Recess
Cirque du Student
Her parents should have known. When Holly Rollins, Ed.M.’08, was a kid growing up in Wrentham, Mass., midway between Boston and Providence, she asked her father to remove the swing from the swing set and replace it instead with a trapeze bar. Still, years later, he was surprised when he answered the phone one day and Rollins said she had joined the circus.
“His response was something like, ‘You mean you’re going to ride around on elephants?’” says Rollins, now a student in the Arts in Education master’s program.
She did not ride on elephants, but she did go back to her earlier love: flying through the air. Rollins had just accepted a position in Las Vegas as a trapeze artist with Cirque du Soleil, the 25-year-old circus created in a small town near Quebec City. At the time, she had been working for Club Med in the Bahamas and Mexico and playing around with the trapeze for fun.
“I knew I liked to perform and be on the stage,” she says. “There’s something powerful in trying to emotionally move the audience.”
After being told she was a natural, she started really training and eventually ended up in Las Vegas auditioning for Cirque.
“It wasn’t easy. It was a grueling two-day audition,” she says. “I was invited to Montreal for a nine-month, intense training with no guarantee that I’d get an actual job from them.”
She did, though, and was cast in Quidam, a show that traveled Europe for two years. She eventually moved to a permanent show, La Nouba, based in Orlando, Fla. After shoulder injuries sidelined her, she moved to Australia to work for the National Institute of Circus Arts, an undergraduate department at Swinburne University where students can actually get a bachelor’s degree in circus arts.
“In Australia, contemporary circus is approached as an art form,” Rollins says, likening it to majoring in theater or painting. While there, Rollins says she fell in love with her students and how “fulfilled” she felt teaching — something that surprised her. Here at the Ed School, she is studying how movement forms such as dance, mime, improvisation, and circus can support learning. Eventually she will go back to Australia, at least for a few months every year.
“I want to go back to teach,” she says. “I want to use the resources of the university’s circus school to craft a program for children that would entail a classroom of students creating and planning their own small circus show.”
