Pauliina Räsänen

Pauliina Räsänen is a Finnish aerialist and circus artist who trained at Montréal's National Circus School and brought swinging-trapeze technique to Cirque du Soleil's *Alegría*, then built a multidisciplinary career as a company leader, teacher, and cultural historian. She graduated from the National Circus School in 2001, specializing in swinging trapeze. After graduation, Räsänen joined Cirque du Soleil's *Alegría* as a solo trapeze artist, touring for approximately six years in a role that combined dance-like phrasing, character work, and technically demanding aerial releases within large-scale theatrical circus production.

In 2008, Räsänen co-founded ArtTeatro in Finland with acrobat Slava Volkov. The company's artistic philosophy combines theater's expressive force with technically refined variety and circus arts, drawing on both Räsänen's solo swinging trapeze and the partnership's work in duo hand-to-hand acrobatics and silks. Between 2010 and 2012, Räsänen created or directed multiple ArtTeatro productions, including *White Wings*, *Winter*, *Oceanborns*, *Sirkus Caravan*, and *Sky Is the Limit*, alongside circus and variety programs such as *Cirque Dracula* and family-oriented works.

Teaching became integral to Räsänen's practice. By 2020, she was actively instructing swinging trapeze through ArtTeatro's Archipelago Circus Festival programming, bringing twenty years of experience in Canadian-style swinging technique—a lineage acquired in Montréal and refined through touring, directing, and coaching.

Alongside performance and pedagogy, Räsänen developed a career in cultural history. She completed a master's degree at the University of Turku with research on female stardom in nineteenth-century Finnish performance, and has since pursued doctoral research on forgotten women in magic and circus arts. She has conducted archival research, published on historical performers including magician Pauline Schmidt, and participated in European circus-history conferences. Her current profile joins embodied expertise with scholarly investigation: she researches and teaches the traditions whose performance practices she has inhabited for decades.