When I was little, I went to the boys and girls club in Salida at the Saint Joseph Church. When the circus started to be practiced there, I thought I would try something new because I was just bored and waiting for my mom to come pick me up all day. I walked into the gym and my eyes went straight to the tall structures holding beautiful long silks that people were climbing up, flipping down, and doing all sorts of tricks. I knew I wanted to try it right then. 

First, I started on the aerial silks. Aerial silks is a type of performance in which one or more artists perform aerial acrobatics while hanging from special fabric straps. The people that were on it made it look way easier than it really is. It took me probably 30 minutes just to learn how to climb. But then I tried trapeze. It was so much fun, and I was already doing so many tricks. When you’re younger, you can really just throw yourself around because you are so light. 

But as years passed I stuck with silks. Once I was 12, I kind of started losing motivation and getting out of the circus, but one night I was asked to do a performance for Halloween when I was 13. Of course I did it. I only had about three weeks to train for it. So, we decided to do a trapeze routine because it’s a lot easier to get into. I was doing a triple trapeze routine with my coach and one other person, but then the other girl had something come up and couldn’t do the performance anymore so I had to learn the rest of the routine by myself. 

After that, I fell in love with trapeze. When I’m doing trapeze, I feel free. Sometimes it’s really painful, though. I started learning more tricks on the trapeze ever since then and practicing more than ever. But it’s hard to stay with it since we haven’t had a consistent gym. Thankfully, though, we have a gym for the Salida circus in the making. 

For three years, I’ve coached for the New Year’s Salida Circus camp, which is where children around 12 and under come for a weekend to learn a bunch of cool circus acts and then perform in a show, mostly for their parents and friends. It’s adorable. This year, when I was doing that, I found out about the Ireland kids. They kept just saying the “Ireland kids” and I was so confused, so that’s when I asked what those kids were. I found out there is a group of Salida Circus people going to Ireland to do an exchange program with another circus in Ireland. 

Of course, when I asked Laura, one of the main circus directors, she recognized how I have been staying mostly consistent with the circus for a long time, and she invited me to come. There is a lot of hard work now that I have to put into fundraising for this. Also, I have to put a lot of hard work on my body to get used to doing trapeze and to get better at it. I have to set up a new routine before I go. Making a routine for any aerial apparatus is difficult because you have to form a mix of beauty, grace, and wow into a three or four minute song. 

I am just really excited for how far I have come and that I will get to experience Londonderry in Northern Ireland. I will be learning new things that their circus does that are different from ours, and hopefully traveling to learn about other circuses in the future.