THE BIG MAGIC OF CIRCUS FLORA
A small taste of the DAZZLING PERFORMANCES happening now in Grand Center Arts District.
Sitting just outside the Big Top tent of this year’s Circus Flora, I’m watching the matriarch of the tightrope-walking Flying Wallendas exit her airstream. She’s cradling a toddler in her arms and she carefully walks under a nearby oak tree and points into its branches. The little girl reaches into the tree and plucks a fresh banana from a hanging bunch, peels it, and eats it as they waltz together back behind the vintage camper. She notices me watching and smiles giving me a knowing head nod.
It’s a bit like a scene from a dream, and for a moment takes me out of the steaming parking lot I’m sitting in just off Washington Avenue, in St. Louis’ Grand Center Arts District. I realize that the hanging bananas have been placed in the tree on the edge of the parking lot by a parent Wallenda, a person well-versed in giving their children natural experiences while on the road.
The romance of this tiny kindness, a private moment between a grandmother and a granddaughter, overwhelms me. This is a moment I shouldn’t have seen. It’s not part of the show, it’s in the parking lot during their break. All at once I think to myself, “Wild traveling cowboys do still exist, in modern-day circus performers.”
But that may be a wrong comparison because the Flying Wallendas aren’t lonesome drifters. They’re an incredibly talented family of high-line walking daredevils that have been making the news together since their name was coined by the press in the 1940s.
This isolated moment was only one of many magical treats I experienced while with my family at a performance of this year’s “Circus Flora: Undercover.” Now playing through June 25, the show delivers a sense of wonder, comedy and dazzling displays of physical prowess hard to find elsewhere.
Circus Flora is a local, non-profit organization that has been performing yearly shows in the St. Louis area for more than 37 years. The house band performs original live music set to a choreographed two-part theatrical performance weaving a story of hilarious espionage and anchored by the awe-inspiring individual circus acts.
Before the show and during intermission, circus-goers can take advantage of the refreshment tent, VIP hospitality area, live music, face painting, camel rides and more.
In short, it’s worth the trip.
Now, I’m back inside the air-conditioned Big Top, flanked by my two elementary-aged boys squeezing my arm tightly as the Flying Wallendas climb tall, skinny ladders to a second-story high-wire. They lean and hang off the platforms not unlike bananas in a bunch dangling from a nearby parking lot tree. My son gasps when the older Wallenda cycles his bike slowly across the thin tightrope suspended above the ground with no net to catch a mistake. And then our shoulders all relax as we hear screams of glee as he makes it safely to the other side.
All photography courtesy of Circus Flora.