Each summer as tourists flock to Greece to island-hop and lie on silk sand beaches, a global band of skilled circus performers and musicians set sail on the same waters for a different purpose.
They believe their shows, which include fire-eating, clowning and tightrope walking, can help change the world by conveying a serious message in a playful way.
The Sea Clown Sailing Circus is performing all summer in sleepy fishing ports and lively seaside resorts throughout Greece and its 300 inhabited islands. As it tacks back and forth across dolphin-studded seas, the international group hopes to encourage others to respect the fragile marine ecosystem that covers two thirds of the earth’s surface.
“When I came to Greece with all those islands, I thought that everyone would be on the water or have a sailing boat,” says one of the circus’s founding members, Alvaro Ramirez, a 45-year-old musician and acrobat from Uruguay.
“But when I first told my Greek friends that I had a boat they thought I must be rich, because the only people who have boats here are retired people with money.”

He sails his vessel, the Valkiria, to the island of Crete each year and meets up with the group’s co-founder Fred Normal. They then work with a core team of skilled performers and an ever-changing troupe of international volunteers to rehearse their latest show, which they will perform all summer in the many Greek venues it is possible to sail to.
Energetic and with tousled hair, Normal wins huge admiration from members for the way he leads the troupe. “He does it effortlessly – it just comes naturally to him,” says musician and sometime company manager Giorgos Grigorakos. “You see Fred doesn’t play at the revolution, he is the revolution.”
Born in the wilds of Alaska 40 years ago, Normal cut his teeth in the US travelling with other nomadic performers. Always keen to reduce his carbon footprint, he initially launched his circus project on land with the Cy-Clown bike-circus, a troupe of acrobatic wandering minstrels who travelled by bicycle around Europe, performing shows as they went.
After meeting his partner, Greek acrobat Nikoleta Giakumeli, in Italy, the idea of a circus on the waves was born. Despite the fact they’d never sailed before, the couple bought a boat, Surloulu, for €5,000 and spent the next decade travelling from port to port and performing their shows with a constantly changing troupe of volunteers from all over the world.
Nowadays there are three boats, but the rhythm is the same: sailing over turquoise seas to a different port in Greece every few days, dropping anchor and enjoying laidback days swimming from the boat or doing yoga or rehearsing, then live-wired nights performing their acts.

The money they make from busking is used to pay for food for performers and crew, and upkeep on the boats which have to be hauled out of the water each year for maintenance.
The Sea Clowns also help fund initiatives like the Daedalus Academy, an educational project launched by a group of visionaries and artists who hope to help children – via Waldorf- and Montessori-inspired workshops and activities – to cultivate free will, develop self-awareness and acquire a lifelong love of learning.
“With Fred we shared the same ideas – we wanted to motivate the next generation about the environment and many other things,” says Alvaro, who first met the Sea Circus’s founder in 2006 in Rosa Nera, a squat housed in a building belonging to the Polytechnic School of Chania, in Crete, which was a magnet for artists and people with revolutionary ideas.
Despite their utopian dreams the troupe have also faced with the darker side of life at sea, witnessing inhabitants of war-torn countries fleeing in search of a better life – and sometimes dying during the attempt.
Touched by the plight of the refugees who were coming into Greece, the Sea Clowns began performing in the camps.
“It’s super hard to do this – these are people who have fled from their countries and lost everything,” Alvaro says. “They come to Europe for a better life and they find themselves living in these camps. These are children who, when you give them crayons, instead of drawing a house and a dog they will draw you terrorists cutting off heads.”
Like other members of the circus, however, Alvaro admires the Greeks for their solidarity with the refugees.
Source : INews