INTERVIEW by LEO BROOKLYN
Kyla Ernst Alper has been dancing her entire life and has become a force in the world of aerial arts and dance here in New York City. I sat down with this visionary artist and athlete to hear about how she has created her life in this city and to discuss an exciting new music video she is starring in.
Tell me about your journey into the performance space. I’m so curious about how you’ve created your life here as an artist.
When I was two and a half my mom took me to see a performance by a regional ballet company, and my mom was bored, but I was totally mesmerized. I remember telling my parents that I was going to be a dancer. They were public school educators but they did everything they could with what they had to support me. At 9 I was going to sleep-away ballet camp and at 12 I was invited to join the Ballet Tech school in NYC, where I trained every summer. At 16 I was asked to dance professionally with the company.
My career has been possible because my entire extended family supported me.
How did you make your way into aerial arts and the incredible strength you’ve developed from that?
I started aerial arts in my mid 20’s. I briefly quit dance and then was pulled right back into it with a company that was working with circus artists. The rest is history. That changed my whole trajectory.
I was born in 1982, in an era that lacked the body positivity of today. I was very good at ballet and a very good student, which means you keep your mouth shut. At one point in my early professional career the ballet mistress pulled me aside and told me that when the director is yelling and screaming and throwing things and cursing it’s my job to figure out how to make him happy—that way of existing was drilled into me.
Ballet groomed me to take abuse while asking my body to do insane things. I had no body autonomy and I learned how to push through wild amounts of pain. I’ve been told that my muscles are too bulky and that I’m too thick for my entire career, when I’m actually quite petite. You don’t just snap out of this kind of trauma one day. I’d say recovery takes longer than time spent training.
Did aerial lead you into more of your own power with your movement?
I think the biggest thing that started my recovery was when I quit dance, I started martial arts training. The aesthetics didn’t matter, only the strength mattered. And with aerial, I was naturally weak and you can’t starve yourself when you need to climb into the air on a rope. So I’d say the aerial reinforced the recovery that started with doing martial arts.
How do you structure your work week as a full time performer?
Sometimes I have freelance gig work, other times I’m on a contract, so it depends. I feel my age now and I have to prioritize rest and recovery. Generally I try to do one really intense strength training day, and of course my daily aerial warm ups and practice include strength training. If I have a week where I’m not performing too much I’ll do a daily regimen of 30 minutes of warming up, 1 hour of conditioning and then more skill specific stuff. I perform on aerial fabric, rope, straps, lyra and mini lyra. I try to practice on all of the apparatuses.
What are some of your self care habits that help you recover from your extremely physical job?
My job is both physical and emotional. I fill my apartment with colored Phillips Hue bulbs and I like to use the red bulb in my bathroom. I put the shower on and sit under it, get high and massage my feet or my calves. I stretch out my shoulders. I’ve been known to bring ice cream in there! I’ll have a shower snack like clementines.
My whole apartment is filled with dim and colored lights and then when I get out I like to roll around on a foam roller and balls. And I’ll have my playlists going.
What a beautiful self care ritual. You’re giving me ideas! Tell me about your new music video—I’m so excited to see it.
My collaborator Black Taffy is a Dallas based composer who basically does chopped and screwed classical music. I’ve used his music a lot for creation over the years. I was filming my practice at my parents barn in Vermont and he thought it would be a great filming location, and that sparked the idea to work together. We filmed a music video together last spring to support ‘Big Tiny’, the first single off his new album. The video has different meanings for each of us. For me, this music video is meaningful because it goes into the many facets that one human contains. It speaks about the facade you put on as a ballet dancer, the experience of moving through society as a woman, and the internal discomfort of having to do that.
The next music video drops on Friday and it follows that character, me, as a burlesque performer in a bar and there’s some magic that happens there. We have future videos planned that go further into the surrealism.
I think now it’s common knowledge that our bodies carry our emotions. It’s interesting for me because I’m more in touch with my body than most people are but I’ve also been groomed to shut off so when I’m in pain I’ve trained myself to say that pain is just a sensation. Some people go to church, but my movement practice is my spiritual practice. That’s how I check in with myself and realign myself. Doing ballet or basic warm ups for me realigns me. I’m drawing lines from point A to point B. It’s like I’m creating beautiful folded origami. That’s spiritual for me.
That resonates with me as someone who started pole dance classes at age 37 after a decade of only doing gym workouts and biking. The dance movement in pole added a spiritual element to my movement practice. I would cry a lot during pole, and I thought, what is happening? It’s what you said—your body holds a lot of emotion and there is something extremely cathartic about a dance movement practice.
