Who is Real?

To regard aerial silks as a sport or performing art that takes place only in the air is, I think, mistaken, or, if not mistaken, at least incomplete.

In general, there are many stages on which aerial silks is treated as something performed almost entirely in the air, with floorwork allowed only as the slightest touch of makeup upon it, something one may use a little of (for instance before the act properly begins) and no more. On longer works of a more interdisciplinary, large-scale theatrical kind, this is not always entirely so, but especially when performance time is tight, or when the event is a solo silks competition, floorwork may not even be part of the judging at all, or else may be restricted by rules such as no more than 20 seconds in total, or no more than 10% of the piece. In many cases, of course, one may begin in the air and end in the air, in other words, one need not touch the floor at all.

It is certainly true that there are many forms of expression possible only in the air; indeed, once one has chosen to do aerial at all, aerial expression is inevitable. For the aerialist as well, the air may be a sanctuary in which to become another self. A human being on the floor is all too human, walking, returning another’s gaze, existing at the same height as the audience. A body on the silks, by contrast, comes closer to a symbol, or rather to some kind of concept. Though still a real body of flesh, it appears to have stepped a little outside the laws of reality.

Yet height, in exchange for a wider vista, takes conversation away. Up on the silks is too far away for the kind of contact that means coming right up beside the audience, catching the change in their faces, touching them at times, and entering into the sort of exchange only live performance allows.
If one takes aerial to be the means, and the point to be the making and enjoyment, together, of one precious instant wrested from an otherwise drowsy life, then the visual sanctity of the air is purchased at the cost of intimate contact with the audience, and the higher one goes, the thinner the conversation becomes.
That is why I think it is, after all, a somewhat limited vision of the world to regard aerial as something complete within its aerial passages alone.

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If the air is the place where dreams are dreamed, and shown in turn, then the ground is also the place where those dreams come into contact with the audience’s reality. But between dream and reality, which is real?
If ever, someday, I were again to make a work without constraint of any kind, I would want to build its floorwork and aerial passages around the image of one of those strange phenomena that people encounter only very rarely in life: a place where dream and reality, which should never properly meet, do meet; where there is neither illusion nor truth, neither past nor future; where only this single instant called now continues as though it were eternal.

After all, whether something is a reality so dreamlike that it feels almost enchanted, or a butterfly dream whose contours you feel you could almost touch as though it were real, such things cannot be aptly named while you are still inside the decisive moment itself.
And yet, once everything is over and time has passed, we wonder: might it not have been that we, each of us dancing high in the air, were the real ones, while you and I, meeting each other’s gaze and touching on the ground, were the ones inside the dream?
But the truth has become entangled and mingled, like the knotted meeting of a pair of silks twisted intricately together, and now it can no longer be known.