If you put working in a circus along a yardstick for happiness factors at work, just about all the boxes would turn red. It is a physically demanding profession, the risk of accidents is high, the earnings are below average and you work on an irregular basis.
“You actually think: why would you do that? Until you start talking to these people,” says labor sociologist Fabian Dekker. “I think it’s the most passionate profession I’ve ever spoken to.”
His book about this group was published last week: Forgotten professions, Living and working in the Dutch circus† Dekker is affiliated with Erasmus University Rotterdam.
The publication is the first in a series about ‘forgotten professions’, which Dekker makes on his own initiative. With this he wants to zoom in on professions that usually receive little attention, at least among his colleagues. For the book he interviewed 28 people from the circus sector. Not ‘heavy scientific work’, as he himself says, but an entertaining insight of more than a hundred pages into a special industry.
That sector turned out to be an interesting subject for a labor researcher. Dekker soon found out that all the major macroeconomic developments of recent years have had an impact on the circus sector. „In the past you had many permanent contracts with large circus families, such as Circus Renz, but nowadays more than 90 percent of the artists are self-employed. In the Netherlands, one in three working people is now self-employed or flexworker. The discussion about social protection, for example through disability insurance, plays a huge role in this physical profession. And then we also have the digitization that means that the circus has to compete with a night of gaming or Netflix.”
In the Netherlands, the professional group, according to the CBSmore than six hundred people. Every year, about twenty to thirty people come from the two higher vocational education courses Circus Arts, in Rotterdam and Tilburg. What kind of working life do they get? And is there any money to be made with it?
Strange and insecure
It is a strange and uncertain existence – that is what circus director Kevin van Geet (28) from Hapert in North Brabant learned from his grandfather, who founded circus Harlekino in the late eighties. “He didn’t advise me to work in the circus, but he certainly didn’t recommend it to me,” he says on the phone. “My grandfather didn’t always find it easy financially. In addition, you are away from home three quarters of the year. So, although I loved the circus from an early age, I still went on to do a college degree in garden and landscape management.”
My grandfather didn’t advise me to work in the circus, but he certainly didn’t recommend it either
Kevin Van Geet (28) circus director
But the blood creeps where it can’t. Kevin van Geet raced to the circus every day after his lectures: as a marketing man for his grandfather, but also as a lighting assistant at a German circus, and for performances as a chin balancer. “That’s with constructions piled up on your chin: chairs, daggers, fire torches — that sort of thing.”
Today he is active full-time with his own circus company. The main part are the two winter circuses in Tilburg and Etten-Leur that he organizes every year and where he is the ringmaster himself. He also rents out circus equipment and visits campsites and recreation parks in the summer.
In the first few years, Van Geet “bought even the edge,” he says. “It’s not fat. I live in a caravan all year round and do as much as possible under my own management. That keeps costs down.” When the time came to take advantage of his investments, corona broke out. With the support measures and two summers in which he was able to act, he saved the financial net.
Dekker writes in his book that income insecurity and unpredictability are inextricably linked to working in the circus industry. Aerial acrobat Roos Hermanides (40) from Groningen has never let that stop him. “I’ve always had a kind of blind faith in what I wanted to do, which was to perform on stage. You also have to have that kind of attitude. I see it in the children I teach at the youth circus: the doubters who also think about a plan B do not come.”
From graceful to slapstick
Roos Hermanides herself also started with the youth circus and has now formed the Duo Musa, on the trapeze, together with her husband Salim for almost twenty years. Where they used to have graceful songs that revolved around flexibility, they developed their act into a slapstick song after Roos’ hernia ten years ago. One threatens to fall out of the trapeze every time and is then just caught by the other. They perform in large, traditional circuses, at street theater festivals and in modern theater productions by, for example, the Zuidelijk Toneel. From the spring, the duo will join the Magic Circus, which will take you along cities in the Randstad for nine months.
Hermanides: „I love the circus and I really want to travel, but for that I have to pay the high price that I see my children a lot less. That is always a huge dilemma for me.”
She and her husband have now arranged for their 13-year-old son to live with Hermanides’ mother from Wednesday to Sunday. Son of 17 eats with grandma, but otherwise lives in the parental home, two blocks away. “As an adolescent he doesn’t mind at all,” says Hermanides with a laugh. During the weekends, the children sometimes come by train to the place where their parents are with the circus and from Wednesday to Sunday they live and sleep in their caravan.
The duo has always had enough jobs. Where in the past they mainly sold their act through an agency, nowadays they arrange most performances via social media. “Producers respond to the videos or photos we post on Facebook. Or a circus writes a casting call out for an aerial acrobatics number to which we then respond.”
There are a number of top acts in the circus world, says Kevin van Geet. He calls the Australian-Moroccan Messoudi Brothers. „That is a power number of three brothers and a father with handstands and human pyramids† It is very well put together artistically and physically. Such numbers are already fully booked for the next three or four years, that goes without saying.” Other disciplines sometimes have to work a little harder. “With jugglers, for example, you have good ones and less good ones. Then you have to do your best to distinguish yourself and sell yourself at circus festivals or via social media.”
Rates per performance
An artist who has a ‘job’ is usually paid per performance. She would not say what daily price Roos Hermanides is asking; she thinks it’s private. Van Geet can say something about prices: for his Christmas circuses with a thousand people, he pays 100 to 500 euros per act per day. “Sometimes I also pay a wage per week, for example if someone fulfills a double role behind the scenes. That is more than a price per act.”
How Hermanides sees the future with such a physical profession as hers has been a regular question for eleven years. “And I don’t know the answer yet. Physically I’m just going backwards, that’s a fact. But now I can still work around the injuries and it hasn’t made the act worse.” She is studying theater directing and between the lockdowns, she got a lot of energy from organizing a culinary circus event. “Maybe that will be my path.”
Occupational sociologist Dekker would give the circus sector a better image. He noticed when writing the book that the circus is often known as a dusty, inferior art form. “That picture is really skewed. They are HBO graduates with an enormous entrepreneurial spirit and resilience. Many sectors can learn from that.”
Kevin van Geet also sees that image formation sometimes hinders the circus sector. “Many people think of circus as a group of strange guys who travel through the country with a clown, a pony and a tent. While: it’s so much nicer, more important and more serious than that. It is not for nothing that circus culture has been intangible heritage since 2013. As a sector, we can sometimes show that more.”
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of February 15, 2022
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