Why do you want to train THAT skill?

On owning & honouring your aerial training journey

I love training aerial rope and sling. Yes, it’s my job, but it was my joy first. But I sometimes lose sight of this in pursuit of skills and technique that I think I ‘should’ have. Again, yes, as an aerial coach it’s important for me to understand the contemporary vocabulary and popular skills and techniques in order to be able to help students who want to learn them. But this doesn’t mean I need to be able to DO all of them perfectly myself, and even if I CAN, understanding a skill in my own body is always and only through the subjective lens of my own anatomical limitations or advantages and training history. [There are at least another two blog posts that could be written based the previous sentence: on coaches coaching skills they can’t do themselves - yes I absolutely believe a good coach can do this - and on what doing a skill ‘perfectly’ even means - because perfectionism sucks, so really it means doing it safely and effectively in the way that works for your body. I’ll get to those blogs some other time.]

Even when I was relatively new to aerial circus, I got caught up in the idea of certain skills as essential landmarks in one’s aerial journey. Straight leg inversions, straight arm inversions, meathooks, beats, back balance, roll ups, half releases, full releases, J flips, scorpion, back flag, flare to flag, elephant lifts, pirouettes, double pirouettes. This was my mental map of the skills I would need to achieve as I toiled along the increasing gradient of the path to aerial nirvana - or to calling oneself an aerialist. All this even though I’ve never been part of the kind of studio culture that demarcates beginner/intermediate/advanced level classes (what do these even mean really?) or that requires certain skills to progress from one ‘level’ to the next. So, as an aerialist who’s had the luxury of curating her own learning journey with some incredible 1:1 coaches (who’ve never pressured me towards a skill), why did (sometimes do) I fixate on these as landmark skills for myself? I don’t know! I can only guess it’s because of the general chatter in the wider aerial circus world - or even the smaller aerial rope community - and the general curricula and progressions we tend to teach as coaches.

Some of these skills have come easily to me (hello dynamics and releases) but some - even some considered easy for others (urgh back balance, scorpions) - have been SO inaccessible for my own particular body and its relative proportions and mobility limitations, that I’m still training them on a glacial treadmill (hello C shaping and hip key roll ups) or studiously ignoring them (not even saying hello back flags and elephant lifts).

Often the key overlooked factors in this quandary are time and energy and joy. Some skills take a considerable ongoing investment simply to work towards. Some skills we gain readily, but the more we gain, the harder it is to train them all consistently and to keep them all readily accessible whilst still training new (and the ongoing hard) skills. [Some skills are super needy and will regress or disappear if we don’t train them regularly. These are high reversibility skills. Some - low reversibility skills - will obediently remain within reach even if we neglect them somewhat.] Some skills truly spark joy. And some skills are genuinely painful or hard - maybe (controversially) even unhealthy - for our particular body and its needs so why can we feel compelled to train them?

I don’t have answers but I have questions. My invitation is for you to ask yourself some questions about the skills you think you want to train. If you want a skill because you think you OUGHT to be able to do it (because everyone is doing it, or because equivalent ‘level’ aerialists are doing it, or because it’s popular) then I’d suggest you take look at what that skill is really offering YOU or your practice, and the time and energy levels you have.

Do you need the skill to be consistent to teach and demo it regularly?
Do you want the skill always within reach for improvisation or choreography?
Do you want the skill because you’d like the experience/sensation of nailing it but can happily let it go again afterwards?
Do you want the skill because it gives you baseline strength and/or mobility and/or pathways for a bunch of other related skills that you love?
Do you want the skill for an act? (If so, do you need to train it on both sides forever more or do you train it in the specific context of that choreography?)
Do you want the skill because it looks cool AF? (If so, does it serve any of the other things above too?)

Or maybe controversially: do you want to keep learning skills or do you want to make art with all that you already know?

And PS if you want THAT skill because you think you need it to call yourself an aerialist: please know you’re already an aerialist. And you’re already ENOUGH.