Alive! Alive! Alive! The Future of Sideshow

By Pat Cadigan

Alive! Alive! Alive! Carnival Diablo: the future of sideshow
Omni,  March, 1995  by Pat Cadigan


I have spent at least 13 of the last 40 hours in a rented van, driving from Calgary, Alberta, through the Canadian Rockies to Abbotsford, British Columbia, and my reality feels as if it has acquired a heavier-than-usual layer of grit. So it's not too surprising that I fit right in here at the Katz Club, whose reality it seems has also been crusted by a bit of travel dust from the road.

Covering the alcove leading to one of the pool tables, below a crazed Ren and a manic Stimpy, is a large handpainted illustration of a man pierced in several places by long needles. "Impaler" is the legend across the top of the canvas; "Unusual," it says in the lower left corner, and in the lower right, "No Illusion." Everyone who comes into the club sees that one first. Then the eye travels on to the canvas hanging beside it, the one hiding the pinball machines and the videogames, the one that shows someone strapped to a wooden electric chair with the juice on. "Electric Chair!Real!"

On the other side of the room another canvas displays a hollow-eyed lady enjoying--if that is the word--a meal of pink worms from the bowl of some unfortunate's brain pan. "Bug Eater," states the legend above the image. "Weird," the canvas further assures. "Alive. Alive"--in case there was any doubt.

Eventually, I notice the area where bands would most likely set up on live music nights. But there is no band playing. Tonight the stage is set in baroque, with overtones of the Gothic and the outre which draw the crowd for a closer look at the small, almost-human figure in the formal, pinstriped suit. Standing four feet high, he is poised beside an onstage banner as if he had just stepped out from behind it--perhaps to check on the rest of the set, or to count the house, or maybe just to see the expressions on people's faces as they tried to get a closer look at the bald head, the pointed ears, and the demonic, fleshless grin below cold, hard, absolutely dry eyes.

This is Boris, road manager for the current tour of Canada's only professional performing sideshow, Carnival Diablo, or so the ringmaster, Scott McClelland, told the staff of the club where Carnival Diablo performed that night. If the staff regarded this somewhat skeptically before the show, what they witnessed during the performance put them through enough changes that afterward, Boris seemed among the more normal aspects of the night.


Regulars frequent this place. It's that kind of joint, run by three guys still young enough to be in this business because they like their nightlife. They've tried some different diversions here; bar Olympics went over pretty well. As far as entertainment goes, the bands they book play a lot of covers. People like what they know, and they're here to dance. But not this evening.


"Ladies and gentlemen, what you see here tonight could change your lives . . . forever." Under the colored lights, the ringmaster's eyes are dark holes in his too-pale face. "Welcome to. Carnival Diablo!"


The audience doesn't seem sure how to react. Is this guy putting them on? After all, they're children of their time--high technology, high expectations. The special effects that used to take movie-making teams months to achieve are now available as screen-savers for desktop PCs and Macs. These people have seen aliens, predators, terminators, UFOs, superheroes, white worms, and black holes. They're giggling.

The giggles turn a little nervous as the man on stage warns them that tonight they will witness some very unusual practices involving the transcending of the human body and the negation of pain. In shopping-mall video arcades, they can pay a buck a minute for a VR helmet and transcend the body in some weirdo computer-generated cartoon full of angles and facets. Get shot by another player, there's a flash of light but no pain at all. How can anyone do that in real life?


And then there's Boris, grinning at them from one position throughout the night. Boris doesn't move like Disney's animatronic figures, so what is it supposed to be--besides creepy? The explanation never comes, but it doesn't matter. Because this isn't a bunch of special effects in a movie or a computer-generated picture or an animatronic re-creation of some historical figure, nor is it happening on the other side of the world and coming to them via satellite. This is right before their very eyes, this minute, no computer fudging, no instant replay in slo-mo. If you're going to get people to sit still for unenhanced reality, it had better be arresting. Remarkable. Extraordinary. Very extraordinary. If it's real life, it had better be bigger than life.



And that is precisely why the sideshow is back in town, Scott McClelland told me earlier that day. The carnival ideal that he and the other members of the troupe have done their best to adhere to is the encounter with the bizarre that sends the observer on an emotional roller coaster. If the capacity crowd in the club tonight is any indication, people crave to ride that roller coaster more than ever, even in these high-tech times--maybe even because of them.


