Nathan Price and Isis Clegg-Venell of Trio Vertex have been working together for over a decade and have traveled across the world, captivating audiences with their unique choreography, cheeky humor, and stunning, death-defying acrobatic skating techniques. How did they find their way to the Teatro ZinZanni tent? We recently asked them for their origin story.

“So how did we get good at skates? A combination of overpromising, overconfidence, and having no other choice.”

-Nathan Price

“We both learned to skate as kids, playing roller and ice hockey which is a very, very, very niche sport in the UK. Years before we met at circus school, we actually played roller hockey in the same building when we were 12. We didn’t really do anything with it until 2017 when Cirque du Soleil was making their first ice skating show and were looking for acrobats who knew how to skate. We sent our stuff in, and got hired to do that show which was half ice skaters, half circus artists. 

The ice skaters there were incredible, and they would show us all these cool tricks from their world and we’d share things from our world. We were doing a bunch of hand-to-hand on ice, and learning all these traditional skating lifts and spins. When we left in 2018 we thought “that wasn’t so hard.. we should make a roller skating act!” I was living in Chicago at the time, and saw an advertisement for Teatro ZinZanni on a bus stop. This was when they were first opening in Chicago, and I thought “they look cool, I should email them.” I’ve sent 100’s of emails in our career to various shows, and never heard anything back so I didn’t expect much. But the next day I got a reply saying they loved our stuff and if we could meet.”

They just happened to also be in Chicago, so we went and got coffee the next day. At this point, we hadn’t yet started training the roller skate act. But because of how easy it was on ice, we were confident we’d have it down in no time. I told Teatro ZinZanni that as well as doing hand-to-hand we could do a roller skating act as well. They loved the idea and we very quickly were contracted and hired for our first season of Teatro ZinZanni, opening in Woodinville in 2018/2019. 

We went back to London and started training the act. Now. Here’s the thing. On ice there is very little friction, because; you know, it’s ice. You didn’t really have to work too hard, you would just kind of glide. But wheels on wood? Harder work. We ended up not having as much time to train as we thought, and it took us longer to adapt from ice to wheels; by the time we got to Woodinville we were good, but not great. But having to do it everyday on stage, on a tiny little platform makes you get better at it very quickly!

So how did we get good at skates? A combination of overpromising, overconfidence, and having no other choice. One thing it meant is we ended up with a pretty unique skating act. Normally, skate acts are “we go around and around in a circle, very fast and we’re very cool”. Us not being very fast (or very cool) meant we had to find another edge in our act to make it entertaining. We leaned into a more characterful & comedic act to make up for our lack of speed and cool-ness. 

Now we’re able to rip it and are pretty snappy on the wheels (unfortunately no cooler) but we’ve kept the funny characters and the playfulness from that first season in Woodinville. We have a style that you don’t really see anywhere else other than at Teatro ZinZanni.”