In Israel, life’s a circus

April 7, 2011 - 1:45 PM by David

Douglas Gerling of the Medrano Circus

You know spring has arrived when the circus comes to town. Virtually ever since Israel’s inception, there’s been an influx of European traveling troupes who set up a little village centered around the big top and perform two, three and even four shows a day for the adoring Israeli audience.

The Medrano Circus, established in 1864 in Italy, has been coming regularly here since 1952, and this year they’ve already started a staggering eight-month stint of performances in over a half dozen locations in the country.

They’ve finished up a few weeks in Haifa and have pitched their tents in Tel Aviv for the Pessah school vacation period which begins this weekend. It really is a little village in the backstage area of the circus with over 150 performers and staff people living in caravans, tents, and experiencing the carnival life for most of the year.

Douglas Gerling, one of the daredevil high wire experts and practitioner of stunts like the Wheel of Death and The Globe -where he and his cohorts drive high-speed motorcycles in a tiny suspended cylinder narrowly avoiding taking each other’s heads off – loves being in Israel, even though he’s away for months at a time from his wife and two young children in Germany.

He was a featured performer in Circus Europa which came to Israel last year, and this year joined the Medrano. A paramedic by profession, Gerling was assigned to an ambulance in waiting staff at a German circus and fell in love with it. Within a few months, he was performing.

“Some days we have four shows in a row, and at the end of the day, you’re so tired you can’t walk. But when we go out to perform, we don’t think about being tired – we give everything we have,” he told me last week. “I like the audiences in Israel very much. They give us so much love and power to perform. The Israeli audience is hot.”

If you can’t make it to cheer Gerling and his colleagues on in Tel Aviv, they’ll be heading to Beersheba for Yom Haatzmaut in Beersheva, June in Jerusalem and onward through to Succot in Holon. When the real circus of our daily lives gets to be too much, it’s reassuring to know that the old-style circus has come to town.