Spotlights and Lights Out-- Get to Know 3 Circus Super Moms

Circus News

Spotlights and Lights Out– Get to Know 3 Circus Super Moms

With thriving careers and families, circus mothers seem to have the best of both worlds. But just because they can do so much on their own, it doesn’t mean that they don’t need support networks. Circus artists and mothers Gasya, Holly Treddenick, and Ginger Ana Griep-Ruiz share life lessons from parenting and performing.

A performer’s life is hard enough without carrying two children on your shoulders, but these three circus women do it all. Juggling busy careers—onstage and off— with family life, they don many hats as artists, performers, directors, athletes, business owners, wives, and mothers. They might even wear all of those hats at once. Dedicated in all walks, their passion and their patience are matched only by their love of family (not to mention their amazing family photos). Despite the bumps and hard choices, they’re grateful to be on the paths they’re on… even if that path sometimes becomes a tightrope.

Without further ado, let’s meet these Circus Super Moms!

Mother and acrobat Gasya Atherton does a hand-stand with bent legs. One of her children is on her back, the other is between her arms.

Gaukhar Atherton, known as Gasya, was born in Kazakhstan on July 31, 1988. Raised in Almaty, she joined Cirque du Soleil at the age of 17. Since then, she’s performed in 5 CDS shows: “Varekai” Big Top Touring show (2006-2010), “IRIS” Hollywood (2011-2013), “Paramour” on Broadway, Lyric Theaty (2016-2018), “Paramour” Das musical, Stage Entertainment theater, Hamburg (2018-2020), and “JOYÀ” – Riviera Maya (2020- present). She also performed as a guest artist at the 84th Academy Awards in 2012. Gasya is married to fellow Cirque du Soleil performer Andrew Atherton; they have 2 kids together, 9 and 7 years old.

In Femme du Feu Creations

Holly Treddenick is balancing many, many things, all the time. She’s the artistic director of Femme du Feu Creations, a charitable circus organization founded in Toronto in 2003; they moved out it of Toronto just before the pandemic hit, and now live in a smaller town. First trained as a dancer in Toronto, Holly came into circus after working as a professional dancer, and now bridges the worlds between them as an artist. She is the mother of two kids a year and a half apart, ages 9 and 7, as well as being a wife and daughter.

In costume from Cirque du Soleil's Mystique, Ginger Griep-Ruiz smiles in a picture with her daughter

Ginger Griep-Ruiz was born and raised in the grit and whimsy of a traveling American circus before moving to Toronto, Canada, where her family founded the city’s first circus school. Originally a tightwire walker, Ginger’s career led her to aerial tissue, where she climbed up (pun intended) out of tradition and onto the stages of Cirque du Soleil, where she performed her revolutionary signature aerial act in six productions over 15 years. In addition to her work on stage as a principal aerialist, she is a two-time Cirque du Soleil innovation grant recipient, acrobatic performance designer, choreographer, and award-winning photographer. Ginger’s strengths converge in art, movement, and music; goofball, clever ideas; and elegant design. She is the writer of short stories, a keen ideation partner, a natural project manager, and an innovator who savors the process of creative collaboration.

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We asked these three superwomen to weigh in on matters of motherhood: striking the balance between family fun, and managing their careers and lives; how they’ve grown along their journeys, and where they hope to see their children and their worlds grow with them. Here’s what they had to say.

What are your favorite activities to do with your family?

Atherton family in workout gear
The Atherton family

Gasya: I, along with my husband, do a variety of activities with the kids, ranging from gymnastics to skateboarding. We also include a lot of creative development, such as art, singing, and dancing. Our goal is to educate them to live a healthy, active lifestyle, which should be both fun and fulfilling for them.

Holly: There’s a lot… we love spending time together, doing whatever it is. One thing we like is getting out in nature. We love to hike, in any season. We in a small town with a big canal that’s beautiful for swimming, and now that the weather’s warm, we love to swim, to paddleboard there. But where we live now doesn’t have much opportunity for arts engagement, so we like taking the kids to events around Quebec, Toronto, and wherever. We try to take them to a spectrum of arts… as well as circus, they’ve seen political art, early-years art, galleries, live music, DIY shows.

Ginger: Travel. I love exploring new places, cultures, foods, and languages with my family. Having the opportunity to discover together, to get lost and find our ways, helps soften the parent/child power dynamic. I also love to learn new things together; I want them to know it’s ok to be a beginner. We like to play piano, sing, dance, cook, draw and be wild together.

How did motherhood help you discover more about yourself as a performer?

Gasya: Being a mother has taught me to take each day one at a time. You learn very quickly that your time is no longer your own, and a schedule can, and most often will, be broken. I’ve learned to be more patient and relaxed at work. Things that bothered me before, no longer seem that important. Kids are very good at teaching you to just enjoy the simple things life has to offer.

