Emily
Prior-Willeard is a bioveterinary scientist, a circus performer and a MSc Performing Arts Medicine student at UCL based at the ISEH.
While
helping with the horses at Giffords Circus — a traditional English
circus from the Cotswolds — Prior-Willeard was able to put her joint
hypermobility to new uses. Although she already knew her joints could
move beyond the usual range of motion, her exposure to circus life
subsequently allowed her to experiment with aerial hoop, contortion,
silks, corde lisse and static trapeze. “I’m a dislocator,” she says.
“One of the acts I do is to go through a tennis racket. You’re bending
to such extreme limits: flexibility comes down to your muscles, your
ligaments, your tendons, the way you’re built, hip and shoulder socket
depth.”
Prior-Willeard’s life and passion is now the circus, and she can be
found in the Giffords Circus UK tour every summer. Yet it’s an
under-recognised side of the life of a performer that has led her to
UCL. “As performers, a lot of our identity and our self-value is
external; we often find it hard to internally validate our success. So
we are always pushing to be better and more amazing, to the point that
we are doing such risk-taking acts to draw in the crowds. It’s down to
us as performers to provide that entertainment, but with these risks
obviously come injuries.”
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