Lucy Eden’s ‘Circus of the Self’ Blends Juggling and Gender Identity
Trans performer Lucy Eden juggles a wealth of talents in her autobiographical show "Circus of the Self" at Spooky Action
Poised to juggle her past and present, her fears and joys, in the one-woman autobiographical show Circus of the Self, Lucy Eden will also be juggling her two favorite props.
“I’m using balls and knives,” Eden says, grinning. “And there’s also some unicycling, some balance elements. I like to balance things on my face. It’s one of my favorite elements of juggling.”
So is comedy, which the performer blends with poetry and first-person narrative to relate her own origin story — someone who is trans and grew up in rural south Georgia, before relocating to the Bay Area.
The former English major now has a full-time career as a street performer and comedy juggler, having honed the circus skills she initially picked up. “[It’s] a hobby born out of a desperate need for a coping mechanism,” she says.
Known these days as Lucy Juggles, those skills didn’t come quickly. “It definitely took me a little while to figure out,” Eden says. “Because I taught myself from a little kit of like three beanbags in a plastic tube, with a little single-page insert of ‘Step 1, 2, 3, here’s how you juggle.’ That’s not really the best way to learn because it leaves a lot up to interpretation.”
But you can’t beat practice and repetition, and Eden brought another experience to the table. “I was always a pretty big video gamer as a kid,” she recalls. “So a lot of the hand-eye coordination, reflexes, and problem-solving sort of feels like pretty direct parallels.”
Having mastered her skills to the level that she was a Top-40 ranked juggler, according to the International Jugglers’ Association, Eden eventually turned her creative energies towards integrating her circus talents with her long-held interest in memoir and nonfiction.
“That idea of telling a personal story has always been a big draw for me,” she says. “And there’s also a pretty strong tradition in juggling of what we would call the comedy juggling format, where you’re talking to the crowd, telling jokes, and doing tricks. And that’s sort of the basis of every street performer.”
In Circus of the Self, Eden uses the format to boldly broach discussions of transphobia and mental health, among other issues of identity, gender, and acceptance. “Those topics are rooted in my own experience,” Eden says, offering that their treatment in the context of the show is modeled after the idea of finding the universal in the specific.
“I guess that’s part of what I am aiming to do, is [take on] some of these broader universal things, that are so large in our national rhetoric right now, but that I think a lot of people who don’t have a direct experience with don’t really understand in a specific way, and don’t realize how these things play out in individual lives,” she says.
“My approach to it, is to show as much of my personal experience and my personal self as I can, because I have not ever met a trans person who has not experienced transphobia. It is sadly and shockingly normalized.”
Circus of the Self: A Show about Queer Joy, Juggling & Identity runs May 29 to June 6 at the Universalist National Memorial Church, 1810 16th St. NW. Tickets are $15 to $35, with discounts for students, seniors, and theatre industry artists/admin. Call 202-248-0301, or visit www.spookyaction.org.
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