To understand the passion of Sophia Blachman-Biatch is to see her unroll from two giant streams of blue silk, 30 feet in the air, plummeting toward the ground so fast you think she – oh! – jerks to a stop, head upside-down, four inches from the floor.
When the Weinberg sophomore arrived on campus last year, she immediately tried to convince others to do the same. “I printed out a picture of myself on silks and wrote, ‘Are you interested in doing this?’” she says.
A small group of students saw the posters and showed up at her dorm that night, curious how they too could twist and strain high above the ground. Having already written a constitution, Blachman-Biatch led a vote to inaugurate an acrobatic and aerial arts club they named Cirque NouveaU.
But unless you visit the private gym, where Blachman-Biatch pays to practice on trapeze equipment, you’ll never see her or anyone from Cirque NouveaU actually perform. “Every person I tell about silks asks me when my show is,” Blachman-Biatch says. We’re sitting in the SPAC lobby after practice, which I’ve taken part in for the second time this week. Halfway through her college career, Cirque NouveaU still hasn’t performed in front of a crowd.
The problem is the Northwestern bureaucracy, according to Blachman-Biatch. She says the Office of Risk Management cleared the group, now a conditional club, to practice. But when they went to Blomquist to rig her silk, Daniel Bulfin, director of recreational sports, suggested the group practice at a private gym instead.
“There is no one on my staff that can certify the installation of that apparatus,” says Bulfin. “To bring in a specialist just for one club, it’s not economically feasible.”
So instead, Blachman-Biatch practices on the second floor of SPAC. She hovers below a crossbar that connects two fitness systems, yards of unused silk pooling between stacks of metal.
“It’s so frustrating. There’s no space. There’s no height. There are people walking around. I get really embarrassed doing something that I want to look good, trying to perform it, but then everyone is kind of staring and I feel awkward,” she says with a sigh, pausing.
Then: “But it’s too much fun not to want to do it.”
Blachman-Biatch compares the strength-building SPAC sessions to “taking her medicine.” The silks are soft, but the workout is hard.
“I would also like to try some of the acrobatics, if possible, or at least the training that a beginner would need to get in the air,” I wrote in my initial email to Blachman-Biatch. “I work out four or five times a week, so hopefully fitness wouldn’t be a problem.”
What a joke. When my turn came, (the group practices twice a week for an hour and a half) I wondered why the person who had just finished was sweating.
“Just commit to the move. You have to commit,” says Blachman-Biatch, teaching me a basic pose, the straddle back. “Hold the silks by your head, one in each hand, and then pull your body over with your legs straight out.”
I took a breath and jumped, essentially trying to stop myself at the apex of a backflip. I thought if I leapt backward high enough, my legs would just flop over my head. But I pulled to heave my body over, forearms burning, abs locked tight. Acutely embarrassed, I realized that members of Cirque NouveaU do get to perform — every Thursday night for a gawking crowd of SPACrats and musclemen.
Eventually I inverted myself – success came when I listened to Blachman-Biatch and forgot about the hard floor below. Trust is essential in the circus arts.
“I think when people come and try they get interested, but not many people are consistent,” says Cirque NouveaU co-president Antonia Yang. “They come once or twice and then it’s… ” The Weinberg freshman trails off.
When I ask her what it’s like among the rafters, swaddled in silk, Blachman-Biatch at first demurs, saying she can’t do the experience justice. But I get a sense later, when she describes her favorite moves: the controlled “three star” falls from above. “It’s like whipping through the air, kind of like a roller coaster,” says Blachman-Biatch. “Except you get to choose what happens on the roller coaster.”
Blachman-Biatch will be abroad next fall and her co-founder, Communication senior Helen Kwok, is graduating. It’s a steep track to putting Cirque NouveaU in the air for Yang and Bienen junior Calvin Lee, the new co-presidents. But the thought of Cirque NouveaU reaching that height, all eyes on them, at last about to fall back down – it’s breathtaking.