Itaya and Jane Bryan on the silks
It’s safe to say that Jane and Itaya Bryan spend their time together differently than most mothers and daughters. For them, “hanging out” often involves hanging high up in the air.
“We like to do adventures together,” said Jane, the owner of the Harrisburg aerials studio Artz N’ Motion. She describes aerial arts as an adventure itself.
With good reason—the artistic sport combines strength, flexibility and acrobatics. Along with climbing up apparatuses (often, a feat of upper-body strength), it also involves flipping upside down, and sometimes, doing animated drops from as high up as the ceiling rafters.
“Aerials is not easy,” said Itaya. “It is not something that everyone can just pick up in five minutes.”
Although for the daughter of the studio owner, the sport comes easier than most.
The 24-year-old has been flipping upside down since she was in elementary school, starting on apparatuses hung in their family’s professionally rigged garage.
“Ever since I was little, I was always hanging off of something, always climbing,” she said. “I learned the basics so early.”
Her aptitude for dynamic movements is helped along by the more than a decade she spent during her childhood doing competitive cheerleading. Of course, it also helped that she grew up watching her mother, her first teacher, fall in love with the sport.
It all started when a 36-year-old Jane, who had an athletic background in gymnastics and tumbling, saw a flyer for a Cirque Du Soleil show in 2006. After a little research on the internet, “which was still fairly new,” Jane said, she tried an aerials class just two hours away at the Philadelphia Circus School.
“I humbled myself greatly because I couldn’t do one climb,” Jane remembered with a laugh.
All the same, she was hooked.
She spent the next several years driving back and forth to the school to train several times a week, sometimes with Itaya, who was just 5 years old at the start of the journey, in tow.
Itaya remembers watching from the seating area of the school as she did her homework.
By 2009, Jane, who had by this point trained on trapeze, the silks, the hammock, and rope, opened her own cirque business, Artz N’ Motion.
She began teaching students to use apparatuses herself—first through classes at the Harrisburg Christian Performing Arts Center and then in her own physical location. Teaching gave her a new purpose.
“I love making an impact in people’s lives,” Jane explained.
Jane and Itaya Bryan
You Got This
Jane starts each class with a stretching circle, so that class members can talk and get to know each other as they answer a weekly ice breaker question.
“I pull teeth to get people to talk to me and ask all those deep questions that people don’t want to answer to make them feel comfortable—to make them feel like they belong in a space and create community,” she said.
Another perk of coaching aerials, she said, is showing people they’re more capable than they know when it comes to doing certain moves.
“Yesterday, I had a kid, and she was terrified, even though she’s so strong she could probably hang for five minutes,” she said.
But with a little support—“You got this. You can do this.”—she accomplished the move, Jane said, and wasn’t afraid of it anymore.
For Jane, the studio entered an exciting new phase last year when Itaya began working as one of her aerial instructors. She described the development as a “pinch me” moment, and said she loves being able to share something with her daughter so close to her own heart.
Like her mother, Itaya finds aerials to be an organic extension of herself and enjoys teaching people to do things they never thought they could do.
“One of my favorite things to do is to help someone out or encourage people,” Itaya shared. “I feel like this is one of the biggest and easiest ways that I can make an impact on someone’s life.”
A young Itaya on the silks
Born to Move
The studio, now on its second physical location, operates out of a warehouse in Swatara Township, a venue chosen for its high, structurally sound ceilings. Its unique cirque-style fitness offerings—silks, trapeze, lyra, and hammock training for both children and adults—draw students not just from Harrisburg, but York, Reading, Hanover, Carlisle and State College.
More than just training, the studio also gives students the opportunity to perform once a year at an annual spring showcase at HACC. In the show, Jane and Itaya often perform together on the silks—which has become something of an annual tradition for them.
“It’s a different way to be deep with someone, a different way to connect,” Itaya explained. “When you’re putting something together, you’re creating a story.”
“I like the connection,” added Jane. “I might come up with some ideas, you come up with ideas, and then we bring it together, and it makes the whole piece.”
She added that she and Itaya have also inspired two other mother-daughter aerialist performances at the studio and that, in Artz N’ Motion’s showcase this year, a brother and sister will also be performing a duo routine.
Jane’s favorite part of working with Itaya, though, is when she isn’t working at all— it’s when she has an hour break during her daughter’s class.
“I’m in the office, and I get to hear her laugh,” she said.
While Jane said she would never want to force Itaya to live out her own dreams, she added it isn’t “out of the realm of possibility” that her daughter could take over the studio one day.
“I feel like I was born to move. Some people are like, born to be doctors, I was born to move,” Jane said, nudging her daughter. “And I feel like you have that as well. You were just born to move.”
Artz N’ Motion is located at 1235 S. Harrisburg St., Suite E, Harrisburg (Swatara Township). To learn more about the studio, visit www.artznmotion.com.
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