Volo Project: The Adventure with the Wizard

The white parrot appears as if from nowhere. The man in a tailcoat and ruffled shirt has just conjured it up. His name is Marko Karvo and, together with his wife Vanessa, it is not the first time that evening that he has amazed the audience. The bird now flies a few centimeters above the heads of the audience through the hall of the Tigerpalast in Frankfurt and, after one round, lands unerringly on Karvo's shoulder.

The performance of the Finnish magician and his Frankfurt wife is the highlight of the evening in the famous Frankfurt variety show.

What the audience doesn't see is the animals' extensive training and everything else that is necessary to "keep everyday life running," as Vanessa Karvo says. In addition to the pigeons and parrots, the artist couple also has three children, aged fifteen, eleven and seven. From birth, they travel with their parents around Europe when they are booked for a new season in Barcelona, ​​Copenhagen, Prague or Frankfurt.

The life of such a family does not correspond to bourgeois norms in many ways. Vanessa Karvo did not realise how great this break would be when she blindly agreed to it twenty years ago. The reason for this was - how could it be otherwise - love. For Marko Karvo, whom she met where the two are currently performing: in the Tigerpalast. That is where they are currently living. The Tigerpalast has ten apartments above the hall for its artists, to which some showmen bring half their families.

Vanessa Karvo was hired as a wardrobe attendant at the Tigerpalast more than twenty years ago. Originally, it was only supposed to be a part-time job while she was studying. But the world of variety quickly turned out to be her true passion. "I immediately felt very comfortable in this wonderful place," she says.

She gave up her studies and began training as an event manager at the Tigerpalast and was sitting in the audience with her family when she saw Marko Karvo for the first time. That was in 2004, at the Christmas revue in the Wiesbaden Kurhaus. When Marko Karvo then came to the Tigerpalast in Frankfurt for the rest of the season, they became closer and liked each other.

The Frankfurt native's training was almost over when the Finn was looking for a new partner for the stage because his current partner wanted to quit the job. So she decided to move on with Marko Karvo after the season at the Tigerpalast.

At that time, she was unfamiliar with life as a traveling artist, apart from the few impressions she had gathered at the Tigerpalast. But she wanted to be with Marko and be on stage with him. "Then I had to find a solution for myself: How can this work? Does it even make sense? Isn't this far too crazy to make it a reality?"

Vanessa Karvo's parents also thought it was crazy. "They weren't particularly happy when I said I was going to Denmark with the magician," she remembers. They had more of a classic, middle-class existence in mind for their daughter.

Marko Karvo, who grew up in a small village in Lapland, had already spent two decades on European stages and knew life in a suitcase well. He had only worked once for six years at the famous Lido de Paris variety theatre. Otherwise he was always on the road. For Vanessa Karvo it was clear at the time: "Either it works or it ends in disaster. But a little madness in life is never a bad thing."

So she threw herself into the adventure that still defines her life today: lots of travel, no permanent home, irregular income, hardly any permanent contacts apart from Marko and the children. Because they not only work together but are also a couple, they depend on each other 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In addition, there are the birds, who even then had to travel with us as part of their profession and who have “more space than us” in their own apartment in the Tiger Palace, as Marko Karvo says.

It's going well. After five years of performing together, their first daughter, Karla, is born. She is now 15 years old. Vanessa Karvo had to make another decision. "When children come into play, it gets more difficult, of course. We quickly said that we would throw everything into the same pot, so we would do everything together. The children are always there," she says. Whenever we move to a new location, in every new city.

It was especially through the arrival of their offspring that the family, and above all Vanessa Karvo, who is primarily responsible for organizing everyone's life, realized how different their concept of life was from that of other people. The pregnancies had to be planned in such a way that the birth of the children did not fall during a performance season (this did not work out with the middle child, Oskar, and she was on stage until five days before the birth and again shortly afterwards). The health authorities were not at all amused by the medical examinations for small children when they were not in Germany for a long period of time.

Things really started when Karla started school. This was the first time she thought that things would stop, says Vanessa Karvo. "In Germany, schooling and attendance are compulsory. Other countries are more flexible."

However, her children cannot comply with compulsory attendance - unless she stays behind with them in Frankfurt. But that was never an option. After some time, Vanessa Karvo found the "School for Children of Professional Travelers" (SfKbR), which enables them to continue traveling as a family and pursue their careers as a couple despite compulsory schooling.

The lessons take place on the computer, regardless of location. "The children then saw their teacher in the online classroom two or three days a week and were given tasks." They then completed these together with their mother and sent the results back to the teacher. "When the children got older and chemistry or other subjects like that were added, we naturally reached our limits in the caravan."

Within Germany, the teachers also come to the showmen's families in so-called learning mobiles and teach the children on site. "It's a fantastic thing," says Karvo.

During the pandemic, the family temporarily moved to Finland. There were no performances in Europe anyway. All seasons and shows for which they had been booked were canceled. In March 2020, they had their last performance in Hanover for around two years. "It was a really tough time," says Vanessa Karvo. Especially because no one knew how long the restrictions would last. The financial cushion that they, like all freelance artists, had built up for emergencies, became smaller and smaller, adds Marko Karvo.

For a while, the children also went to school in Finland and had to grapple with the Finnish language, which they could speak thanks to their father, but whose grammatical and written subtleties they were less familiar with.

Sometimes the life of an artist is not easy for the children, says Vanessa Karvo. The constant changes of location are particularly difficult for eleven-year-old Oskar. "He is the least suited to this travelling life. I think he would like to just stay somewhere and lead a completely normal life." Finding friends of the same age is almost impossible with this lifestyle, also because his classmates do not invest time in someone who will no longer be there in a few months or even weeks anyway.

Karla, who has also experienced these "downsides", as her mother says, is coping well. "She is a real showgirl. She loves being with the artists, who come from very different countries." At the age of five, she had already asked when she would finally be able to have her mother's stage dress and replace her at Marko's side.

For the current school year, which the family plans to spend in Frankfurt, Karvo has enrolled her three children in three different schools. "The rules are that the main school is the SfKbR. The schools that the children now go to are base schools." The day is strictly scheduled. Get up at half past six, wake the children, have breakfast and take the youngest, Viktor, to school. They have time until half past twelve for flight training and looking after the birds, then Vanessa Karvo picks up her youngest from school.

In the afternoon, they alternate between practicing for the show and their parenting duties. From Thursday to Sunday, they have two performances every evening. Between the seven o'clock show and the ten o'clock show, they put the children to bed. Their days are then not over until well after midnight.

As the children get older, another difficult decision is now looming. Karla, Oskar and Viktor can only obtain a secondary school certificate at the SfKbR. For the senior year, Karla, who will finish school this summer and brought an A grade to the Tigerpalast at the half-year mark, would have to switch to a "normal" high school. This would also tie her to one place, probably Frankfurt. How they will cope with this situation has not yet been decided.

"We want to give the children the choice of which world they want to live in. Of course, that's only possible if they also graduate from normal school and can then decide for themselves," says Karvo. Until then, they will continue to perform together. Initially in Frankfurt's Tigerpalast until the beginning of March, eight shows a week.

This text is part of the final project of the trainee class 2023–2025.