Adding to the festivities of the Garden Tour on April 28, two young neighbors, 7th graders Sadie and Violeta, treated tour goers to an extra special treat: an aerial silks dance routine on Dacian Ave. near one of the Tour gardens. I interviewed the dancers to learn more about this beautiful and fascinating art form.
Trinity Park News: How long have you been practicing aerial silks?
Violeta: About 8 years.
Sadie: About 5 years.
TPN: What inspired you to try it for the first time?
Violeta: I was taking a ballet class, and there was an aerial silks class going on in the same building. During water breaks, I could see the other classes.
Sadie: My friend was doing aerial silks and invited me to try it. I was doing gymnastics at that time.
TPN: How do you practice?
Sadie: I take classes at the JCC.
Violeta: I had been taking classes at the JCC before COVID, but stopped during COVID, and just did conditioning at home. Then after COVID, I didn’t start classes again, but my mom got a rig for my backyard.
TPN: Sadie, do you wish you had a rig, too?
Sadie: Yeah, I want one.
TPN: Tell me how you came up with the performance on the day of the Garden Tour.
Sadie: First, we picked a song. We chose The Story of Us by Taylor Swift. Then it was lots of trial and error to figure out the moves.
Violeta: We’d have lots of improv sessions.
Sadie: Some things stayed the whole time, and some things changed. We knew we wanted to try some partner moves, because we hadn’t done them before.
TPN: Are partner moves harder?
Sadie: Some are. It depends. Our rig is taller than the one we used to have, but not tall enough for some of the hardest moves. My instructor came to Violeta’s house to work on the partner moves with us.
TPN: When will you perform again?
Violeta: We’re doing another performance for Halloween on Watts Street.
TPN: What songs are you considering?
Violeta: Probably something by Taylor Swift.
Sadie: Friends have asked us to do maybe “Haunted” or “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me.”
TPN: Those sound like good songs for Halloween. I can’t wait to see the routine you come up with! Thank you for performing for the neighborhood!
Neighborhood aerialists Sadie and Violeta, doing an aerial silks performance at the Garden Tour on April 28. The silks are suspended from Violeta’s rig, temporarily set up in Sadie’s yard.
