In Training for Life Under the Big Top

At one of Russia’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning, no students work harder than the class clowns.

“It’s a common idea that to be a clown is an easy thing,” says Valentina Savina, director of the State School of Circus and Variety Arts. But clowning is the most intellectually demanding major offered by the four-year college, and about half of the tiny number of freshmen who start as clowns switch to other specialties.

“You must be born a clown,” she explains, “and you must have a philosophy of performance.”

Moscow’s circus college doesn’t just train a fresh crop of young entertainers each year. It has helped preserve Russia’s revered circus traditions in an uncertain era. And though the school has fallen on hard economic times, it increasingly is helping introduce the discipline and artistry of classical Russian circus to Western audiences.

From the start, Soviet leaders regarded circuses as recreation fit for the masses.

Not long after the Russian Revolution, two Moscow ringmasters persuaded Communist Party officials that the best way to prepare performers was through a rigorous, standardized curriculum.

So in 1927, the Kremlin founded what administrators say is the world’s first circus college north of central Moscow. “It was an opportunity for the new circus generation to acquire knowledge, to achieve a higher level of culture,” according to the school’s brochure.

Graduates walked tightropes, did back flips and stomped around in big floppy shoes from Minsk to Murmansk. The school inspired the founding of similar institutions in places like Mongolia, Vietnam and Cuba.

In the last 74 years, the school has produced more than 5,000 graduates, among them many alumni who went on to socialist fame, if not capitalist fortune. Four years ago, the death of one alumnus, the clown Yuri Vladimirovich Nikulin, brought thousands of mourners to view his body in Moscow’s Old Circus.

But like many institutions that thrived in the Soviet era, the Russian circus has suffered since communism’s collapse a decade ago.

Many circuses have simply closed. Those that remain attract dwindling audiences. Circus stars are no longer the celebrities they once were.

“The prestige of the profession has somehow dropped,” Savina says.

So have the fortunes of the college, where former circus stars earn teaching salaries of less than $2,000 a year. A decade ago, the college had 400 students and graduated 100 a year.

Today, there are only 167 students, and they come to classes each day at a squat building where the floors are dusty and the walls are in need of a fresh coat of paint. But there are still seven applicants for each slot in the freshman class, more than for any of Russia’s other colleges for the arts.

Students spend the first year practicing all the performance genres taught at the school--balancing acts, trapeze work, clowning, acrobatics, gymnastics, juggling and others. They also study the history of art, music and theater and take acting and dancing lessons to improve their poise and stage presence.

A typical day includes an hour of warmup, five hours of instruction and long hours of practice every night. Students usually end the day exhausted. “Afterward, I want to take a hot shower and do nothing but eat and sleep,” says Nanou Perrot, a 22-year-old French acrobat.

Still, there are rewards. Graduates are virtually guaranteed jobs. By graduation day last year, Savina says, 22 of the 32 seniors had already been hired. The best students typically wind up working overseas for what, by Russian standards, are fabulous salaries. Those who remain in Russia earn middle-class incomes and are eligible for a state pension after 15 years.

Teacher Boris Belokhovstov was once a star circus acrobat and one of the Soviet system’s pampered elite. Today, the veteran teacher’s salary is less than $170 a month. But he isn’t nostalgic about the glory days of Soviet circuses. Young performers, he says, are better than those of past eras.

“As for technical skills? It’s been advancing each year,” he says. “Not only in this country, but everywhere in the world.”

Swedish performers Henrik Agger, 28, and his 19-year-old partner, Louise Bjurholm came to Moscow to hone their acrobatic skills. “When you start to learn,” Agger says, “you want to learn more and more difficult things.”

As part of their act, Bjurholm does a handstand on Agger’s hands. He tosses her up, flips her and catches her--standing--by her feet.

Belokhovstov, Agger says, showed the couple how to make the feat seem effortless. And, they say, he understands how they work together better than they do. “He can just figure out what movements fit us best,” Agger says.

Most of the school’s top Russian students hope one day to work for Western circuses, such as Ringling Bros. in the United States or Cirque du Soleil in France. But the performers who emigrate seldom return. Agger wonders what will happen to the school when teachers such as Belokhovstov retire.

“Who will come after him and be like him?” Agger asks.

Belokhovstov wonders, too. “It’s a complicated question,” he says.

The collapse of Russia’s circus traditions would be a blow to world culture. But Savina says there is no cause for alarm. As long as there are Russians, she says, there will be a circus school.

“The circus art is for the fanatics,” she says. “They have always existed, and there will always be such people.”

Douglas Birch writes for the Baltimore Sun, a Tribune company.