Meet the Coach: Tess Lozensky
Tess Lozensky started dancing at three years old and discovered aerial at seven after seeing a Cirque du Soleil show with her mom. She started coaching at 16 as a student coach and has continued training, teaching, and performing ever since. Her background includes competitive and collegiate dance, aerial performance, festival touring, and aerial competition, including first-place finishes at Aerialympics in 2023 and 2026.
At Roustabout, Tess coaches youth across silks, straps, sling, and dance, and teaches straps, dance, and silks for adults. We sat down with her to talk about growing up in dance and aerial, what she loves about silks, her approach to competition and artistry, and what she looks for in her students.
How Did You Get Started in Aerial?
I came from dance. I grew up dancing. I started when I was three, and then the story goes that when I was seven, my mom took me to a Cirque du Soleil show, and I was like, "I want to do that."
My parents found a local studio, and I was able to start taking aerial. I fell in love with it, and then I continued to pursue it. I started coaching when I was 16 as a student coach and have continued with it ever since.
What's Your Favorite Aerial Apparatus?
I feel like that's picking your favorite child a little bit! Lately, my favorite apparatus is silks, but straps depends on the day.
What Do You Love About Silks?
I love silks because they really combine elegance, strength, athleticism, and artistry, where you get to create and discover new pathways, and it just feels limitless.
There are so many different things that you can do. You have 20 feet of apparatus, and you just get to explore and do things where you're like, "Maybe someone has done this before, and maybe someone has never done this before." You're tangling and untangling, and it's so thought-process-y, but it's also so physical.
I also love fabric because I think it's so underutilized. You have your fabric, but your fabric is so much more than just two ropes.
Tell Us About Your Performance Background.
I grew up dancing, so obviously I did the competitive dance thing. I competed in jazz and pom, and all through high school I was on the high school dance team, so I did all of the competitive pom and cheer and hip hop.
When I got to college, I did collegiate dance. I primarily competed UDA, which is the Universal Dance Association, and that was pom, sideline/game day, hip hop, and jazz. We competed and performed on sidelines, so think football games, basketball games, and then we would also go to Orlando every January and compete at nationals. That was a really enlightening experience for the performance world.
In the aerial realm, I've done a lot in local studio performances and productions, and then I've done some festival tours over the summer and been able to travel around and perform.
Aside from that, I've also done a little bit of aerial competition. I competed with Aerialympics back in 2023, and then I competed again in 2026. I won my division the first year, and then this past year, I won first place for All Stars.
Pump Turns: Love Them or Hate Them?
I love pump turns. I think that they're so fun. I was not a good turner, though, so that was my nemesis skill.
I was a really great jumper, really great at angles, really good at ground skills, like floor work, but turns were my nemesis. I could not turn to save my life.
Usually in dance canons, you have the group that's doing 32 turns, and then you have the group that's doing 16, and then you have the group that's doing eight. I was the group that always did eight.
But I always got to do my toe touches. Love a good toe touch. And then I was always the one getting lifted and thrown places.
How Do You Balance Competition Scoring and Difficulty With Artistry?
I think it's a really interesting question, and I love the perspective that competing in collegiate dance gave me because it is very much, yes, the artistry and the performance capabilities in competition are definitely a challenging and interesting side of it.
Competition oftentimes takes the elements of dance and makes them very rubric-y and not overly artistic. I think that my experience in collegiate dance helped me realize that you have to keep that artistry in order to engage with the audience.
There are competitions that are more skill-based, like, "How well can you do these skills?" But a lot of competitions are also looking at, "How good of a performer are you?"
Ultimately, how good of a performer you are is how well you can connect with an audience. No matter how impressive your skills are, if you can't take the artistry and build that connection into your piece, you're not going to be able to become a really good competitive performer.
That's where I think there is a distinction between strictly skills competitions and more creative and artistic performer competitions.
How Did You Get Into Coaching?
The studio that I grew up at had a student teacher training program, and it was a really great opportunity to go through a curriculum. The teacher at that studio was an educator for the state of Colorado and helped build the dance curriculum for Colorado.
We went through an entire pedagogy and curriculum development program, understanding youth development and how bodies develop as you're going through puberty. How do you coach when you're having students who are right in those difficult ages where their body isn't feeling like their own skin anymore? How do you communicate to those types of students? How do you make sure that dance is a safe space for them?
I just fell in love with the connection that you're able to make. I primarily started with teaching youth. I taught everyone from about eight to 16 years old and really loved it. Then I started teaching adults and absolutely loved that.
I honestly love teaching anyone who's passionate and excited about what we do.
What Do You Look for in a Student?
Show up to class, work hard, and ask questions.
I don't have as much of a care about how well you can do the things as long as you have a good attitude about what you're doing.
How Would You Describe Yourself as a Coach?
I had a student who told me that I was one of the toughest coaches that she'd ever had, and it always felt like it came out of a place of love.
I would tell them to try harder, but it was because I really cared and really wanted to see them succeed. I love being able to know how hard I can push students and just seeing how much they're able to grow.
Why Did You Want to Coach at Roustabout?
I wanted to teach at Roustabout because I love good communities. That's what the aerial community is. It's the people that you're able to coach with, that you're able to teach, and that you're able to bond with.
I don't believe that education ever really comes from having this hierarchical status. There is the coach-student relationship, but when you're able to communicate person to person, I think that's really important.
I really feel that the energy of Roustabout is very much about that community spirit, seeing that professionalism and seeing that community element, but also being able to come together as a community and have good conversations in class while also working really hard and training hard.
What's Something People Might Not Know About You?
Oh my gosh! I have so many fun facts.
This year, I ran my first marathon, and I said it was going to be my last. I signed up for a half marathon in November already, so it's not going well with being done with running.
My other fun fact is that in high school I was in a yacht club, but this yacht club was not like a standard yacht club at all. We built two catamaran canoes that were 26 feet long, and then my class, there were 16 of us, traveled to Tacoma, Washington, and did a 70-mile race down Puget Sound.
Random fun facts. Always here for a first side quest.
