I never expected to have “start taking trapeze in my early sixties” on my life-bingo card. I certainly never expected to be doing trapeze and slings into my seventies. But here we are – I started trapeze the year I turned 62, I’m about to turn 70, and I don’t see myself stopping. Canopy has become an integral part of my life.

When Canopy first opened, I remember thinking “That is SO cool. If that had been around when I was younger, I would have done that.” At the time, I was in full sandwich-generation mode, crunched between aging parents, my own family, and a demanding job. Plus, I mistakenly thought that I was already too old, way back then. In my mind, Canopy was for kids and young adults. It took me a while to realize how wrong I was.

Decades later, soon after I retired, the class Deb Atwood started for students 52 and over was featured in Boom Magazine. (The “Over B-52’s”, now just shortened to the “B-52s.” There’s a whole story about how that started that you should get Deb to tell you sometime.) Wow! I called to see when the next session might be. Honestly, if they’d said it would be weeks away, I’d probably have talked myself out of it. Fortunately, the session had just started; Ann and Deb encouraged me to give it a try, and I went to my first class in spring of 2018.

And I was hooked. Achieving even the first baby tricks was exciting. Doing Canopy provides a child-like “I did it!” high that you don’t get much as an adult. It’s amplified by the encouragement of the wonderful teachers and all the other students – the community support is absolutely amazing. Whether you’re learning basic moves or mastering complex material, you can count on being part of a group that celebrates each other’s progress.

Canopy has been an incredibly positive influence on my health. When I first started, I thought I was in pretty decent shape. I had been doing aerobics three times a week for years! I did Pilates! Surely I was up to this new activity.

You can all laugh now.

While I could manage the initial balance-based moves, it soon became apparent that I needed to be stronger in order to do the cool tricks I aspired to. Because of Canopy, I joined the YWCO (another nice community) and started a strength-training circuit class twice a week. As everyone is probably aware, strength training is very important as you age, especially for women. I just hadn’t been able to make myself do it until Canopy provided the incentive. It’s been really good for me - I am objectively stronger now than I was a decade ago. However, even though I’m stronger than I was, I’m not as strong as I want to be! Knowing that I can actually still improve is empowering

.

In all honesty, I do face age-related challenges. I have to be more careful about injuries than I would have been when younger, and there are body parts that I have to baby. You don’t get to be this age without some wear and tear! There are tricks I may never be able to do. After all, having started at this point in life, joining a circus is pretty much off the table! Still, when I stop to think about it, I’m amazed by what I can do, light-years beyond my initial expectations.

My life has been so enriched by participating in Canopy. I don’t see myself quitting anytime soon. In fact, my weekly schedule is completely driven by my trapeze and sling classes – everything else has to work around them. And I have to admit I totally love how impressed people are when they find out that yes, I do Canopy!

PS – If you want to see what the B-52’s can do, they will be in the upcoming show on September 12^th. Get your tickets and come say hi!

Two years ago, Canopy staff presented at the Educational Conference for American Circus Educators, please enjoy the teaser video from this presentation, if you would like access to the entire presentation please email ann@canopystudio.org

A conversation and reflection between Ann and Julie, Canopy’s Board President, about a very special day volunteering for Share the Magic Foundation.

Julie: A week ago Tuesday, I spent two hours in Stegeman Coliseum putting “This book belongs to” stickers inside Malcolm Mitchell’s fifth children’s book. More than 2,000 second graders from Clarke County and surrounding counties would receive a copy at a reading rally the next day.

Ann: The next morning, we stood outside as the buses arrived and helped lead the students into the Coliseum. I was the host for JJ Harris, Ana hosted Stroud, Mary Jessica welcomed Whitehead Road, and Ashley was able to see students and her kids’ old teachers from Oglethorpe Elementary School. The students were excited, but so were their teachers. You could feel it before we even got inside. This was a big deal for everyone.

Julie: I was volunteering as a host and greeting students from Timothy Road Elementary—where my own children went to school—as they got off their buses. As I led them to Section L, I heard those wonderful, amazed voices:

“Wow!”

“This is so cool!”

“I’ve never been here before!”

There is something pretty magical about watching a child walk into a place they have never been before and realizing that, for one morning, this place belongs to them, too.

Ann: And then came one of my favorite parts of the whole morning. Each school had the opportunity to nominate a handful of students who were already showing themselves to be strong readers. Those students were called down onto the floor of Stegeman Coliseum and presented with something very special—a football jersey with their own name on the back and their own unique number.

You could see what it meant to them.

These weren’t just jerseys. They were recognition. Someone had noticed their hard work. Someone was saying, You are a reader. You are doing something important. Keep going.

For a child, being called onto that floor in front of thousands of other students and receiving something with your own name on it is a pretty powerful experience.

Julie: Malcolm Mitchell’s mission is to make sure every child not only learns to read, but learns to love reading and understands the power that reading can give them.

One sentence in his book stuck with me:

Books are wings.

Ann: And that phrase made me think immediately about Canopy.

Because Canopy is also in the business of giving people wings.

Julie: I was at the reading rally because I volunteer with Canopy Studio, which will provide the entertainment for Malcolm’s fundraising event at the Georgia Aquarium next year. During planning conversations, Ann heard about this reading rally for Clarke County students and said, “Canopy does outreach to these same students. We can help!”

Ann: And when I heard about the opportunity, there was never really a question about whether Canopy should be involved. We already know these students. We work with their schools. We see them in our outreach programs and field trips. We know that sometimes all it takes is one experience to make a child think, Maybe this is for me.

So we signed up to help in any way we could.

Julie: When I joined the Canopy Board, I had no idea just how much of Canopy’s work happens beyond the studio walls. I didn’t know that Canopy provides every student with disabilities in Clarke County an adaptive P.E. class. I didn’t know how many ways Canopy works to make movement and the arts accessible to people, regardless of the obstacles they may face.

Sometimes that help comes in the form of an extra teacher added to a class, sometimes it comes through a reduced or free cost. Sometimes it means creating a completely unique experience for a student who usually experiences limitations and nos because their body or brains work a bit differently .

Sometimes it means making a few extra phone calls and a bit more planning to make sure an uncertain teenager knows that there is a place for them at Canopy.

Ann: That’s the part of Canopy that I wish everyone could see.

We often talk about trapeze and aerial dance because that’s what people see when they walk through our doors. But the trapeze is really just the tool. The bigger thing we are doing is helping people discover what they can do.

We’re giving kids a chance to be brave. We’re giving teenagers a place to belong. We’re giving adults a place to challenge themselves, create, connect and continue moving. We’re giving everyone a chance to move and participate in ways that are meaningful to them.

We use trapeze and aerial skills to teach grit, encourage resilience, and give everyone a safe place to try hard things.

These are all the same skills that a person must develop to become a great reader.

Julie: Canopy, too, wants to give people wings. Resilience and grit spill out from Canopy’s walls and into the lives of all our students.

Ann: Trapeze is just the tool.

Julie: If you’re reading this, you probably already know this. Maybe you or someone you love has experienced it firsthand. Maybe you’ve watched a child discover that they are stronger, braver, more creative, or more capable than they thought they were.

Ann: And in the same way that Canopy staff and Board answered the call for help, we are asking for your help to keep doing that work in our new home at 150 Ware Street.

We are in an amazing position for a nonprofit. Through the generosity of this community and years of careful saving, Canopy has raised and saved almost $900,000 toward our new home.

But we need to raise $300,000 more before the end of the year to move into our new building debt-free.

Julie: “Debt-free” might sound like a luxury. You might wonder why that is something worth giving toward when there are so many needs in our community.

The reason it matters is simple: Canopy is a nonprofit because we choose to prioritize outreach and accessibility.

Scholarships. Adaptive programming. School partnerships. Community performances. Free and reduced-cost opportunities. Extra support for students who need it.

If we take on significant debt, those are the first things that become vulnerable.

Ann: Being debt-free gives us the freedom to keep saying yes.

Yes, when a school asks us to bring aerial arts to students who might never otherwise experience them.

Yes, when a student needs an extra teacher or an accommodation to participate.

Yes, when a family needs a scholarship.

Yes, when a teenager is unsure whether she belongs and needs someone to make that extra phone call.

Yes, when a community partner says, “We have an opportunity. Canopy, can you help?”

Julie: We want Canopy to be a place where people discover their own wings.

Ann: And we want the new building to make it possible for us to give those wings to even more people.

Julie: Will you help us get there?

Every gift matters. Whether you give $25, $100, $500, $1,000, or more, you are helping build a home where Canopy can continue making movement, creativity, connection and possibility accessible to our entire community.

Ann: Our new building is more than a building.

It is a place where people will learn to fly.

Julie: Just like Malcolm’s books, Canopy’s wings are meant to be shared.

Ann: Help us raise the final $300,000 and move into 150 Ware Street debt-free.

Julie & Ann: Because everyone deserves the chance to discover what they can do when someone gives them wings.

Donate

Today is March 1st.

I’m in my backyard, the same backyard where I ran wild as a kid. It’s the place where I learned that if you have enough imagination, a pile of lumber becomes a castle, a theater, a pirate ship, or an impossible invention. My brother, Sam Crowe and I spent countless afternoons building things that probably shouldn’t have existed and certainly shouldn’t have been trusted.

One of those projects was a trapeze rig built from four-by-fours. We knew it was too rickety to fly on, but building it was never really about the finished product. It was about asking, Could we make this? It was about learning by doing and about possibility and teenaged stupidity.

I still live in this same home. Over the years this yard has hosted performances, photo shoots, live music, poetry, community gatherings, and plenty of aerial apparatus hanging from official and structurally sound rigs. It has always been a place where ideas become something tangible if I let my mind drift a little bit.

So this morning I’m outside again, watching spring rehearse its ancient choreography. The goldfish circle the pond with determined purpose. The breeze is warm enough to hint that winter is finished. The sun filters through the trees just enough to remind me that sunscreen could be an important addition to my middle-aged face.

And I’m building trapeze bars; splicing rope, banding hardware, threading elbow covers. The kind of repetitive, physical work that lets the back of your mind wander while your hands remember exactly what to do.

And it feels fitting, while I’m building bars in my backyard, our organization also building something much bigger. After years of planning, fundraising, dreaming, revising plans, and solving problems none of us could have anticipated, we are well on our way to creating Canopy’s new home.

Now it’s August, I must admit that I’m used to controlling all the details and things usually happen from sheer force of will, but not building timelines, and we are building something significantly more structurally sound than the back yard four by four rig this time around.

The bars that I built in early March no longer smell like new rope. They’ve lost some of their stretch, and the ropes are darkened by the grip of hundreds of hands. Our building continues to take shape, and every week brings another visible reminder that this dream is becoming real.

And I’m still building bars, we didn’t lose a bar, but because that’s what this work is—constant maintenance, continual improvement, and preparing for the next person who will trust what you’ve built. Building a building is exactly the same, just a bit (ahem, SIGNIFICANTLY) larger.

