3 posts tagged “hoop”

In hindsight, my wrist might have been sending me a warning sign when, for the past three weeks, it hurt every time I put weight on it.  Possibly that was not something I should have ignored.

But, in my defense, putting weight on a flexed wrist (like the top part of a push up) is very different from holding a trapeze bar, a rope, or basically any part of a hoop.  As far as my (limited, mostly apocryphal*) knowledge of anatomy goes, my hand should not have freaked the heck out during hoop class on Friday night merely because I pulled up on the top part of the hoop.  But there you go.  Color me bewildered.

So I took about five days off to deal with the fact that my right hand seized in pain whenever confronted with such everyday objects as doorknobs and sink handles, much less trapezes, and to try to figure out if I could train myself to write with my left hand (answer: not legibly, not in five days).  I have basically no idea what I did to it or what's happening under the skin, but it never swelled.  Since swelling is my only red flag to go to the doctor--barring such subtle indicators as major blood loss or loss of limb--I have not gone to the doctor.  The doctor would probably tell me to quit monkeying around on trapezes.  Therefore I have resigned myself to living in ignorance.

Five days felt like an extremely long break, especially since I haven't quite gotten to the end of my post-Showcase high, so last night I went back to hoop.  I only irritated it a couple of times--and it was for a really cool new skill, which I feel should balance it out.  (My wrist feels otherwise.)  It helps that I just now discovered the power of two incredibly simple things: tape and icy hot.  Taping my wrist makes it roughly 100% less tweakable than it would be without (possibly because I can't flex or twist my wrist significantly).  And icy hot is friggin amazing.  I have no idea how some menthol has given my wrist full, painless range of motion mere hours after I made it angry by hanging from a hoop.  Magic, probably.

After being nice to it and judiciously applying magical icy hot, my wrist is more or less functional, although pens continue to thwart me.  I'm realizing, however, that this may be one of those things that never actually goes away: my right wrist, after all, is both my dominant wrist on trapeze, and the hand that uses the mouse/track pad and all of that carpal-tunnel-syndrome-inducing stuff.  It gets the worst of all possible worlds.  

I'm now making a concerted effort to use my left hand more for trapeze, but I'm also reconciling myself to the fact that I may have a cranky wrist for a good long time.  And as with any injury, I have been given many opportunities to reflect on the marvelous fragility and complexity of the human body.  You only get one.  I mean, I do have another wrist, in this particular case, but it can't write its way out of a paper bag, so I had better start taking good care of the right one.  I have a long career of awesomeness ahead of me (if I may freely toot my own horn), and how am I going to accept all those congratulatory hand shakes and high-fives with my left hand?  Now you see the full extent of the problem.

--
*So excited that I got to use "apocryphal" in a sentence.

(Heh, get it?  Plucky?  Banjo...plucky...Okay, fine.)

As promised, here are some video clips from my most recent hoop class:

I have no particular comment, except that my friend Diane calls the skill at 0:20 "open for business."  To which I say: some people should get their minds out of the gutter.

Although...she has a point.  Most aerial skills aren't renowned for their modesty.

Also, the little drop which Marina spots (why does she look so nervous, I wonder?) is supposed to look that way.  I mean, I didn't just fall off the top part of the hoop, in case you were wondering.

Oh!  And!  This was filmed with my very own camera.  (It's ridiculously simple to use.  I'm reasonably sure a chimpanzee could operate this thing.  Or a dolphin, if it had thumbs.)  No longer do I have to beg other people to film me!  I've started filming myself while I train, which means that now I do my act over and over and over and then I go home and I watch it over and over and over.  And take notes!  Ahh, circus.  Without you, I might be forced to go outside and interact with other people.

This semester I'm taking a hoop class: not this kind of hoop, or this kind (though those are also cool), but  aerial hoop-- also known (in the grand aerial tradition of never calling anything by the same name twice) as aerial ring, cerceau, and lyra.

