Inspired by old Hand-bills where performing horses were listed with their pedigrees
by Ottie La Bonche
Our circus family is not related by nature but by nurture. All our teachers and mentors were taught by someone who was taught by someone else, our circus has been passed down from all over the world, across different continents and we have collected all of the teachings from different places and combined them into Five Ring Circus!
Our circus history is like a map, there is multiple ways of getting to your destination. We have different routes to different countries, through different people and different teachings but if you follow all of them, they will (in the end) lead to Five Ring Circus! For example our links to the eastern circuses, we could go directly there through our acrobatic teacher Vladimir was at Moscow Circus School, Russia, or we could go with Cheeky from Witty Look, Japan, because through her teacher was also linked to Ukraine and the Kiev Circus School. We can also get back in a few short steps to famous clowns including Jacques Le Coq, and to most other continents apart from Antarctica, but we can do penguin tricks with our hula hoops.
We have invited our teachers to do their portrait on a spoon to add to our “Family Tree” It is a bit like the tradition of clowns paining their make up design on an egg. Gerry Cottle has several of these in his collection at Wookey Hole.
