentina, and their little dog Yumiko climb into a black SUV hitched to a U-Haul trailer and drive away. One by one, in cars and in taxis and moving vans, all 107 members of the Red Unit drive away from the train yard until it is empty.
For some, they’re driving towards permanent addresses, towards apartments with full size stoves and refrigerators, to nine-to-five jobs and consistent wifi signals, toward high schools with homecomings and proms, utility bills and bathtubs instead of showers that suddenly - with an odd curve of the train tracks - tilt so far to the side that the water starts pooling and overflowing, and has to be bailed out the window. A quieter life.
Ivan Vargas is joining a pirate-themed dinner theatre in Myrtle Beach called Pirates Voyage, where he’ll be learning to sword fight and stunt dive. The Wheel of Steel act is joining a circus in Spain. The Danguir high wire troupe are going back to Morocco, where they are semi-finalists on the Simon Cowell-produced TV show Arabs Got Talent.
Nicole Sanders nearly signed a deal to do cannon in South Africa, but it fell apart at the last minute. She was offered a contract at a smaller American circus, but says the pay was less than minimum wage, with no health insurance. She turned it down.
Performing, you know you’re not going to make a load of money, but you want to be able to survive.”
She catches a flight to New Orleans, Louisiana, to stay with her mother while she figures out her next move.
The last person at the train yard in Providence is ringmaster Kristen Michelle Wilson. She was hired to be Ringling Bros first female ringmaster, and had held the title for exactly one month when she found out that she would also be its last. Before being whisked into the national spotlight as the face of Circus XTREME, she’d been playing a ringmaster in a circus-themed dinner theatre in Orlando, Florida. She’s heading back to her hometown of Tallahassee without concrete plans for the future.
With much groaning and shuddering, the train cars start moving down the track heading north, and slowly pick up speed. The bright red “RINGLING BROS AND BARNUM & BAILEY” banner stamped on the side of each car rolls past Wilson dozens and dozens of times.
The Red Unit train will join the Blue Unit train in New Jersey in preparation for their final performance on 21 May in Uniondale, New York. Along the way, the cars that have been purchased at auction (minimum bid: $10,000) will be uncoupled and left behind to be picked up by their new owners. The Misers bought one that will be delivered to their cannonball training grounds in Peru, Indiana, and used as a guest house. At least one is destined to become a dinner train in Cincinnati, Ohio, albeit with the Ringling Bros name scraped off. What is left of the train will make the long, final journey south to the circus’ headquarters in Florida. Unsold cars will be scrapped for metal.
The final car disappears over the horizon, the shrill squealing noises get tinier and tinier until they’re gone.
An older man in a ball cap who was watching the departure approaches a sleep-deprived Wilson, who’s standing alone outside her moving truck with tears streaming down her face.
“Excuse me,” he asks in a thick New England accent. “Are you the ringmaster?”
Wilson answers simply, “Yeah,” and they both laugh joylessly.
Long after the train has left the yard, Wilson lingers filming the tracks on her iPhone, pacing up and down the parking lot, and fretting because she forgot to thank the circus’ concession workers in her final speech. The sky is filling slowly with ominous dark clouds.
Finally, she stops at the cab of her huge yellow moving truck.
“It’s been amazing,” she sighs. “Time to get in this bad boy and figure out what I’m gonna do.
“I’ll see you down the road.”
