The bawdy songs and physical feats of the circus underground have begun to ooze into their proper home: the club scene. The annual Carnival Reverie will hit Neumo's August 7 and downtown club Contour has begun Breaks and Freaks, a monthly mix 'n' match of DJs, dancing, and circus entertainment. This Thursday's show, July 28, seems especially intriguing, with suspension (people hanging from hooks in their flesh), clowns, and a road show of old-fashioned genetic freaks that go by the lugubrious name Thee 999 Eyes ov Endless Dream Traveling Carnival Sideshow and Museum ov thee Damned.
Breaks and Freaks evolved from a regular Thursday gig at Contour featuring DJ Osiris Indriya. He and his manager Yvette Soler added live percussion, guest DJs, fire performers, and spiritual readings to the club night, attracting some of the Burning Man crowd and generating interesting results.
"The commercial and underground scenes have different ways of dancing," Indriya said. The former favors small movements, partnering, and grinding while the latter is "more expressive, with energy exchange. By the end of the night you can see how the two groups have affected each other. The commercial people make grander gestures and the underground crowd dances closer together."
Guest DJ Lorin Bassnectar brought circus performers to one of the Thursday nights, and Breaks and Freaks was born.
Dig, the 999 Eyes ringmaster, did our interview in character, and preached an apocalyptic sermon of the freak revolution against the "barons of bipedalism and the grinding heel of conformism." A showman to the hilt, Dig boasted that his troupe includes the last authentic collection of traveling freaks, including Pegleg (who, according to Dig, "has the Elephant Man's disease and was liberated from a bloodthirsty institution"), the Lobster Girl, and Jackie of All Trades, a "human tripod" from Eugene, Oregon, who saw 999 Eyes a few weeks ago and abandoned grad school to join the circus. There is also a collection of preserved freaks, including Patches the Two-Headed Calf, who made his first midway appearance in 1907.
999 Eyes has never performed at a dance club and I asked Dig how the cirque noir phenomenon had reached so far.
"The world has gotten a bit gray, hasn't it?" Dig asked. "It wasn't that long ago when conjoined twins could make a living, marry, become celebrities, but now they cut them in half and force them to live as cripples in institutions. As General Tom Thumb said when they shut down Coney Island: 'What am I supposed to do? Go on welfare?' People have accepted the yoke of homogeneity so readily—the more people are called on to live lives free of brightness and difference, the more some of us will refuse."
And the more people who will pay a few bucks to spend an evening surrounded by freaks, clowns, and other colorful refuseniks. n
