EDITOR’S NOTE: Whether they're selling handmade crafts, doing consulting after hours, or operating a weekend catering business, side-hustles are meant to provide extra coin beyond what a regular day job pays. For many, it's a way to turn their passions into profit. In 2017, according to CNN Money, 44 million Americans reported having a side-hustle to either pursue a passion or supplement their income, or both. Here is one in a series of stories from NE Ohio:
CLEVELAND, Ohio — By day, Jaime Bouvier teaches Case Western Reserve University law students how to be good lawyers. Two nights a week, she teaches others to fly.
As a side hustle, Bouvier, 46, an assistant professor of lawyering skills at CWRU, teaches and performs aerial circus arts (think trapeze, and all the high-flying acrobatics of Cirque du Soleil).
“It’s like a compulsion more than anything else,” Bouvier says of her side gig. “I’m not happy if I’m not training.”
After leaving a full-time law practice to teach at Case about 10 years ago, Bouvier had the time to take an aerial silks class at a downtown yoga studio. Aerial silks involve acrobatic performance while hanging from fabric. Bouvier had long admired circus performance, but would never have considered trying it when she began eight years ago, without knowing an older friend who did trapeze.
“I always thought it was beautiful and cool, but I thought it was completely out of my league and impossible,” she says.
It took her about four years of “struggle” to master the silks, in part because the art requires a lot of memorized sequences and knots (tied with the feet). “I was extraordinarily bad at that,” she says.
She began teaching, and performing, about five years ago. She’s traveled all over the world, to Canada, England, France, and beyond, both learning new skills and performing her art.
Today, Bouvier teaches two aerial silks classes a week at Sokol Greater Cleveland, a gym in the city’s North Broadway neighborhood. She performs at least a few times a month with her troupe, the Shanty Circus Jacrobats, as well as WizBang, a Cleveland-based circus and theatre performance group. Bouvier also choreographs other performers.
In addition to the silks, she’s mastered aerial performance on lyra (hanging metal hoops), straps, trapeze and cordelisse, or ropes. She also performs partner acrobatics (“basically people balancing on each other in different positions”) and walks on stilts.
Bouvier said she’s learned a lot from studying and teaching circus arts: to allow herself to be bad at something while still loving to do it; empathy for her students who are learning a new skill, whether in the law classroom or atop a trapeze; and that if you put enough time and effort into anything, you inevitably get better at it.
Bouvier can’t make a living off her passion, but she is devoted to it all the same. She spends three or four hours a day, at least three days a week, honing her skills, plus additional time training to stay in performance shape.
“It’s not like I wake up and say ‘Oh, I gotta go train,’” Bouvier says. “I’m like ‘Yes!’:that’s my time of day where I get to be happy and have fun and enjoy myself.”