It wasn`t completely out of the blue. I mean, I had already been studying Circus Arts (Aerial Dance) for several years, having gotten involved with the trapeze after choreographing an argentine tango for a Le Cirque Center production of Chicago. I trained on a variety of Aerial Apparatus, including Lyra, Silks, Trapeze, and Corde Lisse, and was absolutely in love with the experience of flight. I found myself both performing and teaching, but it was hardly something I thought of as a viable life course. It was circus, after all. “Art.” I mean, one has to make money.

When I was a little girl, I used to ask everybody I met: “If you had one wish, what would it be?”

I always wished I could fly.

With politics lost, I enrolled full-time in New York Circus Arts, a Professional Training Program for Contemporary Circus Arts. I trained five nights a week, two hours a night, on top of my full-time university courses and my increasing explorations in the world of fine art. Conditioning, flexibility, vocabulary, mechanics. It was a two-year program. I was also still enrolled at NYU, taking 18 credits of philosophy, art, dance, and existentialism while I tried to figure out what I was doing with my life.

In february, I began to have ideas.

I would draw them in class, weaving long ink stories across the pages of my Japanese Album Moleskin. I was also working on a series of cast figures with canvas for the Gallatin Art Festival, spending hours with my hands covered in ink or oil paint, plaster of paris or hot glue and pink watercolor. I don`t think I ever really got the paint out from under my fingernails.

In March, a muse blew across my path.

He dropped a word on me once.

“So, basically, you`re majoring in circustentialism.”

In April I bound books.

We had a party. GAF was just over, 77 Allen St (my next art show, a guerilla collaboration with four other emerging manhattan artists) was in its early stages - and in the space between, for a final project in one of my NYU classes, I bound and drew a giant storyboard.

It was for a production unlike anything I`d ever imagined drawing, or writing, or even imagining in the first place. The piece combined dance, theater, and circus with abstract philosophy and impossible visuals, calling on what I knew about fine art to capture my vision for performance. As I presented my storyboard - a couple dozen pages and almost twenty-two feet long - for my class, I suddenly found myself realizing that this was not just an abstract idea. I was actually going to do this.

This word, Circustentialism, kept floating around in my head. What was it? It was philosophy. It was performance art. It probably involved at least one trapeze. And maybe a cloud swing.

It was Yoga.

In May I flew to Brazil.

My friend Amia and I had lost our summer scholarship due to a mysterious error in beurocracy at NYU, and made a last-minute cancellation of our plan to study abroad. Argentina laid to the side (for the second time, interestingly enough), we found ourselves with two tickets to Rio de Janeiro. What were we to do?

We flew to Brazil.

We spent almost a month in the coastal town of Salvador, in Bahia, camping out on a long white-sand coastline of artists, musicians, and dancers. While there, I connected with a Circus School (one of over 300 such schools in the country) called Circo Piccolino, which served as both an artistic endeavor and an agent of social change, pulling children off of the street in order to give them an activity, and education, an experience, and a livelihood.

In fact, all of Circo Piccolino`s senior instructors were once street children themselves, who grew up in the school and now taught the classes, as well as passionately pursuing their expression as artists and aerialists. It was so inspiring to see the incredible joy these people had in their process of creation - the lines between “art” and “work” and “life” were not even in existence.

I read “Alice no pais de Maravilhas” (Alice in Wonderland) in portuguese. I practiced two hours of Yoga on the beach at sunrise every single morning. I taught a little and trained a little and hung around the circus school and watched. What blew my mind most was the way these people played towards living, casually creating out of the fullness of their freedom to do whatever they wanted. It doesn`t hurt that the beach is a pole-jump away. They practice backflips in the sand.

The thing about Circus is, the word itself really doesn`t mean anything. The “Circus”, traditionally, has been “anything freaky enough that people will pay money and turn out in crowds just to see it.” Thanks to Guy Laliberte and Cirque du Soleil, who transformed a group of street performers into a series of some of the greatest performance art the world has ever seen, the word has transformed into something more ethereal, more fantastic. Uma escola do circo in Brazil, of course, is something completely different than a circus school in New York.

Circustentialism.

In June we went to Europe.

We didn`t do anything there. I mean, for someone with no real job, and no foreseeable future, and no more money to stay in school, I was very casual about taking two weeks to visit family, drink good wine, eat cheese, smoke welsh, and think. We traveled. Paris, Amsterdam, Mons, Bruges, Ghent. We reported on four different art galleries, taking photos and writing articles. We did a lot of Yoga.

My head had begun to turn with another idea. A duo show, a man and a woman, one fabric. Maybe half an hour long. Music that was more like humming, sculpture that transformed into dance. Dialogue during re-rigging. Something different. Something…pretty. A love story.

Once again, it was my muse who found the word I was looking for: Lila.

Sanskrit for divine play.

When we came back, we applied for the New Orleans Fringe Festival.

In July, I began teaching.

We traveled West. To Ashland, Oregon, where my old Circus School lay nestled between a creek and a mountain.

I had begun training with le Cirque when I was seventeen, but because it was a children`s school, in less than a year I was too old for the company. Hungry for more flight, I started adult classes at le cirque center, bringing in at first two, then three, then four other students, and learning almost everything from workshops - and Youtube. Two years later, my director Lorenzo invited me back to perform and teach - at the Ashland Circus Festival.

It was an incredible pleasure to return to the school that had first given me the gift of flight - and to see, with perspective, both their growth and my own.. I got to work alongside some of the best Aerialists on the west coast, from San Francisco to Montreal. The two weekends of shows and constant teaching - from Learning to Fly to my Trapeze and Choreography Course - were as exhausting as they were inspiring, as exciting as overwhelming. I learned so much, and taught so much, that I thought my head might burst with all of the incredible possibility of the universe.

The thing about circus is it is just so fat with possibility. There is nothing that cannot happen. Bicycles can ride through the sky, a woman in mouse ears does chinese pole from a hanging umbrella, a midget bounces from palm to palm as she floats beneath a bouquet of balloons. Why not, after all?

Why not? Why couldn`t this be my life, after all? In ten days, I made about $800 - doing nothing but my art. Which may seem like a massive amount or a piggybank`s paltry - depending on whether or not you have ever been a starving artist. My performances were unlike anything I had ever done before - braver, newer, purer, stronger. Things were shifting. Growing.

In August, I began to teach.

I had taught a few tentative warm-up workshops in the months preceding, beginner`s classes covering the very basics of trapeze and silks. They were small, but successful, leaving behind a trail of inspired and talented students wanting more.

It was time to realize their potential.

I taught two long classes every weekend, relaxing from the triple class schedule of the preceding months and warming into a comfortable, rythmic schedule of learning and training. I connected with the other schools, performing at STREB, teaching at SKYBOX. I found almost unbelievable (at least to me) success with my Trapeze and Choreography class, drawing a class that filled the ground (and the air) with their passion and talent. The vast majority of students had never before touched a trapeze.

The word had grown into a sentence. The sentence into an idea. The idea into creation.

Circus. Circus that combined theater with dance, yoga with art, philosophy with creation.

The School of Circustentialism.

This is that school.

WEEKLY CLASSES

WED 9 - 11 CLOUD SWING @ The Trapeze Loft

SAT 4 - 6 CIRCUSTENTIALISM @ The Skybox

SUN 4 - 6 LEARNING To FLY @ The Trapeze Loft