Circus; 7; The Flyers

…aun't the wind, with its three haunting notes, or the blue danube. Almost always awolts, as the faces turn up and the dark sea of audience frightens. Out near the entrances, even the performers who are finished, return in their bathrobes or costumes to watch an act that traditionally closes the show, one which even they never grow tired of seeing. The flying act, more properly the flying return act, the flying trapeze. The flying act, more properly the flying trapeze. Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna.

Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna, Nanna. It was in about 1860 that a young man named Jules Leotard took Paris by storm with the first really new development in centuries of tumbling and acrobatics. He had invented the flying trapeze, and he devised the tights that aerialists wear as well. They are named in his honor, and the flying act with its summer solts from one trapeze to another is still as pure and elegant as anything the circus full. Though known as an American act, it was invented by a Frenchman, developed by two Englishmen, Charles and Ernest Clark, and brought to its fullest glory in the 1920s by an extraordinary Mexican, whose brilliance diminished everything that came before and after. The graceful and tragic Alfredo Codona.

The Clark Brothers, descendants of a long line of Shomen, were the first really significant flyers to follow the Great Leotard. Their father had seen the Frenchman perform in London, and was so mightily impressed that he had once set his sons to practice. It was seven years before they were ready for their first performance, but they were to make their mark in the history of the circus. Ernest was the flyer or leaper and Charles the catcher, and it was Ernest Clark, who was the first regularly to perform the triple summer solts. The trick that more than any other distinguishes the good flyers from the Great. The performance usually takes place forty feet in the air,

although many acts work higher. The old Hanlon Vultors once worked the Crystal Palace in London at a height of one hundred feet from the ground, but that was exceptional. There is always a net below. Flyers say we depend upon the net, but we never trust it. Many injuries sometimes mortal are caused by bad falls into the net, which must be landed upon in a certain way, on the back of the neck and shoulders preferably. Once the Great Codona fell through the net, which had rotted, coming down from forty feet and plunging through like a stone, only superb reflexes saved him. He managed to hit the earth in the summer salt and roll the shock away. So flyers never miss a trick intentionally. The net is too dangerous. We fear falling, Codona said, but we are not afraid we are going to fall. The Apparatus, from which the trapezes are hung, is called a frame.

It has evolved into a rather standard forty foot length. At one end is the pedestal board, upon which flyers stand, and from it take off for their tricks. The first trapeze or fly bar is fourteen feet away. The catch trap or catcher's trapeze is at the far end, forty feet away. Fay Alexander, here setting up his rig for the Tompac Circus in St. Louis, is a veteran, fifteen years of flyer. Does the triple, throws the triple as flyers say, and has no one to envy among active performers? He was with the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus for a long time,

but now books his troop independently. Last year, 1963, it consisted of four people. Fay, with his sailors tattoo, his wife rose, another leaper, Paul McAusland, and Bill Simpson, the catcher. Fay Alexander has the typical flyers torso, powerful and well developed. He's had some shoulder trouble though, the shoulder. That's the thing flyers always hurt, he says. Codona ended his career with a shoulder injury, and when at Cancelo had a bad shoulder. It's occupational. It kept Fay off the trapeze for an entire year. He went to Barbara School that year. The catcher is very important.

He can make up the difference in a trick. Make it work and look good even if the flyer is awful little. He must be strong and not too small. He doesn't hang from his knees as it might appear. Rather, he circles his legs around the ropes of the trapeze for better support. It's significant that Ernest Clark was caught by Charles's brother, and Codona by his brother, Lalo. The relationship between catcher and leaper need not be based upon blood, but it frequently is. Here is a double by Fay Alexander, done from the vault position, which is to say over the bar. Most tricks are done from the straight position, that is, hanging beneath the bar. Practice sessions like this one are seldom lengthy. They are often governed by the condition of the flyer's hands. Trapeze work is very hard on the hands. They get hot as the flyers say. They burn and blister. The skin separates at the creases,

and raven, which is dusted upon the palms, to help grip the flybar, doesn't help things much. After a trick, the flyer performs a return to the flybar. This is often done with a pirouette or several pirouettes in mid-air. Codona was famous for these, and the peculiar legs apart grace with which he did them, floated through them, it appeared. But all the technique and grace are nothing without the trick. Leapers on the ground and later trapeze artists in the air had always been obsessed with a haunting and elusive third summer salt,

