As I sit down to write this week’s column, I note that it’s International Women’s Day. What better way to celebrate than to highlight Lauren Rile Smith, the founder of Tangle Movement Arts, an all-female collaborative ensemble? Tangle Movement Arts is a circus-arts company with an interdisciplinary focus, whose work integrates traditional circus like trapeze and acrobatics with dance, theater and live music to tell a multi-dimensional story. Though Tangle dazzles with its talented roster of women — flying high and showing feats of strength and agility — at heart, Tangle is about telling stories.
Part-circus, part-theater, part-cabaret, the group’s new show, “Tell It Slant,” can be seen March 12-14 at Christ Church Neighborhood House. Says Smith: “Tangle is about women who literally support themselves and one another, lifting their own bodyweight and that of their friends, as well as creating stories that convey a physical intimacy that ranges from passionate to platonic.”
A true Philadelphian, Smith was born and raised in Chestnut Hill and attended Swarthmore College: “Just a hop, skip and a jump away.”
PGN: Describe growing up in Chestnut Hill.
LRS: Very leafy green. My father is a lover of trees and he planted a lot of trees all over the neighborhood.
PGN: Did I read that both of your parents are artists?
LRS: Yes, my whole family is full of artists, going back several generations. My grandparents manage an agency for classical musicians, so classical music is in our blood. I have three younger sisters and we all played classical music as children, and one of my sisters is still in the biz. She’s studying the viola at Julliard for her master’s degree. She actually collaborated with Tangle and played the violin for one of our shows. Another sister is a glass blower who does beautiful flame-work sculpture — she graduated from Tyler School of Art — and my youngest sister is an actress and a playwright and she’s a Tangle company member. Before she went to school, she performed with us, but then she just had to go to college and get an education.
PGN: The nerve of some people!
LRS: I know! She’s in New York following her dreams. Whatever! [Laughs] No, she’s amazing. They all are. People joke that it’s in the water, because we’ve all pursued the arts. I actually tried to go the non-arts route for a minute; I studied English literature and philosophy at Swarthmore and I went to grad school for social work. It’s a long story but my mother, who’s a novelist and editor, had a reaction that was the inverse of most mother-daughter conversations. She kept saying, “Don’t you think the real path for you is as an artist?” And here I am!
PGN: I understand that you also do some writing.
LRS: Yes, it’s true. My first career, like my mother, was that of a writer and it’s still important to everything I do. I also edit poetry for Cleaver Magazine. It’s an interesting contrast to now be in the completely physical world of acrobatics. For me it almost closes a circle — that the personal expression that can be articulated in writing also can be expressed in a physical manner.
PGN: What was the first poem or poet to capture your interest?
LRS: When I was young I was fascinated by Emily Dickinson.
PGN: Ah, I did notice that title of your show tonight was from one of her poems.
LRS: Yes: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” But it wasn’t my idea. In fact, when the idea of using that title came up, my reaction was, “Oh no, we can’t do that!” It was one of the first poems I ever memorized and I still had an intense adolescent attachment to her. But I realized that was my own baggage and got on board. Everything Tangle does is collaboratively devised by our entire company. It’s part of our commitment to feminist principles. It came out of us wanting to explore personal stories using the surreal language of circus arts. And the title really came to encapsulate the mission of the show and was perfect.
PGN: So what is the mission of the show?
LRS: It’s about telling several stories from a female and queer perspective using the sideways language or “slant” of aerial acrobatics. It’s a cabaret-inspired structure with a mix of acts. It has everything from the intensely personal memoir of a woman trying to conceive, to a little light romance in which two women meet and fall in love 16 feet above the ground. One of my favorites is a real high-energy piece that combines all of the high energy, flirtation and drama of a West Philly dance house party and condenses it to five minutes with six women on one rope! It’s going to be really fun.
PGN: Tell me a little more about the company and its mission.
