Serenity Smith Forchion

Serenity Smith Forchion is an American aerial dancer, acrobat and circus educator who built an international performance career while co-founding two institutions that shaped contemporary circus training in the United States. She and her identical twin sister, Elsie Smith, grew up on a homesteading farm in western Massachusetts without electricity until age seven. At sixteen, during a family trip to the Dominican Republic, Serenity tried flying trapeze for the first time—a moment that redirected her toward professional circus. The sisters performed with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Circus of the Kids and the New Pickle Circus before developing a shared aerial identity as Gemini Trapeze. Serenity also helped found the San Francisco School of Circus Arts, positioning herself at the intersection of traditional touring circus and the emerging American circus-school movement.

In 1997, Serenity and Elsie joined Cirque du Soleil's *Saltimbanco*, performing as a swinging duo-trapeze act and touring internationally through 2001. Beyond their on-stage work, they taught backstage, developed aerial-silks pedagogy and, in Serenity's case, served as the production's Pilates captain, focusing on injury prevention and rehabilitation. The four-year engagement embedded an approach in which technique, conditioning and teaching were inseparable.

After leaving Cirque du Soleil, the sisters settled in southern Vermont. In 2002 they launched early aerial teacher-training workshops, and in 2003 established Nimble Arts, combining performance production with systematic coach development. In 2007 they co-founded the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) in Brattleboro as a nonprofit offering recreational, pre-professional and professional training. Their goal was to build repeatable coaching methods, safe progressions and an institutional anchor for circus education.

Throughout her directorial and teaching roles, Serenity continued to perform and choreograph. She has worked with Pilobolus, Canopy Aerial Dance Studio, Air Dance Bernasconi, AirPlay, Circus Smirkus and other companies, and has performed duo acrobatics with her husband, Bill Forchion. Her teaching emphasizes fundamental body awareness as the foundation for sustainable technique and creative choice.

Her work earned significant recognition. The spinning duo-trapeze act created with Elsie Smith received a special prize at the Wuqiao International Circus Festival and a bronze medal at the First International Festival of Circus in Albacete, Spain. In 2016, the sisters received Vermont's Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts and the American Circus Educators Award for Excellence in Education. Serenity went on to become a founding leader of the American Circus Alliance and continues as NECCA's producing director and coach.