A Utah man’s death-defying pivot to the circus arts

Originally Published: 08 DEC 25 15:46 ET

By Peter Rosen, KSL

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    SALT LAKE CITY (KSL) -- Bryan Flanders thought he was going to die. He ended up teaching circus arts instead.

His story begins with a small bump on his shoulder that grew bigger and more painful. He went to a doctor who he said diagnosed it as terminal cancer.

"It was a type of cancer that the life expectancy was anywhere from about one to five years, and there just wasn't any treatment for it at the time," his wife, Chantel recalled. At the time, they had been married for two years.

"I mean they (his doctors) said that essentially that in the next couple years large chunks of your body would be cut off and until you would be done," Bryan Flanders said.

A month later, he found out he did not have cancer and was not going to die. But the experience already had him thinking.

Flanders had been on track for a career in public policy. He was working full-time to put himself through graduate school, and he had an internship, as well.

"It just kind of felt like, why was I doing all this for if I was going to die," he said. "What was the point of this, you know, meat grinder lifestyle of just working myself to death, and it made me want to choose happiness."

Happiness for Flanders turned out to be taking his shoes off and becoming a yoga instructor.

Until he was diagnosed with cancer, yoga was "something for older people," not him, he said.

"Bryan was bullet bike-riding, rock climbing, tough guy," Chantel Flanders said.

But during that month, he tried yoga, took to it and found himself teaching at studios up and down the Wasatch Front.

He learned acroyoga (acro, as in acrobatic) and then more circus arts and opened the Salt Lake City Circus Arts Center at Trolley Square.

"It really shifted my thinking into helping people feel better in their bodies and helping people become physically fit," he said.

"When I was dating Bryan, he always said, 'My ultimate goal is I want to be a college professor. That's what I want do. I want to teach,'" Chantel Flanders said.

"And this is not what he foresaw himself teaching, but he's a very good teacher. It's amazing how he can look at someone and know the intricacies about what they need to change in their body to make something more successful."

You can see how thoroughly Bryan and Chantel Flanders have steeped themselves in acroyoga and circus by flipping through their family photos – a long series of the couple and now their 3-year-old daughter Eleanor and dog, Archimedes, in perfectly-balanced acrobatic poses.

"Bryan and my photos are very 'OK, what are we going to wear? What heels is Chantel wearing? What new outfit should we go get? How can we match?' I think everybody thinks that that's me. It's actually Bryan," Chantel said.

"Ninety-five percent of the time Bryan is down on the ground on his belly. He's framing the shot. I'm the one that's standing in in frame so he can focus on something," Chantel said. "And then he sets the timer, he runs over and we've got no more than 20 seconds from the time that he leaves and we strike a few poses, try to listen for the camera going off and then we go back and see if we got anything."

Bryan Flanders says he is grateful for the cancer he didn't have.

"Everything that happens to us helps (us) become who we are, and I for sure wouldn't change it," he said.

"A little face face-to-face with death changes how you view life."

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by KSL's editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.

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