MOVIES, FASHION & LIFESTYLE

How Salman Khan’s ‘Bharat’ revived circus on sets.

Once a popular medium of mass entertainment, Circus  today has become severly endangered. Many famous circus establishments shut shop as it proved to be a white elephant for its respective owners. All we are left today are with golden memories which is exactly what superstar Salman Khan’s Bharat professes to recreate. A glimpse of the same is offered in the latest video ‘The Making of Circus’.
The teaser of the film had already created quite a buzz especially with the scene where Salman Khan is seen riding a bike through a flaming ring. Set in 1964, an era when circus used to be very popular, film director Ali Abbas Zafar and producer Atul Agnihotri delve into the details of what went into bringing back the once famous art form back into life.
Co –writer Varun Sharma and stunt coordinator Rajnish Hedao reveal that the circus scenario today has indeed changed from what they witnessed decades ago. The same memory carried by Ali Abbas Zafar gave birth to Salman Khan’s character of a stuntman in the film. The challenge lay in reviving the traditional period circus which had the trademark ‘flying –around’ stunts and to infuse them with the more recent experiments done by todays artists using straps, rope and even silk materials. The total set height was around 40 feet but half of it went in displaying aesthetic beauty and even more number of metallic ropes, rigging and cranes were put in to bring the gigantic sets alive.
To replicate the diverse atmosphere which comes for artists working for a circus, around 120 professionals who are acrobats, trapeze artists and others who did juggling, fireworks, hoops and rope were sourced from around the globe.  Dance coordinator Lola Mino was first asked to provide 60 artists within a very short number of  15 days. It took a whole new level of madness when a total of 173 costumes had to be made, tried on with the stunts to be performed to check whether it was feasible or not. Actor Sunil Grover who also stars in Bharat further concludes “ I have never seen a beautiful circus in my life…it should be revived after Bharat…this should come back to life.”