The UniverSoul Circus is the only black-owned-and-operated traveling circus in America, and the only place you can watch double-Dutch jump-roping under a 70-foot-high big top or a Chinese bungee-jumping troupe sailing through the air to the hip-hop grooves of OutKast. Though black-run circuses have existed in America since the turn of the last century, they were mainly regional outfits. UniverSoul, which kicked off its new season this month and will hit 55 cities before November, has spent the past decade pitching its tent in underserved urban areas, offering a show that combines traditional circus fun with contemporary black culture. Its motto: “Hip hop under the big top.” The performers are mainly people of color–whether from Brooklyn, South America or Central Africa–and the acts are backed by a live nine-piece band, or rap, R&B and jazz mixed by a DJ. Music is the soul of UniverSoul: the audience is expected to sing and dance in the aisles, and almost never disappoints. “When we go to a concert or church, we like to stomp our feet, snap our fingers, sing along,” says Dupree, who cofounded the company in Atlanta with partner Cedric Walker in 1993. “We want interaction. Why go to a show when you can’t sing hey, ho, hip-hop hooray?”
Last year 1.8 million people paid $10 to $25 per ticket to shout out hip-hop anthems, watch Gabonese acrobats perform traditional African dances between their airborne stunts and laugh at dancing dogs from Chile. UniverSoul is so popular, it split into two units in 2000, Poppin’ Soul and Soul of the City. But it wasn’t always this much fun. According to Walker, the circus lost $600,000 its first year, and he was “tickled pink” with a $30,000 loss the next. “You think it’s hard to get a bank loan for a black-owned business?” he says. “Try a black-owned circus.” Walker put up his own cash and solicited support from sponsors such as Coca-Cola. Dupree, a former DJ who promoted rap’s earliest tours (Run-D.M.C., Whodini) with Walker, remembers that even people in the community doubted them. “They thought we were crazy,” he says. “They’d say, ‘Y’all gonna have one clown, half an elephant, there’s gonna be a lion on a clothesline jumping around on an old mattress.”
There’s no lion or clown in sight in Savannah tonight (“A good clown is hard to find,” explains UniverSoul publicist Hank Ernest), but there are four Colombian motocross riders who defy gravity (and death) by riding 360s around each other inside a tiny steel globe, and a Motown dance parody by four midgets called the Little City Dancers. UniverSoul is dazzling and rigorously professional, but it isn’t so polished that it lacks the old-school circus elements of surprise and danger. On opening night an acrobat in a gauzy pink tutu from the China Soul troupe has a near-fatal fall–not faked for effect–off the top of a human ladder three-people high. The audience screams. When the embarrassed performer makes it the second time, the crowd gives her a standing ovation. Hey ya, that’s entertainment.
