40th Anniversary Videos
For forty years, the Big Top has gone up in Grand Center each summer and something happens inside it that is hard to put into words — so we thought we would try to put it on film instead.
This short series goes behind the curtain of our 40th Anniversary season: the people, the craft, and the small daily acts of care that add up to a circus. New films are released through the season. We hope they let you linger a little longer under the tent.
The Music
At Circus Flora the music is never in the background. It is played live at every single performance, in the ring, breathing with the show — rising under a leap, dropping away to a held breath, landing exactly when the acrobat does. Our first film is about that sound, and the musicians who make it happen night after night.
Beginnings
Every circus has an origin story. Ours starts with a man, a dream, and an elephant named Flora. David Balding founded Circus Flora with Sacha Pavlata and Sam and Sheila Jewell, setting out to build something America hadn’t really seen — an intimate one-ring circus in the European tradition, where every seat is close to the action and the show actually tells a story. It opened at the Spoleto Festival in 1986, and St. Louis embraced it as its own.
Hear from Cecil MacKinnon and Jessica Hentoff, two performers who were part of Circus Flora’s original company and are still in the Circus Flora ring today.
The Flying Wallendas
You can’t tell the story of Circus Flora without the Flying Wallendas. Eight generations on the high wire, and part of our shows almost from the very beginning — watching a Wallenda step onto the wire under the Big Top has become one of the great St. Louis traditions.
Tino Wallenda talks about confidence over fear, the family’s darkest day on the wire, and why his grandfather was back up there the very next day.