Camille Swift specializes in the savage and the strange. With each new act, she strives to embody both ferocity and finesse and bring to life a new femme farouche (wild/savage woman), not entirely human, not entirely beast. They spring from the jungles of her imagination, the dark, mossy forests of her subconscious, the spongy underbellies of dreams. They stalk and slither out of one fairy tale into the next, from myth to legend, seizing the fragile yet toxic ideas of femininity therein and pulling them apart, to see what their insides are like, gobbling them up, spitting them out and then looking back at her out of their gleaming eyes as if to say, “What? We didn’t make this mess. Nothing to see here.” Then they glide away into the trees, wings rustling, teeth snapping…and she has no choice but to follow them.
Camille is a Chicago-based circus artist, specializing in static trapeze, dance trapeze, and aerial sling, with extensive training in traditional arts (ballet, piano, oil painting) and a few less conventional ones (breakdancing, Japanese swordsmanship). Her mission is to create acts that are highly skilled yet imaginative, expressive and visually striking. She speaks fluent French and has traveled to Paris and Montreal to train and develop her acts.
