Circus Skills
Juggling & Stilts

Crystal is a dancer and circus artist with over 18 years of experience teaching. Originally from Texas, she trained in ballet, tap, jazz, modern, musical theatre, voice, and acting at Expressions Repertory Theatre, the Barn Door Theatre, the Flower Mound Performing Arts Theatre, and The Ballet Conservatory. In high school she focused on dance and performed with the Lake Cities Ballet Theatre while taking lessons, assisting with youth classes, teaching piano, and running lights for the local theatre’s plays and musicals. She went to Mount Holyoke College for here undergraduate studies in dance and French and, in addition to taking classes in the dance department, worked with choreographers from around the world, directed dance performances, and ran lights for shows in the theatre and dance departments. Her junior year was spent in Montpellier, which is when she first fell completely in love with France and knew she would find a way back, eventually!

After graduation she immediately started her MFA in Dance at Oklahoma City University, one of the schools with the most graduates on Broadway. During her two years in Oklahoma, a friend introduced her to aerial fabric and gave her a first taste of circus. She moved back to Massachusetts a few years later and found that she was only a short drive from an amateur circus studio! She started with aerial fabric classes, then added lyra and juggling, then stilt walking and trapeze... within months she was completely hooked, training at both the amateur studio and the professional school in Brattleboro, Vermont in lyra, fabric, static trapeze, duo trapeze, flying trapeze, stilts, partner acrobatics, parkour, cloud swing, and corde lisse, among other disciplines. In addition to teaching dance classes at studios and Mount Holyoke College, she started teaching circus to children and adults at SHOW Circus Studio, ran circus workshops throughout New England, stilted at festivals, taught flying trapeze with Arlie Hart, and performed with Cirque To Go, Sparkle Pants Ladies’ Action Theatre (SPLAT), Show Circus, and Tapella. In 2017 she started a second master’s degree that sent her to Toulouse for an exchange, and, thanks to an unpredictable series of events, she is still here! She teaches lyra, static trapeze, and flying trapeze at Hyperactive Studios and Cie Envol. In addition, she teaches at many of the local schools and universities and perform with Sounds of the Sol, a rhythm-based dance company, and Tapage, a tap dance company.

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