Ruby in the Sky
If you find her Website—“the only place she stands still”—you’re told that you have only caught a glimpse of Ruby Rowat ’93. She is, in fact, an incredibly hard woman to catch. Over the course of two weeks, I played phone tag with her as she moved from a West Coast theater to a job rigging Alegria, a Cirque du Soleil show, in Philadelphia. When I finally caught her, she told me her life story through an airport payphone between flights. Being up in the air, though, is her life and love: Rowat is a freelance trapeze artist, a trapezista, with a portable rig, three passports and a penchant for going anywhere in the world that offers an audience and 18 feet to swing.
Her aerial work has taken her all over the world, hopping from circus to circus to work on everything from rigging to performances that bring out her edgy, powerful grace. She is not, she would caution, a “circus princess.” In fact, she’s among the first aerialists to fight against that image, creating characters that range from an airborne matador to an unbound aviatrix. Rowat has fought hard to get where she is, confronting unemployment, family members who questioned her decision to fly and an injury she was told would end her career. Amelia Earhart, one of Rowat’s inspirations and a model for her Aviatrix act, said, “Flying may not be all plain sailing, but the fun of it is worth the price.” Rowat would agree.
You can find Rowat flying in any number of places; limiting her to a circus would verge on criminal. She has performed in raves and nightclubs, folk festivals, Amherst’s Holden Theater, acrobatic competitions and even, as one of her first professional aerial performances, the 1996 Cycle Messenger World Championships. In the latter, she performed two acts in return for airfare and a chance to race with the bicyclists. Rowat, hired as a performer, took second place in the championship race. “Circus princess” is hardly an apt description.
It started when she was 7 years old, growing up in Canada in a family of hikers, skiers and mountain climbers. She saw the Moscow Circus in Vancouver, where the Flying Cranes performed one of the first aerial acts to incorporate theater and story with higher-level circus technique. After seeing the Flying Cranes, Rowat wanted to fly, too.
“Lots of people want to be in the circus,” she sys, “but my parents were adventurous, so they went looking for a trapeze coach.” There was no trapeze coach to be found in Vancouver, so Rowat’s parents enrolled her in a gymnastics program. It was a short-lived plan: “When I got a bit too good, my parents took me out [of the program] because they were very strict about going to bed on time, [and] training started being past bedtime.”
Rowat did gymnastics for two years before switching her focus to competitive ski racing. When she was 14, she went to a high school with a “superachiever” program that was developed for skiers. She began skiing four days a week and going to school the other three, but a 7-year-old itch to fly was just begging to be scratched. Rowat tried out for—and got into—a Vancouver children’s circus modeled after an Australian program. “I ended up cheating on my ski training and doing circus training,” she jokes. For most of high school, she did both. And then she had to choose one.
“I figured I could ski until I’m 100 years old, but I can’t always do trapeze,” she says. Rowat devoted herself to circus training, studying all the disciplines—cycle, tumbling, juggling, tight wire and an aerial specialty in trapeze. She figured she would be a trapeze artist until she turned 30, then go to medical school. Even with this plan, Rowat didn’t have to look far from home to find her critics.
Rowat’s parents were supportive, but it took a long time for her grandparents to come around. “They were terrified that I wasn’t going to go to a university,” she says. When she started training professionally, her grandmother sent her “a really nice letter that said ‘You’ll be sleeping in elephant turd with roustabouts.’ They were business-class lawyers,” Rowat explains, “and their viewpoint of circus was how it was perceived publicly: three rings and some animals.” Rowat laughs it off, saying that once “they realized they never had to pay for my trapeze and circus education, they decided it was legitimate and accepted me.”
Rowat trained with the National Circus School after graduating high school, practicing 10 hours a day, six days a week in her first three months there. Going from a children’s circus to the “real circus life” had its difficulties; Rowat went from catching and lifting 5-year-olds to training full time, lifting people her own size. “I was young and gung-ho and 18 years old and invincible and Wonder Woman, so I promptly got an injury. They told me I could never do trapeze again,” she says. Rowat elected not to have the recommended surgery, a hit-or-miss shoulder repair that some professional swimmers underwent after similar injuries. Instead, she stepped back from the circus and started thinking about college.
Rowat said that she was “brainwashed from an early age to go to a fancy Ivy League school,” even though she grew up in a part of the world where SATs and the like had little meaning. She narrowed her search to two colleges on the East Coast: Smith and Amherst. After visiting both and putting up a simple request—“You have to let me swing in the gym”—Rowat chose Amherst.
Her reputation arrived at Amherst well before she did. “I was fairly well-known already in the incoming class,” she said. “Everyone would say ‘Oh, there’s the trapeze artist.’” Rowat, not one to be pigeonholed, began to study for her biology degree through the pre-med program. She took classes in every area she could—physics, chemistry (she always saw herself as more science based) and, at Smith, French Canadian Women Authors. “You know how Amherst is,” she says: “I might as well take advantage of all the crazy classes. That’s how I treated my education.” In the meantime, Rowat practiced meditation and Qigong, a form of therapeutic Chinese healing, to heal her shoulder injury.
