How to Become a Tight Wire Act

Laila: Hey! Welcome to watchmojo.com, I am your host Laila and I am going to talk to Steven Natalie Good, at the National Circus School, to see what it takes to specialize in tightwire. Natalie tell us first a little bit about, your background? Natalie Good: I started out actually as a gymnast and a dancer and I just started circus a few years ago, kind of I was performing as a dancer mostly and doing acrobatics in my dancing work, and some circus people found me and saw me doing acrobatics. Laila: What's your specialty now? Natalie Good: I am doing tightwire now. Laila: Is that strictly walking across the wire? Natalie Good: Well, there is different types of tightwire, there highwire and there is low tightwire which is more dancing and acrobatics on the wire. It's actually really hard to stand on it. And once you learn that, you could walk and you could start turning and jumping and it's kind of like dance moves, that you transfer to the wire, after you get a little better with dance. If I am acrobat so, I started doing acrobatics as soon, as possible on the wire. Laila: You think that you'll venture up in the highwire? Natalie Good: I really want to try, you never know, until you try. But I would love to try it at least once. Laila: How rigorous is the training? You want to walk us through a typical day at school. Natalie Good: We start anywhere from 8:30 - 10:30 in the day, I warm up my body, get my muscles warm, stretch do injury prevention for my shoulders and legs so that when I train, I am prepared and I am strong. Then, I train for two hours, sometimes two-and-a-half or three hours and stretch afterwards and then, at the school we also, have classes and dance, anatomy, tough physique, it's like muscle masculation. Laila: Are you training mostly solo. Do you work with other students or do you train individually? Natalie Good: On tightwire it's individual training here, but we have group classes like dance. In first and second year, you do hand-to-hand it's kind of acrobatics with two people. So you have one person porting and other person flying and you do more group stuff and some people do hand-to-hand for their major and they work together, but I am mostly alone. Laila: You can expect to get your major next year. Do you have any plans, for what you want to do afterwards? Natalie Good: I have a lot of dreams and a lot of plans, but I don't know exactly, what I want to do. I definitely want to work in creation and to work with other artist and create a project, create a show, create performance environments. Laila: How competitive do you expect the world of circuses to be when you are finished? Natalie Good: I have no ideal, I think it depends on what you are specializing in. I know, for some apparatuses like swinging trapeze, it's really difficult to find work, because it's difficult to rig and in competition, I don't think there's very many tightwires walkers. There's not really that many in North America. So for tight wire, I don't think there's so much competition, but we'll see. Laila: Thanks a lot. Natalie Good: Thank you.