By day, Stephanie Richards MPH’12 is an outreach program manager with the UW Community Arts Collaboratory in the School of Education. In every other spare moment, she’s an aerialist at the Madison Circus Space (MCS), a circus-arts facility that Richards helped design and build, quite literally, from the ground up. It was the least she could do for the craft that gave her a community.
“Madison Circus Space became my home,” Richards says. “It became not only my exercise, which was what I had been looking for, but it was my community, my artistic expression, everything.”
Contrary to the adage, Richards didn’t “run off and join the circus.” Instead, the circus found her. New to Madison and seeking exercise that didn’t involve rows of treadmills and racks of weights, Richards ran the gamut of physical activities that the city had to offer, from rock-climbing to contra dancing.
At a friend’s invitation, she attended a trapeze class with Wild Rumpus Circus at the Goodman Community Center, intrigued by a memory of fairies floating among tree branches at a local festival. In that first class, she struggled to hold on to the bar. She couldn’t get her backside over her head. And she couldn’t get enough. She shelved her bedazzled dancing shoes and threw herself into the Madison circus community, her new dance partner an aerial silk that swept her off her feet.
“It was fun. It was play, which I don’t think we do enough of as adults. And it was exercise,” Richards says. “I was building strength without even really knowing it.”
In 2013, she joined MCS, a nonprofit organization operating out of a rented warehouse on Madison’s east side. MCS hosts instruction and programming in circus arts, such as trapeze, aerial skills, hula hoop, and juggling. When the opportunity arose to build a new space, Richards stepped up as the director of development for the million-dollar capital campaign that funded the construction of MCS’s custom-designed circus arts training facility, one of only three in the country.
“It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life,” Richards says of the undertaking. “[And] now, we have this world-class facility on the east side of Madison.”
Like MCS in its early days, many circus organizations around the country operate out of retrofitted buildings that lack heat or air-conditioning. In the new MCS, artists train in a climate-controlled facility with hardwood, sprung floors; mirrored studios; and a fully equipped performance space.
“We designed it to be a hub for circus arts in Madison and for the surrounding community,” Richards says. “We started with 12 members, and we’re over 100 now.”
Richards, who earned her master’s in public health at the UW, also recognized the connections between circus practice and physical and mental health, both in herself and in her fellow artists. Seeking a career in which she could combine her passion with her profession, she found the UW Community Arts Collaboratory in the School of Education.
“The School of Education is home to arts, health, and education, all in one school, so it’s really been a pretty perfect place for me to land professionally,” Richards says. “All of my work at UW helps me in my community work, too.”
At the UW, Richards supports art programming that empowers young people to express themselves creatively and the training of educators to provide these opportunities. At MCS, she’s a youth aerial instructor teaching timid newcomers and fearless daredevils alike how to flip, float, and fly. Fifteen years after that first trapeze class, she gives the advice that has kept her feet off the ground ever since: “You just have to be brave enough to hold on and jump.”
