At the European Youth Circus in Wiesbaden 2024, her aerial ropes performance was one of the surprises: 21-year-old Amelie Kamps neither comes from a circus family nor did she attend any well-known circus school. But when she was awarded with the German Variety Theater Prize in Wiesbaden, she already had her next big engagement in the bag. The contracts for Flic Flac's Christmas show in Erfurt had already been signed. I met Amelie there in the foyer to talk about her path to acrobatics between two shows.
It began when she was 14 years old, also in a Christmas circus. At that time, however, she was still sitting in the audience at the Xanten Christmas Circus, not far from her hometown of Kevelaer in North Rhine-Westphalia. There, the Casselly family, who run the Christmas circus, handed out flyers for their youth circus project in the summer. Amelie was immediately enthusiastic and imagined becoming an artist. So her mother signed her up for the holiday project. Could she have imagined what this step would entail?
When Amelie took part in the summer project with a friend the following summer, she didn't just see it as a holiday pastime, but took it seriously. "I thought they were really training there," she says. In the first year she learned trapeze, and the year after that she learned you ground acrobatics. But she had barely found the two areas that she enjoyed when she was already too old for the youth circus.
An incident followed that seems to be typical of Amelie's attitude to life: there is no such thing as can't. "Then I simply gathered up all my courage, approached the circus director Jonny Casselly junior and asked if he could train me," she remembers. Casselly agreed and the training could begin. It started with strength training to create the conditions for professional aerial acrobatics. Then she was given an aerial ring. Amelie began to travel after the circus, which continued to tour after the summer project. "It was often in the area, my parents always drove me there," she says, "sometimes once a month, sometimes once a week." She was going to school at the time and used every free moment to train. Amelie was lucky that her father had a large hall where she could attach a hanging point for aerial acrobatics and train for one to two hours a day.
Jonny Casselly junior gave her lots of tips and Amelie continued to work on herself using video recordings of her training until they put everything together to form a number for Jonny Cassely's Christmas Circus 2019. That was how Amelie had her first performance. More were to follow in Xanten, including a cradle act together with Jonny Casselly's daughter.
She tried out a lot of things, and Amelie was fascinated by the straps, as she reports: "Then I told my boyfriend that I would love to do a number with them." Her boyfriend is no stranger to the circus world: Karim Messoudi, the youngest member of the "Messoudi Brothers", who have performed their hand-to-hand acrobatics in many circus arenas and on various variety stages. At the time, he was employed by the GOP and created her number with Amelie within two weeks. He did the choreography, and the GOP proved to be very helpful: "We even had the GOP team film it and that became my application video."
In her number, Amelie wears an all-white dress, which is untypical for an aerial straps act. "The idea is that I sleep," she explains, "and somehow I end up in a kind of dream world." To the song "Leave a Light on," a light shines down the straps from the top. "Illuminated" in this way, Amelie embarks on a four-minute, smoothly flowing sequence of tricks, before slipping back from the dream world as she falls asleep.
For Flic Flac, Amelie had to adapt her number; the music and intro had to follow the show's specifications. She can't sleep at the beginning because, due to a change on the stage, she starts from the audience. The show was put together over four days of rehearsals, but only about half an hour of that was left to rehearse each act.
Amelie has already gotten used to the fast-paced routines of the classic circus and finds something positive in the change. "It was totally spontaneous. Before that, I was at the GOP with my aerial ring act, and the day before I left I was sent my song," she says, "I just listened to it in the car and then rehearsed it twice here on site and it worked. At first I thought 'oh no' and now the music and I have become friends."
Amelie feels very comfortable at Flic Flac and appreciates the sense of community in the cast, where artists from various countries come together for three weeks and share more than just the work. She uses the breaks between her performances to study for her degree, because parallel to her life as an artist she is studying marketing management in her first year. And that is not her only parallel activity. She also works as a model and recently started her own business with yoga courses. How does she manage it all? "Modeling is usually at the weekend. When it comes to acrobatics, I concentrate more on Christmas and galas. And I give my yoga courses in the evenings after university," she explains her time management.
She is currently working on a new number. It will be a floor act in which she wants to combine two of her passions, acrobatics and yoga. Amelie likes to get inspiration for her performances from Instagram. This was also the case with her aerial straps act. In contrast to many classic strength-based acts, she wanted to include elements of contortion. It was a mixture of tricks that she saw other artists do while scrolling through Instagram.
With her engagement at Flic Flac, one of Amelie's dreams has already come true. Where would she like to perform in the future? "I think the Moulin Rouge is great," is the first thing that comes to her mind. But for now, her goal is to work at a Christmas circus again next winter, perhaps a little closer to home or together with her boyfriend. She doesn't have any concrete plans yet. There is no doubt, however, that Amelie will follow her path in the circus world.
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