IMPULSE #4 – Guerrilla Focus Group at an Aerial Workshop at the 12th Grazer Acrobatic Festival

As mentioned in the last 2 blog posts, 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.

One of the aerial workshops I attended was titled “Sequencing on Silks” and taught by a very talented aerialist who came from a dance background. I found out pretty quickly that my body was too tired to be able to perform the advanced sequence she was teaching, and decided to pivot and use it as an opportunity to conduct guerrilla research through a small focus group of the 3 other students in the class (furthermore referred to as P1, P2, and P3).

P1, an aerialist with more than 25 years of experience, has been attending workshops taught by this teacher for years, and has her own class where she teaches other people. P2, an aerialist with 24 years of experience on silks, had never met this teacher before, and she herself had not been a student in the aerial discipline for 10 years, as she had been performing professionally and is now getting back into teaching others. P3, an aerialist with 5 years of experience, is a professional performer, and despite having immense strength, is not as familiar with the silks as an apparatus (she mostly uses chains, straps, and sometimes hoop).

The teacher of the workshop, despite being extremely talented as a performer and showing beautiful lines, failed to lessen the learning curve of the students as it seemed she was speaking the language of dance and embodiment rather than the language of specific figures on silks. For P1 this was no problem, since she already understands the patterns that the teacher usually follows due to their previous interactions. For P2, however, this created a huge amount of overwhelm that made her unable to understand what she had to do. Since the teacher pointed out the flourishes and embellishments rather than the important parts of technique required to do the sequence she showed, this overwhelm felt by P2 was multiplied. P2, despite having more than enough strength and experience to do the sequence, couldn’t seem to figure out how to replicate the moves. She was only able to understand after P1 translated the instructions from the teacher’s dance and flourishes into technique and specific body part usage.

The teacher also employed lots of hand visualization techniques while not actually getting up on the silk, which seemed to be in vain before she showed the actual real-life sequence. After that, her gestures were more easily understood. Plus, while watching either the teacher or P1, P2 was imitating their movements while on the floor to try to understand better.

When P2 tried to do the sequence, the teacher said, “now you have to get to cradle, so something else has to happen”, which P2 could not seem to figure out until explicitly told what it was that needed to happen. When asked how P1 was able to understand so seamlessly, she responded, “I don’t think, I just let my body guide me. All I do is just give it instructions like ‘go this way’ and not ‘left knee over the silk’ – I trust my points of contact. I try to feel it in my body and predict what comes next, about where I could go.”

When asked about what is important to them when looking at the teacher, P1 mentioned that she tries to observe what body positions she needs to create that she sees on the teacher, since this teacher doesn’t verbally point it out as much as P1 does in her classes. P2 mentioned she tries to imagine she’s doing the move with her. P3 mostly focuses on her body without listening to the words she’s saying, and tries to look at where the teacher is putting her body parts, asking herself, “where is the silk? on the hips, her back?”. She tries looking for familiar movements. P1 echoed this sentiment, saying, “if I can get my body to a pattern that I know then I can just follow it and trust it.”

All of this observation and focus group interviewing led me to reframe and further hone in on what it was that I actually want to achieve with my thesis. Yes, it’s about wanting to use interaction design to improve learning on silks. However, to drill it down even more, it’s about using interaction design to reduce overwhelm and cognitive load to improve memory retention and proprioceptive spatial awareness. It’s about making visible what is invisible to many, unless you’re like P1 and have experience on your side. In teaching silks, the teacher needs to increase the saliency of the technique, paying attention to the micromovements and internal muscle sensations, in order to lessen the learning curve and more easily make the student understand the move when they feel it, and not just when they see it.

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Sources read that support this conclusion: