For  a few months in 1990, Katie Hickman spent most evenings riding an elephant while dressed in spangles

THE BIKINI WAS scarlet and decorated with silver beads.  It came with a red feather boa, silver gauntlet gloves, a scarlet and silver choker, garters, and a matching headband.  I looked at it dubiously.  It was small. Very small. But not as small as the blue or the green costumes which had also been on offer.

“I liked the blue better,” said Brissel,  “it showed you off really well.”

“She means your chichis,” said Olinda, opening her huge eyes even wider and grinning.  “You know what your chichis are, don’t you?”

“Just try the blue,”  Brissel was coaxing.  “Think what your family will say!”

I could imagine exactly what my family would say.

“I think the red will be fine,”  I said, grabbing the costume hastily.

Back in 1990 I spent several months living and working with a circus, Circo Bell’s, in Mexico.  I had gone there to write a book about my experiences there, but at the insistence of my friends, Brissel and Olinda, I ended up with a night job too.  In my scarlet spangled bikini I rode an elephant, twice nightly,  in the circus parades. When I look back on these adventures, they seem so surreal I can barely compute them. But at the time no one, least of all me, thought it odd. If you lived with a circus it was quite simply what you did; it was the most natural thing in the world.

While the circus as we know it today itself is a relatively modern invention, the skills it requires – feats of strength, physical daring and dexterity, even the wearing (ahem) of spangled outfits – are, along with soldiering and prostitution, make it among of the most ancient professions in the world. The ancient Greeks painted acrobats on their funeral urns; medieval fairs sported conjurers and dancing bears. Today,  even in the remotest parts of the world, there are variants of it everywhere. During my own travels I remember a strongman and his son in the Taklimakan Desert, working their way round the camel fairs and caravanserai; fierce, blood-letting equestrian displays in Kazakhstan; and a travelling entertainer in Xian, China, whose sole trick was to push a snake up his nose and then pull it out of his mouth…

Modern sensibilities makes us queasy about these sometimes crude displays,  but the circus is about something more than just a desire to be entertained.   Even the most modern of circus acts – the strongman, the jugglers,  trapeze artists and high wire walkers, even the dancing girls – all have ancient roots.   They seem to speak to some basic human need to be taken out of ourselves,  to be amazed, mystified, transported.

The year I spent travelling in Mexico with Circo Bell’s remains the most powerful experience of my life. Every time I put on that scarlet spangled bikini I was transformed from plain Katie Hickman into something quite other:  ‘Katty, La Gringa Estrella’   – Katie, the Star Gringa.

ENDS

Katie Hickman is the author of Travels with a Mexican Circus, recently republished by Bloomsbury.