“When you do aerial, you’re doing something that you think is impossible,” says Drago Nesa, entrepreneur, international circus performer and longest-body-burn-while-hanging-from-their-teeth world record holder. “And when a person can conquer their ability to do the impossible, they get this amazing sense of empowerment.” Drago teaches aerial silks at SkyHigh Odditorium, a Richmond-based aerial arts and acrobatics school where strength training and choreography fuse in midair.
Drago’s Intermediate Silks class meets every Wednesday at 6pm. When I sit in to see what aerial is all about, everything feels familiar at first—the session begins with a rigorous warmup of stretches, yoga poses and ab drills. But as soon as the silks are unraveled and the aerial practice starts, the class literally turns upside down. The students launch into movements that are immediately implausible—mid-air hangs and flips with the wow-factor of a good magic trick.
Aerial silks is the acrobatic art of climbing into the air on two long, flowing ribbons of fabric and manipulating the fabric to perform an athletic dance that doesn’t touch the ground, as the performer wraps, suspends and dangles in strange, precarious shapes. The silks are the aerialist’s only safety line, allowing performers to rise, fall, twist and sometimes seem to vanish into knots. Each move is a negotiation between body and fabric, as the students tangle themself into twists and loops of fabric that feel both reckless and precise.
Developed in the ’80s and ’90s, aerial silks is quite a young genre of aerial acrobatics that first became well-known when it featured centrally in a Cirque du Soleil show in 1998. Drago discovered it while performing in a traveling fire performance troupe in Taiwan, then found an aerial teacher when they moved back to New York. “I just thought she had the coolest life,” says Drago. “She would be in this amazing art space with these great ceilings, surrounded by a bunch of really cool babes, doing badass stuff in the air. I was like, ‘I want this to be my life.’”
Drago founded SkyHigh Odditorium in 2012 with a vision: a 21+ aerial arts school that was accessible to beginners while keeping its roots in performance art. “My mission statement at SkyHigh is that aerial is both art and fitness,” says Drago. Their students aren’t just learning tricks for fun—they are working towards the ability to showcase their skills. “I built SkyHigh around the idea that people would be trained to perform,” Drago continues.
Some students build their skills enough to join the Dragonettes, SkyHigh’s in-house performance troupe that appears at local events and tours across California. Drago sees the artistic side of aerial as the core of the practice, giving it creative flexibility. “Gymnastics is so compulsory and non-optional. You have a set frame of what is good and what is beautiful. But with aerial, there’s a lot more space to creatively express yourself,” explains Drago.
Aerial silks looks intense—and it is—but SkyHigh’s doors are wide open to anyone and everyone, regardless of previous experience or athletic ability. Drago finds that many prospective students have a preconceived notion of what they’ll need to be able to do to be successful in aerial—a full split, a big drop, a ton of pull-ups. “But as they learn aerial,” Drago says, “they see that there’s so much more to it than flashy moves—and that there’s space for anyone that has ambition and motivation and willingness to work hard and forward their craft.”
Student aerialists do need grit—this isn’t a discipline you can just drop in on a few times a year. “You can take an aerial class one time, but honestly, the thing that you’re going to understand most about that class is that aerial is really hard,” Drago says.
For those who stick with it, though, the journey is addictive. “The people that stay with it are in for the long run,” notes Drago. “I get this kind of very interesting demographic of people that are adults who are looking for something fun to do, but something fun that’s going to go somewhere.”
The first step is learning the basic moves that one can do within the two strands of silk, and how to manipulate the fabric to get there.
“There’s a lot of directional analysis,” says Drago. “You are supporting your own weight with just your hands, and then moving your body around and navigating shapes that you’ve never seen before in your life.”
When I sit in, the Intermediate class is focusing on inversions—moves done partly or completely while hanging upside-down. The students practice moves like the spiral plank drop, which involves weaving silk around their legs and torsos to create a harness, then doing an expert swivel that magically unravels the knot, dropping them into a fall that’s caught just in time by another skillfully-formed snare of silk.
Drago introduces each new move with a demonstration, pointing out the muscular underpinnings, where the students should feel tension and what to watch out for. Often, Drago is comfortably lecturing while fully inverted, an impressive feat of diaphragm control.
In performance, the aerialists will put these moves together into a seamless sequence. “I look at aerial as a language,” Drago tells me. “Silks 1 is learning the vowels. In Silks 2, you learn consonants and start putting together words.”
As the students practice their consonants, Drago watches and gives precise corrections and suggestions.
“Everybody is different, and a good aerial teacher, after observing somebody over a short period of time, should know the exercises to give somebody that is at their level of strength and flexibility,” says Drago.
With the help of Drago’s specific and intuitive cues, the students progress quickly. “I don’t think I’ve ever done so many inversions in one day,” says student Megan Tvedt. The atmosphere in the class is warm and supportive, as students cheer each other on and burst into applause when someone nails a particularly badass move.
“I think that the community plays a huge part here,” Drago tells me. “First of all, you can’t train alone.” SkyHigh welcomes a diverse range of students, many of whom haven’t found a home in other fitness spaces (“We are indeed, all Odd here,” says their homepage). Some of Drago’s best students arrive with no athletic background and are able to develop an incredible level of fitness, going from being unable to lift their own body weight to doing so while suspended upside-down 10 feet off the ground, protected only by their own strength and a few folds of silk.
“The other thing that I see completely transformed with my students is their level of confidence,” says Drago. “I have seen all of them go through their own levels of empowerment.” After all, they’re all doing the impossible.
For those who are aerial-curious, SkyHigh offers a weekly beginner class on Sundays, where no previous experience, strength or flexibility is required. “I just think anybody can do aerial,” says Drago. “If you are at all interested, you should try.”
“It makes you feel so good, no matter what,” Tvedt adds after class, as the students carefully braid the silks together for storage. “And you have Drago cheering you on.”
