Aerial dance classes let you soar on strips of fabric

Blue Lapis Light offers aerial dance classes at Austin studio

By Pamela LeBlanc
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Friday, November 14, 2008

Nicole Whiteside glides down a silky sash suspended from the ceiling, graceful as a flower petal drifting on a breeze. I feel more like a grasshopper caught in a spiderweb, but I'm trying.

My abdominal muscles are screaming, but a workout is half the point of this beginners' lesson in aerial dance at Blue Lapis Light studio.

Blue Lapis Light specializes in site-specific aerial dance, with performers skimming and twirling along fluttering cloths high above the ground. In the past few years, they've staged shows at the Seaholm Power Plant and the now-dismantled shell of the Intel building downtown.

Whiteside, a performer and choreographer for the troupe, also teaches aerial dance to people who, like me, have no dance training. She's a classically trained ballet dancer. I can barely stand on one foot without tipping over.

I signed a waiver, though, and tonight

I'm one of a dozen or so students cavorting like wannabe Peter Pans in Southwest Austin.

Class begins with a session of core-strengthening exercises. Aerial dancers need strong abdominal and back muscles to hold themselves in place on those curtains of fabric.

"Are you feeling your stomach muscles burning? Good, because that's what we're going for," she tells us. "The artistry is in making everything look easy."

After another 10 minutes of warm-ups, we unfurl the six synthetic "cloths" or "silks" hanging from the center beam of the barn-shaped studio. Each is a different color — purple, white, bronze or blue — and slightly stretchy, so you can grip it without slipping. Whiteside shows us how to wrap our arms in the fabric, then lean forward, letting the cloth support us.

It's much harder than Whiteside makes it look, and my muscles quake after a few seconds. Someone yelps as they struggle to hold position.

Whiteside leads us through a series of basic moves. First, she coils her leg around a long sash, then shifts her weight onto it. Soon, we are all easing our weight onto our own cloth stirrup, hanging 12 inches off the floor. Then we try the double leg lock, with both feet supported by the cloth.

We wobble and sway. She looks strong and steady.

Next, she slinks up the cloth like an inchworm. We ooh and aah. Then try it, with mixed success and much less grace

"Think about making your back wider and flatter," Whiteside tells us, demonstrating what looks like textbook-perfect posture.

"Not like you're holding on for dear life?" Erika Domatti, 38, says, clutching her cloth.

Blue Lapis Light added this type of aerial dance to its shows in 2004. "First it was harnesses, then nets," Whiteside says. "Then we added cloth. Once we got on Intel, everything got bigger and higher until we were making ziplines from one building to another."

Whiteside loves it. "As a dancer, I find it meditative," she says. "It's an intensive workout, and it's really satisfying to get to the point where it is relaxing — which at first it is not."

Kyana Joy, 42, would second that notion. She hollers as she tries to mimic Whiteside's flowing motions. "That was exhausting," she says, slumping back to the ground. But worth it to fulfill a few dreams. "I just want to run away and join the circus, and this is as close as I can get."

At the end of the row, Jennifer Dormer is hanging upside down in mid-air, giggling a little apprehensively.

"Trust," her husband, John Dormer, 37, encourages her.

"That pinches!" Jennifer Dormer, 35, says, sliding back down to terra firma.

John Dormer talked his wife into taking the class after watching a video clip of aerial dance. He was curious how demanding it would be. The answer? Very demanding. "I don't think I've ever gotten a workout like I do on the cloth," he says now.

Vanessa Loverro, 25, has more experience than most of the students here. She's been taking classes for a year and a half and even set up her own rig at home, getting her father to drill a hole into the high ceiling beam in her sister's bedroom and hang a cloth.

"I have always been intrigued by this sort of stuff," Loverro says. "The circus, Cirque du Soleil — I love heights and this sort of motion and the sensation. And I love that it's a complete body workout."

Tonight, she even talked a friend who is engaged to be married into coming to a class.

"I like that it's getting me in shape for my wedding," Jenny Broaddus says.

At the moment, Whiteside is teaching another move. "What we're going to do is flip ourselves up into this knot," she explains, pointing to a huge knot tied at waist level into the cloth.

I hold the silk loop open with my arms and flip my legs over my head, somersaulting into position. Suddenly, surprisingly, I am suspended by my hips. I uncurl my legs until I'm stretched out flat. Then I pull myself up so I'm sitting in the loop. I feel like the woman on the swing at Austin's late Old San Francisco Steak House.

I look down the row. People are dangling upside down like caterpillars from strands of colorful silk.

Joy is hollering up a storm, mostly out of excitement.

Soon, I'm sure, we'll be as graceful as Whiteside. Give us time.

pleblanc@statesman.com; 445-3994