Piedmont Profile: Shaheen Alikhan
Antonia Florence, staff writer
Shaheen Alikhan is an aerial performer. She is a Fairfax, Virginia, native and born to a German mother, who has always been supportive of her artistic endeavors, and a Middle Eastern father.
“On my mom’s side, there were a lot of performers before it was considered ‘respectable’. Musicians, genuine vaudeville performers, dancers….so I suppose my heritage did feed into the performance art. … I remember years ago, when I was working with horses professionally, telling my aunt I was dancing and riding for work; and she looked over at my mom and just said, ‘That sounds familiar’.”
Aerial silks is a mixture of acrobatics and artistic expression performed in the air while hanging from fabric without the security of safety lines or netting. There are three main categories: tricks, wraps, and drops. A trick may involve a swinging release and catch, either individually or with a partner; wraps occur when the fabric is entwined with the body and striking poses; and a drop, which requires the most strength, can be a free fall while rotating to a lower position. Aerial silks demand a high degree of strength, stamina, flexibility, grace and a large dose of courage, according to Alikhan. “I prefer dynamic moves like drops and fun climbs with fluid transitions, rather than relying heavily on poses. I do solo silks, partner silks and partner balance. Flexibility is hugely important. It’s vital to engage the muscles prior to putting them under stress, you’re generally counterbalancing an additional person’s weight,” Alikhan said.
Alikhan states, “Silks need a lot of core and upper body [strength]; for solo silks, having good grip strength and staying calm, trusting your own wraps, is necessary. Partner silks requires all of these, plus strong air awareness and complete trust. If I don’t trust my partner to catch me when we do releases or flips, I could hurt us both.” Frightening experiences still occur even when all precautions are taken. In fact, one was quite recent. “We were performing at a private event for a local figure, and it was insanely humid that day. Like, you’d towel off, and moving a step would make you drip with sweat. Literally drip. During our partner silks routine, we had just done a release, as in, my partner was holding my ankles, we flipped me, and we caught each other’s wrists. We were both so sweaty that even with rosin we ended up barely connected. That was pretty terrifying, as I was about 15 feet in the air,” she said.
Alikhan is also a professional belly dancer. Belly dancing, with its roots in the Middle East, Mediterranean, and northeastern Africa, is thought by many experts to be the oldest known dance. It is a social dance, performed by women for women, and uses the full body with emphasis on fluidity while isolating individual movements.
As a folkloric tribal fusion dancer melding the styles of many countries, she express her creative license. Choreography is a large part of achieving the right effect. She practices aerial silks and dance at least 12 hours a week, is a full-time honors student with her sight set on becoming a landscape architect, works at Alloy Construction, and maintains a busy performance schedule. She has taken a break from teaching weekly dance classes but still offers workshops.
Sometimes, things can go wrong in a performance. She said, “There was one duo silks routine when, in the middle of a performance, my partner hissed at me to hold (in the super weird precarious position I was in). I didn’t realize what had happened until he fixed the clasp on my top that was almost completely undone. It felt like it took three minutes and would be really obvious, but in the video you can’t tell and it was just a second. Out of the hundreds of people watching, ONE PERSON was at the correct angle to see what had happened.”
