trickpony

After 9/11, New York-based aerialist Chelsea Bacon escaped the dust and terror to live with me and my new family in Minneapolis for five months. We began collaborating, locating mutual personal terrain around brains: tumors (hers, my late spouse David’s), a fascination with neuroscience, autism/savantism and unusual brains in general. Also, horses. Chelsea shared a book called “Nadia” about an autistic girl tremendously skilled at drawing horses. We connected Nadia’s story to stereotypical little girls’ attractions to tutus, horses, and blue ribbons and created an aerial romp about unusual brains.

I was the pony, the prey animal that Chelsea-as-child drew, both of us mute but communicating genius and panic.

I trained in aerial, learned how to make rope and leather chevaliers (boot-like gaiters). I bonked my head a million times on the metal frames, the floor, yanked my shoulder out, bruised my entire body and hands with rope burns and blisters. But I got strong. And I was flying.

I invented some weird and wonderful stuff as the pony, like the pointe shoe tap gallop around the stage. It is a completely joy-filled, wild step, a weirdly virtuosic moment. Also, drawing/dancing the giant horse head with black rope over the entire white stage.

trickpony was a wild show, thematically, and visually. It was aerial/dance/theater and true collaboration across all realms, challenging, frustrating, and pushing us beyond our perceived limitations and labels.

2002, 2008