Holly: Becoming a mother has made me understand myself more. By better understanding myself as a person, I know myself better as an artist. One big thing is the time factor– I have less time for everything, and for myself. I have to be reassessing all the time, what are my values? What’s the thing I want to focus on the most?

Family hiking with the Treddenicks
Family hiking with the Treddenicks

Motherhood has helped me clarify what that is, and that’s always changing as I change, as the world changes, as my kids change. Even so, I work toward those goals and always keep my values in mind. I ask what my priorities are, and stay clear that I’m working toward those goals. As an artist, it’s brought clarity to my practice and helped me be more critical and more questioning of it.

My ideas of who I am as a performer have also changed. My oldest kid’s 9 and a half, so I’m a little bit into the game of parenthood. I’m 45. I’m a mother. I don’t train like I did; I’m not 20. It’s really different. I find circus, especially in Canada, is very young, and a lot of the values are placed more on virtuosic skill. My interests as an artist and a performer are not so much aligned with virtuosic skill and more about storytelling, conveying an idea, sharing an experience with the audience. I want to see— and share—more than the skill. And I’m more and more interested in seeing artists with older bodies— different bodies, different stories, different artistic intentions.

But as I age, it’s sort of hard to separate me as a person from me as a parent from me as an artist. It’s all so intertwined.

Ginger: While it might sound a little negative, pregnancy taught me how special it is to not be pregnant. It also taught me how hard it is to be an aerialist. Coming back from my first child, I was BLOWN AWAY when I couldn’t instantly invert on my fabric; a move I have been doing my entire life was now completely impossible. Returning to aerial after having a baby taught me humility, resilience… it taught me just how much I was really capable of, and to honor my body.

As a performer, my children taught me how to let my guard down, to be an idiot, to be completely in the moment. And, again, this sounds a little negative… but becoming a parent has taught me to savor the totality of aerial—one of the only places in my busy life where I am allowed to focus entirely on one thing.

How do you balance your parenting with your performing?

Gasya: Again, it’s about balancing life as a whole. You never want the scales to weigh too heavily on either side. The children are the most important thing in my life, but I also know I have to look after myself, my profession, and my marriage. I have an amazing family around me. My husband and I share very similar values as to what’s important in life. We support each other both at home and at work. It’s important that we stay open and honest with each other. Yes, we have our challenges, but we overcome them together. I feel very lucky to have this support.

Holly: I don’t know if balance really exists, or if it’s just a thing we all occasionally pass through. I’m at a midcareer point in my life– combining that with parenting and various forms of caregiving, I don’t know if there ever really is balance. It’s more about prioritizing. When I became a parent, I realized that every decision I made was also something I chose not to take, and that became quite critical in how I was living. Balance isn’t something I strive for anymore because it feels so unattainable.

For me, it’s more about finding sustainability instead… how to keep making this happen. How to stay in the arts and keep creating, how to keep using circus in my practice—and how to involve my kids in what I’m doing. These are all questions I ask myself, and they’re always changing.

Taking it one day at a time, I always try to keep the big picture in mind. I’m always trying to figure out what the small steps are to get to those big goals. I’m pretty strict with myself in terms of making a list and laying out priorities, and trying to achieve the highest priorities on a day-to-day basis. Sometimes it means not getting my training done, or training instead of doing something else. I think about what’s coming up, and then decide where I need to step back, for now… and where I can ask others to step in who align with my values. That includes caregivers that I want my kids to be around, that I want to influence my kids.

It’s about knowing my goals—big-picture goals, the macro and the micro—and really prioritizing: knowing what needs to happen when, and being okay with letting things not happen. It’s being organized, and having a team around me. Finding a team of caregivers that have the same vision in mind.

Ginger Griep-Ruiz
Ginger Griep-Ruiz

Ginger: I am no longer performing; however, I am creating acts and working on projects. I try to bring my children into the creative process, giving them an opportunity to see the concept from the beginning, inviting them to share their ideas, and encouraging them to pursue their own goals.

Reflecting back on the years when I was parenting and performing full-time (10 shows a week 48 weeks a year). I can honestly say it was exceptionally challenging and exhausting. In many ways, going to work was the easier of the two jobs; shows offered a mental break from the demands of raising a small child. But at the same time, being away from my daughter created a lot of guilt and stress that made performing harder.

I remember, when my oldest was about 4, she came to see me in Mystere and throughout the very quiet opening of my act, I heard her little voice from house left: “Hi mom”… “HI, mom”… (I winked at her)… “Mom!”… “MOM!?!” I finally broke character, waved, and blew her a kiss. The audience clapped, and I did my act thinking how special it was that the audience knew my daughter was there and that I was performing for her. Letting down that barrier and letting the audience see me not as a Cirque superhero, but as woman and a mother… that was a special moment.

