Aurelia Cats

Aurelia Cats is a French trapeze and contortion artist whose fusion of extreme flexibility with aerial strength created a distinctive new trapeze style recognized across European and international circus. Born in Arès, France, in 1979, Cats entered the children's program at Annie Fratellini's École Nationale du Cirque in Paris at age eight. Rather than specializing early, she trained across acrobatics, equestrian vaulting, ballet and circus disciplines under specialist teachers Pauline Palacy and Sacha Dubrovsky, who directed her foundation toward aerial work.

At ten, Cats won the K d'Or at the youth Festival Première Rampe in Monte Carlo. She began performing professionally in Annie Fratellini productions as a teenager, and by 1995 had established herself as a distinctive voice in aerial performance. That year she won the Gold Medal in the Cirque de l'Avenir category at the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris and silver at Riva del Garda. In 1996 she won gold at the Cirkus Prinsessan festival in Stockholm. These early victories marked recognition of an act that bound contortion to fixed and swinging trapeze, making the apparatus's contradictions—weight and lightness, control and risk, strength and femininity—into dramatic material.

Cats performed across traditional circus, variety theater, music hall and international special events. Her credits include the Cirque d'Hiver-Bouglione, Casino de Paris, Olympia, Lido de Paris, Tigerpalast, Wintergarten, Apollo Varieté, Palazzo and Teatro ZinZanni, as well as special events associated with Cirque du Soleil. She joined the original cast of the Lido revue *Bonheur*, which opened in 2003.

From performance, Cats expanded into production and adjudication. She served on the jury of the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in 2005 and the International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo in 2008. That same year she appeared as a judge on NBC's *Celebrity Circus*. The *Dictionnaire universel des créatrices* included her in 2013 as the creator of an original trapeze style, and she returned as a special guest for the Paris festival's 35th anniversary in 2014.

Cats's later work has centered on artistic direction, act creation, consulting and mentorship. She continues to help performers refine technical, creative and professional skills, extending the logic of her own career: circus technique is a structured language of movement, character and audience attention, not merely a sequence of feats.