Did you hear the one about the boy in the circus who wanted to run away and become a lawyer? Sounds profoundly odd, especially when your father is an acrobatic big bird in the Cirque du Soleil-- one of the world's most celebrated modern circuses, which is performing in Auckland this summer.

But life in the circus is all 10-year-old Artur Matula has ever known. The constant travel and hanging out with fire dancers and clowns sounds like ond big childhood fantasy but "for me, this is normal life," he says.

The sone of a Polish circus-performing father, he has spent most of his life roaming the globe with the troupe. He has been to more countries than he can remember, "but definitely more than 50", speaks four languages fluently and can do back flips with the rest of his peers.

But Artur is not interested in life as a clown; rather it is the Old Bailey that calls. Being a lawyer would be "cool", he says.

In fact, most of the children in the Alegria Cirque School, based at each Cirque site, are pretty nonchalant about their life under the big top.

There are 16 of them, aged between six and 16, who take school lessons five days a week, just like any other child would. They are used to their nomadic existence-- it's part of Circus life, they say.

The school roll is made up of eight Russians, three Mongolians, three Americans, one French-Canadian and one Pole. Five of the students are Cirque performers and the others are children of performers or permanent staff.

Based on the Quebec education system, the school is divided into four sectors, with elementary and secondary classes in French and English.

They learn the same subjects as a regular student, though PE sounds a lot more fun than the run-of-the-mill crosscountry or cricket.

Just about every student is proficient in assorted acrobatic manoeuvres. Well, you would be if your teacher was a Russian acrobat.

Asked if he could do a backflip, Artur replies indignanntly, "of course" as though it were a mere handstand.

Kristina Ivanova, a 15-year-old Russian student at the school, lives and breathes the Cirque.

When she is not at school, she is either rehearsing or performing. Being a fast-track acrobat sounds like hard work. All that running takes a lot of training, so when is there time for teenage stuff?

For a start, there is no school on Mondays-- or "dark days", as they say in the Cirque-- and the few hours left to Kristina are spent with her farmily or with her contortionist and acrobatic friends.

"You know," she says with an American twang, "we go shopping, watch television, hang out. Normal stuff."

Well, as normal as it can be when your friends can bend themselves in half and put their legs behind their ears while watching Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons.

Kristina plans to stay with the Cirque till she finishes school, then hopes to go on to university to stuudy mathematics or photography.

David Godbout, one of the three teachers, has been teaching at the Alegria school for 18 months. It is the biggest of the seven schools touring the world. "We call ourselves the board," he says.

Mr. Godbout, who comes from Montreal-- the birthplace of Cirque-- has never quite made it to the conventional classroom.His first job was teaching Inuit in the high Arctic. From there, he travelled up the Zmazon in Brazil to teach literacy.

"I always think about teaching in a normal school, but..."

Mr. Godbout says there are advantages for teachers and pupils at the Cirque school.

"There is a lot more one-on-one teaching, which is enriching, especially for the older ones. They learn to be independent and are able to relate to kids in age groups other than just their own," he says.

The downside is that they are not exposed to a greater number of children from different backgrounds, Mr. Godbout says.

But Artur and Kristina reckon they have got it pretty good. The Cirque school is more like a family than anything else, Artur says. Think the Partridge Family meet the Brady Bunch on tour.

And , perharps Artur's long-held career ambitions of being a lawyer are not so far away from his current life in a world of clowns, contortionists and high fliers.