Aerialist Mimi Ke carves space for aerial dance in Iowa

Red aerial silks hung to the floor at National Dance Academy in Coralville before Mimi Ke wrapped the silks around her forearms like candy cane stripes.

In a swift movement, she twisted her body, using the momentum to push her feet off the mat. As she spun, she held her legs towards her chest, performing an almost mid-air yoga pose. Then, she lowered her legs, slowing down the spinning of her body until she came to a complete stop, finishing the demonstration for her aerial dance students.

The class of about 10 adults spent the session trying out moves like this to build their aerial dance skills. They worked on how to wrap the silks around one’s foot to help ascend the silks, or how to maneuver one’s body to safely drop to the ground.

The day ended with play. Students climbed the silks and formed a basketball hoop with their legs while classmates tried to make baskets with a small ball.

Ke has been studying aerial dance for over a decade, exploring an art form that requires one to slow down time and make decisions based on how an apparatus — like rope, aerial straps and lyra — feels.

“You don’t have a lot of time to think about anything else,” Ke said while suspended in the air, “and that’s what I really appreciate about it.”

She said the thinking comes after she’s filmed her work and watches it back. “And then, based on what I see, which is usually quite different than what I experience when I’m in the air, then that is when different windows of inspiration come in.”

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Ke teaches aerial classes for children and adults at National Dance Academy, located at 2100 Norcor Ave. in Coralville.

“When I teach new people, I love to see that a-ha moment where they realize that they’re able to do something that they couldn’t do before,” Ke said.

She said there’s a perceived barrier to starting aerial — an unnecessary mental roadblock she has experienced herself.

“I thought, oh, I can’t do this in my 20s. People start when they’re like five,” Ke said.

When she did start training, she loved how it challenged her brain. Ke describes aerial as a “sensory and creativity puzzle.” Mental strength is as important as physical strength when performing aerial dance.

“Safety in aerial is also a big part of the puzzle where understanding and solving the physics, risk assessment and wrap theory is key to keeping bodies healthy and safe in the air,” Ke said.

There are various sequences of wraps and movements one can perform to achieve specific poses or transitions.

"Once you learn basic skills, linking skills into sequences becomes a problem solving exercise,“ Ke said. ”Over time, your strength and stamina increases so that you have the ability to stay in the air for longer periods of time and work through this logic.“

She said that although her background in gymnastics and dance helped, it’s not required. Her six week classes build her students’ aerial vocabulary, skills and stamina up over time.

“There’s classes that are open level. The community is really great ... I just wish more people knew about it,” Ke said.

Becoming an aerialist

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Ke estimates that she was 8 or 9 years old when she first voiced that she wanted to become a circus artist. On a vacation, her family visited the now abandoned Splendid China theme park in Kissimmee, Florida. She remembers watching a traditional Chinese circus and being carried away by the music, costumes and energy of the performance.

She told her mom that she wanted to do what she saw the performers do on stage.

“But my mom told me, we’re not from that lineage. You have to be born into a family of circus artists, so therefore you cannot be a circus artist — because this was a time where there weren’t studios,” Ke said.

“I was really interested in movement, dance, music, but I sort of lost all of that interest when I got a little bit older and became a little bit more practical, and thought that there (was) no practical path for these interests to meld together,” she said.

Ke thought she’d become an architect or pursue a career in STEM, but she retained her interest in the circus arts. She watched aerialists on YouTube and thought, “well, this is something that makes sense to me, but I’ll never have the opportunity to do it because I live in Iowa City, and we don’t have that opportunity.”

Ke has taught and choreographed dance for National Dance Academy since 2011. After expressing her interest in aerial to the studio’s owner, Ashlynd Jones, Jones connected Ke with Betz Demonico at The John Cooper School in The Woodlands, Texas. Ke spent a week training aerial dance with Demonico for eight hours a day in March 2014. When she returned, Ke started the aerial program at National Dance Academy.

