VERO BEACH — As Hannah Peters, 14, dangles from her ankle 20 feet overhead, Bob Greco, a maintenance worker at Leisure Square, stares up at her, immobilized. He swears his somber expression is not fear, only concern.
After all, Greco installed the rigging she’s hanging from, practicing for Vero’s Aerial Antics youth circus.
“We don’t do this to scare people,” says Greco. “We do it for the fun of it.”
Greco is a burly former beauty shop owner who also worked in construction. His circus rigging know-how was gained only through “about 2,000 hours of on-the-job training,” starting a dozen years ago when Aerial Antics and related classes got their own building.
Now in its 39th year, Aerial Antics is one of only a handful of youth circuses in Florida. Greco will oversee the circus’s temporary rigging over St. Edward’s School’s stage next weekend, when 250 young aerialists, dancers and gymnasts put on their big summer show, this year titled Circus de Colores.
“We devise new rigging for each venue,” he says, eyeing the ropes and chains holding Hannah aloft.
A Vero tradition spanning four decades, the circus has involved thousands of Vero kids.
For $90 a week ($15 more if kids don’t live in city limits), kids can spend their days defying gravity, building muscle, stretching their limbs to their apparent limits and devising maneuvers meant to terrify the sort of parent who hovers under a kid on a jungle gym.
Greco doesn’t have kids of his own, but he certainly understands anxiety.
“The best part of the show is when it’s over,” he says, all the while looking up at Hannah.
A junior varsity cheerleader at Vero Beach High involved in the circus since the age of 3, she is twisting and tumbling on a ceiling-to-floor swath of fabric called a silk.
Hannah’s stunts, Greco says, are a lot safer than they may appear.
“These kids know what they’re doing, and we take every precaution.”
Patty Howard, assistant director of recreation for the city, has worked with the program for 16 years.
Born to an old Vero family, she took part in the circus from the age of 5, back when it was held in the grass at Pocahontas Park.
When Howard went to college at Methodist University in Fayetteville, N.C., she studied physical education and learned that the non-competitive nature of circus was a large part of its appeal.
“We are strictly performance based,” says Howard, 39.
She says circus teaches children to “push through challenges with their own efforts,” and that in the process they gain a sense of accomplishment, and knowledge that they’re capable people.
Like Howard, her friends Julie Norman and Liz Matthews started circus classes at 5 years old; Angie Holshouser began at age three. They all kept it up through high school. Today they are Howard’s circus co-directors.
Holshouser is the supervisor of the Centerstage complex.
“This whole group is like a family,” says Kelsey McCord, 20, as she hits the remote to start and stop a Cold Play song for the dance routine.
A Vero Beach resident who takes classes online from Santa Fe College in Gainesville, she graduated from Vero Beach High in 2011 and has taken circus- related classes since the age of 11.
“It’s much more expressive ” than traditional dance and gymnastics classes, she says. “It’s open and airy, and you can come here and not feel stressed.”
Therein lies the illusion of the circus.
The audience owes its wonder to the skill of the performers, who mask their stunts’ difficulty with their grace and showmanship. If it doesn’t feel stressful to performers, it certainly does to the gasping audience.
For centuries, circus has existed as a non-elitist spectacle both for its viewers and its participants.
Training began not in academies and conservatories but in urban alleys and rural fields, as kids showed off for each other juggling, walking fences, or turning backflips into barrels off the front stoop.
Its qualities of showmanship incorporating risk take the performance beyond theater and dance, though it requires aspects of those arts as well.
At the same time, circus is practiced as a sport, demanding intensive training to develop the requisite strength, agility and coordination.
Vero’s circus is a granddaddy of the sport nationally, which only began to take off 20 years ago. The sport is poised for growth, says the American Youth Circus Organization based in Sarasota.
That group estimates current involvement at 10,000 kids, and predicts a fivefold expansion by 2015.
Increasingly, experts are studying the role of youth circus in expanding children’s ways of learning, with peers imparting many of the skills, and teachers incorporating the participants in developing tricks and routines as they go.
Inside the warehouse-like structure named Centerstage, an estimated 1,000 kids over the course of a year practice aerial stunts, lifts, tumbling and dance routines behind Leisure Square’s community pool.
Built with a matching grant from the state, the building is outfitted with mats, scaffolding, and a remote control sound system for the musical accompaniment.
Overhead, a system of pulleys, chains, rope and steel bars form the foundation for assorted devices: trapezes, rings, hoops and something called a triangle, in which two or more performers maneuver in unison or in counterpoint to one another.
Greco installed the rigging in 2001 and updated it in 2009; the rigging ropes are replaced every two years, Howard says.
Last week, sisters Ashton and Amber Atwell twirled high above the mat, each on a different colored silk, the ceiling-to-floor swath of fabric on which performers climb, twist and dangle.
Varsity cheerleaders for Florida State University and Tallahassee Community College respectively, the girls peer-teach at circus camp as well as perform.
“OK, let’s get some stamina going,” goads Holshouser, urging the Atwell sisters to the top of the silks. “You can climb it now, or you can climb it later when you’re tired,” she advises, as they work out a routine together.
Deftly using one foot to wrap the silk around the other ankle, the girls begin their tandem ascent like soldiers in boot camp, deciding how high to climb based on the tricks they’re about to do. Wrapping around different body parts supports their bodies like temporary trapezes.
Though they look as if they’re wrapped in jersey evening gowns, the silks actually function as quick-release safety harnesses, undone with a flick of the foot or a twist of the hips.
Those releases combined with gravity causes startling drops. At one point, the girls inverted themselves, releasing the silk like a slip knot. In an instant, they plunged five feet, snared only by the remaining wrapped silk.
“Ow!” hollers Amber, and not for the first time. Moments earlier, as she posed upside down, waiting for her sister to catch up, she called out through gritted teeth: “Oh, Ashton, you gotta hurry! Cramping!”
Across the room, teams of boy and girl dancers emit similar groans, the girls heaving themselves up and over partners’ shoulders, and the boys wincing at having to match the girl’s moves with their less limber legs.
The sound effects should be edited out by next weekend, the grunts and moans saved for backstage. But there is less backstage this year, thanks to huge attendance.
“Last year the shows were so packed that we had to rearrange the entire set up to make more room for the audience this year,” says Howard.
Aerial Antics Circus performs Aug. 8-10 at 7 p.m. at St. Edward’s School.
Tickets cost $6 for adults; $5 for children and seniors. Call 567-2144 for more information.
