Spotlights at the Circus

Mists spread across the arena, braced by steel scaffolding and safety ropes. Catapulting through the haze: performers with blue sequined eyes and clothing vacuum-sealed against their bodies. Complex lighting arrangements hang like egg-sacs from the ceiling; big brained things that swivel and glare across the expanse. Beyond that, in the shadows: the four of us. We see action and, like spiders, trap and release it in our lights.

There are four of us attached to the umbilical contraption called a headset. We are each in our own corner, high up in the rafters of the domed circus canopy. Dressed in black and hidden by the darkness, we are each a featureless silhouette to one another and to the audience below. Gripping the hot metal cones of our spotlights, we are an awesome disconnect of the senses. We are a rush of signals through the radio. We are the optic lens of the spectator, widening and narrowing our irises to define action that we are not a part of.

While performers leap and glide across the stage, performing inhuman acts of skill and daring, we remain in the rafters, shadowing their movements with long strokes of our arms. We are attached to these athletes, to the strain of their muscles and the shading of their skins. We tense in wait to follow, tracking the tautness of each elastic tendon. They are cats preparing to pounce. We are their shadows.

We are in the action, but we are also outside of that action. We form a web of communication outside of it, like an external nervous system in sympathetic movement with the primary atoms. We are part of the complex network of machinery, among fabulous contraptions like the Russian Swing, the German Wheel, and the Shoot-Through Ladder. We cross-light during the Spanish Web and scissor acts with inexplicable names like Adagio and Pas de Deux.

We are in darkness, invisible, and detached from others. It is sensory deprivation, but it is also an overstimulation of the senses. There is an otherness present – a sense of being fully in tune with the movement of strangers. It’s like being a third species, with a peculiar awareness of what it is like to be more than one person. Like homunculi at the circus, our impressions are distorted and surreal. We have enlarged sensory organs, with afferent nerves wrapped around the four corners, swallowing the crowds inside of us.