Summer Intensive being over, Killer Class with Ms.B is back.
It wasn’t too bad yesterday, though I was too bad yesterday.
Sure, a year ago, I would’ve killed for a class in which I was like, “Yeah, I’m hella tired; I’ve only got half-baked double turns and single assemblés battu.”
Still, I felt like an ongoing disaster: my rotators didn’t want to stay rotated, my balances were Meh, my balancés were Meh, I had trouble keeping things in my head, and at one point I forgot we had already done both sides of a combination and stood there blinking with the wrong hand on the barre while everyone else patiently waited for me arrange my waterfowls, etc.
Still, I made it through. Even managed beats in petit allegro, which was mercifully slower than Ms. E’s on Monday, during which I mentally grumbled about wishing we could do men’s tempo for once whilst simultaneously observing that any Danish-trained danseur could certainly manage this tempo so that’s no excuse.
Grand allegro was better than I expected it to be, if not quite awesome.
I think les turnouts (which, regardless of Autocorrupt’s delightful suggestion, are definitely not “turbos” right now) and the leg-springy muscles need a day off. They might get one today, but I’m still on the fence — do I go take class with Company B, or do I acknowledge the fact that I’m rapidly careering towards two straight weeks without a rest day?
Anyway, afternoon and evening comprised a therapy appointment, my first Trap 3 class, Hoop 1, a break during which I stuffed hummus wraps into my face as I tried not not to heckle Denis during his Trap 1 class (which he’s intelligently taking to supplement Trap 2) and then some futzing about in the Dance Corner, where I discovered that I really shouldn’t more than mark Albrecht because that floor beats the holy hell out of your legs after a couple of runs of big jumps (to be fair, it’s not intended for grand allegro executed by someone with a lot of jump).
Trap 3 was revelatory. I got bumped up from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3 very quickly because apparently that whole thing about lacking upper body strength was some kind of delusion and I’m naturally flexible, while ballet has imparted enough grace, coordination, and kinesthetic awareness to successfully tackle all the things.
Trap 3, on the other hand, is going to be harder. I expected, for example, to nail meathooks yesterday because I have solid single-knee hangs, a stellar center-split, and controlled v-ups. Ha! In Mother Russia, it turns out, meathook nails you.
Our instructor, who I’ll call Siren (because I somehow just realized that there are two Aerial Ms!), pointed out that for for me it’s not a question of strength, but of figuring out how to get all the parts to work together in an unfamiliar way*.
In short: meathooks are … hmm. Ronds-de-jambes that you do in a different plane whilst in a long-arm hang with your head down and your junk up against the bar in such a way as to finish folded over your own arm or arms.
They should end up looking like this (thanks, YouTube!), more or less.
Our meathook exercise involves transitioning from inverted straddle to left two-handed meathook through inverted straddle to right two-handed meathook and back. So far, when I’m lucky, I can get from inverted straddle to an approximation of one meathook or the other — and that’s it.
Trying to convince your shoulders to continue to engage and your body to remain upright while you patiently rond first one leg, then the other around the barre is mind-bogglingly difficult.
I think part part of my difficulty, though, was that I set my grip too wide, which (because T -Rex arms) makes it potentially impossible to engage correctly through my shoulders and and chest. I have this same problem with the arrow/pencil inversion on lyra (and its children, pike and Verukai [sp?], when I don’t remember to set my grip a little narrower than instinct suggests).
Still, I managed to finagle my way through the Cuddles sequence (I can only assume its name is at least somewhat ironic), which opens with an inversion into a pike across one of the ropes (or, in short, a kind of inversion into a meathook sans straddle) — and the fact that I’m very much capable of managing that inversion suggests that, indeed, strength is not the problem.
After the initial inversion, “Cuddles” involves more or less waving your legs around artfully to tie yourself in a very complicated sliding knot, from which you next glide first into a split and then into a leana, slipping yourself free of your knot as you go.
It’s a devilishly complex motor sequence, roughly akin to the opening phrase of Albrecht’s variation in terms of coordination and motor planning (though not in the modulation of force, which is part of what makes Albrecht’s variation hard).
After all that, Hoop 1 felt like a walk in the park (which is good — I wasn’t sure that lyra as a chaser for a hefty draught of trapeze was anything like a good idea), though I made the same grip-width mistake on my first go at the day’s enchaînement.
After, I shot some video of Albrecht’s variation broken into phrases so I could work on properly sequencing my arms. I think, though, that I’m not going to run it on that floor anymore — I tried to turn down the jump on the cabrioles, but when I do that, the result is cabrioles badly executed, with the top leg dropping to meet the bottom as it swings up to beat (to be fair, it does have the decency to spring back up again — but it shouldn’t drop in the first place). Not a habit I want to cultivate! (I also need to get out of the habit of doing tiny, cautious tours, which I won’t on that floor).
