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photo by Nina Reed
Nancy Smith originally wanted to be an astronaut or a race car driver. Instead, she became the founder and Artistic Director of Frequent Flyers® Aerial Dance since its inception in 1988 and began doing her annual Aerial Dance Festivals in 1999.
Frequent Flyers is a 501(c)3 professional company based in Boulder, CO. Smith's work with Frequent Flyers has been seen in Boston, California, Louisiana, Virginia, Montreal, the Bahamas, throughout Colorado, and most recently at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC.
Smith first worked with Bob Davidson in 1979 during a summer Skinner Release Technique (SRT) intensive and subsequently undertook research on the use of imagery to facilitate training the body during her master's work at UCLA, bringing both Joan Skinner and Bob for controlled experiments in the Kinesiology Department. Shortly thereafter, Smith moved to Seattle and studied SRT for five years. She is a Level One SRT instructor and has developed her own unique means of blending aerial dance with SRT. When Bob moved to Denver, he set choreography on Frequent Flyers' dancers as a guest artist and also was a guest teacher and performer at the international Aerial Dance Festival.
Smith developed and teaches Aerial Release Technique (A.R.T), which is the foundation for her teaching method. Focusing on releasing, breath, alignment, economy of effort, poetic imagery, and a codified vocabulary, students are cracked-open for expression.
She has received numerous awards including "Living Legend of Dance in Coloado", "Women Who Light the Community", the "Cutting Edge" Award, the "Pacesetters Award" for Arts and Entertainment, a National Endowment Fellowship in Dance, and the "Arts Innovation Award".
She is also an instructor at University of Colorado's Dance Department, spreading the wonder and beauty of Aerial Dance and co-authored the first book on the history / theory of Aerial Dance, as well as, the introduction to Terry Sendgraff's memoir.
photo below by James Goldmill
 As a part of the Airborne Festival, Smith will perform Breath/e, a self-choreographed solo on the "window," a steel rectangular invented apparatus exploring the concept of our first and last breath.
Come see Nancy Smith perform alongside fellow artists who trained under Davidson as they honor their mentor!
Airborne Festival:
Honoring the Legacy
of Robert Davidson
Saturday, September 15 @ 8:00 PM
Sunday, September 16 @ 2:30 PM
Manhattan Movement and
Arts Center
248 West 60th Street
New York, NY 10023
Purchase tickets HERE
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Friday, August 17, 2018
Nancy Smith, Frequent Flyer
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