Human beings continually create small worlds to sustain impossible arts. One of my close friends is August Tye. She is Ballet Mistress at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Her parents are sculptors. Her husband is an operatic baritone. She has three children. The eldest, Georgia, I have known since she was a baby. Now 25, she is a choreographer and photographer. Her husband is a Peruvian magician. Of course he is. They are a family of artists and performers. The kids are doing what mom and dad do. Their lives are unimaginable to most people, carried out upholding the arts of ballet, opera, magic, and music.
I have always been drawn to Picasso’s several paintings of the La famille de Saltimbanques, otherwise known as The Acrobat Family. The name saltimbanque includes all traveling performers, itinerant acrobats, fortunetellers, dancers, circus folk, freaks, and their ilk. A kind of tribe that has always walked the earth for as long as recorded history can tell. Shaolin monks and Vajrayana Buddhist monks very much share this organization—a dedicated community at the edge of society, not living by the usual social norms, but having a way of life specifically designed to master and transmit sophisticated mental and body practices that result in amazing physical and psychic feats such as tantric yoga, gong fu, and Buddhist cham dance. The gallery of images offered with this article shows grand similarities among dedicated distinct artist societies. They are meant to provide a warm feeling, an intimate look at the stewards of secrets.
These performers aren’t produced in colleges or institutions, but in communities of people living according to a way of life that defines them. Monks are always on the move between monasteries, religious events, and staying connected to their families. Monks also travel the world. It is their whole way of life, which sustains precious ancient teachings of body and mind over hundreds, even thousands of years. These performers occupy a mythic zone between ordinary life and another reality. They live unordinary lives.
Kashmiri Bhand performers are traveling artists dating to the Mughal Empire. Very few remain. They dance, sing, recite poetry, tell jokes, play music. They are all men, and female roles are played en travesti. Bhand Pather performers are hereditary. They have also been bone-setters and dentists, and they delivered services available only when they were performing in a town. They can be bawdy and hilarious, or somber and spiritual. They know Arabian Nights by heart and can enact many scenes from the book of extravagant fables. They are a small society within society, once with a more integrated relationship to popular culture.
These acrobats and monks are not merely “dance communities”—which they are—but hereditary or liminal orders of embodied transmission; people who preserve difficult arts by living partially outside ordinary society. When I talk about Buddhist dances such as cham, I emphasize that is it different from the prevalent notions of dance in the West. One difference is that the monk-dancers live a different kind of life. An old lama once told me, “If you want a good monk-dancer, start with a good monk.” Monks are made in monasteries, living according to a monastic code. They are a family. They perform mystical dances in the same place where they live, and sleep, and eat, and play, and meditate, and grow up, and grow old.
Picasso’s La famille de Saltimbanques is a powerful entry point into the liminal lives depicted because the painting shows moods at the same time tender yet melancholy, the raw trappings of a poor, itinerant community of highly disciplined performers, keepers of amazing feats, but aloof and spiritually estranged from bourgeois society. It shows a family. Indeed, a completely other society and way of life. They belong. Picasso sees this belonging. Life is organized around the transmission of the arts. In one version sits a monkey. The monkey is perfect, a plain fact, a companion in the circus life.
This gallery of images is not merely portraits of performers, but revelations of enclosed worlds of transmission. Certain arts survive because entire human communities organize themselves around preserving them. Magic isn’t just entertainment; it sparks something ancient within us. These marginalized performers keep secrets. Old secrets. Sometimes initiate secrets. The monastery is not merely a place where dances are occasionally performed. It is an entire ecosystem that protects rituals, dances, mudra, music, and costumes. It sustains oral transmission and a behavioral disciple of daily monastic movement. It preserves techniques of sculpting and painting, and above all, preserves ancient techniques of meditation.
Traveling performances, circus folk, freak shows, and the earliest forms of drama usually included something paranormal: spirit possessions, ghost stories, seances, psychics, mind-reading, fortunetellers, people in trances, blessing from the ancestors. It made for a richer variety show, appealing to people’s superstitions and fascination with workings of the unknown and the afterlife. No doubt some of these performers were capable of mental, physical, and psychic actions not available to most people. Monks certainly have minds trained beyond the imagination of most people. Noh actors as well, have advanced mental capacities, in part by performing in states of sensory limitation.
The same is true of circus folks, commedia dell’arte families, traveling Noh troupes, and Kashmiri Bhand Pather clansmen. Shaolin monks have always routinely performed in Chinese opera performances, and in modern performances, still living the elevated life of a Shaolin monk. Even with classical ballet, the painter Degas shows us an ancient style of master-disciple teaching; a highly disciplined artisan training within a larger bourgeois society. The lives of ballerinas haven’t always been ones of respect and honor, but they have always been vessels of one of the most beautiful arts known to man. They appear superhuman, doing incredibly beautiful things most humans can’t do. You can’t go to college to become a ballerina. You must go to a ballet academy, a privileged type of archaic training unto itself. A lifestyle.
Cham is performed in important Buddhist religious ceremonies. But it survives in the spaces between performances; in the very lives of the monks, who are intentionally outsiders to mainstream society, highly disciplined, meditation adepts. Picasso understood something similar about acrobats: his real subject is not their astonishing tricks, but the life required to sustain the impossible art. Itinerant, poor, humble, disciplined vessels of ancient transmission at the edge of society. Everything about it is precious.
In closing this meditation on those who live lives designed for the transmission of ancient practices, I leave you two more paintings by Picasso, titled the same as the lead image above, La famille de Saltimbanques, all painted the same year, 1905.
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