Aerialists spend so much of our lives suspended between places. We train ourselves to leave solid ground. We trust rope, fabric, and one another, we also trust the steel that most people don’t think too much about because they don’t climb up and touch it on a daily basis. Yet every flight begins with infrastructure that someone carefully designed, engineered, fabricated, inspected, and assembled.

Freedom requires a solid foundation and the skills of so many professionals beyond aerial coaches.

That has become the story of this entire project.

People often ask what it’s like to build a nonprofit or lead an organization through a project this large. The honest answer is that it looks a lot like building trapeze bars. Thousands of small tasks that no one notices individually. Measurements checked twice. Tiny adjustments. Hardware tightened. Rope carefully spliced. None of it particularly glamorous, but every detail matters because someday someone else will trust it with their body.

Community works the same way.

It isn’t built through one spectacular performance or one successful fundraiser. It’s built through consistency. Through welcoming someone new. Through remembering a student’s name. Through volunteers who show up. Through donors who believe before they can see the finished result. Through board members willing to wrestle with difficult decisions. Through teachers who quietly change lives every afternoon.

As our new home continues to come together, one of those carefully built spaces now has a name.

As we continue preparing our new home, I’m especially excited to share that one of those spaces now has a name.

The Conroy–Crowe Community Room has been fully funded through the extraordinary generosity of the Conroy and Woodruff families. This room is named in honor of Laura Conroy and Sam Crowe, two Canopy aerialists and performers who died by suicide—Laura ten years ago this October and Sam twenty-three years ago this summer.

There is something beautifully fitting about the room that now bears their names.

The Community Room was never intended to be just another studio. It was purpose-built so that Canopy can serve every member of our community. It will function primarily as a dedicated space for Adaptive Physical Education classes, specially-abled student instruction, and many of our children’s classes. Thoughtful additions—including lifting pulleys, a sink, secure storage for adaptive aerial apparatuses, and doors that can close to create a quieter, more focused environment—will make this a space intentionally designed for accessibility, dignity, and belonging.

Like every trapeze bar, every beam, and every carefully engineered point in our new building, this room exists because people chose to build something that would support others.

One wall of the Community Room will feature a sunflower mural designed by Timera Temple and painted by members of the Canopy Repertory Company. The mural honors all of the Canopy students we have lost during our first two decades. It is both a memorial and a promise: that the people who shape this community continue to shape it even after they are gone. The design leaves space to honor others in the years ahead, because community is something we continue to build together, generation after generation.

That feels like the right legacy for Laura and Sam—not simply to have their names on a room, but to have those names attached to the place where so many students will discover that they belong.

But every time I see that phrase, I find myself rolling my eyes a little, because the truth is that Canopy’s philosophy is almost the exact opposite.

In fact, if any of our teachers or students or repertory company were actually in the studio doing aerial every single day, I would probably call a meeting and stage some kind of sweat and glitter intervention. Not because circus and aerial arts aren’t wonderful, but because we are not trying to build a culture where people are constantly in the air. Bodies simply aren’t meant to sustain that kind of repetition without consequence. When aerial training happens every day, fatigue accumulates, small injuries creep in and little injuries become bigger and slower to heal, and eventually the joy of the work begins to erode.

At Canopy, we think about aerial differently. We practice it with the long view in mind: we want to celebrate a lifetime of healthy movement, strong bodies, and mobility that lasts well into old age. - remember the aging aerial presentation from two Septembers ago?

Looking forward to a life time of healthy movement shapes the way we teach. Rather than assuming everyone should train constantly, I spend much more time thinking about how to make aerial arts sustainable and meaningful for the once-a-week or twice-a-week student. That’s the rhythm most people can actually maintain in the midst of everything else we are juggling. Our students have full lives outside the studio—jobs, families, gardens, school pickups, older parents that call in the middle of the night and bodies that benefit from rest as much as exertion. The goal isn’t to dominate every hour of someone’s physical life with circus training; the goal is to make circus something that enriches it.

Which is where cross-training becomes the real magic.

When I talk about cross-training, I’m not talking about punishing workout schedules or extreme regimens designed to wring every last drop of productivity out of the human body. I’m talking about the quieter, steadier forms of movement that build strength and resilience almost without us noticing: long walks in the woods, afternoons spent gardening, carrying groceries, sweeping floors, stretching before bed. Yoga, Pilates, weight training, and mobility work play their part and are expanding these offerings at Canopy, but so do the everyday rhythms of living in a body.

Sometimes cross-training is playful rather than structured. It might be riding bikes on the weekend, learning to juggle in the backyard, walking on stilts, or spending an afternoon baking bread and folding laundry while music plays in the kitchen. All of those activities cultivate coordination, balance, patience, and endurance—qualities that translate back into the air.

Our rep company and teachers often explore movement all over Athens, and over time a small collection of favorite places has emerged. Pilates training with April Skelton, which has become a favorite way to build the kind of deep strength that aerialists rely on but rarely see. Others build strength by lifting weights or kickboxing at Strength & Strike Fitness, or spend time refining alignment and control at Pure Balance Pilates. Powerful body work happens through Yamuna Body Rolling with Julie Phillips (also our aerial yoga teacher), while many of our students stretch deeply at M3 Yoga.

On weekends, it’s just as common to find people biking or taking long walks on The Firefly Trail, or paddle boarding across Lake Chapman. Some love wandering the paths at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, where long walks double as both recovery and inspiration. My current favorite place for walks and biking and playing in the creek is Thomas Farm Preserve. What all of these places have in common is that they remind us that movement is not a single discipline. It’s a wide landscape. Circus is one beautiful corner of it, but the rest of the terrain—the walking, stretching, lifting, wandering, playing—is what makes the circus possible in the first place.

So perhaps the slogan could use a small adjustment.

Instead of Circus Every Damn Day, maybe the phrase we’re really after is something more like this:

Circus twice a week,
Movement every day.

__________________

I invite you to drop into some of our new class offerings, bring a friend and have fun moving without an “trick” goal. All these classes welcome drop in students:

Monday aerial conditioning at noon, kids/teen ground acrobatics at 4:45, adult handstands at 5:30 and partner acrobatics at 6:45.

On Thursdays we offer mat-based yoga at noon.

Round your week out on Fridays with aerial yoga at 9:30 am and conditioning with hand weights and body weight at noon.

I have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS), a connective tissue disorder. As a result, I also experience postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) and chronic pain.

All the doctors say is, *shrug* and *have you tried losing weight*? What I am saying is, I have all the joy of horrible leg pain and the fun of no one knowing why.

So, obviously, I decided to take up trapeze. A sport known for its necessary strength and balance along with heights and variations of height at rapid speed. What can I say? I was seduced by the glitter.

It was hard at first. I mean, it is still hard, but the beginning was harder. I started with private lessons because I didn’t even know if this was possible. The last time I did anything active was in middle school and that was figure skating. Now, I had a pre-schooler and a baby and had just recovered from some pretty extensive hip surgery. Those first classes were rough but fun. I saw the magic of doing something so unreal and crazy and I saw how my body was actually doing what I wanted it to do.

I wasn’t planning on doing much more than a simple trick or two and then going back to being a moderately decent mother who went on walks with giant nalgenes and matching track suits around the track at the local high school. I would invest in pearls and sweater sets and be the stereotypical person I had in my head. But, in those classes, I realized I wasn’t that type of person. I liked the thrill of testing body and making it do hard things. I spent an entire lesson working on “pulling the four” of a claire split. My hands became rough and my body sore but I saw that I could actually pull my body weight to the right. I went home after that, barely being able to close my hands but I was in love. I joined a gym to help me get stronger. I hired a personal trainer. I developed a pyramid scheme of exercise to try and get better for my hobby that was quickly taking over. I joined a class and kept my private lessons. I would work on the curriculum ahead of the class so I wouldn’t struggle as much in front of people.

And yes, I know that everyone at Canopy has health issues, considerations, kids, age, the works. But, they were different in my head. They knew themselves and were confident and strong. And I was just me, nothing special. But at my first performance, that moment on the stage was the time I saw that I could be more. That I already was more. That anyone can be a star and be amazing doing anything. A friend saved the Flagpole from that show. Unbeknownst to me, she had it framed and wrote such encouraging words on the back. Saying how proud she was of me. Of blooming into grace.

I teach now. I take classes with people who have become close friends. My pain has gotten worse and I have a whole squad of doctors stumped. But my legs hurt less when I am in the air. My hands are strong, my mind active, and there is no place else I would rather be. And the people I teach? They are going through their own health problems and struggles. And I get to usher them through the tough moments and get them to achieve their own goals and have their own moments of pure grace and happiness.

I was at a private this week with Ann. She is trying to solve a problem I am having with inversions in the ropes with my less than amazing arms. Back to basics, we do rainbow straddles and work at keeping the butt to the bar. Talking with people as they walk pass, hanging upside down. I enjoy every moment.

I was sitting at a red light, distracted by the shadow of a bird gliding across a stretch of fresh sod. I watched it drift until it disappeared into the texture of the grasses and wildflowers growing in a retention pond. The shadow was only a gesture of movement, an echo of the real thing, but for a moment it held my attention.

That shadow feels a little like my imagination these days.

While we are busy planning a building with steel, wood, and sheetrock, what keeps me going isn’t the building itself. It’s imagining what will happen inside it: the first student climbing a fabric, the first swing of a trapeze, the first rehearsal, the first moment when someone discovers they can do something they never thought possible. It is the ethereal movement of dance, flying, creativity, and community that reminds me why we are doing all of this.

It won’t surprise anyone who has ever been involved in construction to hear that our project is delayed.

When we first began this process, I was told the building could be delivered in May and assembled in June. I confidently told our community that we’d be moving in the fall, believing we had built in nearly four months of extra time. What none of us—including me—fully appreciated was the complexity of translating the unique demands of aerial arts into the language of structural engineering.

Designing a building for aerial dance isn’t like designing a gym or a theater.

Over the past year, I designed multiple rigging grids that would serve Canopy’s current programming while giving us the flexibility to grow for the next thirty years. The challenge is that aerial rigging isn’t really measured in pounds. It is measured in dynamic forces created by moving human bodies. A person doesn’t simply hang from a point—they swing, spin, drop, catch, and create forces that change dramatically in motion.

When I tell an engineer that a performer weighs 150 pounds and the equipment weighs another 40 pounds, it is tempting to imagine a static load, like hanging a speaker in a concert venue. If we had designed the building that way, the rigging would have been inadequate for the work we do every day.

As we refined the engineering, however, we swung to the opposite extreme.

