Cyprian and the Snake Man’s performance in Argus

Cyprian and the Snake Man’s performance in Argus is a traveling vaudeville spectacle that brings acrobatics, live reptiles and spiders, grotesque comedy, and staged danger into the town gymnasium. Cyprian arrives not seeking work but as part of a lyceum series, touring with Vilhus Gast; their act makes the audience laugh, recoil, and marvel, and leaves Markus talking about it for weeks. Its parade of unstable balances and startling reversals gives the performance its particular force: danger appears real, then becomes theatrical trickery, while the joke can turn suddenly sharp.

The engagement and its audience

Cyprian announces that he has come to play an engagement, not to look for a job. He is now part of the lyceum series and travels with the Snake Man, carrying a roll of pink cardboard tickets to sell. The change matters to Delphine: she had not heard from him, and his news establishes that he has built a touring act with another partner. Her response carries a trace of hurt and jealousy, sharpened by her question about whether the Snake Man also serves as Cyprian’s human table. Cyprian explains that the two men developed different balancing tricks, and that Vilhus Gast brings his own python onstage in a wheeled leather case, along with other reptiles and a spider.

Cyprian gives the partnership a history that joins personal affinity to a shared sense of exclusion. He says that he had never known a Jewish person while growing up on the reservation, just as Gast would not have known an Indigenous person. Gast, however, had heard of Indigenous people and believed they were one of the lost tribes of Israel, also doomed to wander and live on the edge of things, hounded and hunted. Cyprian says he proposed that they roam together, and that they had played steadily ever since. The account frames the touring partnership as an answer to isolation as well as a practical arrangement between performers.

The next night, Delphine and Markus arrive early at the school gymnasium and sit in the first row of creaky wooden folding chairs. Delphine expects people to turn and stare at her and at Cyprian’s shaved head, whether with curiosity or derision. By choosing the front row, she puts her back to the spectators and makes room to watch the show on her own terms. She intends to enjoy it rather than spend the performance monitoring the town’s gaze.

Acrobatics, spiders, and political farce

When the curtains part, Cyprian and Gast are barefoot in tight black gymnasium suits, standing on large red rubber balls. They pedal around one another, accelerate into a do-si-do, then leap and exchange places on the spinning balls to applause. Gast is similar to Cyprian in size and build, but his shifting, conspicuously bad toupee turns out to be part of the act. The apparent defect becomes the opening for a sequence in which balance is both a physical skill and a means of controlling the audience’s expectations.

Gast holds still with his hands raised as Cyprian bounces with the ball caught between his feet. Cyprian springs upward, turns over in the air, and lands in position to lock hands with Gast. Their muscles strain as they sway close to toppling, but the pair recover their balance. Gast then moves the ball across the stage while pretending to struggle to keep Cyprian aloft. They balance on one arm and one leg, bringing the act to a precarious-looking peak before the toupee slowly creeps from Gast’s head and reveals a giant spider.

The spider crawls from Gast’s arm to Cyprian’s elbow and then settles over Cyprian’s bare head as he lowers himself. Gast releases another, smaller hairy spider from a box and guides it with a feather. The creature climbs Cyprian’s throat, passes over his mouth, and curls into the shape of a square black mustache above his lip. The act turns the men’s bodily control into a comic tableau: the audience watches spiders cross the performers’ bodies, while the performers remain poised enough to make the unnerving contact part of a measured routine.

Cyprian next appears in a swallowtail coat and polished black boots, his legs comically bare and the spiders still attached to his head. He impersonates Adolf Hitler, but an offstage tuba repeatedly punctures the dictator’s stern pose: each squawk makes Cyprian’s rear end twitch and jiggle beneath the coat tails. When the audience discovers that it can provoke the effect by giving the Nazi salute, the parody becomes participatory. Spectators raise their arms, the tuba sustains its groaning interruption, and Cyprian’s Hitler careens around the stage. The curtain closes on roars and howls, converting the salute from a solemn emblem into the trigger for a farcical bodily gag.

