“We used to have a rhino on Ringling,” Jeff Jenkins says. This was back when he was a young clown in the Greatest Show on Earth. The rhino would charge fullspeed into its pen backstage the moment the show ended, sometimes dragging its handler on the floor behind it. It was terrifying. Today Jenkins is the ringmaster of Chicago’s Midnight Circus, which he cofounded in 1997. The circus employs a pit bull named Rosie. Rosie has the same instinct to sprint to her bed backstage while the bipeds bow. But she’s far less terrifying. Cute, even.
Midnight had originally planned to try out its fresh conception of circus in theaters, but the Jenkinses and their small team found theater managers unreceptive and couldn’t get critics to pay attention when they tried staging their act on their own dollar. Then in 1998, the city called. This is how Jeff remembers the story:
“Yeah, yeah! It does look like a plaza!”
“And a mayor!” Jeff went on. “Mayor . . . Maximilian . . . Spookenberger!”
The show that came out of that free- associative idea session got the go-ahead for seven trial performances. After those first dry runs on a pair of blue panel mats in front of Law’s structure, word spread and things grew. Politicos milling around the plaza would come every day during the annual six-week run, sometimes catching every performance (there were five a day). Schools sent field trips. Chicagoween became the most successful circus show in Chicago’s history, running in the Loop for 17 years and attracting some of the greatest circus talent in the world. These days, due in large part to the success of Chicagoween, Midnight has an international reputation. Its Circus in the Parks initiative has raised more than $1 million for the city to restore its playgrounds. People trained in the best Montreal circus schools compete to take part.
Aloft was always intended to double as a circus training school: since the company is for-profit, Swanson knew from the jump that she would have to teach classes to fund shows. The message on the chalkboard in the lobby at the Aloft Loft is admirably no-nonsense: “Aloft Circus Arts values: to be a Brave Space, to nurture badassery, to be purveyors of fine circus.” Underneath, it reads, “Please make all checks payable to Aloft Dance.” The school offers many programs for beginners and hobbyists, but at its core is a 40-hour-a-week apprenticeship program. Running away to join the circus, as everyone knows, continues to be a more viable career move than running away to join the English department. In six years of operation, she says, Swanson’s intensive has graduated 90 percent of its students into careers in the circus.
