BY CARMEN SIERING
If you’ve ever wanted to run away and join the circus, FlowMotion Fest, August 22–24 at Stable Studios in Spencer, Indiana, is a safer, similar, closer-to-home opportunity. Trained instructors will offer workshops on aerial arts, juggling, hoop dancing, slacklining, acrobatic yoga, and more. Supervised children’s activities will free up parents to concentrate on movement skills and fitness. In the evening, everyone will gather for live music and entertainment — a “flowcase” demonstrating the best of the flow arts, defined by Fund the Flow Arts as movement-based art forms that integrate dance and creative exploration of movement, often with skill-based prop manipulation.
August’s event is sponsored by Kinetic Arts Academy, an organization working to bring the area’s flow arts community under one roof. Right now, that roof is more figurative than literal, explains Paula Chambers, one of the founders of local hoop dance group The Hudsucker Posse and a co-founder of Kinetic Arts Academy. “We’re starting without a venue, and our first big venture is the festival,” Chambers says. “We’ll be looking for a site in the next year or two, a place to house all of these arts.”
Scott Myers, former co-owner of Panache Dance, is also a co-founder of Kinetic Arts Academy. He says while the long-term goal is to find a physical space to house the group, the immediate goal is to unite those who teach flow arts. “For now, we want to produce events like FlowMotion Fest and support these artists and teachers,” Myers says. “It’s hard to get noticed as an individual, so we want Kinetic Arts Academy to be a unifying brand. It’s a way to let someone else worry about marketing, and let the artists worry about teaching and performing.”
Sue Rall, an aerial silks instructor with AsaBela Studio who teaches at Twin Lakes Recreation Center (TLRC), plans to have a freestanding rig at FlowMotion Fest to gain exposure. “It seems we don’t have a lot of visibility outside TLRC,” she says. “It’s also a way to promote ourselves as performers.”
Chambers says interest in the flow arts is surging. “People want to do something different, so we’re on the cusp of something big,” she says. “We feel we’re hitting this at the right time.”
