Watching Fuoco sculpt the sky with her body is nothing short of mesmerizing. Whether she’s spinning an aerial hoop, creating intricate contortions, or dangling in a rope suspension, her magnificent poise and strength infuse her motions with an emotional charge that strikes you like lightning. After what seemed like hours of scrolling through her work online — including tutorials, drills, and performance clips — it was almost jarring to see her just sitting in a chair for our video call.
Circus and rope: a balancing act When Fuoco and I spoke late last autumn, I’d caught her in a rare moment of downtime during a cross-country Christmas tour with an acrobatic performance troupe. The show’s two-month run required her to take one of her longest-ever breaks from rope, a pretty big deal for her. ‘It’s always been really important to me to stay rooted in both places,’ says Fuoco.
Fuoco is one of those artists who has practically carved out her own discipline, so I’m not surprised to hear she’s so attuned to the ebb and flow of her creative wellspring. Technically, she’s an aerialist, acrobat, and ‘switchy rope person and educator’ as she puts it on Instagram. But a word like ‘dancer’ seems an unfit catchall for someone whose lexicon of motion links every flip, swing, and suspension not only in sequence, but in an aesthetic exchange between her twin passions of circus arts and shibari.
The traits that lend themselves to both arenas seem obvious: a flair for performance, a daredevil streak, a high tolerance for pain. ‘I think all circus artists are masochists,’ Fuoco says through laughs during our recent Zoom call. For her, the somatic and psychological extremes are a major selling point. 'The boundaries of my physical limits are really interesting to me,' she tells me, 'like how hard and how far I can push it, what that looks like and feels like.'
A flying start Though she considers herself a traditionalist, Fuoco does value the way being an educator in both spaces opens her mind to how each practice can potentially inform the other. 'With circus coaching, you get really good at looking at bodies in specific ways, and understanding how a body can be shaped and sculpted and transformed,' Fuoco explains. 'Any time I take a movement class, a part of my brain is like, “Is any of this rope-relevant? How can this information be translated from the circus world?”'
'Any time I take a movement class, a part of my brain is like, “Is any of this rope-relevant? How can this information be translated from the circus world?”' This creative fusion makes even more sense once you know that circus and rope, the yin and yang of Fuoco’s career, actually entered her life around the same time. A lifelong dancer from Phoenix, Arizona, Fuoco’s 'cirque du shibari' journey began when she first entered the BDSM scene there in the early 2010s. It was right around when shibari had gotten trendy among a certain milieu of kinksters, and it was everywhere . Before long, Fuoco was hooked — or better yet, tied down . But rope wasn’t her only new fascination.
At the same time, she enrolled in pole dancing classes for fitness (and also because gym workouts bored her to tears). Pole work evolved into trapeze, which is how she became 'fucking obsessed' with circus. In 2012, Fuoco brought along her fierce passion and budding skills for these disciplines to London, where she’d eventually earn a Master’s degree in human rights. As it turned out, the city was the perfect place for her to spend that part of her journey. 'Six or seven nights a week, you could go find an event and do rope,' Fuoco recalls.
Then there was Berlin, just a short plane ride away, where she began bottoming for rope workshops on occasion. This is how she met and befriended Shibari Study co-founder Gorgone , who would later invite Fuoco to begin shooting bottoming and movement content for the then-nascent platform, like stretching and strength-training videos. But by the time she’d finished grad school, she was yearning to bring circus work to the center stage of her career. When her partner at the time offered to float her financially while she figured that out, Fuoco accepted gratefully and returned to Phoenix, admittedly as a 'big fish in a little pond' in her home city.
By the time she’d finished grad school, she was yearning to bring circus work to the center stage of her career. Nonetheless, she managed to cobble together an income from her circus work, which she immediately invested back into her career, always seeking opportunities to hone her craft. In 2016, Fuoco enrolled in a month-long contortion intensive in California, where fellow performers encouraged her to apply to a prestigious circus school in Vermont. She did so instinctively, feeling little choice but to be hopeful.
Finally, only two weeks before the program’s start date, Fuoco was told that a freshly vacated spot could be hers if she could simply cross the continent in time. She didn’t think twice, breaking her lease and selling everything but her car, which she shipped to Boston before hopping on a redeye flight on the eve of the program’s start. She’d never even been to New England before.
'I just drove straight up to the circus school and slept in the sun in the parking lot for an hour before the noon orientation,' Fuoco says, shaking her head at the memory. 'That was the start of a three-year-long, full-time professional training program. It was intense but that’s how circus became big for me.'
Shibari Study and reimagining rope It’s this kind of tenacity and innovation that makes Fuoco such an obvious choice for Director of Education at Shibari Study, where she’ll design the curriculums on the website and act as a liaison to the community, lending her congenial spirit and potent wisdom to this corner of the kink world. One impact she hopes to have is a broader reimagining of how shibari can show up in our lives.
'Something that’s true of my shibari practice is that it can meet any relationship where it’s at,' Fuoco observes. 'I’m able to do rope with friends, strangers, lovers… and none of those relationships really have to change for us to do rope together in a way that everybody gets something out of it.'
‘Something that’s true of my shibari practice is that it can meet any relationship where it’s at.’ The concept of 'fluidity' occurs to me often as I talked to Fuoco, in terms of both the grace of her movements and the range of styles in which she deploys them, plus her approach to realizing her dream. Fuoco’s adept navigation of the ever-evolving circumstances of being a working artist, and the way she alchemizes the various disruptions into more fuel for her fire, is something I admire tremendously. Like any great acrobat, she’s got a seemingly innate ability to trust that she’ll land where she needs to, every time.
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