Homegrown circuses are a San Francisco tradition. Going back to the Pickle Family Circus in the 1970s, various circus troupes such as Make*A*Circus or Sweet Can Productions could be found doing summer shows in the parks or indoor shows during the holiday season.
For the last 15 years, one troupe that’s taken up the torch is Circus Bella. Founded in 2008 by Abigail Munn and David Hunt, the band of clowns, aerialists, jugglers and contortionists been doing free shows in the parks around the Bay Area ever since (minus a pause for COVID, like most performing arts organizations).
“We were touring with a very traditional style circus called Zoppé Family Circus,” recalls artistic director Munn. “And we got this idea of could we bring open-air free circus for the people back to the Bay Area. I grew up with the Pickle Family Circus as a kid, and that was such an important part of my childhood. There are a lot of things that we do differently than the Pickles, but some of the same core values are there. It’s 2023 versus the mid ’70s. And now at this point, there’s kids that have now grown up coming to Circus Bella, which is so amazing.”
Now Circus Bella is branching out into doing winter shows as well, starting with “Kaleidoscope 2023,” its indoor seated show in a heated circus tent at the Crossing at East Cut, the downtown recreation area perhaps best known as the site of the temporary Transbay Terminal when the current terminal was under construction. The show was recently extended to Jan. 7.
“I think this expansion for the company is really exciting and actually essential to our stability and longevity as a tiny company on a shoestring budget,” Munn says. “Our free summer programming is wonderful, but it barely pays for itself, and doesn’t really cover the day-to-day operating costs of running the organization.”
This is actually the company’s second experiment with a winter show, after an earlier version of “Kaleidoscope” on Treasure Island in 2018.
“It feels like a whole other world ago, on the other side of all of this,” Munn says. “It’s a different tent, it’s a different cast. It’s like a different era.”
Growing up in San Francisco, Munn was involved in performance from a very early age.
“My dad was the lighting director for the San Francisco Opera, so I grew up backstage at the opera,” she says. “Ridiculous spectacle was day-to-day life for me. My parents signed me up for a class when I was 9 at the Pickle Family Circus School, when it was up on Potrero Hill. I walked in there and there was a picture of Buster Keaton on the wall, and there was this lion costume, and I was like, ‘This is it. This is what I’m going to do.’”
After graduating from the Urban School of San Francisco, Munn went off to UC Santa Barbara for a BFA in Modern Dance.
“I came back to San Francisco, and I was supposed to be a choreographer for some little weird show on Potrero Hill, and then the trapeze artist got pregnant. And I said, well, I can do that! So I got back up on the trapeze and started training. And then I worked for Wild West shows and had a burlesque act for a while, and then went off and joined the circus.”
On a circus spectrum that includes both traditional big top shows like the Ringling Brothers and dancerly cirque nouveau spectacles such as Cirque du Soleil, “I think we’re sort of somewhere in the middle,” Munn says. “As a company, we do ensemble work. Everyone in the company knows how to juggle, so we always do these big group massive juggles together. One thing that is really important to me is that we perform in the round. We always have a ring, and we always have a live band.”
The six-piece band is led by composer Rob Reich, a veteran Bay Area jazz musician renowned for his improvisational flair.
“Rob’s been part of the company since the beginning,” Munn says. “He really works with each artist to try to find what their rhythm, what their texture needs to be, and then creates these beautiful pieces. What’s incredible about our band is that they have this really intricate music that they’re playing, but they’re also watching the artists and improvising with the artists, because everything’s live, and who knows what’s going to happen? Of course I love the circus, but you could close your eyes and not even see the circus, and you’d be fine just listening to the band.”
Originally the trapeze artist for the company, Munn decided to come down to earth during the pandemic and now serves as the show’s ringmaster.
“I’d never spoken on stage, and that was terrifying,” she says. “I can hang by my neck 30 feet in the air, fine. But somehow saying words into a microphone was a whole other journey of fear. But now I’m enjoying it.”
Contact Sam Hurwitt at shurwitt@gmail.com, and follow him at Twitter.com/shurwitt.
‘KALEIDOSCOPE 2023’
Presented by Circus Bella
Through: Jan. 7
Where: The Crossing at East Cut, Beale Street at Howard Street, San Francisco
Tickets: $55-$75; www.circusbella.org
