Circus Club Takes Center Ring at UMW

Sadie Hagberg

While most of us were busy juggling classes, work, and extracurriculars last semester, a small group of students were gathering for their own kind of juggling – circus juggling.
Last spring, several students created the UMW Circus Club.  The club, which has 15 members, meets weekly to participate in circus-related activities.
“We are always looking for new members who want to develop interesting skills and have fun while doing it,” said Mike Mosley, the club’s president.
Mosley said the group wanted to get together and share their knowledge about performance acts while learning new things themselves.
“We started the club as an excuse to hang out together and get new skills,” said Mosley.
Mosley said that the group likes to focus on a different activity every meeting.
“One of our goals as a club is to set up a sort of ‘skill swap’ atmosphere, where if one person is really good at juggling they can teach anybody who wants to learns, and the next week somebody else can teach them how to ride a unicycle or do a handstand,” he said.
Prospective members don’t need any previous background or knowledge in circus performance acts to join the club.

“All skills are welcome,” Mosley said.  “We’re happy to teach anything we know.”
The club recently hosted a series of workshops with a professional French performer named Anthony Nicolas.  Nicolas taught the members how to walk on stilts, ride unicycles, juggle and do acro-balance, or acrobatic balancing, which is essentially one person lifting another.
After the group acquires new skills, they perform them for an audience.
“We’ve got a couple of performances lined up for the spring semester, but we’re always looking for excuses to break out our stilts and juggling balls,” Mosley said.  “Right now we are looking for opportunities to perform around campus and around Fredericksburg.”