Fanny Kerwich is the mother of circus arts in Dallas

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. 

A peek inside Lone Star’s summer camp might reveal gravity-defying tumbling teenagers, girls swinging from rainbow-colored silks affixed to towering ceilings, a boy in big shoes balancing a plunger on his nose while a woman encircled by children waxes lyrical about mindfulness and discipline — while handstanding. 

The circus school has proved fertile soil for quiet or eccentric people to take root and find camaraderie and confidence, according to the handstanding teacher. 

“They go from being shy, head down, to weeks later being very outgoing, like saying ‘how’s it going’ to everyone they see.” 

Circus has always been one of the most inclusive cultures known to humans, Kerwich says, “the essence of diversity.”

“You like to be very weird, and you like to juggle? You can spend hours doing that. You are extremely big, and you want to be a base for an acrobat to fly above you? We’re gonna celebrate each individual. Your background is from this, from that, you don’t speak English? It doesn’t matter because we don’t talk. We express ourselves.”

Through September, Lone Star Circus members put on the “Summer of Cirque” at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grand Prairie. The show features feats of balance, strength and magic, bow-and-arrows fired by toes and a dozen or so hula hoops maneuvered at once by a fit, petite platinum blonde. That’s Fanny Kerwich, who has grown more charismatic in the 20 years since Kaleidoscope came to town. 

During those two decades she also has created and directed shows for Dallas Scottish Rite and Dallas Children’s Theater and appeared in the Dallas Opera’s Great Scott. Her Le Petit Lone Star Circus won Best of Loop at Watertower Theater’s Fringe Festival. 

In 2016 she worked with singer Erykah Badu, who performed at Lone Star Circus’ 10th annual fundraising celebration. 

“She was really good, like she must have been a circus person back in another life,” Kerwich says. 

Despite marrying a normie, Fanny transferred circus genes to her daughter, Gitana “Gigi” Doyle, 17, a cheerleader at Ursuline Academy and an awarded silks aerialist for Lone Star. 

Kerwich and Doyle’s 15-year-old son is a showman in his own right who started his vintage clothing business at 10, riding his bike to Goodwill, buying ’80s T-shirts and selling them online. He takes it seriously and has set up a little shop in a backyard shed, Kerwich says. 

Not much surprises Fanny Kerwich, colleague to sword swallowers and contortionists, but she is sometimes nonplussed by the lack of attention afforded Lone Star Circus in its hometown. 

“We just did an international competition. It was like the Olympics of the circus. And I don’t think anybody in Dallas knew about it,” she says. “We are pretty famous all over the world, but maybe a little bit less famous in Dallas for some reason.”

Perhaps it’s the name. If it was called Cirque du DFW, something exotic and European, maybe people here would think it was higher art, she concedes. 

“But I’m proud to call it Lone Star Circus,” she says. “Our name is vibrant, charismatic and making its point.”