Photos courtesy of George Wiltshire.

by Joe Devlin and Emily Berk

March 2011 — Anna Robertson is a typical senior at Half Moon Bay High. She studies hard for her Advanced Placement courses, hangs out with friends, hikes in Quarry Park, and makes “killer devil’s food cake.”

But Robertson has another side that few of her friends relate to. Robertson is a circus performer — her specialty is aerial silks, a discipline almost everybody has seen, but few understand. “I am an athlete and I love my sport and I love my high school, but people in high school don’t really see it as a sport. There is little intersection between the two,” she says.

As an aerial silks performer, Robertson climbs up two hanks of fabric 30 feet long, wrapping the fabric around parts of her body, then flying through the air striking poses while swinging and spiraling up and down the fabric in spectacular controlled falls and elegant climbs.

Anna has performed her act all over the country, first as a member of the San Francisco Youth Circus, then the New Pickle Circus, the San Francisco Circus, and as a part of the popular kids musical group, the Sippy Cups.

Robertson started training at the San Francisco Circus Center at age 5. “I experimented with tumbling, contortion, walking around on my hands and the like, but by the time I was 11, silks had become my specialty,” she says.

Silks complement Robertson’s unique talents and physical characteristics. “At 6 feet, I was too tall to be easily lifted as part of an acrobatics troupe and too heavy to be caught as part of a trapeze act. My height is perfect for silks. When I stretch out my legs or assume a pose while suspended 20 feet in the air, people can clearly see the lines I have worked so hard to perfect,” she says. “I love the athleticism and the dramatic nature of the sport. I can still get my mother — who has seen my act many times — to gasp as I plummet towards the ground in a spinning controlled plummet.”

A long-time professional, Robertson recalls many interesting performances. One of her favorites was the gig she performed at Symphony Space in New York City. She says, “It wasn’t the best performance or most spectacular I’ve done, but it was one of the most challenging. The professional we hired to rig the silks did a terrible job. I normally work with a 30-foot fall of fabric and had worked with as little as a 20-foot fall. This guy gave me just 14 feet. I was not sure I could work in such a short column, but with several hundred kids in the audience I gave it a try. The kids shrieked at my every fall and after the performance I was mobbed by little girls telling me I was amazing, asking how I learned to do that — lots of practice, my child — and clamoring for autographs.”

What’s next for Robertson? Her high school course load and the college application process forced her to cut back on performances this past semester. But she has been applying to colleges in urban centers with close proximity to a circus center where she can practice, perform and maybe teach. “Not sure what major I am going to graduate with in college, but I am sure that the circus will continue to be a part of my life,” she says.

If you’d like Anna Robertson to perform on her silks for your corporate or political event, or fundraiser for a local nonprofit, drop her a line at AnnaGRobertson@gmail.com.