When thinking of a trapeze artist, their grace and elegance are almost immediately pictured — soaring through the air, curling up and over bars and bending in ways that most people can only dream of. For junior Nora Wolff, being graceful is one of the reasons she does the trapeze.

“On the ground I’m a little klutzy, so on the bar I can look a lot more graceful,” Wolff said. “And it’s different. I like seeing people’s reactions to it once I say that I do it.”

Wolff became interested in the trapeze about a year and a half ago after her aunt, who used to perform in the Big Apple Circus, and introduced her to it. When her friends showed her a place where she could learn how to trapeze, TSNY Boston, she was sold.

Wolff started out with a style of trapeze called “flying trapeze” and then after trying out silks and static trapeze, chose to static trapeze.

“Flying trapeze is basically just that the bar is flying, and it’s a lot less graceful, and it’s much shorter trick time,” Wolff said. “But with static trapeze, the trapeze is usually just standing still, and the tricks look a lot more graceful.”

While the trapeze tricks look graceful, they take a lot of strength and experience to perfect. Wolff attends a circus class that does workouts that can make doing the tricks easier, but because the ropes can be painful, Wolff says that practicing the tricks is the most helpful.

“At first, the tricks can be really painful because the ropes can wrap around you and cut off circulation to different parts of your legs and body,” Wolff said. “It can hurt at first, so you just have to practice.”

In a couple of months, Wolff plans to do her first real show at TSNY and Simply Circus, another trapeze place she occasionally attends. At shows, people perform their routines, which are generally about three minutes long and are a choreographed performance.

Doing this show is only the first steps in Wolff’s plans for performing with the trapeze. She hopes that one day she can make it into a profession or at least carry on with it later in life.

“I don’t think that this would ever happen, but to be in Cirque du Soleil — to be performing there, that would be incredible,” Wolff said.

Another possibility that Wolff sees is to combine her art and trapeze work together, which would allow her continue to trapeze.