Are the natural and artificial worlds somehow connected? This is the question posed (and possibly answered) through circus in NECCA’s upcoming show.

The New England Center for Circus Arts will present “Of Myth and Mushrooms,” its Winter Circus performance, this Friday Dec. 15, through Sunday, Dec. 17 at its downtown Brattleboro space.

Since 2007, New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) has emerged as the premiere circus arts training facility in the nation.

The Winter Circus, formerly known as the Flying Nut, is the largest show NECCA produces. It features youth and adult students from recreational classes alongside aspiring professionals in the three-year ProTrack program. This year’s show features more than 80 performers in four shows.

“Most of the other shows are program-specific,” said NECCA’s artistic director and co-founder, Serenity Smith Forchion, “This once-a-year show combines all the programs.”

The mission of NECCA is to provide high-quality circus arts training for students and artists while facilitating greater access and programming to everyone. As a non-profit organization, NECCA works to ensure financial and inclusive access to serve students of all ages and abilities, offering recreational circus classes, pre-professional and professional programs and workshops.

Winter Circus director Chelsea Barrett took a “tree dancing” workshop with Forchion, during which she talked with students about how trees, plants and fungi are interconnected through mycorrhizal networks.

“The concept [of the winter show] is that interconnectedness balanced against the world of AI, which takes over the world,” said Forchion.

The main character’s journey starts in a robotic office environment, Forchion explained, with fluorescent lights.

“The main character says ‘this is not for me’ and runs away to the forest,” she said, and meets trapeze bears, bugs that do a Russian bar and hoop diving act and mushrooms performing in aerial slings. Performing the hoop diving act is a circus artist from Cirque du Soleil as part of an exchange program with NECCA.

One of the pieces of music in the show was created using a synthesizer, while the performers, dressed as mushrooms and “synthesizer people”, depict the connectedness between nature and technology. “[Synthesizers and mushrooms] can create music through a chemical and electronic interaction,” she said.

NECCA has worked, rehearsed and performed in a custom-built trapezium since 2017, but one thing missing has been seating that gives audiences a raised view of action on the floor. Thanks to a longstanding relationship between the New England Youth Theater (NEYT) and NECCA, the circus will have portable risers for this performance that will provide 50 more seats.

“The sight lines [for performances] were difficult,” said Forchion. “[The risers] provide a wonderful opportunity to improve and expand.”

These risers are the latest of numerous facility upgrades NECCA has made this year to enhance the audience experience along with stage lighting, sound system, remote control shades for black out and wing curtains for a proscenium view.

The next session of classes at NECCA, which will begin Jan. 3, includes a new harness dancing class that combines circus and dance.

“It allows you to flip and fly with less impact than when on the ground,” said Forchion.

Another new class starting up next year is Silver Circus.

“We’re trying to open up opportunities for the non-typical circus demographic,” she said. “There are studies that show circus can have a lot of benefits for older bodies. It can be scaled to be lower-impact.” Silver Circus students will be part of next year’s winter show.

The New England Center for Circus Arts Winter Circus Show, “Of Myth and Mushrooms,” will be held this Friday, Dec. 15, at 7 p.m.; Saturday, Dec. 16, at 3 and 7 p.m. and Sunday, Dec. 17, at 1 p.m. at the NECCA Trapezium, 10 Town Crier Drive, Brattleboro. Tickets to the family-friendly Winter Circus are $15-$35 and are available at www.circusschool.org.

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BRATTLEBORO — New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) just keeps growing, it seems, stretching its sinews to embrace an expanding universe of dramatic and kinesthetic arts.

This Sunday, Aug. 20, NECCA hosts North Star Puppets to present Hot Jam Puppet Slam Festival, an event of puppetry, music, theater, crafts, and food.

From 4 to 7 p.m. under the circus tent, a family-friendly festival will feature an all-ages puppet show, silkscreening, live music, and a craft workshop.

Festivalgoers will hear singer-songwriters Stephen Peter Rodgers, Ponybird, and Sean O’Reilly, and see Wandering Theatre’s festival-style puppets, Big Chicken’s large parade puppet, and Dragon Treasure shadow puppets by Nappy’s Puppets. Cloudgaze will also perform immersive theater.

At 7 p.m., festival creators Phoenix Leigh and Aaron Lathrop (North Star Puppets) will offer and host the Hot Jam Puppet Slam, an adult-oriented variety show of 12 short acts by 11 puppeteers from throughout New England and beyond.

“Puppet slams are an underground phenomenon,” Leigh explains.

