Nelson Smyles had already been accepted by Cirque du Soleil before he even graduated from circus school. In the seven years since, he’s toured the world performing with the circus and acrobatics company. Now he’s back in Australia as a cast member of Luzia, which will make its Sydney debut next month.

It’s a homecoming tour for the New South Wales native, who grew up in Port Macquarie. As a child, Smyles’s boundless energy left his mother with little choice but to sign him up for the local gymnastics club. By the age of 12, he’d outgrown the top level available, so he and some friends began teaching themselves.

“That’s why I got into parkour, the free running style of movement. It was way back when that started getting super popular on Youtube,” says Smyles. “I’d take a video to my gymnastics club in Port Macquarie and, with a couple of mates, try and figure out how to do the trick.”

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After finishing high school, Smyles was accepted into the National Institute of Circus Arts (Nica) in Melbourne, where he studied a bachelor of circus arts. In his final year, he received what he first thought to be a scam email from Cirque du Soleil.

“A couple of mates and I had really got into making our journey at Nica available on Instagram,” he says. “We started a daily post that ended up being our diary, which ended up being the résumé that Cirque du Soleil used for the recruitment.”

Turns out the company had reached out to some of Nica’s coaches, asking if they had a tall student who could perform hoop diving and clowning – the two disciplines Smyles majored in.

“I remember when they sent the contract and I got it signed, someone at the school asked, ‘Nelson, what are you going to do when you graduate?’ I said, ‘I actually just got an offer from Cirque du Soleil’. And they said, ‘Oh, I’ll bet you did’.”

Sure enough, 11 days after graduating, Smyles arrived in Montreal to begin preparing for Luzia. Celebrating the richness of Mexican culture, the show’s name is a portmanteau of the Spanish words “luz” and “lluvia”, meaning light and rain respectively. The two-hour extravaganza has everything from high-flying acrobatics and pole dancing to performances inspired by Mexican folklore.

“I like to call it the perfect embodiment of Mexico,” he says. “Because when we took the show to Mexico and did the performance in front of people, the love that was felt on and off stage was just incredible.”

There’s no shortage of stunning visuals, but the standout is the centrestage rain curtain, which showers the performers as they perform gravity-defying flips and tricks. Smyles plays one of the hummingbirds that open the show, leaping through hoops while running atop two giant treadmills in a dizzying acrobatic display.

While his performances have taken him across the globe, there’s one venue that stands out as his favourite. “My dad was a world champion ballroom dancer and got his world title in 1984 at the Royal Albert Hall in London,” he says. “And I think my favourite memory was him watching me do clown [there].

“It was like a full-circle moment for him – to have achieved so much in that venue – to watch me, by myself, on the Cirque du Soleil stage in the same venue. That was a real tearjerker for the both of us, we were a mess after the show.”

That moment might be hard to top, but Smyles anticipates that bringing Luzia to Sydney’s Entertainment Quarter is set to be another emotional milestone. “It’s going to be a very full-circle moment for me,” he says. “I grew up in Sydney, and that’s also where I saw my first Cirque du Soleil show, in the same venue that we’re going to be performing in.

“I think I had just done my audition for Nica, and my mum was the one that took me down there. We were sitting there, watching … and I said, ‘One day that’ll be me, Mum’.”

This article is produced by Broadsheet in partnership with Cirque du Soleil. Luzia is showing Under the Big Top at the Entertainment Quarter, Moore Park, from November 24, 2024 to February 9, 2025. Find out more and get your tickets at cirquedusoleil.com.