Feeling isolated from other aerialists, Ke moved to Boulder, Colorado in 2017 where she trained with Frequent Flyers, a nonprofit that specializes in aerial dance education and performance. This broadened Ke’s horizons within aerial, and this is where she first felt like an artist.

“Within aerial, you have invented apparatus as well as the more traditionally known apparatuses like silk, rope, lyra, trapeze, and then a lot of other things like harness dancing, or some people call it vertical dancing, and bungee, which is in a harness,” Ke said. “So just different ways of interacting with the air that made me feel like I had a lot more tools for my practice.”

Aerial in Iowa

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Ke returned to Iowa City in 2019. While Iowa isn’t a hub for the circus arts, Ke has carved out a space for her art and teaching in the Corridor.

“The circus scene here, for me, it feels isolating at times, but other times, that parameter of being by yourself is also very rich,” Ke said. “Because of that parameter, I have chosen to work with different people that I wouldn’t have (sought) out or known about if I had a lot of other aerialists around.”

Ke said that as an aerialist, making a living involves performing at events and teaching. She said it’s challenging to build relationships with artists outside of Iowa.

“To be able to bring people in ... that work really well with you, and you have both this professional relationship (and) creative relationship with, and are willing to come out to Iowa has been challenging,” Ke said.

‘The Circus of Tensegrity’

The lack of circus artists also influences the infrastructure for being able to put on an aerial performance. Ke said that has guided her to look at venues outside of theaters.

Ke’s current work-in-progress, “The Circus of Tensegrity,” is a site-reactive work. She presented her research for the project during a performance at Windy Goat Acres in Chelsea, Iowa on May 31. Tanis Sotelo, founder of Soten Taiko, performed live taiko drumming that, combined with the ambient sounds of nature and Ke’s aerial movements, created what Ke calls “an experiment of collaboration and deliberation with the landscape.”

“Tensegrity” combines the words tension and integrity. It is a principle that describes how the structural integrity of a skeletal structure relies on a continuous tension network.

“You don’t have to be incredibly strong to be able to do aerial, but what you do need is sort of this integration of forces,” Ke said. “When you look at a tensegrity structure, it’s not just defined in strength by compression, like maybe an apartment complex would be, but instead it can move and has these opposing sort of floating compression (members), and it uses that tension to be strong.”

“And that’s sort of what your bones are and those stay in your body, but then how you use your body can give you a lot of integrity in the air. So that word just felt very poetic to me.”

Ke draws inspiration from Tai Chi and films. She said the soundtrack for the 2023 Yorgos Lanthimos film “Poor Things” influenced a lot of the movement in “The Circus of Tensgrity.”

She was influenced by the lack of venue infrastructure to bring the project to rural Iowa, but she said the Chelsea performance illuminated challenges in pulling off the feat.

“I realized that driving that much equipment in my personal car is just not feasible,” Ke said.

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When Ke performs, she stuffs her Subaru Impreza with a 20-foot rig that is deconstructed into 17 pieces of steel, straps and pins.

“That’s just the structural rig itself. I also have a pulley system, so that’s a lot of rope for pulleys and additional rigging,” Ke said. “Then there’s tools like Allen wrenches and additional tools you might think you need, tape.”

Add in the aerial apparatus itself, plus rosin, which is used to improve the aerialist’s grip.

“I don’t bring any tech, thankfully, but it’s also something I would like to be able to bring in the future,” Ke said.

“I would like to be able to share this work in different spaces in Iowa, but I learned that just in terms of energy and capacity, it’s not as feasible.”

“The Circus of Tensegrity” was funded by the Iowa Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. Ke has been a recipient of Iowa Arts Council grants the past two years, which allows her to create and bring her work to the public.

“Without those sources of funding, it would be really, really difficult to have this be a livelihood and also be based in Iowa City,” Ke said.

Comments: bailey.cichon@thegazette.com

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