Government of Clowns

Figure 1.

The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus. Photo: Carl Saytor.

Figure 2.

Stephanie Monseu plays with fire. Photo: James Graham.

The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus is a touring anarchist carnival and sideshow based in Brooklyn. For the past four years, they have played venues from Lincoln Center, to the annual Burning Man Festival and Art Car Orange Show, to children’s parties. The show includes circus freaks, “pain-proof” clowns, Ramona Bindlestiff scarfing insects, the Copper Top Marching Band, the World’s One and Only Brother and Sister Bed of Nails Act, David Didd the slack-wire walker, and Mr. Pennygaff the blockhead swallowing blades of steel. While the style and tone of the show are purposely low-tech and poor, the performers are skilled and conscious of themselves as part of a great tradition—they take their name from a slang term for hobo widely used in the 1920s.

ANNIE DORSEN Would you describe a typical show, and the relationship you try to develop with your audience?

STEPHANIE MONSEU A typical show takes place in a venue in which alcohol is served. The audience is relaxed, maybe slightly loopy. As ringmaster, I start things off by playing a little game with them—get them hooting and hollering, see if they are paying attention. Then I get them to take off their underwear. It’s an accelerated attempt to make sure the fourth wall is broken down and all boundaries are blurred. Upon this depends our success with an audience. It’s not the fact that I have their panties in a little pile at my feet—it’s their realization that we are making ourselves just as vulnerable to them.

What kind of audiences come to your shows?

MONSEU We play everywhere from little punk rock venues without working toilets to gorgeous renovated vaudeville and opera houses. One night we’re in something super, with beautiful makeup rooms, mirrors, and then the next night we’re trying to do makeup in candlelight. It’s really difficult to put a finger on exactly who our audience is, because we’re always changing the show and looking for new people. Sometimes we’ll have an age range from sixteen to seventy, from all different backgrounds. They range from theater types to teenage punk rock folks, who are politically active and who can spend two or three dollars to go to an all-ages punk show. Our “all-ages” shows bring in eight- and nine-year-olds. And it changes once we go outside of an urban environment. In New York City we’re not likely to have a Sally Jesse Raphael fan come to the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, but in Iowa City we are. Traveling so much has opened my eyes to a whole perspective of what people want and like outside of New York.

KEITH NELSON The circus is accepted and understood by everybody. If we get pulled over by a cop, we say we’re a circus and I think it helps us out quite a bit, because they remember being nine years old and having cotton candy. If we said we were a rock-and-roll band, we’d probably be stuck on the side of the road for the next eight hours. Life on the road is getting better, though we haven’t been able to afford a new vehicle. We have a van that won’t be able to do another round. Right now that’s our hardest issue. When we’re on the road, we only make enough to survive on the road. We have to figure out how to find funding without jacking ticket prices up to ten, fifteen bucks.

So you think that ticket prices affect the attitude of the audience?

MONSEU Absolutely. We usually offer a dollar off admission price if people come in clown makeup, and it works wonders. It makes them leave behind a lot of baggage. When somebody comes dressed up as a clown, and hoots and hollers and rowdies up the folks around them, it’s great to see that.

What’s your connection with the punk scene, or with a group like the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow, which often has an antagonistic relationship with the audience?

NELSON We have a couple of acts that might fall into that category. We have a juggling duo that basically juggles shit and are totally guttural about it. They’re making fun of male, in-your-face energy.

MONSEU We’re not asking people to abuse us, and we’re not looking to abuse anybody. But it’s hard to say what we expect of them and what they expect of us. There’s no rule book; this isn’t taught in theater classes. There’s no way to say, “It’s all right to laugh out loud, but it’s not OK to yell questions.” It’s an organic thing. We have no problem dealing with somebody who is causing problems. We know how to handle that—we’ve been forced to learn how because we have this policy of openness.

If you didn’t learn what you’re doing in theater classes, where did you learn it?

NELSON Five years ago, we were a fire-eating duo. We started outside the theater world, in clubs and bars. We took the circus sideshow into places that weren’t used to anything but rock bands. Even now, four or five years later, we try to stay away from being considered a “theater group.” We’re staying true to traditions of entertainers, vaudeville stage, the origin of the theater world.

