Today we’d like to introduce you to Circe Rowan.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Circe. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My story is a bit strange — until I was in college, I thought I was going to be a mathematician. I’ve always picked up academic subjects very quickly, but the way I decipher them doesn’t mesh very well with the structure of most modern pedagogy. I was fast enough to compensate when I was young and the lessons were simple, but it became more and more difficult over time to translate between the linear structure of classes and the way I want to develop comprehension, which is to start with as much information as possible and stare at it until patterns jump out at me.
They wouldn’t feed me info fast enough for me to do it my way, and if I try to do it one step at a time without knowing the overall goal, I have no idea what I’m working toward, and get lost very quickly. I’m a stubborn cuss, so I made it all the way into undergrad before I realized that, as much as I love math, I did NOT get along well with math classes, and I was going to either ruin myself our flunk out before I got anywhere with it professionally.
After that, I spent most of my time flapping around uselessly, trying to figure out what I did mesh well with. I tried majoring in languages, but the university required 30 credits in my primary language and 20 credits in my secondary language for a degree, and the catalog didn’t offer that many hours of the two languages I wanted, French and Japanese. I tried visual communication — that is, graphic design and computer animation — but the major was so over-crowed that I was camped in the back of freshman classes trying to get an override signed when I had already taken so many electives I was a junior by credits.
Eventually, I ran out of funding and had to find something I could finish in a year or less, or leave without a degree. Somehow I settled on sociology, and you know, it was the easiest thing I ever did. All I was required to do was read a bunch of stuff, develop some opinions on it, and explain it to other people at great length. I could do that in my sleep, and frequently did, as I was slowly but surely giving up on the lifelong battle to keep myself on regular business hours. I have never coped well with early mornings, and so far as I could tell, neither did the sociology department. I had one professor who gave us the study guide for the first test on the first day, the guide for the second test at the first test, the third guide at the second test, and told us that if we liked our grade after the third exam, we didn’t have to show up for the final. I think he was secretly hoping that one day nobody would show up for lecture and he’d get a three hour lunch.
A sociology degree is economically useless, particularly out west. I always felt the only higher education that got any respect out there was STEM, and that only because you need those people to build your expensive widgets. The environment where I lived was also uncomfortably conservative, and I had never fit well. I stuck around for some years after graduation, having nowhere else in particular to go, and took whatever work I could find, almost all of it tedious clerical and retail jobs. I am for some reason physically unable to get up at 7 am on any kind of regular basis — I tell housemates now that if they wake me that early and I find out it’s not because the place is on fire, I will fix that. I’m fine on swing or graveyard shift, but mornings wreck me, and when you take the kind of crap work I could find, your schedule is at the whim of your manager. I hung on by my fingernails until the very last job I managed to find (and only got by lying and telling them I DIDN’T have a degree) suddenly eliminated the overnight shelf-stockers and decreed that all of us would now only be coming in at 4 in the morning, but also spending the last four hours of our shift working as sales clerks.
I hung on for six weeks, and that was about five and a half weeks longer than I should have done. I could not maintain a regular sleep schedule, and I hate positions like sales, where everyone and their brother is entitled to break my concentration at any time. It wrecks me in the same way as sleep-deprivation, so that was a double whammy. I broke down so hard I ended up in the emergency room. I waited for five hours to talk to a counselor, and I must have looked like an utter basket case, because they sent me home with a very, very large bottle of Xanax, and told me to stop doing whatever it was I was doing to get myself into that state, effective immediately.
There was really nothing left there for me. I was fairly pessimistic about my chances in life, so I decided I might as well move so I could at least starve to death somewhere nicer. I’d always liked the idea of Boston; we didn’t have cable when I was a kid, so I spent a lot of time planted in front of the TV watching PBS programming from good ol’ WGBH. A friend offered me a couch to sleep on, so I sold everything I could and booked a one-way flight.
After that, everything has been more or less a matter of saying ‘to hell with it’. I cannot possibly be worse off than I was right before I took off eastward. I might as well start dancing again. I might as well audition for that play. I might as well put up a Patreon for my blog. Why not? I have nothing to lose.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Oh goodness no. I mentioned before my inability to handle early mornings. This is one of a whole host of medical issues I’ve had my entire life. I can’t keep business hours, I have sinus issues and get migraines, all of my joints bend backwards and sometimes dislocate if I use them wrong, I react weirdly to a lot of medications, I don’t tolerate heat or prolonged stress very well, I fatigue incredibly quickly sometimes, and I generally have a hard time maintaining homeostasis. They all seem unconnected and crazy, and that was what I believed until I met someone else with the overly-bendy problem, and found out she had something called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome.
