Press

Fly through the air with the greatest of ease! (And strengthen those core muscles and arms)

By Midwest Events

JULY/AUGUST 2017

If you are biking down Olinda Trail in Marine on Saint Croix, north of St. Paul, Mn you come across a 30 foot high trapeze rig standing in the middle of a field. Welcome to Flying Colors Trapeze and the home of the Embrace Adrenaline Flying Trapeze Club, started by Sherri Mann. Sherri has been teaching Flying Trapeze Camps for 10 years and offers Summer Camps from 8-75 as well as Saturday Morning Class and group events. No experience is necessary, they teach to all levels. If you spent your summer as a youngster swinging and hanging on the bar on your swing set. welcom to the big time.

The Adult Boot Camp group in this session included four novices to trapeze, Frederick and Kristen Allen and Terry and I.  Also flying are several flyers, with varying experience, along with the instructors, Sherri, Katrina Nord, and Shane Klancke. 

Flying Colors Trapeze follows a step by step approach in learning the basics, to build your confidence and skill.

The morning starts out with warm up exercises and yoga to stretch out your muscles. Then onto the ground training.

To begin with you practice on a stationary bar close to the ground, learning how to grip the trapeze bar, to swing your legs over the bar and hook your knees on it, and then release your arms. The final goal, aside from boosting your self-confidence, is to get you into a knee-hang one the flying trapeze, to prepare you to be caught by a catcher on another trapeze. All in the timing!

Safety harness on and hooked up to the safety line, you climb up the 30 feet to the platform, where Katrina is waiting for you. With Katrina holding onto your harness, you are instructed to lean forward, grip the trapeze bar with one hand, then the other hand, and on Sherri's command, "Hep" you basically jump off the platform and swing out over the net.

Sherri is on the ground holding the safety rope attached to your harness. On her next command, "Legs Up", you hook your legs over the bar while swinging midair. Then the command "Hands Off" and you are swinging upside down on the trapeze preparing to be caught.  Next command, "Hand On" and "Legs Down" and you swing your legs off and are swinging on the bar held by your arms again. One more swing and you let go of the bar, and land in the net. Next time up you aadd releasing with a back flip. Everyone takes a turn and the novices get a chance to see the more experienced flyers do more advanced flying.

Once the flyers are comfortable swinging by their knees, the catcher climbs to the second trapeze.  Timing and trust are important here. The photo shows Kristen following Sherri's commands and being caught by Mickey Dupont.

Kudos to the coaches oat Flying Colors Trapeze. They are very supportive, encouraging and experienced at guiding students through the process, and make it a lot of fun. Their guidance and support empowers the students to reach their goals. Terry was successful in accomplishing his knee-hang to the catcher and left with a big smile.

The Adult Bootcamps include Flying Trapeze as well as a sampling of other circus skills, such as acro-hand balancing, unicycle, juggling, balancing, aerial  arts as well as Water Sports including Wake Surfing, paddle boarding, kayaking and water skiing. The next Adult Bootcamp is July 28-29 and Women's Empowerment Camp is August 4-5.

Flying Trapeze is a great way to exercise and connect the whole body, core and mind, not to mention challenging yourself to get out of your comfort zone. Now doesn't that sound like a lot more fun than a treadmill!

check out all of the kids and adult camps, classes, group events and programs available.

Programs focus on everything from robotics to flying trapeze, from rock 'n' roll to human rights. By Lauren Otto Star Tribune 

MARCH 2, 2018 

..."For 13-year-old Elsa Reilly, trying something new meant going to a Flying Colors Trapeze camp last summer. The facility offers a range of circus and trapeze camps. Because she’s a competitive swimmer, Reilly didn’t have time to 

sign up for a regular gymnastics or acrobatics class. The three-day trapeze camp gave her a chance to explore this hobby.

“I only mainly do swimming, but I took the time off for this, and it was totally worth it,” Reilly said. “It was super-fun, and it was nice to do something different for a change.”

The founder of Flying Colors Trapeze, Sherri Mann, said that empowerment in the face of a bit of fear is one of the integral values taught to kids through the summer camp programs.

“I think because we’re doing so many different things, they’re really getting to learn about themselves,” she said. “They get to see what they’re capable of.”...

"There’s a surprising sight out near Big Marine Lake on a plot of beautiful grassland: a large flying trapeze rig."

By Kim Schneider

Jul 29, 2018

"There’s a surprising sight out near Big Marine Lake on a plot of beautiful grassland: a large flying trapeze rig.

On a recent hot summer weekday, Flying Colors Trapeze owner Sherri Mann critiqued a young man’s technique while spotting him with a rope hooked to a pulley and his harness. After he landed safely in netting, the teenager clamored back up the ladder to the trapeze landing to try again.

