Free Acrobatic Duality by Tamara Vardomskaya

 
    1. BALANCE
    18.1 The characteristic of Balance Exercises is that the partners remain in contact at all times during the performance of pair/group elements.
    We are one, and we are not one.
    The music crescendos as we lower into a half-needle stance, on two hands and one foot. The base’s right leg is extended in a vertical split, and the top mounts it, gripping the perspiration-slick pointed foot with chalked-up hands, and casting up into a handstand.
    For three seconds we are a single still line, foot to leg to toe to hands to arms to body to legs. Then the base’s body straightens, rising slowly to a full needle, vertical split against the base’s back. The top curves into a Mexican handstand, bending almost double, backs of knees over head. Carefully, carefully maintaining balance, our bodies staying still around that crucial single centre point.
    By the edge of the sprung floor, Coach Salter waits, as taut as us even though he stands on two feet with arms crossed, for his most special pair to finish the first routine of qualifying for the Acrobatic Gymnastics World Championships women’s pair final.
    Our tendons shudder, but we remain still for the required three seconds, until the top bends her legs and stands both feet on the base’s one foot, in a ring. Then rises up out of it, balancing on two feet on top of one foot. Just standing, as if on the floor; it seems the simplest, but a foot stand is the hardest move in Balance routines, much harder than handstands. An additional five points for difficulty, because no one else does it, not even at the World Championships, not for the three seconds.
    The top dismounts in a somersault. Double front salto, instead of back. Incredibly hard for almost everyone, as one cannot see where one’s feet will land. But we are not one.
    The music ends as we both raise our arms to salute the judges. As usual, the women’s pairs alternate with another competition, the mixed pairs, and we let our countrymen Chris and Eva step on the floor as we wait on the couches in the kiss-and-cry.
    The scores come up, setting us at runaway first in the women’s pair qualification standings after the Balance routine, even before Chris and Eva have finished performing. We do the obligatory hug for the TV cameras, and sit back and watch Chris and Eva’s routine on closed-circuit, Eva finishing with a one-armed handstand on Chris’s uplifted hand, his eyes up and meeting hers. Their routine is world-class, but dares try no footstands, and no front saltos.
    They are two separate people. No one may know that we are not.
    *   *   *
    The world knew us, in the convention of listing the top first, as Kim Tang and Alana Watson. We remember ourself as Jennifer Smith. I was Jennifer, who started out in artistic gymnastics but switched to acrobatics after my growth spurt meant I wasn’t as good a senior as I was a junior. I knew my bars and beam would never get me to senior elite level, not with memories of a terrifying crash off beam at an invitational meet. Balancing on your partner’s one extended foot in half-needle is easier than balancing on five meters of solid beam. Humans cooperate, and yield in the fall; a beam is hard, and unforgiving.
    Then at the age of twenty-one, Jennifer Smith was heading to the airport—to vacation, even, not to a meet—and that was the last we remember as I.
    The next we know, we wake up in our apartment, and know we have intensive practice this morning and we know how to get to Coach Salter’s gym, and little else.
    Who was Kim Tang? Who was Alana Watson? We know our official birthdays on our FIG registrations: Kim a month older than Jennifer, Alana three weeks younger. We know our bodies can stretch to splits and needles and fold nearly in half in Mexican handstands and rings. But we know nothing of who these bodies loved and were loved by, what visions had delighted them, whether the