Sylvia Hernandez ran away from the circus to join real life. It wasn’t that her life under the tents didn’t offer romance. Her German mother was an acrobat, and on a visit to Havana in 1958 met and fell in love with her father, a Cuban gymnast. The head-over-heels part came later when the pair worked up a teeterboard act, the circus stunt where someone heavy jumps on one side of a board and the person on the other end gets hurled into the air, somersaulting to the shoulders of someone else standing nearby. The act helped the young couple escape Castro’s revolution; they left the island attached to an itinerant troupe headed to the U.S.
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The second of four children, Sylvia Hernandez began training for the family act at age seven and kept with it almost continuously for 25 years. She had to stop once following a mishap during a performance in England. “I was jumping to a three-high,” she says, referring to a trick where she would have landed on the shoulders of the third person atop a human tower, “but I jumped high enough for a five-high and missed.” Though Hernandez performed another show that night, X rays the next day revealed she had broken her back. She spent three months in a body cast; doctors told her she would never perform again. They were wrong. Circus performers, Hernandez says, are durable. She finished her circus career in 1990 with the biggest of the big tops, Ringling Brothers’ Barnum and Bailey Circus.
The idea for the gymnasium struck Adler as a good one. When he heard that space in Evanston’s Noyes Cultural Arts Center was opening up earlier this year, he called DiStasi to ask if he were still serious about it. The two agreed that Hernandez would be indispensable to the project, and enlisted her help. Carl Coash, a local performance artist and educator, was also drawn in to shape the project. After only nine months of planning, the school opened in the arts center’s gym, a vaulted structure that looks suitably like a circus tent and is now outfitted with a “sprung floor,” which acts as a cushion. From the ceiling hang a high and a low trapeze, and what circus pros call “the Spanish web,” the climbing rope with a loop at the top to hold performers’ hands, feet, or mouths as they spin sideways at Mixmaster speeds. The Actors Gymnasium offers 24 classes, ranging from text interpretation to martial arts. It already serves 140 students, about half of them adults.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos’Randy Tunnell.
