This past week was the 12th Grazer Acrobatic Festival organized by the local circus group Akrosphäre, which I attended. It consisted of 4 days of acrobatic and aerial workshops, in different apparatuses, and spanning a broad array of circus disciplines.
As a participant of this event, I took the opportunity to not only learn new tricks from different teachers, but also to observe the different techniques each one used in their communication of muscle movement and engagement. Besides, I also had the opportunity to learn disciplines I’m not familiar with, and experience firsthand if there is a difference in the teacher-student communication than in aerial silks.
What I noticed was that in both Partner Acrobatic Dance workshops I attended, the experience completely differed when trying out new things by myself versus with a partner. In the first 1h30 workshop, I was paired with a man who had already learned half the sequences the day before, so for him it wasn’t new bodily instructions. As his flyer, all I had to learn from the teacher were the correct grips, and everything else fell into place. The teacher showed the movement a couple of times, making sure to point out the important grips and movements that needed to be done by both the base and the flyer. He also broke down each dance flip into progressions, which the partners had to complete before moving forward. The experience was seamless due to the fact that the base was experienced, and in this specific discipline, all I, as a flyer, had to do was get into the correct body position (handstand, split, stand in a certain way, etc.) and be guided through the movement. Besides, through the progressions implemented by the teacher, the initial fear factor of being flipped in the air was eliminated, and trust was created between base and flyer.
In the second 1h30 Partner Acrobatic Dance workshop, though, I was paired with a different man, and the information was new to both of us. Additionally, the teachers of this workshop were teaching a move they had just created the week before, and hadn’t had the time to completely grasp the intricacies of. This resulted in a much longer learning time for both of us. While the first workshop sequences were successfully completed by my partner and me in a maximum of 2 attempts, the sequences of the second workshop took an average of 8 attempts to successfully complete. The difference was that the teachers didn’t adequately point out the small steps to pay attention to, but not because they forgot to – they simply hadn’t realized them. This is something I also relate to my own experience in aerial, as something my old aerial teacher used to tell me was that every time she teaches the same move to someone new, and they don’t understand, she gets to understand the move better by learning new ways of explaining. Not only did the teachers lack an integral understanding of the flips’ intricacies, but it was also unknown by both the base and me, and there was a lack of broken-down progressions of the flip. This all contributed to the longer learning time, plus the increased fear and cognitive load. Another interesting thing to point out is that after every attempt, I asked, “what did we do differently this time and how did it affect the outcome?”, a core principle of Experiential Learning, which is a theory I learned during my Bachelor’s education and decided to implement in my daily life since then. In contrast, the base responded, “I don’t know, let’s try again”. When I accepted this answer and moved on, we made no progress towards our end goal. When I didn’t, I reflected on the experience, stated what I think was the problem, and tried again with this new knowledge, attempting to solve it. In these cases, we were always able to make even a tiny bit of process (or at least find a new, different problem in our approach).
A day later, another man wanted to learn the same sequence of the second workshop. As a flyer who had already done it, I offered to partner with him to show him how it’s done. Given the fact that my earlier base and I had already learned through copious failure, and the fact that I had successfully completed the move as a flyer, I was able to teach this man and we successfully completed the move in 2 attempts.
This leads me to the conclusion that movement understanding is critical to new movement learning. The more a teacher understands the intricacies of specific muscles to engage, specific push and pull dynamics and their timings, and specific joint position, the easier it is for them to point these out and lessen the learning curve of the student. If not done by the teacher, the learning curve of the student is steeper, and they must learn through reflecting on their own failure (experiential learning) rather than through being instructed. Even though acrobatic dance is a partner discipline and aerial silks is an individual one, I believe this insight can be applied to both, since the core principle is the same: through practice one fails, through failure one understands, and through understanding oneself one can successfully teach.
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ACCOMPANYING LINKS
Further reading:
- Teaching Movement Education book, by Karen Abels & Jennifer M. Bridges (equivalent in the sports education field to Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things in the UX field): https://es.scribd.com/document/625314831/ACFrOgA20C8HkqkqJKojvUHwTnre6ZvhQRHVky3FNweI8NSk6UyRPm3TDZ9iKTNlu-nuYLzFdKoEC7DCCgPWylhelaMoS8YeN-WRD73b0jqL9rVCLgBrAdCf6UxqgIfIF7lRkesddTibxdZQqELe#page=1
- Experiential Learning introduction: https://experientiallearninginstitute.org/what-is-experiential-learning/
- Dance teaching best practices: https://www.richardpowers.com/teaching-tips
