If you’ve got kids, maybe over the summer you’ve sent them to camp. There’s obviously tons of options — space camp, theater camp, band camp. But how about circus camp?
Jens Larson runs Phoenix Youth Circus Arts, where he teaches kids stilt-walking, aerial silks and clowning. It’s a continuation of his 20-year career as a circus performer. Larson toured all over the country and the world performing feats like stacking chairs as tall as a house and doing headstands on top of them, all while reading a book. He also twirled and flipped high above the crowd on a trapeze.
Earlier in Larson’s life, he thought he was going to be a competitive gymnast — but then, by chance, he wandered into a small independent circus, and it changed his whole perspective.
Larson joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
JENS LARSON: Circus is sort of just an advanced and acceptable form of play.
SAM DINGMAN: So what was this experience with the small circus that kind of altered the course of your life?
LARSON: Royal Liechtenstein Quartering Sidewalk Circus, big name for a little circus. It was, a Jesuit priest started a circus in the ‘70s because he wanted a, a way to, to sort of confront people in an unexpected way. It was very much under the table. If you saw the show, you'd have no idea perhaps that there was any kind of religious connection, but there was magic and there was an appeal to the imagination and appeal to, as he said, if people can make believe together, who knows what they might be able to believe, you know, late ‘70s.
DINGMAN: So that's, that's good coffee.
LARSON: Yeah, exactly. And so it was an inspirational experience. I traveled to 48 states in eight months, hundreds of miles on the road, worked with animals, did six or seven different skill acts with four other people in a company, you know, so it was very intense.
DINGMAN: What made you want to sign on?
LARSON: I guess I'd been living a fairly predictable life as a student. I'd been doing academics. I was always, you know, just doing what I needed to do to do well at school and then I realized this was a way to kind of explore a new world and see what happened and and something happened.
DINGMAN: Yeah, I would say so. Well, so tell me a little bit about what I imagine is the difference between doing something like gymnastics where it's a kind of a team sport,
LARSON: There's rules.
DINGMAN: You're, I'm imagining being judged a lot of the time.
LARSON: That's exactly what you're doing because that's, yeah, you, you have to earn points, etc. So I'll compare that to what I tell the kids today in our circus classes, which is, there are no rules except it has to be fun to do, fun to watch, and nobody and nothing gets hurt.
DINGMAN: Did it feel like a shift for you in your own mind and self-awareness to go from what I imagine when it comes to gymnastics could sometimes feel like execution to performance.
LARSON: Oh yeah, which is to say I wasn't a good performer at first, OK? I could do some tricks, but I didn't necessarily know how to perform and one of the things it took me a long time to learn to do was to take my time because working slowly and letting the audience absorb what you're doing and being comfortable in their presence.
It is different from just going out there going mechanically through a bunch of gymnastics tricks and then walking away. So yeah, opening yourself up to the idea that this is a, you're presenting yourself.
DINGMAN: So help me make the transition from that kind of growing awareness that you were feeling and already having a, a vocabulary of movement in your body into clowning.
LARSON: I got to work with a lot of really great people in San Francisco for the Pickle Family Circus, which again was one of these new circuses, sort of a theatrical company, but also very much a circus company as well, and it has a history of some really amazing clowns – Larry Pissoni, Jeff Hoyle, Bill Irwin – some people that are now pretty well known, even outside the circus community, were clowning in that show, so there was a great clowning tradition, and I got to see people like that and others working.
DINGMAN: What did you resonate with in the performance of other clowns?
LARSON: It's that connection, that idea of just being able to make small motions that have big meaning, make big motions that are funny, exaggerate. It's one of the hardest things to teach. I don't pretend to be a clown expert, but we do teach clowning to our kids today and it is the hardest thing to teach.
Now kids love to do clowning. And it's kind of, it's like one of my favorite people here locally is a clown teacher, Brian Foley, and he has a great saying. He says, you have to control your silliness to be a good clown, and that's, that's hard for kids, of course.
DINGMAN: Yes. I took a, I took one clown class in college, and the thing that has always stuck with me is this, there are two things. One is that everybody has their own clown. There is a clown within you, and it, and the second piece of it is that the audience tells you who that clown is, that you come out, and the way you are and what they react to about the way that you exist in front of them, tells you what to lean towards and away from.
So maybe you come out and you seem prideful somehow, and so they wanna see you fail, or maybe you come out and you seem unconfident and they wanna see you surprisingly step into confidence. Is that the way that it unfolded for you?
LARSON: It was a little more, oh, I don't know what the right word is, but it's sort of like, well, I was gonna do a chair balancing act one way or the other.
DINGMAN: OK, that was the goal.
LARSON: Given that I had to get the chairs up and given that I then had to put the chairs down, and given that I had to do this, how can we work in a character thing with that and acting like a bookworm because that was the setting, we were in like a library and I was reading a book. And even though I was upside down, I was still reading the book and then I needed the chair that my wife, it turns out, the librarian was sitting in, and I would steal it from her and so.
DINGMAN: And stack them on top of each other but also keep reading.
LARSON: Yes.
DINGMAN: That's beautiful clown logic like these chairs are getting higher, but I must finish the book.
LARSON: It's really fun. I again, I'm kind of come back to the experiences I have now teaching. Sometimes a kid doesn't latch on to one of the physical skills that much, and then they totally relate to the clowning. That can be so transformative for them. And so when it works particularly with a kid that maybe hasn't found something else, circus can take just about any kid and they can find their place.
DINGMAN: What do you think is core in terms of, you know, if somebody comes to an event and they see, they might see feats of physical amazement, they might see magic, they might see clowning and comedy. If circus can be any of these things, what is, what is the fundamental that makes it circus?
LARSON: Well, there are old timers that will quibble about the definition of circus. If it's not under canvas, it's not a circus. If it's not in a ring, it's not a circus. If there's no animals, it's not a circus. I'm much more, hey, it's all good. I think if you, if you have the idea of a variety show, and you have the idea of possibly theming it or linking it, then it's a, it can be a circus.
DINGMAN: It's so interesting the way you're describing it. I'm almost getting the sense that what makes it a circus is the mindset that it doesn't have to be a circus, you know.
LARSON: Yeah, that could be right. Let's get together and do a show, see what we come up with.
DINGMAN: What kind of kids do you find gravitate towards your classes?
LARSON: We always say, OK, you gotta have an open mind and you gotta keep trying these new things because you don't know what you're gonna take to and it's not easy. If it were easy, it wouldn't be as much fun to watch.
DINGMAN: Yeah, yeah. So it's a, it's a, it's a kid who, who has an open mind, who's willing to try stuff.
LARSON: Oh, I call them look what I can do moments. And this happens all the time. A little new move with the flower sticks, or two balls in one hand with the juggling. So it could be a very minor thing, but it's huge, and it's this moment where they just have to come up to you and say, look what I can do.
It's just magic to see them, you know, really get success like that, and the look what we can do moment. Because when kids do things together, that's also super powerful, like when they form a pyramid for the first time, and it works.
DINGMAN: Just to come back to this idea of how do you define the circus, that seems like a great way of describing it, like a series of presentations where the theme is, look what we can do.
LARSON: That's right, that's right.
