Rough and tumble: Germantown school teaches the circus arts

SABRINA FECHER seemed more than a little nervous as she walked through the doors of the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts Sunday afternoon. It was her first day for a beginner's class in aerials.

She was early. So all around the bright and airy studio, with its 20-foot-high ceiling, bamboo flooring and colorful silk banners dangling from the support beams, teachers were busy with other classes.

Fecher, 31, of South Philadelphia, didn't seem to know what to do.

Someone finally directed her to the observation area upstairs where parents or students can watch the rope and fabric climbing or trapeze artistry going on at nearly eye level.

Fecher discovered the school at Greene and Rittenhouse streets last fall when a professional aerialist troupe performed there during the Fringe Festival.

Opened last June, it's taken over a space that once held a furniture store and warehouse, a glass factory, a TV and radio repair shop, and Elvis's Dirt-Cheap Moving Co.

The circus arts school has become a magnet for other movement arts in the neighborhood. There is a dance school next door and around the corner is Pilates in Germantown.

After the Fringe performance, Fecher decided to return to Germantown to take a class. This past Sunday was D-Day - the day to do it.

"I was really, really nervous," Fecher said afterward. "I was really apprehensive about how it was going to end up. I was worried I was going to fail completely."

Fecher, who works in the children's education department of the Wagner Free Institute of Science, in North Philadelphia, still looked nervous after her class had warmed up and the instructor led her through the basics of climbing ropes, or corde lisse, in circus parlance.

Fecher watched as the teacher placed her right foot on one side of the rope, then put her left foot on top of the right. When it was Fecher's turn, she scrambled up the rope to the teacher's cries of "You, did it! That's great!"

After others tried, Fecher made it up the rope a couple more times, going a little higher each time.

Suddenly, she wasn't that nervous-looking novice who had just walked through the doors 20 minutes earlier.

Now, hands on hips, her cheeks flushed, Fecher looked confident and strong, like a woman who knew she was powerful.

"I was surprised I was able to get myself up," Fecher said after class ended. "I really was very happy with what I was able to do."

And that, says Shana Kennedy, director and founder of the Philadelphia School of Circus Arts, is what this is all about.

It's not just grown-ups trying to recapture a childhood fantasy of running off to join the circus.

Sure, for some students, that fantasy is part of the attraction. But for others, it's about exercising and staying in shape in a way that's more fun than pounding a treadmill.

And it's about pushing one's body and mind beyond self-imposed limits.

"For me, circus is about people, not animals," said Kennedy, 33. "It's about human potential, and discovering what the human body is capable of.

"Here at the circus school we're achieving the impossible every day, challenging ourselves to do more amazing things all the time.

"It is the essence of life!"

Kennedy's path to circus arts started when she was about 12. On a family vacation she saw a unicycle for sale, probably at a yard sale, and asked her parents to buy it.

They refused. And Shana sulked until she and her family returned home to Natick, Mass., the story goes.

Not one to give up, Kennedy searched and searched the want ads until she found a unicycle for sale.

This time, her parents gave in. And after about a year of practice, Shana got pretty good at it.

She took up juggling in high school. Her parents went along with it as long as the National Merit Scholar promised to complete college.

She did, but not without taking a year off to study circus arts in Bristol, England.

It was during her college years - she graduated from George Washington University, in Washington, D.C. - that she met her future husband, Greg Kennedy, at a juggling convention in Philadelphia.

He has an engineering degree from Drexel, but works as a world-class juggler who performs and competes around the world.

Shana Kennedy knew that the life of performance and constant travel didn't suit her personality. Plus, in the space of six years she had three children, son Baz, born in 2003, and then sisters Ayla, now 4, and Isa, 2.

Shana Kennedy could still perform, but what she wanted to do was raise her children. "And I wanted to be here with them."

So while husband Greg travels, Shanna runs the school, which now has about 250 students and a staff of 17 teachers.

Before there was the School of Circus Arts, Shana and Greg removed a second-floor ceiling in their three-story house so Shana could practice and teach aerials in their home, just three blocks away from the school. She taught at home for several years, getting new students by word of mouth.

But the new space is a showplace. It has two sets of wide-open-to-the-world windows.

One set faces Rittenhouse Street in front - where passers-by have been known to stop their cars to watch students and teachers as they juggle bowling pins, ride unicycles, or twist and turn their bodies into balletic poses 15 feet in the air.

The other windows give performers a wide-angled view into a beautiful back-yard garden next door.

The green grass, gnarled trees and picnic benches create a picture that reinforces aerialist and ballet student Anthony Zangara's opinion that this is indeed "a magic place." *