Lord of the Fleas, page 2
As perhaps the only person in America who can put "flea impresario" on her tax statements, Maria Fernanda Cardoso is living proof that one person's pestilence is another's vocation. The holder of a masters degree in sculpture from Yale and a former teacher, the native Colombian is an artist who has at last found her milieu. Haring had his subways, Schnabel had his crockery -- Cardoso has her bugs. "I work with animals," she explains. "It's just that most of the time they're dead." For years, she's been creating sculptural installations with starfish, piranhas, and snakes. Then, four years ago, she got the itch to try something new. "I wanted to be a full-time flea trainer," she says."I had heard about flea circuses like everybody else, when I was a kid, and I had this mental picture," Cardoso says. "Nobody knew what they were, because they had disappeared for the last 30 years. Only the old people had seen them. So I thought, If I cannot see it, I will make one." Cardoso offers no
other explanation for why she has chosen to spend her life trying to make stars out of creatures only 1/16 of a inch long. "My work explores the relations between people and animals," she says. "With the fleas I feel like I can communicate with another world."
The flea circus has a brief but noble history. In the nineteenth century, it was performed for the amusement of royals in Europe. In small towns and villages, it was part of traveling fairs. And in booming big cities, it was a staple on street corners the way buskers and panhandlers are now. Perhaps the popularity of the flea circus had something to do with the prevalence of its stars: people may have figured that if they couldn't beat the li'l parasites, they'd at least make them jump through hoops. Once pesticide manufacturers figured out how to get rid of them, the idea of bringing them back, even in tutus, failed to arouse enthusiasm. The Hartz collar replaced the big top: the flea circus was dead. But if Travolta can make a comeback, why not vermin?
In a most unflea-like fashion, Cardoso's entire flea circus project took a long time just to get off the ground. She spent months poring over old programs and written recollections to get a sense of the tricks that constituted a traditional circus, like the "juggling" of a cork ball and a chariot race. That was the easy part. Then she had to figure out how to duplicate them. "It took two years just to harness the fleas," she explains, adding nostalgically, "It's a lost art."
While Americans spend a billion dollars a year on collars, powders and other extinguishers of minuscule life, Cardoso points her cash toward acquiring performers from a nearby lab. They're kept within confined spaces, where they learn quickly after a few knocks on the ceiling to control their manic jumping. From there, they begin to specialize as acrobats, strongmen and more.
As any showman knows, one can't just rest on the laurels of past triumphs. Cardoso and her crew of siphonaptera are constantly working on more elaborate routines. She shows off a diminutive carousel she's constructing which will eventually be fueled by flea power. The self-proclaimed Queen of the Fleas spends up to months at a time creating a single piece of equipment for them. "Working with the fleas is trial and error, so I make things and change them for them," she observes. "They've enslaved me. I'm at their service." So maybe it's not just the desire to enhance production values but also a little taste for turnabout that's prompted her to begin work on a four-legged version of the world's most famous monument to slave labor. "I'm going to do the building of the pyramids," she says excitedly. "Five hundred fleas all bundled together, pushing. It will be very big, proportionately."
When a person works with insects all day, a bit of fanciful anthropomorphization is inevitable. Cardoso glitters up her Tango Fleas, sets them to music, and calls them dancers. "They are wearing the tutus with the sequins and their little heads sticking up," she says cheerfully of an assembly that to the naked eye looks a lot like ambulatory confetti. And while her whole rigorous training setup may seem like a "Farewell My Concubine" for bloodsucking parasites, Cardoso insists, "They have fun." It's not all work either. She notes matter-of-factly, "I have a lot of couples." Onstage the artistes may go by some decidedly co-ed names, like sword fighters Pierre and Pedro, but in fact the circus has a gender inequity that would shock the EEOC. "I only work with females, even if they have male names," Cardoso admits. "The males are no good. They are wimpy. They're smaller, they're wimps. The only thing they are good for is mating."
Perhaps it's just as well. Life in the circus isn't all glamour and glory. This was brought home at the performance I saw, when Cardoso began the show by paying solemn tribute to the life and work of the recently deceased high diver Fearless Alfredo. Accidents are the dark side of the flea circus, and Cardoso doesn't like to talk about them. (The exact nature of Alfredo's death remains cloaked in mystery, although he appears to have drowned in the thimble he was diving into.) She demurs on the subject of how many of her hardworking crew have sacrificed themselves for their art and gone on to the heavenly fleabag motel in the sky. She does, however, take every precaution to ensure that few of the troupe meet the same fate as Alfredo. The tightrope act, for example, is performed with a net the size of a palm.
Cardoso's currently in the process of taking the carnival of insects on the road. "I'm doing it this month in Bogota, and I'm going to Australia to set things up to take them to Sydney. Then I want to go to New York and Paris," she says. That's if the folks in Customs have no problems with the transportation of creatures whose previous greatest claim to fame was transmitting the bubonic plague. "This is my dream, this is what I want for them, for the fleas," Cardoso says, without the faintest bit of irony. And the fleas, what about their hopes and ambitions? "They dream of being stars in Paris," she shrugs. I wonder for a moment if she really believes that. Then I wonder if the fleas really dream of being stars in Vegas, but they're too embarrassed to tell Cardoso.
