What kind of aerialist do you want to be?

(Tl;dr maybe it’s the one you already are…)

1. The backstory
I’ve spent a lot of my aerial training life thinking that I ‘should’ be following some kind of perceived trajectory of ever-increasing technical competence (as I touched on in a previous post). This has meant working my way through mastering a set of aerial rope skills lined up in order of increasing difficulty, like the rungs on a ladder. Yes, I’ve spent some time sequencing , I’ve created acts, I’ve improvised, I’ve even on very rare occasion collaborated. But on the whole I’ve worked consistently and singlemindedly towards the acquisition of specific skills. (This is most evident to me when I realise I don’t know how to train with other aerialists any more.)

I think this was all loosely based on the idea that once I’d arrived at a big enough skill set, I’d have sufficient vocabulary “to be a bit more creative”. Or you have to know the rules to break the rules. There is nothing wrong with any of this; it’s a totally legit - and very common - way of working/being as an aerialist.

Also I suspect my intense technical focus has been because aerial is the only movement discipline i’ve ever studied in which I’ve actually found I do have a degree of technical competence. In contemporary dance training I was perpetually thwarted by the limits of my technical facility (my hips don’t open ‘enough’, my ankle joints can’t bend ‘enough’ to allow me to deepen my demi plie or squat, my hip and spinal extension is limited). cue tiny violins I so desperately wanted to look like a contemporary dancer. But that was never going to be possible. (It doesn’t mean I can’t dance. Obviously I can - we all can - but it’s hella quirky and within a limited range. I’m an acquired taste, not a contemporary choreographer’s blank slate.) But aerial has helped me develop a relationship with movement in which i don’t hate seeing myself move. I think I do look like an aerialist. Yay.

But, I started to wonder recently, what kind of aerialist is that?

2. My aerialist confidence crisis
In my head, I have a sort of classification system for some of the many different flavours of aerialist I admire, and I often admire them for being what I think I’m not:

The Innovator (the playful inventors of new drops, skills, pathways, wraps, shapes, loops)
The Dancer (the sublimely buttery beautiful movers)
The Narrator (brilliant character/clown/narrative)
The Beefcake (force production to infinity, elephant lifts for dayzzzz, one arm straddle climb anyone?)
The Extreme Badass (scary huge open drops, multiple pirouettes)
The Improviser (jamming, freestyling, flowing)
The Socialite (collaborative, love playing add on, make wonderful work together)
The Shrimp (the bendiest of the bendy)
The Prodigy (they can just do everything brilliantly and usual humbly as well)

(Please don’t get me wrong here: this is for poetic license purposes only. Much as I love taxonomy and cataloguing, I don’t believe anyone or anything fits in a single box. We’re all multiple, layered, three dimensional Venn diagrams.)

But in the summer, I came across - on the same day - a couple of rope artists who made me stop dead in my tracks and have a substantial meltdown about my own pathetic existence as an aerialist here on Earth. I don’t know how to describe them and their movement style or skill, but not only did I admire them, I LONGED to BE them. And I cursed myself for having been so focused on one area of practice (skill acquisition) that I’d somehow not trained or explored all the other things that they had done to… become them. They were fresh, dynamic, soft, characterful, infinitely creative and somehow uniquely themselves.

I had an immediate and profound aerialist identity crisis. Why was I such a technique geek? Why was I even a coach? What on earth was I doing training the stuff I was training? Why wasn’t i spending every moment of my remaining mortality trying to become like these supreme aerial beings? I realise now this sounds ridiculous, but at the time, this meltdown felt justified. I tried to talk to people about what I was feeling, but I couldn’t even put it into words. Inside and very quietly, I was completely lost.

(If you’ve followed this far, well done. I am now working up to a point here, so please continue to bear with me.)

3. The Imperfectionist
I subscribe to an email newsletter called The Imperfectionist by Oliver Burkeman and I LOVE it. It’s beautifully written, not too long, not too frequent (I’m semi-allergic to reading post PhD #2) and always contains a genuinely helpful nugget of wisdom. Most of the content relates to “anti-productivity”; drawing from or inspired by ideas in his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals which is “about making the most of our radically finite lives in a world of impossible demands, relentless distraction and political insanity (and 'productivity techniques' that mainly just make everyone feel busier)". I can wholeheartedly recommend it if, like me, you feel perpetually overwhelmed, underproductive and with a constant sense that you’re not working on quite what you should be working on. (And if you don’t like the idea of a full book, many of his posts here are gold.)

Back in October an issue of The Imperfectionist arrived in my inbox titled ‘Becoming who you are’ and when I read it, I felt a sudden sense of understanding my way out of the long drawn out crisis of confidence I seemed to be having. I’m not even going to try and precis, because these words are powerful enough to need quoting directly:

”A big breakthrough for me – in my job as a writer, but really in life as a whole – came when I figured out that making solid progress on creative work, and enjoying the process rather than hating it, is in large part a matter of being willing to be who you actually are.

This risks sounding both incoherent and clichéd, a terrible combination, so I’ll explain more below. But the short version is simply this: there are certain aspects to your personality – things you’re good at, things you like doing or don’t – that are obvious to you on some level, and probably very obvious to people around you, but that for various reasons you really don’t want to acknowledge. You should, though – not least because you’ll almost certainly be a lot more productive, and find lots more fun and meaning in what you do.”

Firstly, it made me realise that the reason I wasn’t these other, innovative, wondrous, quirky aerialists I (thought I) wanted to be is that I’ve always already had a tendency to lean into my nerdy side; to catalogue movement, to explore minutiae, to dwell in the sensory, to figure out drills and movement efficiency, to repeat the same skills over and over, to develop better cues. I’ve done this rather than invent quirky new transitions or my own brand of rope vocab because… it’s what I’ve wanted to do. It’s given me “fun and meaning” in itself and it’s made me a better coach. So I wasn’t missing some essential component of being a truly well-rounded aerialist. I’d just been… being me. Or being the me I’d wanted to be, for that period of time.

Secondly, it made me remember that there are many, many ways of being “creative” and choreography or inventing new skills/transitions are just two of them. There is creativity inherent in finessing a movement cue or designing a class or working out how skills can be catalogued. And it frustrates me that one type of creativity - the type that produces “novelty” - is valourised over others.

Thirdly, it helped me embrace the kick up the arse that I’d experienced in the summer - maybe it’s not that I wanted to BE these other aerialists BUT maybe I did need reminding that I’d been neglecting a side of MYSELF that is already part of who I am. I needed some less structured, more creative time to be… structured into my existing training programme. And I needed to not be scared about losing some skills in order to allow a different side of myself some time to flourish. (This was something that my coach had been nudging me towards anyway - that time between focused skill acquisition cycles of a periodised training programme is ideally spent with a different focus - e.g. strength, flexibility, creativity, a different apparatus or discipline.)

So here we are. It’s January 2024 and I’m in the middle of my training sabbatical: an unprecedented 6 weeks booked off teaching to focus on… inhabiting my own aerial practice more deeply and becoming who I (already) am.

And how is that going? Well it’s not exactly what I expected: coming back from 6 weeks off due to injury rehab and still in the tail end of burnout, launching a programme and streamlining my teaching systems, it’s NOT the unpolluted utopia of creative exploration at the peak of my technique and physical fitness that I was quite hoping for. But c’est la vie. I’ll be reporting back on findings next month!