Emily Scherb is a physical therapist with a lifelong passion for understanding human movement.
She’s been a practicing aerialist for almost 30 years and has dangled from balloons, danced in the air, and swung from trapezes. That background inspired her to specialize her practice on circus and aerial artists. As an educator, she travels the world teaching circus artists, instructors, and healthcare professionals about the unique physical demands and challenges of training the body to do incredible feats.
She received her graduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis and now lives in Seattle, where she works with professional and pre-professional circus artists. She is the Resident Physical Therapist at the School of Acrobatics and New Circus Arts and the Company Physical Therapist for the contemporary circus company Acrobatic Conundrum.
Her first book, Applied Anatomy of Aerial Artists, was published in August 2018.
She is a new AYCO board member and generously Zoomed with Daisy Coleman to share some of her experience.
Daisy: My very first question is, how did you get into aerials?
Emily: When I was 10 or 11, I went to a summer camp. I was a gymnast, but they also had circus and one of the things you could do was Mini Tramp and I was like, “Oh, mini tramp, that’s just gymnastics. I can do that to start with Mini Tramp.” Then there was a friend from my mini tramp class who was taking static trapeze and I was like, “Oh, she’s cool. I’ll go hang out with her”. And then I took trapeze and I was like, “Oh, this is good. This I really like.” And then, uh, there was a cute boy. Cute boy and peer pressure. And so I tried flying trapeze.
I just absolutely fell in love with it. I was like, “This is using all of my gymnastic skills, but in a really different way that’s really fun and exciting and there’s applause.” I kept training every summer and doing circus. And when I got my license, I would drive into New York City, an hour and a half to go take like an hour lesson and then drive an hour and a half home.
Daisy: Wow. That was very dedicated.
Emily: I was very dedicated! So that’s kind of how I started.
Daisy: How did that transition into physical therapy?
Emily: Circus is so much ingrained into every step of my life from the time I discovered it. But at the same time, I had always thought I was going to do something with medicine. Even when I was a little kid, I was like, “I’m gonna be an orthopedist”, or “I’m going to be doing something with bodies and movement”. So finding circus was just kind of reinforcing that. I love movement. I love thinking about how bodies move, moving my body, watching other people’s bodies move. I was always just a deep lover of movement.
I got to college and realized it was time I had to actually figure out what I was doing next. I wanted to be in a profession where I’d actually have to spend time with my patients and I wanted to be in a profession that leaned towards movement as health, movement as medicine. That narrowed it down really fast to physical therapy.
I also didn’t stop doing circus. Between high school and college, I took a year off and performed with an aerial dance company out in Portland.After school, after my undergraduate degree, I moved to New York and did circus full-time.
I ended up managing TSNY in New York for a little while before going back to grad school. I kept doing circus all through my schooling. I never stopped when I was in physical therapy school. I had to do a rotation in orthopedics and a rotation in neurology and rotation in inpatient or in hospital- based physical therapy. And to be completely honest, I only took rotations that were near flying trapeze rigs.
Circus has always been that undercurrent as long as I can remember. And it was always something I thought, “oh, it’ll be fun. I’ll get to see a circus artist or two eventually in my practice.” And I have more than exceeded that.
Daisy: Well, that’s really amazing. I’m a junior in high school and so I’m trying to find my own path. It feels very similar to a lot of the things that you’re saying because for me, circus is like the consistent thing for my whole life. And for a long time I was like, I’m only gonna do circus. And then only this year I thought, maybe I’m actually interested in other stuff too. But that is still a huge part of itf or me and it’s like part of my college search. I gotta choose somewhere where there’s circus.
Emily: The great thing is at least there’s tons of options now. I agree because you can either incorporate it or just find a way to carve out time to stay active in it.
Daisy: What was your experience in pursuing both a circus career and a doctorate at the same time?
Emily: I continued teaching during grad school and generally stayed active and that was awesome and healthy. A lot of my peers had a blinders focus,”I’m gonna do the school thing” and I was like, “Oh, I’m putting that down and I’m gonna go teach a client trapeze class, I’ll be back.” And it was very much my space where I got to just be me. A version of me that wasn’t a student, that wasn’t stressed out about the test, that was more excited about my students’ accomplishments. That enabled me to have both that mental and physical break that was just so healthy.
Once I graduated, I did keep teaching for quite a few years, until I started my business. As I moved around the country, I thought, “Who are all my friends, who do I meet? How do I build community?” You reach out to the circus people and they are the best people in the whole world. We have learned that novel movement learning, especially in something like circus, builds resilience. It builds our ability to fail and learn from that failure. Most of us don’t get that skill the first time or understand there’s baby steps, steps that need to happen to get there. And that has been such a useful skill.I think it makes us really a welcoming community too, because we understand that not everyone’s perfect right away, and that there is this growth that happens. I think it all feeds into what makes our community special.
Daisy: This is my experience with it too. It’s such a unique community. I feel like such a well-rounded person. You learn interpersonal skills and social skills. You learn prioritization of information that you’re coming in right now. Like, “Oh, do I need to pay attention to that?” Or the fact that my hand needs to go there right now. It’s like I need to be able to figure this out and to figure out how to adjust this really quickly. And I think it makes our brains happy.
Emily: I literally cannot imagine my life without circus.
Daisy: I agree. What does it mean for you to be on the AYCO board and to be a board member?
Emily: I’m so excited. I am excited for the opportunity to help develop circus education. My passion lives in the education side. I really think circus should be accessible for lots of people and I want to do it safely and better than we’ve ever done it before. I want us as a national organization to really embrace good teaching practices and support increasing knowledge for our educators moving forward, which is going to help all circus artists be safer, better, happier, tell more of their friends about it, do more of it and share the joy of what we do.
I’m a brand new board member. I still feel like I’m learning all the things, all the wonderful things that AYCO does, and how we are serving the community. How we are doing so with the enthusiasm of our members.
Daisy: What advice would you give to people wanting to pursue circus as well as a very serious other career that might be adjacent or not?
Emily: No matter what you do, circus will always be a part of you. Seeking out a place where you can make it a part of you, make it a part of your life, is such an amazing opportunity to build community and build your sense of self at the same time. Ideally in my world, I want you to have at least one medical provider with whom you feel comfortable talking about what you do. I think it’s important for former students of mine or patients of mine that have gone on to professional careers to know that they can always reach out to somebody and say, “Okay, I have a question.” Whether that’s a coach or a healthcare provider; I think it’s really, really important to build those relationships before you need them.
circus is my life 