The Actors Gymnasium: Summer Intensive Showcase 2025

Near the end of July, the Actors Gymnasium in Evanston, IL, invited Distant Era to photograph their Summer Intensive Showcase, thanks to a referral from my friend and colleague Greg Inda.

The Actors Gymnasium trains performers in circus arts, produces nine circus-theatre productions annually, and creates entertainment for events featuring professional circus artists. With a thirty-year legacy, the Actors Gymnasium is one of the top training centers for circus arts in America.

We expand human and theatrical potential through the vital forms of circus arts by providing artistic and educational programs that push the limits of physical, emotional, and creative expression.
The Actors Gymnasium

The 2025 Summer Intensive Showcase

Performers who participate in the Actors Gymnasium’s summer intensive training get to show their work in a final public performance at the end of the program, the Summer Intensive Showcase.

Over the course of an hour, the Actors Gymnasium students perform their fantastic circus work for a large audience. It’s mystifying to see such physical skill on display, and it was a lot of fun following the action.

These two galleries show only the barest glimpse at the talent onstage in the Summer Intensive Showcase. For this blog, I’ve selected a gallery of vertical images and a gallery of horizontal images that show the extraordinary forms these artists make in midair, with a few shots zoomed farther out to show the scale of the performance.

Performers: Efren Cruz, Naija Sherwood, Finoula Scheiber, Shannon Reilly, Lila Euler, Avery Flores, Amanda Comess, Hawthorne Hong, Maya Marling, Mia Hilt.

Photography

Photographing storefront theatre is one of Distant Era’s main disciplines (along with fantastical studio portraiture), so I’m in my element capturing action in low light, adjusting for LED flicker, squeezing as much as I can from the exposure triangle of shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. Perhaps the most significant differences between photographing a dance-heavy show like Blank Theatre Company’s Sweet Charity (in April) and the Actors Gymnasium’s Summer Intensive are the amount of available light and the speed and distance at which the performers are moving, as well as where I can position myself. We had a full house for the Summer Intensive Showcase, so I positioned myself in the center aisle of the theater, below videographer Stephanie Duffard, and followed the action.

In the end, I had a wealth of images. Artistic director Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi gave me a very helpful ballpark estimation on how many images would be ideal for the Actors Gymnasium’s purposes, so I went home and got to work turning them over.

Credits

Here’s the program for the Actors Gymnasium Summer Intensive Showcase. I’ve only just seen the special thanks the Actors Gymnasium sent my way. What kindness and attention to detail!

Connections and Gratitude

As chance would have it, my contact at the Actors Gymnasium was their marketing manager, actor Alice Wu, who I’ve photographed twice before—once in key art for Babes With Blades Theatre Company’s Plaid as Hell in 2021 and again in 2022 for Midsummer Flight’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a very big small community.

Weeks after the event, as I look over the program, I see Richie Schiraldi credited as house carpenter; I worked with Richie twice this summer—once in May with Broken Planet Show and once in June for Well Balanced Dads, Richie’s show with Britt Anderson for the Being Made in Chicago, part of the Physical Theatre Festival Chicago.

This is all to say, it really is a small world, and it gives me such joy to see how everyone is connected.

Thanks to my contacts at the Actors Gymnasium, Alice Wu and Sylvia Hernandez-DiStasi, for bringing me on board to photograph the showcase. It was a wonderful experience, start to finish!

Big applause for the talented performers of the Actors Gymnasium’s Summer Intensive Showcase.

Mighty thanks once again to photographer Greg Inda for the referral. Greg’s working on an exciting new project called What the Forest Grows, and I hope you’ll check it out.

steven Latest posts

Steven Townshend is a fine art/portrait photographer and writer with a background in theatre, written narrative, and award-winning game design. As a young artist, Steven toured the US and Canada performing in Shakespeare companies while journaling their moments on paper and film. In his transition from stage to page, Steven continued to work as a theatre photographer, capturing dramatic scenes while incorporating elements of costume, makeup, and theatrical lighting in his work. Drawn to stories set in other times and places, Steven creates works through which fellow dreamers and time travelers might examine their own humanity or find familiar comfort in the reflections of the people and places of a distant era.