RECREATION: Swing Time

Written by 
Bess Hochstein
Photography by 
Gregory Cherin
These daredevils fly through the air with the greatest of ease---on the trapeze

 

 

Suzi Winson hit her mid-life crisis right on schedule. Rounding the forty-year corner, she lost her long-term beau. Her father died a year later, and she felt a need to jolt herself with a new life direction. But, as the petite blonde explains, “I couldn’t buy myself a sports car because I never learned to drive.” Instead, she chose to address her fear of flight—and transportation in general—by tackling the flying trapeze.

 

Winson had studied ballet since she was eight years old and began dancing professionally at fifteen, achieving success as a triple-threat on Broadway and in touring productions such as Brigadoon, Annie, and My One and Only. In 1985, she originated the role of the nun who wanted to be a ballerina in the perennially popular musical Nunsense.

 

“I actually got to dance classical ballet in a full habit,” she says, laughing. But by age twenty-seven her feet were ruined, ending her professional dancing career. “I was physically done,” she recounts. “I limped after Nunsense; I was in really bad shape. I stopped, and I was thrilled to stop.”

 

In 1988, Winson shifted careers to marketing and writing, and began working with her brother, Robert, on his literary magazine, Fish Drum (which she subsequently took over upon his death in 1995). At a conference in Mexico in 2000, Winson met men’s movement icon Sam Keen, author of the seminal Fire in the Belly, who also wrote Learning to Fly: Trapeze-Reflections on Fear, Trust, and the Joy of Letting Go after taking up the flying trapeze at age sixty-two. Keen told Winson that he’d be leading a weeklong trapeze workshop at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York, that summer.

 

“He kind of dared me, and I went,” Winson recalls. “At the time I thought, How fabulous. I’ll be off my feet. I thought I’d be a natural at it, and I wasn’t. It was very scary.” But her fears differed from those expressed by others in the weeklong workshop. “Nineteen of the twenty people said, I’m afraid of heights,” recounts Winson, “but I’m afraid of nature and transportation.”

 

Though she left the workshop bruised and battered, trapeze proved to be the perfect outlet for the intensity that drove Winson during her ballet years. She threw herself into it, and within three years, having attended many more workshops and classes, Winson bought her own full-scale trapeze rig, which gets frequent use in the backyard of her Columbia County weekend home.

 

“I started spending more time in Claverack [New York], and I’m not an outdoors person. I needed something to do that would get me outside,” she explains. “Imagine having the world’s biggest swing set.”

 

Winson’s “swing set” requires the swinger to climb a nearly upright ladder to a narrow platform twenty-five feet above the ground; lean over the edge to grab the trapeze bar; jump off and swing as high as thirty-six feet; and eventually release and fall into a net—not counting the flips, splits, layouts, catches, and other tricks executed in midair. The rig was built by Peter Gold, a circus veteran who leads Trapeze-Experience workshops—who trained Winson to work the platform and help others take flight. Now she invites everyone who visits, and nearly everyone she meets, to play on her swing set—with a safety line, of course. “I fly everybody who comes here,” she says. “It’s part of the deal of being a relative of mine.”

 

Peter Spear, a brand strategist living in Hudson, New York, and a friend of Winson’s stepson, Sam, is among those she corralled into swinging. “I had never given the trapeze a thought before, ever,” says Spear. “And then there was Suzi talking about how intense it was, and how beautiful it was—and she talked about it as a craft and an art. That really intrigued me. I loved that it was all about flying.”

 

Spear had been skydiving before and felt comfortable with the idea of trapeze, though he wasn’t sure what to expect. “With trapeze in particular, you think you might know what it’s going to be like,” he says, “but you’re invariably surprised by how simple and natural it is, and by how challenging it is.”

 

Spear relishes the thrill of mastering a new trick. “By far the most exciting time was when I was caught—which basically means letting go blind[ly] in midair—hanging upside-down and facing away from the catcher. You think you’re all alone up there, listening for the instructions from the team, simply reaching out behind you, letting yourself go … and finding someone else up there with you to hold onto was intense.”

