Theory

disclaimer: this is not a guide on how to safely construct multicordes for yourself. this is the rationale for how i constructed mine based on my personal risk assessment. goal i’ve been intrigued with the chaotic aesthetic of multicordes since seeing photos of them, probably first via instagram posts from european aerialists. construction-wise i had very little to go on when i decided to start prototyping some for myself. i started with observing the hardware i’d seen on a few different examples: circle, rescue-8, and bar. ...

getting show photos or videos back from a performance always reminds me that i’m a visual artist first and a performing artist second. i dove deeply into circus because it was such a boon to my mental health. my technical skills and artistic expression in that modality developed in parallel to my documentation of it, and when i train i often don’t realize that i am much more concerned with producing visual media for consumption rather than performance. ...

i’m usually underwhelmed by shots of aerialists from below, so when there happened to be an aerial point at this venue in santa cruz, i took some wide-angle video from below to scope out problems and possibilities from this angle. i tried a few things and settled on this split in s-wrap, which looks a lot more interesting from below than it does from the side; it adds visual interest other than unintentional-seeming foreshortening. other considerations were the positioning of the tail (if i’d had someone to pull it out of frame and show the foot, i think that would make this image perfect). ...