If you’ve ever been in Goldsmith at 6pm on a Tuesday, you will find a number of desks joined together, filled with board games, as members of DU Gamers conduct their activities.  You will find workers of the SU cafe filing into their weekly shift meeting (or that one evening they shot Naked Calendar behind the deli counter) and finally, if you peep around the door to what by day is a lecture theatre, you will find what has transformed into a space suitable for a circus training to take place. I’m not joking. If you have ever wondered why there are people in there doing pole dancing, here is your answer. 

Amy, the treasurer of DU Juggling and Circus Society, first met a couple of members during Freshers fair. “They were juggling and doing balloon animals and stuff and it was just kind of weird and looked fun”. 

“We run a weekly training space. We have a lot of people who are strictly jugglers. We do pole dance. We have an aerial programme that’s starting up so people can do aerial silks. We do a lot of what’s called ‘flow arts’, so people doing poi, which is spinning balls and flags on strings, and staff, which you roll around your body. Then we do fire training which is when we go out to Sandy Mount strand and have an evening on the beach together and we practice doing all of those props, but on fire”. 

To participate, “we have a group chat to just say, “hey the weather’s good today, the tide’s gonna be out, do you want to come down? And we’ll go and drink hot chocolate and play with fire”. As an accident-prone person, I express some concern. Fire burns at “not a super high temperature, so basically it’s very hard to set yourself on fire”, Amy assures me. “We have a wet towel wherever we’re doing it …. Also being on the beach it means people can run into the sea if need be”. Luckily, this has never happened though. 

They perform a fire show in Front Square every year. It’s free entry and a “nice, non-pressured way for people to get into circus performing”. A couple of members have gone on to do circus in more professional capacities and “you can get involved with that through conventions, which we also go to”. 

You don’t need any prior experience to join. “I couldn’t juggle, I couldn’t do any sort of acrobatics”. The training space is “not an exclusively student training space a lot of the time. We run an open training space for the wider Dublin circus community, so it means we have a lot of professional circus performers who come along and, at least in my experience, they’re very nice and very helpful and willing to teach you things”. There are also open workshops at the national conventions they attend where “professionals basically teach you and you can just learn anything you want under the sun”. 

Amy has met many different kinds of people through Circus. “It’s a very gender non-conforming environment in a lot of ways”. Anyone can participate, “it’s kind of just about learning what you can do with where you’re at” and “learning different ways you can move your body”. Circus is a space that usurps a lot of social boxes. “That’s definitely something I really love about it because I came from a dance background. I did ballet for a long time and Cirus is very non-body focussed”. There’s no emphasis on appearance or “the idea of being normal. Whatever you want to do with it, you can do. And I think that is something that is missing from a lot of sports and one of the reasons that a lot of people drop out of sport”. 

“A lot of the people who get into circus, both in Trinity and on a nationwide level, are neurodivergent and there’s quite a lot of people who would have physical disabilities who get involved. It’s just a really broad environment where people from all sorts of backgrounds get into it”. 

Last September, the society attended “Tionól Lámhchleasaíochta”, a juggling convention on Inis Oírr run entirely through Irish. “It’s a really small group of people who go, but because we had a bit of a Trinity contingent there, we got a chance to speak some Irish, see somewhere that a lot of the people, particularly the international students in the group, had never been before and also learn new skills surrounded by this incredible landscape”. 

“We were able to offer quite a good subsidy this year as well because we did some fundraising. It meant that it became quite financially accessible and then all of a sudden I was in this training hall and there were people doing trapeze and silks and there were people standing on each other’s shoulders and I was there doing a back somersaults workshop and I was like, this is just, it’s crazy”. 

“I know a lot of societies probably say that, but I think Circus in particular has no expectations of what you’re already able to do. There is no pressure to try anything. You can come along every single week to training and sit and do your work if you want to get comfortable with the space”. 

“It’s so open. And I think that that openness is something that can be so lovely to walk into when you’re stressed about approaching a new environment like Trinity”. 

A funny niche exists within the club. A lot of engineering and physics students really like juggling. 

“A lot of the best jugglers are physicists and mathematicians, because if you get really technical with juggling, there’s numbers that correspond with different passes. A lot of people in STEM take to it so quickly”. International students are involved as well. “The Germans learn to unicycle in PE in high school. So we get a lot of German students who come in and unicycle”. 

However, Amy is keen to stress that truly anyone can join. “You can come along every week and never learn how to juggle and we will still want you to keep coming because the point of it isn’t to necessarily ever get brilliant at something, it’s just to keep trying if you’re having fun with it”. That’s what she does. “I still can’t do most of the things that we offer. I just enjoy fucking about. So I keep going”!