Category Archives: aerials
Cirque du So Far, So Good
Today was Shiny Tights Day … At least, it was for me.
Candlestick in a straddle with no feets. No big deal.
Just, like, hanging out with our instructor, Ms. C(1). (There were two Cs today.)
A little Archer’s Pose (this was actually part of the dismount).
“Squatty hip lean,” and probably the nicest picture of me going. Also, I haz a pasty. Wow.
Finally flying Denis in foot-bird!
The highlight of acro-balancing, in which we built a mighty wall of tabletops.
Cold, Comfort
This morning, we were alllllll cold.
Mr. B. gave us a slow, full-body warm-up, which made a world of difference, and class as a whole was pretty good. I fell apart disastrously going across the floor, but it was my own fault: somehow, I put myself in the second group and found myself in Advanced Class mode — which is to say that I came in on the second phrase of the music, and my intrepid partner jumped right in with me, and we promptly became incredibly confused because Mr. B. was calling out the combination to the first group.
Today I Learned that it’s actually quite hard to complete the first phrase of the combination while someone is shouting the second phrase at the top of his lungs. Go figure.
I eventually reined it back in, but for a while there it was hilariously bad.
At least there were double turns today?
Anyway, you know it’s cold when the whole class starts out wearing warm-up trousers and leg warmers and hoodies and three shirts and everything else. Today, it never got warm enough for any of us to strip all the way down to tights and leos only. We debated closing the studio door towards the end of barre, but opted against, because it gets so, so hot in there with the door closed; like, people passing out on the floor hot.
B. drove me home and we worked on Super Secret Plan B, which is now fairly concrete. It may or may not pan out, but at least it’s a plan! 😀
After, I crawled into the tub and read for a long time. These days, I spend a lot of time re-heating my body when it’s cold, because even though I was once a hardy, northern-bred boy, I am now a complete hothouse flower because ballet*.
*To whit: the human body doesn’t really do all that much to adapt to cold, but it adapts to heat like crazy. When you spend oceans of time sweating your butt off in a very warm dance studio, you tend to develop excellent adaptations for heat, but when you walk out the door at it’s -5 C and your body has lovingly prepared itself for Miami in July, you freeze your huevos off.
Better winter clothes would help, but we don’t get that many days that are really, really cold.
This evening, Denis and I tried the Fitness & Flexibility class, which combined challenging conditioning exercises (try hanging upside-down with your legs pointing straight up, then touch your toes as many times as you can in a minute**) with stretches that were adaptable even to ridiculous noodle people like myself.
With the supervision of a qualified instructor, of course.
I actually managed to get my butt off the lyra while doing “baby pull-ups” (ha!), so I’m definitely making progress***.
***Sadly, this means I will lose the Very Best Excuse Ever: “Sorry, I have basically no upper body strength, I can’t help move that fridge/bath tub/sofa.”
Last week I just, like, engaged all the muscles and … nothing. I just sat there straining and contemplating my place in the universe (which, at the time, seemed to be, “Right here, with my butt on this lyra.”). This week, I managed to do 11 “baby pull-ps” on the first round and 13 on the second round (F&F, like Conditioning, uses a circuit-based approach).
I noticed that staying warm in F&F was more challenging than in ballet — in part, because it’s colder in the aerials studio than in the ballet studio (except maybe in Studio 5, which gets COLD), but there were also a couple of other factors.
First, the aerial apparati…es? really work better when you’re not wearing a bunch of warm-ups.
Second, ballet simply generates more heat — though possibly not more than the stuff the more advanced aerialists are doing, which involves more constant motion.
I get really hot in the ballet studio in part because the muscles in my legs are fairly enormous. They’re constantly in use and they generate a lot of heat, so I get really warm.
So, anyway, there you have it. This week is all about figuring out how to stay comfortable in the cold while being an admitted hothouse flower (or tomato, as B. put it this afternoon).
More to come.
À bientôt, mes amis!
PS: We have some good new pictures of Denis from Sunday, but he didn’t take any of me.
Wednesday Class: Less Tired This Time
Barre today was challenging: Brienne stepped things up a notch, bringing in changes of body direction in long combinations. I got many, but not all, of them.
I continue to try to focus on using my inner thighs, though it’s a greater challenge while also trying to remember the direction changes and whether to go en croix and trying not to kick the taller of the two new guys, who stood beside me today.