LRS: Tangle Movement Arts is a feminist circus-arts company. So we make aerial-dance theater using the vocabulary and apparatuses of traditional circus arts like trapeze and aerial silks. It’s very interdisciplinary. We use tools from dance, theater and sometimes spoken word to take circus out of the traditional setting of the big top, which is oriented towards spectacle and moments of gasps, and take it to a more intimate setting, relating stories of ordinary lives with a strong emphasis on female strength and relationships between women. Relationships between women are frequently erased or turned into stereotypes. In contrast, we wanted to make a circus-theater show that reflected our largely queer and female community, expressing the variety of ways women relate to one another: old friend, old ex, new buddy, new flame, source of tension, source of support. And we draw the occasional gasps too.
PGN: How did you go from poetry on the page to the poetry in motion?
LRS: Well, I’ve always been someone who was very much inside my head. For me, I always felt that there was such a great intimacy in sharing your thoughts with someone — that one-dimensional experience of putting something on paper for someone to read and then having your words inside someone else’s head. Perhaps my quest for the cerebral was because I’ve had problems with chronic pain since I was a teenager, so to me my body was an unreliable conveyance, like a broken-down car. And very uncomfortable, the air conditioning wasn’t working and you had to stop often for fuel, not something you could trust. But when I discovered circus arts, I found that my body could be a partner, a project, a creative constraint. Something I could deliberately shape or use to make art, that I could take care of and that would take care of me. I went from not being able to do a single push-up to doing pull-ups for fun!
PGN: How did you get involved?
LRS: During my junior year at Swarthmore an alum, Quinn Bauriedel, came to teach a two-week workshop on acrobatics. I signed up on a whim and found myself fascinated and challenged in a brand-new way. Later I began training with LAVA, a feminist company based in Brooklyn which performs acrobatic dance. I had never done anything more physical than ride my bike around campus. I had no experience with dance or gymnastics, but I instantly knew that this was something I wanted to be part of. I was on fire with how feminist an art discipline it seemed to be. Men are graceful and women build muscle, and everybody partners in ways that are about physical intimacy and trust that aren’t necessarily sexual. I’ve been fascinated ever since with circus performance as a way to mix storytelling with movement, put strong women on stage and challenge expectations for both genre and gender. So in 2011, I gathered a group of like-minded artists and we did our first show at the Fringe Festival. We got a tremendous response and have since done two main shows a year, in the spring and fall, with some pop-up shows in between. It’s funny: At first it was hard to get people to understand what we do, but now aerial arts are really gaining in popularity. I’ll mention it to someone and they’ll say, “Oh, kind of like what P!nk does!” I’m very grateful for P!nk; she’s made things a lot easier to explain!
PGN: Where’s the most interesting place you’ve done a pop-up show?
LRS: We did one at 30th Street Station, which was so much fun. We did it like a circus flash mob, where we had people going around as if they were regular people. One person dressed like a businesswoman on her lunch break, another as a nurse at the end of her shift, a bike courier, etc. My character was someone about to miss her train [laughs] — unfortunately I have a lot of experience with that, so I was able to bring some realism to the role. In the midst of it all, our circus performance broke out. It was super-fun. I’ll give you an exclusive: This summer, we’re going to be doing one at Clark Park during one of the Farmer’s Market days. So when you least expect it … You may be there shopping for organic apples, and acrobatics will begin to happen around you! I love the pop-up shows. Actually one of the guest artists for “Slant” is someone we met at one of the pop-ups, Caitlin Donaghy.
PGN: Oh neat, who are some of the guest artists?
LRS: Well, as I mentioned, Caitlin, who’s a fantastic hooping artist. She’s never done any aerial work before so this will be a first for her. Nina Giacobbe, who is contributing an aerial silks piece, and Megan Gendell and Lauren Feldman, who are internationally known trapeze artists who will be debuting a high-energy piece exploring the joyous abandon of new love. In addition, fiber artist and multimedia sculptor Julia Wilson has created large fiber-art sculptures that will transform the theater of Christ Church Neighborhood House.
PGN: Tangle is described as a queer collective. How do you define that?