Instead of assuming too little force, we imagined the absolute maximum. What if every rigging point experienced its highest possible dynamic load at the same time? Picture twenty aerialists performing together, each executing a dynamic drop on the same musical cue. The computer models responded by growing larger and larger until the steel required to support those theoretical loads became enormous. Beams that had once been eight inches deep became thirty-six inches deep. Horizontal cleat beams began extending into the rooms. Suddenly, we weren’t just adding steel—we were losing nearly three feet of usable space around the perimeter of every studio.

But the answer can’t be found at either extreme.

Somewhere between a building that could have been delivered months ago—but couldn’t safely support our art—and a building engineered like a bridge overpass lies the solution we actually need.

Safety has always been, and will always remain, our highest priority.

One of the greatest challenges in this process is that there are no American building standards specifically for aerial arts. There is no governing code that tells an engineer exactly how to design for trapeze, aerial dance on fabrics or rope, or dynamic circus movement of partnering. Much of our equipment exceeds the strength needed to hold a car, not because we expect those loads, but because in our field redundancy and safety matter. We intentionally choose systems that are stronger than necessary because people trust us with their bodies every single day.

That commitment to safety is worth taking the time to get right.

So if you drive by 150 Ware Street and wonder where the building is—or remember that we hoped to move this fall—please know that it is still coming. We are simply taking the time to ensure that the building we open is one that can safely support the art we make today and the art we haven’t even imagined yet.

I keep thinking about that bird’s shadow.

The shadow crossed the ground so gracefully that, for a moment, it became the thing I was watching. But somewhere above it was the bird itself. You had to squint into the bright summer sky to find it.

Right now, our new home feels a little like that.

The dream is easy to imagine. The reality takes a little more work to see. Above all of the drawings, calculations, revisions, and delays are architects, engineers, builders, and riggers—all tracking the real bird, making a multitude of decisions that will eventually allow us to turn a shadow into something solid.

And one day, very soon, we’ll stop imagining what can happen inside those walls.

We’ll step inside, climb into the air, and begin.

I have to tell you a story.

Several years ago, before COVID, my mornings often consisted of back-to-back private lessons. Occasionally, Melissa would work privately with students who had very specific goals or needs during those hours.

On one particular morning, I was working with one of my teenage students with autism (her language preference is person-first.)

When she first came to Canopy, she was virtually nonverbal. There had been periods of self-harm, she did not interact with many people outside of her family and she was homeschooled. Somehow, though, she decided that she wanted to do trapeze and found Canopy in a Google search.

So we started small. She joined a tiny homeschool class where she had the opportunity to interact with a teacher and one same-age peer and her own younger sister. As her comfort grew, so did her world. One peer became several peers and she found a voice where movement became creativity and participation became connection.

To help manage the anxiety of participating in class, we developed a strategy. Each week she would come in for a private lesson before class where we would preview the lesson plan and learn the skills ahead of time. She was pre-taught the physical skills so that when she arrived in class, she was already the expert on the tricks. The challenge was no longer the movement itself; the challenge was the social experience of taking a class alongside other people.

The model worked beautifully, as she grew, she needed less and less support, but we continued our weekly private lessons for several years. I became a mentor, we shared music, drawings, and big world ideas in addition to trapeze tricks.

On this particular morning, Melissa happened to be working across the room with a gymnast who was preparing audition material for a show in Las Vegas. She was beautiful, strong, confident, and extraordinarily talented. She needed to demonstrate aerial ability, so Melissa was teaching her a series of complicated skills and creative transitions for her audition video.

The remarkable thing was that they happened to be the exact same skills and transitions that I was teaching my student and this is the moment that the room leveled.

My student looked across the studio and saw this confident athlete, someone headed for circus auditions in Las Vegas, struggling with the very same trick she had just mastered moments before. In that moment, I imagine that something shifted for both learners.

I do not think this is unusual at Canopy.

People from every walk of life come together here, and when they step onto the floor they arrive with remarkably similar goals: to learn something new, to challenge their bodies, to build friendships, and to find ways to express themselves. In the rest of the world, how often is the awkward teenager better at a physical skill than the all-star athlete?

How often does someone who has spent years being defined by their differences by most of the world suddenly become the expert in the room?

I do not know whether the gymnast ever made it into that show in Las Vegas, but I do know what happened to my student.

Sharing a learning space with people of vastly different experiences and abilities gave her something powerful that day: confidence.

As she entered her later high school years, she had mornings free and started volunteering at Canopy. When we hosted morning field trips for students with disabilities, she was on staff and ran one section of the obstacle course. After practicing scripts ahead of time, she encouraged small groups of children with phrases such as, “I like the way you ___,” “I see that you are holding on so tight,” or “Your pointed toes look so strong.”

On several occasions, when I spoke with undergraduate classes at the University of Georgia, she joined me as a public speaker. She developed an incredible ability to sit in front of a room full of strangers and explain what it was like to grow up as a misunderstood, nonverbal autistic child. She spoke about being in class at Canopy with same-age peers, about performing, and about writing her own choreography and stories.

When she graduated from her online homeschool program, she had earned a full scholarship to Kennesaw State University, moved into the dorms, and started building a life of her own away from her family and away from Canopy.

The last I heard, she was pursuing a master’s degree in library science.

People often ask what circus changes, sometimes it changes strength and flexibility. I think that circus gives confidence, grit and resilience.

And sometimes, if you are lucky, it changes the story someone believes about themselves.

It changes the story because one day they realize that everyone in the room—the gymnast, the teenager, the professional athlete, and the recreational student—is struggling with the same trick.

That may be the greatest leveling trick of all.

These days, as we talk more and more about the new Canopy building, people often ask me what I’m most excited about. The honest answer is that I’m so stinking excited about the whole thing that sometimes I can hardly sleep at night. Depending on the moment, my answer to the question shifts. Some days I talk about the 30-foot ceilings and the possibility of finally having the vertical space that aerial arts really deserve. Other days, I get excited about the idea of multiple teaching spaces - separate rooms where we can run music for rehearsals with a movement class in another room, a pole class across the hall, and still hold a business meeting in an office while someone else can receive a massage from a therapist who knows the sport and the fatigue. And sometimes I’ll lean in, wink a little, and say, “Five bathrooms and a paved parking lot.”

Back in March, I had a conversation that made me realize there is something else that might matter even more.

I was talking with Joaquin Madrid, one of Canopy’s earliest board members, and we found ourselves reflecting on those early years of the organization. There was a fair amount of vulnerability in the conversation as we talked about what those days felt like and how much the organization has grown. Joaquin first came to Canopy as the father of three young children. He didn’t grow up in Athens and didn’t have the kind of built-in community that many people here develop through the University. He wasn’t particularly connected to the arts or music scene either. Joaquin is from Spain, and when he first found Canopy, he was still very much building his life and community in a new place. What drew him in wasn’t the circus arts themselves, but what he remembers most clearly is the feeling of being welcomed.

He told me about sitting in the studio while his daughter took class, watching from the side with another parent. At one point, he laughed and said they were like those two old Muppets sitting up in the balcony watching the show, making quiet observations about what was happening below them. I immediately knew exactly who he meant. I could picture the two of them sitting there, watching their children discover new skills and cheering them on in their own understated way. Over time, Joaquin began taking classes himself, becoming more connected to the community inside the studio, and before long, he was invited to join the board. Eventually, he stepped into the role of board chair during a pivotal year for Canopy, guiding the board through the transition when Susan was retiring and Melissa was coming in to lead the organization. It was during that same period, somewhere around 2008 or 2009, that the board also began to seriously consider whether Canopy might someday need a larger space.

Thinking about that conversation brought me back to the question people keep asking: what am I most excited about in the new building? As Canopy has grown over the years, our current space has gradually filled in until every square inch is in use most hours of the day. Classes run back-to-back, equipment lines the walls, and every available corner has been claimed for teaching or training. In the process, we have lost something that once existed more naturally in the studio - the gathering space.

We talk a lot about community at Canopy, and we work hard to build it intentionally within classes. Teachers learn their students’ names, students encourage each other, and over time a class begins to feel like its own small ecosystem. But there is another kind of community that grows just as powerfully, and it tends to appear in the unstructured moments around the edges of the day. It is the quiet connection that forms when two parents sit beside each other watching their children’s class. It is the casual conversation that starts while people wait for a lesson to begin, and the familiar nod in the hallway that gradually turns into a friendship.

What I realized is that the new building will give those moments room to exist again. What excites me most right now is the idea of a gathering space, a lobby, a hallway, a mezzanine. These areas are not teaching spaces, but they will support the entire experience of coming to Canopy. These are the places where families will sit and watch, where friends will meet unexpectedly, and where relationships will deepen in ways that no one planned but everyone benefits from. Grandmothers will sit there, babysitters will sit there and do their own homework, parents will meet other parents, and little sisters and little brothers will curl up nearby while they wait for class to end.

Over time, those spaces can become what sociologists call a third place. A place outside of home and work where people gather, where you are known, where someone greets you with a smile, and where a support network forms almost without anyone realizing it. These spaces don’t appear because someone schedules them; they grow because the environment makes them possible.

So yes, I am excited about the ceilings and the teaching rooms, and I’m still very excited about the five bathrooms and the paved parking lot. But what I’m most excited about today is the space between the classes because that is where community quietly takes root and grows.

Subscribe now

· · · ·

To learn more on the Imagine More Capital Campaign, the new studio, and to donate, visit https://canopystudio.org/imaginemore

There were ten, twenty, maybe thirty people on stage at any given moment. A crowded, pulsing, joyful chaos. They played a twelve-minute rendition of Flash Light. The room moved as one organism.

But what I remember most wasn’t the crowd on stage, it was the beginning of the second set. The stage cleared and one person remained under the single spotlight. And then the opening narrative of Maggot Brain was spoken into the nave beams above us.

If you were there, you know what I mean when I say the room had a special kind of haze. The smoke caught the spotlights and turned them into something holy, not clean cathedral light, but something fractured and golden. There was God-light in this smoky venue, the kind of light that makes everything feel mythic.

“Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time…

This is followed up by a repeated guitar phrase so soulful that it echos in the hollow places in your body; I looked this up later and found the mythology of the prompt from George Clinton to Eddie Hazel during the studio session, “to picture that day, what he would feel, how he would make sense of his life, how he would take a measure of everything that was inside him and let it out through his guitar.” The words, the guitar, and the rise and fall of the music we know were recorded in a single take.

The contrast alone was enough to hush the audience, from spectacle to solitude on stage in an instant. When the guitar came in, that hush turned into tears. They were not performative tears or even nostalgia, but something deeper, something broke open and was shared among strangers in the audience.

That was the moment I said: I have to do this song.

That guitar solo is birth and grief at the same time. It is the world falling apart and the world beginning again. It is devastation stretched across time until it becomes prayer.

