America’s best-known circus leaves town permanently

RINGLING BROS and Barnum & Bailey, America’s largest circus, knew how to make an entrance. For decades, its elephants promenaded through the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan, then walked trunk-to-tail along 34th Street to Madison Square Garden. New Yorkers of all ages lined the streets, often in the early hours, to see the annual elephant march. In 2015, bowing to pressure from animal-rights groups, Feld Entertainment, the circus’s parent company, did away with its elephant acts, and once the big beasts were taken off the show ticket sales plummeted. So on January 14th, after 146 years of touring, Feld decided to close the circus nicknamed “The Greatest Show on Earth”.

PT Barnum, one of the show’s founders, is said to have remarked that “clowns and elephants are the pegs upon which a circus is hung”. Sending in the clowns was not enough to keep Ringling Bros going. More than 400 performers and roustabouts will lose their jobs, and scores of animals, including tigers, horses, dogs and kangaroos will need new homes. The retired elephants are in a sanctuary.

Ringling Bros is only the latest circus to call it a day. Cole Bros Circus flapped its tent shut last year. The Big Apple Circus, which folded up its big top for the last time over the summer, will begin auctioning off its assets next month. And animals are being taken off the marquee at other circuses. Equestrian acts have all but vanished. Brett Mizelle, a history professor at California State University in Long Beach, says animal acts can delegitimise a show. Families are uncomfortable seeing large wild animals perform. San Diego’s Sea World ended its controversial killer-whale show earlier this month. Moreover, competition is fierce, not just from the likes of Netflix, but also from other live acts for families, such as “the Wiggles” and “Sesame Street”.

Yet Scott O’Donnell, a former clown, now head of the Circus World Museum, does not think the closure of Ringling Bros, once the “caretakers of wow”, is a death knell for the industry. He notes that great acts are coming out of Russia and China. “And thirty years ago we didn’t know what a Cirque du Soleil was,” he says, referring to the Quebec-based acrobatic company that has become a global hit, with multiple touring shows and 4,000 employees but few animals. Its founder once said, “I’d rather feed three acrobats than one elephant.”

Ernest Albrecht, editor of Spectacle, an online journal celebrating the circus arts, concedes that some of the romance is gone. People no long want to run away to the circus: they can just go to clown college or sign up for trapeze classes. In New York alone, half a dozen circus schools teach trapeze and acrobatics. Some universities offer circus-related courses. The show may go on after all.