Stay Grounded.

Like so many impossible New York horizons, the view hanging over the West Side Highway is a salad of stunningly discordant fixtures: Sprawling warehouses, office complexes, rooftop soccer fields, sunny piers, driving ranges, and perhaps most notably, the occasional soaring trapeze artist, free-falling over the Hudson somewhere between Spring and West Houston.

This particular stretch of netted campus belongs to Circus Academy New York, a trapeze and circus school with locations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and at Manhattan’s Pier 40. It’s a permanent home for those plagued (blessed) with the inclination to run away with the circus. “I always joke that flying trapeze keeps me grounded,” says Alana Taub, a student doctor who operates as both a participant and an instructor at the academy. “Medical school is a lot of work… But once I’m in the air, there’s a singularity of focus that is unparalleled. And that feeling of freedom and joy helps me reset.”

Naturally, as a doctor (in training), she harbors an adroit knowledge of the human anatomy and thus the potential for traumatic injury in her chosen side hustle—but the risk is part of the thing, folded up inside the largeness of the experience. “I try to leave accident mechanism analysis at the hospital,” she says. “And I try to remind students and myself that it’s healthy to acknowledge the fear; being scared while so high up trying something new is a good survival instinct. Your amygdala is doing its job! Deciding to jump is a choice, but once you’re in the air, there’s nothing like it.”

Taub is just one of Circus Academy New York’s loyal and eccentric cast members. Alongside her, or perhaps below her, bellowing support from the ground, you’ll also find Nevada-born twin sisters Dana and Leah Kreitz, both of whom work as instructors, while Dana moonlights as the school’s events & media coordinator. Although the duo only began their foray into trapeze in 2016—with Circus Academy, of course—they say they bore witness to plenty of circusry in the throes of their Las Vegas upbringing. Participation was inevitable. “There’s a required focus to flying trapeze. You don’t have the brain space to be focusing on emails or to do lists or whatever. You’re forced to be really present, which is awesome,” says Leah. “I also love the community. Circus folks are the absolute tits.”

It’s not just a question of the crowd, or the contagious energy, though. “ I actually talk about this in therapy quite a bit 'cause my therapist is like, oh, you like trapeze because you like the lack of control,” adds Dana. “But I think that, in reality, I like the training and the specificity that goes into it. It's a practice, it's a craft. It's something that takes time and repetition.” In short, there’s some merit in grasping at whatever agency is available to you amid a free fall. There are immense rewards in training yourself to exercise control, through rote repetition and perhaps good ‘ol-fashioned bravery, over what seems inherently uncontrollable.

“Teaching beginners is the best because people love to put limitations on themselves before they even try something…in trapeze and in life,” says Leah. “But newcomers almost always surprise themselves. Trapeze is so much about exposure and reps. Naturally, it starts out scaring the shit out of you. But you keep showing up and doing it day after day. Eventually, out of nowhere, you catch yourself unfazed by it.”

On the whole, the academy—formerly titled Trapeze School New York—is a full-service operation: In addition to trapeze-flying courses for aerialists of all experience levels, you’ll find silks workshops, trampoline sessions, and aerial strap and hoop instruction—as well as youth programs and summer camps. While most regulars and employees maintain otherwise day jobs (hello, student doctor), the academy remains a risk-saturated safe space for its patrons. A medium in which to flirt with so-called danger in a confined arena, cloistered away from the alternative anxiety-ridden risks implicit to living a real life: The financial hangups, the social and relationship-oriented fears, the creative and professional swings. “Everything in life comes with inherent risk—people can drown in the shower,” says Taub. “But I think risk is tied to the notion that you have something to lose. When you stand on the board, you’re choosing to jump off of a perfectly stable and secure surface…for fun.” In other words, you’re forfeiting the convenient furnishings or structure and safety of groundedness, if you will, not because you’re without a choice. Not because circumstances have led you here. Rather, because the euphoria is worth the risk, arguably a result of the risk, even.

“Flying really taps into your primal self. When you're on the bar, you can't be focusing on anything except for the present moment,” offers Sam Hart, one more pivotal member of the Circus Academy New York crew. “It brings deep feelings out of people: Satisfaction, courage, excitement, adrenaline. Some people cry—tears of joy, of course—because they get so overwhelmed. It's really incredible.”

Hart met his partner, Anna—also an instructor at the academy—at none other than circus camp, where the pair flew trapeze together. At the time, his father worked as a fabricator, crafting flying trapeze rigs. He was hardly new to the art form. Nevertheless, while it was still Anna’s first foray into the sport, that experience gap did little to hinder the connection. “Flying trapeze feels like total trust. Trust in yourself, those flying with you, and in the equipment,” Anna elaborates, speaking to the iron-clad nature of community in a niche like this one. “Trusting the people I fly with is incredibly important for me. The more trust there is, the less risk I perceive.”

Risk is a human imperative; an inherent byproduct of being alive. We grapple with the return on investment—consciously or otherwise—each time we board an airplane, cross the street, dine on raw fish, kiss, invest, blow out birthday candles, leave the house in a set of new shoes. With trapeze, however, you opt for the risk, lean all the way in, relinquish the strongholds of steady ground. Sure, there’s a (literal) safety net—countless fixtures in place to protect your wellbeing—but that hardly overwrites the need to smother oh so much self doubt in order to succeed.

In the Pixar masterpiece, The Incredibles, an otherwise forgettable villain offers one sage, invaluable piece of commentary: “Flying is just falling with style.” There's some poetic truth there. At bottom, that's what trapeze is: Wringing art out of fear—all while in the lofty throes of human flight.