In the Fall of 2014, the Repertory Company did the the vampire show. Julie Phillips and I set out to be beautiful, tragic, worldly vampires at the end of everything, she was cold silver and I wore the pulsing red of blood. We worked on that piece for two or three months while my body shifted week to week. Our partnering changed each week; my weight shifted and my center of gravity softened. What felt stable one rehearsal felt entirely different the next. I hadn’t told anyone outside the rep company that I was pregnant, but by the time that piece was performed my costume fit a little rounder, I had more blood, a growing body, I was becoming a mother.

There I was, carrying a child, performing a piece about the end of the world.

At the end of the duet, after holding and basing Julie, we separate into lonely creatures and I walked up the black stairs in the back of the room. I passed the door to the underworld and the stairs to nowhere. Don Chambers and three other musicians were on a platform halfway up, a pole set into the middle of the floating stage. I climbed the pole, and inverted into extended butterfly. Julie matched on rope beside me, we were still connected in shape but making choices to be apart going forward.

Side note: My biggest fear in that moment was not for my safety or even for the safety of my child, but what if I kicked a guitar?

At the end of the piece, I continued up those nowhere-stairs as the final chords of Maggot Brain poured over the audience. Alone, suspended between endings and beginnings.

When I write about our history, I often look for parallels and repeating patterns, sometimes there are clean narrative arcs and clear echoes. There isn’t one here, except maybe this:

Last fall, a Phoebe, student in beginner teen fabrics, she is the coolest fifteen-year-old you can imagine, wanted to perform to Maggot Brain for her Christmas show. I don’t think it survived the democratic vote of her class, but when she suggested it, I smiled.

Because our kids bring more to the stage than their narrow school experiences. They are reaching for depth, reaching for understanding, looking at the idea of transcendence, many want something bigger than what fits inside a semester.

That coolest fifteen-year-old is now on staff.

I hear from her mentor teachers that she is a powerhouse teacher with a clear voice, strong direction, and a grounded presence. The little kids look at her like she’s the most beautiful person in the room and they want to be like her.

And that gives me hope.

Because if she’s cool, and everyone wants to be like her, and she’s teaching five- and six-year-olds who are already listening deeply to music and planning their own pieces, their own stories for the stage, then we have longevity, and we have a future of making art.

We have artists of all ages and experiences sitting cross-legged on the floor right now, listening to something that will break their hearts open someday. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll hear the first note of something that changes everything.

P.S. My mother advocated for Luna’s name to be Phoebe for years. She wanted her to be named for the little bird that nests in the breeze way each spring. This year the phoebe’s are renovating for a second brood of little birds in the mild, damp Spring

.

Not us. My cousin and I both work in the arts.

At one point, she looked at me and asked, “How are you, really?”

I could have answered the normal way: “Everything’s great. I’m busy. Luna’s wonderful. Work is good. Blah blah blah.”

But it was the “really” that got me. Instead, I put my hand in the hollow place between my ribs and gathered the fabric of my dress into a fist.

“I just feel so empty,” I told her.

Not empty like hunger. Empty in the way that creativity sometimes disappears while everyone around you still assumes it exists. People look at me and see someone who teaches and performs and choreographs and writes and gardens and creates constantly. But lately I feel like I never fully hold onto the little spark long enough for it to become my own fire.

I start creating and immediately hand it away to someone else who is just as hungry and looking to me for some guidance, the nugget becomes easy nourishment before it has a chance to really grow. Hand over hand; choreography, tricks, costumes, meals, gardens, a little bit of love for everyone near and dear.

Some days, everything gets passed along before I have time to sit beside it and let it grow.

My cousin — who works in administration and programming for the Savannah Music Festival recommended The Artist’s Way. In fact, while we stood there among the champagne glasses and polished shoes, she pulled out her phone and ordered it for me. The book arrived on my porch before I had even fully recovered from the festivities the next morning.

It took three days before I started reading.

I bought the spiral notebook. I made the promise to write three pages every day, no matter what — just to clear the static from my brain.

And then, almost immediately, life took over again. We went to the marsh to perform. It truly was a beautiful show, and I could see all around me the places where seeds of my creativity had taken root in other people and grown into something marvelous.

A short sequence I taught a year ago in advanced trapeze class had made its way into the opening choreography for another performer. It looked nothing like the way I originally taught it, but the mechanics and pathways were still there — the salto straight into sitting on the bar. A piece of choreography I assigned another dancer back in December had evolved into her own expression entirely; faster spins and fierce looks through shagged bangs

A piece originally written for Susan, then performed by me ten years later, had now been passed to a third dancer along with a stern recommendation to use THIS MUSIC. And somehow it became breathtaking in its simplicity and emotion through her own patience and practice.

Watching all of that should have made me feel full. Instead, in complete honesty, my own piece felt like someone else’s choreography wearing my face. I performed it smiling, happy to be with my beloved friends, but without a deep emotional connection to what I was doing.

Maybe some days are just like that. Some days you just go through the motions.

After the show, I was talking with my partner about all of this. He toured for almost twenty years with European companies where a single show might be performed several times a week for eighteen months straight.

I asked him, “How do you still find the emotion the hundredth time you perform something?”

I was probably thinking about one of the first pieces he ever saw me do — a piece I wrote when I was furious. Truly furious. I took the horns of that anger bull and harnessed it into something beautiful. I have tried to bring it back, but that was almost four years ago, and I don’t have the same ready anger at my fingertips to fuel my tiny flame into another roaring fire.

Last year, Romain suggested I pull the piece back out. I laughed and said, “I can still do the skills, but I don’t feel the same anger anymore.”

And he said something simple that has stayed with me.

“You can choose a new emotion. A new story to tell. That becomes the creative act.”

****

Every Monday, Deb and I get together and get in the air to train. Sometimes three, sometimes four, sometimes five different pieces in the same afternoon. We rehearse old pieces to keep the tricks and pathways alive in our bodies. In an art form that requires as much strength and automaticity as creativity, sometimes maintaining the machine becomes the full-time job.

Often, we don’t even play the original music. We talk about the mechanics of life while we move through the motions.

Other days, we put on entirely different music and peek through the tunnel toward what creativity could become again, looking for the tiny bit of light. The possibility that it still exists…somewhere.

****

Maybe creativity does not always arrive as a wildfire. Maybe sometimes it arrives as maintenance and as repetition. Could creativity at this phase of my life be returning to old work with softer hands and rosy glasses, where armor was once strapped on and a different story to tell?

I’m going to revisit the older pieces, the ones Deb and I don’t rehearse on Mondays anymore, and see if new stories are hiding inside them.

And maybe after enough homework, enough listening, enough attention, the barrel won’t feel quite so empty. Maybe I can give my permission to hoard a fame or two just for me, then maybe the hollow place between my ribs will eventually hold something more than a fistful of silk dress fabric at a wedding while trying to explain what it feels like to spend your life giving and realizing you might have forgotten to save some for yourself.

With every passing birthday, I feel like I’m slowly becoming more serious about life. I still know how to have fun, joke around, and enjoy my college days, but I’ve definitely become a more cautious and level-headed person. I notice that I take my responsibilities more seriously and tend to think through my decisions more thoroughly than a lot of my peers. Additionally, I have grown to be more confident and independent as I’ve aged. When I reflect upon my transformation, I realize the main reason I am who I am can be attributed to the fact that my second home has been and still is Canopy Studio, an aerial studio located in Athens, GA.

When I was a kid, I found participating in any sort of competitive sport terrifying. I tried swimming, which ultimately made me feel like I no longer knew how to swim. Swim meets were the worst, with parents yelling from the stands for their kids to “go faster, win, kick your legs!” I quit after the first meet. Next, I tried ballet. I love to dance and consider myself to be quite coordinated with good rhythm, but ballet dancing didn’t really tap into the kind of freeform moves that I loved to do at the time. So, once again, I gave up on my attempt to become the next Anna Pavlova.

At this point, my parents were frustrated with my lack of desire to do sports and be active. So, like any good parent, my mother turned to Google to answer the question, “What activity will Isabel enjoy?” And, as usual, Google did not disappoint. My mom found a competitive-free and unique studio and signed me up for my first-ever dance trapeze class.

Canopy Studio is an aerial arts studio in Athens, GA, where they offer classes in dance trapeze, silks, slings, pole, and more. In the beginning, I remember feeling terribly shy and nervous. Even though I was always eager to learn new tricks, if I didn’t catch on quickly and master a move, I would become frustrated and start tearing up. Asking for help from the other students and teachers filled me with great anxiety, but thankfully, after some time, I became more confident and began to communicate my needs. The Canopy instructors are caring and attentive and created an atmosphere where I felt safe to ask questions about the tricks we were learning. As I became more comfortable in this new environment, I began to share opinions about routines and tricks and felt like my contributions were valued and respected. This is when I realized that Canopy was not just a place for me to learn trapeze, but it was also a space that made me feel important and cared for.

One thing I did not love when I first started at Canopy was the bi-annual shows where classes had to perform a choreographed routine for family and friends. However, because of my love for trapeze, I decided not to give up and quit, but instead, I pushed through my anxiety and fear of failure. The first few shows were nerve-wracking, causing me to perspire and making my stomach tie up in knots. But after each performance, I always felt a great sense of accomplishment and was excited to have shown off all my hard work.

As I progressed in my classes and moved up from beginner to intermediate to advanced levels, my love of dancing in the air continued to grow. Eventually, I signed up for private lessons to receive extra help on tricks I struggled with and began to choreograph a solo piece. This was empowering and helped me to realize that not only am I a good trapeze artist, but I’ve also mastered some of the hardest moves within the art of trapeze. Furthermore, I was able to perform my solo piece in front of an audience. To me, a performance is very similar to public speaking. When talking in front of a crowd, the speaker, full of adrenaline and nerves, has the full attention of everyone but no one else is making a sound. People simply stare at the speaker and notice if they fumble their words or stutter. While I never spoke during my performances, I still had the eyes of roughly one hundred people watching me intently. I did not want to fumble my performance. However, one thing I’ve come to realize about performances is the audience does not know what the piece is supposed to look like. They won’t catch the moment where I forget to point my toes and won’t notice if I miss a move and don’t place my right hand exactly where it’s supposed to go. Even though I still tend to beat myself up after making a mistake, I’m learning to show myself grace because most likely, the audience didn’t notice the error. I’ve also learned to embrace my mistakes and learn from them in order to improve for future performances. Furthermore, instead of becoming sad and frustrated, I’ve learned to brush off my mistakes and not take things so seriously. These little mistakes are part of my trapeze journey, and I can now look back and see how far I’ve grown as an artist and performer.

Now that I was getting older and had mastered a number of skills in the aerial arts, the next step for me was to become a trained instructor. At age 15, I began my training, which involved volunteering to help in classes so that I could observe other instructors and their teaching methods. Teaching young children requires a whole different set of skills I had not yet developed. So, when I joined my first class as a junior teacher, I remember feeling intimidated by the lead teacher (who also happened to be my boss) because she was so good with the kids and knew exactly how to manage their outbursts while still maintaining structure in the lesson. There were times when I would mess up or forget the more beginner tricks I hadn’t done in years, and I remember feeling so embarrassed with my boss right there. But once again, she showed me grace as I fumbled my way through learning to help and teach kids the correct way to use the trapeze apparatus. The more teaching experience I got, the easier it became to explain tricks and work with children, and I became more confident in helping my students. Now, I am able to explain my instructions with clear and precise wording and demonstrate tricks without the fear of messing up.

