Elsie Smith

Elsie Adelia Smith is an aerial performer, choreographer, educator, and institution-builder who transformed professional circus training into a durable educational infrastructure in the United States. Raised on a small homesteading farm in rural Massachusetts with her identical twin sister Serenity Smith Forchion, Smith grew up without inherited circus training; her path into aerial performance came later, making access and pedagogy foundational to how she would shape the field.

Smith and Serenity developed a career as aerial performers, creating a spinning duo-trapeze act that toured internationally. The sisters performed a four-year engagement with Cirque du Soleil's *Saltimbanco* and worked with companies including Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, the New Pickle Circus, and Circus Smirkus. Their duo-trapeze work earned awards in performances across China and Spain.

Performance led to teaching. With Serenity, Smith developed an aerial curriculum that joined apparatus technique to progressions, body awareness, spotting, rigging judgment, and creative problem-solving rather than treating aerial skills as isolated tricks. She choreographed and instructed for organizations including Pilobolus, Cirque du Soleil, Frequent Flyers' Aerial Dance Festival, VivaFest, and Circus Smirkus, while earning trampoline coaching certification.

In 2007, Smith and Smith Forchion established the nonprofit New England Center for Circus Arts in Brattleboro, Vermont. By the Smithsonian's 2017 documentation, NECCA had become the longest-running professional circus-arts training program in the United States, serving ages from young children to retirees and establishing Vermont as a destination for professional and recreational circus study.

Smith also co-founded Nimble Arts, a production and consulting company through which the twins work as performers, directors, dramaturgs, riggers, teachers, and advisers. She served as a founding member of the American Circus Educators Association's Safety Committee and the American Circus Alliance, work that extended her practitioner knowledge into field-wide standards. In 2016, the sisters received the American Circus Educators Award for Excellence in Education and the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council. Smith's current work foregrounds photography and documentation alongside direction and education, making her influence broader than performance alone.