The snake dance and its staged peril

The second act begins before the laughter has fully subsided. A leather valise eight or nine feet long rests on four sawhorses. Cyprian and Gast return in jeweled turbans and transparent, delicate veils that billow around their legs and trail behind them, while a tinny phonograph plays whining music. They open the case and reveal a living, mottled python, quiet but charged with movement. Announcing the Dance of Death, they coax it into their arms and wind and unwind with it as it grows more alert and tries to draw them into its coils.

The dance is improvised, graceful, and sensuously peaceful, but the audience believes the python may devour the performers. That expectation holds the room in a different kind of suspense from the balancing routines. Cyprian and Gast carry the snake down the center aisle, allowing spectators to touch its dry, charged skin. The crowd sees its incongruously small head and cold, bright eyes, and is relieved when the performers return it to the case and snap the locks shut.

The relief is immediately tested. Cyprian and Gast produce gleaming, sharp-toothed handsaws and announce that they intend to reduce the python to stove lengths. Cyprian asks whether there is a butcher in the house, and Pete Kozka is called on to test the saws; he pronounces them keen and effective. The performers saw at the python inside the valise as it writhed and whipped its tail through the unlatched end. The scene borrows the credibility of a butcher’s inspection to intensify its apparent violence, before the act turns again toward theatrical restoration.

The men burn a fragrant substance, chant portentous syllables, make signs over a pot of school glue, and put the python back together. The deliberately makeshift materials sit beside the audience’s alarm: the trick’s magic is presented through glue, gestures, and ritual language rather than explained away. The show then shifts into lighter displays, including juggling lizards, a huge iguana motionless as a stone carving, and Mighty Tom, the spider introduced again as Gast’s toupee. Gast carries Mighty Tom down the aisle in a large round candy jar so the audience can inspect the creature at close range.

Escalation, reception, and aftermath

The remaining routine keeps changing the scale and kind of spectacle. Cyprian and Gast balance cups, plates, and their curly-toed shoes on their heads and noses, then perform more acrobatic tricks. The crowd answers with applause and shouts for an encore. The pair return as twin Hitlers on unicycles, saluting and breaking wind as they nearly topple; then they juggle flaming swastikas, followed by hatchets, cleavers, and knives. Apples join the sequence, and the performers take large bites until they are juggling only the cores. The act ends not by settling into one register but by piling risk, absurdity, and physical skill on top of one another; in Argus, they are an enormous hit.

The performance changes how townspeople regard Delphine after Cyprian and Gast have left. For weeks, Markus talks about little else. People stop Delphine in the street, approach her with shy admiration, and treat her with the respect accorded to someone who knows a great artist or has access to one. Their attention shifts from the curiosity and whispering she anticipated in the gymnasium to a desire for details and secrets about the show. The act’s afterlife is thus carried both by Markus’s sustained excitement and by the new social standing spectators confer on Delphine.

Form and significance

The performance is built from reversals of appearance: a bad toupee becomes a giant spider, an acrobatic display becomes a Hitler parody, a dance with a python becomes an apparent butchering, and sawing gives way to a glue-and-incantation restoration. Each turn makes the audience revise what it thinks it is watching. The show’s force lies not only in individual tricks but in the way physical control repeatedly teeters at the edge of its opposite—collapse, bite, or dismemberment—before becoming another display of control.

Its comedy also depends on exposing the mechanics of spectacle without dispelling its hold. A feather guides a spider, a tuba cues the bodily gag, and school glue accompanies the python’s reassembly; yet the audience still gasps at the animals and believes the danger of the Dance of Death. By placing these visible devices beside genuine live creatures and difficult feats of balance, the act keeps artifice and risk in play at once. The result is a performance that gives Argus a vivid communal event and makes Cyprian’s new touring life visible to Delphine, Markus, and the town.