Flying Colors Trapeze, located at 10180 Olinda Trail N. in Marine on St. Croix, offers trapeze camps and classes for children, teenagers and adults. This is the business’ second summer offering an array of trapeze and circus arts learning opportunities for the general public.

When Mann started flying trapeze 16 years ago, she immediately fell in love with it, she said.

“It’s thrilling — and it’s safe,” Mann said. “Plus it’s really good exercise and super fun.”

Mann traveled the nation to train with flying professionals, who she now brings to Flying Colors Trapeze camps to help train students.

Flying Colors Trapeze was used exclusively by the Embrace Adrenaline Flying Trapeze club for 12 years, Mann said. There weren’t many opportunities to practice circus arts in the area so she constructed a rig in her yard, she added. General interest in trying flying trapeze has grown over the last few years, Mann said, so last year she started a full summer program.

In addition to flying trapeze, Mann instructs clients on: hula hooping, hammock, low-level circus skills, silks, web and lyra, she said. Flying Colors Trapeze has camps and classes for kids, teens and adults, as well as open classes on Fridays through August. Mann is also running a Women’s Empowerment Camp, Aug. 3-4 that includes flying trapeze, circus arts, water sports and yoga. The women’s camp is designed for women, especially mothers, to take a weekend to focus on themselves.

If flying on a trapeze doesn’t quite sound like a swing in the park, that’s alright; Mann frequently teaches people with no experience.

Before taking the leap, new students learn the proper safety requirements and about the equipment. Then they go through “ground school” — techniques and basic skills that get them comfortable in the process. The ultimate goal for a two-hour class is that everyone leaves having completed a knee hang to catcher trick, Mann said.

“It’s all about building on skills and starting slow and building on them methodically,” she said. “A lot of people would surprise themselves.”

Overall, Mann said the experience is empowering because it helps people conquer a fear in a safe way.

“Maybe it’s enough that they climb the ladder and take a swing down,” Mann said. “Just breaking through those fear barriers, you know, and showing them they can do it.”

Mann brings in circus professionals primarily for her intermediate students, who are building on all the skills they’ve already learned.

Colby Balch, a flying trapeze professional from Atlanta, is co-coaching camps with Mann in July. Balch has toured with the Ringling Brothers Circus to Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Balch helps Mann teach students basic trapeze fundamentals as well as higher level tricks. His primary job, though, is to be the person on the other trapeze who catches students after they complete their trick.

“The beginners can learn and be inspired by what they see the more experienced people doing,” he said.

A portion of camp proceeds go to community enhancement programs, giving circus arts opportunities to under-served women and youth in the community, Mann added.

This year’s non-profit partner is Dream of Wild Health, a program that teaches Native American youth about their culture and indigenous foods. A group of youth from the Twin Cities will come to the organization’s organic farm in Hugo, Minn. for a week as well as spend a day learning trapeze at Flying Colors Trapeze.

“This is really outside of anything they’d ever thought they’d do,” she said, recalling a young man from last summer who climbed up the ladder a handful of times before braving his first trapeze swing. “He said, ‘if I can do that, I can do anything,’ which is what we want.”

kim.schneider@ecm-inc.com

"Program guided by belief that children should get outside and play more. "

By  Matt McKinney Star Tribune

AUGUST 28, 2022 — 3:30PM

"The first thing newcomers have to master at the Flying Colors Trapeze School in Scandia is the climb.

It's 24 rungs of a fiberglass ladder from the front lawn of Sherri Mann's farm and school to the platform where one of her assistants awaits. The platform is the last thing students touch before they swing into the air. It's covered by a canopy. It's blue. It's the size of a gurney.

Standing there on a recent day a student would have seen far across Olinda Trail to a field of freshly rolled hay, or to their right the paddock where four horses idly grazed, heads down and unaware; or, below, a sturdy-looking net stretched tight, like it was ready for impact.

For many of the students who come to Mann and Flying Colors for a one-week camp of trapeze and circus lessons, climbing the ladder the first time is soon followed by climbing the ladder again, back down to the ground, after refusing to swing out into space.

"Almost everyone comes in and looks at it and says, 'I can't,'" said Mann, who first learned trapeze as an adult when she followed her own kids to circus classes in St. Paul.

That's right where Mann hopes to find them, nervous and unsure, a bit daunted by the sheer size of the professional trapeze that she and her husband installed on their Scandia property nearly 20 years ago. It was a birthday gift for Sherri from her husband, a bit of a pipe dream after she fell in love with the idea of hurtling through the air suspended by ropes and her belief that she could do this.

Flying Colors Trapeze, located at 10180 Olinda Trail N. in Marine on St. Croix, offers trapeze camps and classes for children, teenagers and adults. This is the business’ second summer offering an array of trapeze and circus arts learning opportunities for the general public. 

