The most significant thing Mike Togni does during our interview is something he doesn’t do. We’re at the circus, his place of business – the Circo di Barcelona, encamped in Lakatamia as part of its three-month “Cyprus Tour” – talking in a small office, which is already quite unusual for Mike. Mike doesn’t work in an office. Mike is a clown.
To be honest, the circus doesn’t look like much. Even Nicos Papadopoulos, head of NGP Capital Entertainment – the company responsible for bringing the Circo to Cyprus – admits it’s “not the biggest circus” (last year they brought the Circo Medrano, which is much bigger). Long-distance trucks have been parked end-to-end to create a perimeter, within which about 20 caravans sit in the mud. It’s late morning, and the atmosphere is desultory. A young man in T-shirt and sandals stands outside a caravan, hanging clothes out to dry. There are satellite dishes planted in the ground, portable toilets in a corner, a half-flat football abandoned where it rolled between two trailers. It all looks a bit neglected.
Still, a circus is a circus. There’s a Big Top, and I venture inside cautiously. A man is balancing an eight-foot pole on his forehead, constantly shifting his legs for balance, meanwhile talking tersely in what sounds like Romanian. I sense the businesslike tone of professionals at their daily practice, like musicians playing scales.
Later, I see a woman holding a mop. I assume she’s a cleaning-lady – but I walk a little closer, and realise the mop isn’t a mop. What she’s holding is actually a chain, with a lion at the end of it! I wander idly, stopping to make notes outside a trailer, and notice there’s a ramp leading from the trailer to the ring, where the lion is. The trailer door is closed, but I note the sign reading “Attenzione! Transporto Animali Feroci” (“Attention! Wild Animals”) and hear a low, lazy roar emanating from the trailer. I shuffle away, feeling like a cartoon mouse walking on tiptoe so as not to rouse a sleeping cat.
It’s a relief when our interview begins, Mike having come from the (slightly larger) trailer where he lives with his wife and three sons. He’s 53, with rather sad brown eyes, wild unruly hair and a thin black moustache. His handshake is firm, very hard and dry; it’s like shaking hands with a Brillo pad. He’s Italian, from Turin (despite its name, the Circo di Barcelona hails from Italy, though the performers include Spaniards, Russians and Romanians). We meet in Nicos Papadopoulos’ office – and this is where Mike does the significant thing I mentioned earlier, because Nicos (who has other business to attend to) offers Mike his chair for the interview, but Mike refuses. Even when I say I’d prefer him to sit opposite me, for tape-recording purposes, he won’t go behind the desk, insisting that I take Nicos’ chair and he sit on the other side. He doesn’t explain his reluctance, but I think I understand. Nicos is the boss, the “impresario”; Mike is a clown, a performer. He won’t sit behind the desk. It’s not his place.
The circus world is a closed community, and hierarchies are important. The system is almost feudal. One family, for instance – the Alessandrinis – are circus owners and/or managers; Marco Alessandrini is in charge at the Barcelona, while his brothers manage other circuses all over Italy. Mike’s family, on the other hand, are performers, having been in the circus for six generations. They were all circus people, he explains in his broken English – parents, siblings, grandparents. His two sisters are still in the game: “One is in Roma, Circo Americano. The other in Firenze, Circo Medrano. Now not working in the show, work in organisation.”
Mike himself is a foot-soldier, having done a bit of everything. He worked with chimpanzees for many years, including a stint in Las Vegas. He was a trapeze artist till his early 30s, when an accident almost left him paralysed (“Here, metal,” he explains, indicating his lower back). Now he’s a clown, though not just a clown: he juggles, does somersaults and works with the horses – the Circo has seven horses – not least because his wife is in charge of the horse number. Their sons are young, aged eight, six and four (Mike’s been married twice before, but has no other children), and the eight-year-old is already working with the horses, preparing to follow in the family footsteps. Already? “When you no start when you’re young, not possible to work in circus,” explains Mike.
But what if he doesn’t want to work in the circus?
Mike looks puzzled: “Why?”
Well… because the world is different now.
“Yeah,” he agrees, “but every family…” He stops, trying to find the words. “My family work in circus,” he repeats. “I like my son to work [in the circus]. When no like, okay. School? OK, school, no problem.”
Did Mike himself go to school? “I [was] in school, but no very intelligent,” he replies with a smile. “Obligatory school”. He was too busy learning other things, inspired by his father who was quite a “maestro”, a trapeze artist and well-known lion tamer.
“Me, no have talent for lion,” shrugs Mike. How does he know? “I tried,” he replies simply.
Really? He tried to tame lions? “Is normal. You try everything in the circus. But my father said ‘No, you no have talent’. I have a cousin, perfect for working with lions.”
