In the rafters of the Las Vegas Circus Center, a trapeze artist cuts through the air, her trainer encouraging her from below.
She may makes it look easy, but it’s not. The flight, the mid-air acrobatics, and the impact as she falls into the padded net below — all these pose unique health risks for circus performers.
For years, experts say, these local artists have been left to fend for themselves when they get injured on the job.
That may be changing.
UNLV’s School of Integrated Health Sciences and its College of Fine Arts have joined forces with local circus performers to pioneer the United States’ first circus medicine consortium: the UNLV Consortium of Arts + Medicine. According to its founders, the program’s goals are oriented toward helping performers cope with and prevent injuries, which can be career-ending.
Nathan Hollister is a UNLV emergency medicine resident alumnus and director of the consortium, as well as a trapeze artist himself. He said a lack of proper medical attention to circus-related injuries can be catastrophic physically and financially.
“A lot of performers are paid per show,” he said. “So, if you are injured and you're unable to perform at a show, you just don't get paid. The question then becomes, ‘Is this a short-term injury … something that you think takes you out for a show or two to let you recover? Or is this more of a long-term injury?’ … You do run a risk of not having your contract renewed due to injury, because they do need someone [to make sure] the show must go on.”
Scott McDonald, another one of the consortium’s founders, is himself a circus performer of 25 years and an acrobatic coach. He goes even further. “It's very difficult on the body to do a lot of these things,” he said. “And sometimes there's a mentality of staying strong and pushing through. Sometimes it's just a fear of reprisals or losing one's contract [if admitting injury]. And if you are perhaps someone who has immigrated here from elsewhere, you have a family, you have a social circle [in the show] — you don't want to lose those things, of course, so many times, people will do whatever they can to simply bypass or avoid [seeking treatment] until it's perhaps too late or inevitable.”
Though there’s not a clinical component quite yet, the consortium’s founders see the first step in solving this problem to be collaborative.
“It's gathering people in this newly created thought community, bringing people together,” said Nancy Uscher, dean of the UNLV College of Fine Arts.
McDonald sees the initiative as a way to bridge a trust gap between circus performers and healthcare providers.
“In my industry, a lot of people will deliberately conceal injuries because they don't necessarily trust that they're going to get the health care that they need,” he said. “I believe that the first step towards having a clinic or anything of that sort would just be having more awareness.”
Beyond uniting and supporting members of one of Las Vegas’ most recognizable industries, the consortium will also have a research component.
Hollister describes those conclusions as being easily generalizable to cases outside of circus medicine. Take the “tramp wall,” for instance, which features a wall the performer runs up before falling onto their back on a trampoline positioned below.
“That's multiple head impacts, over and over and over in a short period of time,” Hollister said. “We have used that to analyze the effects of mild repetitive head injuries. So, that is able to be applied to multiple things, from F1 drivers, to car crashes, to even our youth football or other sports or activities where we might not be [giving] ourselves concussions, but be bonking our head a little over and over. The other things that we can look at is dizziness — looking at vertigo, spinning sensations. We can look at eating disorders, eating habits, nutrition. We can look at the psychology of, how do you perform in high stress.”
To this end, the consortium is kicking things off with a day-long symposium, titled Circus Meets Medicine, on Oct. 4. Featuring a morning lecture series by experts in performance medicine, followed by afternoon circus performances and more conversation.
“In the morning, we have the academics and healthcare speakers speaking and the performers listening and learning,” Hollister said. “In the afternoon, the performers get a platform to speak and educate the healthcare professionals and researchers about their needs and what's really important for them.”
The consortium’s founders believe the program is a natural fit for Las Vegas. “I like to say we’re the arts and entertainment capital of the world,” Uscher said. “We're the perfect place.”
Hollister echoes that sentiment.
“We have the best performers in the world,” he said. “Here, our economy is based off of these performers. Vegas is synonymous with live entertainment, and with UNLV becoming our one research institution and really putting a focus on research and expanding knowledge, it's the right time, it's the right place, and we have the right people to become a world leader in really understanding performance and the medicine required for performance.”
For more information about the UNLV Consortium for Arts + Medicine, and to find out more about the consortium’s upcoming public symposium on Oct. 4, visit unlv.edu. For tickets to the event, visit eventbrite.com.
Guests: Nathan Hollister, emergency medicine alumnus, UNLV, director, UNLV Consortium of Arts + Medicine; Scott McDonald, circus performer and acrobatic coach; Nancy Uscher, dean, UNLV College of Fine Arts