EDS is a disorder of connective tissue formation. All the collagen in my body is super flexible, more than it’s supposed to be. You see people with the “classical” type on those ‘incredible medical things’ shows sometimes; it’s usually the guy who can stretch his upper lip all the way over his head. I can’t do that — I have what’s called the “hypermobile” type — but I did have all of the same major signs as my new acquaintance, so I started looking into it.
You have no idea how many parts of your body use collagen until they all quit working at once. It’s not just in your joints (mine bend too far, all the time), but in your eyes (I’m myopic), in your blood vessels (I have trouble maintaining blood pressure), and a jillion other things. For reasons unexplained, EDS is also highly correlated with things like anxiety disorders, and problems metabolizing certain drugs. I’m the weirdo most of the black box warnings on prescriptions are meant for. The list of symptoms looks like something a hypochondriac would come up with after an evening with Dr. WebMD, but damned if I don’t hit all of the major ones and most of the irritating minor ones.
It’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, it can be debilitating. I fatigue easily, and when the temperatures creep up over eighty. If I’m not in a room with air conditioning, I melt into a migrainous puddle. EDS sufferers are prone to joint damage and arthritis, and something or other hurts pretty much all the time. On the other hand, I can do all kinds of contortion tricks and I have a four-plus octave singing range (your vocal cords are made of collagen too!). EDS patients tend to have strange proportions, which means that I’m not quite 5’3″ but my floor-to-waist measurement is 40″, and because wrinkles for when collagen loses its flexibility and breaks down, I will never, ever look my actual age.
Please tell us about Circe Rowan.
I specialize in not specializing, I suppose. My main skill set is recognizing and creating patterns. I write, learn languages and translate, dance and choreograph, act and model, design and create clothes and makeup looks, knit incessantly, sketch and do graphic design, and otherwise just jam my nose into whatever looks interesting. Once upon a time I had some business cards that just said ‘consultant’ on them. When people asked ‘what kind of consulting do you do?’, I just said, ‘what kind do you need?’
As an actor, my longest-running (and by far my favorite) gig has been as Mary Stone in the Mrs. Hawking series of plays (mrs.hawking.com). The series, written and directed by Phoebe Roberts, is an experiment in serialized theater — you don’t need to see the previous installments for the stories to make sense, but if you have caught them, you get to see the evolution of the characters over time. It’s something you rarely see outside of television these days. We debut a new show at Arisia every January, and perform an encore at the Watch City Steam Punk Festival every May.
As a dancer, I work primarily with props. Hoops, canes, umbrellas, fans and fan veils, scarves, hats, anything small and handheld that looks like it would create interesting shapes and trailers. So far as I know, I’m the only one locally who does. There are circus artists whose act revolves around the props, and dancers who occasionally accent their work with objects, but my focus is on the intersection of both. I like the idea of dancing ‘with’ something. (Or someone! I’ve started picking up ballroom dance, but the same aspect of EDS that makes props a helpful reference makes it hard to dance with other humans — my joints are so imprecise, I never quite know where my feet are.) I have somehow convinced a bunch of friends it would be fun to form a dance company, “Found Objects”, and we’re making out debut at the end of June, in the Festival of Us, You, We & Them at my home studio, the Dance Complex (dancecomplex.org).
As a writer, artist, designer, and anything else anyone cares to ask for, I work freelance as the opportunity arises. I’ve recently started blogging about dance at circerowan.com, where I also link to my random-things blog at ariflynn.blogspot.com, and the company page at foundobjectsdance.com.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
Books! I did not interface well with the other kids, so I spent most of my time reading. Most of my non-fiction was science — I got kickballs thrown at my head at recess for reading Stephen Hawking on the playground. Fiction was mostly mysteries. I’m pretty sure the adult who handed me the Sherlock Holmes canon later came to regret that. I took the whole detective thing to heart.
Pricing:
- Solo dance lessons from $40/hr
- Private group lessons from $20/student
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.circerowan.com
- Email: circered@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/foundobjectsdance/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CirceRowan/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/FoundObjectsDnc
- Other: http://www.patreon.com/ArabellaFlynn
Image Credit:
(green dress, curly hair) model: me, photographer: Roland Marquis, wardrobe: Suki Jones
(hoops and fans) model: me, photographer: Annushka Munch
(blue apron) model: me, photographer: Annushka Munch
(big hat, Victorian dress) models: me, Jeremiah O’Sullivan, photographer: Annushka Munch
(black hair, kooky bracelets, feather boa) model: Cari Keebaugh, stylist: me, wardrobe: Suki Jones, photographer: Annushka Munch
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