THE BALLOON MAN

Flying high
Twenty-two-year-old aerialist Lindsay Culbert-Olds has formed a new circus troupe, performing August 19 and 20 at the Arlington Center for the Arts.

 

Lindsay Culbert-Olds.
From:  bostonglobe.com
as told to Melissa Schorr
August 11, 2013
 I started off as a gymnast, but I was never super-competitive. When I was 8, I was watching the PBS show Zoom; they interviewed two kids on the Circus Smirkus tour, and I thought that was amazing. I started going to the sleep-away camp, auditioned three times for the tour, finally got on, and did that for four summers.
During high school, I studied trapeze at the New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro. It was just a crazy thing I liked to do; I didn’t realize it could be a career for someone not born into a circus family.
It wasn’t until I got to college at Mount Holyoke that I realized how much I missed it. There wasn’t anywhere in the United States to keep training at the technical level I wanted to reach. In Europe, Asia, Canada, circus is this respected art; it has a history, a culture, government support. In the United States, it’s not a recognized art form. There are very few American circus companies for kids to dream to grow up and be in. So I left to attend circus school in Montreal, where it’s a big part of the culture.
[Our collective] wanted to come back to the United States and show what we do, present our vision as performers. In traditional circus, you’re creating a spectacle to thrill your audience; in contemporary circus, you’re trying to include theater, dance, other forms of art to tell a story. It’s more of a performance piece. There wasn’t really an American company we could do that with, so we created our own. We named it Frequently Asked Questions, because there’s a standard list of questions we always get asked: Are you a clown? Do you work with lions? Our goal is to answer those questions: No, we don’t work with lions. No, we’re not all clowns. Yes, we can do a flip.
The name for our show is “Now You Know.” 
—CATCH THE ACT The circus company Frequently Asked Questions performs August 19 and 20 at the Arlington Center for the Arts. For tickets: faqcircus.bpt.me; for venue information: 781-648-6220; acarts.org As told to Melissa Schorr