"Ready? Okay!"
Afraid of nostalgia, I hardly check social media, and was, for a good decade or so free from those errant reminders on Facebook about what I had been up to x number of years ago. But last week I fell, quite by accident, into the rabbithole of old videos. Specifically, videos of past cheerleading performances.
“Your head nod was so vigorous,” Mei laughs. “What a strange culture,” J says, viewing a video of me and blurry-eyed team members waving red and white pompoms in the middle of the night, yelling “Go, go Singapore!”
Cheerleading is an opaque and often baffling enterprise to the non-initiated. Its language is a series of indecipherable code, odd marriages of onomotopeia, iconography, and numerals (“Tick-tock heel-stretch,” “X-Out,” “1-1-1”). Cheer music sounds like an alien overlord swallowed a dozen of the greatest club tracks of the times and spat out a high-energy, intergalactic mash-up of technologic crack. Mechanized voice-overs blare out the team’s name, EDM drops cascade left, right and center, and the incessant sound of shooting laser guns highlight spins and stunts hitting their mark. I watch a younger version of myself ruffle her ponytail and blow a kiss. Yet the cheesiness of such acts, the indignity of short skirts and flashing safety shorts, the pageantry of pompoms, banners and flags— all were unironic components within the syntax of cheerleading, demonstrative adjectives that positioned us within the cultural dialect of this hyperactive mash-up of sport and performing art.
I binge on these reminders of my past, transfixed by these moving snapshots of nerve and verve. Beng is there, fresh and handsome, a head taller than most. I marvel at the seeming lightness and incredible strength needed to toss a human body several feet high. Had my body been so strong, so flexible? How had I been so daring with it? Letting people handle me, flying high into the sky, staying there for a brief, shining second, before hurtling back down— what had I been thinking?
Or perhaps I hadn’t thought at all. Next to me, Beng comments with awe, “I can’t believe that life used to be like that. That we thought with our bodies instead of our minds.” I share his incredulity, both of us often victims of our minds’ uneasy muscles of discontent. In cheerleading, sense-making functioned only in terms of the body’s intelligence and how it enabled us to connect to the bodies of others. It was a strenuous skill that has nothing to do with rationality. In a review of the Netflix series Cheer, Jia Tolentino draws from her own experience with the sport and observes, “Physically, cheerleading requires a surreal mix of rigidity and flexibility, control and heedlessness. Mentally, it’s a game of nerve and commitment: to throw a tumbling pass or a stunt, you have to be nearly thoughtless but also relentlessly focussed; if you think too much or not enough, you’ll waver and fail.” I have felt it before, this same centered sense of complexity, this near-emptying of thought; the delicious struggle to figure a problem out that has nothing to do with language, and everything to do with the body.
A cheerleading routine is a vision of control and ease, a high-energy showcase of dexterous maneuverings and athletic strength. Pyramids are precarious architectures of bodies stacked on bodies— giant abstractions of bones on bones, each shoulder or forearm a rung of scaffolding for someone else to climb or be tossed ever higher. These large, intrepid friezes of audacity and endurance are assembled in the forceful second it takes to sound a thunderclap. They exist for all of two seconds before they are collapsed like houses of cards for something new to be built; a city of humans never satisfied with its skyline.
But beneath the spectacular control presented by these arrangements of human totem poles are desperate improvisations— the speedy recalibration required to save a basket-toss gone askew, some imbalanced weight of step compensated for with groaning forearms and blooming bruises. I watch a video of a past performance, and see a base struggle to lift a mid-flyer’s leg up for a stunt known as a glad-hitch, his teeth clenched with exertion. She firmly keeps the blinding rictus-smile on her face even though the stunt may fail and she might fall, as though she can salvage it with sheer tenacity alone. It’s out of her hands. It is, very literally, in his. Everyone’s watching. After a valiant struggle between his palm, bicep and her foot, he stabilizes, her leg finally goes up, the top-flyer jumps onto her thigh and the picture is complete, though three counts too late. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I had been holding. On screen, the crowd cheers.
The poor video quality of many of these performances from over a decade ago makes watching them a fierce exercise in squinting. “This is pre-HD,” Beng frowns at the screen, unhappy. I cannot make out the blurred pixelated faces of these people in flashy uniforms, but know them by the shape of their bodies, the way they moved through the circumscribed square of the blue roll mats— some memory of the way a ponytail bounced, the heft of a bicep, the stretch of an arm.
There was a time when I knew nothing but the bodies of others, knew nothing but how we moved in concert as one organism, hearts beating together in time, labored breaths held and drawn in sync. For a few intense years, my life was dedicated to the observation and deciphering of torsos and limbs, the weight of a person on my forearm, the feel of broad shoulders beneath my feet. Our physiques made sense only in relation to those of others. Grab her foot. Brace yourself on his shoulder. Hinge your arm around his neck. Throw, catch, lift, swing. Bodies snap to each other like magnets. Hold, hitch, support, dismount. My higher education was in becoming a creature of muscle, motion, and music, in unison and inseparable from the frames of others. Together, we were a choreographed landscape, each of us one of its minute details. Absorbed into the sentience of a routine, the self was diluted, assimilated into a circulatory system of turning, heaving and throwing, limbs and expressions moving together on cue. The solidity of my world depended on grasping hands, arms curved and waiting, as well as wrists pushed to the brink keeping erect perilous monuments of human bodies held together by the fierce cement of hope.
