They Float Through the Air With the Greatest of Ease . . .

“We’re definitely twins, we work together, we live very closely together but we’re pretty individual – I think that helps us maintain sanity.”

Once upon a time there were twin sisters from a small New England town who flew on the flying trapeze. They were not the children of lion-tamers and didn’t run away to the circus. Their introduction to trapeze was as remarkable as their subsequent career in the aerial arts.

“We first did trapeze at Club Med,” grins Elsie Smith, 34, explaining how she and her identical twin Serenity eventually ended up as performers in Montreal’s Cirque du Soleil. “When we were sixteen, my mom, who’s a doctor, had a medical conference at Club Med, where you can go scuba diving, parasailing, play volleyball – and you can fly on the trapeze.” It was their mom who first ventured on the trapeze. The girls felt that if someone their mom’s age could do it, surely they could; and if one sister tried it, the other would not be outdone. “It was a lot of fun, and the instructors remarked on our natural ability.”

“We were farm kids,” continues Serenity. “We didn’t have any dance or gymnastics background at all – we were the nerds in school: we loved books. But we would climb trees; we read our books up in the trees. And there were photos that my dad had of us doing cartwheels on logs – he was a logger – so it was definitely in our blood before we realized it.”

The Club Med experience did not alter Elsie or Serenity’s college plans. They both attended U-Mass Amherst. Elsie was drawn to architecture, Serenity, who had received a full scholarship, considered becoming a doctor, like her mom. During summers, they taught at a performing arts camp with a company called Circus of the Kids; here, they pursued acrobatics and trapeze further, learning from other instructors as well as teaching themselves. “We would help teach the kids, and then at lunchtime we would try a trick.”

When the fall semester came around, Elsie decided to remain teaching with Circus of the Kids; soon afterward, Serenity began performing with Ringling Brothers, and then the Pickle Family Circus of San Francisco. Elsie later joined her there. “We lived in San Francisco about five years; we’d probably been doing circus for 8 or 9 years by the time Elsie and I got together and started doing duo trapeze,” Serenity recalls. “A year later we were found by Cirque du Soleil.”

They are the first twins to perform for the troupe who actually had a trapeze background. “There have been several duo trapeze twins in Cirque du Soleil – they specifically cast that — but they usually hire gymnasts and then train them to do trapeze,” they explain. An artistic director for Cirque saw the sisters’ photograph at a circus school, and they were called for an immediate private audition, and hired on the spot. They toured with Cirque du Soleil, performing “Saltimbanco,” for four years.

Aerial Gymnastics

The art of trapeze has transformed through the ages. The best-known form is the flying trapeze: two trapeze swings, high in the air with performers swinging in unison; one artist lets go of her own bar, hurtling, spinning through the air as the crowd holds its breath, waiting for her to be caught by her partner. Elsie and Serenity perform and teach the flying trapeze. Their family farm outside Brattleboro has the trapeze set up outdoors through the summer for students who come from around the world to train and perfect their technique.

There is also “fixed trapeze,” explains Serenity. Performers use a trapeze bar that hangs from above, much closer to the floor than flying trapeze. There is nothing static, though, about this kind of trapeze — a complex acrobatics, gymnastics, and dance routine combined into one performance, on a tiny bar far smaller than a balance beam, and higher off the ground than uneven parallel bars.

The twins add to the drama with a sequence of rapid spins on the trapeze. One might think that they have a cohort out of sight manipulating the trapeze cables from above on cue, winding the performers up like a top. But it is the sisters themselves who control all the movement with their own power, with the help of a curved C-shaped apparatus they invented for this purpose. “Elsie went to Brown Roberts Hardware in Brattleboro and found two plant hangers, which we experimented with. It worked, so we brought the design to a welder friend of ours who made what we use now. Most people don’t even notice us reaching up to push on it during the act,” Serenity smiles.

“It’s exhilarating, and empowering, freeing, and really fun. When it’s not going so well, it’s terrifying, it’s painful —”

“It’s embarrassing, and sometimes it’s all of those things all at the same time.”

“There were some entire shows!” exclaims Elsie. “The first time you go out in front of two thousand people and you’re the only two people on that stage, and, you’ve been practicing for a while, but maybe there’s an additional thing that isn’t quite what you thought it was: maybe it’s more humid up at the top of the tent, and hotter, so you’re sweating, and more slippery.

