THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 21, 1995 TAG: 9502210064
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY RICKEY WRIGHT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
RINGMASTER Eric Michael Gillett handles his job with aplomb. One minute, he's introducing two ``honorary ringmasters'' from a radio station in Richmond, where the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey played 11 shows last week. The next minute, he's riding a wheeled swan while singing about wonderlands beyond your hands.
He's in control, just what the crowd expects from its master of ceremonies. The facade slips just once, as ``Clown of Clowns'' David Larible is escalating the level of lunacy during an audience-participation plate-juggling act. Gillett is passing breakaway dishes to Larible, who in turn engineers their destruction at the hands of four volunteers. A flying plate heads toward one woman. Alarmed, she turns her back to it, hands covering her face.
Gillett doubles over, laughing.
Two hours earlier, he had been in the stands, casually discussing the breakneck pace of his life, in which he balances the Big Top's demands with his career as a cabaret artist. His non-circus engagements include a stint at New York's Russian Tea Room beginning in late March and an anti-AIDS benefit there in April.
He'll be with the circus as it opens at Scope tonight.
``It's kind of a scary schedule,'' he said with a sort of resigned satisfaction. ``It's like what people do when they skydive. Basically, what I do is fly to my hobby.''
The requirements of circus and cabaret work are different, he acknowledged, but there are similarities.
``Essentially, our job is to entertain. Whether it's here, whether it's on a ship, whether it's in a cabaret, it's all about making people happy,'' he said. ``People have to believe that I am singing to each one of them. You have to feel like you know me.''
That intimacy is key to both venues, Gillett said.
``Ringmaster is not an acting job. It's not a role,'' he said. ``You are providing the audience with the best possible extension of your personality.''
Both forms of expression come together in his first CD, ``Sing a Rainbow,'' released last year. His goal with the album is to ``speak to the child in all of us, with a certain innocence, but to not talk down to anybody.
``Most of what I'm doing in the circus this year is fed by the cabaret work,'' he said. ``The job with the circus is better,'' helped by the more personal material he has brought in. Still, he knows it's not his gig.
``Circus is about people risking their lives and taking chances. The ringmaster's job is to make sure you know how awesome that is,'' he said. ``In order to be good at this job, you have to sublimate your own needs and sublimate your own ego. The show is not about the ringmaster. He's a focusing device, he's a camera. The ringmaster is not the star.''
Gillett is a good spokesman for the brothers Ringling.
``The wonder of the circus is that we regenerate,'' he said. ``We're not doing this for now, we're doing it for 20 years from now. Our job is to create a memory. People should come back and say, `Oh my God. That's everything I remember and more.' The kids should say, `I wanna be in the cages with the tigers.'
``I think the reason the circus survives and that people come back to it is to get something they don't have time for in their lives anymore.'' ILLUSTRATION: MOTOYA NAKAMURA/Staff color photos
Main photo: Eric Michael Gillett is ringmaster for the Ringling
Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Inset photo: The Chicago Kidz are
acrobatic stars.
by CNB