Chloé St-Jean-Richard

Born between two Cirque du Soleil tours, Chloé has circus in her blood. She performed for the first time as a professional circus artist in 2001, at age 9, alongside her father and aunt. During her 19 years performing and almost 800 shows, she trained with many renowned coaches, including André St-Jean, Julia Pohling, Wolfgang Bientzle, Véronique Thibeault, Sarah Poole, Éliane Domanski, Valérie Doucet and Nico Lagarde.

As a young girl, she practiced dance, gymnastics, silks (and other aerial apparatuses) and german wheel, and later graduated college in acting. In 2009, she attended the prestigious École Nationale de Cirque de Montréal, where she graduated but never really felt at home. In 2010, she started autonomous training at La Caserne, where she focused on aerial silks. From there she worked and toured with many circus companies and co-owned one in Texas, but she had grown unhappy with her training, her acts and her art in general.

In 2017, she made a radical career change and became a welder. She worked at Iltech and Scène Éthique, where Cirque du Soleil stages and sets are made, among other things. Less than a year later, she came back to the world of circus. In search of new ideas and inspiration, she created her very own apparatus, the tissangle, to deconstruct the traditional aesthetics of aerial silks and play with shapes, heights and dimensions.