http://www.backstage.com/bso/news_reviews/features/feature_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003714277

Circus Skills

When Christina Aimerito walks into an audition, she calms her nerves by remembering there’s one thing she can do that most of her competitors can’t: hang upside down from a ceiling. For the past year, she’s been studying aerial arts-a blend of trapeze, rope swinging, and other high-flying stunts popularized by troupes such as Cirque du Soleil. “The confidence it gives you as an actor” is unparalleled, Aimerito says.

Performer Joel Jeske, meanwhile, finds his strength in being a goof. Whenever he appears in a stage comedy, cast members demand to know how he comes up with all his physical shtick. It’s all from clowning, says Jeske, who has toured with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus and teaches physical theatre and clowning at New York’s Clown in Practice. “Performing as a clown,” he says, “is insanely empowering.” Whether you take a clown workshop in Manhattan or contort yourself in Hollywood, the circus arts-aerial tricks, juggling, acrobatics, contortion, clowning-offer a unique training opportunity. These skills demand physical timing, body control, and spontaneity, all of which can be useful on stage, film, and TV.

In Stephanie Abrams’ classes at Kinetic Theory Experimental Theatre in L.A., where Aimerito trains, students push their flexibility to the limit, snaking around circus ropes and braving the trapeze. Abrams, an actor and founder of the all-mime theatre, stresses presentation as much as physicality. At the end of her eight-week beginner aerial-arts class (she also teaches private lessons in contortion and other circus skills), each student performs a short piece of choreography, including three or four aerial tricks. “Circus is a performing art, not just a sport,” she says. “It’s really movement theatre.”