Upon graduating high school, I really had no idea what I wanted to do career-wise and decided to take a gap year before going to college. I also simply needed a break from school. During this year, I worked part-time at Canopy Studios where I taught more group classes and private lessons, helped in the front office, took on leadership roles when available, and joined Canopy’s Repertory Company. The Repertory Company is for active teachers to train outside of class time and to work on Repertory shows held twice a year. In becoming more involved and working more hours, I learned the basics of what it takes to run a business. To keep the studio running and progressing requires most, if not all, of one’s attention and energy. This leaves less time to teach and interact with students. In a business, there always seems to be a fire that needs to be put out or an email that needs to be sent, and phone calls that need to be made. The task list is never-ending. But after experiencing this firsthand, I can now see myself running my own studio one day and have made close and strong connections with people to help guide me.

Because my boss at Canopy and I have a good relationship, she helped me get a second part-time job working as a physical therapist technician at Athens Physical Therapy (ATP). At the time, I was strongly considering becoming a physical therapist. While working at ATP, I spent my time helping the therapists with minor tasks. For example, I would help prepare ice packs, take care of the laundry, and would sometimes help patients get started on their exercises. Frequently, I would have conversations with patients who loved to talk about anything and everything, which seemed to put patients at ease while they were undergoing treatment. I learned about the body’s muscles, tendons, and ligaments and how to properly stretch in order to keep these working effectively. This helped me significantly with my teaching job at Canopy because I was able to share stretching exercises and proper body positions in order to help students keep from getting injured. Even though working at ATP was a valuable experience, in the end, I realized that being a full-time physical therapist did not interest me anymore. I found the job to be very repetitive, which does not appeal to my creative side. I prefer to have a job that taps into my creativity and allows me to experience new and interesting things, so at the end of my gap year, I decided to leave the ATP job and focus on Canopy.

I have worked at Canopy Studio for over four years now, teaching dance trapeze and slings to kids and adults. Throughout the years, I have seen my students grow in confidence and strength, and love for the aerial arts, just like I did when I was younger. Seeing this fills me with such joy and pride. It is because of this that I know I want to pursue a career that involves helping students not only master skills but also help them become strong and independent, confident, and ready to tackle anything that comes their way. I believe this to be my true calling.

Canopy Studio has been one of the mainstays in my life. It is the place where I learned how to better communicate and ask for help, knowing there would be no judgment. I’ve become more confident as a teacher and person, and now know what direction I want to take in my career. I’ve learned how to handle my responsibilities and manage my time so that I can accomplish my tasks and still leave time for social activities. Lastly and most importantly, I’ve become an independent person who believes in herself. Taking on leadership roles and teaching others has forced me to step out of my comfort zone in order to develop and provide meaningful and effective instruction, and because of this, I’ve come to realize that I am capable of anything I put my mind to. Canopy Studio has helped to shape and develop me into the person I am today and I’m proud to call it my second home.

This past weekend was our annual kids and teen showcase at Canopy Studio, something we have done twice a year for the last fifteen or so years. It is always one of the most magical weekends of the year for me, both as a parent and as a teacher. Sometimes there is an additional layer of magic: senior teachers watching a younger teacher lead their very first group of students onto the stage. A passing of the torch.

To explain what I mean, I need to introduce the Cymerman family.

Jeff and Hope Cymerman and their son Samuel have been part of Canopy since Samuel was about eighteen months old. Jeff used to bring him to Sunday morning parent-assisted toddler class, and anyone who knows Jeff will not be surprised to hear that he was always trying to push the edge a little. I distinctly remember having to remind him more than once that it was the toddler class, not the grown-up class.

Eventually, Jeff started taking classes himself, attending several times a week for years. After he had his knees replaced, he was able to return to his love of riding horses in earnest. Jeff remains a dedicated volunteer and show rigger. He’s one of a handful of people that I can call when I’m in over my head in projects at the studio and need a little bit more weight and expertise ,or an angle grinder, or a 30-foot extension ladder. Hope still takes classes and is part of a long-running group of mothers and friends that meet weekly. Both Jeff and Hope have been around long enough to understand the dynamics of students and teachers, and the strength and reliance their kiddo has developed. But the truly remarkable thing is that the eighteen-month-old little boy climbing around the studio is now sixteen years old, with a grown-up voice and the experience to start leading.

Samuel has grown up at Canopy.

He moved through our curriculum from baby classes all the way to advanced sling and trapeze teen programming. He could not wait to start teaching, and of course, we said yes. It is not every day that you find a young male teacher who is talented, kind, enthusiastic, and still young enough to be considered cool by the next generation of kids.

This weekend marked the first kids’ showcase Samuel attended where he was not actually one of the performers. Instead, he sat cross-legged on the floor beside the stage, watching his own group of students perform. He cheered them on, cued them quietly, and stayed ready to step in if anyone got stuck or needed support.

And then there was Jeff.

He came to the show not because his son was performing, but because Samuel’s students were performing.

At one point during the show, while I was watching the room, Jeff caught my eye and motioned me over. Normally, when Jeff pulls me aside, I expect a joke. But this time he had tears in his eyes.

“I need to thank you,” he said.

“Thank you for believing in my child. I am so proud of who he is becoming and that he has a job that is meaningful. He could be flipping burgers somewhere, but instead he’s here making a difference.”

It was not the first time a teen teacher’s parents have come to support them as teachers instead of performers. I remember my own mother attending shows because I was so excited about what my students had created.

But it was the first time a parent had ever said those words out loud to me:

“Thank you for giving my kid his first job.”

And what struck me most deeply is that this is really the heart of what we do. Yes, we teach aerial arts. Yes, we create performances, and choreography, and community events. But underneath all of that, we are helping young people become themselves. We are giving them responsibility, confidence, purpose, mentorship, and a place to belong. We are creating spaces where they learn not only how to climb, spin, catch, and trust — but how to care for other people.

Now, Samuel gets to be part of shaping the next generation of kids the same way this community helped shape him.

That is the real legacy of Canopy.

And perhaps the most beautiful part is realizing just how many generations deep that legacy has become.

Samuel is currently planning a piece with one of his teachers, Charlotte — who was one of my very first kids almost twenty years ago. Which raises the question: does that make me Samuel’s grand-teacher and Susan his great-grand-teacher?

As Charlotte and Samuel wrote in their application for the September show:

“Focusing on students becoming teachers and the passing down of knowledge from one generation to the next, it would follow the story of Ann being Susan’s student, then Charlotte being Ann’s, and so on. It covers 4 periods of time, starting with Susan’s classes at UGA that predate Canopy to the children who are the future of Canopy.”

What moves me most is that this story is no longer just about one child growing up at Canopy. It is about a lineage of care, creativity, trust, and mentorship being handed from one generation to the next.

From Susan’s UGA classes before Canopy even existed, to my own years as a student, to Charlotte growing up in our studio, to Samuel now stepping into leadership, and finally to the little kids he is teaching today — the story keeps unfolding.

That continuity is the true gift of community art spaces.

Not simply the performances, the tricks, or the applause, but the way people grow into themselves here — and then turn around and help someone else do the same.

There’s no secret that I lost my mother in October. It is also no secret that I have always been a caregiver for everyone around me. It’s where I find the most comfort. It’s where I find identity.

Knowing that Mother’s Day was approaching — and suspecting that this first spring without my mother beside me might feel especially sharp — I planned ahead. The first Mother’s Day without my own mother. The first flowers blooming without her here to see them. I expected the day to be hard, so I decided to ignore it completely.

Instead, I planned a day hiking in the Hitchcock Woods outside of Aiken. I tried to avoid thinking about mothers altogether, but there were a few quiet hours in the car and grief is clever.

Every time my thoughts drifted toward mothers or mothering — toward my own mother, toward my identity as a mother, toward the ache of absence — I found myself purposefully reframing the thought into something broader: caregiving, caretaking, the act of mothering in the a broader sense; the profound privilege of helping carry another human being through the world, even briefly.

And eventually, as most things do for me, those thoughts led back to Canopy Studio.

At Canopy, we teach aerial dance, movement vocabulary, choreography, strength, sequencing, performance skills. But underneath all of that, there is another practice happening all the time. We allow people to care for one another.

Not through lectures or mission statements, but through opportunity and vulnerability, through culture and the tone set by the people leading the room.

When classes stay together for years — sometimes for over a decade — something deeper than instruction develops. Teachers begin to know when a student is pushing too hard, when someone is grieving, when confidence is slipping, when fear is disguised as frustration. Students learn each other’s rhythms and struggles. They celebrate pregnancies and promotions and opening nights. They bring meals after surgeries. They text after hard days and they notice absence.

My strongest and most beloved teachers — Deb, Mary Jessica, Mazie, Dub, Ana, Jo and Ashley, and so many others — all understand that part of teaching is caretaking. They create spaces where people feel seen, safe, challenged, and supported. That tone then spreads outward into the student community itself. People begin mirroring the care they have received.

I saw this powerfully while preparing for our most recent show. The work extended far beyond rehearsals and technical details. Of course there were cues to finalize and costumes to sew, but the deeper work was emotional. Performers needed reassurance that they were good enough to stand onstage. They needed room to talk about fears, injuries, insecurities, memories, exhaustion. They needed someone to help hold the emotional weight that comes with being vulnerable in front of an audience.

And what struck me most was that the caretaking did not just come from me as a director. It flowed between everyone. Performers painted each other’s faces, fixed costumes, checked in after difficult rehearsals, offered encouragement from the wings, celebrated the big catches, sat quietly beside one another after disappointing runs. The culture of care has been built together over the last 24 years.

That is the part of Canopy I find myself thinking about most lately.

Just today, a longtime friend texted me to tell me that her father had died over the weekend. She’s an adult student at Canopy, and I’m not even her teacher, but the connection still exists. Vulnerability asks something of us. It asks us to show up for one another sometimes in small ways like a text. A few years ago, one of our teachers suddenly lost her father. Without anyone on staff organizing it, her students took up a collection and covered most of the cost of his cremation and memorial service. Nobody told them to do that. They simply responded to years of being cared for themselves by that teacher.

That is how culture works. That is how community sustains itself.

The care moves outward and then returns again.

Losing my mother has made me think differently about what it means to nurture people. I used to think of caretaking as something singular — one person holding everyone else together. But I think what we have built at Canopy is something much more powerful than that.

We have built a community where the responsibility of care is shared.

