By Tracy Gates
Thirty feet above the ground, a woman hangs, suspended in silk. She wraps first one leg and then another in lengths of it. She loops it over her arms and twists it around her hips. She pushes her heels out, spreading her legs into a full split and grins down at us far below. My palms are slick. There is nothing but a thin blue mat on the floor far, far under her. She tucks in her knees, pulls fistfuls of silk to her waist and with a flick of a wrist the silk unravels and the unthinkable happens. She drops with sickening speed toward the floor.
I am at S.L.A.M. (STREB Lab for Action mechanics) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, watching an evening of aerial acts by mostly amateurs and a few professionals, and it’s an interesting mix of performance—forced and awkward interspersed with fluid and graceful. The first act features three women on aerial silks—those long flowing ribbons of silk hung high above the audience—who climb and twist and tumble with varying degrees of ease. At its best, the movements look weightless, but many of the performers are still learning and that adjective does not yet apply. In some cases, very far from it. I’m not used to watching amateur performances, unless you count the New York City sidewalks or the subway when I often have to avert my eyes as the kid in the falling-down pants attempts a back flip between steel subway poles. It’s not always successful is the thing—wince. But there’s something admirable and familiar as I watch these women perform; they are clearly pursuing something they love. Their imperfection—showing the strain, the sweat, the grit—is something I know too well, but not in their world.
I’ve never thought of squash as performance, at least not at my level, but as I watched these aerial dancers climb through the air in front of the fifty or sixty of us in steel folding chairs, I began to sense the similarities. A sport played purely for fun or just to keep in shape seems closer to an ‘activity’ or ‘game’, but as soon as you add the competitive component—a league match or a tournament—then it turns closer to performance. Whether you like it or not, others will probably be watching and you have more on the line. It may not be as fun and certainly not as relaxed as a friendly game, but if you want to improve what better way to test yourself than in front of others? After years of playing in leagues and tournaments, I still feel anxious before a match, and not unlike how I felt years ago before acting in a high school play, but the payoff can be pretty big. Put in the rehearsal time and people will be clapping whether you win or not. And knowing that they’re there makes you want to play better, cleaner, more watchable squash.
While playing a match at the Howe Cup Team Championships last month, I finally won a point that had run both my opponent and I up and back and from corner to corner too many times to count. A huge cheer went up from the other side of the glass wall and I glanced back to see the bleachers filled with our team of students from StreetSquash, the urban youth enrichment program based in Harlem. Now you just can’t let a group like that down, and for the rest of the match I truly did feel like a performer. I fought harder for every point and was rewarded with rounds of clapping whenever I nailed it. I may not have been a few stories up in the air, twirling around like a sweaty Tinker Bell, but audience approval can definitely give you an extra edge. You want to put on a good show or risk losing your audience. Perhaps the prayers of an aerialist and those of squash player are not dissimilar: dear god, don’t let me fall/fail in front of these people!
Unless, of course, the fall is intentional, as is the one I watch take place thirty feet up in the air. Like a squash ball hit at maximum velocity, like a racquet thrown in maximum frustration, the young woman’s body drops with disconcerting speed. And then, just mere feet from the floor, like a drop shot caught at the last moment, the body stops, snaps back, is safe. It’s all part of the act. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do that, too…
