A strange, slow-motion circus unfolds in a cavernous gym. Acrobats inch up ropes, tumble tentatively, and climb and balance on each other, all in slumberous tempo.
It’s a routine training session at the Circus Center, a school of circus arts in San Francisco. And here in the “Big Room,” just like the Big Top, the action isn’t only on the ground. Up in the rafters, a figure somersaults, midair, through a hoop. The highflier is Susan Voyticky, a geneticist-turned-aerialist who performs professionally with the center’s New Pickle Circus.
Voyticky, ’95, specializes in cerceau—a French term for the metal ring that propels and cradles her in the air. Her cerceau can spin as well as swing on its axis, like a circular trapeze. To her knowledge, Voyticky is one of only three circus artists in the world who perform on the swinging version of the ring. With no safety net below, she dangles precariously by her feet or her chin and uses the powerful momentum of the swing to launch her riveting moves.
Voyticky’s passions for genetics and performance have threaded like a double helix through her life. A native of Brooklyn, she started dancing “almost when I started to breathe,” she says. By age 15, when she saw Phantom of the Opera in New York, she was certain that theater, in some form, was her calling. At the same time, she was pursuing an intense interest in genetics, taking her first class—at age 12—in a special program at Columbia University. Graduating from high school at 16, she brushed off MIT and headed for Stanford with plans to pursue both science and stage.
For Voyticky, the two share a fundamental appeal. “Genetics offers a beautiful blueprint for understanding what it means to be human,” she says. “Theater is a completely different method for understanding and expressing humanness.”
At Stanford, she studied genetics and majored in science, technology and society while taking classes in drama with actor/playwright Anna Deavere Smith. She also spent six months in Japan studying butoh, an avant-garde dance form incorporating theatrical improvisation, and two months in Vietnam teaching English with Volunteers in Asia.
After graduation, half her dream came true: Stanford hired her full time to do research on the Human Genome Project. But the other passion kept pulling. “The whole time I was working on the Human Genome Project,” she says, “I was also applying to drama schools.”
In 1996, Voyticky decided to move to Paris to attend the theater school of Jacques Lecoq, a master teacher of movement and physical expression. There, she studied a range of forms, including mime, acrobatics, voice, ballet and capoeira, a Brazilian martial art. She also encountered the so-called “new circus” that was emerging in Europe, North America and Australia.
“The only circus I had ever seen was Ringling Brothers,” Voyticky recalls. “This was a whole different experience. I was shocked.”
Blending daring physical stunts with story, dance, music and theater, the experimental troupes focused on creative expression instead of animal tricks and vast, impersonal productions. Today, Canada’s Cirque du Soleil is one of the largest and best-known examples of the genre. Smaller groups, however, like San Francisco’s Pickle Family Circus, pioneered the approach in the 1970s and ’80s, blending street performance and acrobatics in more intimate shows.
When Voyticky saw her first “new circus” production—“Le Cri du Caméléon,” by the French National Centre for Circus Skills—it changed the direction of her life. “The show was a mix of humanness, physical poetry and amazing skill,” she says. “I remember thinking: wow, am I too old to do this?”
The answer became clear when she met French and American performers in another avant-garde circus, Cahin-Caha. “All the artists,” she says, “were older than I was.” She began training with the group, then heard about a school in London, the Circus Space, that was offering a degree program in circus arts. Voyticky spent the next two years training intensively there, honing techniques like flying trapeze, clowning, tightrope and cerceau.
She decided early on to be an aerialist. “Ground-based arts are much harder on the joints,” she explains. “And ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved to climb. Working in the air, when everything feels right, gives me a giddy, joyful, weightless feeling, like jumping on a trampoline—a sense of absolute freedom and abandon.”
She chose cerceau over trapeze, she says, because working creatively with a “square and boring” bar is difficult unless you’re an Olympic-class athlete, which Voyticky says she’s not.
She returned to the States in 2001 to work with Cahin-Caha co-founder Keith Hennessy, who was launching his new Circo Zero in San Francisco. After a successful run with that group, she joined the New Pickle Circus, the descendant of the original Pickle Family troupe. Voyticky starred in its 2002-03 production, “Circumstance,” playing a woman enraptured by a ragtag circus tribe. In both groups, the 110-pound, 5-foot-4 soprano performed as both aerialist and vocalist, blending swinging and singing in an extraordinary physical challenge.
Voyticky’s skill range gives her uncommon versatility, says Hennessy. “Because she has had so much training in dance, theater and singing, her performances go far beyond set moves,” he says. “There’s a real emotional expressiveness to all her work.”
These days, she’s practicing daily and looking for additional performance opportunities. (New Pickle produces just one show a year.) Although circus, like acting, is rarely a full-time occupation, she seems undaunted by the instability. “In this work,” she says, “you have to overcome your fears or they’ll overcome you.”
She even dreams of creating her own production, exploring the intersection of art and science. “I keep thinking about genetics and DNA,” she muses. “I just know there’s great material there for a show.”
Susan Wels, ’78, is a writer in San Francisco.
