THE GREATEST SHOWWOMAN

Story by CHRISTINA HUGHES BABB |

In 1999, before Dallas had a circus scene, a traveling show called Kaleidoscope pitched a tent at Valley View Center, then located at Preston Road and LBJ Freeway. The one-ring European-style production included a bit with a frumpy interrupting janitor-lady clown who, by the end of the show, via the magic of applause, transforms into a beguiling and agile acrobat.

The clown-acrobat role belonged to Fanny Kerwich, a 30-year-old French woman with the ancestral blood of circus performers pumping through her veins.

When Kaleidoscope wrapped, Kerwich — who had dazzled spectators at Paris’ Moulin Rouge and Germany’s Circus Roncalli and trained under The Great Valentin Gneushev in Moscow — married Dallas attorney Mark Doyle. The newlyweds put down roots in the Disney Streets neighborhood of Preston Hollow, where they and their two children live today.

Had the lawyer run off with the circus, it would have been more conceivable.

“We normally don’t do this in circus,” Kerwich says in an accent that reflects her nomadic youth. “We marry people in circus, stay in circus, raise children in circus, and we try to pass on this heritage. But I fell in love.”

Prior to Doyle, Kerwich had “almost exclusively dated clowns,” according to a 2010 D Magazine piece about the “true love” of a “Gypsy” and a lawyer.

Back then, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey regularly rolled through Dallas and packed big venues, but there wasn’t a circus community, school or place to practice.

A different woman might have accepted the trade: career for true love. But not Kerwich, whose wedding, according to the 2010 write-up, was “a raucous event, with local jugglers and musicians performing at the reception.”

For one thing, the circus was more than a career. Circus performing is in her DNA, going back eight generations, since about the beginning of modern-circus time, Kerwich says.

Her adventurous father liked to go to very rural places where there was no circus at all.

“We went where circus was needed. It was a beautiful exchange, with no sense of competition or desire for fame,” she says. “It was a moment in time shared only by those in that auditorium, everyone sharing that double somersault or seven-clubs juggling. Everyone is holding their breath. You do that trick every day, but every day you don’t know if you’re going to make it. It’s not recorded, not for TV, it is precious and alive.”

And another thing: Dallas’ death of circus arts presented an opportunity for Kerwich to do what her dad had done — bring circus to where circus was needed.

When she was new to Dallas, Kerwich — who trained as an acrobat, contortionist and trapeze artist before taking up hula-hooping and comedy in her 20s — performed in the streets just to nourish her soul.

“When Mark said, ‘You don’t have to do that,’ I said, ‘Oh yes I do,’” Kerwich says. So he said he’d pass the hat.

Kerwich performed at a cabaret on Lower Greenville, took corporate gigs and played a Texas-born, cross-dressing aerialist in the Kitchen Dog Theater production Barbette.

She taught circus arts to children at Dallas International School and to theater arts students at Southern Methodist University.

Former student Jeff Colangelo, a stunt choreographer and owner of Prism Movement Theater who still works with Kerwich, says her teachings blew his mind and shaped his future.

“She introduced me to the idea of circus arts as fine art and to this kind of theater,” he says.

As a theater arts major, Colangelo was familiar with a certain mode of performance, the closed-off style made for the traditional stage.

“But circus arts comes from something a lot older, from the 1600s,” he says. “It is much more open. It’s about expanding your energy out to the audience and working with that. Fanny constantly talks about projecting your energy not just through your face, but through your back and body, 360 [degrees].”

In 2006 Kerwich established the Lone Star Circus.

The Dallas-based circus arts nonprofit includes school for children and adults and year-round performances.

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