MONTREAL—Agustin Rodriguez Beltran dangles these days from the underside of his kitchen table.

It is far from death-defying. Nothing like the aerial straps he typically uses to fly and spin and twist high above the ground. But there is very little that is typical for students at Montreal’s École National de Cirque right now.

The coronavirus pandemic has shuttered circus shows around the world. But the class, as they say, must go on.

The world-renowned school counts contortionists, clowns, acrobats, jugglers and aerialists among its students. As with schools across the country and around the world, those students are now learning at home via computers and video conferences.

However, scholars of the circus arts face unique educational dilemmas with this approach. Space isn’t a constraint for contortionist Saffi Watson, who can wrap her body into a little package. But the others? How to correct and perfect handstands and other movements and tricks via Zoom? What are students of tumbling or trapeze to do while confined indefinitely in an apartment with nine-foot ceilings?

“Aerialists cannot do anything,” says Rodriguez Beltran, 20, referring to a performance discipline that employs ropes, straps, silks, hoops and bars hung from a circus big top.

To get around the problem, he’s doing pull-ups beneath tables, attaching elastic exercise bands to the metal bar in his closet and freeing up several yoga mats’ worth of space by rearranging his bedroom.

He has three other roommates, two of them also circus students. The challenge is to keep in shape while keeping the noise down in case the neighbours complain.

“The walls of our apartment are paper thin,” he says. “We prefer not to do big jumping stuff just to avoid problems ... We’ve been doing lots of handstands.”

Santiago Rivera, a juggler from Guatemala, took the public-health authorities’ stay-at-home orders as a creative constraint for a homemade video he submitted for a juggling assignment. Dressed in white coveralls, he juggles in his narrow hallway, then sitting in a chair, then in the living room while a roommates cooks in the kitchen, seemingly oblivious — and finally in a small backyard clearing, the only space big enough for Rivera to keep six balls in the air at a time.

“My style of juggling is combined with dance, so moving a lot for me is easy,” he says. “The idea of creating in a confined space was really a challenge.”

When the circus school initially closed for two weeks on March 13, Watson, who is in her first year of the program, worked out from her Montreal apartment, submitting daily training diaries to her coach to show that she was completing the cardiovascular exercises, strength movements and handstand practice assigned to her.

Physical-conditioning work has replaced the circus-specific classes which were judged “unfeasible” in the current circumstances, says Éric Langlois, the school’s director. More academic and theoretical subjects, such as language, philosophy and career-management courses, are better suited to distance learning.

That approach, however, doesn’t come naturally for budding performers who are happier flying through the air than sitting in front of a computer.

“Normally in the circus you do physical things. Now it’s impossible and we have to do a lot of writing stuff, which is not our favourite thing to do,” says Giorgos Karagiannis, a third-year juggler from Greece, whose mesmerizing act involves him balancing a small red ball on his head.

When the school closure was extended indefinitely, Watson returned her family’s home in Seattle. The extra space has let her incorporate dance and improvisation training into her daily routine while also launching an Instagram account to connect contortionists from around the world now training in isolation.

It hardly replaces the intimacy of working side-by-side with a coach in the school’s well-equipped gym. “But it’s also been good for us to be able to push ourselves alone since we can’t have our coach there all the time,” Watson says. “It really shows who is motivated.”

Some students are working out with their housemates, coaxing each other to do drills when it might be more tempting to sit on the couch. Contortionist Jean Roubieu has adapted to a quieter routine. His two roommates both returned to their homes in Quebec City and France. His ballet teacher runs an online class and he has regular meetings with his coach, during which they discuss technical and creative improvements to a performance that Roubieu was working on when the outbreak occurred.

But he is otherwise alone, far from his family in France.

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“It’s difficult to be alone, but ... I’m someone who operates well alone. I don’t need someone to work,” Roubieu says.

The extended school closure led to the cancellation of its end-of-year show — an important fundraiser for the school — as well as the individual cabaret for graduating students. The latter show annually draws circus directors scouting for new talent, and so serves as a gateway into the professional world. More than 95 per cent of graduates find employment within three months of finishing school, said Langlois.

This year, though, Joaquim Verrier, a cigar-box juggler from France, could only submit a video of the act he had been spent months perfecting. It was filmed not on a stage but in a room within his apartment without the wide-open space, the stage lights and the energy of an audience.

“It’s an enormous change and it’s a little frustrating for us to have to do it in front of a camera instead of the public or potential employers,” he said.

For the moment, though, there are no potential employers.

The world’s most famous circus company, Cirque du Soleil, shuttered its operations and laid off thousands of performers due to the coronavirus outbreak. When Montreal cancelled its array of summer festivals, that included one devoted to circus performances which often serves as summer employment for the school’s students.

The future is uncertain. Everything is in flux.

The spillover effects of the public-health crisis may already be showing among the student population, Langlois said. A recent school survey found that many of them had higher levels of anxiety, not only because they are in isolation and cut off from friends and family but also due to financial uncertainty. Some students have been unable to work at their part-time jobs, others have seen the positions they had lined up for the summer disappear.

When Karagiannis isn’t juggling, he works part time as a food-delivery courier.

“If I wasn’t able to do that I’d be stressed economically,” he said. “I know a lot of students who can’t work now and can’t work this summer, so they don’t know how they’re going to handle it.”

The school is bracing for the possibility of long-lasting COVID-19 rules that could affect classes in the fall. That could mean social distancing, longer-term online-education scenarios and uncertainty about the fate of international students — half the school’s population — who could potentially have difficulty obtaining visas to enter the country.

Rodriguez Beltran, the Mexican aerialist, is embracing the pause that has been imposed on the his career, the circus industry and indeed much of the world.

He recently enrolled in an online course on the creation of performances in public spaces, he’s doing yoga classes and he’s experimenting with other creative outlets that don’t easily fit into the busy life of a full-time circus student.

“I don’t think I have ever had this much fun in my life, to just have time and energy to focus on different things that do not revolve around circus,” he said. “It’s eye-opening. It’s like, ‘Oh! The world! Life!’”

He expects that so much pent-up physical and creative energy of circus artists will result in a “huge creative boom” when the industry gets back on its feet.

“We can really allow ourselves to take the time. We can take it as a residency if we want, if we have the motivation,” Rodriguez Beltran said. “It’s exciting to look forward to what’s going to be created.”