My Circus DNA - Estefani Evans - Cirque du Soleil

I actually am five generations of a traditional circus family. So I grew up in the circus as well as my brothers, my siblings, my mom, my grandma, back five generations. That's what I was born to do. My parents, they had a small circus in Brazil and they used to like travel to South America with the small little circus. So at four, I was like helping the magicians or being a clown or just I thought I was a contortionist. You know, I was doing a bridge pretty wide, but I thought I was very professional at the time. The circus life for my family was completely different from what I did in circus. Like I used to live in circus caravans, trailers, RVs. And my family back in the days, they still live in circus tents. It's a completely different like life. Even I met my grand grandmother. She passed away a few years ago and last conversation I had with her, she said, I still can do trapeze if I want to. She was her 94 and she's like, I can still do trapeze. We grew up traveling a lot. So each city we had to go to a different school which is different from what my kids do now. My kids do homeschool with me. I, every city and sometimes it would be two weeks in one city or sometimes a month. When it was a month or two months, I was so happy, you know, because I actually made friends. But the bad part is like, I'm going to leave them, you know, in a while. But that was my life outside of the circus. Like I made a lot of friends in the city. When I was young, my parents didn't want to tell us that they did flying trapeze as well because and now I understand because I have kids and it's really hard for me to see my kid, my son, Davi, he's 10 years old and he wants to do trapeze as well. When my son is flying on trapeze, I am scared. So now I understand why my parents didn't want me to do trapeze. But at 12, I tried trapeze for the first time and then I just left behind everything that I taught you before. I'm like, this is what I like to do. And then my mom took a while to tell me like, actually we all, all your family did trapeze, you know, it's on your blood. So it was fun to understand that this is actually what I wanted to do was running on my blood, the trapeze artist, you know. My first contract was for Portugal, then was when I elevated my skills because I was already doing the double, talk, somersault. And then by that time, we didn't have many girls doing this same trick. So it was like a really high skills. As I'm working with the Nevis family, they were building a show to go to Zaya. Zaya is another production show in Macau from Cirque du Soleil. That's when I got the contact, you know, because I already working with them. They working in this production and then my name came up. So for me, it was like just to be out of Brazil and getting to travel the world was already the top of line for me. But when I got that contact, it was just like, oh my God, is this really happening? I mean, it's Cirque, you know, like I was really happy. It's kind of like pinch yourself to wake up.