Fly With Me

Diane Lokos has been flying, flipping, spinning and soaring for over two decades. Once a professional muralist and painter with her own gallery on Queen West, she now teaches aerial arts and is a foundational member of the Toronto aerialist community – but it took her some time to spread her wings and fly!

“I used to live at the Robert Watson artist’s lofts,” recalls Diane. “I kept seeing one of my neighbours walking around the building with a homemade trapeze. I finally asked her what she was doing and it turned out that she was a part of an aerial troupe called Gravity Works.” It took Diane six months to finally summon the courage to join in on the group’s daily sessions, but once she did, her passion for aerial arts immediately soared and she was officially hooked. That was in 1996, and for the next 15 years, she dedicated herself to daily practice,  conditioning and performing until she suffered a major shoulder injury. “I almost quit then,” she recalls. “I actually kept thinking ‘oh, you’re getting older and you should slow down, but when I did, I was actually in more pain. Once I figured out that I couldn’t stop, I decided to teach.”

In 2012, Diane pursued her teacher-training course, which she continues to update annually by attending workshops and retreats. In the same year, she opened Fly With Me in a perfectly suited industrial building on Sterling Road. “I thought it would be the other way around as I aged, that my career would go from more physically active to less, but it actually went the other way around; I went from artist to aerialists!” laughs Diane.