American Circus Educators Magazine Summer/Fall 2018 (Issue 2, Volume 13) | Page 22

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 22 23