Lauren Herley, Circa ensemble artist

In the second of our series of interviews with the Amazonian women of the leading Australian circus troupe Circa, Liz Arratoon speaks to Seattle-born rope artist Lauren Herley. Lauren comes from Montreal and is a graduate of its national circus school, where she specialised in corde lisse, contortion and handstands. She is one the very few foreigners ever accepted into Circa, which she joined this year, and is currently the only one. She has worked and collaborated with major circus companies, including Cirque Eloize, Les 7 Doigts de la Main and Cirque du Soleil. 

Lauren is an original cast and creation member of Eloize’s Cirkopolis and has performed in large events including the opening ceremony of Vancouver’s Winter Olympics. She has also studied and performed everything from hand-to-hand to the ancient art of hair hanging and enjoys risk and “the beauty of pain”. She now appears with Lewie West and Daniel O’Brien in Circa’s What Will Have Been - a special commission by the Norfolk & Norwich Festival - which has its world premiere there on 15 May and marks Circa’s tenth anniversary of touring shows.

The Widow Stanton: What first inspired you to go to circus school?
Lauren Herley: I was home-schooled as a kid in a big family. We didn’t have a lot of money so we were very active, creative kids. I could say I’ve really been an acrobat since I was probably five years old. My big sisters and dad just encouraged us to play outside… you know, we had monkey bars, a rope tied to a tree in the backyard, we saved up for a trampoline, so I was a self-taught acrobat young. I studied music and that led into my later years when we started to have more money when I hit about 14, I was a competitive swimmer, competitive gymnast and did track and field and I was quite good, so I went full force into those. It didn’t take long for me to realise that I wanted something more artistic. I didn’t like how in sports it was all about rules, what you can’t do, and I kept trying to create more with my body.

At about 17 I realised, ‘Huh’, and started to research circus. I’d look in the newspaper and saw Varekai was coming. I bought tickets and saw it, and said, ‘OK, this is serious, and there’s more out there’. So I was working like crazy. I was working in four different gyms teaching everything from swimming lessons to… I was a certified kinesiology trainer. I trained a lot of women and every morning trained like crazy myself. I moved away from home at 17 to start to pursue circus, which brought me to San Francisco for about a year to the Circus Center, where I trained with the Russian and the Chinese trainers – and to perform. It was kind of up in the air because Cirque du Soleil was contacting me to go do Love in Vegas. And I said, ‘Oh, I’m auditioning for the school in Montreal in one week’. Getting accepted there was the best thing that ever happened to me. It opened up this universe.

Had you auditioned for Cirque du Soleil?
No, I had a friend who was in O in Vegas and I think I sent her a video of my training and they called me. They wanted me for about six months or longer to do straps, rope and contortion. At first I said, ‘Oh, a job, wow, OK’, but it was much, much better for me to go to Montreal instead.

I have the impression that the amazing skills of the Montreal school’s graduates are down to work very hard. Can you tell us about the rigors of going there?
Well, you know, Liz, it’s all about the individual. I went there and I said, ‘This is three years of my life I’ll never get back’. And I put myself full force into that. I did not have a life and I don’t regret that. There were times I said, ‘I don’t really party much with the others’. I mean, I didn’t take sick days ever even if I was vomiting like crazy. People thought I was insane at school and I probably was. I was of a different breed because there are a lot of people in the Montreal school who are pretty laid back. They do the programme, they graduate and they’re talented and they’re good, but I decided to put all my heart and soul into those three years. I look back now and I’m very happy I did that. I put my body through a lot of turmoil but I prepared it for what it is now… the kind of artist I wanted to be.

With all the companies you’ve worked with, has there been a favourite show so far?
Hard! What makes it beautiful to me is that everything’s different but right now I’m having probably the most enriching and challenging experience of my life in creation with Circa. But my heart will always have this deep, deep love for the Eloize show Cirkopolis. I helped create it and was part of the original cast.

Were you in the UK with that show?
Yes, in Brighton, but I broke my rib there in the rigging test. It was quite a catastrophe. Normally there’s a blonde girl in the whole show and she does rope at the end. That was me. I felt terrible because they had to figure out the whole show without me.  

