Standing Acro Convention 2025 - Teaching Team
Chris Carlos
Chris Carlos is an acrobat, performer, coach and event manager with 20 years in the performing arts industry. Continuing on from his professional fire spinning career, Chris entered the world of acrobatics and has toured the world performing with multiple award winning shows with companies such as Gravity & Other Myths and Circus Tricktease.
After retiring from performing 2 years ago, Chris is focusing more on coaching and helping grow the Australian acro community. His coaching technique and in-depth knowledge provides students with opportunities to upskill and grow in their acrobat journey.
Steve & Gina
Steve and Gina are bringing the acro fire all the way from San Diego!
With 8 years of teaching and performing together, the two have shared their passion for acro across six continents. Now their 2yr old son Koa is along for the ride.
In California, Gina is an avid surfer + yogi and runs a Pilates studio near the beach. Steve alchemized his days as an athlete and airborne paratrooper into a vehicle for human flight and never looked back. The couple lives to inspire emotion through motion and build joyful moments of connection & community.
Matt & Meital
Matt is a vagabond acrobat, coaching and performing circus wherever he might be in the world. His main disciplines are hand-to-hand and group acro, but he also practices and coaches icarian, whips, and L-base flow, as well as a number of other circus arts.
Meital is an experienced acro teacher in various acro genres, teaching around the world. She studied circus at Carampa and Shabazi circus schools, and just loves to pass on her knowledge!
Matt and Meital met last summer and haven't stopped chasing each other since. They've been meeting wherever they could across 3 continents so far to teach, create, and develop their own language and style, and are excited to keep on sharing!
Mychael
Mychael is a professional cheerleading and choreography coach. With over a decade of coaching experience, he travels to help cheer teams all over the UK and Europe with stunting, tumbling and choreography.
As an athlete, Mychael has been a member of the Team England Senior Coed Cheerleading Team for 6 years. He is currently coach of the England Youth Team, and between his coaching and performing holds 6 World Championship medals.
Saila
Saila is a circus teacher and performer from Helsinki, Finland, with a deep passion for partner acrobatics. Whether flying, basing, or midding, she embraces every aspect of the art form. Most recently, Saila toured Europe with the Copenhagen Collective, showcasing her skills, and is now working on shows with Underhouse Productions.
With a Master's degree in Sport Science, Saila has dedicated most of her life to teaching sports. She has a rich collection of drills and insights to share with her students.
Her enthusiasm for acro and circus is contagious, and her passion shines through when she shares her knowledge—it's hard not to get excited about acro and circus in general, when you hear her talk about it with such passion and love!
Scott & Michaela
Michal first met this duo nearly 20 years ago, at a time when he and Scott preferred climbing buildings to climbing people.
Highly skilled acrobats, great fun and great teachers, Scott and Mic have been doing acro for over a decade, learning all the ways not to do things so that you don’t have to! They travel and teach all over the world and we hugely appreciate their support and advice in our own acro practice.
Indispensable to our first SAC in 2023 (in quite a few ways...!) we are delighted to invite our dear friends back to Bristol again to share their tips, tricks, and quips.
Rachel Locks
Rachel is an acrobatic base. Her biggest childhood struggle was sitting still, that is until she found an outlet in Sports Acro. She competed nationally for 8 years and during her career won multiple national titles.
Now an international circus performer, Rachel has just finished performing in a West End Musical in London. She has toured with companies such as Highwire Entertainment, One Fell Swoop, and Copenhagen Collective.
Outside of circus Rachel likes petting any animal that will let her, anything outdoors, and giving dodgy homemade tattoos.
Matt & Tasha
Tasha and Greeny are professional circus artists and local superstars. Specialising in partner acrobatics, hand-balance, and juggling (sometimes at the same time) they both travel and perform worldwide, as well as teaching at acrobatic and juggling conventions.
Coming from a mixed background of fine arts, gymnastics, BMX and flow arts, they trained at the National Centre for Circus Arts in London, before building their international performing careers. Both are very good at balancing all sorts of objects, themselves, and each other!
They were a joy at last year’s Standing Acro and we’re excited for them to share more this year!
Ethan
Ethan is a hand-to-hand teacher who specialises in dynamic acrobatics and stylised flips.
He started off as a freerunner who made a sand pit his best friend. He now enjoys throwing and catching other people in flips!
Ethan trained acrobatics in circus schools for 9 years, specialising as a dynamic hand to hand base. Since then, he has made it his mission to coach and raise the level of H2H in the UK.
Ethan really enjoy analysing tricks and seeing how technique adapts to different people. He’s been involved in every Standing Acro convention so far and enjoys meeting people with the same passion for acro!
