Lessons from Aerial Injuries

​I’m in the homestretch now of eight weeks out of the air due to a silly finger injury, a metacarpophalangeal joint collateral ligament sprain, to be precise.  I’m usually pretty private about injury, but nearly two months of buddy taping my middle and index fingers together kind of let the cat out of the bag. 

Throughout a lifetime of dance and aerial, I’ve never taken time off for injury.  Not that I haven’t been injured—I’ve had bulging discs in my cervical spine, tendonitis in my elbows, and most recently, a torn labrum in my hip—just that I’ve always kept dancing right on through it (admittedly, not always the smartest choice...). 

So it’s almost funny that something as seemingly small as a finger has taken me down.  While I’m not trying to paint a picture of my recovery time as all sunshine and rainbows, I have been trying to focus on the positive opportunities that have come from it:
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• The opportunity to focus on what I can do.   Appreciating the time I spend dancing on the ground, doing yoga, and hiking helps me keep my injury in perspective.  Even though I can’t hang from my hands, it could be a lot worse!
• The opportunity to reinvest in my dance teaching.  When I am hyper-focused on my own aerial training and performing, my enthusiasm for teaching dance suffers.  With more time in my schedule for class planning, I am finding a renewed joy for working with my students this semester and more generosity as an educator.
• The opportunity to say ‘yes’ to projects outside my comfort zone.  Dance choreography is challenging for me, but this month, I’ve been creating a modern dance piece for twenty students with a theme that I would not have had the time or energy to investigate otherwise. 
• The opportunity to reexamine my daily warm-up.  I’ve said it before, but sometimes I become so obsessed with the health and well being of my shoulders that I actually forget I have a lower body.  Reconnecting with the ground has helped bring balance to the way I approach my personal warm-up and conditioning routine.  And of course, I’m doing Theraband exercises like crazy so that when I do return to the air, my shoulders are ready!
• The opportunity to engage in creative problem solving.  This is a term I use with my improvisation/composition students all the time and now it’s my turn to put it into practice.  Prior to my injury, I had been working on a brand new act, with a new partner, on a new apparatus for a show in November.  One of the most difficult things about this injury has been dealing with an unknown timeframe and trying to be honest with my partner about my ability to perform.   Through the generosity of a fellow aerialist, we have continued to work on the act with a stand-in for me.  This gives me the unique perspective to be the “outside eye” on my own duet and has led to some really cool new movement invention! 

About the Author:  Elizabeth Stich is an RTAP reviewer and contributor to Born to Fly™.  She holds an MFA in Modern Dance, a Certificate in Movement Analysis, and has performed as an aerialist in various parks including Sea World.  She currently teaches at Salt Lake Community College and Aerial Arts of Utah.