> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://defying-gravity.synaps.media/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # When Letting Go Becomes Technique - URL: https://defying-gravity.synaps.media/en/when-letting-go/ - Published: 2026-08-30T17:32:27.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-01T11:20:02.000Z - Description: Watching the remarkably clear flow of an aerialist I respect, without a trace of physical noise in her movement, I began to notice something: the better someone is at aerial silks, the less often you can see them trying to control the fabric by force. - Author: Tatz - Tags: #en Watching the remarkably clear flow of an aerialist I respect, without a trace of physical noise in her movement, I began to notice something: the better someone is at aerial silks, the less often you can see them trying to control the fabric by force. In other words, perhaps the more you let go, the better you become at aerial silks. This is more than merely a piece of training advice, and I suspect that behind it lies something closer to a law built into aerial silks itself. With beginners, you can tell at a glance that they are gripping the silks with their whole body tense. Intermediate aerialists begin to mix moments of release into moments of effort. Advanced aerialists seem to spend more than half their time simply letting the silks carry them. Let us call the proportion of time spent this way the "*letting-go rate"*. It is the proportion of a performance in which the body is carried not by muscular force, but by the tension of the silks, gravity, and inertia, riding the movement of natural forces. In other words, it is a rough, intuitive number for how much of the performance you spend using no force at all (or at least appearing not to). A beginner’s letting-go rate starts at almost 0%. By my own extremely arbitrary estimate, however, I suspect that among today’s top artists it may reach 70 to 80% in some cases. Entrusting themselves to the silks becomes the very core of the performance, and they clearly spend more time riding forces such as gravity and inertia than actively pulling the fabric into place. Perhaps this principle runs so deeply through aerial silks because, unlike hoop or pole, silks have no fixed shape of their own and take form each time through a negotiation between the human body and gravity, so that the more you try to control them, the more unnaturally they resist, while the more you entrust yourself to them, the more beautifully they move. — Take the time spent falling in a drop. I did not understand this until I had gained some experience with it myself, but as long as the wrap has been set correctly beforehand, a silks drop is basically a matter of holding a clean position and falling. During the drop itself, we do almost nothing to control the silks through muscular force. The fall is gravity’s job, and the tension that catches the body at the end is the silks’ job. In fact, if you try to do something extra while falling, or allow unnecessary tension into the body, you only make the flow less clean. Spin works the same way. No matter how desperately you try to control it with force in order to rotate faster, the spin will not become beautiful. What you need instead is to create the initial rotation, then feel what the body, the fabric, and gravity naturally want to do, enter the axis without noise by releasing force rather than applying more of it, and then simply wait for centrifugal force to open the shape. And it is not only in clean, economical drops and spins. It is in the time spent drawing close to the fabric almost affectionately, resting inside the silks, joining their natural swing, yielding to them, and not trying to dominate them directly through force. Moments when you truly are using very little strength, or when it looks as though you are using none at all. The more of those moments there are, the higher the letting-go rate, and the more refined the performance begins to look. — This tendency for the letting-go rate to rise with maturity may describe not only the development of an individual aerialist, but the direction in which aerial silks as an art form is moving as a whole. Within gymnastics, the rings are a discipline where power moves can fairly be called the orthodox centerpiece, and straps have an unmistakable lineage connecting them to that tradition. But straps themselves have gradually developed from a discipline centered largely on strength into a softer and more artistic form, followed by aerial silks, which emerged as a stage art in the 1990s. Even within the still relatively young history of silks, it is hard not to notice a movement toward a higher letting-go rate, and that may have something to do with the establishment of *flow* as a concept in its own right. I have written before about [well-known studios in LA placing great importance on flow](https://defying-gravity.synaps.media/en/aerial-resources-1/), and from what I have heard, the idea of treating the transitions between tricks themselves as something worthy of artistic attention only became established around the mid-2000s. More recently, with the development of motorized rigging, the anchor point itself can move, lifting, lowering, and carrying the silks through space. That has likely made room for more stage work in which the performer does not simply move the fabric, but listens to where the fabric is taking them and lets the body respond. In that sense, perhaps the entire form, like the individual aerialist, is gradually moving toward a higher letting-go rate. — If I were to offer my own somewhat wishful prediction for the future of aerial silks, I imagine that even in competition-oriented training, the emphasis may gradually shift away from simply teaching tricks and making control more precise, and toward teaching the feeling of riding the silks, learning to read what the fabric wants to do, and carefully cultivating the sense of becoming friends with gravity. The number of aerial competitions seems to be increasing every year, and I would not be surprised if judging criteria eventually begin to give more explicit weight to qualities such as the beauty and naturalness of flow, qualities that, in effect, reward a higher letting-go rate. I also suspect that stage work in silks will increasingly center not on showing how completely the fabric and body can be controlled through force, but on showing a body flowing together with it. And if that is indeed where things are going, I think there may even be room for the kind of [polyester silks I like, soft, satisfyingly chewy, and pleasantly springy](https://defying-gravity.synaps.media/en/magic-or-poison/), to become more popular than the nylon silks that are currently mainstream. In any case, aerial is free from the constraints of language, and the sense of competence that comes from learning to control risk can be almost narcotically addictive, and it seems to me that aerial has the potential to become a sport at least as popular as rhythmic gymnastics. There are many people I am deeply glad I was able to meet through this sport in the air, and every one of them showed me a performance that made it easy to believe in the future of the form. If we can create an environment that is freer and more open than it is now, where people can push one another to improve, and if we can bring more people into the sport, then the future should be bright. — *\*For the record, this is only an impression I decided to put into words. I practiced aerial for just 1 year, and I certainly do not have the technical ability to analyze professional aerialists with any real precision.* I’ll be writing more stories for aerial lovers! Subscribe to get notified when a new post is published. Subscribe **Check your inbox!** A confirmation link is on its way. Please click it to finish signing up. Something went wrong. Please try again later. Sending... --- [One Wish, Then Everything Else (How to Build an Aerial Silks Routine #1)Thinking through and building an aerial silks routine of your own is genuinely fun. It is a kind of creative play open only to those whose repertoire of tricks and expression has grown, and at the same time![](https://cdn.synaps.media/defying-gravity/content/images/icon/Screenshot-2025-12-29-at-17.43.42-2-e74406b9-8a66-4c7c-8421-ad193fd3ca3a.png)Defying GravityTatz![](https://cdn.synaps.media/defying-gravity/content/images/thumbnail/ogp3-2-9e55663a-c6db-49d5-88c9-42c719eb17c6.png)](https://defying-gravity.synaps.media/en/how-to-build-a-routine-1/)