Today was rough. Last night I was confronted with a few of my personal weaknesses, and a few ways I need to get stronger. This morning I was sluggish and demotivated. I thought about quitting. I wanted to quit. Give up circus entirely, leave it to the full time pros, and find something I could do more casually or just get fat doing science. But I had to teach. So I gave my students and myself a challenge: take something we often consider a "bug" of fabric, and make it a feature. Take a weakness and make it a strength. The worst thing about fabric, the thing that everyone who hates fabric decries the loudest, is its lightness and its width. It is not an apparatus that stays where you put it. This is why a novice at tissue (and even the most seasoned pro, sometimes) fidgets and fumbles. A rope will stay in place. Fabric billows and stretches and spreads; it isn't always easy to catch. You can't always move as quickly or as forcefully on silks as you could on rope or straps, because the apparatus floats and flutters. It is, and this is the word that everyone who has complained to me uses, floofy. It also means you can do things on fabric you can't do on other apparatuses. You can use the sail to create a unique tableau. Finding the perfect balance between floof and precision is the challenge, not avoiding floof entirely. Playing with the fabric this way was exceptionally freeing. My students were laughing about it, reveling in it. Personally, it was exactly what I needed today: to allow myself not to be perfectly neat and tidy. In a lot of ways, the weaknesses I struggled with yesterday were the weaknesses of fabric. I was too reactive. I was flighty. I was messy. If I accept (if I learn to love, and use) those things about my apparatus, it will make me a better performer. Because in the end, the lightness and width of fabric -- the things that make it billowy and reactive and messy, that take patience -- aren't good or bad. They just are. I hope some day I can see myself that way too.
