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There isn ' t a single performing professional aerialist who can ' t name a good friend or co-worker who has been very seriously injured on the job . The reality is that even for highly trained professionals , accidents happen . The risk of a catastrophic accident is statistically small but cannot be ignored . That means that there is a * great * deal at stake , personally and financially , for performing artists in how the industry operates at the professional echelon . The social conventions around teaching and performing have been developed in large part with respect to that .
TRAINING , TECHNOLOGY & COMMUNITY EVOLUTION Using video feedback to evaluate your own work really only became common in the 1990s , as few people prior to that could afford recording devices — before that , you relied entirely on your coach ' s eye . Even archival footage of other aerial performers was only available in rare enclaves , so there was little opportunity to base your technical development on others ' work even if it had been considered socially appropriate . But it wasn ' t . You learned as established technical vocabulary only what people were consciously choosing to share with you . Pursuing training at a professional level in this way was ( and still remains ) a considerable financial and physical investment , as it involves being where the teachers are and paying for hundreds of hours of their time and studio time to push technical boundaries . The explosion of popularity of aerial as a fitness and recreational trend along with social media and technology in the last ten years has really upended a lot of the historical framework of coaching and learning aerial disciplines . As late as the early 2000s , most producers and shows still preferred to receive a hardcopy DVD of an artist ' s promotional material . The rise of the internet as a means to propagate promotional material was incredibly swift and had far-reaching consequences . By 2008 most performers had switched exclusively to online platforms to reach the people involved in casting . YouTube was one of the few early forums able to host large video files , and so it was commonly used for putting up act videos , particularly full and unedited performances .
The unintended side effect of this switchover was that instead of a handful of promoters seeing your act for consideration in their programming , hundreds and then eventually thousands of YouTube watchers and internet users could peruse your body of work , searching for keywords to hone their results . The community morphed , ballooning within a handful of years to include increasingly tangential individuals and groups . For the first time , people started looking at professionals ' act videos not simply as art to appreciate , but as potential tutorials for their own development , even though the artists themselves would in most cases have strongly discouraged such use .
RAPID SHIFTS We ' ve now seen a seismic shift in this broader aerial culture , especially with the more recent expansion of aerial work into the pole community and with the popularity of video / photo platforms like Instagram . The pole community has adopted disciplines like aerial hoop and aerial silks largely in a fitness / recreational and competitive context in the last few years , which is a drastic change from the way the circus community has traditionally worked . While competitive festivals do exist in the circus world , they are overwhelmingly for professional level artists that compete across all disciplines using a subjective scoring system . So between the emerging genre of fitness / recreational pole and circus there has also emerged a large gap in attitude towards proprietary moves , research , creative content etc .
Much of the contemporary circus community acknowledges a loose one to three year rule , where artistic and technical innovations by an artist are left alone for that period depending on the circumstances of the artist and the degree of innovation . No one will replicate the moves unless they undergo significant transformation — merely reordering a sequence or modest adjustments to form and pacing are not considered sufficient . Leaving new material alone for a period of time gives the artist in question leeway to financially benefit from having created something unique in a marketplace that is increasingly competitive as more and more people from various backgrounds have been seeking out professional career experience as aerialists . Again , the emphasis is on heavy initial artistic ( and financial ) investment being directly linked to career advancement and financial remuneration as a stage artist .
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