But . . . sideshow? It's an unexpected juxtaposition, this shiny, high-tech, information-rich era we live in now, and this old-style entertainment reminiscent of a simpler time. Sideshow, McClelland says, is an art form made to remind us that our technology and our information deluge don't satisfy every part of the human spirit. Western society, he feels, is lacking a cultural expression for the thrilling curiosity which attends acts of mystery and of magic. "I think that when people come to a sideshow, it's a modern way of a primitive culture coming together to see the shamans perform their magic. People need to learn about the magical parts of themselves, and we're not talking about illusions. We're talking about their looking for that side that seems to have been lost because we live in such a high-tech society."


Is that really what we're looking for when we go to a sideshow--some kind of spiritual experience? Given the promises of Carnival Diablo's own sideshow banners--the Impaler, The Electric Chair, The Bug Eater--the experience waiting for us would seem to be a bit more primal. What we would really seem to be looking for, when we go to a sideshow, is something freaky to stare at--something or someone.


There are several parts to a traditional circus sideshow, as explained by McClelland, who should know--his grandfather, Nicholas Paul Lewchuk, owned Canada's largest touring carnival sideshow and vaudeville troupe between 1920 and 1968. The Lewchuk Midway came to rest in Canora, Saskatchewan, and McClelland's mother, Sonia, grew up working the concessions. McClelland himself spent his childhood summers listening to his grandfather's stories of life in the carnival.

The stock features of the carnival are as familiar as elephants at the circus. First, there is the Freak Show, which consists of human oddities such as the fat lady, the human skeleton, and the Siamese twins, as well as anomalies in jars, known in the trade as "pickled punks," which can be either animal--two-headed calves and the like--or human. Then there are the sideshow performances: human marvels such as sword-swallowers, contortionists, and fire-eaters and physical freaks, such as midgets or so-called giants who may have an additional talent, like singing or playing a musical instrument.


Finally there are the blow-offs-illusions like the Lady With No Head (just a lot of tubes coming out of her neck), the Snake Woman, or the Girl-to-Gorilla illusion. There was also the big blow-off, usually a hermaphrodite, cordoned off in an area meant for viewing only by people 18 and over. The hermaphrodite was the clincher aimed at making attendees spend a little more money than they already had, and it was usually good that people really didn't mind--in fact, McClelland says, it was quite the opposite. "People felt privileged that they could see such marvels for just a little bit extra."


Given that the ever-vigilant and omnipresent media seem always ready to swoop down on any newsworthy event--and the more lurid, the better--then our so-called modern time is not as far removed from the sideshow as we would like to think. How else to describe the media frenzy over some British Royals' foundering marriages, a teenager who shot her much-older lover's spouse, or a former football star's day in court on murder charges but as, say, the Great Media Sideshow?


Tour the exhibits: instead of JoJo, the Dog-Faced Boy, we have Michael Jackson. The Fat Lady is more likely to have her own TV show rather than her own tent, while the Human Skeleton can be seen modeling designer clothes on a Paris runway.

See the performances: Barnum had the Swedish Nightingale, Jenny Lind; we have Madonna--or Mariah, or Barbra, or whoever can draw the crowd this week.


No doubt about it, we are fascinated with our freaks, and if there are none handy to stare at, we are only too ready to turn somebody into one just so we can stare.

Sideshow is definitely not the sort of thing you'd watch beamed by satellite from an arena in Sydney on pay-per-view. It's in-person and intimate--actually a little too intimate and in-your-face with its sights and sounds. It will amaze you, shock you, scare you a little, probably offend you, and then laugh heartily at your discomfort with no apologies for any of it. Maybe that makes it the perfect antidote to the era of political correctness, when nobody wants to offend anybody else.


In anticipation of seeing the Carnival Diablo performance at the Katz Club, I'd been wondering exactly what--in a time when people are promised that in the very near future they'll have five hundred channels to surf and an artificial reality that will outdo anything natural reality has to offer exactly what will make people still want to leave their homes for entertainment. Now I know.


The Lady Julianna plucks an earthworm from the bowl on the table in front of her and dangles it between two fingers for the audience so they can see that it is very much alive and squirming. Then, grinning madly, she places it on her tongue and closes her lips around it, leaving half hanging out so she can suck it in like a piece of spaghetti. Her chewing is exaggerated and she shows the squealing audience the mashed-up worm on her tongue before she washes it down with a bit of liquid refreshment.

The Bug-eater is a staple of the old-time sideshow entertainment, and most modern audiences find this sort of act highly disturbing, especially so because a woman is doing it. Later in tonight's performance, Lady Julianna (real name: Julianne Manchur) will disconcert everyone further by eating glass as well and then will top off her part of the show by lying on the Bed of Nails.

