3 posts tagged “silks”
Or, the unabridged title: Things That Don't Usually Hurt, Under Normal Circumstances, But On Which Circus School Is Particularly Hard.
1) My feet. The tops of them. You would be astonished how many aerial-related things involve the tops of your feet: rope climbing, ankle hangs on trapeze, foot locks on silks. All of this will lead to lovely bruises on the tops of your feet. As an added bonus, I sustained my first circus-related injury by kicking the radiator during my stretching class. I wasn't stretching, at the time. I was more... walking. But now I have a little puncture wound and a bruise which makes all of the above activities still more excruciating.
2) My upper trapezius. Not, as one would anticipate, from trapeze, but from silks. I've watched with interest as the muscular strain of climbing migrates up my arms. When I first started, my hands and forearms hurt after class, then it moved into my biceps, and now my upper trapezius. Climbing will soon be giving me jaw strain.
3) There's a spot across the belly, just below the hip bones where one can-- in theory-- balance oneself on the trapeze. I am yet to find it, but the whole area is bruised. Trapeze bars, I am rapidly discovering, are harder than they look.
4) Backs of the knees. There should be little trapeze-bar-sized spaces behind your knees. But there aren't.
5) My rib. I pulled a little intercostal or something back in Week 2 of classes, and now, at Week 6, it is still easily irritated by reaching up or out with my left hand. It's been especially bad during silks (and interestingly, when I talked to the teacher about it, she said that she suffered several pulled-rib-muscles when she was starting on silks), which means that, lamentably, I've dropped my silks class. The silver lining is that I get part of my money back, which is now my fund for single point trapeze classes. I think I'll have my first on Thursday, and I am very excited. (It's funny, because when I first came out here, I had it in my head that I would specialize in silks, but that was really only because it's what I'd done before. "What's the big deal about trapeze?" I wondered. And then I actually got on a trapeze. And I said, "Oh. I get it, now.")
6) The fronts of my hips, and this one actually isn't accidental OR my fault. It's my stretching teacher's fault, because while the other students were innocently practicing their backbends, he put me into a home-made torture device to stretch out my hip flexors (since they have been identified as the barrier between me and the Best Splits Ever as well as A Glorious Backbend). I would attempt to describe it, but you would only be confused, so allow me to draw you a picture.
The yoga strap binds my knee to my chest, and the ankle weights pull my opposite foot down, opening the front of that hip. Are you still confused? Me too. But it worked, if the goal was to be super sore the next day.
And the pièce de résistance:
7)
The undersides of my toes. No, seriously. I have tears right beneath the pads of three of my toes, in the little crease where the topmost joint is. (Don't make me draw another diagram.) I used to get
these if I walked around in a swimming pool. In this case, I think
it's from standing on the trapeze. You have to stand on your tip toes,
with the bar right beneath the toes and the topmost part of the ball of
your foot. It's not a part of your foot you put direct pressure on
very much-- in fact, that's the one thing all these body parts (except
for the trapezius) have in common: they don't get very much use. Until
now. If I don't post for awhile, it'll likely be because my
fingernails hurt too much. I can't imagine why, not right now, but I'm
sure the circus can think of a good reason.
nataliedee.com
No, no, not circus school. I quit at Starbucks! And I managed not to do it gleefully. On Wednesday, the nice folks at the yoga studio decided to give me a whirl, which means no more getting up at 2:30 in the morning and making frappucinos for people. (Actually, that's not true: I have only a very vague idea of how to make a frappucino, as I have spent the past month chained to a cash register. It's unusual for me to get within two feet of the espresso machine, much less the blender, and, honestly, that's probably best for everyone.)
The fabric is looped around each foot so that you can rest weight into them from different angles (i.e., not just standing). It looks simple, but I had been taught to get into it using the "aerial dance method," which is complicated and silly and requires the ability to whirl your feet around in enormous circles to wrap the tail around your legs. (I do not yet have this ability.) Turns out, if you go one foot at a time, it's not so bad. From that position, I learned how to do two things I've seen in virtually every silks act or video in the whole world:
I also learned a few neat things on trapeze, but try as I might, I can't find pictures of them anyway. (I promise that, by the end of the semester, I'll find someone to take pictures of me so that I don't have to pillage the internet quite so much.)
The down side to all this trapezing and rope-climbing and so on is that my hands and feet are blistered and bruised, respectively. The foot bruises are odd (it must look like I dropped someone on my feet... both of them... symmetrically) but the hands are problematic: the calluses that are forming are like little pebbles right where I need to grip. Fortunately, my aerial skills teacher acquainted us with a whole arsenal of slightly arcane hand-preservation techniques.
And finally, some pictures from my week:
Ah, another Sunday night of avoiding writing my (monstrous, slightly daunting) final paper, going to bed at a reasonable hour, and posting my damn furniture on Craigslist. But while doing nothing productive, I found a video about the Circus Center, where I am destined to be in [checks calendar] 35 days. Picture me climbing those steps, jumping around on that equipment...
Also, after failing to remember to bring my camera to silks for ten consecutive classes, I remembered! Many thanks to Shelrey for photographing (and sorry about butchering the spelling of your name). Check it:
This is actually very comfortable. Except that Courtney (the teacher, visible bottom right-- looking mildly pleased with me, no less!) made us go into and come out of them five times in a row earlier in class. That was kind of hard.
This is the setup for what Courtney calls iron cross (none of these things have "official" names).
Here's me trying to get out of the final product of iron cross. The actual pose is like this, but with my arms out. And... higher. And not so tangled.
Setup for the pirouette. I unhook my top knee...
and
roll
to
here
Ta-daa!
I may well look back on these pics and say "pffft... pathetic." But right now? I'm proud of myself.
