Little Big Top
(Page 3 of 4)
May/June 1996
Marilyn Snell, Utne Reader
Cardoso: 'Chiquito' (her cat, whose photo she dramatically whips out of her silver miniskirt).
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Question at the 3:00 show: 'What do the fleas eat?'
'A secret solution,' Cardoso says perfunctorily and ends the question period before anyone can ask her to elaborate.
Question in her studio the next day, when I have her pinned down with the tape recorder running: 'OK, what the hell do those things eat?'
Cardoso: 'I don't feed them.' (That would help explain the turnover rate.) 'I used to let them bite me, which in a bizarre way brought out my maternal instincts,' she continues, though I sort of wish she hadn't. 'But that didn't last long.'
It's an ominous vision, Cardoso playing hostess to her performers by offering up her own blood. Suddenly, considering this alternative, I don't even mind that she starves them. 'They live longer when they don't eat,' she says, with a scientific reserve I find strangely calming right now.
Cardoso may be mischievous and deliberately full of contradictions, but she's no philistine. She has spent many hours researching entomology as well as the history of flea circuses. Her studio walls showcase her whimsical sketches of new acts and costumes, but her bookshelves are full of well-used science, philosophy, art, and history texts. Ricky Jay's Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: Unique, Eccentric, and Amazing Entertainers is a personal favorite of Cardoso's, but so are the ideas of French scientist and philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who considers imagination and reverie as well as reason to be creative forces in knowing the world. As a sculptor of concepts, Cardoso has brilliantly molded science, ecology, aesthetics, and humor into her current body of work.
It's been a long, painstaking road to knowing the mind of the flea, but through study, patience, observation, and not a little dominatrix-like dexterity with a whip, Cardoso has figured out how to animate her insect world. She's learned, one could say, to speak its language. Her blown breath means 'come hither' in flea vernacular, since carbon dioxide signals a warm body and food. The fleas obediently respond by jumping in her direction. Cardoso has also discovered that fleas dislike light, so she uses it to coerce them into pulling a pocket-sized locomotive thousands of times their weight. The Herculean feats of strength are merely desperate efforts by the fleas to stay out of the limelight. They can't talk yet (though Cardoso says she's teaching her fleas Spanglish), but they sure can dance: As Latin music blares above a petri dish, made up with glitter to look like a disco dance floor, fleas wearing star-shaped tutus do a teeny, tiny tango.