For the last blog post, I conducted interviews to figure out aerialists’ attitudes toward learning body awareness. For this one, I would like to see their behavior rather than their attitude, in order to be able to compare and contrast what they say versus what they do.
This time, I decided to make a video blog (vlog) for this week’s entry, chronicling the different ways that teachers and students have tried to explain new figures to me (the constant participant in all of this).
Own video.
In the video, you can see how the Slovenian teacher, who focuses on making the figures look pretty and performative, moves my body in order to try to make me understand how I should move. This is directly contrasting what the Ukrainian teacher does, since she only uses verbal input while I’m in the air (since it’s also higher up). You can also see how the lack of a standardized language makes it hard to understand each other. In the video, I translate literally the name of one movement in Spanish (“camiseta” – “shirt”) and the teacher doesn’t understand me. For context, I had to learn the English names for some basic moves (“hip key”, which is used in the video, was not a word I knew before coming here; I called that move “tijera” or in English, “scissor”).
In the video, you can also see how the learning process in silks doesn’t go in incremental steps. Since it’s in the air, people have to try out the full figure immediately. Unlike in silks, in gymnastics, you can see that there’s different prerequisites before fully trying out a new move. This helps in understanding what the body must do to successfully complete it without help (even though I still haven’t been able to figure out the 2nd move).
What’s not shown in the video, however, is that throughout the past few weeks’ class observation, I’ve noticed a pattern present in novice explainers (read: when it’s not the teacher, but another student explaining a figure or correction). Usually, they would say “left hand”, and when they see it’s the wrong hand, they correct it with “no, the other left”. If it’s a move where the person must go into the silks or wrap around them, and the apprentice doesn’t do it correctly, novice explainers usually say “no, the other way”, even when there’s many “other ways” to wrap around (sometimes, novice explainers go as far as to say “no, the other other way”). When asked about this, they all agreed that learning new skills in aerial silks is half about trial and error in learning how their body is supposed to move, and half about trial and error in learning how to communicate the steps from person to person.
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Source: own observation.
