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Feeling low? Get high

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Published January 7, 2021
Feeling low? Get high

Most novelists need a second job to help pay the bills. Few of them choose to run away with the circus. For his new novel The Trapeze Artist, however, Will Davis conjoined his twin passions: writing, and aerial acrobatics. It’s the story of an awkward gay man who, in his struggle to overcome teenage trauma and an adult breakdown, begins a tumultuous relationship with a performer in a travelling circus, then obsessively trains himself in trapeze artistry.

The author’s own background is less dramatic, but he nonetheless attributes a new-found contentment to his time spent swinging through the air.

“Writing is cathartic,” he says. “You channel your emotions on to the page and put them into a format that’s worth something, like a monument to whatever you’ve gone through. But circus helps you to compartmentalise it and to put it in a place where it can be dealt with later.”

Davis was born in 1980 and brought up in Hungerford in Berkshire. As a shy child he hated sports, suffered from vertigo and feared the circus. “Like a lot of people,” he says, “I saw the film of Stephen King’s It, and I developed a massive phobia of clowns.”

After studying film in London (“film degrees don’t qualify you for anything, not even working in film”), he applied himself to fiction. His first novel, My Side of the Story, was a coming-out and coming-of-age tale about a gay teenager in London, published in 2007. In his mid-20s, Davis had seen some experimental, contemporary circus productions by the likes of Cirque du Soleil and NoFit State Circus. Away from the traditional big top, he encountered a side to circus that incorporated other disciplines, such as dance and theatre.

“I thought: ‘That looks amazing and I’ll never be able to do it.’ But I’d always wanted to do a backflip and I thought maybe that much was possible. So I went to Circus Space [the circus conservatoire in Shoreditch] to try it. I didn’t manage a backflip, but I saw other people training on rope and silks and I decided to try aerial circus instead.”

Suitably svelte, tall and flexible, he took to the trapeze with surprising ease – not to mention silks, the rope and hoop, all elements of aerial circus. But the training was gruelling, each climb or trick complemented by a regime of muscle stretching and flexing. “It takes a long time before you can hold on with one hand and do a trick without having to come down immediately and stretch.”

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