Submitted by Jim Soames, Jan 10, 2008 09:19

So-called "French New Circus" is not especially French or New. It is a hybrid of centuries of performing, music, and visual arts techniques from global sources including Asia, Eastern Europe, Africa, and the USA. A child of the hippy 60's and 70's, it owes more to American street theatre, "happenings," and avant-garde performers like Merce Cunningham, than to any original French source. By dint of endlessly repeating the mantra "French New Circus" and by institutionalizing circus schools, the French government has tried to buy the brand, which was originally created by maverick younger offshoots of the traditional circus families who were typically from Italian and North African roots. By the 1970's, New Circus appealed to the French government's culture commisars because it provided a bland, apolitical spectacle at a time when much theatre and dance were polarized by anti-government social messages (Sartre, Genet, Camus, et al). Your reporter seems just to have recycled a press release without doing much research or asking questions such as: if "New Circus" is so popular ("50 million patrons each year"), why does the French government need to subsidize it with hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidy, including the current showcase touring the USA to try to generate more bookings? Ironically, the most successful New Circus venture in the world is not French, its the Quebecois-American Cirque de Soleil which has gone way beyond the "official" French circuses, and makes a huge profit from a vast voluntary audience, without any government handouts or meddling.

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