While American circus has long been a source of horror and ridicule—see Mark Twain, Stephen King, or the Joan Crawford vehicle Berserk!—the French were taught by their painters to revere the humble form. It follows that at Paris l’été, France’s Frenchiest summer arts festival (forget the internationalism of Avignon and the other provinces, these artists are French), circus and its adjacent arts dominate. French circus, of the nouveau kind that blossomed after Mai ’68, means more sweat than illusion and more poetry than stunt. As the festival website breathlessly reports of its pièce de résistance, the world-traveling Collectif XY’s premiere Les Voyages, they “are building human architectures based on trust. Solidarity becomes the cement for ephemeral sculptures!” Paris l’été’s new directors have dispersed the “human architectures” across the city for us to happily stumble upon—in the Jardin de Tuileries, the Bois de Boulogne, in a lone tree in a schoolyard in the 19th arrondissement—juggling, tumbling, and balancing on a wire so far up that the backdrop is pure blue sky. —Apollinaire Scherr