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Spring 2006

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Twins Be Nimble

Feature

Twins Be Nimble

—Eric Goldscheider




	Elsie and Serenity Smith (photos by Ben Barnhart)

WHAT DO THOSE DARING YOUNG ladies on the flying trapeze do when they’re not wowing audiences with gravity- and death-defying acts of kinesthetic poetry? That’s a question audience members at circuses big and small have been asking themselves for the last decade as they’ve watched identical twins Elsie and Serenity Smith fly through the air or dangle precariously (albeit meticulously synchronized) from bolts of fabric cascading from the rafters.

The answer is that these 35-year-old sisters run a school for nimble artists in Brattleboro, Vermont, in what was once a shoe factory. They also perform regularly in near and far-flung places like Boston and Norway.

Nimble Arts www.nimblearts.org/ describes what they do and is also the name of their troupe and of the school where they teach individual and group lessons. Their pupils run the gamut from novices interested in fitness to aspiring big-top performers.

On a typical Saturday morning a few of their more than one hundred private students will be learning the basics or honing routines in a room with large windows, white-painted bricks, gray linoleum floor, movable mats, and tools of the trade that are, for the most part, attached to the ceiling. In between Serenity’s three-year-old son, Zebulon, might be heard saying, “Mom, look at this trick” as he tries walking backward on a low tightrope. Zeb tucks his hand into his dad’s palm while Mom teaches a student the finer points of hanging by one foot curled around the bar of a trapeze.

Serenity imparts information such as “cool ways” of getting into a “straddle,” “meat hook,” or “crucifix” position—all part of her craft’s lexicon. “In gymnastics there is a standard. In the circus you can call it whatever you want and make up whatever you want,” Serenity tells her student. That could be a metaphor for how she and her sister live their lives.

Elsie and Serenity grew up in the small western Massachusetts town of Huntington. Near the top of their high school class, they both had scholarships and followed their parents’ footsteps straight to UMass Amherst.

Two years earlier the trapeze bug had bitten them. Their mother, Melissa ’73, had taken them along to a conference at a Mexican resort where they tried flying from swing to swing. “It was terrifying but thrilling,” recalls Serenity.

After their first (and only) year in Amherst, the sisters ran off and joined the circus. Or something like that: they needed summer jobs and found them at a circus camp in upstate New York. Elsie became romantically involved with a man, and Serenity was recruited by Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey. There she started out riding elephants for legendary animal trainer the late Gunther Gebel-Williams. Serenity, who is Serenity Smith Forchion, met her husband, Bill Forchion, when he was a clown and she was a showgirl for “The Greatest Show on Earth” in 1989.

The sisters went their separate ways for a while. “We’re not the kind of twins who always need to be together,” explains Serenity.

To look at them you would think they are more granola than glitz. Out of the spotlight they don’t wear makeup, and their wardrobes tend towards old T-shirts and sweats. But Serenity says she found something alluring about appearing onstage in “skimpy skirts, a feather headdress, lots and lots of sequins, and fishnet stockings—think Vegas.” She slips into an alter ego when she performs. “Even to this day I can’t reconcile me with the person who is up on the trapeze,” she says.

Her path led her to San Francisco where Elsie joined her to start developing an act together in the mid-1990s. Their credits include a four-year tour as duo-trapezists in Cirque du Soleil’s Saltimbanco, as well as gigs with nearly a dozen other well-known groups such as Pilobolus, the New Pickle Circus, and Sea World. In addition to their work with Nimble Arts, as they still perform as the Trapeze Twins and are recognized as among the best at what they do.

What they do is to tickle your fantasy. Serenity hopes audiences come away reminded that “anything in life is possible, life is meant to be lived rather than plodded through day to day.” The wares the duo peddles in their eight-minute trapeze act include but are not limited to beauty, illusion, vitality, grace, whimsy, and flirtations with danger. When the whole troupe of seven performs—their repertory includes “The Love Show”—add in juggling, vaudeville, burlesque, and guffaws. It’s all about taking the control and timing they’ve spent years polishing and putting it in the service of a tragicomic take on human relationships.

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Twins Be Nimble

Twins Be Nimble: more images