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Emese Sáfrány
Aleska Diamond is the former screen name of Hungarian aerial performer, instructor and author Emese Sáfrány. Her later career brings together aerial hoop, teaching, Pilates and a memoir about finding her own direction.
Emese Sáfrány
The person behind the name
Known first to audiences as Aleska Diamond, Emese Sáfrány moved from adult-film work into aerial performance and teaching. Her public story includes a return to her own name, a memoir and competition successes in aerial sport.
She has described dance and circus performance as childhood ambitions. Those interests became a working life built around performing, developing classes and running a studio, alongside an enduring interest in painting.
Emese Sáfrány: from practice to teachingReturning to Emese
In a 2015 interview, she explained that Aleska began as Alexa, with the spelling changed to make it distinctive. Diamond was added because she liked its sound and association with something strong and beautiful.
By then she wanted to use Emese Sáfrány again. She described the change as part of closing an earlier chapter, while still acknowledging the work through which the public had first come to know her.
A childhood ambition in the air
As a child, Sáfrány imagined becoming an actress or working in a circus. She was especially drawn to the performers who seemed to dance in the air, even before she knew the names of the different circus disciplines.
Speaking to Life.hu in 2017, she connected that early fascination with her later dance-school experience. Dance gave her a foundation for aerial work; the move into the air was a way of pursuing an ambition that had existed long before her public career.
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Competing on hoop and cube
In October 2017, Sáfrány won European gold in the Professional B category. Contemporary coverage also noted the success of one of her own students in an amateur category, placing her teaching and competition work side by side.
At the 2018 world championship in Prague, she reported silver medals in both Aerial Cube Professional B and Aerial Hoop Professional B. The two results reflect work on different apparatus, with each discipline demanding its own routine.
A memoir about identity
Her memoir De hová tűnt Emese? appeared in 2015. The title asks where Emese had gone, returning to the question of how the public identity Aleska related to the person behind it.
Explaining the book to Velvet, she said it followed her path from a small-town life into the persona by which she became known. Aleska and the book were also listed in Líra’s 2015 Book Week signing program.
Painting and the stage
Art remained part of her life alongside sport. In her 2018 birthday interview, Sáfrány included a painting gallery and singing in a musical among the experiences she was proud of, together with her book and studio.
She described her twenties as a period of searching and spoke of learning from the decisions she had made. The achievements mattered to her as things she had once imagined and then pursued, across more than one form of creative work.
A studio and a different responsibility
Sáfrány opened the Aleskaaerial & Art Center in 2018. By that period, teaching had become a central professional direction, and she was also taking responsibility for a studio where other instructors worked.
In her conversation with Bors, she described enjoying this more managerial role, while recognizing its demands. Having taught when she was younger, she felt that accumulated experience now gave her more to pass on to other people.
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