ON STAGE
Cirque du Soleil's Quidam
When: Sept. 5 to 9
Where: Save-on-Foods Memorial Centre
Tickets: $45-100 regular; discounts for children, families, seniors, students, military. cirquedusoleil.com/quidam or 250-220-7777.
Tanya Burka's gig operating a nuclear reactor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wasn't anything to be scoffed at.
But the fact that she couldn't help climbing on the equipment and doing handstands suggested her calling may be elsewhere - namely, the circus.
"That was the moment I realized I wasn't quite ready for a desk job," the self-proclaimed math and science nerd said. "I'd be sitting in the reactor doing eight-or 16-hour shifts, looking for anything I could climb."
About a decade later, Burka suspends from great heights as the aerial contortion act in silk, as part of Cirque du Soleil's Quidam. And although nuclear engineering and circus acrobatics may seem like divergent career paths on the surface, Burka says she applies her physics training regularly.
"A lot of how the discipline works is in how you wrap the fabric around you and how you create figures that work," she said. "A lot of that, bizarrely, comes down to engineering things. You have to be able to sit there and pick it apart: Why does it work? Is it going to be consistent? At what point could this be dangerous?"
When creating movements unique to her, she uses processes of experimentation and troubleshoots with the same part of her brain she used in school, she said.
Burka's 12-year background in competitive gymnastics helped, too. But the seed of the circus was planted between high school and university, when she completed an internship at the San Francisco School of Circus Arts and learned Chinese acrobatics, contortion and static trapeze.
Upon leaving, a few of the teachers pulled her aside and told her that if she committed a few years to it, she could do it professionally.
"It was kind of this mindblowing idea, because everything in my life had been going in another direction," she said. "I thought I'd keep it in the back of my head while I did my degree and if I was still really attached to the idea after I had my bachelor's, then I could see where I could go."
In her senior year, she applied to circus school. Burka graduated from Montreal's Ãcole Nationale de Cirque in 2006 and has performed around the world - from the opening ceremonies at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver to the famed Adam & Eve Hotels in Turkey.
Though she grew up in Philadelphia, she now calls Vancouver home.
While Burka has cast off any shackles she may have worn in an unfulfilling career, her role in Quidam is one of another woman feeling claustrophobic. Quidam centres on a child named Zoé.
Bored and ignored by her parents, she seeks to fill the voids in her life with an imaginary world.
"For me, my act is an opportunity to explore what the mother is feeling. And what frustrations she deals with as a mother and the fact that she kind of feels locked into that role," she said.
As for her own desk job - it doesn't look like Burka will be heading back there anytime soon.
"I promised myself when I turned 30 I'd step back and evaluate where I've gotten with this," she said. That deadline came last year and passed - she was still having a good time, she decided, so she'd check back at 35.
"At the moment, I love working in the circus industry. I think it's so vital and it really engages me," she said. "Every day that I wake up, I'm so excited to do my job."
