New club teaches acrobatic skills

After petitioning for University approval for the past year and a half, the Aerial Circus Club has officially launched this semester, receiving the Student Government Association’s approval on March 4.

Meeting on Friday afternoons, co-founders Marni Epstein and Gwen Martin lead a group of 12 students to the Mobtown Ballroom in Pigtown, Baltimore to teach them the fundamentals of aerial silks, a form of aerial acrobatics.

Epstein and Martin, sophomores with eight and six years of experience in circus respectively, have wanted to form an aerial silks club since the fall of their freshman year.

“I started circus when I was 12 years old at summer camp,” Epstein said. “Before coming to Hopkins, I took a gap year and spent five months at a youth circus in South Africa teaching children. It has been a huge part of my life.”

Epstein pointed out that the process for gaining club approval was particularly arduous.

“Unfortunately, we encountered a huge amount of resistance from the school when we first approached them because they were so unfamiliar with the concepts,” Epstein said.

Aerial Silk is a type of circus in which performers climb two 25-foot-tall pieces of fabric while contorting themselves and spinning between the two. Because it is inherently performed without a harness, the University was reluctant to approve the club until they were able to find a space to practice off campus.

“We were told by the administration that if we want to succeed, we would need to find a place to go off campus because the school did not want liability,” Epstein said. “It’s funny though, because [aerial silk] is probably as dangerous as basketball. I’ve never seen a single person fall.”

When they were finally approved as a university sanctioned organization this semester, the two found a group of interested students to take the weekly trip downtown, even as most had no previous experience with the activity.

“I hadn’t done circus until Marni showed me silks,” sophomore Bijan Abar said. “We’re both in the Outdoors Club, and because I am really into climbing, she suggested I join her new club.”

On Friday afternoons, Abar and the other 11 pupils travel to the Mobtown Ballroom for a two hour session.

For the first hour, a professional instructor teaches the group the proper footholds and grips of the sport, at which point Epstein and Martin take over instruction.

There are two main categories of moves within aerial silk. The first category, drops, consists of wrapping one’s legs around a strand of silk and contorting one’s body while sliding down.

The second, static poses, requires the aerialist to tie knots in the silk with his or her feet while holding a pose in the air.

“Both require a lot of body awareness,” Epstein said. “But eventually you’ll be able to master it and do a split upside down, which is just awesome.”

Although the club is brand new, they are already looking to expand. Due to the limitation of the space they are renting, the group needs exactly 12 people to commit to going for four weeks, with the cost of renting the space staying constant no matter how many members show up.

While they initially had 15 students interested in joining, Epstein and Martin had to turn three away due to space limitation.

By the end of the semester, they are hoping to find enough people interested to create a second session on a different day.

“It’s really cool how all of this has spread via word of mouth,” Epstein said. “We most certainly are hoping to expand in the future.”

Abar echoed Epstein’s remarks.

“I know most of the people who have joined so far are from the Outdoors Club,” Abar said, “but we already have had one graduate student join us, and no experience is necessary to join.”

The group is hoping to put together a performance by the end of the year to showcase what they have learned this semester.