Elmira’s Nathan Shuh has finally realized his childhood dream of running off to join the circus.
The trampoline gymnast earlier this year made the shift from competition to thrilling audiences by joining Cirque du Soleil, a Canadian entertainment company and the largest contemporary circus producer in the world.
The 27-year-old has dreamed of working with the Cirque du Soleil since he started gymnastics about 16 years ago.
“Friends and family would always say, ‘you’ll be in Cirque du Soleil one day.’ I didn’t really think too much of it because it was always kind of out there, and to actually act on it now is pretty cool,” Shuh said.
After watching Rose McLennan at the Olympics on TV performing her gold medal-winning routine, he switched to the trampoline, where he competed for 10 years.
“I ended up getting a message from one friend in November that I worked with at Canada’s Wonderland, who said Cirque du Soleil was looking for a trampolinist, and he thought I’d be a good fit for the role,” said Shuh.
“The timing happened to work out perfectly, and a few months later, I was at the show in March,” he noted, saying that he was doing trampoline wall work.
Which is an acrobatic/circus discipline concurrently created by Cirque du Soleil, according to the World Trampwall Federation, where the acrobat uses a wall and platforms next to the trampoline bed to performs tricks.
After sending in his demo video to the artistic director, he had to wait about a month for them to respond, saying they were interested in having a conversation with Shuh.
Then another month passed, “I went to Montreal and started the training period for the spectacle in February,” he noted.
Despite the fact that he soars about 17 or 19 feet in the air, he is not scared to fly through the air performing various tricks.
“Initially, when I was learning how to jump from the tramp wall, it was really scary – but through repetition, it becomes easier over time, and now it is a lot of fun,” he said.
Going from the smaller Canada’s Wonderland stage to the bigger stage took a bit of getting used to, especially sharing the performance space with more people.
“It’s about knowing where we need to be at the right time; the backstage will need to know what certain skills we’re going to be performing in the show that day, and with certain sequences, we’re doing it with other people,” he explained.
“We need to know exactly what the game plan is beforehand.”
When he flew in his first show, he naturally felt nervous. “Which I think is a good thing because it shows that I care,” he noted.
“It took a few months to really get my bearings, but now I’m more playing on stage, and it’s more of a fun time.”
The part of performing he finds the most exciting is pushing himself to do more.
“You can always add another flip, always add another twist. With tramp wall, this is a new discipline for me, so I still have a big learning curve that I’m still on – there’s still a lot that I can do with it, and it is the closest thing to flying,” he said, noting he has been doing trampoline wall since 2016.
His favourite trick has been where he and another are holding onto the wall at the start of the show, and they leap off and do a few straight jumps, then cross over, do a few flips and go back.
This, in a way, brings him back to his roots of performing straight trampoline when he was younger, “since this trick is more what I’ve experienced.”
But hearing the audience’s reactions keeps him flipping in the air. “Trampoline and tumbling is the last act in the show, so when we are all done, we do this big formation on the wall, and when we hit our final pose, the crowd is going very loud – there really no feeling like it.”
The spectacle he is participating in is called Ovo, which is Portuguese for egg.
“Within the show, there’s a lot of Brazilian influences, and the theme is that we are an insect colony,” Shuh explained.
“And at the beginning of the show, the voyager arrives on stage with the egg on his back,” he added.
“And it’s kind of the story of how the insect colony interacts with this voyager, and we tell a bit of a love story as well as how we’re interacting with this character and whether we accept him into this colony or not.”
The next Ovo show will be held in December in St. Catharines. That’s very much close to home with a show that has taken Shuh around the world, with his first stop in Belgium, then in the UK and Ireland.
“We’re in a new city about every week,” he said, adding that Washington, DC was a favourite stop given that he’s a history and politics buff.