Yes it definitely comes out. A few years ago my mom died of cancer and we watched her decline for 14 months. When she told me she was dying she said, “I have terminal lung cancer, I am going to die, and I don’t want you to stop performing and creating.” She got a lot of joy from seeing my process. At the height of her decline I would visit every week and train in their barn. She would often come in and watch me and she took a lot of joy in that. That added a layer to my practice. This is something that my mom loved and she came to every show of mine that she could. I feel her joy and pride in me, and doing this now connects me to her.
She was really proud of me being a burlesque performer and taking ownership of my body and taking my clothes off on my own terms.
I did my first burlesque performance around 2008. My motive to start was to be more versatile in nightlife gigs but as I studied the amazing performers I had the privilege to work alongside people like Gal Friday, Medianoche, and her wife Ivory Fox, I learned about incorporating stillness into my performances. I had a natural tendency to move rapidly and burlesque taught me to slow down. The way you take off a corset, the way you choose to drop that corset is part of the story you’re creating. With aerial it’s not the big trick or pose that matters, it’s how I’m moving in and out of those positions where the character really comes through.
A simple gesture can say so much. Burlesque and vaudeville take me back to when I was a kid when I would watch old Hollywood musicals. This tradition of dance gives you permission to be bigger and more cartoon-ey with your movement, which is really fun for the audience.
Can you tell me some things you love about your performance community and being a performer in our awesome city of New York?
New York is overflowing with unbelievable talent and I never stop learning. I’m constantly inspired by the people who are performing on these underground stages. It made my standards so high. Innovation, costuming and act ideas are on such a high level here. Being surrounded by other aerialists who turn performances into storytelling is really exciting.
I do the rigging and also perform in a show called Illegitimate Theatre produced by Fire and Fury Burlesque, which only happens twice a year. They rent a private venue and turn it into a theatre and at some point in every act the performer gets fully naked. In New York it’s normal to see fully nude people of all identities. I’m so used to being fully naked on stage. It’s cool that we live in a place where that can happen. Of course, we’re going back in time now and I felt the change coming a year ago. I started working on more modest costumes. I started filming an aerial fabric act and made sure I had full butt coverage instead of wearing a thong. I just felt the wave coming.
For me as an erotic photographer I’m feeling that in order to share work I need to shoot stuff that’s really modest and send followers to another platform where they can see the actual work I want to make.
Yes, I’m starting an Only Fans with Black Taffy because my body is often censored on instagram. I had a photo in my profile where I’m doing aerial straps wearing a lace cropped tank top and you can only see the side of my body so there’s no butt showing, and I’m in the air doing acrobatic movement. It was taken down and deemed to be explicit. I get flagged for stuff all the time.
I am so grateful for the trans community on a personal level, because their activism and their claiming space has actually made my body more generally acceptable. I barely have boobs and I can look like a pre-hormone trans woman on top. I’ve been misgendered for a lot of my career. I've had a man stick his hand down the front of my shirt, to see if I was “actually a woman or not”. The more we have bodies of all kinds represented in the performing arts, the healthier we are as a society.
You have such a powerful and sensual presence when you perform. What does it mean to you to be a performer in the erotic space?
Shame and fear are powerful. The first decade of my dance career was filled with shame and fear. I survived and found success by disassociating from how I felt, how people and situations made me feel. Now, when I perform, I am a surrogate for my audience's shame.
Connecting to my own body, moving in ways that celebrate the beauty of my body, revealing my unfiltered flesh, and moving in ways that actually feel good, is a wild act of defiance, liberation, and empowerment.
The work that I present in burlesque, erotic shows, nightlife, and "illegitimate theater" (which is just a new way of saying vaudeville) isn't generally accepted or respected on concert dance stages - it's "slutty", "trashy", etc. But when I perform sensual, sexy ballet choreography, it is culturally accepted, and it is reviewed by critics writing for prestigious publications. I can't get a theater review of my cabaret show The Underground Cabaret, because (I was told) my guest lineup is different every time, and I can’t even get a cabaret reviewer to review my cabaret show, because even though The Underground Cabaret is a cabaret show, we include burlesque and therefore, I was told, my show cannot be reviewed.
As I trace the line of my leg and stare into an audience member's eyes, I may appear vulnerable, but the longer I stay on that stage, and the more clothing I take off, the more powerful I become. I am doing something that would make many people in the audience feel shame if they did it, but I am not ashamed. And when you add in the layer of aerial, it gets really interesting, because I am doing things that most people, including people who work out regularly, cannot do. And I'm doing things that have big scary consequences if anything goes wrong. So I'm really hitting my audience over the head with this experience of watching a woman over 40, with no breasts, strong and feminine in her movement, expressing sensuality, taking her clothing off, and doing it all without shame.
Check out the newly released music video by Dallas composer Black Taffy that features Kyla!
Follow her on instagram at @kygwen