Mandy is after a poetic, illumined circus. A circus that takes its heart from honesty in form and the vulnerable power of the human body. Mandy is fascinated by secrets, the half-hidden, by in-between spaces and anything that can be climbed, spun, dodged, rolled over, or danced in. Mandy believes in digging low and flying high, in the very small and the very large, in the unexpected and the deeply investigated. 

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A dancer from age three, Mandy slid sideways from the world of contemporary postmodern dance into the world of circus. She began her aerial journey doing guerilla acrobatic dance in and around trees, and has since studied and performed in rope, fabric, lyra, sling, and unconventional apparati of all kinds. Her dual studies of dance and comparative religion have spooled out into a practice of circus as embodied philosophy, using the body as a way to pose questions of the universe and explore possibilities of being, both individual and collective. She has an abiding obsession with tying herself in knots, with bird women, with unexpected intimacies, with the subterranean and the monstrous.

Mandy has performed and taught aerial arts, contemporary dance, and composition nationally and internationally, from Denver to Atlanta to New York to the Kennedy Center in D.C to Gujarat, India. She has performed with ground and air companies including Frequent Flyers, Control Group Productions, Upsidown Productions, Sinecdoche Dance, Mike Kelley, and others and is the resident Director of Circus for Double Blind Productions. She is currently on-staff coaching aerial technique and fitness with Frequent Flyers of Colorado, where she coaches beginners all the way through students in their Professional Training Program with a passion for anatomical efficiency and finding windows to individual expression. Most recently, she has taken this passion to MSU Denver as a professor of functional anatomy for movement artists.

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