Like this:

I've seen more great hoop acts than I can count (for real) and I've wanted to try it out ever since I saw it on the schedule at Circus Center.  This term, it's my goal to go in and train six days a week, and I figure it'll be a good mental exercise to hop on something that's not a trapeze on one of those days.

In some ways, a hoop is just a giant, curving trapeze that doesn't have ropes where you expect there to be ropes.  (I say this as a trapezist; hoop people almost certainly feel that a trapeze is just a hoop, three quarters of which has been removed and the remainder of which has been pointlessly flattened.)  As a mental exercise, getting on a hoop was instantly successful: every time I reached across and my hand encountered bar, I went "hey!  that was supposed to be a rope right there!"  Or, for that matter, whenever I reached above myself and found-- yes!-- more gently curving metal bar... friends, it blew my mind.

Marina, the teacher, said that student unaccustomed to working with a single-point apparatus tend to find its wobbliness the biggest difference from, say, static trapeze.  Since I'm used to a wobbly, spinning trapeze that's not such an issue-- although I have to say that since the hoop we were using is literally only connected by a single point at the top of the hoop, it has all kinds of wobbliness that I'd never thought about.  If you reach up and pull down on one side, the other side rotates upward.  (There are hoops that are organized more like a single point trapeze, with two points attaching to the top, and Marina says these are more stable.)

Marina started me off by teaching me the hoop equivalents of a lot of basic trapeze moves.  These were basically the same, and not at all hard especially when we switched out the hoop that was up and gave me a slightly smaller one.  We all grumble when the static trapezes are changed out and the bar becomes narrow/wider/thicker/thinner/differently roped, but there's really not that much difference in what it allows you to do (or prohibits you from doing).  Having a slightly smaller hoop, on the other hand, made a BIG difference to my dinky little arms-- I didn't feel like the other side of the hoop was miles away.  This is a comforting feeling.

From there, we kept going with more and different skills: some are trapeze equivalents (fish/mermaid, gazelle, monkeyroll) and some are special for hoop (the "man in the moon" position is surprisingly comfortable).  What I found interesting-- because I'm a geek-- is that some things became much easier on hoop because of the curvature: I haven't been able to do pinwheels on a trapeze to save my life, but I got it right away on hoop with Marina spotting me.  Any skill that involves hanging from and/or balancing on the hoop is easier, whether it's be heels, toes, a back balance, a front balance-- because the hoop is cradling you just a little.

And then some things become harder.  It's hard to start a good spin in the way I usually do on trapeze (i.e., holding on with one hand from the bottom of the hoop), because a hoop is much heavier.  I didn't appreciate this until I had to get it moving.  The flip side, of course, is that once you get your spin, it'll keep going forever.  You know what else is harder?  Hip circles.  I know, right?  I just figure them out on trapeze, only to go to an apparatus where they are damn near impossible.  I inderstand why, though I'm not sure I can explain it; basically, the same shape that makes it easy to pinwheel makes it very tricky to hip circle.  You would not even believe how riveting I find this.  I could talk about it all day.

Suffice to say that I had a lot of fun and that we covered a ton of ground over the course of an hour and a half (I was the only student, but there is someone else signed up; I'm happy either way).  By the end of class, Marina was talking about stringing skills together in a combination, which I love.  I even found myself plotting to start coming in and using the hoop on my own (in a month or so, once Marina feels assured that I won't kill myself on it) but for the short term I have to confine myself to trapeze.  Because last week, fliers appeared announcing that the June Showcase auditions are coming up in mid-April. 

Mid-April.  Let's all ponder how close to mid-April it already is.  Unless I'm mistaken, next weekend is mid-April.  Between now and then I have to come up with some video to submit to the (gulp) audition committee and then hopefully they'll let me come do it for them live.  While this is my chance to a) shine and b) reap the rewards of all that training... gee whiz, am I ever not looking forward to that audition.  And until then, hoop will have to be my once-a-week mind-blowing experiment.