/Coaches
Salt City Circus coaches have a passion for movement, coaching, and growth. With a shared goal of embracing you both as a human and artist while aiming to challenge you both physically and creatively.
Kate Law
CoFounder & Coach
As a teacher and coach Kate loves to see the growth and confidence that circus gives her students. For 21 years she has been teaching dance, gymnastics, yoga and circus arts to people from 18-month tots to professional adults. She is a certified yoga instructor and Cyr Wheel coach and has completed several Nimble Arts aerial teacher trainings. She specializes in teaching active flexibility, contortion, trapeze, cyr wheel, and pole, in addition to lots of other fun disciplines. Kate has toured nationally offering workshops, is a founder of Bow and Sparrow in San Francisco; and has coached for Esh Circus Arts in Somerville, MA, New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) in Brattleboro, VT, and The Circus Project in Portland. From 2016-2021 she was the Director of FlyCo, a professional training program at A-WOL Dance Collective.
Kate has performed with Jo Krieter’s Flyaway Productions, Project Bandaloop, The Crucible, and Supperclub in the Bay Area and appeared at the Portland Trail Blazers games, the San Francisco Opera House, the Boston MFA, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the House of Blues and numerous music festivals around the country. She was awarded the RAWArts Boston Performing Artist of the Year in 2012. She has been a choreographer and performer for the Boston Circus Guild since 2011 in addition to producing for her company, Bow & Sparrow. Kate is a graduate of Professional Track program at New England Center for Circus Arts. In 2016 she moved to Portland and has performed with AWOL Dance Collective, Night Flight, The Circus Project and created Pole Disclosure, a full-length duo show. She has recently returned to Salt Lake, her home town, after teaching and performing all over the place for the last 20 years and is so excited to connect with her home town circus community and lead Salt City Circus along with co-founder Rachel!
Rachel Belling
CoFounder & Coach
Having spent the majority of her life as a dancer, teacher, and healthy living enthusiast Rachel has an insatiable desire to understand more fully the connection of mind, body and soul. With over 25 years of dance and movement training and 16 years of coaching, she continues to be passionate about learning and sharing with others. Rachel creates an environment for students to build confidence through movement regardless of their experience. Her classes incorporate a fusion of energized play, mobility, Pilates, mindfulness, expression and connection. She has completed a Nimble Arts aerial teacher training and has been certified in Pilates, as a mobility coach through The Ready State, group fitness classes, and Barre.
The stage is where Rachel thrives, sending audience members away feeling something be it inspiration or contemplation. She has performed with a variety of NW dance companies and artists on projects ranging from full length productions to music videos and loves the collaboration process. Rachel is a dynamic performer skilled in a variety of disciplines including dance, contortion, partner work and many aerial apparatus though her specialty is lyra. Movement is the tool that allows her to communicate what can not always be put into words. A self professed lifetime learner Rachel gains satisfaction from the investigation of new things and has an insatiable desire to expand her artistry. In the last few years she took up surfing and snowboarding with her partner, began playing ukulele, started juggling classes, and co-founded the Salt City Circus retreats with Kate Law Hoflich.
PJ Perry
Coach
PJ has been multi-disciplinary aerialist since 2008, specializing in corde lisse since 2013. She was introduced to the rope in 2012 during a varieté theater contract (nothing like learning by performing!). After finishing the contract, she realized she’d found her apparatus. Though PJ is primarily an autodidact, she sought help from multiple coaches along the way and has studied rope with Alex Allan, Emiliano Ron, Gabrielle Tramullas, Ezra Weill, and all of the amazing rope community found at rope meetings. PJ loves the simplicity of this apparatus and thrives on chasing momentum. Her performance work is defined by her love of the narrative, with a strong sense of intuitive pathways stemming from training and creating in relative isolation.
Holding a masters degree in kinesiology in addition to 20+ years of teaching experience, PJ strives to dive deep in her coaching. Her pedagogical background includes teaching Pilates to both students and teachers, anatomy and kinesiology for healing trades such as massage therapists and acupuncturists, lecturing in kinesiology at Western Washington University, and of course, coaching rope since 2017. She firmly believes that coaching should be comprised of encouraging self-discovery of pathways, learning multiple techniques, and pushing physical limits safely, in equal parts. Her progressions involve seemingly unrelated skills that utilize similar motor pathways but with graduated physical demand. This particular approach has enabled her to assist many students and performing artists to access one of the more complicated skills, rolling while ascending.
PJ currently lives in Bellingham, Washington, and coaches rope and handstands at the Bellingham Circus Guild and online, via her Patreon. She still performs and is always looking for the next fun opportunity to be creative. She has performed with the Acrobatic Conundrum, Circus Monti, Venardos Circus, the Aerialistas, Bellingham Circus Guild, the Dream Science Circus, Western Australian Circus Festival, Moisture Festival, Apogee Aerial Dance Festival, Southern Fried Circus Festival, Vashon Open Air Festival, Denver Aerial Arts Festival, Vancouver Circus Festival and in Stuttgart, Germany, at the Friedrichsbau Variete. Her most recent adventure was in collaboration with Eve Diamond (Girls Gone Rope) and they attended the Circus Princess Festival in Saratov, Russia, in October 2021.
JEnn Bruyer
Coach
Jenn enjoys the good life in the beautiful Kootenay Boundary area of British Columbia where she lives with her partner, horses, dogs, goats, ducks, and chickens. She is a multidisciplinary performance artist, choreographer, and coach. She has entertained audiences and guided students around the world
including over 30 US states, China, Italy, Germany, Ireland, Scotland, Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, and Mexico since 2008.
As an Aerial Coach, she seeks to provide the highest quality progressive instruction to aerialists of all abilities from novice to professional performer.
She is excited to return to the Salt City Circus Retreats for a second year!
Her mission as a human is to cultivate a warm, non-judgmental learning environment that fosters community, to build physical and emotional strength within the individuals who participate in this environment and methodically construct a vehicle by which to create art.