Evening Circus

I first heard the drums. They pounded, beat after beat. Each beat became louder. The drums were approaching. It was Friday evening in Košice, the second largest city in Slovakia. I was sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant enjoying the last scoops in a bowl of Pho. I returned my tray to the kind-faced man behind the counter and went outside to see what all the commotion was about.

A large crowd paraded down the street, walking away from the town’s central St Elizabeth Cathedral and towards the large Mestsky park. They were led by an odd-looking float made of rusted metal in the shape of a fish skeleton. Inside the float were some men with alien heads in dark suits playing various musical instruments. There were also two other performers dressed in round costumes that looked like a scaled up version of the coronavirus. They walked beside the float and screamed at onlookers. I wasn’t exactly sure if joining the crowd would have me accidentally joining some sort of piscine cult but I thought it was worth the risk. I followed the crowd to the park.

I discovered that this parade was the beginning of an outdoor performance. For what exactly, I still don’t know. Research seems to say that it was to do with some celebration of life and the meaning of it all. But ultimately, as I discovered on the night, the performance was really an excuse to take over Košice’s central park and display the often under-appreciated circus skills of the region.

The show-proper began after nine, once the sun had come down. Hundreds, if not over a thousand, people surrounded the park’s lake. After an official welcome from the local police chief, the show began with a wafer-thin plot line that would hold the progressive performance together throughout the night. From what I could tell there were either some children or bacteria that had escaped from either a castle or a petri dish and the show revolved around the race to capture the thing that had escaped. Even if I had understood the brief instances of dialogue played in Slovakian over the loudspeaker, I think I still would be confused by the plot.

At the first station performers on stilts argued with the coronavirus-costumed thespians about something. This was the catalyst for an onslaught of about twenty dancers. Dressed in leotards and yellow wigs, the dancers performed in perfect unison to a mix of hip-hop and local tunes. I still wondered if this was the orientation for a cult.

After the dancing had completed, and applauded reluctantly by the local crowd, tribal drum music began playing over the speakers and spotlights directed the crowd to another section of the park. Led by a woman in stilts, the mob made its way to station two. At this station a woman sitting on a suspended hoop performed various feats in aerial acrobatics, accompanied by a throat singer in a floral dress. A couple then provided the audience with an interpretative dance piece inside the nearby rotunda. It was almost a reimagining of the famous ‘You are Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ rotunda scene from ‘The Sound of Music,’ if only Rolfe had spent more time studying contemporary dance and less time studying Mein Kampf.

A group of large floating sea creatures took the audience to the next station at the park’s fountain. A man dressed like a pantomime Liberace pretended to play a motorised white piano that moved through the crowd and around the fountain whilst a ballerina performed on top of it and stock images were projected onto the cascading spray of the fountain. I think that requires no further explanation.

After the water station at the fountain we were in need of some pyromaniacal relief. The antepenultimate station was the fire show. Jugglers threw flaming sticks into the air, though with better safety precautions than what I had experienced the previous year in Thailand. Drums covered in kerosene were banged in time with music and a flame-throwing exhaust pipe threw flames just shy of the nearby trees. Behind all this were two human-sized rusted hamster wheels that spun via electric motor. It took me some time to realise that, throughout this whole fire performance, there was someone inside. But only in one of the two cages. Assumedly, the other cage’s performer had realised that walking around in a steel cage for fifteen minutes was unlikely to advance his acting career and had chickened out at the last minute.

The local gymnastics ensemble performed at the next station on the basketball courts, during which a fear-inducing, backflipping clown chased the children/bacteria around the courts and reminded me that there was meant to be some sort of narrative linking all of the circus mayhem. The next and final station ensured that the circus skills itch had been scratched by providing a liquorice all sorts finale consisting of singing, dance, trapeze and ribbon dancing. The narrative had been resolved, apparently, so I took my overwhelmed self to bed to ponder the moving circus I’d just seen in a city seventy kilometres away from Ukraine’s border.