2018 American Circus Educators Conference

Get new ideas for warmup, theatre, skill, movement, and group cohesion games to use with your students! Share your favorites, the tried-and-true games you pull out because they are loved and they work. This workshop will be mostly descriptive in order to cover the most material, but we will play a few games ourselves too!

This workshop is a crash course in the art of magic for circus artists and educators. Joe Culpepper* will share secret sleight-of-hand techniques and research tools for adapting magic effects to your shows. You will learn how to make objects magically appear, transform, and vanish. Most important of all, you will learn how to think and direct attention like a magician. No previous magic experience necessary. Joe's first job was teaching at his hometown's magic shop in Sacramento, California, in 1998. He currently teaches magic at Montreal's National Circus School.

Optimally preparing the body for training requires more than just raising the temperature of our muscles. The movements we do as part of our group warm-ups give us the opportunity to address the body’s “weak links” by reducing tension in overactive muscles and activating underactive muscles. With the balance of appropriate muscle tension restored, the use of functional movement patterns helps to make these changes “stick”. Most of our students come to us after days spent sitting and/or looking down at their computers or phones. Each of the “must-haves” to be presented is intended to address the most common muscular imbalances and compensatory movement patterns that develop as a result of our “modern lifestyles”. Participants will have the opportunity to try each of these movements and for each “must have” exercise, we will provide suggested coaching cues and discuss the common pitfalls.

CircusYoga Tools of Teachers Are you a teacher, therapist or parent looking to improve your toolbox of games that make leading groups fun, easy and active? Spend an intensive and experiential hour or two with CircusYoga co-founders Kevin and Erin Maile O’Keefe learning practices they have developed over 40 years of teaching dance, theatre, yoga and circus. All of the practices develop inclusion, connection, co-authorship and empathy in the group learning process and can be adaptable to any classroom, population or curriculum.

Did you know that the musical accompaniment to the the world's first circus was provided by a choir of 60 children? Or that contemporary social-psychology and neuroscience has found a positive correlation between singing ability, self-image and social inclusion? In this workshop participants are invited to run away and join the chorus! Together we will explore some techniques of song leading, bringing our voices together in rhythm, melody and harmony while holding space for all levels of singing experience. Participants will walk away with the skills necessary to orchestrate and conduct song circles.

Consent Games for Circus is a physical theater workshop offering circus instructors methods for teaching and practicing consent. Through playing games, participants will be invited to explore different elements of consent, such as: boundaries, desire, risk, verbal and non-verbal communication, social media, and power. Circus instructors interested in sexual assault and relationship violence prevention will find Consent Games for Circus valuable. Violet Defiant / Kathleen Livingston, PhD has been teaching college writing for 10 years, teaching circus for 5 years, and teaching trauma-informed movement for 2 years.