Emma Owens — Ratrock Magazine

Feature by Hanna Andrews

Photos by Jane Mok

I met Emma Owens in the Alpha Delta Phi Society, which has been housing crash mats, juggling balls, a steel wire and more circus paraphernalia since last semester in anticipation of the Columbia Circus Collective’s Fall Cabaret show. The show, highlighted on Barnard’s TikTok and Instagram accounts, included multiple aerial acts, burlesque, contortion and wire routines. Co-founder and President of the Collective, the only recognized circus arts club at Columbia, Emma has practiced circus arts as a performer and organizer, and is even writing her thesis on circus arts. Emma also has a background in visual arts, and Columbia Circus Collective Co-Founder and confidant Sam Landa (GS ‘22) describes her as having “a special way of making anyone feel like their friend, whether as a person or performer.”

Introduce yourself!

I am a senior at Barnard studying Art History and concentrating in Visual Arts. I grew up in San Francisco, and in high school, my family moved to Minneapolis.

How would you define circus arts for those who are unfamiliar with the discipline?

It's kind of an infinite amount of things, which is part of what makes it so special, and there are some clear aspects of it that people recognize; if you think of a traditional circus, and you think of a circus tent, there are acrobats, there are aerial artists (like people you see on trapeze or silks), and there are many types of aerial apparatuses, such as lyra, which is a metal hoop. Then there is juggling, hula-hooping, wire-walking, there are clowns and comedians; many circus performers fall into those categories but there are many other categories, such as equestrian circus performing, I mean, that’s a much more traditional thing… people also do sword-swallowing, or sideshow acts.

Wire Performance, Xelias Aerial Arts, Split

So when you say ‘traditional circus,’ what does that mean?

I mean circus that has roots in the “Golden Age of Circus,” starting in the mid 19th century. I would say stuff like Barnum & Bailey, and the Ringling Brothers and all the big circus businessmen from the early 20th century and then it kind of died, but now there’s many types of circuses… people are familiar with Cirque du Soleil, which is a Canadian-based contemporary circus company that has taken over nightlife and is a much more, I think people would say, “artful” kind of circus, but traditional circus is much more family-oriented; I would say there’s the family-oriented circus and then nightlife circus, and those are kind of two different things.

How did you get into circus arts and what are your areas of expertise?

So I was a competitive gymnast growing up in San Francisco and I trained at a place called AcroSports, which is connected to the circus school Circus Center, and I would always go to gymnastics lessons and practice and see the circus happening right next-door. People would be on silks and I would always tell my mom that I wanted to do it…so then, when we moved to Minneapolis, there was a circus arts studio called Xelias Aerial Arts right near my house, and I decided to start taking classes there and try it out.

So then I was told about this circus summer program, Circus Smirkus, and was told to apply by a coach, and I applied to their advanced summer camp program and went to Greensboro, VT, and then went back for two more summers and worked there for three summers. I also continued to train and do showcases at Xelias Aerial Arts in high school. I started off doing aerial arts, like trapeze, silks and lyra when I first started, then I decided I wanted to try out wire-walking, and I quickly decided that was my favorite thing to do, so my main disciplines became aerial arts and wire-walking and I continued to train in both.

Then, I came to college and wanted to do circus arts, and there’s only two places to train: one is in Brooklyn and is pretty far away, one is in Midtown and still far away, and classes can be expensive. I was trying to look and see if there were gymnastics or circus on campus but there was neither. So that all kind of led me into eventually realizing that I needed to get something started on campus for circus.

So that was the genesis of Columbia Circus Collective in a way; how did it actually come about?

There is a wonderful person named Sam Landa, who I met through Circus Smirkus is in high school, and we were in contact freshman year about circus arts and I feel like we texted a few times and were talking about how we both wish there were circus arts on campus… and then nothing happened with it. In sophomore year we started texting about it again and we met up. In the spring we got really serious about saying, we need to start this. The two of us would meet in Milstein and try to write up a club constitution to become a school-recognized club, but we really had no idea what we were doing at that point. In March 2020, we had just gotten news that we were approved, and our final meeting was during the first week of the pandemic and I remember it being on zoom, which is pretty crazy.

So we were founded in spring 2020, not the best timing, but Sam and I did Zoom events through our junior year, and then this past summer Sam and I got everything ready for in-person school.

And that led to the Cabaret.

Yes, that led to the Fall Cabaret. We were able to host the first student-organized circus performance on Columbia‘s campus, I'm pretty sure the first ever.

Columbia Circus Collective, Fall Cabaret, 2021. Photo by Pedro Damasceno.

So how many people are in the Columbia Circus Collective and how did you source people out for the cabaret show and for the club in general?

