Korzo UP #7 with Melody and Lily Nolan

 “Rituals are so important in helping us find meaning in the everyday.”

What connects people who spent their entire childhood together but later went their separate ways? Circus makers and handstand sisters Melody (27) and Lily (22) Nolan, grew up in a traveling circus family on the West Coast of the United States, where they learned early on about trust, physical closeness and finding calm amid the chaos. Now, they meet again on stage during Cirque Mania #21. How then, do you find each other again?

The five of them in a one-bedroom apartment

Melody, Lily, and their sister Juniper Nolan lived with their parents in many unconventional places. First, they spent some time in the hippie town of Eugene, but making circus together also meant a lot of traveling. Therefore they used a refurbished, typically American school bus. At one point, all five of them even temporarily settled in a one-bedroom apartment. The sisters slept in bunk beds, while their parents stayed on a pull-out couch in the living room.

The way you grew up sounds like there was a lot of freedom, but there wasn’t a lot of space…

Lily laughs: “It didn’t feel so cramped at the time. We were just used to being very close.”

Melody: “When you’re used to having so little space, it doesn’t feel like anybody is necessarily invading your space. You learn to find a way of being alone even while being in the same physical space.”

Was it only living together that made your family so physically close, or did your circus disciplines play a role as well?

Melody: “The disciplines that we ended up practicing, like acrobatics and handstands, involve quite a lot of physical contact and proximity. A lot of families don’t have this type of physical interaction.”

Lily: “I also did ‘Russian Bar’ with my parents, a discipline with a pole between two people and then there’s somebody in the middle who gets tossed up and down and thrown in the air. You really are putting your life in someone else’s hands, and there’s so much fine tuning. You have to breathe together.”

As close as you were then, years later your paths eventually led you to different countries. Melody, you now live in Finland, and Lily, you live in Rotterdam. Why did you both decide to leave the US and study at Codarts in Rotterdam?

Lily: “Codarts had the opportunity to really create solo work. Having handstands and acrobatics as my own discipline, I wanted to figure out what my own artistic voice was.”

Melody: “There is also much more infrastructure here and support for small circus companies to make work. It’s particularly true for emerging artists. There are a lot of opportunities for people who are just starting out in the field.”

You actually never had been direct partners in circus while growing up. Melody, you partnered with your sister Juniper, and Lily, you partnered with your parents. Why did you decide to work together after all?

Melody: “We both do handstands. We both do acrobatics, but we have very different approaches physically.”

Lily: “We wanted to find out where we overlap and where we can learn from each other.”

Melody: “This way, we also got a little window into where each of us were in our artistic careers, I guess.”

What happened the first time you practiced together?

Melody: “There was already this innate familiarity. We knew each other’s timing, the way we breathe, and there was instant trust coming from that. But I was also struck by Lily’s maturity and autonomy in the process. This project was the first thing she did after she graduated.”

Lily: “There was this connection and awareness, like a tingly feeling when you’re across the room but can still sense where the other person is. And I also encountered this part of Melody that had gained so much experience and now shared that knowledge with me. It’s such a fun thing that we get to work together because we know each other, but we also meet each other in a different way.”

Your new performance is built around meeting each other in ritual. Why is that?

Melody: “We talked about how we are so connected, even though we are such different people. We realized that ritual is the thing that connects us, that brings us back to our base and to a place we can always return to and depart from on our separate paths. We chose the daily ritual our grandmother had, which was having tea, and to which we were always invited. It was a place where you could gather, check in, and find your footing again. That has been essential in our connection, having these touch points.”

Lily: “Through coming back to the same repeating moment, you watch the evolution of yourself and of each other.”

How can rituals help us?

Melody: “I think rituals are so important in helping us find meaning in the everyday. In our lives, there weren’t a lot of constants. So you actually have to make the rituals for yourself to find something to hold onto. For us, circus was that thing. It was the new way we entered every place, the way we connected with people wherever we went. But it could also be a cup of tea. It can be anything. It’s grounding, a reference point, and always a small transformation.”

Do you have a new shared ritual now?

Lily: “We have something that we do before the show every time where we both cartwheel into a handstand and shift our weight from the right side to the left side, perfectly in sync. Then we go away from one another and meet in another part of the space to do another handstand. We go through this sequence of movements without needing to talk at all. We know the choreography, the timing, and it’s our warm-up together to find each other.”

After years apart, they meet again on Friday March 20 during Cirque Mania. Not only as sisters, but as collaborators and a very promising circus duo.