MONSEU We got interested through research about sideshows. We started learning skills and wanted to present them. We tried every angle: the first time we ever performed as the Bindle-stiff Family Cirkus was at Hampshire College. We delivered a lecture and performance about anarchism and circuses.

What did you say about anarchism and the circus?

NELSON Although we’re living within the social structure, as a community of five to ten people on the road we are also in some way outside of it. We have our own structure, or lack thereof. We show people that you can do the impossible—start a circus and survive on it in the 1990s.

MONSEU We’ve met up with a group of people who share a similar commitment to a boundaryless artistic inspiration. On a grassroots level, that’s an important trend in entertainment and in theater, as it is in politics. All over we see “Food, Not Bombs” springing up, and coalitions organizing civil rights and environmental protests. The same is true with entertainment. People feel empowered to start their own groups, people who are tired of being run around by agents and clubs, or of being ignored by legitimate theaters.

NELSON We’re at the front edge of bringing that network together, because it doesn’t really exist at this point. There are more and more little vaudeville sideshow burlesque groups starting here and there, but none of them have energy or know-how, or know where to start with touring, and after doing it for the past four or five years we’re beginning to know enough venues that are interested in something like this. We’re hoping to create a network or a circuit that others can use.

You’ve talked about the way that the Bindlestiffs live and the philosophy behind your work. Do you think there is a connection between anarchism and what’s actually on stage? Or between anarchism and traditional circus?

NELSON I think that the clown has always presented the chaotic persona of anarchism. The clown has its own perception of society and society’s rules. The clown manages to thumb its nose at the system and escape retribution. The clown’s outsider position allows an objective look at the follies and foibles of those who allow themselves to be governed by society. The clown governs itself. I think many Bindlestiff themes reflect this self-determination. The show is a two-hour visit to a state of suspended laws, a state of individual freedom where the hard evidence of the pursuit of dreams and personal liberty are the acts and the images they present.

Why do you think there is such an interest right now in the old days of vaudeville and burlesque?

MONSEU I don’t know if it’s the old days of vaudeville and burlesque, or if it’s accessible entertainment. Movies are ten dollars now in New York City, TV is the same boring bland nonsense, and how many times can you rent a video and sit home alone?

NELSON I think people want to see flesh and spit again. Our entertainment is too clean. People are too separated. The dirtiness of the old carnival, I think, was the reason people went. It was human. People are looking for that again, wanting it and needing it. There has also been a movement in this country to squash out live entertainment. Being a street performer in New York City means giving the middle finger to authority. Giuliani is cracking down on street performers from Washington Square to Central Park. It’s a fifty-dollar ticket for pulling out a juggling club.

MONSEU The street performers in Central Park tried to use the First Amendment to their advantage and didn’t get anywhere. It’s just an uphill battle, which is why there are more and more underground things happening.

Giuliani’s attempt to close the topless bars comes out of the same impulse.

NELSON The topless bars are connected to cabarets and dance clubs—it’s the same legal lingo restricting live entertainment or people dancing if liquor is served. Then there is the issue of nudity and art. Some towns that we go to have been battling that for quite a time, and a couple permit nudity where alcohol is served as long as it’s for art. The one or two major theaters, where the opera and ballet perform, they have a little cocktail bar—on the books.

In some ways, going to a topless bar and going to a sideshow have a similar feeling. A sideshow is so much about displaying the body in unusual ways and inviting people to gawk. Performers have been crossing over for years between performance art and pornography, like Annie Sprinkle and Penny Arcade, and there’s a similar punk aesthetic to the sideshow.