It feels like so long ago now, but I remember in sophomore year we had to get a certain amount of signatures to officially continue as a club, and I remember through social media or some other means, we got the word out and got people to sign up. We did the Barnard and Columbia club fairs and found a lot of people that way, and people would come up and be like, there’s a circus club at Columbia?, and we’d be like, yeah. I forced all my friends to join!

One of the amazing people we recruited for the club is Maia Castro-Santos (CC ‘25), who is our Vice President and a freshman in CC; Sam and I knew her through Smirkus before and we told her about the Collective, and she joined as a board member during her first week of school! She gained publicity hula hooping on the lawns, and she recruited other freshmen she knew.

I feel like something that continues to surprise people is the sheer amount of folks at Columbia that have a background in circus arts!

People just came out of the woodwork! It was shocking, I don’t know how to explain it! There are a lot of people who do circus arts recreationally, like I did, and a smaller group professionally, like Sam Landa, there were people coming up to us at the club saying they had taken a silks class as a workout; there’s so many different levels to circus exposure. I think a lot of people who did it in high school were assuming that there was absolutely no way to do it in college unless they wanted to commute and pay a lot of money and that’s something we are trying to resolve.

How do you create the material prerequisites possible to host circus arts at Columbia, since equitable training opportunities may not exist en masse?

We would not be able to make circus arts starts accessible at Columbia and Barnard if it was not for Allie Emmerich, who is our club advisor, she was incredibly helpful with space. When Sam and I started the club, our biggest problem was trying to find space where we could have rigging for aerial equipment, everyone told us that it wasn’t possible, that we couldn’t have any rigging, too big of a liability… and Allie, who runs the Glicker-Milstein Theatre at Barnard helped make it possible. She contracted our rigger, and figured out the legality for us to have aerials in the show.

But in terms of equipment, a lot of it is sourced from the people on the board, brought from home and stored in ADP or our apartments, and we share them. This is honestly the biggest thing about all of it, is that the circus community is extremely strong and Sam and I were able to reach out to Smirkus and ask if we could borrow equipment, and they said yes, and we were able to borrow aerial equipment that we were looking for, and juggling balls and hula hoops. It was an act of care.

Something about circus people in general, people who are involved in circus arts, is that they know how hard it is to get it going and they know how hard it is to make space for circus. Sam and I have been super lucky in that a lot of different circus groups have wanted to help us out, just complete strangers who are running large circus organizations like Circus Vazquez and Big Apple Circus. We have reached out completely cold as a new circus performance group and they have given us free tickets to shows.

Your practice includes performing circus arts, of course, but also extends to director and producer roles, which have included you counseling and piecing together acts for the previous Fall 2021 Cabaret and now an upcoming project; where does this inclination come from and how do you see yourself in the director/producer role vs. the performer role?

Performing circus arts is really special to me, but this past semester was the first time that I’ve been able to produce something and it’s just super rewarding to be able to bring together circus people to make a whole entire show. The point of circus is that all these different acts are included in one show and it’s very special to organize that instead of just being one piece as a performer.

You’ve talked a little bit about the different levels or registers of circus performance, for example, with the contemporary circus stuff like Cirque du Soleil versus the family-friendly appeal of traditional touring circuses that are often run by families or even the nightlife stuff. How do you see the future of circus arts and what do you look for or like to see?

You know, this is my crisis right now! I think circus arts, post-pandemic, are becoming very popular, in a series of ways and I can’t fully explain why that is… I think there’s an aesthetic quality people are really interested in, an element of being “low-brow'' and not traditionally thought of as an art form that’s also interesting and attracts people.

Wire Performance, Columbia Circus Collective, Fall 2021. Photo by Pedro Damasceno

There are still family-run circuses that are touring, and then there are more adult-themed shows or shows aligned more with high art, like Cirque du Soleil, which is still mass-marketed, and there are smaller more “artful” shows that are performing for shorter periods of time and under tighter budgets, there are people performing in clubs, but I’m not sure what it’s going to look like in the future.

So you gave a little brief circus history in the beginning of our chat, and I know that your thesis work revolves around circus arts in the Art History department at Barnard. How does this translate as an academic interest to you, or at least one that is interested in history and what that means for you?

My thesis is investigating The Ringling museum which is located in Sarasota, Florida and was founded by John Ringling, one of the Ringling brothers. The thesis is ultimately a comparison of two competing institutions within the museum, the Circus Museum and the Museum of Art. I think the reason why my thesis is about circus arts is because I truly believe that circus is an art form…it’s this thing that has been a part of many significant moments in American history and American culture, you can trace the industrial revolution and development of trains through the Golden Age of Circus when it became big, and all of these things that circus has gone along and adapted and evolved throughout huge events in American history and American culture. In my thesis, I am looking forward to exploring this memorabilia museum and also this collection of insane, beautiful paintings that were bought with circus money in the adjacent museum, and examining an art museum that includes circus to see how it is represented.

