Vashti Cunningham flutters her fingers, presses her lips tight into a determined scowl, bores her eyes into the ground, rocks backward and, on a calm January afternoon in Las Vegas, explodes. Her knees drive forward. Her torso tilts at a 45-degree angle. Her gold-printed Nike spikes dig into synthetic rubber. She plants a slender left leg. She twists. She bursts, and soars.
And for a fleeting moment, hanging beneath an overcast sky, she feels an unexplainable feeling, one that only a select few earthly women will ever feel. “Just a little bit free,” she says of those split seconds.