THE WOMAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE

Arwen Unger imparts skills and confidence through aerial arts

story by JANET COOK | photos by ENRIQUE CHAMBERS and courtesy of EMPOWERED MOVEMENT AERIAL

Arwen Unger was in her mid-twenties, living in Portland, one career already behind her and preparing for another, when she discovered the world of aerial arts.

She was working odd jobs in restaurants and bars, having returned to her hometown after spending a few post-college years as a journalist in New York. She’d decided to change direction and pursue a master’s degree in library science. But despite outward appearances, all was not well.

“I was very depressed and had a lot of anxiety,” she said. “I was also dealing with some substance use issues.” A friend suggested taking an aerial class together — a performance art that’s done in the air on trapezes and hanging fabrics called silks. Unger didn’t know anything about aerial arts but agreed to try the class with her friend. “She ended up not going, but I went,” said Unger, who was drawn in immediately and signed up for more classes.

Unger had done some dance and yoga before, but aerial was different. “It was the right balance of hard and fun,” she said. “It kind of tricks you into working hard, because it’s also super fun. Being upside down, seeing these amazing challenges I could achieve, it gave me inspiration. And hope.” The more immersed she became in aerial, the more she liked it.

Arwen Unger, top, performs on a trapeze at an aerial retreat. Unger teaches kids’ classes and summer camps, inset. At left, students Coco Mosnot and Sophia Morehead pose in a lyra.

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Arwen Unger performs on silks at her Hood River studio, Empowered Movement Aerial. She discovered aerial arts more than a decade ago and credits them with changing her life, giving her self-confidence and easing anxiety.

“One of the things I fell in love with was the aerial community, which was totally accepting,” she said. Unger had struggled with body-image issues, but the aerial studios where she trained felt free of judgement. “Aerial was never about looking a certain way,” she said. “ ere are people of all sizes, and they all t in.” She also liked the fact that people of all ages can do it, adding that dedicated aerialists span from age 5 to 70.

“It’s the de nition of a noncompetitive environment. People challenge each other, but in a camaraderie-based way, and that all really appealed to me,” she said. “It started making me happier and I totally changed my lifestyle around it.”

She nished her master’s degree and got a job as assistant library director for the Hood River County Library. She was excited about the job, but “devastated” at the loss of the aerial community she’d become part of in Portland. ere was no aerial studio in the Gorge.

She occasionally hung a trapeze and a silk at a local gym. She also set up her portable aerial rig in her front yard, where she would frequently train when not at the library. Eventually, one of her neighbors asked Unger if she would consider teaching her daughters.

“ at’s how it started,” Unger said. “I began teaching a few people at my house with the rig, and I fell in love with teaching.” She’s

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Student Ayleen Avelar on the silks. Empowered Movement Aerial offers classes that span all abilities, from beginners on.

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always considered herself an informal educator, as a reporter and then a librarian. Being able to teach something she was so passionate about “hit all the points for me,” she said. at was the beginning of Empowered Movement Aerial.

“I wanted other people to be able to experience the change I had experienced,” said Unger, who also liked helping people learn something di cult. “I was usually the last person to pick something up,

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Eventually, she found space in downtown Hood River’s Mall 202. She did some renovating, including taking out the low ceiling to accommodate her aerial apparatuses, and opened her studio in the fall of 2019 while continuing to work at the library to make ends meet.

In August 2021, Unger left her library job to focus full time on the studio. “Since then, it’s been exponential growth,” Unger said. e studio is small, with class sizes ranging from 4 to 6 students — which allows Unger to provide lots of individualized attention. “For my teaching style, having really small classes is great,” she said.

Unger maintains a busy schedule of classes for all ages and ability levels, starting with beginning kids’ classes for ages 5 and up; her oldest students are in their sixties. She also o ers several pre-teen and teen classes, where students can progress on both silks and the trapeze. “We focus on body positivity and really supporting each other in a warm environment,” she said of the teen classes, which Unger believes can bene t young people at what can be a di cult time in their lives.

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Instructor Sydney Endow balances on the trapeze bar, above. At right, Kathryn (right) and Olympia Davis, a motherdaughter duo and students at Empowered Movement, perform trapeze and silks together at a spring showcase.

“Going into those hard teen years, this is really a counter action to the intensive focus on beauty and looks.”

From the beginning, Unger wanted her studio to be a nonpro t. “As a child, we didn’t have much money, so I didn’t do many after-school activities,” she said. “It was important to me that this wasn’t just for the a uent in the area.” Unger o ers sliding-scale scholarships, low-cost performances and outreach to groups that may not have access to quality physical arts education. She holds fundraisers, including one this fall called Straddle-Ups for Scholarships where students get pledges for the number of straddle-ups (an aerial move on the trapeze) they can do in a minute. All the money raised goes to fund scholarships.

About 10 percent of her students have some sort of scholarship, and Unger aims to increase that to 30 percent in the next year. Comice Leet has two daughters who are students at Empowered Movement, and both have received scholarship money to help pay for classes. “I’m a single parent with three kids on a single income,” Leet said. “It was such a godsend for us.”

Denise Endow, at 60, is one of the older students at Empowered Movement. She came to aerial in a similar way that Unger did — through a friend who invited her to try a class. at was more than three years ago, and she’s been a regular ever since, including performing aerial routines in several shows the studio has put on. “I just really liked it to begin with,” she said. “It felt like something I could do that I didn’t expect to be able to do.”

Along with the satisfaction that comes with steady skill progression, Endow appreciates the upper body workout and the strength she’s gained in her back and shoulders. “ e hanging and swinging is a very unique experience,” she said. “Once I got used to that, I realized it was very di erent than any other workout. e amount of development of my upper body and exibility of my shoulders has been remarkable, and a great side bene t that I didn’t expect.”

Endow also likes being part of the aerial community. “It’s feeling like we all have this shared experience, and we all support each other,” she said. “ ere aren’t many opportunities like that. A book club is di erent. is is shared hardship, because it really is hard.”

For Unger, helping students persevere through that hardship is rewarding. “When you rst start learning aerial, you achieve something new pretty much every week,” she said. “You have these little moments of positive reinforcement.” But as students progress, the maneuvers become more di cult. “ ose are hard-fought-for skills,” she said. “Watching a student struggle for a skill and then achieve it — it makes me so proud of them.”

To learn more, go to empowered movementaerial.org

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Zucchini Pasta

Recipe and photos by KACIE MCMACKIN

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Ingredients

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• flake salt

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Cook the oil, chopped zucchini, basil stems, a pinch of red pepper flakes, 1/2 tsp. kosher salt, shallot, and garlic in a large skillet over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the zucchini is mostly translucent and starting to brown around the edges. Turn off the heat and discard the basil stems when done.

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Photographer Joshua Johnston took this photo on a rainy day last fall. He and his girlfriend had been hiking at Latourell Falls and decided to go on a drive before heading back to Portland. They went east as far as Oneonta Gorge, then turned around and worked their way back through the Waterfall Corridor on the Historic Columbia River Highway. “We took time to stop at pullouts,” he said. At one of them, near Shepherd’s Dell Falls, Johnston found this view, looking east. “I like how it shows the construction of the road, how they had to build it into the cliff,” he said. “I always picture an old Model T coming around the corner.”

The Photographer

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