Sophia dangles from one arm, the rope curling down beneath her to the floor. Eleanor and Catherine swing from a single trapeze, doing flips, twists and somersaults 15 ft. up in the air. I write this sprawled out across a thick blue gymnastic mat, contemplating the past whirlwind month.

25 days of immersive training: 10 full hours of handstands, 350 cartwheels, 200 pull-ups, one new language. Welcome to the circus.

Let me rewind for a moment. I am currently a fellow at The Experience Institute, a masters-level higher education program centered around Design and Entrepreneurship. Over the course of one year, each student in our program works for a series of companies around the world while exploring their unique passions. For me, this means a deep dive into collaboration, storytelling and creativity in a variety of settings.

I spent this fall digging into design thinking and social innovation with a group of talented designers at Civilla, a phenomenal new design strategy firm in Detroit. Together, we teamed up with state and local government to connect community and technology for social impact. My role was as a prototype and build apprentice, in charge of bringing stories and insights to life through physical space. This winter, looking to deepen my research in collaboration and creativity, I have run off to, you guessed it - the circus.

As I’ve learned, contemporary circus is an up-and-coming field in the United States, but what little arts funding is available often goes to its better known cousins, dance and theater. As a result, much of the contemporary circus being done in the U.S. is on a tight budget, meaning that there is little time for collaboration between artists, and thus little growth in artistic vision and minimal social impact.

“Spoke Movement Ensemble” (“Spoke” for short) is in part a response to this problem. The founders asked “how might we re-imagine performance for social impact?” How might we build a process of collaboration that grows the individual while creating an impactful final product ?” And, “How can we create new contexts for understanding?” Built at the intersection of collaboration, creativity and artistic process and drawing from circus, dance and design, its member’s mission is to forge a new context for the language of movement in the U.S and beyond.

A 10-week immersive residency would start the company off in early February, which coincided perfectly with my second term plans. Over the next 2+ months I was to become Spoke’s process strategist and space designer. The catch? Spoke has this crazy idea that shared experience is intrinsic to group process- so I’m also the resident circus guinea pig - doing splits, ballet, and trapeze along with the rest of the crew. Let me be clear, I’ve never circused before in my life. It’s been almost one month now, and while I definitely still feel like a chubby penguin attempting the splits during training- holy smokes- it’s been an amazing few weeks. Every day I wake up, put on gym clothes, and get to be a part of an incredible process of bringing a dream to fruition.

Building a reality isn’t easy. Six days a week we train for between from 5-9 hours, gaining strength, flexibility and putting together group processes of communication, schedule and language. Often during the week, while the others are trapezing or acrobating I’ll also leave the circus cocoon to conduct design research on other types of collaboration. Last week I met with a team at MIT media lab, as well as Nuvu Studios, an innovation studio for high-schoolers in the heart of Cambridge to talk to them about teamwork and idea making. And just to round off the Spoke process-building, the bulk of every Saturday is reserved for ongoing group tasks such as grant-writing, website updates and blog posting (you’ll notice today is that day).

So where am I exactly 25 days into this process? Sitting on a blue gymnastics mat, wondering how I got so lucky. Yes, I’m now able to hoist and stand a person on my shoulders, and I can do a few moves on a trapeze (albeit slowly and carefully). More importantly, I’m re-discovering the joy of being a part of an intense process. It’s sometimes difficult and often tedious, but I keep getting small glimpses of that collective determination to build something greater than myself - and that’s all I need to keep going.