In the drafty expanse of a former city substation, Tim Scofield and Mara Neimanis perform an aerial pas de deux that has the playful, fluid feel of a romp on the moon.
Harnessed by cables between steel yokes, Scofield, a solidly built sculptor, and Neimanis, a wiry aerialist, use their heft against that of a hinged counterweight shaped like a wedge of pizza. The two leap 15 feet in the air, turn somersaults, crook their legs and make like Peter Pan as they swivel aloft for yards and yards.
Scofield and Neimanis are finding their way, exploring what they can make the twin flying machines do - and what the machines can make them do. It is less than a week before their "Aerial Sculpture," an improvisational flight of fancy, which debuts Saturday evening in the Oliver Street space, in a warren of warehouse studios and shuttered factories.
As they dip and turn, carving unpredictable arcs through the substation, the creaking machines, powered by Scofield and Neimanis, resemble two enormous dinosaurs. Unlike "no strings attached" illusions spun by conventional circus stagecraft, Scofield wants his audience to see the engineering and artistry required to experience the sensation of flying.
Constructed of found objects and Scofield's fabrications, their function is what renders his machines into works of art, he says. "Functionality is the aesthetics," he says. "I like the turnbuckles, cables, nuts and bolts and all of the mechanicalness of it."
The machines swivel on circular bases attached to several Rollerblade wheels. On top of the base, a steel sawhorse supports the counterweight, which is controlled by each artist from their yoke at the end of a 10-foot arm. Their flying corsets, made by local costume designer Melanie Freebairn, hitch at the hip to cables on the yoke.
"It really gives you an extraordinary experience with where you are in the moment and where you are in relationship to everything. That's why aerial work is so powerful to work on and powerful to look at," Neimanis says.
As a kid in Illinois, Scofield, an instructor and manager of the machine shop at the Maryland Institute College of Art, was a thrill seeker who savored that "moment of weightlessness" when he left the ground by way of a soaring bicycle, snowboard or skateboard. Now that he is 35, weightlessness isn't as easy to attain. Now, "It hurts when I fall," Scofield says.
