A 15-minute walk southeast from Harvard Square sits a 5,000-square-foot studio gym where trapeze ropes hang from metal beams attached to the rafters. Hula hoops and giant metal cyr wheels lay against the walls while juggling clubs sit in crates in the corners of the room. Multicolored fabric aerial silks cascade from the ceiling 20 feet above.
In the center of the room, one silk is unbraided, the slack piled atop a thick blue mat. Julie Riney, a circus student, stands beside it, looking up. High above, hanging upside down, waist wrapped in silks is Alexis Hedrick, a 37-year-old circus artist and teacher who has hoisted her 5-foot-7-inch, 140-pound muscular body 10 feet in the air.
Without hesitation, Hedrick looks down at Riney and lets go with both hands. The silks unwind from her waist and her body spins rapidly before halting abruptly a few feet from the ground. With practiced ease, Hedrick unties herself and steps onto the mat, joining her student on the ground.
For 27 years Hedrick has trained and performed as a circus artist specializing in aerial ropes and cyr wheel, though her years of experience have also earned her talents in aerial silks, acrobatics, hoop diving and juggling. Since 2014, she has performed around the world and devoted the last 13 years of her life to teaching students of all levels, most recently at Esh Circus Arts in Somerville.
Since she was young, Hedrick has balanced two identities: an electric performer and a social introvert. On stage with spotlights illuminating her body, twisting through the air or spinning within the confines of a metal wheel, Hedrick has always had a strong physical presence. As soon as she places her feet firmly to the ground and gives her final bow, however, she reassumes a naturally shy and reserved demeanor.
She is not bold or loud or overly expressive. While some circus artists sport colorful hairstyles and outfits daily, Hedrick wears standard clothing and has dyed reddish brown hair, chopped short to ear-length; nothing that attracts stares like the flashy costumes she wears to perform. Throughout a long and often tumultuous career as a circus artist, however, Hedrick’s quiet side has never dulled her fiery passion for performance or prevented her from pursuing the craft she has loved since she was 10-years-old.
Hedrick was born in San Francisco in 1988 and raised by her mother and father – career financial planners – as an only child in Oakland. At the age of 5, Hedrick started gymnastics, working herself up to a competitive team by 8. When she was 10 years old, a youth circus called Splash started training in her hometown gym. Hedrick was intrigued and slightly distracted from her own gymnastic practice as the circus kids would make up stories, laugh and do tricks nearby. After trying a week-long circus summer camp Hedrick was hooked. She dropped out of gymnastics and enrolled in the circus troupe.
“I absolutely loved it the entire time. It was the most fun to train these different things…[juggling, acrobatic bicycle], tumbling, building pyramids,” Hedrick said. “It [was] something physically incredible that I didn’t even know I could do. The circus kids just looked like they were having more fun.”
After the spark was lit, Hedrick’s passion for circus kept burning. The young troupe would create performances from scratch, having control over everything from the music to the costumes. They would load up their van and travel to two or three places a year to debut their productions. According to Hedrick’s mother, Kathie Fagan, “they were some of the cleverest shows” she had ever seen.
“As soon as the lights came on, and it’s a real, honest to God show, as much as I wanted to watch other kids in the cast, I couldn’t. I honestly could not take my eyes off her,” Fagan said. “Whatever she does quietly, in 99% of her world, the 1% that she’s on stage, she’s riveting.”
In her time with Splash Youth Circus, the kids in Hedrick’s cohort called her “Ace,” partly because she was good at many skills and partly because she was always covered in ace bandages to support her various sprains.
Once in high school, she tried out for and joined the San Francisco Circus Center.For all four years, three days a week, Hedrick commuted more than an hour across the bay to train with coacheswho had performed with the Nanjing Acrobatic Troupe and Cirque du Soleil, among others.
After training in circus, being featured in an East Bay times article, and excelling in high school, Hedrick had a choice to make: go to college or continue circus school abroad. She tried for both, applying to 11 colleges and auditioning along with her acrobatic peers to one of the best circus institutions in the world, Ecole Nationale de Cirque in Montreal.
“She studied as if there was no circus, but she trained as if there was no college,” Fagan said. “The agreement we had was in May of her senior year of high school. The letters would come in from colleges and maybe circus school, and then she would have to make up her mind.”
Come spring however, the decision between the two was made for her. Montreal said no. Ten of the 11 universities she applied to said yes.
“Not getting in really hurt, but I got into lots of schools, so I think the academic side of me was like, ‘OK, you’ve done well here, let’s just go with that.’”
The next fall, her parents dropped her off at Vassar College inPoughkeepsie, New York, where, in 2010, she graduated with Bachelor of Arts in psychology and French. As it turned out, Hedrick’s move to college was not the end of her circus career. When she arrived at Vassar, the college had already-established a 10-year-long connection to the circus arts with their popular club: The Barefoot Fireflies.
In her second year with the Fireflies, Hedrick produced the organization’s first full-length indoor circus show, bringing together juggling, acrobatics and storytelling, reminiscent of her younger years with Splash youth circus in Oakland. The show is still produced annually, long after Hedrick graduated.
Straight out of college, Hedrick was offered a nearly two-year position as a research fellow for the National Institute of Health. She accepted the offer and also began teaching non-trapeze aerial arts at the Trapeze School New York in Washington D.C. Towards the end of her fellowship, however, she was re-considering her professional direction.
“[I] was like, ‘OK, [circus] is what I’m doing. I tried something else for a while. Now I know this is really what I want to be doing,” Hedrick said. “There was a point where [it was like] ‘it’s now or never.’”
