|
Jake Walther adjusts lights nearly
Jake Walther adjust track lighting. The Stafford High School graduate spends his life on the road, traveling from city to city with the circus. Despite the hectic schedule, he loves his job.
Jake Walther, (left) a circus lighting technician, reviews his work with Sandor Eke prior to opening at the Patriot Center. |
T STARTS with the national anthem, sung by a man in a glittering black tuxedo who sparkles with every move. He stands on a mechanical cart in a circle of pale yellow light, his overpronounced voice carrying to the far edges of the arena.
An elephant in a sequined headband trots from the shadows, hauling a straight-backed woman in a crown who waves the American flag.
Jake Walther is in those shadows, a dark shape hidden among painted black walls and ledges and equipment.
He is not a star.
Walther is not a costumed dancer or a juggler on stilts or a somersaulting clown. He doesn't tame lions or flip from trapeze bars or zip across the high wire.
He illuminates it all.
For just over a year, Walther has traveled with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus as a lighting technician, moving by van from city to city across America.
For three weeks, the 23-year-old is back near his Stafford County home, the place where he grew up and first fell in love with show production.
By vans and a near mile-long train, the three-ring circus made its way to Washington on March 24 and leaves two weeks from today.
Almost nightly--across weekends and holidays and changing seasons--Walther mans an inconspicuous lighting booth or works the floor, turning dark coliseums into stages that glow pink and blue and yellow.
He is part of a behind-the-scenes team that infuses the air with energy and childlike magic.
"I'm not the one they're going to get an autograph from," Walther says of the audience. "I can blend in with everybody but still come in and have my 'glamorous' job. I kinda like that."
Walther's work starts long before the evening show begins, before rehearsals and a steady, early afternoon flow of performers into dressing rooms.
Wednesday morning, eight hours before the circus's opening show at George Mason University's Patriot Center, he helps transform the cool and quiet arena.
At 11 a.m. there are hints of the circus: three tell-tale rings set up across the stadium floor and a man with a painted face and red rubber nose near the loading dock. There's a giant motorcycle cage commonly called the "globe of death" pushed to one side of the floor. And already, the circular lobby smells of warm cotton candy.
A dozen folks haul ladders and hefty boxes and giant cables. Walther is 40 feet above it all, body looped around the truss from which all things are suspended--lights and ladders and ropes, the high wire and trapeze.
Secured by a safety belt, he walks easily across steel framework, plugging in lights and calling to one of four lighting colleagues.
A lot of people don't realize all that goes into setting up, says Jason Gibson, the production manager. It takes 12 hours.
When light spills across the dim arena, Walther announces from his 40-foot perch: "There we go."
Below, someone whistles.
Running off to join the circusWalther imagines his parents must've taken him to the circus once or twice as a child. But he only vaguely recollects the shows.
There was no early dream or defining moment that led him here as a grown-up.
It sort of just happened.
He liked putting shows together, being the invisible hand that transformed empty stages and lawns.
He took drama classes all four years at Stafford High School. He learned to build sets, do lighting and put on shows.
After graduating in 2000, he got a job with National Events, a Newington-based special events production company.
In January 2003, Walther headed south to Full Sail, a private technical college in Orlando.
He got an associate's degree in touring and show production and began a massive job hunt.
Feld Entertainment, which owns Ringling Bros., was looking for a touring electrician.
Walther applied. Interviewed. Within a month, he'd joined the circus and was on his way to New York's Madison Square Garden, working the lights during Ringling's 36-day stop there.
Walther's parents, Kit Carver and Randy Walther of Stafford, are proud of their son, who pursued his passion. With 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth, they'll see two shows before the circus leaves town.
"I think it's really cool to have a kid who ran off and joined the circus," Carver says. "It can really happen. And it's not a bad thing."
Life on the roadWalther stands in a patch of sunlight midafternoon dragging on a Camel cigarette.
Inside, the lighting is up and rehearsal is at least an hour away. He considers a lunch break.
The pie car--so named from the days when circus patrons could buy pies from a train car, Walther explains--is just beyond him.
You can get a meal of lasagna or fries and a burger for under $4.
Walther feasts here, or at fast-food joints or sit-down places like Applebee's. He's eaten four home-cooked meals in a year.
It's part of life on the road. So is living in hotels and out of suitcases, forgetting what city you're in now and which one you're going to next.
Walther is one of a handful of circus workers who live in hotels rather than small rooms on the train. He prefers it this way and spends days off sleeping in rather than sightseeing.
He's made friends with some of the clowns and circus musicians, who hold Friday night barbecues outside their train car.
Some 350 people travel with the circus; there are concession workers and sound technicians, performers and folks who clean up after the animals.
Ringling Bros. is a city unto itself, Walther says, a community on wheels that moves across tracks from one place to the next.
It is a community of children and grown-ups, acrobats and clowns, stoic lions and wrinkly gray elephants with long lashes. And, of course, of a 23-year-old lighting technician named Jake, who still calls Stafford home.
ShowtimeAfter rehearsal, the arena bustles. Men mop the floor and suck up debris with a giant vacuum. Clowns and dancers mill around the rings. Workers sit behind souvenir tables neatly stacked with $22 stuffed elephants, $5 boxes of popcorn and $8 snow cones.
Already, parents line up outside with their little ones, waiting for the glass doors to be pushed open.
Walther takes his place on the lighting platform. The manual labor is done for now; he'll control the lights by computer for the rest of the evening.
When the show starts and the man in a glittery tuxedo finishes the national anthem, the arena falls under darkness.
A drum roll sounds.
"Welcome to this magical world where extraordinary things happen the one, the only, the Greatest Show on Earth!"
Every carefully placed light comes on--the yellow and purple spotlights, strings of pink and blue bulbs that hang from the ceiling like beaded necklaces.
All eyes are on dancers in striped and sequined costumes, on clowns in bright suspenders and oversized ties, and on the parade of elephants that march from the shadows.
To reach KRISTIN DAVIS: 540/368-5028 kdavis@freelancestar.com
