Every night, dancer Tetiana Lotiuk paints on a smile and prepares to wow the crowds as part of a spectacular circus act touring the UK.
The troupe perform daring stunts on unicycles and BMX bikes, juggle with their feet and defy gravity on aerial poles. But behind those painted-on smiles lies the heartache of war.
Because like most of her fellow Circus Cortex performers, Tetiana comes from Ukraine – and carries with her not just the fear for her family, but guilt too at having left them behind.
With tears in her eyes, the 22-year-old says: “You go on stage with a big smile on your face… but your heart is in Ukraine.
“Working helps me for a few hours. It helps that people who come to the circus know we are from Ukraine and they can see we are a talented, strong and hard-working nation.”
Ironically the circus, which began its UK tour this week, has been brought back together thanks to the efforts of its Russian-born director Irina Archer, 45, who lives in the UK.
As Putin’s rockets began to rain down on Ukraine, she immediately signed up to host six stars at her home in Doncaster, West Yorks, under the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme.
She then spent weeks finding volunteers to take in the others and, after months battling red tape, most are now here.
Many of the male performers needed special permission from the Ukrainian government to leave. There is one notable absence – 30-year-old clown Nikolay Bilenkiy, from Lviv, has chosen to stay and resist Russia ’s forces.
Irina says: “The sponsors have become good friends, they’ve all come to see the show. But the clown on our poster is not here because he’s fighting.”
Tetiana – from Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv – had just arrived in Kharkiv, near the Russian border, to cover a friend’s dance classes and look after her dog when Putin invaded.
She says: “I didn’t know what to do. I went to buy food, but after four or five hours of the invasion the big shops closed and the cash machines were empty.
“The second day was very bad. There were explosions and shelling. I was up and down to the basement 20 or 30 times. By the fourth day, I was so exhausted I decided not to go down. I thought, ‘If a bomb drops on our building, I don’t want to die with 20 people near me’. It was difficult emotionally.
“By the sixth day, we were having explosions every half hour. It’s hard to believe this is happening in 21st century Europe.”
On the 10th day, when a nearby explosion shook her building, Tetiana could take no more.
With her friend’s eight-year-old spitz dog, Deli, she headed to the railway station. She says: “I wanted to get a train, but I didn’t know where – it didn’t matter.
“At the station were thousands of people. Women crying, children crying, families breaking up before my eyes because women were leaving and men staying.”
After two days on freezing, crowded trains, she reached the Hungarian border. Tetiana says: “It was only then I started to cry like I’d never cried before. I felt very guilty for leaving, like I was betraying my family. But my mum doesn’t want to leave the country.”
Able to enter the UK more quickly than the other circus stars as she already had a work visa, Tetiana flew to stay with Irina.
She says: “For two weeks I just lay on the bed and did nothing. I had problems with my ears and heard sirens in my head.”
And while she is grateful for being given sanctuary, she is set on one thing. “The first thing I’ll do when it’s safe is go home,” she says. Fellow dancer Ksenia Isaieva, 25, has been fleeing conflict with Russia for eight years already – her home town is Luhansk, part of the embattled Donbas region.
She and boyfriend Sergii Malynivskyi, 32 – an aerial artiste – were living in Zhytomyr, 80 miles west of Kyiv, when Russia invaded.
Ksenia says: “We slept in corridors or on the bathroom floor for two weeks, too scared to go into the bedroom.
“We ate there too. My boyfriend went to buy food between air raid sirens but I lost weight because you don’t feel hungry.”
Viktor Gorodelskyy, 38, and wife Yulia, 40, both unicyclists, had a similar time in Mykolaiv, near Russian-occupied Crimea.
They spent three weeks in their basement with six-year-old son Valdis as bombs rained down. They only made it to the UK two weeks ago.
Viktor says: “We hid in the cellar, with the cushions from the sofa against the windows in case they smashed. For two weeks, we didn’t leave.”
Yulia adds: “I tried to show Valdis cartoons on the iPad, or nice music, to distract him from the bombing.”
After a month they escaped to Lviv, until Viktor got the green light to leave – using his circus skills to act as an ambassador for his country.
He says: “I just took my unicycle and my props. Everything else, I can buy. If we don’t have props, we can’t work.”
Circus Cortex will tour until the end of August – by which time they hope there may be peace. Says Viktor: “We hope to go back to Ukraine as soon as we can. It is all we want.”