MONSEU I don’t think it’s an invitation to gawk, but rather an invitation to experience firsthand. If you go to Annie Sprinkle just planning to watch, and gawk, then you’re making a mistake, because Annie is inviting you to look, get involved, get turned on, and to feel firsthand. And the same is true of most newer sideshow and vaudeville troupes. When you pay money and sit down in the audience, you’re taking a chance that you’re going to end up on stage, especially with a show like ours. I think that to have a really good experience with theater or any kind of entertainment, you have to be willing to participate to a certain extent. I know that we’re not in it for gawk or shock value, we’re inviting people to come and feel excitement, feel fear, to lose their inhibitions, step up on stage and try something new. The crowd that I most enjoy playing for is one that really gets involved, shouts out, and moves around. There isn’t that inhibition that a traditional theater setting instills in people. I don’t know if that’s a punk aesthetic or not, but it’s definitely inviting. We want their response.

Inviting people to share an experience not necessarily their own is exactly what makes people like Jesse Helms so freaked out.

MONSEU In society, when you walk down the street, you don’t look at other people, you look at the ground, or you look at the buildings around you. The whole point is to try to avoid human contact, especially in urban areas. It is important to allow people to look at each other. In our show, people are allowed to look at a six-foot-tall transvestite or transsexual, people are allowed to look at someone whose gender boundaries are completely blurred, people are allowed to look at somebody doing something amazing, or who looks different from them. Somebody asked me why you don’t see so many physically deformed people working in sideshows anymore, and part of it is our fear of looking at each other.

Although in the Coney Island sideshow, the performers are self-created freaks.

NELSON It depends on what season you look at.

MONSEU There are people who are working in modern sideshows who are dwarfs and midgets, and flipper people, and bearded ladies. They’re out there.

Last summer at Coney Island, I went down to Dick Zigun’s . . .

MONSEU You didn’t see Koko the Killer Clown who is a midget, or Jennifer who is a bearded lady?

I saw Jennifer. But right across the street there was a tiny little tent with the “World’s Smallest Woman” lying in a basket inside. And the experience of going into that tent was totally different than going into the Coney Island sideshow. The sideshow is so much a performance, and there’s an aggressive relationship between the audience and the performers. But going into the little tent, one by one, and saying hello to this woman who says hello back—that seemed much closer to the olden days of Zip the What-Is-It, closer to exploitation. In this new resurgence of interest in sideshows and freaks, the performers are empowered; there’s an irony present.

NELSON But there is historical precedent for almost any act that appears in our show—even the Victorians had cooch dancers and Indian fakirs. I view both traditional acts and “transgressive” acts in the same light—for the most part, an individual has to be dedicated, self-disciplined, and creative to perfect and perform acts well, whatever they are. Our show’s aesthetic happens to combine various styles, but I think the mechanics are the same.

MONSEU There is an interesting shift in perspective. In live entertainment these days, there are performers who deal in dangerous and taboo subjects, like Ron Athey or Karen Finley. But on a mainstream and very digestible level, people shy away from fearsome taboos. I think it’s a good thing that people are becoming more able to go and look at the tiniest woman in the world and stand there with no barrier in between—that’s a very raw moment; it’s very vulnerable and revealing. There isn’t that kind of face-to-face moment in today’s live entertainment. Stand-up comedians don’t really go to that level. I haven’t seen theater or music that goes to that level, where audiences are confronted with their own taboos and worst fears. I think Ron Athey goes to that extreme, and Karen Finley, and Annie Sprinkle. But it’s a privileged audience, a privileged few who go and see their work, whereas with the Coney Island sideshow, lots of people can go and watch Jennifer Miller working, and she’ll talk about herself as a bearded lady. You can go and say hello to that tiny little living midget, you can go and talk to Koko the Clown, you can talk to Baby Dee, or Scotty the Blue Bunny, who flaunt their gender identity and don’t make any apology for it. Performers are exhibiting themselves with an agenda.

What’s the agenda?

MONSEU Once again, personal liberty and governance are at issue here. The Deep South or macho fraternity-collegiate Midwest is not the most tolerant of difference—yet we hope that by presenting difference, people can be made comfortable with it. And for people who are hiding in conservative areas, we are presenting a positive image with which they can identify. Scotty the Blue Bunny has said that he hopes to kindle love in the most unlikely of hearts. One would hope that people can overcome their prejudice and appreciate these performers for their consummate skill, if nothing else.