Ellie Rodgers_ Wednesday at the circus.mp3

For many years now, the Upper Valley has been a little hotbed of the circus arts, thanks first to Ted Lawrence and his Van Lodostov Family Circus camp, and more recently to Meg Tenney and her Upper Valley Circus Collective, which since 2019 has run camps and workshops and hosted yearly circus performances by professional troupes. Dartmouth student Ellie Rodgers ventured out, recorder in hand, to a camp at Thetford Elementary—and learned what circus means to kids who don’t always fit in elsewhere, like an 8-year-old with Down syndrome.

“I was really hoping to do an uplifting piece about art of some kind,” explains Ellie. “I happened to come across the Upper Valley Circus Collective Facebook page as I was browsing. It looked like a really cool program, especially as someone that has never interacted with the circus before, and I was even more intrigued after I learned how huge circus is here.”

Ellie Rodgers is a junior at Dartmouth from Nashville. She produced this for Sophie Crane’s winter 2025 class at Dartmouth, “Tell Me A Story: An Introduction to Nonfiction Radio and Podcasting.”