March, 2001

Running away to join the circus is a dream most people have when they are kids. But Chelsea Bacon ran off and joined the Pan-Twilight Circus as a trapeze artist while working on a BFA in playwriting from NYU, which she received in 1996. Now she creates visual acrobatic plays staged in the air. She is probably the only playwright-aerialist around.

Bacon sees the air as "another playground." "I am not attracted to the danger," she explains. "I definitely have a fear of heights, and I have to conquer that fear; but when you conquer something you get to know it more intimately, and that allows for more freedom of expression." This is where technique comes in, because playing in the air is governed by different rules from playing on the ground.

But her show isn't like a big top act. "It's not about sensationalism or making it look difficult," she says. "I think that most people, when they think of aerialism, think of the circus and big tricks and oohs and aahs. It isn't that I want to negate that -- the tricks are important because they are about craft and skill -- but I want people, when they watch my work, not to be afraid that someone is going to fall." Her mastery of the craft enables the audience to absorb the details. "I want the viewer to come away with the experience of the performers' fingers, toes, and eyeballs, and only subsequently consider 'Oh my god, that person was twenty feet in the air.'"

Bacon's latest and most ambitious piece, Breaker, premiers at Dixon Place's three-sided black box theater in March. Breaker is an aerial opera for a cast of six and accordionist Rachelle Garniez, based on a fairy tale about a fishing village visited by a circus from the sea. The show will be staged with a trapeze, several ropes, a suspended window frame, a rocking chair, and a big net. "If you give me something to hang, I will put it in," notes Bacon. She has used large copper objects in other shows. Bacon has the handshake you would expect from a person who has built a career gripping crossbars suspended in the air. She hails from the Pacific Northwest but has traveled all over America and Europe with her parents and sister. "My folks were just restless" she says. She only got into the trapeze in her late teens, explaining, "It's really the only thing that makes sense to me. I just out of nowhere started doing it." Bacon trained for three years with Sandrine Deplanque and Shana Carroll, among others.

In 1999 she received a commission from Three Legged Race in Minneapolis to create an aerial theater piece which she performed with stilt dancer Niki Byrd. At one point as Bacon hung from the trapeze by the backs of her knees, she picked Byrd off the ground, swung her back and forth, and set her down across the stage. For her next project, Bacon would like to stage Aristophanes' comedy, The Birds (what else?). "It's really crazy," Bacon says of her craft. "It hurts, your hands bleed, I'm covered with bruises, abrasions, and rope burns. But it is where I feel most myself." She elaborates, "I don't do yoga, so it is where I meditate... When I was training I loved the mathematics and physics of it. Either you could do the trick or you couldn't -- pure technique. There is something so clean about that. From there, one can be truly expressive in the air."