Big Splash Over Smallest Show on Earth

Maybe it’s because Maria Fernanda Cardoso wears a silver cape and wields a tiny whip.

Or maybe it’s because she harnesses fleas with tiny wires, gives them names like Teeny and Tiny and then blows on them to coax them to walk across a mini-tightrope or jump from a high dive.

Whatever it is, audiences at the Cardoso Flea Circus often leave her weekend shows at the Exploratorium science center with bemused looks on their faces.

“People don’t think it’s real,” Cardoso says.

But close examination reveals that there are, indeed, fleas attached to wire harnesses or dressed in costumes--live fleas that dance (sort of), juggle and lift weights.

One of them, a mighty mite named Tarzan, pulls a toy big rig.

“He’s the strongest, but not the smartest. Otherwise, he wouldn’t do this,” Cardoso says with a coy grin as her mostly adult audience squints to get a look.

Then there’s Harry Flee-dini, the world’s smallest escape artist.

“Oh,” she says, feigning a look of surprise as she opens his box. “He’s gone already.”

Some think Cardoso’s show is strange. Many think it’s funny. And at least one person in the audience always asks if the fleas are alive.

“They’re very skeptical,” Cardoso’s assistant, Heidi Zednik, says.

For the ringmaster and creator of the show, it’s more than a circus sideshow. “I don’t know if they know I’m a serious artist,” says Cardoso, who earned her master of fine arts degree at Yale University.

A native of Colombia, she is a sculptor and installation artist who has exhibited work at major galleries in the United States, Canada and South America. Her pieces often feature animals, including lizards, snakes and starfish.

This latest project, she says, is “art and life”--a chance for her to show her sense of humor and interact with her audience.

“It’s nothing like I have ever done,” she says. “I have never performed anything in my life.”

Cardoso began learning about fleas four years ago. She wanted to use human fleas, as have most traditional flea circuses. But those were too hard to find, so she buys cat fleas from a lab for seven to 10 cents each.

The fleas live about two months--long enough, Cardoso says, for her to become attached to them. The first step is to harness them, using tweezers and magnifying goggles. Then she teaches them to walk on two legs and designs an act for them in her ever-evolving show.

“I tried to find somebody from which to learn. But there was no one,” says Cardoso, who won’t reveal how she feeds the fleas, which of course dine mainly on blood.

In her research, she found suggestions in books about an Italian named Bertolotto who designed elaborate flea circuses in Europe in the 1800s. His audiences included royalty. In New York in the 1950s, a man simply known as Prof. Heckler herded fleas at his show on 42nd Street.

As far as Cardoso knows, the last flea circus met its demise in the 1970s.

“I revived it because it was lost,” says the self-proclaimed Prof. Cardoso, Queen of the Fleas--still a serious artist who teaches sculpture at the San Francisco Art Institute.

But she often finds herself daydreaming about fleas.

“This is an obsession of mine,” says Cardoso, who wants to be buried in a flea-shaped coffin. “I am totally hooked. I got the flea bite.”

But she didn’t know her audiences would too.

“I knew it would be fun,” she says. “I didn’t know it would be such a big deal.”