Cheerleading is its own magic. The triumph when a stunt succeeded— when palms aligned with the soles of feet, thigh muscles worked, shoulders rotated and a whole body was bravely hurled high into the air with practiced strength and breathless hope, and the stunt stuck— the triumph was incomparable, the victory cosmic. All the things that could have gone wrong— inadequate velocity, a flinging limb, an angle gone awry, impossible physics— did not go wrong, the multitude of potential calamities somehow averted, and the alignment of bodies in height-defying assemblages was as astonishing and marvelous as a propitious alignment of the stars. There we treacherously hung, suspended in improbable conquest, foolhardy but happy, flushed with our harrowing success.
On a more subliminal level, but no less miraculous, was the unarticulated certainty that no body worked alone. This created an addictive illusion of weightlessness, though kilograms and the uncompromising materiality of the body was of course, ever present. But the enchantment of moving within and supporting an ecosystem of bodies relieved us of the heaviness of our growing subjectivities, the threatening burden of adulthood. Other things lost their sense of weight. We took ourselves more seriously, as well as more lightly. The script was total, the prayer simple and unyielding: All Stunts Up. Language was frank and literal, refreshingly absent of metaphor— “I’ll catch you when you fall. Thank you for holding me up.”
Whatever our personal worries and uncertainties, for as long as we were cheerleaders, we moved through the world as one. The necessary wrinkles of grandiosity and myopia that accompany a love for performance was balanced by the care: the fact that we had to save each other from being hurt, again and again. The urgent responsibility to always catch falling friends with waiting arms, even if the attempts knocked us off our feet. I remember how important it was to my sense of self, all those years ago, to be a part of this lurching building of human bodies determined to stabilize itself. My body meant something in relation to all these other bodies, and the virtue of cheerleading, this misunderstood and electrifying culture, had something to do with the willingness to believe that this fragile house of torsos was a place to find rather than lose ourselves.
Looking at these performance videos ten years later, it feels like life existed the most forcefully for me in those days where I placed myself within edifices of other human bodies. And yet I know this to be an illusion, a cinematic mirage crystallized by nostalgia and selective re-watching old videos on Facebook and YouTube. Tolentino wryly notes, “In a perfect routine, trouble and weakness are entirely hidden, meaning that extraordinary performances require extraordinary deceptions, both of the cheerleader herself and of the audience.”
Not shown in these videos of smiles and victory are the sub-plots of disappointments and injuries, the violent exhaustion. The pulled shoulders and broken limbs, knee surgeries and electro-current physical therapies. The hundred of hours of failed stunts for a fleeting three-minute performance. The training sessions that began at midnight and ended at 4am. The mats soaked with sweat and blood. Flyers weeping and concussed. A base on crutches apologizing for “ruining the routine.” Off-screen were body dysmorphia and an unhealthy obsession with weight. One cup of bubble tea was approximately 300 kcal. One plate of prata with curry was 500 kcal. The troubling and persistent rumor of the alumni flyer who ate only one box of Pocky a day. The foul moods and jealousies, the frustrated storming off the mats. The sad resignation that accompanied being benched and sidelined. The bitter recriminations (“Why did you let me fall?”) and hurt (“I trusted you.”)
Yet watching these performance videos from the past, the effort we put into creating this flawless fantasy works its charm and spins its dream. The backstories and collective hurts conjured this brief, shimmering performance, this bewitching fabrication. All the exhaustion, resentment, and pain— all for this one shining moment. I forget for a moment that, fast-forward to the present, life has more or less settled down into something accumulated across broad and often unsure swathes of time, ordinary days of trying and often failing to show up on the stage of life. Seeing us smile and wave for the camera, balanced precariously atop each other, I remember mostly how it had felt beautiful to me.
And so, here I am, rewatching this slip of time from a decade away, once again enraptured by the cultural authority this insular and exhilarating sport held over my life. I am startled into remembering certain inflections and stresses— this is when we prep, go on our toes, get ready— and get the tingling feeling that the haphazard, discordant salad bowl of cheer music had never truly left. I am spellbound by the lack of irony and blinding optimism in the way we presented our selves to the public, our hopes and motivations clearly legible to the world. With every peppy shout of “Ready? Okay!”, the maelstrom years of our youth were flung high and spinning to the amped-up tempos of our dreams, glittering with the splendid fiction of opportunity.
The performance ends, and our prayers answered: All Stunts Up. The team runs off-stage, teary with overwhelm, crumpled with emotion. I watch us trip over each other, ungainly back on ground, once again housed in our lonely, individual bodies. The past tense flickers, and is gone.