Icarus at Ease

I did something today which I haven’t done for twenty years. I went to an aerial skills practice session.

There was a time when I did this almost every day, went to a space - in Bristol where I was at Circus school, or in London where I later lived - to train, to practice my circus aerial skills.

Today I went to a small aerial studio in Kent, which happens to be literally down the road from one of my daughter’s friends. She gets a play date. I get to train. Win, win, I thought.

Twenty years on. A different space. Different people. But it was also exactly the same. I recognised it.

For those who have never been to a circus aerial practice session, it goes like this:

There are different bits of equipment - today it was silks, rope, hoop, pole - rigged up. You choose your equipment and you practice your skills. You negotiate if you want the same piece of kit as someone else. Or maybe you have come specifically to train with a colleague, so you take it in turns with them. You go up and you do a move, or a series of moves - say a Shoulder Mount, followed by a Brass Monkey, then a Sneaky V and a Butterly (aerial moves are like paint colours - they all have slightly naff names). Then you come down and have a moment of rest, before doing it all over again. But in that moment of rest, you stand, and either surreptitiously, or quite openly, watch the other people in the space doing their thing. And in that watching, a quiet process of evaluation goes on, so that alongside the perfectly friendly exchanges, there is a rapid ranking taking place. How skilled is your neighbour? Are they more or less skilled than you? What moves can they do, that you can’t? Et cetera, et cetera….

I remember this game. My body remembered it vividly, from twenty years ago. But it also has other memories now - this body. Of giving birth to and raising two children; of sitting on the floor writing a novel; of having chemotherapy and losing my hair, my strength. All of which meant I didn’t especially want to play the ranking game - am not that interested anymore- but I wasn’t quite sure how to get out of it, as I stood at the bottom of the pole, in my resting moments. I wrote about this at the start of last year, when I first came into remission - of how the experience of being ill had finally given me a sense of the end of striving. Not of stopping doing ambitious or daft things - just giving up on the particular quality of effort-ing that, somewhere along the line, necessitates putting other people down in order to feel better, or even the best.

This is the question I am holding tonight - not requiring an answer, but enjoying the tension in the asking: might it be possible to do something that could be argued is the very essence of striving - lifting the body away from the earth, practicing strength, skill, agility - but to do it with a quality of relaxed surrender? Without caring a fig about your rank, your place in the great pecking order of pole dancers, or of people anywhere? Might it be possible to do an aerial training session in a state of enlightenment? Could you be totally free from grasping, as you grip like crazy to do your Shoulder Mount? Could Icarus be at ease?

Well, after the training session I went and hid in the back of the car and did a half hour meditation, then picked up my daughter, came home and cooked dinner while listening to Nancy Kline describing the invisible, insidious nature of the systems that interrupt our independent thinking, and how we need to wake up about them.

So, I am working on - but hopefully not striving towards - an answer. I’ll get back to you…..

From when I did Lifeline again, recently - for the first time in 18 years. Photo by Mika Rosenfeld.