For her first two years, Rowat stayed on the ground, with brief stints in the ski club and the crew team. Then, in her third year, on a whim, she walked into the Theater and Dance Department, expecting them to say, “Circus? What are you doing here?” It was a surprise, says Peter Lobdell, one of Rowat’s professors, but not a bad one: “On the contrary, we were excited. Here’s a gifted acrobat and trapeze performer wanting to move this performance out of the range of ‘Oh, wow, look what she can do.’” Rowat began to work with Lobdell on an independent project that put her back into swing. After signing a legal waiver, she set up a trapeze in the gym and “started training over the basketball players.” Two years later, she had a strong shoulder and a degree in biology to boot.
After graduating, Rowat trained with the National Center for Circus Arts in France, where she was “basically paid to train.” After moving out from the protective roof of her stipend, she relocated to Montreal and was “dead broke.” Eager to do something that would fit between early-morning training and nighttime dance classes, Rowat became a bike messenger (thus her connection to the bike messenger championship). She loved the “urban cowgirl” aspect of it, a side of her personality that would come to shape the eccentric characters she played out above her audiences.
Rowat’s identity as a solo flyer, cemented in her training at Amherst and, afterwards, the National Center for Circus Arts, got her plenty of attention and respect. Two years ago, she had a rare opportunity to work with one of the top family circuses in Europe, Circus Medrano. “Usually you practically marry in to perform with them,” she says. “It was awesome and amazing.” They were like “a crazy Italian Circus Mafia. Being there made me think that I could go back to school and do a Ph.D. in circus anthropology.” Rowat offers the example of a time when Medrano faced stiff competition from another circus family. Desperate to do something that would undercut the competitors and boost their own audience, they came up with the improbable idea of a circus ice act.
Even though Rowat had worked mostly in contemporary circuses, she earned respect for her traditional work at Medrano. “I was walking around,” she says, “30 years old, unmarried, and I would get introduced from the circus head guy to all these strapping young men who are yet unwed.” The perception, she says, was that “‘She’s a good trapeze artist and works hard and doesn’t complain. Yup, fresh young blood here.’ They saw that even though I don’t come from circus blood, I’m pretty much circus blood.” If there was a “Circus Mafia,” Rowat had a nod of approval from its don.
Even though she was trained in and respected by traditional circus, a new type of circus blood was running through Rowat. Outfits like Medrano are incredibly internal operations. For them, “[the circus] is their world, their little big world.” Rowat would go out every chance she had when she traveled, attending art shows, readings and every museum she could. Yet it wasn’t the isolation that really got to Rowat.
“I really hate the soft-core porn of traditional circus: The girls are beautiful and the guys are strapping,” she says. Rowat saw the image of the female trapeze artist as one of powerful subservience. “On stage,” she says, “women do a hard-core trick and finish it with a beautiful move, which is not just about power and grace, it’s about ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m still a girl.’” While the men backstage “appreciate and love their strong women, on stage [the women are] expected to do the traditional style.” Rowat saw the need for a new approach, something that would challenge the classic “circus princess” element of trapeze art. This was the inspiration for Aviatrix, one of Rowat’s solo acts, modeled on Ameila Earhart.
The idea for the act grew out of a few chance comments on a ski slope. “I was doing a long ski-touring trip with my family, and we were goofing around. My sister said, ‘You look like Amelia Earhart,’ because I was wearing my ski goggles and my hat and stuff, and it just made a lot of sense. A lot of the moves in the swinging trapeze act I do without my hands. I had my hands out already in the flying position so it all sort of came together.”
Rowat performs Aviatrix in a scarf and flight goggles, and, coupled with her short hair and airborne tendencies, she’s a dead ringer for the 1930s aviator. She studied Earhart’s history, coming to accept that “Ruby is really Aviatrix; I’m really that character of Amelia Earhart having a great fly, just up there flying around.”
Rowat’s distinctive character work brought out more than just the barnstorming fly-girl in her blood. One of Rowat’s friends suggested that a bullfighting act would work well as “something to try up there.” In response, Rowat developed Matador “with sort of a techno-Spanish” spin, an act that, according to Rowat, “went well with who I am, as well as with the aggression and power you get on swinging trapeze.” Matador, which can be played as either a man or woman, gave Rowat the edge she wanted to fight the traditional view of female trapeze artists. The performance had a power and grace that kept it from tapering off into submission.