How do you ground your style as a performer?

I do really miss doing aerial arts, which I can no longer do because of a shoulder injury, but I really love wire for the same reason because of the fluidity that you can incorporate, and I like trying to balance performing tricks with quality of movement. I think there’s also a playful element and a need for accessibility in content that should be involved in circus performance.

I think there’s something there in that there’s an entertaining and interactive quality that you are looking to preserve that maybe is a balance between the hyper-accessible family environment and the high art stuff, in that it’s beautiful and super athletic, in the way that Cirque du Soleil for example is interested in impressing people and the costuming and characters are over the top, but you’re still encouraged to participate. For example, at the cabaret show, I remember you had to remind people to clap throughout the entire show whenever they saw something they liked, and had to alert them to the fact that they were supposed to interact.

We wanted people to interact because without the audience, there is no performance. That may be a large part of why circus is coming back after the pandemic, because you are supposed to cheer and are supposed to interact and are often encouraged to take photos and videos of the show, and you’re supposed to feel a part of it.

Do you have a kind of preferred set of aesthetics when it comes to circus arts, or choices you like to make as an individual performer or when putting together an act?

With Smirkus, for example, the style is playful and light, the costumes are super classic because it’s a youth circus. Xelias influenced me to find a balance between performative and entertaining while also being athletic and visually appealing. At the same time, I love the traditional circus color palette of red, black, white and stripes, and having colorful lights. Makeup is a key piece to this, and at Xelias it was always very elaborate with facepainting and more.

With Columbia Circus Collective’s upcoming production Hamlet, for example, I’m hoping to balance the slowness and stillness of tragedy with big, colorful, performative moments of circus.

I would love to hear more about some of the aesthetic stuff; I am really interested in the idea of circus as a fringe, sexy art form.

There’s this history of circus artists as “freaks” existing on the outside of society and ostracized for having a non-traditional lifestyle. They couldn’t get work anywhere else, or wanted to travel, and there was this association with illicit or odd activity.

I think there is this idea of circus as a place of refuge—it’s a very particular kind of person who is able to live this way, because people are often not paid very well and circus arts are not well funded. I think this also ties into the sexy factor, because there’s a huge crossover historically with circus performers being sex workers. The circus was a large place of information-sharing, in that audiences could see animals they had ever seen before, and sexuality was allowed in a way that was unfamiliar outside of that context. I was just reading this book about the Ringling brothers where they performed in Chicago and had this semi-nude Greek statue act, in which everyone was wearing tights and revealing clothing in a very conservative period for fashion, and there was kind of this spectacle of danger and promiscuity.

Also, there is a huge queer community in circus. Circus was the first place I found queer role models, and adults celebrated for their queerness. I made a zine about queerness and the circus and talked about freak theory as a final project for the course Queer Contemporary Art, and I interviewed queer circus people I knew. I looked at the history of circus performers and found often these people were already outcasted from society and the circus was where they could find a place. But personally, Circus Smirkus was the first place I could see queer people and queer adults I could look up to. It was not associated with shame, which was cool for me in 9th grade living in the midwest.

Queerness and the Circus, a Zine by Emma Owens, 2020

The sexy circus thing is also so commercialized. In order for circus people to make a living, queerness is often conflated with promiscuity and raunchiness to drive nightlife. I feel like the Columbia Circus Collective is so interesting because it is outside of these categories, neither traditional nor nightlife, and three of the group’s leaders met in this very child-friendly environment, and now we’re college students and adults making our own choices about how we perform.

For the fall cabaret, we said, send us your music, what do you want to do, so it was in the performer's hands, guided by the audience’s requests and it came together beautifully. The beauty of circus is that you can have people doing Thriller and Frank Sinatra in the same show and it works.

What’s next for the Columbia Circus Collective and for you?

This upcoming semester, the Collective is collaborating with King's Crown Shakespeare Troupe (KCST) to put on an interdisciplinary production of Hamlet which will include actors, dancers, and circus artists, and this will be performed at the end of March or beginning of April. Hamlet is a production we’re having people audition for and it’s a large-scale project that we’re taking on that is unlike what we did last semester, and we will be doing a spring Cabaret again this semester which is what we did in the fall, in which no experience is necessary. We just want people who want to learn and perform circus to be involved.

Where else can we stay up to date with your work?

The Circus Collective’s Instagram can be found at @columbiacircuscollective.

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