Lifting Her Spirits

When Her Strength Deserted Her, Mara Neimanis Grew Wings

BALTIMORE

Gravity, what a downer. Always getting in the way. How do you tell the story of Amelia Earhart, for instance, particularly the last few minutes of her fateful 1937 flight around the world, when you're an earthbound mortal performing in a theater space?

Aerial artist Mara Neimanis solves that problem with a 12-foot-tall rotating sculpture of a plane -- and a lot of elbow grease. More precisely, it's extraordinary shoulder, arm and abdominal strength. Her hour-long one-woman show, "Air Heart," running Friday through July 29 in a converted Washington storefront known as the Scientarium at Seventh and D streets NW as part of the Capital Fringe Festival, is an upper body workout to put many a gym rat to shame.

Rehearsing the piece in her sweltering warehouse studio near Baltimore's Station North Arts District, Neimanis, dressed in a tank top and stretch pants tucked into boots, makes the impossible look supremely easy. She uses a stylized plane -- something like a cross between an aircraft and a jungle gym -- that is bolted onto a broad base. At one point, she stands beneath it, and reaching up to grab the sides of the nose, she draws herself into it with a slow, clean pull-up. Then she flips around to hang from a bar by her knees, arms floating out like wings.

The strength moves are there for more than the whoa! factor. Portraying both a straight-talking Earhart and a more poetic narrator, Neimanis uses her muscular grace to emphasize the aviator's unblinking courage, her "madness" for flight and her accomplishments on the ground, advocating for women's rights and an end to war.

The square-jawed performer takes a markedly different approach to aerial work. The art of suspending oneself from trapezes, ropes and other apparatus is dominated by dancers and acrobats. But Neimanis, 42, is no dancer, nor does she look like your typical underfed acrobat. With her firm gaze, deep voice and wide, thrown-back shoulders, there is a distinct force about her. She has the upper torso of a champion swimmer, coupled with a curvy body. She was an actor before she discovered flight, and she calls her work "aerial theater."

"I came to aerial as a storytelling device," she says. "I'm trying to support a narrative. I'm pointing out that this bit is important, this bit and this bit and suddenly ba-boom!" -- she snaps her fingers -- "you have Amelia."

As you watch her moving through the piece, it's clear Neimanis is an unusually powerful woman. Her strength, however, nearly killed her.

Having grown up in a family of actors, Neimanis always knew she'd go into the theater. Her father's parents had acted in the national theater of their native Latvia until they immigrated to this country. Her actress mother had studied with the legendary director and teacher Lee Strasberg. Neimanis recalls that when she was a child in Buffalo, family outings to the movies invariably led to heated discussions afterward. Her parents drummed into her an enduring principle: Technique is all. "If you don't have craft," Neimanis says over lunch after the rehearsal, jabbing a thick finger into the tablecloth, "you shouldn't be on the stage."

But Neimanis, who craved physical activity, knew conventional acting wasn't going to be enough for her. With her strong build and boundless energy, she was cut out for physical theater -- the circus arts and movement. After college, Neimanis moved to Israel and studied clowning. She went on to mime and the masked acting of the improvised Italian commedia dell'arte. She studied at the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre in Northern California, becoming an instructor and a company member. Stage workouts and even cycling didn't begin to exhaust her. Reveling in her physical powers, she says, "I felt superhuman strong."

Then came a grim discovery: The source of her strength was neither good genes nor good health nor the adrenaline rush of self-fulfillment, but a disease.

It started with unusual aches in her feet. Tests showed Neimanis has something called multiple endocrine neoplasia, an incurable disease that can cause benign tumors to grow on her endocrine glands, the hormone-producing organs that regulate growth and tissue function. A tumor on her pituitary gland was causing an overproduction of growth hormone, resulting in a disorder called acromegaly.