Cercle Funambulesque
The Cercle Funambulesque (1888–1898)—roughly translatable as "Friends of the Funambules"[1]—was a Parisian theatrical society that produced pantomimes inspired by the commedia dell'arte, particularly by the exploits of its French Pierrot.
At the Théâtre des Funambules, Jean-Gaspard Deburau, called by the eminent poet and journalist Théophile Gautier "the most perfect actor who ever lived",[2] created, in his celebrated mute Pierrot, a legendary, almost mythic figure, immortalized by Jean-Louis Barrault in Marcel Carné's film Children of Paradise (1945).
[6] Legrand, after working in Bordeaux and abroad, found employment in the 1870s at the Tertulia, a Parisian café-concert, and in the late 1880s, at the end of his career, at a children's theater, the Théâtre-Vivienne.
"[8] When the mime made an appearance, around 1880, in a pantomime at the Variétés, he struck Paul and Victor Margueritte, rare admirers of his art, as "a survivor of a quite distant epoch".
In 1879, the Hanlon-Lees, a troupe of English acrobatic mimes, had performed to great acclaim at the Folies-Bergère, inspiring J.-K. Huysmans, the Naturalistic novelist and future creator of the arch-aesthete Des Esseintes, to collaborate on a pantomime with his friend Léon Hennique.
Eugène, in incarnating the Pierrot of one of Legrand's pantomimes, Le Papillon (The Butterfly), found that he was a more-than-competent mime, and Félix was inspired by his brother's performance to conceive the Cercle Funambulesque.
[21] Its first evening of performances, in May 1888, at a small concert hall at 42, rue de Rochechouart,[22] consisted of a prologue with verses by Jacques Normand accompanied by the miming of Paul Legrand; a pantomime, Colombine pardonée (Columbine Pardoned), written by Paul Margueritte and Beissier, its Pierrot mimed by Paul himself; Najac's pantomime L'Amour de l'art (The Love of Art), with Eugène Larcher as Harlequin; and a parade of the boulevards, Léandre Ambassadeur (Ambassador Leander), starring Félicia Mallet, who would later create memorable Pierrots for the Cercle.
His ideal was what he called the "Théâtre-Impossible": On the elastic boards of a house with scenery painted by the most fervid colorists and pervaded by strains of the "enervating and caressing" music of the most suave musicians, it would charm me if, for the amusement of a few simple—or very complicated—souls, there could be presented the prodigious and tragicomic farces of life, love, and death, written exclusively by authors who had no connection whatsoever with the Society of Men of Letters.
[27]Najac, on the other hand, was repulsed by Margueritte's criminal Pierrot and offended when the Cercle turned his pantomime Barbe-Bluette (Pink-Beard, 1889) into an "old melodrama rejuvenated by indecent innuendoes.
[29] The Larchers had grander plans: as Félix told Paul Hugounet, "we wanted—still while preserving the Cercle form, such as I had sketched out in the statutes—to approximate a theatrical organization, which, in our opinion, had the only chance of succeeding.
Here, true to the ideals of the avant-garde Symbolists, Pierrot is urged by Hermonthis, a kind of Salomé à la Gustave Moreau, to renounce the pleasures of the senses—all nourishment, love, and even life itself.
[39]The new version ends as a comedy: the husband and his lover, Columbine, having expired in a suicide pact, are brought back to life by one of Isabelle's electrical machines, and, as they stagger about like robots, the doctoresse reveals her new shingle: Resurrections My Specialty.
[43] It is not, therefore, surprising that, during the ten years of the Cercle's existence, it produced only one "classical" pantomime (J.-G. Deburau's Pierrot Coiffeur)[44] and only one parade, Léandre Ambassadeur,[45] on its second and first evening of performances respectively, "when the statutes were being conscientiously observed.
"[29] And, despite their explicit inclusion in the statutes, no plays from the Théâtre de la Foire or the Comédie-Italienne were mounted:[24] the theater of the past was shouldered aside by "the Wagnerian tradition".
"[46] He summarizes the plots of several of its pantomimes: Pierrot loses his fiancée when his "art"—of thievery—inspires him to reckless heights (Najac's L'Amour de l'art [1888]); he botches his own suicide and then, stuffing the noose in his pocket for luck, is emboldened to court Colombine ([Fernand] Boussenot's La Corde de pendu [1892]); he plays out a dream of heroic exploit that leads alla gloria militar ([Henri] Ferdal's La Rève du conscrit [1892]).
Sometimes his drama has a hackneyed lesson to teach: Woman is fickle (Camille de Saint-Croix's Blanc et noir [1888]); Earth's the right place for love (Beissier's La Lune [1889]).
Sometimes it is tearful, in the manner of the old-fashioned comédie-larmoyante....[47]Although the Cercle left behind no enduring monuments of the theater, it provided a stage, orchestra, and audience to thirty-nine authors who, over the course of fourteen evenings of production, presented sixty-five playlets performed by and before (along with the paying public) its some hundred and fifty members.
[56] Thus did the work of the Cercle anticipate such twentieth-century creations as Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp, Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot, Red Skelton's Freddie the Freeloader, and Jackie Gleason's Poor Soul.
