The Circus Artist Who Built Aerials Amsterdam

In 2014, Ilan Oxman stood in front of the Holland's Got Talent judges, suspended in the air on aerial silks, and made it to the finals.

Last Tuesday, he was on his hands and knees setting up the studio heaters.

Ilan is the founder of Aerials Amsterdam — the creative gym in Sloterdijk where beginners discover they can climb, spin, and hang upside down with surprising confidence. Before there was a studio, there was just a Chilean circus artist who loved what he did and wanted to share it with Amsterdam.

Ilan grew up in Chile, where circus was both niche and deeply embedded in the culture. “A big part of the culture, but a niche culture,” he says. In Santiago, it became “like an urban subculture,” and by the time he was growing up, it was expanding fast.

He came to it early. At ten, he was already doing diabolo in school. At sixteen, a friend introduced him more seriously to circus, and he started with trapeze before moving into silks.

Circus didn’t just become a practice for him; it became an area of study. Alongside performing, he studied anthropology and combined the two, researching traditional circus families in Chile, interviewing them, working with them, and even performing with them. He authored two books about circus in Chile. During this time he toured extensively across Europe with Compañía de Paso, performing a show called Un horizonte cuadrado.

“I visited Amsterdam once, and then I realized, okay, that’s actually a very nice city.”

He arrived in Amsterdam with no plan to open a studio. He moved in 2013 to start a master’s degree in anthropology, and soon after began meeting people in the local circus world. Very quickly, he met Franz Paul from Olympia Circus, and that opened the door to teaching.

“I started teaching a bit for the kids and also opened my own class for adults.”

In 2013, he started running a single weekly workshop. No studio at the time or grand vision — just a class for people who wanted to try something different.

“It was good old days. We had no system, I had a little notebook to keep track of names.”

Word spread and more people came. Then more. The Monday classes grew quickly, sometimes to 30 people in a single class.

The Holland’s Got Talent moment came in 2014, when Ilan and his duo partner Mira applied in the hope of getting more performance work. The experience, he says, was less a life-changing breakthrough than a useful and interesting detour.

“We wanted to get more gigs,” he says. “We were doing a lot of effort to get more gigs, but we were not.” A friend suggested Holland’s Got Talent, they got selected, and “it was quite interesting. It was a lot of work. Nice and fun to be, you know, to be on stage and be part of the show.” Afterward, “we got some gigs actually, it was very nice.”

How it's going

Today, Aerials Amsterdam runs classes across aerial silks, aerial hoop, and circus fitness, out of a purpose-built studio in Sloterdijk with 5.7-metre ceilings and professional rigging. Beginners, improvers, and experienced aerialists all train together. It's become exactly the kind of community Ilan had in mind, though the route to get here looked nothing like he expected.

Nobody tells you that founding a studio means becoming, among other things, an amateur heating engineer.

“It does give me some surprises where, you know, sometimes I see myself fixing the electricity. Or installing heaters.”

A few years ago, he stepped back from regular teaching because it was becoming too much alongside everything else. Now he is mainly focused on running the gym, responding to feedback from teachers and students, and occasionally teaching special classes “to keep the energy going.”

The gap between circus performer and studio founder is wider than it looks from the outside. One requires you to be completely in your body. The other requires you to fix things, answer emails, install heaters, and keep the whole place running.

He doesn’t seem to mind. “I love it” he says about running the gym.

Paco and Ilan

Why he teaches 

For Ilan, circus always sat at the intersection of discipline and creativity. “I’ve been very sporty all my life,” he says. “And then when I was a teenager, I was craving for something more creative. And then I found circus, and it was a perfect mix.”

What keeps him in it is not just the challenge, but the kind of people it brings together. Circus, he says, combines “very high discipline” and strength with creativity, experimentation, and “a good kind of crowd, which is relaxed, easy going, and wants to learn and hang out together.”

If you’re curious, you can come try a class — and probably meet Ilan somewhere between the studio floor, the rigging, and the heater controls.