Sometimes you are the teacher. Sometimes you are the student. Sometimes you are strong enough to hold someone else up. Sometimes you are the one who needs carrying.

And if we are doing this right, no one has to do those things alone.

Canopy is fairly well known now as an inclusive organization. That didn’t happen by accident.

Before I ever worked at the studio full time, I was a self-contained special education teacher. I brought with me the framework that shapes good special education: inclusion, least restrictive environment, and meaningful educational goals and objectives. But most important was the idea that students need opportunities to generalize the skills they learn in a classroom into the broader community.

After all, students can only remain in public school until their 22nd birthday.

Then what?

That question sits quietly at the heart of almost everything we do at Canopy.

Our outreach programs.
Our youth classes.
Our adult programming.
Programming for older adults, performances, and community connections

At the core is a simple belief: everyone deserves the opportunity to experience high-quality movement instruction and to continue learning—regardless of age, body, disability, finances, or life experience.

Last Wednesday, I was teaching a private lesson with Jenny.

Jenny has been coming to Canopy for a few years now. She didn’t arrive as a child in one of our youth classes. Jenny showed up in her fifties. She’s a woman with cerebral palsy who has been navigating the world for five decades. She’s held jobs, ridden the bus, and lived independently. She came through special education programs forty years ago.

After seeing one of our shows—and at the recommendation of another beloved Canopy family—Jenny decided she wanted to fly.

At the beginning, Jenny and her mom weren’t sure what would be possible. We agreed to figure it out together: how to accommodate, how to modify, and how to give Jenny the freedom she was looking for.

Jenny has right-side hemiplegia and a seizure disorder. She has a VNS (vagus nerve stimulator). Working memory can sometimes be a challenge. Jenny will happily tell anyone that she cannot multitask—she can’t scratch her head and poke her belly at the same time.

I assured them that she was not the only person in the studio with seizures, not the only person with a VNS device, and certainly not the only person with body differences.

Over time, Jenny has grown and thrived. She has built strength and skill, but maybe more importantly, she has built community. Making new connections in your fifties isn’t always easy, but she’s done it.

Jenny is one of about half a dozen students at Canopy who have seizure disorders. Everyone’s seizures look different. She’s also one of three students with a VNS system.

Jenny and I were working together on sling. Her lesson overlapped with another lesson; Kimberly was teaching with a different student—another student who also has seizures and also has a VNS.

They have different goals, different communication styles, different reasons for being at Canopy. But that afternoon they had the chance to meet each other.

Five or six minutes later, the student walked away to work on his favorite activity.

Then Kimberly called out across the room:
“Seizure.”

Before the student’s caregiver could even step onto the floor, Kimberly had already swiped the magnet across the left side of his chest to activate the VNS device. Mary Jessica appeared from backstage ready to help.

I glanced up from my work with Jenny. I saw three adults on hand. The student was safe.

Jenny and I kept going.

The seizure wasn’t scary for anyone in the room. Everyone knew their role.

Jenny’s mom happened to be watching our lesson. She looked up calmly and said,
“Oh, he has a VNS just like you, Jen.”

Jenny nodded.
“Yes he does.”

And we went right back to sets of pull-ups, sit-ups, and balancing in the sling.

That quiet, matter-of-fact moment isn’t unusual at Canopy.

It was just a normal Wednesday.

But later that day, I was telling a board member about it, and I realized how extraordinary it actually was.

There was space in the room for multiple lessons and multiple teachers. A medical event occurred, and it was handled with calm competence and dignity. Meanwhile, another student simply kept working.

We functioned like a set of interlocking gears—everyone doing their part so that every student remained safe and supported.

Jenny and her mom also saw something important that day.

They saw what would happen if Jenny ever had a seizure at Canopy.

I imagine that was reassuring.

The boy who had the seizure wasn’t treated like a disruption. When he regained consciousness, his teacher sat beside him and pulled him into a hug.

It didn’t matter that his pants were wet.

He was safe.
He was loved.

There were wet wipes and a clean pair of pants so he could return to his day.

This quiet moment happened at 2:30 on a Wednesday afternoon. It was just one small slice of a much bigger day of programming at Canopy.

But what stays with me is the love Kimberly showed her student.

The safety he experienced in that room.

And the fact that Jenny got to witness a seizure where there wasn’t panic or emergency—just quiet confidence.

Sometimes inclusion doesn’t look like a grand program or a mission statement.

Sometimes it looks like everyone in the room calmly continuing their work, knowing that everyone else is safe.

Kim and Jenny’s Story

Subscribe now

I don’t feel ready for this show.

On paper, everything is in place. The pieces are polished, and the costumes are finished. The performers have trained, recovered, and are moving with that quiet automaticity that only comes after months of work on the same routine. We are in the final stretch of tech, tightening transitions, refining rigging, shaping the invisible moments between pieces so the whole performance can breathe.

And still, I don’t feel ready. This is not just another show.

Tracy Street has been my second home—my sanctuary. It is where I gather with my people, where I work myself to exhaustion when my mind is too full to be still, where the rhythms of effort and creation have shaped so many people’s days for decades. It’s hard to imagine a future where we don’t cross that gravel parking lot two or three times a day. Where we don’t push open that stubborn door—the one I’ve repaired with duct tape and WD-40, tightening the screws so many times they’ve long since lost their edges.

Soon, we’ll move into a new space. It will have its own quirks, as all art spaces do. The Repertory Company will perform on Ware St this Fall. But right now, that future exists somewhere between architectural drawings and raw materials. It lives in emails and timelines, in conversations with contractors and architects, in the constant effort to keep things moving forward with the help of our partners and donors.

And it is very hard to bridge the emotional distance between this building—the one that has held us—and the one that has yet to exist.

I keep thinking about our first performance here.

That night, Susan Murphy performed a piece called The Melon-Colored Baby. Over the years, it has become part of our shared language. Sometimes it’s a joke, sometimes it’s a spark of inspiration. And sometimes it’s a rite of passage for the younger repertory members: to watch with wide eyes and a hesitant smile as a member of the old guard tells the story and then runs in a circle, drops into a deep squat, and “gives birth” to the room. Those younger company members who had not yet been born when Susan “birthed” Canopy in the opening act of the opening show.

But I remember when it wasn’t a tradition yet. We were there when Susan gave birth to the room. Not metaphorically, but in a way that felt as real as her squat and gestures to the orange walls that cradled the audience. She created something special: a space that could hold all of us and our ideas; the movement and the efforts, the experimentation, the physical exhaustion, and the communities of classes yet to be gathered. The audience that gathers to witness and celebrate. That room has held us for 24 years.

That same show also included a piece called Women of the World. There were eight of us, wearing two-piece costumes which we hated because they showed our stomachs. We hadn’t found our core or our comfort in our bodies. We performed skills that felt advanced then: skaters, bowsprits, hip pullovers. We moved in a circular pattern, sharing the space, moving as a collective, and holding our breath when we wobbled and passed too close to our neighbors. Today, those same skills might be performed by an adult student within their first year of training. The vocabulary has expanded, and the expectations have grown. The level of performance has deepened in ways we couldn’t have imagined back then.

And yet, these pieces still matter. They are a moment in time. They are the starting ‘bang’ of where we began.

There are always more performances, sometimes I think of them as waves. One after another, rising, building, cresting, and breaking. Each one washes the shore differently, but the pattern remains. There is a comfort in that rhythm—the certainty that even after something ends, something else will come.

Still, I’m grateful we’re not done here yet.

We have a few more months on Tracy Street. There will be children’s shows and teen performances, summer camp sharings, open mics, and a final community performance at the end of August. There is still time to gather inside these walls, to move and make and remember.

Because I’m not ready to lock that rickety front door a final time just yet.

This building has meant something to all of us who have passed through it, who have left pieces of ourselves in the air, on the floor, in the quiet spaces between the mats. We need this time to say goodbye to the room properly, wave by wave. wave.

- Ann

Subscribe now

I’ve been thinking lately about the act of going back—not in a nostalgic or sentimental way - but in a more deliberate sense of re-looking, re-exploring, and re-experiencing earlier parts of a creative life, the fragments that at the time felt small or even repetitive, but in hindsight reveal themselves as essential building blocks.

I can still picture myself as a kindergartner on the school bus, arriving at what felt like a deeply important personal decision: that I needed to draw my mother a picture every single day. She was a potter, she worked in clay, and so it followed—logically, inevitably—that her favorite color must be brown. What came out of that reasoning was a month-long series of brown crayon drawings, each one a variation on the same scribbled, muddy abstraction. She must have told me she loved the first one, and in the way that children understand affirmation, that single response became a directive. I repeated the act daily, faithfully, until she eventually told me that she didn’t care all that much for brown, but still she kept an entire folder filled with what could only be described as brown mud images.

The following year, my focus shifted, as it does, into something equally consuming and equally specific: three-legged cats. I drew them over and over again, in motion, always missing a limb—not out of neglect, but out of a kind of observational logic that made perfect sense to my six-year-old brain. When a cat runs, one leg disappears behind another; therefore, you cannot see it, and if you cannot see it, it need not be drawn. This could be described as an early attempt at interpreting movement or just an example of repetitive stubbornness.

And then, as so many artists and latch key kids of a certain generation can attest, there was the year of discovering Bob Ross on Georgia Public Broadcasting—those quiet afternoons spent absorbing technique through our first color T.V. screen, learning the dry brush, the rhythm of landscape, and the quiet confidence of “happy little trees.”

All of that work still exists somewhere, tucked into a file cabinet, flattened into paper and time. It is not, by any external measure, significant work. But that has never really been the point. What remains significant is the memory of it—the moments of inspiration, the act of making, and perhaps most importantly, the experience of being received.

And that is, in many ways, how I have come to understand the body of work we have created at Canopy.

Over the years, we have built more than 50 repertory performances, and if you begin to account for the earlier, pre-opening shows, each containing anywhere from ten to fifteen individual pieces, you begin to approach a number that is almost difficult to hold: more than 500 works that have been imagined, shaped, rehearsed, and ultimately shared with an audience.

And yet, like those childhood drawings, they do not all occupy equal space in memory. Some have expanded over time, growing larger in recollection than they may have been in their original form—not because they were more polished or more ambitious, but because they captured something essential about the moment in which they were created.

Many of those pieces were direct or indirect responses to the world beyond our walls—political climates, social tensions, environmental concerns—while others were deeply rooted in the internal rhythms of our own community, marking losses, celebrations, transitions, and quiet evolutions. Each one, in its own way, served as a timestamp.

And then, of course, there are the pieces that did more than respond—they shifted something.

The first time we approached fabrics as a dance form rather than simply a technical apparatus. The first time we trusted each other enough to share weight, to lift and be lifted. The first time we allowed humor to take up space alongside rigor. The first time we stepped into political expression. The first time we made room for grief on stage in a way that felt honest and communal.

These were not just pieces; they were thresholds. They marked a before and an after, both in our artistic language and in our collective identity.

