Social Workout

My Body

Bobby Hedglin-Taylor on Dancing 30 Feet Off the Ground

Bobby Hedglin-Taylor (photo by David Kimmelman)

Bobby Hedglin-Taylor is an aerialist and the Director of The España Streb Trapeze Academy in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

I started as a dancer, and I’ll probably die dancing. I was a ballroom dancer in the early 80s. That led to theater and dance and so many other artistic endeavors. What led me to cirucs, I was living in L.A. and doing some TV work and not making a lot of money, and I came back to New York to do a voiceover for "The Circus Adventures of Toby Tyler." I was Toby Tyler. It was based on an old book from the early 1900s. They hired a circus trainer to train me because they wanted to do a live version of the show. Eventually the funding fell through, but I’d already fallen in love with circus. So I kept working with the trainer, and six months later, I was performing.

Back then, there were about five of us aerialists in New York, and we made a living in the night clubs. You did two or three sets a night at the dance floor at Webster Hall, Palladium, the Kit Kat Club... You had to become versatile because the same patrons would come every week, so you had to put different acts together all the time.

Aerial work is another form of dance. Your dance floor is no longer a hardwood floor. It’s a 30 foot piece of fabric or a bar with two ropes. Your dancefloor becomes vertical. You’re not dealing with the constraints of the ground. It literally becomes an aerial dance. Anybody who’s ever been on a swing set, it’s like that — you’re like a kid again. All circus skills are are organized play skills. 

I think it stems from my childhood. My father was a guitar player and my mother was a lover of the arts. One of my aunts was a USO tap dancer. So there was always entertainment in my family. And when you don’t have a playground, you make your own, and being from the country, I was always climbing trees and walking the fences. My aunt used to scream at me to get down. She’d call my mother and rat me out. But walking the fenceposts, that’s how I learned to walk a tightrope.

As far as being in a space like SLAM [The Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, which is home to the Streb Extreme Action dance company and España Streb Trapeze Academy], SLAM has an energy to it that is not existent anywhere else. The building feels like a person. It’s like a creative force. When you’re here, you can’t sleep, you can’t rest. You have to move. We have a trampoline, we have a 20 foot truss, we have a trapeze. And there’s just nothing like being off the ground, whether you’re tied up by your foot or sitting on a trapeze bar. The key for me, is you just have to keep moving. The minute you become sedentary in any way, your body just gets used to not being used.