 

Alana Hauptman is another swinger; Winson, a regular at Hauptman’s Hudson restaurant, the Red Dot, invited her to fly last June. A practitioner of yoga and Pilates, Hauptman felt physically prepared, but she was surprised that within five minutes of showing her a basic trick called the knee hang, Winson expected Hauptman to climb the ladder and execute it. “It was daunting; it was a personal challenge,” Hauptman explains. “You go up, they spot you, and you’re in a harness so you can’t get hurt. You put your toes on the edge, and you have the bar. You’re supposed to lean your hips forward and jump off when they yell ‘Hep!’” The trick entailed bringing her legs over the bar at the top of the first swing, hanging from her knees and arching backward upside down, then bringing her hands back to the bar, unfurling her legs, and somersaulting backward into the net; had there been a catcher, she would have released from her knees while hanging upside down and soared into his arms. “I was just, Oh my god,” she recalls.

 

Hauptman was particularly taken with septuagenarian crew member Tony Steele, aka Uncle Tony, a legend in aerial circles who ran away to join the circus at age fifteen (with his mother’s blessing) and became the first trapeze artist to complete three-and-a-half somersaults to a leg catch. Even though he now has trouble walking, this no-longer-young man still flies through the air with the greatest of ease, and he’s a regular at the Claverack rig. He’ll be assisting next month when Winson holds her annual by-invitation-only weekend workshops and her Flying for a Free Tibet trapeze fundraising event for Students for a Free Tibet on September 20. The benefit seems a natural fit to Winson, who once flew a group of Tibetan monks who not only had never seen a circus—let alone the trapeze—but who also didn’t speak a word of English.

 

“On the trapeze you expand your idea of freedom,” she explains. “You’re letting go of things that prevent you from living freely.”

 

Winson credits the strengthening aspects of trapeze for her return to the ballet barre. “Now on a good day I dance like I’m fourteen again,” she says. Winson has begun teaching ballet—substituting for her own teacher at Peridance Center in Manhattan—as well as teaching jazz and theater arts to ballet students with her childhood dance teacher, Irine Fokine, in Ridgewood, New Jersey. In addition, she’s developing a class at the New York Circus Arts Academy in Manhattan to teach balletic movement to aerial artists. Nevertheless, she notes the contrast between performing ballet and throwing a trick.

 

“It’s quite different, more so than one would imagine,” she says. “The time frame for trapeze is about fifteen seconds to do everything you know, whereas in dance you might be on stage for two hours. One is sprinting; the other is a marathon. The constant is grace. Hopefully.”

 

Though fifteen seconds in midair may seem infinitesimal, to the experienced flyer it can seem like an eternity—at least according to Arlie Hart, a trapeze teacher at the New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Vermont. Hart, an expert rigger who met Winson in Manhattan while teaching at Trapeze School New York and who taught her safety measures for her rig, stresses the Be Here Now aspect of trapeze.

 

“One of the things you learn early on in your flying is that while you are flying, you can’t be thinking of anything else,” he explains. “While it certainly seems like things are happening very fast when you begin flying, as you progress you realize how much time you really have during a swing. You realize that there is a lot of time to do your trick. Things slow down. Finally, there is only that one moment, the focus of everything becomes a focus on now, and nothing else matters. What is really delightful is when you begin to expand that realization into the other aspects of your life.”

 

Winson has taken lessons from the trapeze into at least one other aspect of her life: particularly her fear of flying on airplanes.

 

“You become fascinated with flight,” she says. “Trapeze flyers’ idea of a good time is to sit and watch airplanes take off and land. You understand that there are rules about how fast something falls in the air. I’m still not the greatest airplane flyer—a lot of it is the confined space in a small plane. But I like great big planes and seats next to the emergency exit.”

 

She also vows that she will learn to drive this summer, though she has yet to schedule lessons and avoids setting a deadline. “I’ve never even sat in the driver’s seat,” she admits. “I take the bus and train to get here.”

 

Nor has trapeze resolved her fear of nature, a fact borne out by her preference, on a perfect spring day, to chat about flying in the living room rather than on one of her home’s many decks, overlooking an inviting pond.

 

“My idea of nature is a potted plant,” she quips. “I’m really a city person.” Fortunately, her Manhattan apartment has ten-foot ceilings—high enough to accommodate a static trapeze, just like the one suspended from the rafters of her Claverack living room, safe from the perils of the great outdoors. [AUGUST 2009]

Bess Hochstein is a frequent contributor to Berkshire Living.

 

 

THE GOODS

New England Center for Circus Arts
76 Cotton Mill Hill #300
Brattleboro, Vt.

Trapeze-Experience
with Peter Gold

Omega Institute
Rhinebeck, N.Y.

Club Getaway
59 South Kent Rd.
Kent, Conn.


Sam Keen’s Upward Bound

 

 

 

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