So Long

Back in high school, when the world seemed freshly made and full of
possibility, I spent part of each July in the woods at the Oregon
Country Fair. It began in 1969 as a swap meet for hippies, but by the
time I started going—in the late 1990s, as a minor-league
performer and gofer for a Seattle vaudeville group called the Royal
Famille du Caniveaux, which now runs Seattle’s Moisture
Festival—the Country Fair had become an annual pilgrimage for
American circus and European varieté performers: clowns from
Berlin, jugglers from Denmark and Hawaii, acrobats and dare-devils from
all over the United States.

The daytimes were hot, dusty, and crowded, but the
evenings—once the public had been swept out—turned the
place into an anarchic annual reunion with musicians and vaudevillians
standing around campfires, smoking pot and drinking wine, telling
stories from the past year (who beat a speeding ticket by juggling for
a cop, who stole Clarence Thomas’s watch at a gig in D.C.), and showing
off new tricks. Still, it was a hippie festival, and one couldn’t help
breathing the air: People wore sandals and sometimes Utili-kilts, they
slept in tents and ate granola and wanted everything to be “safe” and
“nonjudgmental.” Sometimes they chanted ohm.

One summer—roughly around the time that Burning Man, the
Country Fair’s electrified nephew, was becoming popular enough to ban
guns—an old yellow school bus rolled into the performers’ camping
area and disgorged a younger, more sinister-looking pack of
vaudevillians. They were scruffy road dogs in dusty suit vests and
battered dress shoes. Instead of red wine and marijuana, they carried a
whiff of whiskey and opium. They played music that sounded more like
1920s Gypsy jazz and Kurt Weill cabaret songs, and they comported
themselves with a haggard romanticism, a gutter-dandy air that wouldn’t
become popular in rock and neo-burlesque clubs until years later. Their
show fulfilled the promise of their entrance. It was all the usual
tricks—juggling, acrobatics, sword swallowing, trapeze—but
to my young eyes, Circus Contraption’s stylish cirque noir made
the rest of the Country Fair crowd look like weekend warriors.

I loitered around their bus, smitten. (Making my girlfriend at the
time visibly jealous: “They’re not that great,” she kept
saying.) I overheard one of them telling a story about a party where an
old upright piano was shoved into a bonfire and someone played it while
it burned. They seemed like they’d crawled out of New Orleans, or maybe
someplace weird and unexpected, like Tulsa or Little Rock. I was
thrilled to learn they were from Seattle.

Over the years, Circus Contraption kept touring and performing,
collecting devoted fans. Its shows were always packed with a more
diverse crowd than you’d find at other theaters—goths and geeks
and a curiously middle-aged, middle-income demographic. The fans show
up in costumes and face paint, they hoot and holler and shell out for
the
absinthe cocktails, T-shirts, and CDs. They believe the
Circus’s slogan: “A bracing curative for the afflictions of our
times.”

Circus Contraption was at the tip of the new cabaret movement that
brought the reincarnation of burlesque, speakeasies (both genuine and
regular bars borrowing the aesthetic), and other cirque noir groups, from the Yard Dogs Road Show to the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus.
Circus Contraption is among the best—if not the best—in aesthetics, physical prowess, and musical acumen. (Led by
composer, clarinetist, pianist, saxophonist, and everything-else-ist
Kevin Hinshaw, the Circus Contraption Band is second to none.) Even the
Moisture Festival, a Seattle version of the Country Fair, now has
burlesque nights—something the hippie/second-wave feminists down
in Oregon would’ve probably frowned upon.

Last week, Circus Contraption announced it will split up on May 31,
at the end of its Show to End All Shows, after 10 years
together. The Circus’s last show has the melancholy air of a thing that
knows its time is nigh. It has gilded its gutter-dandy lily with some
1970s glitz (white leather and rhinestones) and adopted a plot: The
ringmaster is a snake-oil charlatan whose big-top empire comes apart at
the seams, falling into a vapid, oversexualized heap of glitter and
garbage. The Circus sings its final number, the apocalyptic celebration
“It’s Been Good to Know Ya,” dressed as cockroaches.

Christian Jacobsen, of the Circus’s board of directors, described
the dissolution as a dandelion gone to seed: “On May 31, when we give
it that one last blast of air, all those performers will go out into
the Seattle arts community and start new things!” No doubt they will:
Acrobat Evelyn Bittner (a tiny, infinitely malleable creature) and her
hulking tumbling partner Jason Williams have already jumped ship.
There’s Lara Paxton, the shockingly strong and inventive aerialist
(this show has her doing an innocent first-act routine as a mermaid
swinging from an anchor and a second-act nasty stripper rope routine).
Kari Podgorski, another aerialist and crowd favorite, calmly smiles
while she flips and tumbles and twists around her cloud swing (a
hanging, U-shaped rope). Sari Breznau, aka the Opera Diva, plays
trumpet, tap dances, and sings with gale force. There’s Matt Manges,
the drummer and stunt man. And Drew Keriakades—the Circus’s
spirit animal—who will undoubtedly woo the Seattle music scene
with his grinning, death’s-head charm and mournful, mellifluous pipes.
Here’s hoping the Circus Contraption Band—which sits in the
center of a complicated Venn diagram of jazz, blues, circus calliope,
John Philip Sousa, Tom Waits, and Balkan wedding songs—continues
to play around town.

I have waited almost 10 years too long to write my love letter to
Circus Contraption—it had always been around, part of the
atmosphere of Seattle’s performance community, taken for granted. As
with too many things, I didn’t know how much I loved Circus Contraption
until I realized it was going away.