So you’ve worked with all these top companies, why did you want to go across the world to join Circa?
First of all, there’s a lot of great circus happening in the world but nobody works like Yaron Lifschitz [Circa’s artistic director], nobody puts artists onstage as he does, thinks abstractly as he does, has integrity as he does… for his ideas. For three years now he and I have been in contact on and off because I said, ‘Before I die I have to work with this man, within this atmosphere’, because I really believe in the essence of the purity of circus, in its true authentic nature, which is taking, you know, the risk and the tension and the build and celebrating these extraordinary feats. But what Circa does, what Yaron does is that he really strips it away of all the decoration that still a lot of contemporary companies use and puts it into an order that we can’t even recognise. It becomes something… it’s just art.

The fact that, as a new Circa artist, you’ve been chosen for What Will Have Been – this special anniversary show – is it a bit mind-blowing?
Yeah… usually when Yaron contacts me and says, ‘Can we talk on Skype’, it means he’s got an idea or a proposition. So when he did that last year, I kind of went, ‘Woah! I’ve gotta make time to talk to him now’. When he spoke to me about it, yeah, my heart was racing, and I had this feeling, right, OK, this is what you’ve prepared your whole life for. I just cried, I’m quite an emotional person. The three of us in the show work very well together. Daniel, he’s young, he’s phenomenal, he’s been with the company maybe a year and a half or two years, not six, seven years like Lewie…

Lewie is stunning! I mean I know he has his own fan club of artists who revere him!
Oh my gosh, yeah!

Is there anything you can reveal about the show?
I can tell you we have three acrobats onstage and a live violinist. There will be a lot of intimate and quite challenging acrobatics taking place. I cannot go to much into detail but… I’m a rope artist… I can give a little hint there.

You say you enjoy the risk and ‘the beauty of pain’. Can you say a bit about that?
I find that there’s something incredibly… I mean if you talk about love and I say, ‘I love circus’, a lot of people say that, but how deep is that love? Would you bleed for it? Would you have scars for the rest of you life for it? Would you have to deal with surgeries and go under the knife for it? For instance, I’ve hung from my hair, would you deal with the cracking of your skull from that… would you do it and why? It’s hard for me to explain but this is a love that’s so deep that I find a real beauty in the pain that arrives with it. And it just means, wow, you have to love that deeply to do that and to come back every day and do it again and again.

It’s phenomenal and this is why I like Circa, too, cos they tend to do things really in the body; you’ve got to be ready to get bruised, bloodied, scraped, throwing your body on the ground, working one on one, mini-group acrobatics. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m going to go and do my solo’, easily done, I sweat a little bit. There’s no room to be kind of a baby about it. You’ve gotta love it. I really believe there are two types of artist out there. The ones who are incredibly successful, but they do their thing and then go home at night, and yeah, they’re fantastic, and then there’s the ones who dig deeper and say, ‘Oh, I like this, let’s get our hands dirty and let’s see what we can create with our bodies together. I wanna try to hang from one knee and one elbow from the rope. I know it’s gonna make me bleed today, but that’s OK’. I tend to like this kind of work a lot.

How are you settling in with all those rough Australians [laughs]?
I’m doing very well. Sometimes I realise, hmmm, this is kind of hard. Like it’s really nice to talk to a woman cos in work I’m the only girl unless the violinist comes. But I sometimes have to pinch myself that I’m doing this because it’s so rare that Circa hires outside of Australia. People will tell you things your whole life what you can and cannot do, and really, deep down it’s how much you desire to do something.

Lauren appears in What Will Have Been, which previews during the Norfolk & Norwich Festival from 13 May, has its world premiere on 15 May and runs until 23 May at the Adnams Spiegeltent, Chapelfield Gardens, Norwich.

Photos: Lauren headshot and WWHB colour shots, Jessica Connell. Lewie WWHB, Darcy Grant Photography

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Now read our interview with fellow Circa ensemble member Rowan Heydon-White from Beyond and look out for our forthcoming interview with Circa’s Brittannie Portelli from S