…

Don’t wrap your hands, the small woman said as we sipped coffee at a shop beneath the rumbling Blue Line.

The woman, Camille Swift, has only known two trapeze artists who wrap their hands — one had eczema, one was a Parisian flight attendant whose bosses wanted silky-smooth femininity whilst handing out drinks. That slight separation dulls your sense of touch and body awareness; even a fraction might be dangerous.

“Even if it involves a crazy amount of pain, you want your skin to be in contact with the apparatus because that way your body knows you’re in contact with the apparatus,” she said.

l’Oiseau de feu

She calls it “circus,” not “the circus.” She speaks of it in the non-American sense, where it’s an art form considered on the level of opera, theater or dance.

“Here in the United States it’s still kind of an underground art form that people look a little askance at at times because they don’t really know what it is, but in France they have big, state-funded circus schools,” she said.

After discovering the trapeze in Chicago, Swift moved back to Champaign, where she taught French at the University of Illinois. A cocktail party conversation at a faculty mixer netted her a semester assignment in Paris.

She showed up in February, too late for the circus semester, but she was able to take classes at Association Volaverunt.

Although she is also a visual artist, she decided to focus on the trapeze during her time in France. Training on the trapeze was cheaper than renting an art studio and purchasing supplies.

Rigging

In 2012, back at U of I, the closest circus was at Illinois State University in Bloomington, 50 miles away. Swift looked into it just to be told it was for ISU faculty, staff and students only.

“I was like, ‘All right then. I guess I’m going to do my own thing.’ So I bought two trapezes, I had my trainer at the time start to train me to teach and I opened a little trapeze school in Champaign.”

It was $500 a trapeze, plus shipping, but the hard part was finding a place to hang them. To preserve both the aerialist and the drywall, static trapezes need to hang from open ceilings with exposed trusses.

Swift found a cheerleading and tumbling gym “in the middle of a cornfield.”

“It probably was more designed to store tractors in,” she said, laughing.

But those same architectural limitations help keep Top Star Trapeze (named after the gym it operates out of) the only aerial arts school in Champaign. When Swift made the move to Chicago, she turned leadership of the school over to one of her very first trapeze students.

The industrial lofts from Chicago’s now-dead manufacturing past make a better home.

Among reclaimed uses like bakeries, photography schools and design studios churning Chicago sports memorabilia, Swift performs and trains at the Aloft Loft with El Circo Cheapo, filling urban blight with silks and trapeze.

Camille Swift twists in the air and flies. She also breakdances dressed as a dinosaur and performs as the X-Men’s Dark Phoenix for Acrobatica Infiniti – The Nerd Circus, which a friend and colleague named Tank is forming (and you can bet your ass I’m going to be writing a story on that one once it gets going).

Spinning, flying with feminism and the trapeze, Camille Swift is the firebird, doing slow spirals in the air.

Video provided by Camille Swift.

Comment on this story

Read part one

Buy 1,001 Chicago Afternoons chapbooks, including “Creators,” which focuses on more obscure arts and artists of Chicago

You expected the cockatiel shock of henna-red hair shunted dramatically to the side. You expected the arched eyebrows and even the tinkling, slightly sarcastic-sounding voice to an extent.

But you didn’t expect someone who could flip and twist and lock her feet and dangle, kink her back and swirl through the air, raising herself slowly toward the sky by the tension of her wrists — you didn’t expect her to be so small.

Aerialist Camille Swift of Old Irving Park is five feet, five inches of the most powerful physical presence you’ve come across.

She’s the firebird.

The First Turn

The firebird spun in her room before she ever learned slow vertical flips around the static trapeze. She spun in her room for hours to her parents LPs until the day her mother was trying to put away laundry.

“Mom! I want to take dance classes!” she recalls herself yelling.

So she did, starting with jazz dance and moving to ballet at the age of 12, a late entry in that Black Swan field. She did it for eight years.

She painted, drew, wrote and, at 15, she saved up to purchase a bow to start archery. She started breakdancing in college and began training in Japanese swordsmanship while living in Chicago after college.

“I just didn’t like the idea of being a damsel in waiting,” she said, smiling over her cup of hot chocolate.

Body Awareness

Archery-honed deltoids would cause her ballet instructors to yell that she was holding her shoulders too high in fifth position.

She wasn’t. She just had more muscle mass and definition than the other ballerinas.

It was a familiar battle with the expectations placed on a woman’s body, and not just in ballet.

“You need to be curvy or you need to be thin and willowy. Pick one. You can’t be muscular,” she said.

She found trapeze through her Japanese swordsmanship sensei, who attended an El Circo Cheapo performance he wouldn’t stop raving about.

Swift got on the Aloft Loft mailing list and, eventually, signed up for a four-week silks class. That’s aerial acrobatics hanging from long, colorful trails of fabric. With archer upper-body strength and dancer body awareness, she took to silks and, later, trapeze.

Tricks of Strength

Unlike the flying trapeze of daring young men and sidekick origin stories, the static trapeze Swift specializes in exhibits “tricks of strength and contortion around the bar.”

“It’s the ballet of the aerial world. It’s kind of the foundation. You’re encouraged to start the static trapeze before you try any other aerial discipline,” she said.

It fit her aerial muse, but it also was a match for the body trained by bows and swords and disciplined by ballet.

“It was very refreshing to find an art world in which women, by default, have very, very strong upper bodies and are encouraged,” she said of trapeze. “I mean, you have to. So a woman who has a six-pack or gigantic lats, that’s fantastic. It’s something that you want and it’s something that you prefer. It’s utilitarian. That’s what happens when you hang from your arms and do crazy things.”

The firebird’s story will conclude on Wednesday, with callouses, Paris, a cosplay circus and setting up trapezes in a warehouse in Champaign.

Read more stories about circus arts in Chicago:

• Clowns
• Jugglers
• Flying trapeze
• Tightrope