We were lucky to catch up with Jerome Hill recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jerome, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

In the thirteen years I’ve considered myself a professional, I can say that it was about six years ago that I began making a full-time living off of my work in live entertainment, and I haven’t looked back! I had my fair share of dead-end jobs, and my last one was a call-center for alcohol distribution. It was a soul-sucking place that thrived on misery.

In 2019, that office announced it was shutting down, and in the throes of figuring what I was going to do, I took a shot in a dark at an audition for a traveling candy museum called “Candytopia” and decided that from that moment onward that I was going to make this work full time. While the stages have changed, I’ve still stayed strong in my determination to make my living doing what I do best. Haven’t had a day-job since!

I learned everything I could about running my own business through both my own research and by watching others that considered themselves above me fail, everything was a learning experience, and still is. My biggest takeaway will always be that there are absolutely no shortcuts. You have to do the work, tough out the bad, relish the good, and invest the time in yourself and your business.

Jerome, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I broke into the circus industry as a solo artist in 2012. From a young age, I have always had an interest in the grandiose performances that you would see at Big Top circus shows, Renaissance Faires, and other festivals and carnivals of the same style. After spending my childhood and my teen years in the stands at these shows, I decided to dabble in juggling at the age of 18. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be until my early 20s that I would first have the thought to try and make a living being a circus performer.

With absolutely no idea where to start. I did some research into my local performance scene and eventually reached out to a circus school in Mesa Arizona that was offering lessons in multiple art forms. A few months after that I went to my very first audition to a Renaissance festival in Arizona, while simultaneously advertising my performance services to birthday parties, retirement homes and anything in between online at any kind of job board or service site that would let me put something up advertising what I could do.

After getting a few years under my belt performing as Jerome: King of Fools, a name I still use to this day, I took a chance and opened my own entertainment company and launched my circus brand: The GasLight Circus. It was a different flavor of family entertainment than what had been done in the Arizona circus scene up to that point, Every show we performed had special narratives and story lines that would carry over to future shows to create one big string of storytelling that no other show like us was doing.

We’ve had stunt artists, we’ve had acrobats, we’ve had singers, we’ve had dancers, we’ve had musical numbers, we’ve had cultural performances of multiple varieties and still to this day put on a show that you really can’t find many other places in the Arizona desert. We’ve reduced our show in size to a more travel-friendly version since 2023, but still have a standard of performance that only we put on.

In all that time, I’ve also since learned that my skill set extends beyond just the stage, but also behind the stage and in the offices as well in the same industry in an all-encompassing role. Which is why in 2023 I branched out and expanded my business from one circus company to an entire entertainment marketing firm called JesterClub Attractions.

Now we don’t just put on the shows, we also help other artists create their shows, create their brands, develop their vision, and then send them out into the world to chase the dreams they want to chase, while having full ownership of their identity free of any kind of bureaucracy that they might get from any other kind of agency.

Our vision as a brand is that the entertainment business was here before we showed up and it will be here long after, and the least we can do is help people maintain its continuance without us when we’re long gone.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

When the 2020 Pandemic hit, I was in the midst of a performance season at the very first Renaissance Festival to close due to COVID-19, in a time where literally everything was uncertain. Not just for myself, but the whole word. I thought to myself “how can I keep doing this if we all have to stay away from each other?” And with some thought, I and my cohorts in GasLight Circus developed a way to bring our entertainment to people at a distance through online videos, and so from The GasLight Circus was born “GasLight TV”, a circus-themed sketch comedy show that we eventually planned to have tie into live performances when we could do them again.

It was a learning experience to be sure, all the nuances of taped and digital entertainment wasn’t exactly foreign to us, but definitely not what we knew best. Like trying to write an essay with your non-dominant hand; it’ll take time, and it’ll feel weird and maybe even wrong, but eventually you can do it just as good as you could normally. What we did with GasLight TV, I’ve strived to take further into my career and try to apply what we did there to the entire business, no new skills wasted here!

Eventually, the world opened back up and I started performing in public again, I even joined the Maricopa County Medical Relief Corp as an entertainer at some of the first vaccine sites that opened in Arizona. I weathered the storm and was determined to get back out there and use what I learned in lockdown to keep people smiling through all that uncertainty.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

I think society needs to do a far better job helping people understand that being creative and being an artist is just as much of a legitimate business as anything else that requires the time and effort that a business does.

It’s always written off in public view as some flighting fancy or phase that people can go through and eventually grow out of to go find a real job in the real world. But that’s not the case when it’s what you want to do day in and day out.

You make it your lifestyle, you make it your purpose, and you’re not going to let anyone tell you that you’re not going to do this, that you can’t succeed, but also that being able to do that requires understanding how a business works. You have to file taxes, you have to track expenses, all this stuff costs money and resources that every other business has to deal with as well. So why is being a creative the red-headed stepchild?

Why do people just want to look down and laugh as a societal norm? To even turn away without so much as a second thought, it’s not fair and it needs to be taken more seriously as legitimate work. Art matters, bottom line.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.gaslightcircus.com

Image Credits

Jesterclub Attractions