According to puppetslam.com, such an event is “an evening of curated short-form puppetry acts intended for adult audiences.”

Having settled in Brattleboro in 2022, Leigh – the reception manager at NECCA – and Lathrop first met at the National Puppetry Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut. Leigh, a puppeteer for nearly 20 years, is a writer, creator, director, and producer who’s had their hand in a host of puppet slams, variety shows, festivals, and workshops.

Lathrop, an actor by training, began in puppetry in 2008 and has been working with, and married to, Leigh since then. Together they’ve toured the United States performing in family shows and late-night puppet slams.

They’ve puppeteered for The Jim Henson Company, Tears of Joy Theatre, Enchantment Theatre Company, and Dragon Con, and they co-produced Puppet-Delphia Fringe Slam in the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Resident puppeteers for the Philadelphia Folk Festival since 2016, they’re the balloon handlers in New York’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Lathrop’s act – “This Too, Too Solid Flesh,” directed by Sarah Borne and developed as part of the O’Neill Center National Puppetry Conference – will be in the lineup while Leigh invites attendees to “experience what’s possible when puppetry is presented with its full scope,” according to a media release.

“Prepare to be dazzled, to laugh, to cry, to ask: How did they do that?” Leigh and Lathrop promise.

Also on the program, the first of its kind at NECCA, the 7 p.m. show in the school’s Trapezium features acts that are, Leigh explains, “fun [and] participatory – small and intimate to meaningful to fast and silly to experimental.”

Among them will be Theatre Adventure of Brattleboro; marionettes by Cripps Creations of Northfield, Massachusetts; toy theater by Eva Cranky Pantz Productions of Fort Greene, New York; Break-Fast Puppets from Storrs, Connecticut; toy theater with Massachusetts’ Christine Dempsey; Playdoh Puppet Productions from New Orleans; projections, shadow puppetry, and movement by Theatre Immediate of western Connecticut; body and rod puppets by OompaPossum Puppets of Western Connecticut; marionettes by Frechettist Marionettist of Burlington; and clowning/mixed styles puppetry with Joel Baker of Brattleboro.

“Puppetry is alive and vital today,” Leigh adds. “It’s getting harder to make a living in today’s world of performing arts, but it’s accessible to pick up puppets and create a show.”

Furthermore, “there are so many styles of puppetry, from cardboard to intricate marionettes, and they’re all effective in their own way,” they add.

“Puppetry is one of humanity’s oldest art forms,” Leigh continues. “It will continue to survive no matter what. Puppetry speaks truth to power, it is full of surprises, it is silly and sublime. There is a lot to be said for gathering together in one place to laugh, cry, think, and be entertained.”

“New England Center for Circus Arts is proud to host the first Hot Jam Puppet Slam,” says NECCA’s producing director, Serenity Smith Forchion, the school’s co-founder.

“This production supports NECCA’s goal to be a vital resource for the local community and beyond,” she continues. “We will continue to expand our ability to offer the community outstanding professional performances, attract visiting guest artists and instructors from around the world, provide a high level of training for students who aspire to be professionals, and facilitate greater access and programming to area schools and youth organizations.”

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For the past three years, the lives of a group of circus students in Brattleboro have been woven together. After this weekend’s graduation show, those lives will split apart as they embark on careers around the world.

The New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) will present “Intertwine,” an original new work in which nine stories of growth and discovery are told through acrobatics and circus arts, this Saturday, May 13, at the Redfern Arts Center at Keene State College.

“There will be nine performers all getting a chance to share their story within the context of the show’s narrative,” said Serenity Smith Forchion, NECCA co-founder with her twin sister, Elsie Smith. The siblings, who performed together in Cirque du Soleil, started the school in 2007 and immediately launched ProTrack, a full-time, three-year training school for aspiring circus professionals (one of the longest-running in the U.S.).

Students choose majors and minors in more than a dozen apparatuses including traditional ones like trapeze, trampoline, aerial fabric and rope, and some more obscure ones like the Tippy Lyra, the German Wheel and the Static Cloud Swing.

“Intertwine” is this year’s touring show—it will go to three states (New York, Vermont and New Hampshire) for four performances—and serve as a final thesis. The first touring show was in 2019—and then the pandemic hit.

“This is the first year we can fully embrace what we planned for the tour,” said Forchion.

In ProTrack, students learn tour-specific skills including how to rig in a theater, coordinate travel logistics, manage props and costumes, communicate with producers, and cohabitate with each other during the three weeks of productions.

