Circus people in America have not enjoyed these past four months.
The bad news began in November when the Big Apple Circus, a beloved and mission-centered American circus known for its dedication to children living in poverty, filed for bankruptcy. The Big Apple — which pitched its tent every year by New York’s Lincoln Center — had been around for 40 years.
In January, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus announced its imminent closure — after 146 years on the road — with its owners saying that the operation no longer was financially viable. That meant the loss of the marquee traditional circus in North America, and all the jobs and visibility there associated.
And then, worst of all, on Feb. 8, the legendary Wallenda family — the living embodiment of what circus means in America and a circus family of preternatural dedication with roots stretching back into the 18th century — had a terrible accident in Sarasota, Fla.
Hephaestus Lookingglass Theatre photo
Rehearsals in 2010 for the Wallenda’s Lookingglass Theatre production of "Hephaestus" included the eight-person pyramid.
Rehearsals in 2010 for the Wallenda’s Lookingglass Theatre production of "Hephaestus" included the eight-person pyramid.
(Lookingglass Theatre photo)
With Nik Wallenda at the anchor, the Wallenda family had been practicing its famous eight-person, high-wire pyramid stunt under the Circus Sarasota Big Top. Someone in the middle lost his or her balance with the pole, it seemed, and five of the inter-dependent performers fell at least 25 feet to the ground (the depth of the fall depended on how high they were on the pyramid). The Wallendas, believing, like their ancestors, that nets promoted unsafe behavior, were working, as usual, without that protection.
In a press conference shortly after, Nik Wallenda — the same man who walked across the Chicago River, 600 feet from the ground, between two high-rise buildings in 2014 — described to the best of his ability what had transpired. He’d fallen himself but been able to grab hold of the wire, the last resort of the wirewalker.
He told reporters that his aunt, Rietta, and his sister, Lijana, were two of the people who did not get that chance (the guys on the bottom have the best chance of catching hold of the wire). Rietta, who was all the way at the top of the pyramid, had fallen some 40 feet, while Lijana, who was just below, had been the most badly hurt; she fell right onto her face and, after she arrived at the hospital, she was placed in an induced coma. Outside the hospital, Rick Wallenda, Nik’s cousin, also spoke to the media, among other things reciting the mantra of his grandfather, Karl Wallenda: "Put your feet on the wire right, hold tight to that pole and never lose your cool, you will never fall."
As far back as 1780 the Wallenda family was performing as a traveling circus troupe. The Flying Wallendas were headliners on the high-wire with Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus during much of the 1930s and 1940s. Today, the extended family of daredevils is known for tightrope tricks and ‘skywalking’ feats over places like Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon.
The accident had reverberations in Chicago. The gifted circus performer and movement specialist Tony Hernandez — long associated with the Lookingglass Theater Company on Michigan Avenue — was formerly married to Lijana Wallenda; the couple has a son. In fact, if you saw the show "Hephaestus" in 2005 or 2008 at the Lookingglass, or at the Goodman Theatre in 2010, you probably saw Lijana Wallenda perform in her then-husband’s show. Witnessing that pyramid is not easily forgotten.
The accident also was a reminder of one of the oft-forgotten truths about the circus business, always a good metaphor for life. The possibility of disaster never is absent — someone can always black out, for example — but it’s during the ordinary, everyday, routine moments when you have to stay the most aware. If you saw Nik Wallenda on TV that warm night in Chicago, you probably laughed at all of the hyped-up tension, the cameras from all over the world, the wobbles on the wire, the dramatic pauses, the nervous city officials and so forth. I was right underneath at the time. It all was part of the act. In fact, that long practiced walk was among the safer things that Wallenda does. Rehearsing, history now reminds us, is far more perilous.
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The aftermath of the incident in Sarasota also is not easy for non-circus people to understand, although, God knows, the Wallendas expend enormous amounts of time and energy trying to explain themselves to us.
After such an incident, most of us would never want to go near a tightrope again — in fact, all of the Wallendas who still could walk performed that very night in Sarasota, even as their beloved family members were in the hospital. They did that with the full knowledge that those injured family members would only have been injured further by their relatives’ absence from the show.
Timelapse: Nik Wallenda tightropes across Chicago Timelapse: Nik Wallenda tightropes across Chicago Timelapse: Nik Wallenda tightropes across Chicago See more videos
If you watch Nik and Rick Wallenda talk to the cameras, you can see their determination to get out the facts immediately. They did not, as is usually the case with people suffering traumatic days or politicians weathering scandal, beg for their privacy to be respected. Even as they talked about the injuries, with total frankness, you could sense their brains whirring around, as if they were processing how such an incident could best be avoided in the future. What more needs to be rehearsed?
What they really want, it’s clear, is to get all their family back on the wire.
Nik Wallenda, who gets the why-do-you-do-it question pretty much every day, can be heard trying, again, to explain that, when you are a Wallenda, this is who you are. It’s not a job, he says, it’s life.
"Life is lived on the wire," he says.
He does not need to add that life lived there also involves your closest and dearest family members.
The rest is just waiting to go on.
Both Lijana and Rietta, it was said several times, hope rising in Wallenda voices, are expected eventually to make a full recovery. Hernandez has been posting regular updates about the health of his ex-wife. Lijana is surrounded by support from theater people in Chicago who don’t understand in the way that circus people understand, but who come closer than most.
To be in the circus is to hear constantly (and irritatingly, at times) of the concern of other people — for the well-being of animals and humans, all living a different life from established. The argument about animals is more complex, for beasts do not have human agency. But the Wallendas make a choice — although I am not sure that in their minds any alternative exists. Beyond self-erasure.
Nik Wallenda walked on a tightrope strung 600 feet in the air during a 750-foot trek from Marina City over the Chicago River to the Leo Burnett Building.
I’ve come to think of this family, whose work I deeply admire, as an inspiring metaphor as well as a real American family — metaphors for resilience, faith, determination, passion and, above all, action. We often hope that our older loved ones will not waste away and become something other than themselves, but will go out in the middle of the high-wire act of their choice — arms outstretched, smiles on their faces, living life to its very fullest.
On Tuesday, it was announced that the Big Apple Circus had been bought out of bankruptcy. The New York Times offered a brief report that the circus will return this fall. I pored over the press release. Who was this savior — this "Big Top Works, an affiliate of the corporate-restructuring firm Compass Partners."
Huh. Where was the money coming from? Why?
It didn’t take long to see the truth. The new owners are old circus people (and their friends with a bit of cash). They were rescuing the Big Apple Circus. They are getting back on the wire.
Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@tribpub.com
Twitter@ChrisJonesTrib
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