So, instead of applying for a master’s degree in psychology, Hedrick, in the fall 2011, applied to study at the National Institute of Circus Arts in Melbourne and was accepted. She called her mother to tell her she was moving to Australia.
“She didn’t tell us she was applying…but she called to tell me she’d been accepted. That was fun,” Fagan said. “I think I realized she was done with [science].”
Fagan recalls that even when Hedrick was in high school she knew where she wanted to end up.
“She [was] humming this little song, saying, ‘Here’s my life plan: I’m going to finish high school, I’m going to go to college, I’m going to go to Australia, I’m going to go to the [National Institute of Circus Arts], yada yada yada. OK, you know, she’s 14,” Fagan said disbelievingly. “Guess what? She did it in that order, exactly.”
In February of 2012, Hedrick set out to finish her teenage aspiration. She was all in. To pay for her tuition and living expenses, Hedrick held three jobs as a waitress, as an assistant on a neurological study and a teacher at NICA. But early in her first year at NICA, she tore the labrum in her right shoulder and was “basically grounded,” Hedrick said.
“For someone like Alexis getting injured, it’s very difficult because it is her living and it is her joy,” said Naomi Goodman, a physical therapist and one of Hedrick’s longtime friends. “But she’s somebody with incredible, deep emotional resilience.”
In late 2013, after two full years of hard work and physical therapy, she received her advanced diploma specializing in aerial ropes, cyr wheel and comedy acrobatics.
Over the next 10 years, Hedrick bounced around from gig to gig doing events, shows, cruises and tours throughout the Mediterranean Sea, Indian Ocean, South Pacific, Europe and the U.S.
In early 2015, she made Boston her homebase between tours. While she had found work abroad, Hedrick’s professional life still wasn’t easy.Out of all the cold emails and applications she sends out, she is only accepted between 10% to 20% of the time.In 2020, she co-founded Circus 617, an organization created to support circus performance projects in Boston.
But her most consistent form of income is teaching at Esh Circus Arts, allowing her more stability during months where there is less freelance work.
Jen Light is a Bern Dibner professor at MIT and has been a student of Hedrick’s since 2019.
“I have been teaching for decades, so I am incredibly attuned to how people teach,” Light said. “[Hedrick] is very good at pushing at least me, but I presume other students, outside their comfort zones in a gentle way.”
In a similar sense, Hedrick often has to keep an eye out for how hard she is pushing herself. She is constantly thinking about balancing how much she can physically do with how much money she needs to make.
EllenWaylonis, the CEO and co-owner of Esh Circus Arts, established the center not only for people getting into circus but as a resource for professionals to fill in the gaps in their income and continue to do what they love.
“It’s like any other job where you’re not being hired as a full-time long-term employee, it’s a hustle. It’s a constant hustle,”Waylonis said. “You really do need to be looking for your own work all the time.”
For Hedrick an added difficulty is being away from home. After meeting her husband of nearly seven years, Greg Jukes, the couple has had to deal with living apart for long periods of time, exacerbated by Jukes’s own career as a touring musician.
Most recently, during Hedrick’s two-year contract with Cirque Bouffon in Germany, which ended this January, she toured between two and four months at a time.
“Touring apart from each other is lonely, and it can be tiring when you’re away from your person,” Jukes said. “She’s had to walk a much lonelier road. I’m specifically a chamber music player, and really am a collaborative artist, whereas Alexis is always selling her acts and selling herself. And I don’t have the spirit for it, and she does.”
Her husband is not the only person who notices Hedrick’s dedication.
“The circus life is not very easy. If you’re touring something, you are lonely, you’re by yourself for months, you are maybe living on a ship, or you’re helping build a circus tent every morning. It’s not glamorous all the time,” Sophia Hersceu, a co-founder of Circus 617, said. “I think a main quality I appreciate about Alexis is that her love for circus is very unwavering, [even] if she has experienced something negative.”
Today, after 27 years of showing up to practices, teaching lessons and performing all around the world, Hedrick has decided to slow down, in part because she still wants to have children. At 37-years-old, she has reached a point where her desire to tour is outweighed by her desire for security.
“(I’m going to) keep (on) trucking for a little bit longer. Yeah, I’m in a moment where I’m really starting to think about what kind of environments or travel that I do or don’t want to take part in,” Hedrick said. “(I’m) just at the point in life where stability is starting to be more appealing and focusing more on putting [down] roots and having a family.”
Most days though, Hedrick is still at the studio teaching or practicing. In the corner of the room, she will roll up the thick mat covering the floors, so it sits to the side like a giant blue hay bale. The bare concrete ground is unforgiving for a fall but perfect for practicing cyr wheel.
Hedrick pulls out her personal wheel – a heavy ring about 6 feet in circumference made from curved metal pipes fastened together with metal bolts – and jumps into its center, kicking off from the ground and spinning.
Headphones in, she lets the momentum take her around and around. At each pass, her body flows between poses: from crouching to reaching to doing the splits in air, occasionally she will swing the ring upside down. These moments are some of the most reflective for Hedrick, when she thinks about what’s next.
“What we do as performing artists is fleeting. It’s temporal. Sure, it can exist in video, but that’s not why we’re doing it,” Jukes said.“She believes in the power of performance to transform people’s lives and perspectives.”
So, while she considers her next move – like she has done so many times before – Hedrick will continue to do the two things she loves most: twirling inside a giant metal hoop, arms and legs moving gracefully to the music or hanging effortlessly in air wrapped in ropes high above onlookers below.
Main Image: Photo credit: Melis Kooyomjian
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This post was last modified on March 23, 2026 4:19 pm