Swing Shift: A Seattle Couple Finds the Perfect Ba

Ben Wendel and Rachel Nehmer are 25 feet in the air, swaying lightly.

He’s dangling by his legs from the trapeze bar, and she’s poised on the ropes above him. They’re halfway through their routine at the 2008 Moisture Festival—Seattle’s annual spring celebration of burlesque, vaudeville and circus acts—and the audience is rapt. Amidst all the shimmying bodies and shimmering pasties, Wendel and Nehmer (known as Duo Madrona) are presenting something unabashedly romantic—a love story played out in the air.

They’ve already cast one another coy looks—he, a muscular, pony-tailed swashbuckler type; she, a smiling, curly-haired girl-next-door—and given flirtatious chase around the trapeze bar, but now, in a blur of twists, Nehmer tumbles down the ropes past Wendel’s outstretched arms. For a split second, it looks like she’s in free-fall. A frisson of fear shoots through the audience and a collective gasp resounds, but Nehmer quickly grasps the back of Wendel’s neck and gently pulls herself toward him. There’s a trace of a smile on both of their lips as cheers and whistles erupt, and they swing together back onto the bar and into their routine.

“That move is actually kind of dangerous,” Wendel laughs. “My neck is pretty fragile, but Rachel hangs on with the utmost tenderness and care. At that point [in the act], we know we can trust each other and hopefully the audience knows that we belong together up there on the trapeze.”

As clear as their belonging seems now—their act has carried the couple from the Moisture Festival to the prestigious 29th Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris in 2008 to the celebrated Circus Flora in St. Louis last summer—it wasn’t always so apparent.

Back in 2004, Nehmer and Wendel were just a couple of friends, graduates of Pennsylvania’s Haverford College, planning to become scientists or biology professors. She had a job lined up at Rutgers University, and he was set to move to Seattle and work at the University of Washington. But before they headed separate ways, Nehmer hung a trapeze bar from a Madrona tree outside her apartment as a lark and, after teaching herself a few tricks, invited Wendel to give it a try. Other than his high school soccer team and her occasional gymnastics classes, neither had any athletic training.

“He was a total natural,” Nehmer recalls. “He was already strong and had an easy, graceful way of moving his body. Some people are just at home in the air.”

Working on the trapeze started as a hobby, but Wendel and Nehmer found themselves putting more and more of themselves into it. They eventually found the combination of gymnastic derring-do, storytelling performance and mandatory cooperation the perfect expression of their personalities. “It was really illuminating, actually,” Nehmer says, “to see how personal this art form could be.”

While falling in love with the trapeze, they also fell in love with each other. They packed up their belongings and moved to Seattle together, with their trapeze bar in the trunk.

Along the way, they also found, both in life and on the trapeze, they are perfect foils for each other: Wendel is more brazen; Nehmer, the more studious partner. “At the start of our number, there is a feeling of tension,” Nehmer explains. “I am deciding whether to go for it, take a risk and join Ben on the trapeze. And of course I do take the plunge. There have been several moments like that in our lives.” They spent two years working as researchers at the University of Washington while practicing on the trapeze in their spare time—honing skills and refining choreography at the Georgetown-based School of Acrobatics and New Circus Acts (SANCA). “Fairly shortly after we opened, they showed up to train and take acrobatics class,” recalls Jo Montgomery, SANCA’s executive director. “Ben got very good very quickly, and they started doing little performances here and there.” They earned a few crucial, enthusiastic supporters of their work through SANCA, including the all-female acrobat troupe the Aerialistas, which asked Nehmer to understudy, then to perform. When Wendel and Nehmer decided to try out for the 2006 Moisture Festival, the idea of becoming professional trapeze artists still seemed like a fantasy—something they’d never consider as a career. “I always considered circus a weird hobby and a cool little world I had been exposed to,” says Nehmer. “I was pretty sure I was going to be a research scientist, even three years ago!”

But performing at the Moisture Festival opened the door to a different future. After the 2006 festival, Wendel and Nehmer worked intensively with celebrated Russian trapeze act Duo Artemiev, perfecting their own routine until they felt like they could quit their day jobs at UW and try to do trapeze full time. They took a flying leap, and soon were rewarded with an invitation to the four-day Cirque de Demain, a rarity for American performers.

Now, the couple’s love story plays out in public every few months. They teach at SANCA and perform regularly at various festivals and showcases, living an improbable life as a circus act with the greatest of ease.