On the more playful end of acrobatic aggression, Rowat recently worked in research and design with Cirque du Soleil, creating a new character and act: Flying Sleepover Extravaganza. Her character, one of three girls, was “the one with a glint in her eye.” It was an intense act, one that had Rowat supporting her weight and another performer’s as she hung only by her toes. “I love [it], working with my colleagues where I could play the glamour/sexy/fun part of it, and if that’s all you wanted to see, that’s all you see,” she says. “But if you also wanted to see our crazy story going on, you’d see three crazy girls at a sleepover party being silly and having slow-motion fights and stuff. Or if all you wanted to see was somebody hanging by her heels, you’d see that, too. I really love that.” All of this, of course, while dangling from a triple-wide trapeze.
This edgier side of trapeze art has put Rowat at odds with some circus traditions where, as she puts it, “the women are there to be beautiful.” In her first traditional tour, she played a contract with the Shrine Circus. “I knew that I would have to walk around and look beautiful and then do my Aviatrix act,” she says. Fortunately, Rowat says, a Russian handstand artist named Svetlana became her “Russian circus mom” on the tour, making sure Rowat dressed well and acted appropriately. “As far as I was concerned,” she says, “it was summer on the East Coast, and I would [just as soon] sleep out on the grass.” Rowat laughs and puts on her best Russian accent for Svetlana’s response: “‘No, Ruby,’ she would say, ‘you are good artist. This is not good impression.’” Svetlana prodded Rowat in the right direction, making sure she didn’t wear track suits with holes in them. “It was normal stuff,” Rowat said, “but I ended up learning it in circus instead of normal life.”
Rowat (far right) and her partners Rebecca Leonard (far left) and Shelly Kastner perform Les Filles aut Lit, or, as Rowat likes to refer to it, Flying Sleepover Extravaganza.
One of Rowat’s few problems with the Shrine Circus came in the walkaround, in which the performers would circle the ring on their tiptoes, carrying flags, waving to the audience and “looking beautiful.” Rowat didn’t know she was supposed to have an evening gown, the unofficial dress code for female performers in the walkaround. Instead, she was walking in high heels and her Aviatrix body suit. The faux pas “didn’t sink in until the end of that gig,” she says. Rowat ended up buying an evening gown and learning how to walk in skinny heels for the opening, but she didn’t take it too seriously. It was another character, one that she found fun to play because of its great shock value—after rigging for a show, she donned her high heels and evening gown for opening night. “Half the technicians and performers had no idea who I was,” she says.
And what about her original plan to go to medical school when she turned 30? “Thirty rolled around and I was having one of the best performing years of my life. I thought, ‘Well, I’m still loving what I do; there’s no reason to stop.’” This love didn’t come without its hardships. At times, work was every other day, switching from circus to circus. There were always lulls, though, and even when Rowat was working, it wasn’t all magic and glamour. She often works on the technical side rather than the performance, designing and setting up rigging for shows. Even when performing, traditional circuses demand three to six hours of setup, “chill” time, makeup, warm-up and then what Rowat calls “transform-into-artist mode.”
Hardships or not, she’s found plenty of work. Rowat has performed throughout Canada, the United States, Italy, Brazil, Switzerland, Japan and even in the Wuqiao International Acrobatic Festival in China, where she was the first independent foreign artist invited. And her efforts have been appreciated. After placing second in a competition in Brazil, she was approached by a female judge. “The circus needs you,” the judge said. “The circus needs people like you.”
Last spring, Rowat’s work brought her back to Amherst. In a play called Dead Fall, by Suzanne Dougan, professor of theater and dance and director of theatrical productions, she acted and helped two acrobats with technical rigging and aerial choreography. Working on Dead Fall, she saw the same professionalism between students and directors that she saw in the Vancouver children’s circus, where, she says, “we were really treated as professionals and expected to behave professionally, but at the same time we were given the tools to do work with. I was lucky to have been at Amherst watching [the professors] work with the students, where the students get a chance to act in a professional-level play,” she adds “It was a really amazing opportunity to work with great people who are both directing and teaching at the same time.”
Peter Lobdell, who acted in Dead Fall, had a close encounter of his own with his old student. “I had one short speech [in the play], and she walks over to the railing above me and just hangs by her knees over my head. It was an amazing feeling,” he says “I could feel her intention and feeling literally hanging about 10 feet over me.”
Rowat sees no signs that the traditional “circus princess” is disappearing. The problem, she says, is that contemporary circuses like Cirque du Soleil don’t cater to a large audience like traditional circuses do, so whatever changes happen there aren’t seen by mass audiences. Still, Rowat works hard to bring her act to the public. “We need a lot of circus artists who are aware of their place in the world,” she says. And she never forgot where she first found her place: In 1998, Rowat had her homecoming. Performing with Cirque Parasol, a mix of Cirque du Soleil acts and independent Canadian circus companies, she returned to Vancouver. It was the first time she played to her home town, flying through the same air where, 21 years earlier, the Moscow Circus’ Flying Cranes started to pull her skyward.
Photos: Top right: Robert Shaer; Top left: Ezec le Floch; Middle left: Frank Ward; Bottom right: Aviatrix: Alex Legault; Bottom left: Flying Sleepover: Robert Shaer