Storyboard from the newest edition of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey.
Goodbye elephants, hello ice.
When the 146-year-old Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus takes the floor of Selland Arena in Fresno, Calif., in early July, it will do so for the first time without its splendid Asian elephants, who have been retired to a 200-acre conservatory in central Florida near Orlando. While the elephants disappear, appearing for the first time at the new Out Of This World circus program will be skaters and ice, plenty of ice.
“This is really a whole new genre of circus that we’re creating,” said Alana Feld, executive vice president of Feld Entertainment and producer of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey as well as a third generation family member in the business. “Part of that is performance based, which is drastically changed and now has a portion of it as an ice circus.
Alana Feld, producer, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus
“We are in rehearsals right now and I can tell you that the production we’ve been working on so far is really exciting. There are a lot of new and certainly different elements and the skating brings such a different type of energy to a performance. You have a lot of speed with the skating and we’re able to move things at a faster pace than maybe before. Because the ice floor is a white surface we’re able to use a lot of video projection that we weren’t able to use in the past on a black surface. There is a lot of video projection, 3D and mapping that really helps tell the story and set the environment throughout the entire show.”
Feld said that the decision to remove elephants from the show was not a knee-jerk one.
“When we made the decision we thought long and hard about it,” she said. “We came to a decision as a family about what was in the best interests for the company and the elephants and for everyone. It’s definitely different but I’m so excited about what we’re working on now with Ringling Bros. We are going to push the absolute parameters of possibilities here. We are creating an experience unlike anything else. We’re telling a story with the show. We’re bringing new technology to the show. We have all these incredible skaters in a circus. It’s exciting and I think audiences are going to be so thrilled and blown away by what they’re going to see when they come to the show.”
The Final Performance
Those who came to the show on May 1 at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center in Providence, R.I., became a footnote to history as it was the last performance featuring the elephants. The circus held a four-day run with eight performances at the venue before the curtain came down on the pachyderms after the 7 p.m. show.
“The mood and the vibe was bittersweet,” said Cheryl Cohen, director of marketing, public relations and booking. “It was wonderful knowing that these amazing animals will be going on to live in a wonderful place in Florida at the Center for Elephant Conservation (CEC). It is great knowing that but, at the same time, it’s hard to imagine the circus without them after so many years. Everybody was happy and sad at the same time.”
Cohen said that there was no “intentional advertising” that the performances would mark the end of elephants in the circus but “it kind of just happened organically through the media. As word got out the hype and excitement built over time and we did a great walk-up all the way to the end. We had great houses for the entire run.”
Circus elephants enjoy a special brunch prior to their last performance on the road in Providence, R.I.
In fact, the May 1 retirement date happened much earlier than the originally scheduled 2018 sendoff as everything came into place.
“Once they decided that the date was going to be moved up we had a little bit of notification and that was when we decided to do a special brunch prior to the first show and to bring the elephants out to the front,” Cohen said.
With happy stomachs it was time for the elephants to return for their final performances, which concluded with ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson delivering a moving speech to the audience about the elephants’ new home.
“Our elephant friends are at an incredible preserve,” Feld said. “They do anything from roaming, snacking, exercising and interacting with one another while some of them are breeding and part of our conservation program. That is really why our center was created by my father (Kenneth Feld) 20 years ago, to conserve Asian elephants because they are an endangered species.
“When you go there you see that the elephants are thriving and on top of that we’re doing some incredible research as well. We work with a pediatric oncologist, Dr. Josh Schiffman at the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City. He was interested in studying why elephants so rarely get cancer. It’s as simple as a blood sample from our elephants, which we do routinely anyway just to check on their health. He can learn so much from them and hopefully be able to use all that for treatment and cures for pediatric cancer in the future.”
An Evolving Brand
When Out Of This World commences in July, it will bring with it an interactivity and spectacle never before seen at a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey performance.
“We are at a point of evolution with the brand,” Feld said. “We are making a lot of changes and looking at doing things very differently to provide a new and different kind of experience than we have in the past for our audiences.”
As producer, Feld assembles the creative team and selects the designers, writers, directors and others who work on the show.
“I really just try to guide them with the vision of what Ringling Bros. should be but with their creativity really driving the story and the moment and performances that the audiences will see.
“Ringling Bros. is 146 years old. It’s been around that long because it’s constantly changing. We’ve done away with three rings over time. We’ve changed the pace of the show and made some of the performances a little bit shorter. We’ve done theming and different things like that to the shows. I would say the change we have in store right now is the biggest yet.”
But despite the new implementations marked most notably by talented thrill skaters, performances will still include gravity-defying acrobats, majestic animals and hilarious clowns.
Cohen looks forward to seeing the new circus when it returns next year to the Dunkin’ Donuts Center.
“I went to the circus every single year as a kid,” she said. “I grew up going to the circus here in Rhode Island and it’s just hard to imagine (without elephants). But knowing the Feld family, they are going to come out with something spectacular. The ice and skating will be fascinating.
“I have my memories and now the circus will create a different memory for the new generation. For them, extreme skating or something like that will be what they remember. They’ll have a whole new memory.”
Interviewed for this article: Cheryl Cohen, (401) 331-0700; Alana Feld, (941) 721-1200