Circus Out of the Tent ... Buddha or a Snow Job?

Cirque du Yoga: Enter citizen Jamie Corydon, who reached her new inner self on a lyra at the Sandou Theatrical Circus School in Las Vegas, founded by two former Moscow Circus performers -- the brothers Sergei and Konstantin. Corydon fell in with some former Cirque performers who are associated with the school. They got her into a trapeze frame of mind and she felt reborn at a festival in Austria, “Is this the secret of the Cirque du Soleil artists —they are Yogi???” asks our dithering dame, Judy Dieli, who sent me the story. Claims Corydon, who teaches the art that gave her wings, “No way could I have done it without Yoga.”

Ringling, a little Yoga for you, too? Or perhaps a few weeks off at the Church of Scientology?. Anything, I’d say, to get in touch with your inner spirit, what’s left of it, so that you can win back the bottled water crowd in picky places like San Francesco -- a city you have, by the way, shunned for two Yoga-less seasons. There by the Golden Gate, aerialists and clowns do okay in bohemian settings that are ringless. Geoff Hoyle (alias Mr. Sniff off the old Pickle Family Circus) is now clowning around the tables at Teatro Zinzanni. Even waiters and waitresses, as pictured in Teatro’s fetching ads, fly over patrons. Maybe all the thirsty patron need do there is shout sky high, “More booze please!!!”

...This being once the city of acid, NO, leave that alone, David. ... We can, however be quite proper at a fund-raising fashion show hosted by Macy’s, where a Cirque character appears, standing alone on a table with a baton in one hand, a partial mask over her anonymous face ... No, Dame, she is not practicing Yoga. She is posturing "in the moment" ...

Down the coast about four hundred miles at the Hollywood Bowl, where mutes are still allowed to cavort with wild abandon, the Peking Acrobats will be working the same bill with Moore’s Amazing Mongrels , themselves beyond meditation, and “the Ditty Bops” — whomever they are. Dogs have a way of bringing us back to circus central. Of rendering mute all abstract allusions to some cosmic revelation lurking behind a fog machine....

Get down, circus, get down! That’s the message from Casual Cal, who will be throwing up his latest big top-type bash at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem. Get Your Circus On is out to prove that “soul is not a color.” Cal, who ringmastered with rare flair for UniverSoul, grew uneasy about the company’s preoccupation with intensely black markets. So good luck, Cal, and may your company succeed without group therapy ...

Global warming this winter? Not, I suspect, while Cirque plays the Big Apple with a story, Wintuk, about a little boy searching for snow. I can imagine a big payoff at the theatre at Madison Square Garden where the Montreal monster begins an annual ten-week holiday gig. Andrew Lloyd Webber gave us the falling chandelier. I predict Cirque will smother the house in dry ice. They just can’t break the special effects habit. It could suffocate them yet.

A habit for tanbark tradition around a real ring, pre-Perrier, still afflicts, thankfully, the Lords of the Big Apple Circus. At least when last we checked. ... And then, a few months later, comes the reductive Ringling-Barnum in its littler, less greatest mode. But the animals acts they defiantly refuse to retire give them an increasingly attractive edge. Oh, sorry, I gotta go. My Yoga instructor is at the door... You might soon see me flying high — precocious senior finds non invasive lipo suction on a lyra.