So I think from here out I’ll either run it on the mats or just mark the legs and train arms and épaulement, depending on whether the matts are free.
Port de bras and épaulement are definitely major goals, now. It doesn’t matter how high you jump or how well you travel if your arms aren’t up to speed. At the end of the day, in fact, that’s the thing that makes me fall in love with Russian dancers every time I see them — they can stand around doing nothing with their legs and break your heart just by lifting their arms.
I want to bring that both to my dancing and to my trapeze and lyra work.
So there you have my new Wednesday schedule in a nut-shell. Killer Ballet followed by Hard-Mode Trapeze, then a lyra class that feels like a break!
I’m mostly ready to go for the Lexington Ballet intensive, but still sort of managing the last bits of the to-do list.
Mr. Merkah approves of my dance bag:
Feline supervisor says the dance bag is okay to go!
…Though possibly less so now that it is one again crammed full of dance junk and waiting in my car.
(Of note: my dance bag is really a tool bag that I got on sale for $5 at a local hardware place. It has nifty inside pockets for essential dance things like shoes, VetWrap, a million bandages, a lacrosse ball, etc. Also makes it easy to spot in a lineup of properly dance-specific bags.)
This time I’ve remembered to pack bandages and cloth tape just in case I somehow wind up with a blister. I’ll be AirBnB-ing it the first three nights, then spending the last two at an inexpensive hotel with a pool (hope it has a hot tub!).
Today while I was demonstrating assemblé, Aerial A said, “Just like that, only without the beats.”
Didn’t realize that I had been doing assemblé battu, heh. It may have been an artifact of practicing cabrioles avant before class.
In other news, this picture about sums up how I feel right now:
Someone please get me a blanket?
After dinner, I am planning on a long soak in the tub followed by an early bedtime.
Tomorrow, we dance.
(And then we drive halfway across the state, and then we dance again.)
In addition to submitting my audition registration forms, today I:
This was one heck of a good day, people. Now I’m going to bed so I’ll be well rested for class tomorrow 🙂
Wednesday Class was decent yesterday (Ms. B is teaching summer intensive, so we’ve got a substitute whose name slips my mind right now, Ms. E); learned that my tombé-pique/step-over/lame duck was a little, erm, enthusiastic; dialed it back and got a double or two in.
I basically always go into it like I’m going to do coupé-jeté en tournant. Or, at least, that’s how I was going into it. We had to do them slooooooowly yesterday – eight turns to super-slow music: pique, pique, pique, double pique; tombé-pique, tombé-pique, tombé-pique, double tombé-pique if you’ve got ’em.
My petit allegro was slow, but that’s why petit allegro isn’t my strong suit. I need to work on that, always. Forever. It’s physics: pendulums with skinny ends swing faster than pendulums with fat ends, and I have freaking huge ankle bones. My ankles exist, now, but they’re not what you’d call skinny.
Wasn’t sure if a thing in grand allegro was temps de puisse or coupé-balloné (edit: it was temps de puisse; I just sort of blipped out somehow while our instructor was giving the combination); once my brain was un-confused, my legs kept trying to do both at once. Other than that, though, pretty good.
Tonight in acro we did a new thing called “lever,” which I fly like an ace because I have pretty solid splits.
Here it is:
This month is Splits Challenge at Suspend. I’ve signed up in hopes of regaining hypersplits, heh.
Here’s my opening salvo:
…Just half mediocre?
The were good moments today, but it wasn’t a shining example of my best work.
It was, however, an opportunity for comparison.
A year ago, I think, things that seem mediocre now would’ve seemed pretty excellent. I realized this whilst kvetching about the fact that I kept switching the entrechat trois with the entrechat cinque in a combination; whilst internally taking myself to task about some turns that were decent, but not great*; whilst being irritated about my tour lent being a touch wobbly on the first run through the adage.
I was a wreck at grand allegro, though. For some reason, my brain didn’t bother to video most of the combination; it recorded the audio instructions instead.
The instructions were:
Préparé
Glissade
Grand jeté
Glissade
Grand jeté
Glissade
Grand jeté
Failli
Piqué arabesque**
Chassé
Tour jeté
Chasse
Tour jeté LAND IN A BALANCE!!!
Tombe
Pas de Bourré
Glissade
Saut de Chat
Buuuuuuut! The initial glissades traveled, erm, kinda diagonally. Otherwise the whole thing turned into a disastrous zig-zag, like a Mini-Demolition Derby Bumper Ballet ride (which they totally DO NOT have at Grandma’s Nap Land; Grandma says that is WAY too dangerous).