In a typical week, the "I can't" becomes an "I did!" as students take their first daring steps into circus life. Each summer camp ends with a Friday performance attended by parents and grandparents who watch, no doubt battling their own nerves, as kids go airborne.

Camper Athena Rynders, 8, said her own friends don't always believe her when she tells them what she did on her summer vacation.

"They're like, 'You didn't do that,'" she said. "And I say, 'Yes, I did!'"

For many students it's a summertime thrill, but some, like Quinn Trocke, 15, use Mann's school as a training ground. Trocke performs in Las Vegas with the Aerial Angels of Trapeze Las Vegas, booking three-week stays with her parents in tow. She's performed at the NFL Draft and at the Minneapolis Convention Center.

"It's an adrenaline rush," she said. For Mann, she works as a coach, helping the youngest campers learn how to do the trapeze or other circus arts, like hanging from silks, juggling, balancing on top of a ball and tumbling.

Trocke has been doing circus since she was 3, first in diapers and then at Circus Juventas in St. Paul.

She's short and powerful, with blonde curls and a megawatt smile. When she says that she doesn't fall all that often, it's believable. She's learning to do a layout, a back flip done in a plank position and not curled up. Timing is all-important.

The whole scene "scares my mom a little," she said.

Her mom, Cheryl Adams, said her daughter made it look so easy that she tried trapeze. Once. It didn't go well. She has confidence in her daughter, though.

"She's very confident up there, and because she's so comfortable it makes me feel a little bit better," said Adams. Quinn will head to Evansville, Ind., over Thanksgiving weekend to perform with the Jordan World Circus. "She's excited," said Adams, who said most of her other children did traditional sports like hockey and basketball.

Installing the trapeze is a day and a half of work each spring, said Mann's husband, Chuck. He bought the trapeze from a circus-industry veteran who drove it up from Florida. His sister-in-law, a retired Minneapolis firefighter, helps with the installation because of her extensive knowledge of ropes, a skill she learned for high-risk firefighting situations.

Four-foot steel spikes driven into the ground keep the safety net pulled tight and the steel supports standing tall. Despite the time it takes to raise it each spring, it takes only about three hours to take it down in the fall, Mann said.

The trapeze was just for Mann and a private club of trapeze enthusiasts at first. Then her daughter's friends came over for summer sessions. Then her daughters grew up and Mann wanted to keep teaching. She started the summer camps several years ago.

Her lessons are guided by a quote from the motivational speaker Zig Ziglar, one that's emblazoned on her camp T-shirts: "Your attitude, not your aptitude, determines your altitude."

It's that, and a belief that kids should get outside and play more. "It's amazing how many kids haven't hung by their knees!" said Mann, who makes that one of the basic maneuvers kids learn on the trapeze.

Even the novice students can end the week by hanging from their knees while swinging upside down and then, at just the right moment, reaching into the air to be caught by one of Mann's professional trapeze artists swinging on a second bar. If it's done right, their arms are gripped tightly by their "catcher," and they can release from their own bar. The catcher then swings once with them before dropping them to the net. Ropes and harnesses keep the student from falling too quickly.

Mann has expanded her camp in recent years, adding a wakeboarding class on Big Marine Lake, which her farm abuts.

This summer she had horse riding classes as well, taught by Veronica Painter. Painter grew up in Chicago but when her family attended a horse show in Lake Geneva, Wis., she was hooked.

"I kept begging to ride," Painter said, laughing. Today she tours the country with three horses and her mule, Pickles, teaching lessons and performing.

"The circus began with horses," she said. That's why circuses are in rings, because the horses would run in circles as the rider performed. In her performances, Painter can do Roman riding, vaulting, trick riding, hanging off the side of the horse, going under the horse while it's running and other tricks.

"You don't see this anywhere, and you don't find places where you can learn it," Painter said of her horse classes. "Kids in cities don't get time with live animals, especially big ones."

On a recent sunny morning, while the horses were grazing, campers practiced crabwalks on mats spread under a canopy. Another group took turns riding on the handlebars of a circus bike ridden by one of Mann's staff. Several other kids worked on their balance by standing on a balance beam, spinning a plastic plate on a stick, or hanging from silks.

On the trapeze, a student who was on her first week of lessons listened as the trapeze catcher told her how he would grab her arms while she was swinging from her knees, allowing her to let go of her own bar.

"Once you hear me say 'gotcha,' you can let go with your legs," he said.

She did it, and then did a double thumbs up when she landed.

Then she put her hand to her heart and let out an audible sigh of relief.

Matt McKinney is a reporter on the Star Tribune's state team. In 15 years at the Star Tribune, he has covered business, agriculture and crime.