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Circus skills are a group of pursuits that have been performed as entertainment in circus, sideshow, busking, or variety/vaudeville/music hall shows. Most circus skills are still being performed today. Many are also practiced by non-performers as a hobby.
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Circus schools and instructors use various systems of categorization to group circus skills by type. Systems that have attempted to formally organize circus skills into pragmatic teaching groupings include the Gurevich system (the basis of the Russian Circus School's curriculum) and the Hovey Burgess system.
Hovey Burgess system
The Hovey Burgess pedagogy divides circus skills into three categories, each subdivided into three skill levels.
Hovey Burgess has been known to compare his system to Newton's third law (i.e., "for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction"). Vaulting is concerned with action; juggling is concerned with reaction; equilibrium is the intersection of action and reaction.
Equilibristics
Circus skills which involve balancing or maintaining equilibrium. The term applies equally to acts in which the performer balances on a piece of equipment or a prop, and acts in which the performer balances a prop on a part of their body.