When we began the process of building this show, we posed what seemed like a straightforward question to the company: Which pieces are worth revisiting?

The answers came quickly at first, forming a list that stretched to forty or fifty works, each one carrying its own argument for inclusion. But the real work began in the narrowing—in the careful, sometimes difficult process of identifying not simply the strongest pieces, but the ones that most clearly traced the arc of who we have been as a performance company.

In that way, this show has come to feel less like a retrospective and more like opening that childhood cabinet.

You do not need to see every iteration of the brown crayon drawing to understand that moment. One is enough. One carries the weight of all the others.

What I did not fully anticipate, however, was how present the work would feel in its return.

There is something profoundly different about revisiting choreography not as an artifact, but as a living practice—especially when that work was originally created fifteen or twenty years ago, in a time when we had far fewer resources, less formal training, and were relying heavily on instinct, experimentation, and a kind of collective determination to figure things out as we went. To bring those same ideas back into the room now, and to offer them to a new generation of performers, has been an experience that is both humbling and deeply rewarding.

Because they do not simply replicate the work.

They absorb it, reinterpret it, and inevitably expand it—finding new pathways, new textures, and new meanings within structures that once felt fixed. Watching that process unfold has been far more satisfying than revisiting archived footage, because it allows the work to live again, not as memory, but as experience.

I am aware that there will be moments of absence for some audience members—pieces that are remembered, hoped for, and ultimately not present on this stage. That was, without question, the most difficult part of this process. We were not interested in creating a purely retrospective evening, nor were we willing to let go of the forward momentum that defines our work.

Instead, what has emerged is something that holds both: a conversation between where we have been and where we are going.

This performance reflects the creative life that has unfolded within these walls, while also, quietly but intentionally, laying the groundwork for what will come next in a new space.

At this moment, our performance company is the largest it has ever been, and with that growth comes a kind of depth that feels both new and long-earned.

When I look across the room, I see a spectrum of experience that spans decades—performers who have been sitting on that same wooden floor for twenty-four years alongside those who are just beginning to understand what it means to inhabit the role of Repertory Company member. The age range alone, from nineteen to sixty-six, tells a story about continuity, access, and the possibility of sustaining a creative practice across a lifetime.

It also creates a structure of care.

This larger company allows for rest, for recovery, for the necessary pauses that bodies require. This season has brought with it a notable number of injuries, and yet the work has not diminished. Instead, what has emerged is a culture of support, where performers step into roles not as replacements, but as stewards—holding space for others to heal, ensuring that the work continues without erasing those who will return to it.

There is a quiet strength in that exchange.

It is not the final performance within our walls at 160 Tracy Street, but it is the final Repertory performance within this space—this melon-colored baby that has held so much of our experimentation, our risk-taking, and our growth.

And like that cabinet of childhood artwork, what we are offering is not a complete archive.

It is a selection of moments—chosen not for their perfection, but for their ability to remind us who we were, how we arrived here, and what we are now ready to become.

“Hello, Goodbye” runs May 1-3. Tickets are available at canopystudio.org.

Subscribe now

This isn’t the all-encompassing history of our life story with Canopy…it’s just a small sample of our love for the studio and the upcoming Repertory Company show, “Hello, Goodbye,” on May 1-3.

Ashley: I moved to Athens in 2001 to attend the University of Georgia (Go Dawgs). Growing up as a gymnast and dancing in college with the Redcoat Marching, I took my first Canopy class in 2007…and of course was hooked. Canopy scratched that very specific movement and performance itch.

Ana: And I grew up in Athens. I was one of the first students at Canopy back in 2002! Canopy has always been such an important space in my life. I’ve been so fortunate to grow up in a studio surrounded by caring and creative people.

Ashley: When Ann and I started working on the spring Repertory Company show, we wanted it to be a celebration of the physical studio that has housed Canopy for so long. So much art has been created here that we wanted to highlight some of those pieces while still allowing for new acts to happen.

I quizzed the company on what their favorite pieces were, shows that were memorable, and so on. At the end of that, we had a list of like 100 pieces - no lie. I should have known that would happen with more than 40 shows under the company’s belt over the years.

So Ann had an idea - what if we allow for multiple soloists taking turns during the weekend to highlight as many pieces as possible. Three of the solos during the show will be from re-set acts. Two of those pieces will be the same act all weekend, just performed by different dancers, while for the third solo, the dancers could select what they would like to do.

Ana: So I was one of those soloists. I immediately knew that I wanted to do Ashley’s Rope Loop Solo. When Ann and Ashley first came to the rep members to ask about memorable acts and pieces, I saw how people that had been part of rep from the beginning lit up with excitement as they remembered the pieces that shaped their creative lives as performers and audience members. I knew vaguely about some of the pieces they talked about, but couldn’t really connect to them in the same way. Not because I didn’t like them, but because I was just a kid when a lot of this was happening! So when I started to think about what has stuck with me over the years, I knew it was Ashley’s piece.

I remember the first time I saw it during the Mystic show. I was in the teen class that also performed in that show that year, so really, I don’t think I was supposed to be out in the hallway when I wasn’t performing, but it didn’t stop me. I watched her solo every show that weekend. I got to the point where I knew the little cues in the music, and I could dance it along on the floor as Ashley would dance it in the air. Over the years, that piece has remained an inspiration to me.

I’ve also been really lucky to have performed, taught, and worked alongside Ashley these past few years as I’ve joined full time at Canopy. She’s one of my best friends, and I was so excited for the opportunity to bring this piece into the space again under her coaching.

Ashley: “Dance in the air” is really generous lol.

It’s really been a joy working with Ana. She is such a talented aerialist and wonderful person. She’s worked so hard bringing this piece back to life - no small task. I don’t really like to toot my own horn, but I know this piece is well remembered by a lot of people at Canopy. To put yourself out there to possibly be compared to the original - not just for Ana but for all 15 soloists in the show - to be that vulnerable is what really makes Canopy and the company so special. It’s just really humbling to know so many people enjoyed this piece…and that so many people are willing to put themselves out there.

When I created this act, it was for “Mystic” in the Fall of 2018. My first solo in a Repertory Company show, which was supposed to represent the Earth element, “Figures of Soil.” My goal was to figure out how to create this grounded feeling in the solo while, you know, doing an aerial piece….which meant a good amount of floorwork.

Ana: A lot of the elements of this piece are not in my wheel house (hello floorwork!). Learning this piece has been a very challenging adventure. Huge shout out to Ashley because she has been to every single one of my rehearsal times. She’s worked with me on both a big and small scale from telling me the original motivations of the piece down to how I should point my foot during a move. With Ashley’s coaching, it has been so much fun to try and fail and try again.

There were definitely times when I was really nervous I wasn’t going to be able to pull this off. It feels scary to take on a piece that everyone remembers so well, and do it in front of the original performer. The thing is that my fear had less to do with messing up on stage and much more to do with making sure I did the piece justice. But, like I said before, working with Ashley has given me so much confidence and has made rehearsals incredibly fun. I’m really looking forward to perform this piece

Ashley: And that’s thing about solos - usually you have to do it basically all yourself. It’s certainly an honor to be able to take a spot for a solo, but all the planning, decisions, whatever are all on you. Of course, there is some collaboration with show directors, but the creation of that piece is all on you. That is a super vulnerable place to be.

What I have really enjoyed this time around is being able to tell someone else what to do LOL just kidding. Even though the choreography was set 8 years ago, the amount of collaboration Ana and I have had, really just makes me so happy. It’s the best of what we do here - create with each other. She wants to do the piece justice and to stick to the intention behind what I created so many years ago - but to be able to workshop what works best now has been a great process.

Ana and I have gotten to work together in so many different ways - co-workers, in several different pieces for Rep Shows, teaching. I think there is a real trust and ease that we have. More than that, I’m lucky to be able to call her a friend.

I really can’t wait for people to experience not only this piece but all the acts we’ve brought back or created for this show. To be with us - emotionally, physically - in this space one last time for a Repertory Company show. It’s going to be bittersweet.

But we cannot wait for creating new memories, friendships, partnerships - trust - in our new studio.

Shameless plug time - come to the show May 1-3! Tickets available online!

Photos:
1. Ana at her first aerial performance
2 & 3. Ashley, Ana, and Katie Grace perform in “A Sense of Place”
4. Ashley performs the original solo in “Mystic”
5. Ashley & Ana had to do a Bad Bunny act in “None More Epic”

Subscribe now

I started this blog in the hopes people gained a deeper understanding about what Canopy means not only to me (and to help process moving into a new studio) but the many, many people that come through our doors, and also so others could tell their story. At Canopy, we often speak about belonging, courage, and lifelong growth—but those ideas become real through the stories of the people who make up this community.

Joe Wyrick is one of our adult students as well as our Board Treasurer. His Canopy journey began not with a plan… but with a challenge from his daughter, Carly, who is now in our Repertory Company.

As you read, consider your own story, remembering that 4 walls do not make a community. It’s the shared experience so where we go, our community will follow.

We are beginning to gather these stories into a shared “story wall”—a reflection of the many ways Canopy has shaped, challenged, and supported each of us. If you’d like to share your story (and any photos), we would love to include your voice.

- Ann

My Canopy story begins with my daughter Carly. When she was in middle school she had already been a Canopy student for several years. My wife and I were proud Canopy parents, and we attended all her student shows. During that time, my son and I were very involved in Scouting and I was attempting to have Carly join us. Carly was having none of it. Finally, after my last attempt, Carly said, “If you think Scouting is so great, why don’t you try Trapeze?”

After some consideration, I took her up on her dare and signed up for a beginner Dance Trapeze class. By this point in my life, in my mid forties, I felt up for the challenge. I was regularly taking Bootcamp classes and cycle classes at the YMCA and thought it would be a piece of cake. I was sadly mistaken. It was an entirely new realm of movement, and I was completely out of my comfort zone. Three to four weeks in, I was having major doubts about my ability to make it through the session. Simply standing on the bar, trying to figure out left from right when upside down, and the rope burns and bruises were causing me to reconsider my decision. But I couldn’t quit now, not after the challenge from Carly. I had to finish the session.

I did manage to tough it out and survived the first session, and a funny thing happened. I really began to enjoy these new physical and mental puzzles that were presented to me each class, and the challenge shifted from something to get through to something I wanted to keep exploring and experimenting with.

I have been fortunate to be trained by many talented and supportive teachers. What started out as a response to a dare turned into a big part of my life. Besides Dance Trapeze, Canopy has introduced me to Handstand balancing, Cyr Wheel and most recently Traveling Rings, among other apparatuses. More importantly, Canopy has introduced me to a new community of encouraging and supportive friends that I look forward to being with each week.

Now in my mid fifties, I have started using the skills I learned from Canopy in Spartan Races, and I draw on my experience with Canopy teachers in my role as a Group Fitness Instructor. I am so inspired by others in the Canopy family, especially those that might be a few years older than me, but are still going strong and still learning and trying new things.

