A Glimpse into the Life of an Aerial Instructor

Let’s assume that those of you reading this have been, or at considering becoming one of our students.  We love hearing your experiences at our studio, and thought you’d want to know a little bit about ours. First of all there are four of us: Anastasia, Erica, Larry, and Nina, and one more in training, the lovely Jolene. We’ve all had various careers and life experience outside of the studio, which makes each of our styles unique.  We all first came to aerial out of curiosity, which developed into a serious passion for dancing on apparatus, and teaching was an opportunity that happened to arise from that.

I (Erica) first fell in love with aerial arts in Seattle, where I lived throughout the first decade of the 2000s.  When I moved back to Buffalo in 2011, I was quite distressed to find this city lacking in things to dangle from and dance on. After searching high and …not really low… I came to rent some space in the Alt Theatre in 2012. Finally, I could at least practice, although I constantly missed being able to take class with other aerialists. Then the emails began; other people in Buffalo wanted to do this too! But how? Having only ever been a student, I didn’t feel prepared to take the jump to instructor.  I wasn’t sure how to structure a class, run a studio, or maintain rigging and equipment, all things I realized I’d taken for granted when I just showed up to my home studio in Seattle, Versatile Arts, and began climbing and twirling.

As interest in Buffalo grew, so did my motivation to figure these things out.  I attended trainings and workshops, and built the confidence to take on a few students, but I was still focused on my original career, completing my M.A. in literature and looking for teaching jobs.   However, the passion of one of my first students. Mr. Larry Acker Jr., affectionately known as Larrison or Larris, began to shift my focus.  Larry couldn’t get enough; he texted me all the time wanting to train more, and he began to spread the word to others–and to teach me about a little thing called marketing.  People started flooding in, and it seemed like overnight we went from a secret society to a studio.

This new-found studio attracted a few experienced aerialists who had recently moved to Buffalo from elsewhere and were searching for others like them.  I recognized their pursuit instantly: where are the aerialists here? I need to find them.  Well the answer was, they weren’t quite here yet, but Larris and I were slowly creating them, and maybe they’d like to help us?  See, besides being insanely fun on its own, aerial arts has a way of drawing in a community of truly amazing, kind-spirited, and usually slightly odd people.  Once you have found that happiness, it’s very difficult to live without it.

The first of these beautiful humans was Anastasia Kambouris, who came to Buffalo in the spring of 2014. She came from Tampa, Florida with her fiance who was doing his medical residency at UB.  I remember two of the first things she said, one was “I never though we’d move to Buffalo” and the other was (in reference to the studio) “I had been in the building before, but the Alt wasn’t open.  I just looked at the door and said ‘I know there’s silks behind that door’ and I was so excited.” I knew that feeling exactly because for most of the first year I’d been back in Buffalo, I was searching for that very door to no avail.  If you’ve even seen Anastasia perform or teach, you know that she is a stunning aerialist and dancer.  It took me about 10 minutes to recognize that, which combined with her extensive background in both fitness and dance training, it seemed meant to be that she join the team.  And we can thank her for bringing lyra (aerial hoop) to the Buffalo area!

About a year later, Nina Vega-Westhoff came to join us from…well… she has traveled all over North and South America, and has so much to share from those experiences.  Nina has been an aerialist, yogi, a dancer for many years as well, and we are still discovering the many profound insights she has into aerial training.  We have learned so much about sustained movement and dynamics from her methods. Her frequent trips to Toronto have forged a bond between our two cities, and well as brought a lot of top-notch artistry to our studio.

She and Jolene Lemke recently took a trip to New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA), which many aerialists consider to be somewhat of a national capital for our field.  They both completed the first round of in-depth teacher training.  If you’ve been to our studio recently, you’ve probably met Jolene, because she’s there all the time along with her daughter Nora, who also participates in aerial training.  Nora is actually the reason that we have Jolene on our team, as Jolene first contacted B.A.D. a few years ago looking for a children’s aerial program.  I had gotten calls asking for kids programs several times before, and hadn’t been able to make it work, but for some reason, fate intervened, and I knew this class had to happen.  After teaching Jolene’s daughter for a few weeks in a workshop, Jolene decided to try an adult class herself.  One thing led to another, and she caught the same obsession that we all had – it’s highly contagious!

So, being an instructor is really an evolution of the journey deeper into the field, although it does help if that journey coincides with being at a studio that needs instructors.  We seek out more knowledge whenever and wherever we can.  We review and reflect on what we’ve learned throughout our years as aerialists, trying to remember what the very beginning was like (the soreness, the confusion, the excitement!).  We organize our tricks into degrees of difficulty, and try to read our students’ level of comfort with each successive challenge we give them. We build transitions, strength and body awareness into and in between the tricks, giving people a nudge to go for it, or a reminder to slow down and breathe. We plan warm ups and stretches, and try to learn as much as we can about anatomy and injury prevention; we make new drills, playlists, choreography, and we have as much fun as we can!