Steve Goes to the Circus (Sort Of)

Three weeks ago I was in Boston for the weekend and the Barnum and Bailey Circus was in town. I joked with a few friends that it would be a lot of fun to spend a few of my limited hours in town at the circus. Now back in Phnom Penh, the circus is in town, and I’m going.

Cambodia’s “National School of Circus” (yes, that’s actually what it’s called) was performing in Phnom Penh. Our friend Pat, who I work with and who now volunteers at Aziza, suggested we check it out. For 3000 riels ($0.75) we really couldn’t go wrong.

Meeting our friend Wes, we tuk-tuked to the Chenla Theater in the western part of Phnom Penh which, ironically, is not an area that westerners tend to frequent. We arrived at a surprisingly attractive theater about twenty minutes before the show began and made our way to the ticket booth. Ready to fork over a few thousand riels for the tickets, we were shocked to find that the show was sold out. We skeptically added our name to the wait list and did just that, surrounded by a healthy mix of foreigners, Cambodians, kids, parents, and twenty somethings.

Ten minutes after the show began and still waiting outside, my name was called and we were finally able to purchase tickets. Unfortunately, we missed the “Opening Parade,” the “Solo Contortion” and most of the “Balance Act.” However, we were seated by the time the clowns came on. Let’s just say that it was a uniquely Cambodian clown performance (i.e. physical comedy in its most basic forms). The premise was that the clown was in fact a dentist and had a patient with a sore tooth. For the first few minutes of the performance the clown did everything but actually come near the sore tooth – he stood on top of the patient, chased him around with a drill, and even played proctologist, inserting an oversized hypodermic you know where. Makes sense for a circus geared towards kids, right? After much tomfoolery, the clown was able to extract an oversized sore tooth with an oversized wrench. While the Cambodian audience was eating it up, the ex-pats were either dumbfounded or horrified.

The clown was followed by a magician who, despite his nice suit with gold sequined trim, was mediocre at best. He did fairly standard scarf-in-hand type magic, though he did manage to pull a few chickens out of his hat (I don’t know that there are many doves in Cambodia…). The magician was succeeded by a hula hooper, who, in my opinion was the star of the show. She could flip hula hoops up from the ground and send them up and down her body, do six to eight at a time on various parts of her body (knees, hips, chest, arms), and concluded by spinning at least ten hoops around her waist at once, looking a lot like a slinky.

After the hula hooper and a team of jugglers, there was a “circus drama” performance depicting Khmer mythology intertwined with gymnastics and contortions. The story was that of Hanuman, a white monkey general who tries to rescue a princess by building a bridge across the ocean. The performance was fairly light, but certainly both captivating and entertaining. All in all, it was a great, cultural way to spend a few hours and not a lot of money. If they come back to town, I would definitely spend another evening as an audience member.