I’m really glad they came back to class. I feel like their presence enriches the class; they’re both good dancers who work hard. Taller Guy* has impressive splits!
*For the record, they’re both taller than I am, maybe even just plain tall — but I’m right on the borderline between average and miniature. Still, I don’t know their names, so for now they’re going to be Taller Guy and Smaller Guy.
At center, we did a pretty, but hard, adagio with … erm, fondu devisé? Something devisé, (edit: turns out it’s divisé — divisé en quarts) short for anyway (edit: also, I have no idea what I was trying to type here; autocorrupt was cray this afternoon). My phone is being weird, so I’ll have to look it up when I get home.
Turns were better. I had doubles from fourth, though not as consistently as I’d like.
Our grand allegro combination was fun — Glissade, jeté, glissade, jeté, step-grand jeté, step-grand jeté.
I did it well enough at first, but as I got tired my legs kept wanting to put extra glissades in after the second jeté.
Still, I was less tired today than I was last Wednesday — much less tired, in fact – and I felt stronger last night in aerials class. My tuck dismount on trapeze and silks is no longer just an uncontrolled unfurling 🙂
I think I will be able to adapt to this training schedule, and since I wasn’t sure, I feel good about that.
There are more days in my life now on which I look at myself as I undress at the end of the day and I think this part or that part of my body is beautiful. Rarely, I even think the whole thing is pretty decent.
This is a huge step forward: I never used to have any of those days. I used to pretty much hate my body all the time.
Ballet and aerials are changing that in a way I never expected. I used to hate it — and, honestly, I often still do – when people would respond to my feelings about my body, which were the irrational result of deep-seated dysphoria, with so much pablum about how much my body could do.
I don’t think being reminded of that on a rational level helps any more than does telling someone with depression to buck up because at least they don’t live in a Siberian prison camp. That’s not, as it were, how any of this works.
But doing amazing things with this body, and discovering it to be strong and graceful and capable, has really helped — as has exposure to the wild array of beautiful male dancers’ bodies, into which my own body increasingly fits.
In short, ballet and aerials have altered the scope of my inner sense of how my body should look (a concept that’s more complicated and less rational than it sounds). Constant exposure to my own reflection, meanwhile, has adjusted my sense of how my body does look.
I suspect that I still often literally see a distorted version of myself, but the maybe the distortion isn’t as bad as it once was.
So that’s it, today. I’m going to go home, take a hot bath (in which I will read La Dame aux Camélias in the original, maybe), foam-roll my legs until they fall off, and then do some work stuff.
I used to think that my body dysphoria and anorexic thought patterns would never, ever, ever change. Now I’m not so sure, and that feels like a good thing.
À bientôt, mes amis!
Edit: PS, my ear behaved itself today. Woot!
Ballet, Meet Cirque
Acro-Balancing tonight. It was fun, although quite challenging at times.
I discovered that being all legs makes mounting more challenging, but balancing easier when you’re the flyer. It makes being the base kinda weird sometimes — thigh stands are okay, but short arms and long legs makes a steep mount in foot bird or candlestick.
Ballet also makes a lot of it easier — if you have a good arabesque, you know how to use the muscles in your back for the foot bird.
This was just before Denis got wobbly on me. He thinks it's gorgeous; I, of course, notice that my feet could be more pointed, my legs aren't even, my neck is tense, my...
I also discovered that I can still do a tripod headstand forever and ever and do cool stuff with my legs during. I’ll have to see if I can get my handstands back. They are awesome for for stability and balance, and I think that would be handy (no pun intended, I swear) for partnering.
Learning to Fly: Weak (But Not Too Weak)
Today, we took our first class at Suspend — their “Cirque Sampler” offering, which lets you try things out (we focused on silks and trapeze).
We had a blast. It turns out that being a dancer makes silks feel pretty
Yeah, I sort of don’t have any new pictures of aerial stuff, so please enjoy this blast from the past.
intuitive — but not so much that it makes you entirely equipped to pwn the silks right out of the gate. Works out about the same on trapeze.
In short, today’s lesson essentially confirmed my worst fears about my core- and upper-body strength (or lack thereof): or, well, maybe not confirmed them, but indicated that they weren’t entirely out of line with reality.
