FOR CIRCUS
By Serenity Smith Forchion
THE
HISTORY
When my twin sister, Elsie, and I first discovered circus, we were in our late
teens with no background in formal sports. We grew up on a farm, so we
were fit and active but untrained, though our family does tell stories about
us putting on endless shows with singing and dancing and anything we could
think of!
But when we did discover circus on a trip to Club Med, it was an instant love
of rushing through the air on a flying trapeze. The next summer we happened
to work for a summer camp that had a circus program and learned essentially
as apprentice teachers. Luckily there were two of us so we had each other
to discover with and spot —after a morning of teaching kids how to do ankle
hangs, we’d spend our lunch trying it out ourselves. When we asked around,
there weren’t any options for refined circus arts training. There were no
formal circus training programs in the US in the early 90s, so our learning
was on the job—scavenging from the other teachers in social circus volunteer
apprenticeships, learning as we went, and then exploring on our own.
Fast forward through a career spanning Ringling Bros and Barnum and Bailey,
Farfan’s American Circus in Japan, Pickle Family Circus in theaters in America,
a summer in an Atlantic City casino theater and then four years touring with
Cirque du Soleil. As we gained acrobatic fluency, we observed what formal
gymnastics-style training had given many of our peers: discernable physical
technique that supported their goals to excel as circus performers. We
were also very curious about the human body and spent a lot of time with
two physical therapists who took trapeze lessons from us while we were
touring with Cirque du Soleil. Together, we understood that there needed to
be improved options for methods of training circus techniques in order to
prevent injury, support longevity in performing careers, and to expand artistic
capacity. Those ideas seeped into our teaching practices—incorporating the
idea of teaching techniques, not tricks, and developing progressions and
physical preparations--all to support deeper creativity.
Elsie and I never actually set out to start a circus school. It was just that when
we settled our roots in Vermont and started our own performing and teaching
company called Nimble Arts, there was such a demand for our teaching at
recreational and professional levels that we couldn’t sustain it. We started
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