Alexander Grant, a Cirkid in Vancouver for 13 years, went on to study at the NCS. Like Nunns, he is tall and broad, the bottom half of an acro-balance pair that was referred to as "the mouse and the elephant" by his coaches.

"I was the pirate captain on the good ship Trampoline," he says, recalling Lost City Circus. He also played the lead in their 2005 show, Circus Metropolis: an evil ringmaster with a red top hat, a red velour jacket with stiff coattails, and red hair that pointed straight up like a candle flame. His entire face was painted red, the creases filled in with black to give him a permanent grimace. To torture his minions, he dribbled them like basketballs on trampolines and stuffed them into trash cans, bent in half like a book, just their hands and feet visible at the bottom. The show climaxed with a juggling battle between the ringmaster, the superhero that pursued him, and the police chief who pursued them both, to a wild remix of Dizzy Gillespie's "Manteca." Clubs flew between them as they jumped through the city skyline, trampolines under windowsills, aerials from rooftops.

Grant only stayed one year at the NCS. He went from a few hours after school at Cirkids to training a grueling ten hours per day, at least five days per week, at the NCS. "They took it seriously there," Grant says. "There was a lot of focus on learning technical movements." He is reluctant to say anything negative about the school. "People were really nice. Like Cirkids, there was a strong feeling of community, just a bunch of people working together to do something cool." After a moment, he admits, "Ach, there were a lot of really bad feelings there, too."

When asked why he left the NCS, he replies, "I don't love circus enough to give up the rest of my life to do it. It's like any art -- at a certain point, you have to give up everything to be the best, and you need to be the best to make a living."

Limits to passion

"I'm always happy to get refugees from Cirque," Nunns says, offhandedly. I push him to elaborate, and his voice drops to a conspiratorial tone. "If you're in a show with Cirque, you do it for six years, or three years, or five years of the same thing, night after night. You're part of something amazing, but that passion, that artistry goes."

"A lot of people," Nunns says, "have a voice that needs to be expressed. And because we don't have any money, we can do that. We don't have ninety million dollars to build a stage. We have intimate shows and interactivity."

Having squinted at distant acrobats in the Cirque du Soleil big top, paying a hundred dollars or more each time, I know what he means. Cirque shows are polished to perfection -- not a feather, a sequin, or a limb out of place. The bombastic spectacles are so thrilling and humbling that you forget that the performers are human beings at all.

By the time I leave the Garden Auditorium, on a Saturday afternoon, the gym is full. All the stations have students on them, some juggling hoops, some balancing, some strapped into high-flying equipment. A coach calls out, "Three more bounces!" at the kids on the trampolines, but it hardly seems necessary; they're smiling, just as Nunns said, with their entire bodies.