Little Big Top

Marilyn Snell, Utne Reader

When the 19th-century flea impresario Bertolotto conducted his 12-piece orchestra for Princess Augusta of Prussia, she is said to have been able to hear sound emitting from the one-inch-square concert hall. History does not reveal the quality of the comma-sized performers, or which waltz was chosen to entertain the princess, but we do know that pioneers like Bertolotto, who excelled in playing with scale and perception, were great celebrities in their day.

Though it is often considered an urban myth, the flea circus has captivated audiences around the world for more than 300 years. With its freakification of the familiar, comic appeal to the imagination, and carny sense of fun, it's not hard to see the attraction (though it is sometimes hard to see the stars). In the United States, the flea circus persisted into the 1950s with the great Leroy Heckler, who dazzled audiences at Hubert's Freak Museum on 42nd Street in New York. Then the little big top ceased to be--that is, until Colombian-born artist Maria Fernanda Cardoso and her flea circus arrived on the scene. Like Bertolotto's peewee performers, Cardoso's fleas appreciate music too, but hers are partial to Latin beats--and they do much hipper tricks.

Four years ago Maria Fernanda Cardoso, an award-winning conceptual artist with a fine arts degree in sculpture from Yale, developed an obsession with fleas. She fled the rarefied world of galleries, which had been exceedingly receptive to her work, and ran off to join the circus. Today, instead of black-clad sophisticates critiquing her installations, she's got 4-year-olds interrupting her show with probing questions and clambering ringside for a closer look at her goods.

'I'm very happy with the accessibility of my project,' Cardoso says of her flea circus. 'It can communicate at every level, whether you're a kid, an 80-year-old, or a museum curator. What's more, it allows me to continue my investigation of the connection between humans and animals.'

The 33-year-old Cardoso, who won first prize at the 1990 Bogota Biennial with her dried-frog sculpture fashioned into a kind of eerie halo, has used corncobs, fish scales, cattle bones, lizards, snakes, grasshoppers, and houseflies to explore the relationship between humans and other species.

Although Cardoso's art has always involved a poetic observation of nature, she refuses the mantle of 'environmental artist.' Asked to define her aesthetic intentions, she won't give too much away--intentionally distancing herself from any cause or ideal and even celebrating the contradictions inherent in her work. 'I'm not politically correct,' she insists. 'I'm not defending any cause, and I don't care if the fleas in my circus die. In fact, their deaths are part of the performance. It's not my intention to point a finger and say, `I love nature and you are bad because you destroy the environment.' I'm more like a scientist who makes experiments and watches what happens next.'

A mad scientist, more like it. During a recent Cardoso Flea Circus performance at San Francisco's Exploratorium, a museum of science, art, and human perception, Cardoso wears weird goggles and a belly-baring silver miniskirt and go-go boots and brandishes a whip--which she uses more than once on those 4-year-olds who get too close to the talent.

Her well-stocked acts are an amalgam of delicately wrought miniature swing sets, trapezes, and safety nets plus twittery costumed entertainers. The performers include Harry Fleadini, the world's smallest escape artist (who is so good at escaping you rarely see him); strongbugs Samson and Delilah lifting cotton balls hundreds of times their size; acrobats Teeny and Tiny walking a tightrope; and jugglers Pepita and Pepón, who shove around luminescent balls while they're dangling from a wire.

All the names in Cardoso's extravaganza go with the costume or the act and not with the individual flea, since one or more of the stars bites the dust each week. (Cardoso acquires her talent from a mysterious laboratory, which agreed to supply her only if she would buy in bulk--500 fleas a week at 10 cents each--and promise not to divulge the exact location of the lab.) Yes, life in the circus is murder; at times it's downright disturbing to watch. There is something faintly grotesque about Cardoso's sideshow, but there's also something refreshingly honest in her act--something primal, raw, and unedited.

When Teeny keeps falling off the trapeze and has to be repositioned repeatedly, for example, Cardoso shrugs and tells her audience, 'You see, it's real! If the fleas were machines everything would be sanitized and running smoothly.' She then fishes Teeny out of the safety net and sets him up for his sixth attempt. This time he crosses the highwire successfully. The crowd of 15 (which is picked by lottery, since each performance attracts hundreds of fans and the performance space is, by necessity, intimate) oohs and ahhs and then lets out a collective hoot of approval.

But at the Cardoso Flea Circus, just as with Maria Fernanda Cardoso herself, nothing is as it appears. During her last set of performances, the impresario takes every opportunity to play with reality and mess with her admirers--especially during the question and answer periods midshow.

Question from the audience at the 1:00 show: 'What do the fleas eat?'

Cardoso: 'Chiquito' (her cat, whose photo she dramatically whips out of her silver miniskirt).

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.

Cardoso has also used her skills of observation to separate the stars from the riffraff, determining which fleas are the exceptional jumpers and which can be coerced to walk. She says she merely harnesses the innate gifts of the jumpers--who, on a good day, can hop 30,000 times without stopping and who can sail the human equivalent of 1,000 feet in a single bound--but trains her walkers by putting them in a little vial: When they jump they hit their heads on the glass ceiling. 'Very soon they learn their role and place in the circus,' says the deadpan professor.

The contemporary boot camp Cardoso has devised may seem retrograde and even a little heartless, but she insists that her experiments are not inconsistent with the hoops she herself has had to jump through in life. Raised in a Bogotá suburb by ambitious and successful architect parents who were obsessed with their children's education, Cardoso says her circus represents the kind of 'unnatural and often useless education' we've all been subjected to at one time or another. 'My head has been packed with trivia since I was a kid,' she explains. 'I think that's why I love the fantasy and whimsy of my flea circus. I hate reality, though I was raised to be a nerd and I can't help being curious about it.'