Bindlestiff family cirkus1/4/2024 Keith summarizes, “The Cirkus goes beyond Demanding the Impossible, we achieve it.” That is, they’ve refused to be bought, and they’ve maintained ideals of parody and protest in the process. ![]() Somehow, the Bindlestiff idea has resisted both gentrification and recuperation. Working with as many as sixteen performers at a time and hundreds of performers over the years in a variety of variety shows, Keith and Stephanie comprise the circus core–their website calls ‘ern the “Ma and Pa of the Bindlestiff Family.” Keith’s partner in performance and the life of the crime of not selling out is Stephanie Monseu. Before I cut the dollar bill in my sword swallowing act, I lament on the fact that the US spends 40 million dollars on the inauguration of a shit-head we didn’t elect.” In his silence he is able to express the pain of life. Keith elucidates, “My clown, Kinko, is of the tramp tradition. Inspired by books like Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone and a willingness to do anything–from traveling with a bookmobile to swallowing swords and eating worms–the Family Cirkus has, since its inception, incorporated political commentary into its schtick. Now, our environment is a bunch of Starbucks, Trader Joes, Home Depots, and McD’s.” We lived in a dirtier, smuttier city steaming with life. New York at that point was a different place. Keith explains, “Bindlestiff grew out of the late-night, New York underground performance scene of the early ’90s. Even though a radical, traveling circus is no longer a novelty, it’s still needed. When the Bindlestiff Cirkus began, the old-school sideshow scene had yet to become surprisingly trendy in the taverns and theaters of the underground. Of the many amazing aspects of this ensemble’s enduring eccentricity, I’m always drawn to the idea that such strangeness is delightfully old-fashioned. Vaudeville and sideshow predate punk and performance art and fancifully create authenticity and artifice, juggling fire on the freak continuum. While ostensibly offering something new, something original, the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus brought us something simultaneously old-fashioned. Founded by Kinko and Philomena Bindlestiff (aka Keith Nelson and Stepahnie Monseu), these veterans of visionary weirdness admit, “Cirkus is hard.” The first decade of Keith and Stephanie’s death-defying adventures are captured in a new DVD documentary. A fire-breathing follow-up to the performance scene, a traveling anarchist circus was an obvious offshoot from the standard stock of shock that shot us with performance artist Karen Finley and crushed us with the neotribal music of Crash Wosrhip. ![]() –Stephanie Monseu aka Philomena Bindlestiff, co-founder of the Bindlestiff Family CirkusĪround the same time I learned that revolution shouldn’t sell selfless sacrifice if it wanted to gain any self-interested revolutionaries, I also discovered dangerous devotees of dissent inside the proliferating avant-garde arts. “A little duct-tape, a little cardboard, and it’s a show.”
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