18th
Time to fly away
(this story appeared in the summer 2009 issue of “Next,” a magazine for people over 50 living in Athens, Ga.)
On a cool night in early May, among 200-year old iron oak trees covered in Spanish moss, Susan Murphy may have had her swan song.
The aerial dancer and founder of Canopy Studio in Athens stepped out from the edge of the gathered crowd, introduced herself to a group of south-Georgia strangers, and with a minimum of ceremony, climbed onto a trapeze and began to dance.
To a first-time viewer, there are few things quite as captivating: a dancer, suspended in air; her movements generous, enduring, as one who has found a cure for gravity. She seems to move either slower or more quickly than you would expect—it’s hard to be objective in the presence of someone who is flying. Still, among the swirl of arms and legs, her face invariably reveals a serenity and surety that softens the tension of watching a woman swing through the air on a rope.
As a member of Canopy Studio’s Repertory Company, I’m far from being a first-time viewer. I have watched Susan perform dozens of times at the trapeze studio she founded in 2002, and I have danced alongside her. Still, I am taken in by her dance and how comfortable she looks there. It seems even more special on this night, with the knowledge that Susan will soon be leaving Canopy Studio and moving with husband Don Carson to this place, the lowcountry of Georgia, to a home on a salt marsh near Sapelo Island. Susan doesn’t like to say she’s retiring and plans to continue a daily trapeze practice, but later she tells me she might be done performing.
Dazzled by the strange and thrilling display, the crowd couldn’t have known that the show that night might have been her last (I don’t believe it) or that despite performing for an audience of mostly unfamiliar faces, Susan was right at home. As a lover of nature and soon-to-be resident of Darien, where the performance took place, Susan was introducing herself, in her own way, to a new community where she and Don will move permanently late this summer. The move requires Susan to step down as Canopy’s director (and Don as the studio’s de-facto engineer and rigger); the couple will be enjoying a slower, more removed world at their marsh home.
It seems an odd pairing, an aerialist performing in a tiny coastal town. But then, it’s not so very different from what Susan and Don undertook to build a community aerial arts center in Athens in a raw industrial space in 2001. Susan, who had come to the University of Georgia as a guest artist and adjuct faculty to teach aerial dance, had previously worked in New York City and Bolinas, California (just outside San Francisco), so opening a trapeze studio in a small southern city—even a somewhat progressive one like Athens—seems like quite a leap.
But Susan, who had been making a somewhat solitary pursuit of aerial work for two decades prior to her arrival in Athens, was so eager to realize her dream of opening a trapeze studio that the challenges the warehouse presented seemed minor. “I was so desperate,” she says. “I had no vision of anything better than what I had done, which was so primitive. … I [couldn’t continue to] wait and hope for a space like this. I’d done it for 20 years.”
Don recalls that “we could see light coming through the roof,” when they bought the space in the Chase Street Warehouses, which is now home to ATHICA, Floorspace Dance Studio, Mercury A.I.R., Pigpen Recording, and other businesses and residences. Still, says Susan, “I only had one dream, so I didn’t have a choice. This was it. … I didn’t even question … money,” or whether the venture would be successful.
Despite a slightly shaky start (after Canopy’s first performance in March 2002, their temporary occupancy permit was revoked and it was June before the studio was cleared to officially open), the intrepid women to whom Susan had been teaching basics on short trapezes in her Finley Street living room helped clean and open the space, designed by Jennifer and Bob Segrest and Chris Evans. Seven years later the studio has held dozens of performances and hundreds of students have come through Canopy in the 20 classes the studio offers every week.
The model that Canopy Studio formed itself on was unusual for a circus arts center. Offering classes “for people of all ages and abilities,” Canopy was conceived as a non-profit community arts center—a very different kind of space from the professionally-oriented training gyms that many aerial studios are.
“I think that’s the core of why Canopy works so well,” says Melissa Roberts, who has been a member of the Repertory Company and a teacher since the studio’s second performance. “It is what she founded the space on. I don’t see that changing.”
Susan envisioned Canopy as a sanctuary, a beautiful space where people could find stillness and quiet, or play as they were moved to do so. Susan says she wanted the work to be “supported by beauty,” and the distance between her vision and its realization is spanned by Don.
“I have a vision and he fulfills it,” she says. “I’m a visionary, but I am not at all able to figure out how to do anything technical or mechanical.” She admits to having her head in the clouds sometimes and credits Don for keeping her grounded—and aloft. Just as it’s hard to imagine Canopy without its founder, Don’s shoes seem impossible to fill. In addition to building and maintaining equipment, installing and checking rigging components on the studio’s 25-foot high ceilings, running lights and sound at the performances and generally looking out for the safety of the dancers, Don, a former professional art photographer, shares Susan’s desire to have a beautiful space in which to work.
“It had to fit into my vision of myself,” says Don. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been good at it, and I wouldn’t have been able to do it, and I wouldn’t have wanted to.” On his first date with Susan, Don, who was then working as a photographer for a company that manufactured rope, brought Susan an enormous spool of rope, which the couple hung down through the spiral staircase of the six-story walk-up Chelsea, New York City apartment building they both lived in. Clearly, Don “got it.” Susan started at the top and danced her way down the cord. “I say we’re soul mates,” says Susan. Even now, Don is eagerly working on plans to construct a smaller trapeze studio for Susan on their property in Darien.
When they leave, it will be a double loss for the studio and the performance community in Athens.
“I just don’t think we’ve quite realized what her departure is going to mean, energetically,” says Melissa. Susan “creates an opportunity for people to make connections with their bodies. … She can look at each dancer and realize what would feed them the most.
“Once you realize dance can be a really sacred, spiritual thing you never want to have it be any less than that,” Melissa says.
Susan’s energy is enveloping. She moves through her life the way she moves through her dances: purposefully, without rushing, with presence in the moment. Her teaching style draws significantly from authentic movement (waiting for an inner impulse to move one’s body), improvisation and ideas of movement therapy. She is more likely to bring a poem or photograph into class as a template to work from than a regimented series of exercises. As a dancer with less formal training than many of her peers (Susan has a masters in dance, but entered that program with little prior experience), she is more concerned with the spiritual aspects of dance than technique.
“I’ve always been better at forming relationships with people. That is my strength,” Susan says. She considers the company dancers her family, calling the women in the group her “dance daughters.”
“She was the first adult who talked to me like I mattered,” says Melissa, of her initial meeting with Susan as a young adult almost eight years ago. It’s a sentiment that many of Susan’s friends echo—how Susan’s true interest in people makes her easy to know, and easy to watch, as a performer—while she dances, she looks you in the eye, seeing her audience as much as they see her.
“When she dances it’s not the novelty of the apparatus she’s on that moves you,” says Melissa. “She’s got this very evident love for us. She gives me hope.”