“That can instantly take a show that you’ve totally prepared for and make it an entirely different thing. It’s incredibly scary because you feel at every instant that you’re going to just slide right off. Maybe it’s windy outside, and the tent is a little bit gooier and looser so every time you do a swing it sags more, and you can’t push up as high as you’re used to. It can feel different — mooshier — like standing on a boat.”

Serenity likens it to “the difference between driving a Cadillac, versus a zippy sports car – technically it’s the same thing, but it feels different, and when you’re not prepared for it, when you get up there and you think you’re going to be driving a Ferrari and all of a sudden you’re driving a Cadillac, it can be intimidating. And the audience won’t know the difference ninety percent of the time, but you’ll feel the difference.”

If something feels amiss, the sisters can usually communicate it without even speaking. “If it’s dangerous enough that we have to express it in words, we’ll actually talk to each other. At a certain point, safety is far more important than saving face in front of your audience.”

They describe an act in which one of them hangs off the other’s legs, and then slides further, and hangs from the top of her sister’s feet. “If it was really humid, we would skip that.” Through a push of the feet or some other physical signal, “We know that means this is the final part of this trick, we’re not going to go any further. You can do a lot with subtle eye contact also.”

“There are a lot of times that you make adjustments: Oops, I went a little too early; or her hand is too far over; I feel her finger under my toe and don’t put all my weight on it; you know, you make adjustments. Because you’re so familiar with the other person’s body movements, you can feel right away, ooh, we’re not having such a good day, she’s a little bit wiggly or tight, so we learn how to accommodate even for each other’s off days.”

Does it happen that one member of the duo is more daring than the other, and wants to push the daredevil factor further?

They both laugh. “Well, we’re really good at compromise – you have to be when you’re really high off the ground sitting on a tiny little bar that you’re sharing with someone else,” explains Elsie.

The sisters are also specialists in the fabric tradition. “The fiber and fabric industry has developed so much that now there is synthetic fabric that has a 2000 lb. breaking load. In the last 15 to 20 years someone thought of using fabric instead of ropes to hang from, taking the old tradition of winding yourself up and tying yourself up on ropes, climbing ropes – now they’re doing it with the fabrics and that’s become a very, very popular act in the circus, and one of our specialties to teach.”

Swaths of colorful fabric hang from above down to floor level, and at the beginning of a performance, Elsie and Serenity perform dance moves seemingly just using the fabric as a prop, or even as a dance partner. Suddenly, one of the sisters grasps a section of fabric above her head and with the speed and skill of Spiderman, rapidly scales the fabric — which is not tied down at the bottom — to a height of thirty-five feet. With graceful dance-like moves, she is at the same time quickly manipulating folds of fabric into elaborate knots around her foot that will allow her to hurtle headlong downward, spinning – only to recover dramatically and resume the dance-like performance 15 feet off the ground, until she finally alights on the floor to join her sister. About the skill of tying knots in this routine, Serenity confirms “You’ve got to get it right because you will either get stuck – or you’ll fall.”

Elsie and Serenity perform with fabric as a duo, and solo. Two months after having given birth, Serenity did a series of performances in a Springfield, MA nightclub, accompanied by a driving techno beat. “It’s fun to perform like that, for the different atmosphere, to do our ‘nightclub alter ego.’ I prefer theater, so it’s not just spectacle, but once in a while it can be fun.”

Other unlikely venues include a Marriott Hotel banquet hall, for a corporate convention. In their performances, stories are acted out. In her solo fabric act for this convention, Serenity explains that it was a metaphor for being a powerful woman, climbing, climbing, up, up — and emerging through the fabric, finishing with a powerful ending at the top. She explains, “I feel strong and graceful and muscular – and I share that with the audience.” In contrast, Serenity describes another performance: “When I performed the same piece for our political show in October – the “Halloween/Get Out the Vote Show (Because Voting Can Be Scary)” – the piece took on a whole new meaning. A close friend of our’s had escaped from Afghanistan with his family when he was young. After 9/11 he turned down high-paying engineering jobs for an opportunity to go home and work in the government. He died in a plane crash on his way to Pakistan for a meeting. My act in this context became a dedication to his dream to return and help his country, and a lament for how the U.S. has completely abused and ruined the goodwill that the world felt toward us immediately following the terrorist attacks.”