So, while I was intuitively able to do graceful things on the silks and the trap, I was not able to climb the silks (or, well, I could climb onto the silks, and that was it) or to hold the extended chair position for any length of time, and my straddle dismount on both silks and trap was somewhat uncontrolled, though not as bad as it might have been.
Yeah, this one’s not just recycled, it’s re-recycled. You’re welcome, Planet Earth.
Denis, meanwhile, has the core strength of a hundred men and climbs like a natural-born monkey. Seriously. He’s just like, “Climb a thing? Sure, I can do that. Extended chair pose for four hours? No problem. Do you need me to work out the Grand Uniform Theorem while I’m at it?”
Basically, in terms of climbing and core strength, I got schooled by the hubster.
Conveniently, however, the muscles that need to get stronger for aerials are the same ones that need to get stronger for ballet, particularly if I want to venture into partnering someday (which I very much do).
Also conveniently, we were able to convert our 10-class card (and $25) into two intro-unlimited-classes-per-month plans — one for each of us for the next month, starting Tuesday, and our instructor today said we’re good to go ahead and step into the second class of Intro to Aerials. w00t!
So, naturally, Denis has now signed us up for All The Classes, and I will finish the month of January significantly more fit and, I suspect, significantly more tired 😉
It looks like we’ll be doing aerials and circus arts on a Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday schedule for now, which should nicely complement my Monday-Wednesday-Saturday ballet schedule. I’ll still have two scheduled rest days, unless I pick up a Friday class somewhere, which depends on a number of factors. I do not want to overdo it.
Tuesday we’re doing Intro Aerials and Thursay we’ll try Acro Balancing, which looks fun. I’ve done a bit of that as a function of gymnastics training when I was younger.
Next Saturday, we’ll be trying juggling after Advanced class, so that should be interesting. I have never actually really juggled, so my day will encompass both something I do well enough to more or less legitimately take an advanced class and something in which I am a complete and unregenerate novice*.
*I realize that “unregenerate novice” doesn’t actually make a whole lot of sense, but gosh darnit, it sounds good, and because I also write poetry, I am just going to claim poetic license here and go with it.
So that’s our first day of life as Official Cirque N00bs.
In other news, I just realized that the grad school application I need to knock out this month needs a 7 – 10 minute audition video, so if I disappear off the etherwaves for a bit, my apologies. Between that, ballet, aerials, and a job I’m in the middle of applying for (for which I’m now in “doing evaluations and preparing for 2nd interview” phase), I don’t expect to come up for air again until the 16th.
Ballet class notes, however, might continue apace, primarily because I ride the bus back from ballet class, which gives me time to do that.
À bientôt, mes amis!
To Know, To Will, To Dare, To — Gosh Darnit!
While I was busy Knowing, Willing, Daring, and Keeping Silent about the project B. and I have underway, I spouted off my mouth (or, well, my hands) about having a job … and it promptly dried up.
HA!
Told ya so!
—The Universe
It’s not a big deal — the job in question was a temporary gig, and dried up because the business in question realized they weren’t going to need more people for that shift just now. They offered me another shift, but it would’ve conflicted with ballet (and everything else, since it started at 3 AM o_O) — and since being able to add Moar Ballet! is half the point, I told them I was absolutely okay with being wait-listed for when they need someone for the shift they’d offered me.
I’m poking around at other job options, now, and still enjoying the privilege of really not having to make a lot of money. I’m not picky, so I’m sure I’ll find something.
In other news, I’m re-reading Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides and trying to figure out how the hell I’ve read it twice before without realizing how gloriously beautiful Conroy’s writing is. It may be a question of not having been ready, really, before: I think I did a lot of skimming, knowing that there were parts of the book that were going to hit me close to the bone and knowing, maybe, that I wasn’t ready for that.
Anyway, this is part of why I re-read books. Whenever I revisit my “old friends,” the experiences I’ve had in the intervening period (one year for some books, like the other I’m re-reading right now, T.H. White’s The Once and Future King; many years for others, like The Prince of Tides) color the author’s words with new insights and meanings.
A good book is a living thing, y’all. Just as you can never step into the same stream twice, you can — if you’re living, and really letting life get to your bones — never read the same good book twice.
As for crappy books? Who knows. I’m willing to admit that I won’t eschew a bad book if it’s all that comes to hand (but I’ll also read phone books and cereal boxes; I am a promiscuous, compulsive reader), but I rarely revisit them. I do know I’ve read the same chapters of If I Stay (which is a potentially-compelling story badly written) about thirty times in the downstairs bathroom, and I have yet to notice any new layers, there … but that might just be the influence of my ivory-tower prejudice against half-baked writing.
