My Circus DNA - Facundo Gimenez - Cirque du Soleil

I come from a family that they've been in the art industry in Argentina. My grandma, she was a singer, a tango singer, and then my parents both dancers. They bought a circus when they were around 40, so I grew up in a circus. I remember growing up in a circus was a lot of fun, like seeing the trapeze artist training, talking with the clowns. The clowns actually gave me my first red nose when I was little. I grew up with this thought of like, I want to do that when I grow up. I want to make people laugh, and it's so fun. You can paint your face and wear colors and be goofy. I was very goofy all the time, so that was something that was calling my attention. My first disciplines in circus were, I was doing clown and trapeze at the same time, but my dad told us, do whatever you want in the circus. You can choose any act, but not aerial acts, you know, and all of us, we choose to train aerial acts, so I started training trapeze. So I decided to put my attention the entire time on clown and the comedy role, and yeah, I think it went well. Everything was a game, everything was, you know, playful, and everything was fun, you know, painting your face and constructing the character. Oh, what shoes I will wear, you know, what type of pants I will have, what wig will make me look more funny, and I think that was the fun. And then my mom, too, started doing clown with me, so we started performing together, and that was a lot of fun, performing with my mom, and, you know, learning different routines, and having fun with the families. When I got the call for Cirque du Soleil was like, I don't know, something like unreal, because I was a fan of the company since I was a kid. I was so surprised, I was crying, I was telling, you know, my friends, oh my god, you know, they're interested, they call me, and this is real, it's happening. When I joined Curious back in 2014, the original creator of the act, David Alexander, passed me all these tricks and tips to perform the animals, to play the animals, that for me was something I never played before, playing a cat or playing a T-Rex, a bird, a dog. I have one kid, she is two and a half, having this beautiful baby, you know, calling you dad, and, you know, and not long ago, she was sitting there, and she saw me performing for the really first time, and she was telling mom, oh mom, mom, it's dad on stage, you know, that was just, it was magical.