Event

Circus Now! with Duncan Wall - "The Ordinary Acrobat"

***UPDATE: Online ticket sales have ended, but you may still purchase additional tickets tonight at the door. Doors will open at 6:30pm.***

Enjoy performances and learn about contemporary circus in this Circus Now! event with Duncan Wall, author of "The Ordinary Acrobat: A Journey into the Wonderful World of the Circus, Past and Present." The evening will include performances, audio and visual presentations, and a book signing.

Tickets are $5 to attend, and if you are interested in a copy of "The Ordinary Acrobat," we will apply that $5 toward the price of a book at the event.

"The Ordinary Acrobat" is an utterly charming account of Duncan Walls's novice plunge into the strange and wonderful world of contemporary circus, and a nostalgic look back at circus history and inside the current Cirque du Soleil-fueled phenomenon.

When Duncan Wall visited his first nouveau cirque as a college student in Paris, everything about it--the monochromatic costumes, the acrobats singing Simon and Garfunkel, the juggler reciting Proust--hooked him. Soon he was attending circuses two or three nights a week, and soon after that, he entered the intensively competitive training program at France's Ecole Nationale des Arts du Cirque. The Ordinary Acrobat is a magical, funny, sometimes scary story of what happens when one average American joins a host of gifted (and flexible) international students in a rigorous regimen of tumbling, trapeze, juggling, and clowning. This is an appealing, richly evocative history of how the circus evolved into the dynamic, thrilling experience it is today.