Among the elephants performing this year on Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey red and blue units.
Elephants have (almost) left the building, a year and a half before originally planned.
On Monday, Feld Entertainment announced that the planned retirement of the elephants from performance on Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 2018 will, instead, take place May 1 of this year.
Communications VP Stephen Payne said the date is not exactly in stone, but the plan announced Monday is to move the 11 remaining show elephants to Feld’s Center for Elephant Conservation in Florida after performances by the blue unit at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center, Providence, R.I., and the red unit at Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza, Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Brian Sipe, manager of the Wilkes-Barre arena, said this means a double whammy this year – the first time in many years the three-ring circus, the big show, has played his arena and the last time the elephants will perform on the road. Sipe has been managing Mohegan Sun Arena for SMG for 14 months now and one of his first calls was to the Feld rep to find out how they could get the red or blue unit to Wilkes-Barre rather than the smaller gold unit. He succeeded in booking the April 27-May 1 red unit date for five performances.
Payne said when the announcement was made in March of 2015 that Ringling Bros. would take the elephants off the road, “we broke the internet.” The news went worldwide and big. This time, the buzz is less but the interest is farflung. He said he got a call from London and Ringling doesn’t even play London.
One unit, which has 14 cities left to play, was performing at Amway Center, Orlando, when the news broke, and the other was at AmericanAirlines Arena, Miami. Allen Johnson, manager of the Orlando venue, who happens to be in London right now for the NBA Global Games Jan. 14 at The 02 Arena, had heard that circus tickets at Amway Center were tracking as usual and was looking for a nice bump for Monday, Martin Luther King Day, when kids are out of school and looking at a last chance to see elephants in the circus.
Payne said the 2018 benchmark was just that, a line in the sand from which to move backwards. The decision to accelerate the change was made when “we figured out we could.”
“Water and poo were the two big issues; elephants are prodigious on the backend,” Payne said. Once they realized the systems are in place to move waste to a sanitary landfill, filter urine to protect the nearby wetlands even with 11 more big bladders in the mix, and feed and house them all on existing land, the decision was made.
The Felds also changed the rehearsal schedule for the circus, so a new show goes into rehearsal in May instead of December. One unit, Circus Extreme, will continue on tour without the elephants, which he noted are 7-10 minutes of a two hour show, while the other goes off the road.
The disposition of the elephant cars, one or two cars in a mile-long train, is to be determined. Feld may repurpose them or may park them or may donate them.
“We are not calling it a farewell tour,” Payne emphasized. Elephants are still part of the Ringling Bros. family, but at CEC, not on the road. “We’re looking at ways to expand access to that. It’s a working farm, no sidewalks, so it is a far cry from being, nor will it ever be, theme park-esque,” he said. But Feld will do more with outreaches like Skype classroom tours and lectures, which they’ve been offering for several months. They will also continue working with the Department of Wild Life Conservation in Sri Lanka.
And, most importantly, the cancer research continues with Dr. Joshua Schiffman, a pediatric cancer specialist at the University of Utah, and others who are searching for cures in the DNA of Ringling’s elephants.
“We are committed to these animals,” Payne said. “And the creativity exists in the Feld family; we will find other ways people can experience the wonder and amazement of these animals in some form or fashion. We just don’t know what it is yet.”
As to the circus, “we still have lions, tigers, horses, dogs, camels and kangaroos. Animals are still part of Ringling Bros., just not elephants as of May 1,” Payne said.
The publicity that will surround the last elephant performances, when those occur, will also be pretty big, Payne promised. The news has a touch of historical and iconic mixed together, a change that was 145 years in the making.
“We don’t want this to be, and it is not, a funeral. Does not mean there is no Ringling elephant, but if you want to see them as part of the circus, now’s your chance. All traditions have beginnings and ends,” he concluded. “We will end it carefully, and with respect.”
Interviewed for this story: Stephen Payne, (703) 749-5505; Brian Sipe, (570) 970-3501; Allen Johnson, 407) 440-7070