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It's a circus out there and it starts with a song. A sultry woman in an evening dress strutting through a cabaret introduction of the night's entertainment: "Open up your hearts, open up your minds, open up your legs to the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus." From then on nothing is ever the same. The next two hours are spent watching phallus strapped mc's and wild pogo stick battles and some fire-eating, sword swallowing, scorpion swallowing mayhem. Sure, there's a clown act and a juggling act, but the clowns race riot through the audience and jugglers hurl a bathroom humor of plungers and scat and burning toilet paper. To top it all off there's a finale in which Madame Bindlestiff, the same long-legged siren beauty who sang in the show's opening, lays bare-assed and buck-naked on the ground while a clown inserts one end of a dildo-tipped four foot pole into her vagina and spins plates atop the other.

Welcome to the cutting-edge of the cutting edge, the new world of alternative circus. It's happening all across the country, in small theaters and dim clubs, in parks, even on the streets. The Bindlestiff's themselves have been touring the states for six years, playing to crowds of up to a hundred who have shelled out the requisite sliding scale ten dollar entrance fee and gathered in converted warehouses and fringe venues that not ten years ago played host to strange world of punk rock and performance art. The theaters are not the only connection, many of the performers involved got their start with bands like Tchkung, Idiot Flesh and Crash Worship—bands that took the anti-establishment energy of punk rock and upped the theatrical ante with costumes, drum circles, belly dancers and fire performance (eating, spitting, swallowing, juggling and spinning). Though the Bindlestiffs took a slightly different route, springing from the New York's early 90's adult cabaret revival, they too responded to the revival fever they saw peeking out around the country. "Circuses are an American tradition," says Bindlestiff founder Keith TK, "they've been around for hundreds of years. It's not just art hounds who come to see us. When we play the midwest our audience is a huge mix of ages, but it's the older folks who are the least shocked by our risqué antics because they remember the adults only hoochie tent from carnivals in the 20's and 30's."

For many other acts it was Burning Man, the interactive spectacle turned non-stop party in the desert that served as both nexus and gene pool for circuses to be. The philosophy of Burning Man is that everyone is a participant and anything can happen and the people who show up come prepared to display their wares—however strange they may be. As far back as 1996, it was at Burning Man that emerging circuses like the Bindlestiffs began to develop their core supporters, but as more and more people saw the possibility of alternative circuses more and more people wanted to be involved. "This year, we went to Burning Man with an idea," says Bantu Circus performer Hilary Nichols, "but the mere mention of the word circus brought people out of the woodwork to help. Six weeks later we put on a giant show in San Francisco with over fifty performers from all over the West coast."

Whatever their genesis, one thing's for certain, a lot of these new circuses are definitely fun for the whole family. "You have to remember that before television, Barnum and Baily was the largest spectacle in the United States," says Paradox Pollack, founding member of San Francisco's Cell Space (a four year old community arts space and alternative circus venue) and of The Dream Circus (started in 1995 and disbanded in 97, The Dream Circus toured the west as one of the first fully-realized alternative circuses). "The alternative circus movement is a movement away from a consumer culture. People want something that's more visceral, more physical, it makes sense that people have returned to the original circus spectacle. There's a need to see impossible things with dire consequences, so the aesthetic becomes a shock aesthetic, a metaphysics of fear. It's very similar to the lure of piercings or extreme sports, only it's being done with a sledgehammer and a bed of nails."

Still, the freak show shock aesthetic only represents part of the circus picture. The word's original definition came from the word circle—one with a 42 foot long diameter to be exact. 42 feet being the minimum distance necessary for a horse running in a circle to generate enough centrifugal force to keep a rider standing on its back. Certainly, these days there aren't many horses running round and if there are it's more than likely that the horses are enormous costume puppets and the puppets don't even function like normal puppets, they flow and bend and turn themselves inside and out in some hybrid contortion act turned acrobatics.

Though her training is in traditional trapeze, New York-based aerial artist Chelsea Bacon is known for her just such wild hybridizations. Her current project tells the fairy tale story of an undersea circus that once, every hundred years, comes out of the ocean, overruns a small fishing village, and drags it back to the deep. "Much of what's happening today is about seemlessly merging circus arts with other mediums. My new show draws on rock and roll, trapeze, slack rope, stilting, dance, puppetry—hell I'm even going to have storytellers in rocking chairs suspended from the ceiling. When it's done it's going to look like a rock opera in the air."

Chelsea's isn't the only hybrid act running round these days. There's the Tucson-based Flan Chén, which started out as a fire performing dance troop, but this year increased their circus thrill factor with the addition of flying trapeze. Already famous in Europe, the "bastard circus" of Cahin-Caha has combined the talents of French circus performers and American performance artists (alongside an enormous grant from the French Ministry of Culture) to create a 3.5 ton half jungle gym, half gazebo and a strong spiritual/political message which they've been dragging all over Europe for the past year and will soon lug across the ocean for their North American tour. Not that this is all too new of an idea. In the sixties New York's Electric Circus and The San Francisco Mime Troop began mixing circus with politics. In the same vein, Circus Amuk combines a "queer aesthetic circus" with grassy pick up your trash and elect a better mayor themes that they've been dispersing for the past five years with free shows in the parks of New York. Coming out of Atlanta, the all black Universoul Circus blends standard big top fare with a strong message of community empowerment. San Francisco's newly founded Bantu Circus calls themselves "nomadic magic healing arts circus that tours the world to spread peace and unite the people of the jester world." And it doesn't stop there. Certainly, this may not be the greatest show on earth and it may not be fun for the whole family, but one thing's for sure, the circus is definitely back in town.