Okay, that’s it for the moment.
Oh, wait! One more thing! How could I possibly forget this?!
For Christmas, our wonderful friend Chef Kelly got us a 10-class card to Suspend, the aerial arts studio run by two of our friends and favorite teachers … so we’ll be taking some aerials classes together soon, if I don’t die of anticipation first.
W00t!
Peacock Tights
People keep asking where I (or, rather, Denis, technically) found my excellent peacock tights, and I finally remembered to ask him for a link, so I’m going to post it here:
If your browser or WP app is being screwy, here’s a verysion you can copy-and-paste:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/221766259117
I’m having a random tough week. The fact that I slept for fourteen hours last night and keep wheezing makes me think I’m coming down with something. That said, it’s been quite a while (by my standards, anyway) since I’ve been sick enough to be more than a nuisance, so I guess that’s something positive.
Anyway, I may drop off the radar for a bit while I’m trying to get over whatever this thing is, for which I apologize. I hope to be back soon with the first installment in my my much-promised and much-procrastinated-over Cooking With ADHD series.
That’s it for now.
Enjoy the tights!
A Very Tardy Update
Last Wednesday, I wrote out my usual class notes but never got around to posting them because we jetted off to PlayThink Movement and Flow Arts festival right after class.
To summarize: I made it through all of class last Wednesday; mostly kept my proverbial waterfowls in a linear array during barre; managed some rather nice center adagio; did rather well going across the floor to the right and somehow lost the combo going left (qv: threw in an en dedans turn where there should have been an en dehors turn and my brain clicked on and proceeded to hose me up completely — I repeat: THERE IS NO THINKING IN BALLET); nailed some entrechats quatres; and didn’t get the medium allegro combination down (in case you’re wondering: when you’re tired, it’s a good idea to mark the combo, because your brain alone might not catch it).
While we were in Florida, I did a lot of tendus, frappes, and degages in the water, as well as some grand battement. That made a big difference to my speed during petit and medium allegro last week. It would be awesome to have regular access to a pool in order to work on that stuff!
At PlayThink, my goal was to gain some more exposure to aerial apparatus. Terri and Cindy from Turners were back again this year, and they’re both great teachers (Terri, in particular, reminds me of Brienne :D).
Last year, we only got to try stationary trapeze because of timing issues. This year, we got to try:
…aerial hammock:
Cindy led a great aerial hammock class. Here, she’s showing me how to get into a forward balance (once you get to this point you take your hands off the hammock; I don’t have a picture of that, though). I didn’t get pictures of the coolest parts, since Denis was in the other group on one of the other rigs at the same time.
Denis points out that it looks like Cindy is doing a stage magician’s levitation trick with him, here 😀
…lyra:
Mermaid with a slightly-broken line: I should’ve brought that arm up just a tad higher
Denis gets his mermaid on
…and static trapeze:
Denis on the trap: just call him “Susan.”
The sunglasses just sell it. *snrk*
And then, because we had the opportunity, we played on the trapeze a bit more:
I need to practice this one more. I tend to set up too low. Terri got me sorted, leading to this rather lovely moment.
…and this one.
Denis is more nervous on the trapeze than I am, but he still got both hands off the ropes.
The trapeze was set about 2 meters up during our second session, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get up there, but it turned out to be very doable.
Of all the apparatus, I think I enjoyed the hammock most (which, by extension, probably means I’d also really love silks; we missed the intro silks class, though, since Denis had to work on Wednesday morning). I’m pretty flexible, and hammock takes advantage of that in a particularly cool way.
Things I learned this weekend (besides new moves on the aerial apparati):
- My lower-core strength is great.
- I need to work on the uppermost core muscles, as well as shoulder-girdle and arm strength.
- I really, really love aerials (this should come as no surprise).
- I should be more confident about life in general.
Both Terri and Cindy teach locally, and Terri will be teaching at the new aerial arts studio that’s opening (which is in a really convenient spot and offers a very reasonable price structure), so I’m hoping to add some aerials to my rotation. I think they’ll be pretty compatible with ballet, and the class times won’t conflict.
First, though, I need to get some income happening 🙂
danseur ignoble 