What’s been the biggest challenge for you as a mother working in the entertainment industry?

Gasya: My most difficult challenge was, by far, getting my body and head back into shape. I knew I wanted to perform again, and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy. In the beginning, I had to undergo surgery to repair a hernia and my separated abdominals. It was a slow and very painful recovery, but I was determined and patient. Seven years and three Cirque du Soleil shows later, I feel I’m in my best shape ever, both mentally and physically.

Holly: Becoming a parent is a huge change, physically, mentally, spiritually, and socially. All of that is a challenge. I’ve worked my whole life in a certain way. Becoming a parent, these things have changed… and continue to change. Learning to manage that constant change is a challenge, too. It means managing expectations of myself, managing time, managing change… managing my own organization.

Holly in Femme du Feu Creations show “Tweet Tweet” (photo by Brian Medina)

Being a parent is a gift. My kids are the most awesome thing that’s ever happened. They’re the best people to hang out with. I want to be with them. Being an artist, and being able to live in the arts sector my whole life, has been such a privilege for me, especially being part of circus. I want to foster that for my kids…. I want to bring them into the circus, and share the gifts and treasures with them it can bring to someone’s life, without forcing them in any specific direction. I want to foster them in any direction they want to go… while also gently nudging them toward circus and the arts.

But there are certain disparities, too— financially, and in terms of time. There’s an equity side to parenting. There are times I make less money than others on a project because I’m the only one who has to pay for childcare, whereas other artists don’t always have the same expense. 20 bucks an hour, if you’re working a full day, can be a lot of money after two weeks… and usually, it comes out of pocket.

The pandemic has brought out a lot of these inequities, too. At Zoom meetings, I’d hear other artists talk about, “Is anyone else so exhausted from working out all the time? Doing all these classes with teachers around the world? I’m so tired.” And I’d be like, no, I’m at home managing my two kids doing online homeschool.

All these things make me have to evaluate: do I want to stay in the arts? Because, if I want to stay, this is the reality. And so, what do I want to say as an artist? If I want to be in the arts, my reality is, I’m not going to be training all day, every day. Nor do I want to, because I want to be a parent. So am I still relevant as an artist? Am I still relevant in circus?

I believe that, yes, there’s an important place for a whole spectrum of artists in circus— in any art form. There’s room for a whole spectrum that come with different backgrounds, with different voices.

I’ve had this conversation with other artists, too– peers in my age group, fellow parents, who are surrounded by all these incredible, young artists in Quebec. Are we still relevant? Yes, we are. But it’s something we struggle with. Right now, we don’t have many role models in circus who are older bodies, still performing in their 40s-50s.

Ginger: I have never had a job that wasn’t either at night or somewhere far from home. I can definitively say the biggest change for me is finding work that allows me to be both a creator of live entertainment and a parent who picks her kids up from school and puts them to sleep.

How do you think the entertainment industry could be more supportive of mothers?

The Athertons at the beach

Gasya: Absolutely! We don’t follow the same schedule as most professions out there. Working at night does bring a whole new set of challenges for parents. As I mentioned earlier, it does take us longer to get back into peak physical shape, in order to do what we do. Again, I consider myself very fortunate, in that I have an amazing family around me. We always make it work!

Holly: There’s a lot of discussion about parenting in circus. How do we support parents? Like I said, I’ve definitely been on the side where I’m hired as an artist and have to shuffle childcare. When my kids were babies, it was an added challenge how to manage nursing them, or if I had to be away for a longer day. At the same time, I’ve also been on the side of running an organization and hiring people with children, and asking how I could support them. Knowing it’s challenging for them, and from the organizational standpoint…. arranging schedules gets hard because you’re managing the children’s schedules as well, and that gets complicated. There’s also a financial component to it. How do we manage money so there’s funds for childcare?

In terms of the financial disparities and equitability– one, from an organization’s perspective, reaching out to parents and opening the conversation about how to make a safe space for them. Then they can take that first step toward supporting parents through things like childcare and flexible schedules. But change happens from both directions. For artist parents, it’s about advocating for the support that’s needed, and speaking up about what their needs are. And it’s important, on all sides, to provide safe spaces for artists to share what they’re going through, and organizations to respond.

Ginger:  To provide a little more context, maternity leave is not a government requirement in the USA. For women with good (typically employer-provided) health insurance, pregnancy falls into the category of an FMLA leave or disability. That classification entitles a new mom to 3 months of unpaid leave post-delivery.

Maternal inequality is, by all accounts, just one of the many systemic social issues in the USA. That said, big companies— including circus companies— utilize private insurance to support female employees through pregnancy, and while it is still called “disability leave,”, we are paid about 66% of our wage, capped at varying amounts by state. I am very lucky to have had financial support through both of my pregnancies, unlike many women in this country.

