Can (healthy) fear be your friend?
Earlier this year we hosted aerialists Rain Anya (@paprdollmilitia), Dara Minkin (@aerialdesign) and Brandon Scott (@brandonscottacrobat) at our studio in Los Angeles for the online Aerial Silks Summit ‘Aerial Silks World.’
The summit consisted of aerial performances, workshops and a ’round-table’ Q&A with aerial-related questions asked in real time by summit participants from around the world.
One of the most provocative questions asked was this one:
“Do you guys experience fear when creating, training and performing and if so, how do you overcome it?”
What followed was an in-depth conversation about fear:
The importance of the ‘heightened state of awareness’ that fear brings with it in order to keep us safe. How fear is the greatest of all teachers, particularly when it comes to learning or creating new tricks and sequences. The helpful ways to ‘remove layers of fear’ that include visualization techniques and measured progressions.
If we let it, fear can in fact be helpful and healthy to our development as aerial artists, as long as we treat it with the respect it deserves.
