I arrive late to the Kilsyth Sports Centre. I find a car park as Aussie voices of fathers congratulate their kids on their basketball games and head off home to enjoy the rest of their sunny Saturday. There’s a game of football being played on the oval. I push my way through the traffic of people heading away from the court entrance. Inside all I can see are ill-fitting basketball guernseys. I walk myself around the back and I find the apparently unused badminton courts. I head down there and find what I’m looking for: Ruccis!
Ruccis is more than just an anagram of circus. When Emily was telling me about it I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. She told me she would be training herself today, learning new tricks (one of the mainstays of circus training is learning a new trick) but I find that she’s been roped into coaching today. I’m sure she doesn’t mind; she tells me “coaching is really rewarding. To have a kid become better than you even though you’re their only coach. It sounds ridiculous because it’s always sad to see a six year old become better than you at the thing you’ve been trying for years but to teach them stuff, step by step, and know the above step, even if you’re not capable of it, to show it to them and see them succeed in that and grow up in circus… it’s really cool.”
I manage to distract her from the kids. She’s teaching them a variety of tricks. Spinning plates, devil sticks and the diabolo are all being coached by Emily today. All the students she is teaching would be no older than 11. She tells me that earlier they had the “Young at Heart” crowd which involved adults learning tricks. I’m sad that I missed it.
She introduces me to three of her friends who are training off to the side. Doogs and Luth are trying a trick on the trapeze that they saw on the erstwhile ABC show Sideshow. Fi appears to be injured and is watching from the side, comparing what they’re doing to a video on her laptop. The trick looks complicated. It involves both Doogs and Luth, attaching themselves together and rotating around the centre of the trapeze pole, like an hourglass spinning. They begin ambitiously and inevitably fall off. “Now if we can get that spinning really fast, and not die, that’d be great,” says one of the girls. Injuries are just part of the circus fun.
“Once you do twirling for long enough eventually you’re going to have to set it on fire otherwise it gets boring,” Emily tells me and we both laugh. “I was at a 6-year-old’s birthday party. I started twirling and the cord I was using – with just a string ball on the end – wrapped around my arm and I couldn’t get it off. So I’m in the corner while the other guys are still twirling to distract. I’m trying to shake it off and shake it off and I’m like ‘Where’s our safety officer?”
She pauses. “We don’t have a safety officer”, she chuckles. “But we should. I had all these red marks from the wire that had heated up on my arm, but it wasn’t too bad.” She continues, “Oh I burnt my hair off once as well; that was just practicing. I just hit myself in the head and was like ‘Oh, looks like I need a hair cut!’ That was exciting.” There’s definitely a fear factor element to Emily’s performance. “And I’ve burnt my clothes a lot, but that’s not really an injury, that’s just sad.” Perhaps also a budget element.
Emily first encountered circus before she was a teenager. “I started when I was about twelve, just doing juggling and devil sticks and all that sort of thing. I wasn’t very flexible and athletic and all that which you need to be so I just did the hand eye coordination stuff cause it’s a lot easier but it takes a lot of patience. I jumped from one thing to the next and kept just doing a little bit of everything and not being great at anything… until I started stilt walking.”
“Everyone is impressed by stilt walking,” she says. “It’s actually not really hard. It’s probably easier than roller skating I would say, so long as you get over the fear factor.” She explains to me that once you can walk on small stilts it’s very easy to continue to the larger ones. “It’s just not being scared of heights that’s impressive.”
It’s a sight to behold too. She almost doubles her height with her stilts, towering over everyone. It’s not just about the practical element of the performance, it’s about assuming the persona. Her face lights up with jester-like qualities. Even when she’s being propelled through the air by a fellow circus thespian or walking above everybody’s heads on stilts, her face hides any fear she may be harbouring. Instead her face shines with an almost jocular expression. When she’s stilt walking she’s in character. “If you’re doing stilts, it’s a lot like suit work. You’re waving to people, you’re a character. It’s not so much showing off a skill. You get that initial wow factor and then they want to know who you are. It’s like as soon as you’re 3 metres taller you’re a celebrity.”
I ask her where she would like to take her circus talents. “I don’t have any grand delusions of thinking I could ever go to Cirque du Soleil or anything like that because I’m a bit old.” At 21, she has already missed her chance. Like sport, it’s a competitive industry, even if it’s not a competitive activity. If anything, the main competition is with yourself, to improve and learn that next trick. “Doing this circus stuff got me into this agency I’m in at the moment called Mos Theatre. They do everything to do with entertainment; so from doing a bit of juggling and acrobatics they got me into balloon animals, suit work like dressing up as Scooby Doo and Mickey Mouse and stuff. And I’ve been the Easter Bunny a few times. Then that got me into promotional stuff like all the boring handing out flyers and stuff and then into cooking demonstrations and it’s become less and less performance based as you go.”
That’s where the money is it seems. The big circus performances don’t always pay as much as Emily thinks they should. “Unfortunately when I was involved with Circus Folk doing the Fed Square stuff and all the really big gigs they were more concerned about publicity than money, which is fair, but they do the really big gigs for free.” It’s a sacrifice they would make so as to get attention to get more gigs in the future. “Randomly somebody invites you to their 21st and pays you two hundred bucks to do a fire show,” Emily explains. “It’s luck of the draw when you don’t have good management.”
It’s clear to me that it’s not about the money for Emily, but it does agitate her that it’s so easy to give away so much of her talent for so little. “It’s very easy to sell yourself short with circus. It’s something that is so easy to you because you’ve been doing it for so long and so you do a 10 minute fire show and they’re giving you so much money.”
“You’re like ‘that’s only 10 minutes’ but you’re really selling yourself short because you have all the hours you put into getting good enough so that somebody would actually want to see you perform.” As a musician I find myself able to relate. One can spend hours of their life training and practising only to get a measly sum for their performances at the end. “The time you put into training is what they’re actually paying for, not just the show itself. For instance one show were doing cloud strings, an aerial act, and they were getting four grand for an 8 minute show. Just two people. Like that’s huge, that’s insane – it’s just 8 minutes. But that’s not what they’re getting paid for, they’re getting paid for all the time that they trained.”
I’m amazed at what I find at Ruccis. It’s not a performance so it’s not designed to entertain, but it’s still astonishing what kids as young as nine are able to do. Even though it doesn’t get the attention like the football and basketball games I find out the front of the sports centre, it provides a similar experience for the kids. A variety of parents can be found there supporting their kids. At the end, the kids all huddle in a circle, put their hands in the centre and after the count of three yell something incomprehensible. For all intents and purposes, for the kids this is their sport, but perhaps with less aggression.
As I sit there watching them pack up, a young girl cartwheels around the entire Badminton court. She counts out as she completes each one, skipping the number eleven. “Mum, I did thirty!” she hollers to her mother who is knitting a pastel coloured scarf. Before I fulfil my urge to object, ‘Actually that would be 29,’ a young boy walks past me beat-boxing an impressive percussion ensemble with only his own mouth.
Emily may have missed her chance to join the Cirque Du Soleil elite level of circus performance but I believe, through her coaching talents, one of the kids at Ruccis may one day reach those dizzying heights. Stilts or otherwise.
© Richard Hunt 2009
