Coach
Thea Runge
Seeing her first youth circus show at nine years old was all it took for Thea to be completely entranced. She spent the next ten years going to Smirkus Camp every summer, and learned to love everything there is about circus. While attending college, she was president of Oberlin’s large and long-running circus group, OCircus, she directed and participated in
shows, and she taught for-credit courses on circus skills through the school’s Exco program. While her early circus education was very generalist, over the years she has come to focus primarily on juggling and object manipulation of all kinds, group acrobatics, and stilting. Outside of circus, you’ll find Thea writing about science and philosophy, playing the kind of video games that you need spreadsheets and a calculator for, and—as of recently—practicing and sparring with a longsword.
Teacher Bio
Thea’s degree in neuroscience has very directly shaped how she approaches teaching. In class, you’ll hear her often say “you have to teach your brain” or “your brain doesn’t want to do this,” because she sees muscle memory as a predictable mechanism to be tinkered with, not part of a person’s identity. Thea’s classes are rooted in teaching the fundamentals of fundamentals: proprioception, balance, ballistic prediction, motor coordination, and, most importantly, for any skill-building: confidence. Her favorite part of teaching circus is giving people real, hard evidence that they can learn to do amazing things, no matter how doubtful of their own potential they might have been when they began.
