‘Portable’ circus offers festival fun

July 9, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

CINCINNATI (AP) — You know those stilt-walkers you’ve seen at Newport on the Levee? The person who made your kid a balloon animal at your church festival? The fire juggler you saw last Fourth of July?

There’s a good chance those entertainers all work for the same place: The Amazing Portable Circus, a 12-year-old company that started out as one guy doing a little juggling.

Now, it’s a group of about 40 people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, who have trained themselves and each other and can put on 200 kinds of acts at nearly 2,000 events all over the region every year.

True to its name, the Amazing Portable Circus has no permanent home. There are no big top and no big animals. There’s just a big backyard on a corner lot in Covedale where performers practice juggling, making balloon animals, face painting and doing aerial acrobatics from a 20-foot-tall rig while curious neighbors stroll by the white picket fence and stare.

The backyard was bursting with activity last week, when the Amazing Portable Circus entertainers were getting ready for the Fourth of July, one of their busiest weekends of the year.

“It just sort of happened,” said Amazing Portable Circus owner Dave Willacker, a 35-year-old former high school theology and theater teacher who was wearing a black T-shirt that reads “Ringmaster” in white letters. “I never intended to do this. But I like what we do.”

Willacker, who grew up in Eastgate and graduated from McNicholas High School in 1993, didn’t learn how to juggle until he was in college at Northern Kentucky University.

His first juggling job, when he was a youth minister making about $14,000 a year, was for $20 and all the pizza he could eat at a Pizza Hut.

Since those early days, Amazing Portable has grown by 50 percent every year, said Willacker. He left his teaching job at Roger Bacon High School last year to devote himself to the circus full time.

Schools, churches, companies and municipalities now hire circus players for entertainment packages that start at about $75 an hour.

Willacker looks for both physical skill and personality in the entertainers he hires. And what they don’t know, he or other seasoned entertainers endeavor to teach them.

“Here, they hone those skills they were born with,” he said.

Most of the entertainers are students or have day jobs. Their ranks include lawyers and ministers, and they work for the circus to earn extra cash during the summer or on weekends.

But after years of practice, a few are now making about $30,000 a year from salary and tips working as little as 10 hours a week, Willacker said.

The full-time entertainers include Mike Riga of Mount Lookout, 23, who graduated from Xavier University last year with a degree in electronic media.

He started working for the circus in high school, when Willacker, then one of his teachers, noticed his artistic skill and asked if he wanted to try his hand at face painting.

“It was just fun going from retail, selling jeans, to being on stage and being the reason people are there,” said Riga, the self-described “crash-test dummy” for the circus. His jobs have included living statue, DJ, juggler and balloon animal-maker.

Even in a time when video games and other high-tech forms of entertainment are competing for people’s attention, Willacker expects the circus to keep growing.

He’s looking for a larger practice and storage space because he’s outgrown the garage in his backyard that’s packed floor to ceiling with every circus-related accouterment imaginable, including nearly 100 stilt-walker and living-statue costumes, hula hoops, unicycles and casino games.

One day, he’d love to start a circus school and put Cincinnati back on the circus map (in the early 20th century, Terrace Park was home to the Robinson Family Circus).

Last week, though, Willacker was focused on getting through the Fourth of July and another big event: His July 26 wedding to fianc e Joanne Crawford, 29, who recently left her landscaping job to help run the circus and work as an aerialist and face painter. It may be one of the most entertaining weddings their guests have ever attended.

“We talked about eating fire for our vows,” Crawford said. “It really depends on whether it’s windy that day.”