Who is Flow Circus?
Flow Circus is comprised of Paul Miller and Dawn Daria, a husband and wife team. We each bring different skill sets forming a powerful team with a unique approach. Paul is a performer with credits including off-Broadway, Disney Cruise Lines, and TEDx Creative Coast, and Dawn is an award-winning educator with degrees in psychology and education.
In 2017, they created the Flop Ball to make the skills and related mindfulness and resilience messaging more accessible and adaptable to the organizations they serve.
What's in a name?
Although sometimes confusing because we don’t have animals or a whole troupe of performers, we love the name Flow Circus. Flow captures that amazing experience of being so engaged in an activity that you lose track of time and self-consciousness. It comes from working at the edge of what you can do - not staying in your comfort zone. Circus highlights the diverse skills and strengths of performers to bring together and inspire a community. When the circus comes to town, new connections are made.
How it all got started: A juggler and a teacher walk into a bar...
Paul and Dawn met many years ago, fresh out of college and figuring out who they wanted to be “when they grew up.” Paul, eschewing a career in accounting, and Dawn, recently deciding a career in law wasn’t for her, both found themselves waiting tables at the same small bar in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Waiting tables gave them time to pause and begin exploring what might be next. Paul honed his juggling, magic, and comedy skills while Dawn worked part-time at a community arts center, taking photography classes and developing museum education programs for the galleries. During this time they both read and were inspired by the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
During a night out, Paul joined some musician friends on stage at a local bar to put on a show. It was an evening of multidisciplinary art. In addition to the music and the juggling, a couple of friends set up easels and painted as the band played. After the show someone came up and said, “That was great! It was like a circus!” Something clicked for Paul and Dawn – it was like a circus with the unifying element that everyone was engaged and performing within a shared sense of flow… the circus of flow.
And just like that, Flow Circus and our mission to inspire creativity and bring fun and play to life’s messiness was born.