aerial silk visual glossary

Some notes since a few people have run across this page now:

This is an attempt to list all the things I know or have seen in aerial silks. It will be obvious from the photos that I'm not a professional performer; there are probably plenty of fine points of technique these pages fail to show (and I often forget to point my toes). There are certainly alternate techniques for some of these moves which require less strength. Ultimately I'd like to make this a wiki, add video, etc. This is just a first-pass attempt to get down the most necessary info.

(What this is not is any sort of real tutorial on aerial fabrics. Conspicuously missing from these photos are the spotters you'd need in order to learn them safely. If you don't already feel quite comfortable on the fabrics (and have spotters), get someone who is to teach you rather than trying crazy things you read on the internet.)

Part of the motivation for this page was the complete lack of standardized vocabulary for talking about aerial silk moves. I've chosen to use a very dry, somewhat unwieldy, but mostly self-explanatory nomenclature here, following my teacher's naming tendencies. I'd like to collect colloquial names for these moves as well.

Ironically, this "glossary" itself needs a glossary-- some terms we use to refer to the fabric, to parts of the fabric, or to classes of moves. These terms are listed down below, below the main list.

The list:

Mini Glossary

Some terms our group uses, some of which we made up:

comments to dcovin@mindspring.com