that impossible third summer salt, that had killed so many men, that the Italians named it the salto mortale, the death leap. Ernest Clark was the first flyer to perform it. Three complete turns in air, and then the catch. But if everything is not just so, the flyer falls. Reggie armor, principal leaper of the flying art tones, throws the triple. His catcher is Bob Yorkies. Here in slow motion that does not seem so slow, they practice the trick. It is, as you will notice, the classic triple, three backward summer salts and a wrist to wrist catch. The tricks aren't the important thing in a flying act anyway, it's the way you swing the way you handle yourself on the fly ball when you're swinging is the important thing. There's no saying between flyers that a trick is made or broken or made

over the pedestal board. That's the board we stand on, which is really true. If you get a good swing, anybody can do a good trick. It's the bad ones that are hard to do, right? Some guys have a tremendous force out. They call it. That's the front of the swing when you shoot your legs out. I could only have a tremendous force out. And other guys don't force out as high and they pump apart in the background myself. I don't like to pump apart on the back up, because it tends to rock me out of position if I work too hard there. So I like to get it on the front end and then just coast. But I don't need a lot of swing for my tricks anyway, because I've got a pretty good lift. And I can do the same trick off the flat of the board as I can off the raise. The only reason I use a raise is because I don't have to work as hard to get the same swing. But I actually get it in my lift. Now a lot of guys don't have this lift, and they have to have the raise built up to get a lot of swing. If I were teaching somebody, I would try to teach them to get as much swing as they could on the force out rather than the back up, because I think it's much easier to stay in position if you don't have to work so hard on the back end of the swing.

The emphasis that I place on it is just smoothness, not height or power or anything like that. When you raise your legs to shoot them out, you should feel just like you're going to float. And you don't want to feel any jerking in the wires on the fly bar or anything like that. Of course, it doesn't always work that way. The easiness and hardness of a trick is determined by the amount of time you have to catch it when you come out of the trick. Now, on a triple, naturally, you're not going to have much time to catch it. It's a fast trick to catch. Everything has to be more perfect on a triple than it does say, for instance, on a double. Now you've got a margin for air. I don't know how long it would be, but whatever it would be on a double would probably be 100 times that fast on a triple. Well, that was a good triple. It was just overturned. I didn't stop it with my legs. I didn't shoot my legs out straight. That's what stops the trick. You can either stop it with your legs coming out straight or your arms coming out straight. Well, your arms coming out straight is no good on a triple especially because

that will make your arms go to a different position and the catch won't be able to take a hole of you. And it just kept right on turning away from you, so you couldn't get a hole of it. These kind of things are what makes it triple hard. The main thing that I run into when I talk to people that don't know anything about the business, the first thing they'll ask invariably is you use a net. It's just kind of funny after a while because actually nobody's ever seen a flying act without a net. Regardless of what anybody says, I don't know why they have this feeling that flying acts are done without a net because you wouldn't last very long if you did. There's just too many things that can go wrong. You can do a beautiful trick and a beautiful return. You can kill it by going back to the board sloppy or not projecting yourself or looking like you, not interested in whether the people like it or not. I've seen a lot of flyers work this way and this I think can ruin the whole thing just as easy as a bad trick.

Now the pirouette was bad and the bar was early on that one. That was an early bar and it came up under my arms. I didn't have time to see it. That's what happened. I got draped all over the bar. A lot of it's myself too. A lot of it's the trick itself to pirouette. It's not too good. It's got a little too much tilt and it wasn't in one piece. I could pick it all apart. I try to be in one piece as much as I can. But you can't always do this. If they're perfect and you're right together with a catcher or you have a different feeling about it, you can just go up and you kind of float. It's real easy to keep your feet and legs and everything together. I think it has to be right all the way through and I think it all connects in the long run to make a good actor a bad guy. Adrian Katarsi, here juggling with his catcher Ivan Williams, is the youngest flyer in the country doing the triple. He is from a famous circus family and sometimes reflects upon the curious and perhaps fateful fact

that Adrian Katarsi, here juggling with his catcher Ivan Williams, is the youngest flyer in the country doing the triple. He is from a famous circus family and sometimes reflects upon the curious and perhaps fateful fact that his initials are the same as those of the greatest flyers of the two generations preceding him. Alfredo Catona and Art Cancelo. We caught the triple the first time I'd never been awake and dreamed anything like that. Right then, for us three, that was the happiest moment I've ever met.