Looking at this issue through the lens of my experience with big circus companies, I have had two children (2011 in Tokyo, and 2017 in Las Vegas). My experiences both times were very different. In one I was fully supported by my employer and my coach; in the other, I was not.

Alice, circus performer Ginger Griep-Ruiz's daughter, on her laptop backstage in a gymnastics training studio
Alice Griep-Ruiz backstage

What the entertainment industry needs to understand is that coming back to a show is not the same as going back to an office. Female artists are athletes, and should be supported with scientifically backed postnatal care, not weight-loss regiments. Having a child is a function of life. No woman should be forced to choose between her career and having a family—male performers certainly aren’t.

In the near future, I would love to see studios de-stigmatize bringing your baby to training. It could be done by simply saying, “Hey, new moms, you’re welcome to bring your babies here between this and this hour,” and having a couple of pack n’ plays around on standby. Additionally, I would love to see microgrants for new moms who need help getting back in shape for circus. If I could really move mountains, I’d love to see schools/childcare on touring productions; employer-provided daycare centers for kids whose families are working in shows 350 nights a year; and a change in classification—pregnancy is not a disability.

Supporting moms and families means supporting the next generation of coaches, designers, directors, administrators, and, in the case of many circus kids (myself included), the next generation of performers. Circus needs moms.

How do you think that being a performer mother determines the trajectory of your children’s careers?

Atherton family portrait

Gasya: My husband and I will not make our children follow in our footsteps. It’s important to us that they know this from a very early age. We only want to inspire them to follow their dreams. Every time they see us perform, we remind them of that. We want them to know that it will take hard work, consistency, and dedication to reach the top of whatever path they will choose. We don’t tell them! We show them!

Holly: That’s a really big question! My first answer is I don’t know… kids are gonna do what they’re gonna do. They’re gonna be their own people and their own personalities. As I said, I do think there’s a lot of great inspiration in the arts—a lot of diverse voices my kids are exposed to, being in an arts family. I hope that helps them develop their creativity and their critical thinking. And being in circus, I know they’re developing their physical literacy, and they’re doing it organically in their own ways.

Growing up in the arts will influence who they are as people: the way they think, the way they see the world. Whatever road they go on in their careers, I hope it serves them well.

Ginger: We are not pushing our children to be part of aerial, circus, or the entertainment industry. I would never sleep knowing they are out in the world dangling at heights like I did. They have both been exposed to shows, entertainers, and daring skills from a very young age. They may seek out similarly animated professional spaces, but ultimately, if having two children has taught me anything, it’s that they are born who they are.

Any advice for other circus moms out there?

Gasya: Yes! There is never a right time to start a family. If it’s something you really want, then it’s something you can make happen. It is possible to have both and flourish.

Holly: Keep going. Follow your dreams. Your kids are the most important thing in your life—give them lots of love. And nourish yourself, too. Prioritize yourself, so you can support your family in the best way possible. As an artist, that usually means fostering your art practice in whatever way that is, even if it’s training in the studio for four or five hours a day. When you’re healthy– physically, mentally, spiritually— you can give back and be the best parent you can be.

Ginger: Just because you are a mom, it doesn’t mean you’re not also all the things you were before you had a child. That said, you don’t have to be all the things you were before—you are allowed to change!

Seek out a coach or physiotherapist that has postnatal experience and will challenge you in the right way. From early on, get your baby used to the gym environment; this will help you a lot as they grow. Do not rush back. It takes nine (or, let’s face it, 10) months to have a baby, and it takes more than three to get back into your body, and sometimes even longer to get back into your head.

Never let anyone box you into that corner of, “You’re a mom now, and you have to do x, y & z.” You are not a noun; you are a super-loving, multitasking badass.

child-made card to a circus performer mom
Card courtesy of Alice Griep-Ruiz
Carolyn Klein
Content Writer -United States
Carolyn Klein is a writer, poet, and circus fan from the Washington, D.C, area. Writing stories about the circus has been a dream of hers since getting introduced to circus fiction around 2014. She recently completed her B.A. in English and Creative Writing, magna cum laude, at George Mason University. As a new member of the Circus Talk journalism team, Carolyn looks forward to learning as much as she can about the industry and people behind circus.
Images shared by Gasya, Holly, and Ginger. Picture of Holly credited to Brian Medina.
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Carolyn Klein

Carolyn Klein is a writer, poet, and circus fan from the Washington, D.C, area. Writing stories about the circus has been a dream of hers since getting introduced to circus fiction around 2014. She recently completed her B.A. in English and Creative Writing, magna cum laude, at George Mason University. As a new member of the Circus Talk journalism team, Carolyn looks forward to learning as much as she can about the industry and people behind circus.