Ex-Olympic gymnast has a whole new act
Nansy Damianova is performing with Cirque du Soleil
Many visitors to Albuquerque eagerly board the Sandia Peak Tramway, only to suffer rapid heartbeat and sweaty palms as the car climbs farther and farther from the ground.
For Nansy Damianova, fear of heights shouldn’t be a problem.
Damianova, a Canadian Olympian and a former University of Utah gymnast, will be in town this week to perform in “Ovo,” Cirque du Soleil’s latest offering, at the Santa Ana Star Center. Her selection is the “Russian Cradle,” akin to a flying trapeze act. As a “flyer,” Damianova is hurled from station to station, by a “thrower,” far above floor level, trusting her “catcher” to do exactly that: catch her.
Her leap from competitive gymnastics to Cirque du Soleil was almost preordained. The famous touring company’s headquarters are in Montreal, just minutes from International Gymnix, the club at which she trained
growing up.
“The coaches who used to coach at my gym ended up working at Cirque, so they kind of knew a little bit (about her),” Damianova said in a phone interview with the Journal. “They go to nationals and kind of look to recruit new talent . ... I’ve always told them that I was interested to eventually do Cirque.”
Born in France to Bulgarian parents, Damianova moved to Montreal with her family when she was just 4 months old. Both of her parents had competed internationally for Bulgaria — her father in taekwondo, her mother in rowing — so finding an athletic outlet for young Nansy was a natural thing to do. She started in gymnastics at age 9.
Her specialty was the uneven bars, perhaps the sport’s closest equivalent to what she now does in “Ovo.” She won a bronze medal in that event at the 2006 Pan-American games, competed for Canada at Beijing in 2008, and won three silver medals (uneven bars, floor exercise, vault) at the 2009 Gymnix World Cup.
She competed at Utah, a storied college program under now-retired coach Greg Marsden, from 2011-2014. The Utes finished fifth nationally in her freshman and sophomore seasons.
Utah home gymnastics meets typically average more than 14,000 in attendance, so Damianova is accustomed to performing under pressure.
She was a first-team All-Pac-12 selection on floor in 2013 and on floor and uneven bars in 2014. She earned All-America honors both those seasons.
She graduated from Utah in 2015 with a degree in communications and a minor in business entrepreneurship. She’d applied for a work visa to stay in the U.S. and seek work in her chosen field of study.
But, later that year, Cirque du Soleil came calling.
“I couldn’t say no,” she said, “because I’ve always wanted to try it.”
Finding herself so much higher off the floor and having to depend on a fellow performer to catch her, Damianova said, was a challenge at first.
“For my act, you train in a belt,” she said, “so there’s no way you’re going to fall because there’s someone holding you all the time while you learn the new tricks.
“I loved it, and it was a lot of fun, but it was definitely really, really hard to understand that you have to follow the swing of the catcher. You can’t do your skills by yourself, because the guy throwing you has to do 50 percent of it.”
The first time she had to perform without the belt, she said, “I was really scared. I was never that scared in gymnastics before, but it was just because it’s something different . ... After a few times you get pretty used to it, and it becomes like gymnastics and you’re in your natural element.”
Competing in gymnastics and performing for Cirque du Soleil, Damianova said, have many similarities and just as many differences.
“It’s similar in the way that you have the adrenalin and you’re a little nervous when you have to try new things, the same as a gymnast when you have to compete (with a new skill) for the first time,” she said. “So the feeling of performing feels very much the same, I would say, but the preparation to get there isn’t the same at all.
“Gymnastics requires a lot more training, a lot more hours. You have someone constantly telling you what to do. In Cirque you have training, but it definitely doesn’t take hours of training for weeks to prepare yourself.
Also, she said, “staying in shape is up to you. You can get help ... but most of us know what to do, so we do it whenever we want according to how we feel.”
A career based on her degree from Utah, she said, likely will have to wait. She’s hooked on Cirque du Soleil.
“I would love to do five years and maybe even more,” she said. “That’s my goal, but it depends on how my body holds up.”
Damianova has never been to Albuquerque, but she’s not completely unfamiliar. Tory Wilson, a former Utah teammate, is a La Cueva graduate and grew up competing for Gold Cup Gymnastics. The Cirque performers, Damianova said, usually get a chance to see some of the sights when they come to a new venue.
“We try to look up cities ahead of time and see if there’s anything interesting to do,” she said. “... We can at least get a taste of every city we go to.”
The Sandia Peak Tram, she agreed, sounded like something a high flyer shouldn’t miss.