ProTrack students spend much of their third and final year at NECCA preparing: creating their own acts, assembling photos and videos of their work, building resumés and websites. NECCA helps them pursue auditions and also hosts them for other companies.

While NECCA has offered hundreds of recreational classes to the local community over the past 16 years, it has also turned out hundreds of professional artists who perform and coach in shows and training studios around the world.

The final thesis show includes personal works created throughout the three-year program, during which students work with coaches and with a director and choreographer.

For “Intertwine,” students worked with Mark Lonergan, Canadian-born founding artistic director of Parallel Exit, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based original physical theater company. His resume includes productions for The Big Apple Circus, Opera North, Disney Cruise Lines, and Theatreworks/USA. He was also the Creative Director for the Circus Smirkus Big Top Tour for five seasons and is one of the founders of the American Circus Alliance, of which Smith and Forchion are members.

Each year, ProTrack students work with a new director—while NECCA has maintained a long relationship with Lonergan, this year marks the first time he has directed ProTrack students.

“We wanted students to be able to work with a recognized and experienced director,” said Forchion. “As far as their future careers, Mark can introduce them to people and hire them.”

“Intertwine,” so named because all of its stories are connected to one another, focuses on what’s happening both on and behind the stage.

“The lead character is the rigger of the show and wants to be a performer,” said Forchion, adding that the performance features comedic and heartfelt moments about personal experiences.

“It’s a family friendly circus show for all ages,” she added, “and it’s non-verbal so anyone can enjoy it. It’s truly accessible in that way.”

The New England Center for Circus Arts will present “Intertwine” Saturday, May 13, for two shows at 2 and 7 p.m. at the Redfern Arts Center at Keene State Collee. Tickets are $5 for the general public, free for Keene State students and available at https://www.keene.edu/arts/redfern/events/.

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Nearly 20 feet in the air at the New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Colleen Agozzino stood on a trapeze and began to swing. She vigorously bent and straightened her legs, over and over, gathering speed and momentum like a pendulum. Suddenly she dropped, hanging upside down on the trapeze bar, and then rolled up and over the bar multiple times, still swinging. Even in this brightly lit gymnasium where everyone was diving through hoops, propelling themselves off a trampoline or doing handsprings, Agozzino’s movements were breathtaking.

She is a student in NECCA’s ProTrack program, a full-time, three-year training school for aspiring circus professionals. Elsie Smith and Serenity Smith Forchion — twin sisters and Brattleboro residents who performed together in Cirque du Soleil — founded NECCA in 2007 and immediately launched ProTrack, making it one of the longest-running professional circus programs in the U.S. While NECCA has offered hundreds of recreational classes to the local community over the past 16 years, it has also turned out hundreds of professional artists who perform and coach in shows and training studios around the world.

On Friday, May 5, NECCA’s 2023 graduates will cap off their training by performing as Circus Springboard in a show titled “Intertwine” at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro. Smith explained that if the ProTrack program can be compared to college or graduate school, the touring show — three states, four performances — is the final thesis.

“Taking all your material and equipment and resetting it in a new theatrical space is both performance and traveling education,” she said.

The nine artists who will perform at Highland Center for the Arts started their NECCA training in fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic. After making it through a highly selective audition process, they dove into an intense curriculum of fitness and flexibility classes and acrobatic and aerial instruction. As in any higher education program, ProTrack students choose majors and minors; their options span more than a dozen apparatuses, including those familiar to the general public, such as trapeze, trampoline, aerial fabric and rope, and those that are more obscure — the Tippy Lyra, the German Wheel and the Static Cloud Swing.

Marine Scholtes Labrecque, 21, came to NECCA from Montréal, having studied ballet for years before switching to circus classes as a teenager. During three years of training in Brattleboro, Scholtes Labrecque, who uses gender-neutral pronouns, designed their own apparatus — “it’s my take on the aerial ladder,” they explained.

“The great thing about being at NECCA is that my skill level has grown a lot, but my style has grown even more,” Scholtes Labrecque continued. “When I started, I was a very lyrical artist because of my dance background, but then I discovered clowning — that I can be funny onstage and get laughed at and enjoy it. Those things merged together to create my own persona as an artist.”

“[Vermont is] something of a magnet for circus people, whether you’re a student or professional.”
MARK LONERGAN

To direct Scholtes Labrecque and their fellow “Intertwine” performers, NECCA brought in Mark Lonergan, the artistic director of Parallel Exit, a circus and physical theater company in New York. Lonergan has collaborated with NECCA since the beginning of the pandemic — he and Forchion helped start the American Circus Alliance in 2020 — and he wanted to work with NECCA’s ProTrack students partly because Vermont is “something of a magnet for circus people, whether you’re a student or professional,” he said.

