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February 27, 2020

“My soul knew it was home on my first visit.” 

Lorelei Ashe found her passion of the aerial arts at a young age, but it wasn’t until she visited New Orleans as an adult that she found her home.  

Cypress Fitness on Celeste Street is a sparse space. No soft pastel walls, gleaming mirrors, or polished oak floors. No Nautilus circuits or rousing Zumba routines. It’s a place for brute strength and sweaty exercise. But 12 feet in the air on a thin trapeze, Kathleen Parke is showing grace and impressive core strength. Her body moves with fluidity through spirals, splits, and flips. And standing beneath, guiding her every move, is Lorelei Ashe, her instructor.   

Ashe owns Gravity Defying Fitness and uses Cypress’ space to teach individual and group classes on the trapeze, rings, aerial silks, and the aerial hoop. Her sessions build strength, balance, coordination, endurance, flexibility, and agility. All the classes are based firmly in her dance and circus training. 

“Mostly, I work with women in their 30s, 40s, and 50s,” she says. “I train those women who never thought they had upper body or core strength. My tagline is defy your age, defy your fears, and defy your expectations.” 

The Circus Life 

What do you think of when you hear the word circus — comedic clowns, glorious costumes, dazzling tricks? But glitz and glitter aside, so much of circus performance is focused on physical movement, strength, endurance, and all the ranges possible for the human body. It’s no wonder Ashe uses her circus training to help her clients achieve optimum everyday fitness too. 

Ashe is a retired aerial artist. At the age of four, in New York City, she started taking movement classes with Martha Graham dancer Willa Shulman. Soon she was working in Broadway and off-Broadway shows as a dancer. After a major injury at 17, she switched to modern dance. 

Starting School in the Air

“But I couldn’t make a living doing that and I didn’t really warm to it,” she says. 

Fate stepped in and Ashe found herself at the San Francisco Circus Center. The school offers classes for every level of ability in flying trapeze, acrobatics, aerial arts, contortion, juggling, and many other disciplines. Ashe studied static trapeze and aerial skills.  

“Aerial arts refers to physical disciplines involving the use of apparatuses that hang down from a rig point,” says Ashe. “Some of the most common are the trapeze — static, swinging, flying, and dance, and aerial silks or “tissus,” the French word for fabric.” 

Aerial silks is performed while hanging from fabric. Performers climb the suspended fabric without the use of safety lines and rely only on their training and skill. They use the fabric to wrap, suspend, drop, swing, and spiral their bodies in to and out of various positions.  

“Aerial dance is a powerful life-affirming experience that allows people to explore a sense of freedom and liberation,” says Lindsey Butcher, founder of The European Aerial Dance Festival. “It evokes a playfulness that we rarely allow ourselves as adults.” 

Ashe was thoroughly exhilarated by her time performing with the circus and teaching at the school. She eventually moved on to choreographing numbers for other acts and she still consults with circuses around the world.  

After retiring from the circus, Ashe founded Gravity Defying Fitness, the first aerial fitness studio in the country. 

New Orleans Connection 

Ashe began visiting New Orleans in 1991. That’s when Quinn Early signed on as a wide receiver with the New Orleans Saints. The two were childhood friends growing up in New York. 

“I’ve known Lorelei since we were kindergartners,” Early says. “She’s the type of person that will drop what she’s doing to help a friend. She’s totally selfless and one of my favorite people on this planet.” 

Ashe loved the joy in the city and the fact that New Orleans is about living life fully. 

“This multicultural soup is a celebration at its core,” she says. “My soul knew it was home on my first visit. The city has the same sense of community as the circus.” 

Finally in 2009, the time was right to move her fledgling business to New Orleans. She remembers the occasion with the fond memory of choreographing the first dance for The Sirens of New Orleans, a Mardi Gras krewe of dancing mermaids.  

Fitness 

Ashe is 54 years old and is a smidge over 5 feet tall. Her weight ranges from 101 to 106 pounds. 

“I don’t own a scale,” she says. “I know how much I weigh by how easy it is to climb up the tissus. If I’m heavy, it’s a lot harder.” 

Years of circus training has left her with incredible upper body strength and a solid core. She spends a lot of time upside down doing sit ups on the trapeze and other equipment. 

“It’s a total body workout,” she says. “And I love working out. I don’t feel right if I don’t find time to work out. The secret is to find something you love doing.”  

She also finds that working out helps her shed stress from her everyday life. She focuses on her routine and leaves everything else behind. Sometimes her clients come in after a bad day and she just works on finding ways to take the stress out of their bodies. 

“She has mastered aging,” says Nicole Dwyer Sanders, who was trained by Ashe and went onto become an aerialist and the Canon Girl, Ringling Brothers’ last human cannonball before the circus closed operations. “She takes pristine care of her body, making sure to sleep and exercise.”   

Early agrees, “If there is such a thing as reverse aging, Lorelei has captured it in a bottle. Her spirit is that of a 20–year–old. She’s a role model for health and fitness for those of us trying to maintain as we age.” 

Volunteering 

Besides her work and her workouts, Ashe is an avid volunteer. “I find helping others so gratifying that I tend to dive in here and there because of some sort of personal connection,” Ashe says. “My work helping people is an organic thing. I love helping people and when people I care about are doing that I can’t help but jump in.” 

Thus, she’s also active with The Ann Early Intervention Foundation, named in honor of Quinn Early’s mother, who passed away from Alzheimer’s.   

Ashe has seen the circus world changed so much in the last 30 years. One thing she’s noticed is the development of social circus, when circuses work as an outreach to underserved neighborhoods. She says the circus arts can offer non-competitive active fun and fitness, artistic expression, social and emotional learning, and enhanced cognitive function. 

The physical demands as an aerialist and fitness instructor are so much more than people might realize. But Ashe makes it all look effortless. It’s a true testament to her decades of dedication to her craft.  

“And like most of us our age, she has aches and pains,” says Early. “But physically and spiritually, she is as young as ever.” 

Pamela Marquis, a freelance writer, has lived in New Orleans for more than 40 years.