- Joe

I desperately wish I could convey the feeling I have when I am at Canopy. It holds within it my childhood, my angsty/awkward teenage years, and now the beginnings of my adulthood. When Canopy came to my elementary school during field day, I fell in love in an instant. It was a combination of my favorite things: climbing, swinging, and performing.

At 7, I did not know the impact this community would have on me. I just wanted to do the big scary drops like Ms. Ann, and whatever trick would impress (or scare) my mom the most. Over the years, I was taught by so many strong women that I can’t believe I perform next to in rep shows now! I put so much trust in my teachers telling me I did the correct wrap, before even knowing their last name. I felt comfortable and capable of anything around them.

As I crept into my teenage years, sometimes all I needed was to lay on the mats and stare at that wood ceiling. Growing pains, rope burns, freshly tightened braces, my clothes feeling indescribably irritating on my skin- whatever it was- it was felt and understood by my peers. Canopy always welcomed me no matter what was bothering me. Someone was always there to listen. And I still wanted to do those strong impressive tricks, but I began to learn what it felt like to move to music. What it means to feel the beat, not just count it.

At 16, I started working summer camps at Canopy and had my official peek behind the curtain. I got to fully appreciate the effort, energy, and time these incredible people put into this non-profit that I have the privilege to call home. It was integral to me to understand that Canopy does not run solely on sparkles and glitter, but sweat, stamina, patience, and at its core, community.

Now I am 21 years old. I am a student, teacher, and repertory company member. I still have so much to learn, and I continue to grow my own voice and style through this outlet everyday. I am forever and always grateful that I found my way here.

- Carly

Subscribe now

Before Tracy Street.
Before gravel parking lots and white footprints in the dust.
Before we were a nonprofit with a name people recognized.

We were already a community.

Smaller.
Quieter.
But no less real.

My story begins in 1999.

I was in high school. Mary Jessica Hammes was working at the Athens Banner-Herald, alongside Julie Phillips and Allison Ohl. (April Skelton would join them soon after.) At that moment, Mary Jessica was assigned to cover a new community class being offered through the dance department at the University of Georgia.

She did what good reporters do. She put on leggings and a tank top and showed up.

The assignment was simple: see what this trapeze class was about. Maybe it would become an arts feature. Maybe it would be just a curious little cultural note.

Mary Jessica wrote the article. My mother read it, and she decided that the best way for our family to spend time together — my mom, my little brother, and me — was to attend Susan Murphy’s community trapeze class every Tuesday night at 7:00 p.m.

That’s how it started for us.

When I think back to those early classes, I remember how unrefined everything was. The bars weren’t adjustable. There wasn’t an established vocabulary. Susan had gone to the grocery store and bought those rubber balls from the dollar bin — twelve inches wide, swirly jewel tones.

We would warm up by tossing them to each other, saying each other’s names. Pressing the ball into our joints. Waking up our shoulders and hips and spines with color and play.

Then we would climb onto the trapeze.

If the bar was too high, Susan tied a second wooden bar, an “add on bar” onto it to make it reachable. There was no elaborate rigging system. Just ingenuity and care.

Some of the people from those classes are still here. Still doing aerial at Canopy: Mary Jessica and Julie. Nicole Mermans joined around then; she later founded D’Air in Atlanta. Allison has remained loosely connected, and there is handful of others that were part of the early days that are still practicing in other aerial organizations.

Because the class followed the university semester schedule, community classes stopped in the summer. But in the fall of 2001, I was able to enroll in Susan’s PE class for credit hours.

The Modern Dance, Physical Education 1101 class also met on Tuesdays, but in the morning hours... On September 11th, I was driving down Timothy Road, listening to NPR, heading to Susan’s PE class. The towers had already been hit by the time we gathered for our 11:15 class. We knew they had fallen, but the University of Georgia hadn’t yet canceled classes.

So we met as a scared collection of twenty-year-old undergraduates, two dozen girls circling onto the marley floor. We sat down together, wide-eyed and stunned.

And we talked.

We talked about what we were afraid of. What this might mean for our country. For the world. One girl’s aunt and uncle were in New York. She was crying. Susan reached into the bottom of her bag and handed her a small metal sculpture to hold.

She gripped it tightly.

Someone found a flip phone and dialed, trying to reach family. Trying to reach anyone. I don’t remember whether she got through. I don’t remember what the final news was for her aunt and uncle.

What I do remember is the feeling in that room.

Those bright-faced, barely-adult students were looking to Susan. Not just because she was the teacher standing at the front of the class, but because we had already trusted her with our bodies. She had already guided us through vulnerability and through fear on the trapeze. Through the tender, awkward act of making art.

Trusting her with our emotions was a natural extension of that.

That hour on Tuesday morning remains vivid in my mind. I remember what I was wearing. My hair pulled back, the sensation of it against the back of my neck. I remember trying to walk to my next class across campus, stopping at the Tate Center and noticing how few students were around. The University had decided to cancel for the day. Emails went out as we were sitting in that circle.

I went home.

I came in through the back door of my grandmother’s house. She was ironing and drinking scotch. Grandma did not iron on Tuesdays. She ironed on Wednesdays. But that day, she was seeking comfort in repetition. In the steady press of the iron. In the rhythm of a familiar physical act — lubricated by Scotch. She paralleled our group of dancers who had sought comfort in a physical act lubricated by tears, moving on a dance floor. We were holding a small metal sculpture pulled from the bottom of a purse. She was holding an iron.

We didn’t know what would happen next in the world, but we had each other.

Long before Canopy had a building. Long before we had 30 adjustable points, a shared vocabulary, poles, fabrics, lyras, slings, and rope, we had practice in caring for each other. We were already practicing something deeper than tricks on a trapeze. We were practicing community.

And even then, before Tracy Street, we were learning that art is not separate from life. It is how we hold each other when life cracks open.

It is how we stay.

- Ann

Subscribe now

For years, we’ve joked that someone really should make a documentary about this place.

Every time we pushed an edge. Took a risk. Fell down and tried again. Laughed with our best friends. Danced across the floor to delightfully silly music in oversized costumes trimmed with bells and sequins. We have celebrated the joy of this place and the community that makes it breathe.

We have not been without drama. Or sadness. Or grief. But in equal measure, we have wrapped ourselves in love, resilience, and deep belonging.

Canopy has all the elements of an epic story.

This blog is my attempt to tell it.

Before Canopy was a nonprofit, before it was 95 classes a week and before 600 students and 54 staff members and budgets and board meetings. It was a handful of us.

Don Carson and Susan Murphy had a vision, a second mortgage, and a building swallowed by kudzu.

When they made the decision to step away from the University of Georgia and build something independent, it did not feel inevitable. It felt improbable and maybe even a little reckless.

But Susan had the vision. Don had the creative engineering mind to make impossible spaces function. Anne and Bob Segrest and Chris Evans donated their services as architects to the dream that would become Canopy.

Together, they convinced a few close friends that aerial dance deserved its own home.

When they found the Tracy Street building, “building” was generous; it was a cotton warehouse at the terminus of the railroad tracks. You can still see the brush of the cotton’s oils on the original wooden posts in the hallway. Those posts change color at the 10 foot mark - it is where trolleys filled with raw cotton rubbed and polished the beams as they were ferried from train cars. The South’s complicated agricultural mark is still visible in our current hallway.

The complex was overgrown with kudzu. The roof was failing. The floors were dirt, and there was no power or water. It was quite literally on the wrong side of two sets of railroad tracks.

And still — we saw it.

Susan and Don took out a second mortgage on their home. They cashed in a small retirement account. And they went to work with a crew of friends and volunteers.

Building Canopy took real labor, actual manual labor. I remember holding panels while my brother drilled them into place. I remember shoveling gravel the day the studio was supposed to open. We did not get our certificate of occupancy until Don poured that small ramp outside the Y door.

People were pulling into that freshly graveled parking lot for the very first show while the inspector was signing the paperwork.

The first time we performed in that space, there was no wooden floor. The concrete wasn’t polished or sealed. When dancers inverted after walking across the dust, they left white footprints in the air. It was imperfect, it was raw, but it was ours.

The studio was built to accommodate three or four classes a week and a twelve-person repertory company. That was the dream. That was the scale.

There were long afternoons when nothing was scheduled. We would come in anyway and lie on the floor, staring up at the ceiling, letting the winter sunlight pour through the clerestory windows. We wanted to be bathed in that light. To feel the room breathing around us.

When we made shows, they weren’t on a calendar a year in advance. We began with a concept. We experimented. We argued. We explored. Eventually, someone would glance at a calendar and say, “Okay. I think we’re ready.”

We would call the Banner-Herald. We didn’t check the football schedule. We didn’t look at Twilight or the Human Rights Festival or anything else happening in town. We just made dance and art until it felt ready, and then we performed it.

And people came.

We were genuinely shocked.

The first time we had to turn people away, we sat in a circle afterward and asked, “Can we do it again tomorrow night?” As a cast, we decided, “Yes, we can.”

But this was before text messages and social media. We couldn’t stand in the parking lot and blast an announcement from our cell phones. We had to go home and pick up our house phones and call our friends and family to tell them there was one more chance to see aerial dance in our little town.

It felt scrappy and miraculous all at once.

And now — we are building again.

Because the little room built for four classes and twelve dancers now holds 95 classes each week. More than 600 students move through those doors each week. The repertory company is no longer twelve strong — it is twenty-five strong with guest artists and community partners. We now have more than 50 people on staff.

The dream outgrew the room, and we have been imagining the next one for years.

This time, we have more experience. We have resources. We have a contractor, a builder, and an architect. There will be two aerial spaces equal to what we have now. A pole space nearly double in size. Offices — because we have grown up, and administrative support is part of sustaining art. Bathrooms. A paved parking lot. A lobby. A washer and dryer. A mezzanine for watching.

It will look different, but some things will feel the same.

We will still call on volunteers. It may not be shoveling gravel the morning of opening night, but we will need hands and hearts to get the doors open. We will need the community that built this once before.

I can already imagine that first moment when the doors swing open.

Not everything will be finished. Something will be unpainted. Something will need adjusting. It will be as good as what we have now — and hopefully a little bit better.

But the color of the walls will not matter and the dust of construction will fade.

What will matter is who is standing inside.

Teachers pressing play on the first piece of music.
Students stepping into a new space with the same old courage.
The first big swings and the first spins.

We may not spend as many afternoons lying on the floor staring at the ceiling the way we did in those early days. There is more momentum now. More motion. More responsibility. But there will still be room for respite, room for gathering, room for stretching, and room for sitting in a beam of sunlight and remembering why we started.

The first time we built Canopy, we were building a possibility. This time, we are building for generations.

And just like before, the structure is important, but it is the people who will make it fly.

- Ann

Subscribe now