Besides NECCA, there is Circus Smirkus in Greensboro and Flying Gravity Circus in nearby Wilton, N.H. “New York has a lot of circus because it has a lot of everything, but what New York does not have is this,” he added, gesturing around NECCA’s bustling space — “the facilities, the people and the knowledge.”

Lonergan noted that even though the United States has a vibrant circus history — Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey — its “circus education for professionals is still quite young” compared to those of Canada, Australia and Europe.

“It’s important for there to be talented, skilled and well-trained circus artists in this country,” he said. The “Intertwine” performers “have been in student mode up until now, learning, absorbing, growing, pushing themselves. My role is to be their connector to the professional world.”

Accessing that world means getting a job, and that is the end goal of students in the ProTrack program. They spend much of their third and final year at NECCA preparing: creating their own acts, assembling photos and videos of their work, building resumés and websites. NECCA helps them pursue auditions and even hosts auditions for other companies, including, earlier this year, a German cruise line that presents theatrical entertainment on all of its ships.

“We as a school have always embraced variety,” Forchion said. She explained that while some circus-training programs focus only on group acts or contemporary circus, she and her sister had a different vision for ProTrack. They had both performed and coached across a wide circus spectrum, from Ringling Bros. to Cirque du Soleil to their own performing company, Nimble Arts.

“We want to train people who want to perform in different places,” Forchion said. “Some of our students would hate performing on cruise ships. Some would love it. Some would love to do burlesque or street performance.”

All of those potential jobs, no matter where they are, can be difficult to get. Among this year’s ProTrack graduates, 23-year-old Josephine Somerville of Needham, Mass., was the first to land a contract. After performing in “Intertwine” on the Tippy Lyra (an aerial ring) and the German Wheel (a cross between a ladder and a giant hoop), she will spend the next four months with Circus SNOR, a small tented circus based in Utrecht in the Netherlands.

Just four years ago, Somerville was finishing a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience (after fast-tracking her education by combining high school with community college). She started a job in the field of behavioral health but didn’t feel fulfilled.

“I realized that circus is the thing that makes me happy,” she said. “So I decided to do the thing that makes me happy and makes other people happy.”

Somerville’s family was “super supportive” of the shift, she said. “My mom was originally an economist, and she left that to be a farmer,” so the idea of leaving a stable job to pursue a more satisfying career was not unfamiliar.

Even as Somerville and her peers applied for positions with circus companies and festivals, they spent most of their time rehearsing for “Intertwine,” which is both a showcase of their individual acts and a “collaborative art project.” That’s according to Layton Hahs, 26, who came to NECCA from Cape Girardeau, Mo., and performs on the aerial sling.

“Everybody here is incredibly skilled, and you’re going to see some amazing feats of human strength and flexibility,” Hahs said. “But it’s also our last big hurrah as a group. I think what will really bring the audience in is the connection we have. Everyone can relate to the feeling of togetherness and cooperation.”

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Intertwine (stylized in all caps), will debut at NECCA’s trapezium at 7:30 p.m. April 22 in Brattleboro.

Serenity Smith Forchion, NECCA co-Founder and former Cirque du Soleil performer framed the importance of the connection with Lonergan. “Mark is the real deal when it comes to devising creative shows from the ingredients our students now have to bring to him. I’ve had a chance to watch him work during their initial research week back in February — showing him acts on swinging trapeze, handstands, German wheel, and more,” Forchion said.

Tickets are on sale at circusschool.org with links to the full tour. The show creation and tour are funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Arts Council, New England Foundation for the Arts, as well as sponsor businesses Brattleboro Savings & Loan, Holiday Inn Express, BackRoads Granola, Oak Meadow, Berkeley & Veller, and Bill Sapsis.

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Numerous benefits come from Aerial Yoga including relieving joint pressure and spinal compression that floor workouts can trigger, increased balance, improved breath and body awareness, and enhanced core strength that is preventative for back and joint health. Experience the health and wellness benefits of Aerial Yoga at NECCA’s Cotton Mill Studio during weekly classes on Tuesdays at 7:30 a.m. and Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m. starting March 21. For more information, call 802-254-9780 or visit CircusSchool.org

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The event was meant to honor the hard work and dedication of first responders, and NECCA plans to honor three different groups at later dates.

Brattleboro Police Lt. Adam Petlock was one of the first responders to participate in the program and said he had a similar experience when he was in the police academy about 15 years ago.

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