LRS: “Queer” for us is a very large umbrella. The queer ethos of Tangle is taking relationships between women very seriously. Sometimes that comes across in our work very explicitly; we have a lot of queer romances on stage and sometimes more sub-texturally. We don’t have an identity check box for members but it is an ethos that suffuses all of the work that we do.
PGN: We’ve spoken a lot about your work in the air, but your ground-based job is fascinating too.
LRS: Oh yes, I work at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s the best day job ever. I work with all sorts of special collections at U of P, mostly printed. From things that look like the rare book most people imagine, like Shakespeare’s “First Folio,” to three-dimensional collections. One of my favorites is a fan that folds out and has the lines of a poem written on each of the slats.
PGN: Do you have to wear white gloves?
LRS: [Laughs] Actually, that’s a very common misconception. When it comes to working with paper, our bare hands are much more sensitive and less apt to do any damage. We just wash our hands obsessively!
PGN: What’s a favorite book you’ve handled?
LRS: I love our comics collection, which has its fair share of superheroes, but I really get a kick out of some of the more unusual examples, such as “Krazy Kat,” which was an incredibly surreal strip from the ’20s.
PGN: That’s the one who was always throwing bricks, right?
LRS: Yes, that’s the one! I was obsessed with that for a while.
PGN: First book as a kid?
LRS: We had these primers that we read that emphasized the letters of the alphabet one vowel at a time. I don’t remember the name of the books but the sentence “Max the cat nabs a ham” is one I’ll never forget.
PGN: Last book you read?
LRS: “Notes from No Man’s Land,” a collection of essays by Eula Biss. Really beautiful prose and thoughtful insight.
PGN: What was one of the most profound “a-ha!” moments you’ve had recently?
LRS: Oh my gosh, I got my driver’s license in 2013, about 10 years later than most people. Like a lot of city kids, I never really needed to drive but, with my life as a circus producer, I travel with a lot of equipment and taking the bus toting trapeze apparatus is tough. And it gets old having to ask friends for favors. Being able to drive myself was a powerful change for me. It was a bridge that had taken a lot of time to cross.
PGN: If you could rid the world of one thing, what would it be?
LRS: Hmmm, I think poverty would be the first answer to come to mind. I don’t know. What’s your answer?
PGN: I’d say greed. It leads to people not wanting to share wealth or resources or power, which goes hand in hand with your answer. It’s what is causing us to be in this crazy predicament where half of the global wealth is held by 1 percent of the population. How much money does one need?
LRS: Very true.
PGN: What was your coming-out experience?
LRS: I had a coming out that was intensely mediated through literature, as I didn’t find a community of queers until quite a while down the pike.
PGN: No queer community at Swarthmore?
LRS: Oh, sure, but I came out when I was 14 and I had a lot of those “Dykes to Watch Out For” feelings. I’ve always had a fascination with queer history and literature.
PGN: So, combining your bookish side and your queer side, what three books would you recommend to a baby dyke just coming out?
LRS: “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For,” an anthology of Alison Bechdel’s touchstone comic strip “Stone Butch Blues,” and a definitive novel by Leslie Feinberg. And “I Am Your Sister,” the collected writings of Audre Lorde.
PGN: How about a favorite LGBT movie?
LRS: Well, I just watched “But I’m a Cheerleader” again the other day and we have a reference to it in our show that queer movie buffs will get.
PGN: So are you partnered?
LRS: Yes, my wife actually does all the behind-the-scenes aspects at Tangle, so she’s a fantastic collaborator in many ways.
PGN: How long have you been together?
LRS: Since May 2008. You’ll have to do the math!
PGN: Ha. I’m told I’m chronologically challenged. Does she do aerial work?
LRS: She’s trained in trapeze and handstands but she’s not interested in performing. She makes everything happen, though. She rigs for all of our performances and rehearsals.
Tangle Movement Arts performs “Tell It Slant” 8 p.m. March 12-14 and 3 p.m. March 14 at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American St. For more information or tickets, visit www.tangle-arts.com.