Catching Air
Aerial Artists Fly Into Town, Offer Classes

“It’s pushing the limits of what’s physically possible.”

David Clarkson, artistic director of Stalker, helps Ileigh Reynolds perform a stunt on stilts during a class at the Carnival Center. Michal Arias, white shirt, and Pedro Soler watch. Photo by Mitchell Zachs/MagicalPhotos.com

By Cynthia Archbold

Ileigh Reynolds, a professional modern dancer who is opening Flyspace!, Miami’s first aerial dance studio, says she is “addicted to being in the air.”

She believes aerial dance is catching on in South Florida, and there’s compelling evidence to support her claim. Not long after Christmas a quasi-supernatural aerial spectacle called “Flexion” took place outside on the plaza in front of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Miami.

For three nights kids, mothers, fathers and grandparents from all over Miami-Dade County — folks who might never have been there otherwise — plopped their lawn chairs outside of the glamorous concert hall, looking upward, spellbound.

Up in the sky superwomen-nymphs with sword-legs sliced the air, barely missing each other as they flew from a 15-foot-high metal cage in the plaza. Even famed performer Chita Rivera came out one evening to watch them after her own show at the Carnival Center.

Although the attraction seemed to have dropped like a meteor from outer space, “Flexion” was actually the result of a three-year relationship between the Carnival Center, which commissioned the new work, and the stilt-walking aerialists from a Santa Fe, N.M.-based company called Wise Fool, who performed it.

The Wise Fool artists perform and teach their unique combination of dance, stilt-walking and aerial acrobatics, which is called “physical theater.”

“I wanted to establish a momentum for physical theater here in South Florida because I thought it was an ideal location to do that,” says Justin Macdonnell, the Carnival Center’s artistic director, who notes this kind of art is very popular in Europe and South America.

“We have a great climate, a very outdoor lifestyle, lots of young people. …”

He hired members of Wise Fool to come to Miami, perform and teach circus arts workshops in youth center after-school programs all over Miami-Dade County for the past three years.

Macdonnell says through the “Walking Tall” program, hundreds of young students in Miami’s most disadvantaged communities have learned how to walk and dance on stilts, juggle and tumble.

“They love it, they love it,” says William Pregues, who helps run the North Shore Park and Youth Center in Miami Beach. “The program is great, very different.”

He says students are clamoring for the Walking Tall workshops, six-week sessions that take place during the fall and spring and culminate in a parade.

The next session begins March 12, and the parade takes place April 28 at the North Shore Park and Youth Center.

Many of those students who trained in circus arts brought their families to watch “Flexion” at the performing arts center, their teachers transformed into warrior-women, costumed in rubbery armor, sashaying on the glinting pincer-stilts, strutting like giants.

This was no standard circus act.

The performers wielded those giant chopsticks when they tumbled on the concrete and propelled themselves into backbends, somersaults and splits.

They kept them on as they climbed the giant cage and swooped through the air, and as they thrust and parried like upside-down fencers.

The stilts looked lethal, and part of the thrill was that the dancers could collide, or impale each other or fall.

“They seemed superhuman,” says Flyspace! studio’s Ileigh Reynolds. She admires the work of Wise Fool, and says they inspired her to incorporate stilt-walking into her aerial dance performances.

She believes the time is ripe to teach adults to take to the sky.

“It’s pushing the limits of what’s physically possible,” she says.

Reynolds is the director of adult programs at the Miami Contemporary Dance Center. Born and raised in Miami, with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from New World School of the Arts college dance program, she fell in love with aerial dance while working as a dancer in Arica, Chile.

Reynolds describes aerial dance as a genre of movement that has been gathering momentum in the United States since the 1970s. Using low-flying and static trapezes, and a plethora of hoops, hand loops, webs/corde lisse, silks (sturdy fabric), bungee cords, harnesses and stilts, she explains, “aerial dancers are able to explore space in a fully three-dimensional way.”

Even though Reynolds has been a professional dancer all her adult life, learning aerial was physically tough. “I had no upper body strength at all. I couldn’t even climb the silks the first four times I tried. …

“That’s why I became addicted to aerial, because it was the hardest thing I have ever done. I’m a perfectionist, so I’m like here’s something really hard; I want to master it.”

Through word of mouth alone, 15 students have already signed up for her classes, which are scheduled to begin Sunday, Feb. 18.

Aerial dance is hot these days because of the public appetite for Cirque du Soleil-type performances on cruise ships and at theme parks such as Disney and Busch Gardens. Reynolds says mastering aerial is the ticket for a commercially successful dance career.

“If you are a dancer, and you show up and you can do aerial, you will get a job,” she says.

But, with training and practice, anyone should be able to learn to climb the silks, and, she says, that’s the beauty of it. For more information call 786-556-6860. Flyspace! is located inside Chi Tae Kwon Do at 12122 SW 131st Ave., Kendall.

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