Why?
“Because is talent. The lions see you, if you have talent or not.” Dad took him in the lions’ pen once when he was eight years old – just to get a feel for it – then again at 14 for a more extended audition, when it became clear that his gifts lay elsewhere. “I no relaxed,” he explains. “My cousin relaxed. My father said [pointing at each one in turn]: ‘You, no. You, come on, avanti!’ Because animals understand quick if you have no talent”. It may have been a blessing in disguise – and even his talented father almost lost an arm years later, when attacked by one of his lions. Mike shrugs philosophically: “This is circus.”
He’s done his share of dangerous work, especially in the days when he used to swing from a trapeze every night – though the real danger isn’t falling (as a layman might assume) but mistiming your swing and colliding with your partner; that’s why his father, the “maestro”, had the most important role, watching everyone’s swing and telling them when to launch into the air. Mike’s accident happened during a different number, a kind of man/monkey pyramid – “working with four chimps and one cousin,” as he puts it – where his cousin climbed on Mike’s shoulders and the chimps climbed on top. Something went wrong during a show and the whole edifice collapsed, leaving him in a wheelchair for six months – the doctors said he’d never walk again – and forcing him into less risky work, like clowning.
These days, his daily routine isn’t too painful – and might be even more relaxed if he didn’t help his wife with the horses. He goes to bed around 2 (it takes a while to unwind after the last show), wakes up at 9, feeds and cleans the animals, rests a while after lunch then starts preparing for the 6 o’clock show, “make the clown, make my wife”. His trailer looks fairly spacious, and I’m sure he’s used to it after a lifetime in the circus – but he still sounds wistful when describing his house, 80km outside Turin. That’s where he goes between jobs (once the Cyprus Tour ends, there won’t be any work till March), with a stable for the horses and room for the whole family. “Oh yes, my house is beautiful. Fantastic!” he enthuses – and shakes his head as if wishing he were there, instead of a muddy field in Lakatamia. “My house is paradise.”
Do I detect a tinge of regret? Is he getting tired of it all, I ask? After all, he’s 53 – an age when roaming through Europe with the circus may have lost some of its charm. “No … no,” he replies, as with a question too fanciful to deserve much thought. Well, but does he ever wish he’d been born into a different life? Found a different job, perhaps?
“I don’t know,” he replies. “But I see my friends in other jobs – no interest for me. No enthusiasm. I like this,” he concludes, gesturing round at the Big Top and trailers. Why? “Because when you work, the people like you” – he makes a gesture of applause. “When you work in fabbrica [i.e. factory], you work, but never people applause, compliment. You know?”
I know. Yet looking around at the muddy encampment of the Circo di Barcelona leaves a bittersweet feeling – a sense that the days of the circus may be numbered, just as its near-feudal structures and family hierarchies hark back to another, pre-globalised world. Partly it’s a question of changing sensibilities, animal welfare being the most sensitive topic – though Nicos Papadopoulos shakes his head when I mention it. “If you could only see how they treat those animals,” he says, waxing lyrical. “They eat with them, sleep with them – so to speak – talk to them, train them every day.” Is it fair, though, keeping them caged up like that? “You want to set them free, that’s another matter. Let them pass a law, and we’ll follow it”. But there’s no question of abuse, he insists: “I wish I could talk to my child the way he talks to his horses!”
Mike himself admits that times are changing. His chimpanzee act is long gone, “because the chimp is animal primato [i.e. primate], now is impossible absolutely to work in circus. Is finished”. He once worked in Vegas – but now it’s a field in Lakatamia. “Now circus not possible in the States,” he admits. “Is a different mentality.”
Above all, the audience is fading. Kids have so many other distractions; parents have so many options. A circus can appear small and seedy to the clued-in prepubescent, weaned on glossy theme-parks and films with CGI special effects. The past five years haven’t been good, says Mike sadly: “No fascination. The people no [he mimes excitement] ‘Ooooh, circus!’” Change is needed, he affirms. The circus must become “different, more modern”. But how? Maybe television can help, he suggests with a touch of desperation.
You have to wonder if Mike Togni’s sons will end up becoming the seventh generation of circus Tognis – yet, for Mike himself, nothing could be more natural. The circus has surrounded and nurtured him all his life; it’s all he knows. Isn’t it difficult, I ask, all that tumbling and swinging and balancing? “Is difficult for you,” he replies. “For me, office is difficult” – and I remember how he didn’t want to sit behind the desk in Nicos Papadopoulos’ office. I shake his hard, dry hand again – the product of 53 years of circus labour – and wonder if he sometimes feels like a man out of time. The tears of a clown, when there’s no-one around.