Gilbert always, his goal in teaching was always to teach a champion. And I knew, and I have a new, that if we ever caught this triple, then we'd be his champions. And so we caught it, and I knew then this guy was the happiest guy in the world. And certainly I've always wanted to catch it, and Ivan did do it. And we were the happiest people in the, the happiest three people in the whole world. We were so happy we just stood around and looked at each other. I always thought, before we caught this triple, when we did, we hug each other and raise all sorts of cane and you know what's going to, we didn't, we just kind of stood in and looked at each other. You know, like, well by guys, you know, we could do it all the time, and we could quickly satisfy ourselves and everybody around us. And yeah, I, that was probably the happiest moment I ever met. You know, I've been here for 21 years, and I think that's the happiest moment in my whole life. I was catching that thing. I could do that. And Gilbert just happened to grow. I wish I was born about 30 years ago, because that's where the circus was. You know, it's Hayden. Codona at the time was me, you know, and then when you were great, people realized that they knew, but now you can be great.

And the only people that were appreciated other than yourselves, other circus people that know, you know, what you're doing. Although the converse is true, because if you, if you're great, you'll do the trick so beautifully, you could even mount it and I can say it. But I, yeah, I'd love to go out and fly for, you know, to be the greatest ever. Alfredo Codona, born in Sonora, Mexico, 1893. The son of a circus family, he began his career at four and became the Nijinsky of the circus, a man whom legend has elected the greatest flyer ever.

His song was the Blue Danube Waltz. They played it during his act, and they played it at his funeral. He was married three times. His second wife was Lillian Litzel, the greatest circus star of her time. It was a union of royalty, but very brief. Litzel fell to her death in 1931. Codona married again this time Vera Bruce, who was in the act. In 1933, he fell and hurt his shoulder. It never healed. He was finished. Four years later, in a lawyer's office in California, he shot his wife and then himself, like Nijinsky, his life ended in tragedy. Here is Codona performing with Vera Bruce and his brother Lalo in the Berlin Winter Garden in 1931. This old film shows him doing the triple. His repertoire included every important trick, and his grace was consummate. It has never been equaled.

The Blue Danube was his son. They played it at his funeral.

The Blue Danube was his son. They played it at his funeral. He was buried beside Litzel. Beneath a fantastic monument, he had first seen in a dream, and upon which is inscribed, re-union. The greatest woman flyer was a convent girl from Burlington, Vermont, Antoinette, Cancelo. She began in 1927, and taught by her husband, Art Cancelo, was soon doing difficult tricks. By 1934, she was doing the two-and-a-half, the only woman ever to do it. Girls have long been a part of flying acts, but usually Justin give them a little glamour. Not this lady. By 1937, she was doing the incredible. The triple. No other woman has ever done it. Up until the time I started, a double was the biggest trick a woman had ever done. So I was very anxious to try these different things, and I really didn't actually know the value of them at the time. But I just wanted to do certain things.

The triple, it was a great thrill, because I had this pognitive shrine in Detroit who were working for at the time. It kidded me for several years, wanting me to do the triple for me. I had taught several in practice, and I had done some in the mechanic, and some out of the mechanic, and just that and the other. We opened in Detroit anyway, the opening night, and everything went fine. We did all the complete act. So I put the phrase up and nodded to our catcher, and Mr. Stinson, who was the potent date then, knew what I was going to do then. The drummer in the band picked up a drum roll, and it was a dead silence.

Oh, there was just a big wall, a silence, a whole building, and the people were, well, what we call a straw house, people were sitting way up to the ring curbs. I did the triple and caught it and returned to the bar, and Mr. Stinson went to the microphone and described it to the audience and told them what they had just witnessed, and it had been the first time in circus history that had ever been accomplished. By a woman flyer, and he had always told me that when I did the triple for him, he'd buy me the nicest dress they ever had, so the next morning his wife appeared at the hotel and took me shopping. Oh, she brought me a beautiful dress. It was beige, and well, I can't quite describe it now. The styles have changed, you know. Mr. Stinson, but I was very proud of it.

The Flying Artones, St. Louis IV of July 1963. The Flying Artones, St. Louis IV of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993.

The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993.

The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993.

This is NET, National Educational Television. The Flying Artones, St. Louis III of July 1993.