Except for the tent of hoochy-koochy dancers and the odd tattooed woman here and there, the carnival sideshow was dominated by men. But in the process of sideshow being reinvented as the theater of cruelty for the twenty-first century, it isn't just a man's world anymore. When she lies on the Bed of Nails in her backless dress, the audience is simply in awe, especially when the ringmaster stands on her. Afterward, when she gets up again, she displays her back for the audience so they can see that there is no trickery, no illusion. A woman who eats worms and glass, a woman with marks on her back from a bed of nails--does this disturb you? The Carnival Diablo performers would only smile and say, good, it's supposed to.


Carnival Diablo's Eric E. Everlan is an accomplished escape artist as well as a sideshow performer. This tour is the first outing for an escape he developed, an arrangement in which his wrists and neck are chained to a wooden board. He calls it the stocks, though onstage, the effect suggests crucifixion as well.


This is one of the audience-participation portions of the show, in which the ringmaster prevails upon someone sitting close to the stage to come up and lock the chains around Eric's neck and wrists, someone who can later tell everybody else that they were real chains and real locks. Audience participation is another sideshow tradition. Today, we might describe this as interactivity the old-fashioned way, and it is definitely not the safe and sanitary interactivity of the high-tech era. There is a certain riskiness--any stranger plucked at random from an audience is an unknown quantity and some are less manageable than others. Tonight, the man selected for the task turns out to have had more to drink than anyone realized. Despite several stern warnings from McClelland, the man tried to fasten the neck chains too tightly. Hours later, after closing time, someone claimed that the man was currently out on bail with murder charges pending.


Eric touches the red marks on his throat reflectively; that wasn't the most dangerous thing he did tonight. He could have lost a finger when the animal leg-hold trap closed on his hand, and he risked real injury to his spinal column when the ringmaster threw darts at his back--they lined up perfectly, one atop another, along his backbone.


All in a night's work--torture feats are also mainstays of the traditional sideshow. Being chained around the neck by a possible killer, however, does throw him for a moment in a way that being fried in the electric chair by the ringmaster does not. It may seem odd that a man who lights a torch off his tongue from the electricity coursing through his body every night would be so disturbed by such an encounter, and it makes for a very freaky story--pun intended. Tonight, these performers who and it makes for a very freaky story--pun intended. Tonight, these performers who are.



But then, sideshow outre is a different brand of grotesque altogether, more like a mirror of the society it lives simultaneously in the midst of and apart from. "Sideshow is part of the now, it's always there," McClelland told me. "People today," he continues, "have more than enough problems of their own. They don't want to see any whimsical fancy-assed little flower show. They need something that's going to wake them up."


While Carnival Diablo is authentically old-style sideshow, McClelland loves current technology and all the possibilities it presents for building the better sideshow entertainment. He plans to use animatronics so that tomorrow's audiences can meet John Merrick, the Elephant Man, and JoJo, the Dog-Faced Boy, and the most famous Siamese twins of all time, Chang and Eng. "These are the kinds of things that give sideshow a historic value but also give it a really nice bend to the future. If I could, I'd have a holographic image of Barnum, even if it was just on a small pedestal on the stage, to introduce the show."


Even virtual reality--he'd love putting an audience into VR helmets just for the sake of giving each person an extra jolt. Perhaps he should be wired for his fire-eating act, with the audience wearing helmets during that. portion of the show. "So they see the torches coming toward their faces and they see the fire leaving their heads," he says. "I think that would be an interesting thing, because the primal heads," he says. "I think that would be an interesting thing, because the primal thing that all animals have is the fear of fire."

Primal creatures may well describe the sideshow audience of the future. "When you're watching the sideshow, we're in control, and your emotions are not in control anymore--you're not going to know when you're going to feel aversion, or fear, or anything else. And you could turn your head, but you won't."

True enough-one would expect a lot of people in the audience to turn their heads when McClelland goes into his impaling act, which is both excruciating and sadistically beautiful to watch. More than anything, it is thorough, performed slowly, so that everyone in the room can see the skin on McClelland's arm tenting on the point of the needle before it goes through the flesh. But while there are gasps and hollers, some revolting and some almost lascivious, no one turns away from the sight.

Eventually, McClelland plans to take the sideshow out of the clubs and put it back inside a tent, where it got its start and where McClelland feels it really belongs. So someday in the not-too-distant future, enthusiasts will go out to some fairgrounds and find, amid a number of brightly-painted banners picturing things like The Bed of Nails and The Bug-Eater, a blood-red tent with a sign over the entrance proclaiming Carnival Diablo and underneath, Freaks, Freaks, Freaks. A man in the ringmaster's outfit with a sinister smile on his too-pale face will be waiting for them, chanting a seductive invitation: Alive! Alive! Alive!