Wanderings

    Each September in the town of Colorno, near Parma, a very cool event takes place: the International Festival of Circuses and Street Theater, organized by Teatro Necessario, a trio of actors/street performers based in Parma. One of three, Jacopo Bianchini, is the father of Antonio’s grandson, Milo. (The latter is quite a charmer, and a lucky little boy: he gets to answer the question “what does your daddy do?” with “he’s a clown!”)

   This year, Antonio and I along with our dear friend Lynn (visiting from Boston, and not expecting—but happy—to be taken to see a bunch of clowns et al.) were given tickets to the event’s highlight: “L’Homme Cirque.” It was an hour’s performance by David Dimitri, a man who, according to numerous people in Jacopo’s line of work, has revolutionized the concept of a circus.

   I dunno about revolutionizing, but Dimitri sure blew us away. For starters, he works alone. This means he must organize all his props while performing—in addition to undertaking various mysteries of movement, as I came to think of them: things that left me scratching my head in wonder as I tried to figure out how he’d managed them.

   He started off by pretending to be a man without balance, teetering on one foot
as he changed from one pair of shoes to another. Then he put himself through a series of short problem-solving skits, never speaking a word but always smiling, his grin calm and unforced. It took me a little while to realize how extremely controlled his performance was, since he gave the impression of total ease. (He’s helped in this by the fact that he’s a handsome man, his body taut and elegant. But he’s also fifty years old, a bit long in the tooth for most circus performers.) Humor underlies everything he does, along with a palpable sense that danger and disturbance are everywhere and unavoidable, even necessary.

   What did he do? Dimitri put himself into, lit the fuse of, and got himself shot out
of a cannon he hauled onto his little stage. He dragged out a wooden horse—Helen of
Troy would’ve loved it!—and did acrobatic feats upon and with it, his love for the horse
as evident as it was perverse. And he walked a tightrope suspended above the stage,
getting onto and off it just as any cat would a fence. His movements were ceaseless, fluid,
sensuous. He’s got feet that work as hands might—equally as articulate, each muscle and
toe doing its job. The stories he told without words, through various balance-challenging
acts, were of a solitude strung delicately over an abyss of loneliness; of the attempt to
make things work right, and work out; of comedy as the only path possible through
thickets of distress.

   And his body shouted Freedom! with every move. I can think of only a few dancers (Bill T. Jones comes to mind) with that sort of command of a language, an entire vernacular of movement, which seems utterly instinctive. Dimitri is called a circus performer, but he’s really a dancer in the circus of his imagination.

   The ending of his show? He somehow slipped out through a hole at the top of his tent (which was small three hundred of us were shoehorned into it, barely able to move) and shimmied up to a tightrope strung outside. Follow me!, he called as he exited. And so we did, like the Pied Piper’s devotees. Craning our necks upward, we gazed at a marvelous sight: a man with a pole in his hands, traveling by foot from one end to the other of a tightrope high above our heads—each swing of leg and-foot, leg-and-foot a miracle of balance.

    I watched the rapt expression of Milo as he stared up at David Dimitri, magician on the wire, and thought, ah, che fortuna: you’ll always remember this.