Friday, March 06, 2009

From Sandra Zoppe


AZOPPE_Page_1, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Posted by Buckles at 3/06/2009 03:06:00 PM

2 comments:

henry edgar said...

alberto zoppe was a true legend among the brightest stars of the circus, a man who was not afraid to try something new, who adapted to changes in the business and stayed at the top no matter what he was doing. he also remained a gracious gentleman and raised a great family. we will miss him greatly.

06 March, 2009 15:45
Jon Pult said...

The New York Times did a nice3 vfeature in 2005...here's a portion. For the rest you can search "Zoppe" on nytimes.com
The Family Business, 163 Years Under the Big Top
By MICHAEL WILSON


Alberto Zoppé, 83, as worn, dusted and patched together as the canvas of the big top over his head, looked toward his feet and recalled the broken bones, working his way up.

''Oh, one foot, one ankle, one leg one time, one knee,'' he said in the accent of his native Italy. ''The hip. They replace the hip and go back and do it again. I replace both hips.''

Mr. Zoppé is the patriarch of the Zoppé Family Circus, a traveling band of men, women, children and animals that races between county fairs and suburbs like this one near Chicago, playing a few shows a day for a week or more throughout the summer before splitting up into their solo acts again.

The Zoppé circus evokes something from a picture book: the clown, the trapeze, the dancing dogs, the ring and the tent. The show is frozen in a time long before the high-concept, high-dollar Cirque du Soleil, which has opened its fourth resident show in Las Vegas.

''Nobody knows what real circus is,'' said the show's front man and lead clown, Mr. Zoppé's son, Giovanni Zoppé, 39. ''I'm not going to say we're better than Soleil at all. It's a wonderful, wonderful thing. But it's not circus. When a kid imagines a circus, this is what they think of. It's exactly the way it's supposed to be. It's like the circus was 100 years ago.''

Or, more precisely, as it was 163 years ago, in 1842, when a French clown named Napoline Zoppé met a ballerina, Ermenegilda, in Hungary, and they ran away to Venice. They were Alberto's great-grandparents.

''Cecil B. DeMille brought me here from Italy,'' Alberto Zoppé said before an evening performance in Schaumburg earlier this month. ''He tried to get me for three years, but I can't come, because the show in Italy is going so well. I say, 'Well, what about if you send an elephant here to replace me?' He say, 'O.K., but I don't have an elephant.' He included in the contract to replace Alberto Zoppé with one elephant, immediately.''

Mr. Zoppé appeared in ''The Greatest Show on Earth,'' Mr. DeMille's Oscar-winning film, and rose in circus lore with his signature act: a backwards, flat somersault -- his torso straight as a pole, not tucked into a ball -- off the back of a running horse. Onto the back of a second running horse.

He met his wife, then Sandra Kayler, in the early 1960's on the road. ''They asked for volunteers from the audience,'' Sandra recalled. ''No one would volunteer for it, and I felt bad, so I volunteered. He was 43. I was 17.'' They married and had three children....

06 March, 2009 19:33

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)