Weber Brothers’ Circus is one such traveling show. This circus began its life in Germany in the 1880s. Half a century later younger members of the Weber family began their first Australian tour, working hard to establish themselves as the best circus in Australia, and just over a decade ago they first toured New Zealand. They’ve now made this country their headquarters for their Australasian tours.

I went to see Weber Brothers’ latest show in the little town of Mosgiel, and got “VIP” seats in the second row. This is the place to be for circus-in-your-face. You can look straight in the performers’ eyes if you want; the clowns do some of their routines around you, and the “singer” towards the end of the show who has such trouble with his roving spotlight comes out and sits with the audience at one point.

Everything is on a small scale, yet there’s no sense of skimping. The music, and much of the dialogue, is pre-recorded but it’s well co-ordinated. The lighting effects are top-notch, as are the sound effects. And the costumes are in the traditional bright and sparkly, form-fitting mode, with not a sequin missing.

What’s in the Show?

There are eight Asian performers; a Brazilian juggler who doubles as one of the three motorbike riders in the Globe of Death; one of the Webers as La Jester, the clown who goes in search of laughter, and various other bodies who come and go.

I can’t tell you anything about who the Asians are, but like most Asian circus performers both men and women are extremely petite and exceptionally talented. The three boys and four girls perform a turn in the opening that involves swinging from seemingly fragile lengths of cloth, holding each other up in the air, holding several “each others” up in the air (!) and generally having a great time flying around our heads.

In the second half they use some devices whose name I don’t know - and I don’t know whether I can describe. These things consist of padded and presumably weighted sections at either end, and in between are flexible ropes, cords - something! Whatever they’re made of the performers swing them around their heads at great speed, toss them up in the air and catch them (usually after having done a couple of tumbles themselves) and generally work in such a co-ordinated fashion that you wonder if they spend 24 hours a day practicing.

An Asian girl climbs on several carefully balanced chairs, and balances on her head, or on one hand or on next to nothing. And smiles cheerfully throughout. Later she lies on a chair, feet up in the air, using them to toss around first a garden pot - the large and heavy type, of course (procured from one of your local gardening shops, I’d suspect) - and then a wooden table. Neither of these seems to have any weight at all when she gets her feet underneath them. And they zip around wherever they’re told.

Everyone Does More Than Their Share

Because the cast for this show is relatively small, everyone has a star turn or two and fits in wherever else they’re needed. Consequently the Brazilian juggler began with three or four bottle-shaped objects, which, whenever he dropped one, he’d pick up casually with a foot and flick back up into the air again. He also juggled rings - possibly up to ten of them - and finished up catching all of them around his neck.

Later in the show he turned up as one of several tumblers in a ridiculous clowning act which involved lots of falling and nonsense: all of it hard on the body if you weren’t fit. And then, after having popped in and out in various supernumerary roles he took his place on the motorbike and, with two other motorcyclists, spun round and round in what appeared to me to be a very small space. His precision here made you think that the dropping of objects in his juggling act might well have been part of the act.

Besides the jugglers and clowns and acrobats, there are various people who flit in and out as different characters in the ongoing story of the search for laughter. The story’s pretty thin, but it does give the show some context. It’s typical of the approach to circus these days.

I went to see the Cirque du Soleil when it came to Dunedin a few years ago. It was wonderful, superb. But the intimacy of space in watching a small circus at work well compensates for any lack of top class artists.