2019 | Arts + Entertainment Circus Sarasota

“It’s work — it’s not easy,” Cyr wheel performer Valérie Inertie says. “There are a lot of challenges, especially being a woman soloist.”

The Cyr wheel is a large aluminum ring resembling an oversized Hula-Hoop. Circus performers step onto the ring and use its momentum to execute challenging spins and inversions while it’s moving.

Asked what it feels like to be inside it, Inertie says it’s like being in a roller coaster car making loops around a track.

Inertie, a Canadian now living in Berlin, is a former gymnast who stumbled upon the Cyr wheel in 2004. The discipline was new at the time (it was invented by Daniel Cyr in the ’90s), and she was teaching gymnastics at the École de cirque de Québec, just a couple hours from Montreal-based Cirque Éloize where it was being experimented with.

She met Cyr himself and dived right in with him as her mentor, becoming one of the early pioneers of the discipline (she was the first Cyr wheel artist to perform outside of the Cirque Éloize).

Inertie was attracted to the discipline as a unique display of strength and artistic beauty, and her gymnastics background helped her with both those aspects, along with spatial orientation, flexibility and balance, the other key elements involved.

After her first six months of learning, Inertie developed “enough vocabulary of movement” to create a three-and-a-half minute routine on the wheel. Now, she travels the world with it, constantly developing her act.

Inertie says the biggest challenge of being a traveling performer is having to constantly acclimate to not only a new culture and climate, but every new venue’s floor and its surface, inclination and grip. Rehearsals are important for not only refining her act, but for safety reasons so she knows how to navigate the wheel on every new floor.

Although she says it’s hard to be constantly on the road away from her loved ones, Inertie wouldn’t have it any other way.

“We’re connected — me and my wheel were meant to be together,” she says. “I don’t know what else I’d do (career-wise).