Just hanging around

Students flipping for circus in student-initiated class

By Julia Neyman

The Daily Northwestern

The newest class for academic credit at Northwestern challenges students to swing in mid-air, create human pyramids and contort themselves into improbable shapes.

And students already thought college was a three-ring circus.

A student-run seminar sponsored by the School of Communication offers classes on circus stunts, including tumbling and trapeze.

“(Circus) is the most fun I’ve ever had in my life,” said Matt Sheelen, a Communication freshman and the course’s student director.

The class is offered through the Evanston Actors Gymnasium Circus and Performing Arts School at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center. It will teach students the basics of acrobatics, juggling and the “Spanish Web,” a circus art in which students arrange themselves into complex body positions while balancing inside a ring that is suspended in mid-air.

Sylvia Hernandez DiStasi, the class instructor and a professional circus performer since her childhood, said she expects a variety of students from beginners to elite gymnasts and actors to scientists.

“Sylvia is doing a wonderful thing by giving people an opportunity to learn circus and participate in a wonderful art form,” Sheelen said.

On Wednesday Hernandez DiStasi lectured her students on how to master a basic class skill — handstands.

“Leo!” she yelled to an upside-down student. “Don’t pick up into a one-handed handstand!”

Leo Lamontagne, a Communication junior studying dance, also participated in the class during Spring Quarter last year. He said he couldn’t wait to resume his circus studies from last year.

“It’s fun, it’s spring,” he said with a laugh. “It’s always fun to learn new techniques.”

The circus course was offered all three quarters last year and sporadically throughout the last five years.

This year the class was not offered until Spring Quarter because the students who previously ran the course had graduated.

Sheelen — a self-proclaimed circus enthusiast who plans to tour with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus after he graduates — took charge of the program when Communication junior and former circus pupil J. Lauren Lipp gave him the information needed to organize the course.

“This class is a way of pushing yourself,” said Lipp, who could not participate this year because of schedule conflicts. “We don’t experiment with that kind of movement in our other classes.”

The class requires a $300 fee that covers equipment, gym upkeep and liability insurance. Sheelen stressed that careful instruction, spotting and the use of harnesses should keep all students out of physical harm.

The classes will be offered on Wednesdays and Fridays from 2 p.m. to 3:30 pm. Students who wish to enroll should contact Sheelen for registration information and permission numbers.