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Growing up in Chicago with lawyers in the family and a propensity to argue and perform, Danielle Garrison thought she’d make a good lawyer. Until, on a whim, she took an aerial dance class that changed the course of her career.

“I had no idea what aerial dance was. I was just curious,” Garrison said. “When I got on the trapeze I knew immediately it was exactly what I needed to do. In that moment, I just knew, ‘This is it.’ The feeling of being weightless was childlike and I felt so good in my body. That first aerial class set the stage for my dance career.”

Garrison, who completed her undergraduate work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is working toward a master’s degree in with an emphasis in aerial dance. She is the second MFA dance candidate in the aerial dance track. 

She has been dancing since she was 3, and seriously studied ballet and modern dance throughout high school and college. But her goal was to become a lawyer—until that turning point in the aerial dance class when she let her imagination soar 18 feet in the air. Leaving thoughts of a law career behind, she auditioned with Aerial Dance Chicago as a dancer, later becoming choreographer, teacher and assistant director.   

Garrison came to Boulder to dance with the Frequent Flyers dance company and learned about CU’s aerial dance program, which led her to audition. Since 2012, she has been dancing with Frequent Flyers and is director of the student company. She also teaches dance classes in Denver public schools to children of low-income families. 

“I’m interested in making aerial more accessible to people who may never have the opportunity to venture into it,” Garrison said. “There’s so much potential—the conditioning, the workout, the artistry. It’s magical to see women of all ages find confidence in their bodies doing aerial.”

Combining elements of modern dance, acrobatics and fearlessness, aerial dance uses an apparatus attached to the ceiling that allows dancers to explore three-dimensional space. With aerial, dancers integrate movements on the floor and in the air, so the apparatus becomes an extension of the dance floor. Fabric hung from the ceiling suspends and supports the body, giving dancers freedom to play in the horizontal plane while suspended in vertical space. It takes strong core strength for dancers to hold their bodies aloft. 

At opposite ends of the aerial spectrum are the perspectives of modern dance and circus or cirque. Garrison’s approach to aerial dance can be found in the genre-bending place in between. Through improvisation, grace and fluid motion, Garrison has forged her artistic identity.

Her choreography includes work that shows her perspective of the Catholic Church’s position on birth control and a depiction of how Muslim women are viewed in American culture. 

“I’m being radical and experimental now,” she said. “My work has gotten bolder in discussing controversial topics that are both personal and global. I’m trying to do something with aerial that I’ve never seen or done before. I can’t just do work that is purely aesthetic anymore.”

Garrison has received a 2017-18 Fulbright award to France where she will work on her MAPS (Multicultural Aerial Performance Stories) project at La Grainerie, a pre-eminent cirque institution in Toulouse. Through MAPS she seeks to answer the question, ‘How can aerial dance encourage transcultural empathy of grief in a post-embodied global world within the collaboration of art, live-embodiment and technology?’ 

By bridging aerial dance, cirque and various forms of media, she hopes to encourage an empathetic connection through live performance. Future implementation of her ambitious project would someday take her to far-flung parts of the world to work with artists on choreographing performances that can be viewed along with news stories on a website.

Among her awards and distinctions, Garrison was a Fulbright semifinalist last year, a recipient of the and the which she used to study cirque in Paris last fall. In 2016, Garrison received the Children, Youth and Environment award for the work she does with youth in Denver public schools, teaching them dance and then bringing them to nursing homes to perform.

“Art should be an expression of how we respond to different topics,” Garrison said. “I want the audience to not just think the performance was beautiful, but also to have a conversation about the message. Maybe art can be a bridge that unites different views and initiates dialogue about what’s happening in the world. I want the audience to get something more out of my art, even if it’s discomfort or frustration at the message.”