1 post tagged “contortion”

It seems kind of odd to get up first thing in the morning and go to the Circus Center.  The majority of classes are at night, but I ended up with daytime classes this semester, some of them rather early.  (Warning: non-caffeinated circus may be hazardous.  Be safe, drink coffee.)  When I showed up for my contortion class, moms were dropping off their pre-schoolers for class and the die-hards who I always see there on Wednesday afternoons were slogging in sleepily for their day in the main gym.  (Let's all pause a moment to respect these people who are there stetching and working in their chosen field from-- apparently-- ten in the morning until at least four in the afternoon.  No wonder they look sleepy.)  But the place, normally teeming with students by night, was strangely quiet.  Especially up in the room where my class is supposed to be.  It was empty.

"Have you tried the basement?" suggested the woman in the front office.

"There's a basement?" I replied, startled.

There is a basement: it's the mystery room that you can see into from street level (odd, in a basement), with German wheels stacked against the window, as well as a lot of other interesting props and supplies, including what I believe to be the door on wheels that figured prominently in Sweet Can's Habitat show (you'll have to take my word, since I can't find any pictures) with a rug thrown over it, and what looked like a small and colorful pipe organ, though I'm not 100% on that one. (This isn't the storage room, either: that room is upstairs, and full to bursting with velvet-lined contortion platforms, unused silks, large balls, strange boxes, and those parasols that they use for foot juggling.  At least, that's what I've noticed the few times I've had occasion to pass through that way.  The Circus Center has enough magical junk lying around to start its own museum.  I wish they would.)  The basement, as the other students cheerily point out, is the warmest room in the building (it's a furnace, in fact) and therefore staked out by the contortionists.  I'd been wondering where they all hid out.

Although there were a group of girls practicing a Mystic Pixies-like routine (as sampled in the video ) on the other side of the room, the learning curve for the actual class wasn't quite that steep.  In fact, it was very similar to the stretching class of last semester, though there was a greater emphasis on shoulder and back flexibility.  When we're each waiting our turns, we cycle through front and middle splits, or cobras and bridges (different kinds of back bends).  Then the teacher, Serchmaa, comes around for assisted stretching.

If you've never experienced this kind of assisted stretching, let me explain that it's much more intense, simply because the person assisting you is not hooked into your nervous system. Take something as innocent as stretching your point.  As I sit on the floor with my legs extended, toes pointed, Serchmaa steps on the top of my foot.

My internal monologue: Oh goodness.  She's going to break my foot.  She's going to snap it in half.  I can see where all five of those long bones are going to snap.  I won't be able to walk for months.  It might never heal completely.  I'm sure it won't ever heal completely.  And then I'll have to decide whether to sue the Circus Center because this crazy woman stepped on my foot and broke it in two, but I really like them-- even Serchmaa, even when she's about to snap my right foot-- and I still want to continue in the aerial program and that probably won't work if I sue them.  Can I still fly trapeze with only one foot--?
Serchmaa (calmly): You feel?
Me (calmly): Yeah, that's working.

And then we do the left.

For "foot" you can substitute "hamstrings," "shoulder blades," "every vertebra in my back," and, most memorably, "ligaments of my knees" (an unpleasant side-effect of stretching the side split, at least for me), and that's contortion class in a nutshell.

Fortunately the body can't remember pain, not really: this is why people get multiple tattoos (or, for that matter, have multiple babies), and why we can have a contortion class that lasts eleven weeks without experiencing an immediate, 100% drop-out rate.  My muscles are going to wake me up tomorrow moaning and groaning.  But that doesn't mean we're not going back next week.