Flying Home

After several years on tour with Cirque du Soleil, the sisters decided to leave. Says Elsie, “They are a great company to work for, but our goals are different now. What we really missed at Cirque was, you are only a performer, and we find a lot of satisfaction from being teachers as well as performers, so it’s really nice the way we have our lives set up right now and can have both.”

The twins’ family had moved to Brattleboro. “Our father had kept sending us emails, saying ‘Look at what an artistic town Brattleboro is! It’s so cool! You should come back!’ So he definitely pushed the issue.” Elsie and Serenity moved back, and opened their Nimble Arts studio in a renovated cotton mill in Brattleboro, which offers spectacular space for artists of all manner. They still perform around the country as Gemini Trapeze, hired by various circuses or festivals.

In addition to their new roles, Serenity and her husband Bill Forchion became parents. How did it affect Elsie when Serenity became pregnant – how did they negotiate the pause in their career?

“The timing was really good,” relates Elsie. “Serenity got pregnant shortly after we left Cirque du Soleil, and we were coming back here and setting up the school for teaching. But we did have to make accommodations – we had been hired to do a double trapeze act that ended up being a solo, which was a great challenge for me. I had always performed as part of a duo, and especially as twins you walk on stage and instantly there’s a story that the audience can relate to – there’s a relationship, so you’re ‘something.’ But when you’re a soloist, it’s a lot harder to be something to your audience that they care about at the very beginning of your act; hopefully by the time you’re thirty seconds into it with the music and the costume and the character they’re with you; but I was so used to as soon as the lights went up ‘oh they’re twins, that’s so cool!’ So that was a real challenge for me, but – it was great! It’s much easier for me now to work as a soloist because sometimes we’re not both available to perform.”

Trapeze Artist Philosophy

“Circus, the way that we teach and perform it, is so much about mental strength as well as physical “brute” strength,” believes Elsie. “It becomes a mental strength – controlling fear, trusting that you can learn something at a particular age, trusting your inner strength as well as trusting a coach to spot you through something that you thought you could never possibly do. I love working with the beginners because the inner strength that they need just to go and hang upside down for the very first time is such a rewarding experience for them to feel, and you don’t actually need a lot of brute physical strength to do some very basic things. It isn’t until they get to the more intermediate advanced level that we’re talking about brute physical strength. With the work we do, yes, it’s about brute physical strength.

“We were taught to use this strengthening as a tool for empowering people, even children, to learn life skills, to learn about themselves, to dare to do things they never dreamed possible, to trust – so even though we’ve become these high-level professional performers and teachers, that is still our focus. Even if we’re working with someone who’s doing a double twisting back flip off the trapeze, it needs to be an enjoyable experience for them. It can also be a tool for them to learn about themselves; and if they learn that ‘big trick,’ that’s an added bonus, and that’s great. But we think that circus, and especially aerials (because you’re high off the ground) is a wonderful tool for people just to learn about themselves in the world.”

“The world in the sense that when you’re working with other people in that atmosphere – sometimes you’re working with two other people, say, on the same trapeze – you need to share space; you need to communicate with them; it’s the balance of give and take.”

Elsie continues,“We find that so many kids especially, but adults as well, have not been taught how to look at the big picture. You walk in the gym, everything’s all set up for you, you go in to buy your bread and it’s all set up for you – you don’t have to think about where did this come from, why am I doing it this way, how can I make it better, how can I make it better for the person standing next to me?

“To me that’s the metaphor for learning about your world and seeing how you are a part of the greater world around us. Because, up there, if someone just thinks of herself… that’s it! Down here in the greater world if someone just thinks of themselves... unfortunately we don’t have instant ramifications that come. Whereas in the circus you get an instant, “Oh! I guess that didn’t work! You fall to the ground with a thud!”

To the audience watching Elsie and Serenity Smith perform, however, all that can be seen is perfection, doubled.

The 2nd annual Circus Performers’ Gathering,

hosted by Nimble Arts Circus & Trapeze School,
features the Circus Variety Cabaret and will include performances by
LAVA - a women’s circus troupe from New York City;
High Strung/Air Devil from Toronto;
Bronwyn Sims and Elsie & Serenity Smith
from Nimble Arts and more!

May 6 - 7

Showtimes: Friday, 8 p.m. Saturday, 8 p.m.

For info about tickets call 802-246-3001 or
visit www.nimblearts.org or www.lavalove.org.

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