Which I somehow failed to grasp.
Fortunately, we are having air traffic control issues (how often does one get to say that’s a good thing?), and I wound up in the second group, so at least I didn’t collide with anyone while angrily yelling at my body about still trying to launch its glissades to the side. I just looked like an idiot, so, you know. Par for the course, eh?
I also kept wanting there to be more tour jetés, but I always want more of those, soooooooo…
We all also got a general correction on our arms with regard to tour jeté: apparently, our legs were all, AGRIPPINA VAGANOVA! while our arms were like OMG WE ARE FIREWORKS!
This correction included the memorable phrase, “You can do fifth opening to second or you can do this: *demonstrates the arms everyone likes to do with grand jeté* but make sure I can tell which one you’re going for.*
So I then proceeded to think about my arms. I’m not entirely sure that helped, but we all know the rule about thinking in ballet, anyway.
Except, like, sub in "thinking" and "ballet."
(Okay, so that rule isn’t 100% literally literal, obvs. It’s more like, Think with your body, not with your brain.)
So that was my day. That, a bike ride, and open fly. Which isn’t where you inadvertently expose yourself, but where you get to play around in aerial apparati until your arms won’t go anymore.
Oh, and I was totally that guy today: I demonstrated to Denis how I could do awesome pull-ups on the lyra while complaining that about how I was still convinced that I couldn’t do regular pull-ups.
Then he sent me over to the pull-up bar, where I totally did a freaking pull-up.
So that happened, too, I guess. No humble-bragging intended; I just kind of felt like an idiot (which goes with looking like one in ballet class, so…).
I’ve historically danced in a Capezio … um, I can’t remember the model number at this moment, but it’s on my underpinnings page (I’ll link this later, too … if I keep this up, I’ll have to change my surname to “Linklater”).
Today I took a page of of the Monty Python Playbook and said, “And now for something completely different” — Body Wrappers’ M006.
I don’t think a single class can provide a really complete sense of how anything functions, but here are my initial thoughts:
1. The Construction Is, Indeed, Quite Different
I’m rather short-coupled. There’s about a half inch difference in the width of the elastic on these two models, with the BW M006 coming in wider.
The functional difference is rather greater: while the upper edge of my Capezio dance belts rests a couple inches below my navel, the BW M006 rests right at the bottom edge of my navel. (Edit: I think this is because of the way the pouch is designed, really; turns out that’s important.)
This will take a little getting used to and makes it clear that there’s still a little insulation going on there — though not enough to cause the top edge of the elastic to roll. In short, evidently I have a spare tire, but it’s a bike tire (appropriately enough).
On the other hand, in all other ways, this thing is really rather superior in the comfort department. Kind of makes me wish I wasn’t so bleeding conservative about these things.
To be fair, an uncomfortable dance belt is a thing of horror and a hell forever, and you generally can’t return them (or even, at our local shop, try them on first — besides which, they don’t carry this model). In short, because Bodies Are Different, choosing a dance belt falls somewhere between Voodoo and the Dark Arts for many of us even with the help of the entire Internet.
In terms of comfort, the major difference been the two models is the construction of the thong bit, which is flat and unobtrusive on the BW M006. The one on the Capezio is basically a small rope. This makes sitting down for any length of time miserable for me (broke my tailbone when I was 10).
2. Holy Elastic, Batman
I now have two black dance belts and two tan ones. Both of the tan ones are apparently possessed by angry pythons. Is tan elastic inherently stronger than black?
I do suspect that dance belts are manufactured under the assumption that you’ll wear them until they literally fall apart, and that the manufacturers accordingly make the elastics a bit stronger than they need to be, lest we injure ourselves down the road.
3. But Nothing Moves!
If anything, the BW M006 is even more secure than the Capezio whatever (sidebar: why can’t Capezio use less bizarre model numbers?).
4. Sweat
I’m not that certain which of these dries faster. That said, the fact that there’s not a random panel of some different fabric in the middle of the BW M006’s waistband is good by me.
Overall, I’m really quite happy with this thing. I think, given the construction, I will also try the M007, even though (GASP!) the waistband is only 2″. Maybe I’ll be able to convince Denis to try it, too.
Anyway, that’s it for now.
Gotta jeté! (Okay, that was terrible.)
I’ve been trying to sort out the unique flavor of my feeling of anticipation about my upcoming trapeze performance, and I think I’ve finally sorted it.
I was surprised by this sense that I don’t want the next few days to slip away too fast — I’m not prone to stage fright. Rather the opposite, in fact: I’m essentially a giant show-off by nature, but shy around strangers in small groups. Give me a stage or a podium, and I’m good.
So why, I kept wondering, is my anticipation not the unadulterated OMG OMG I am going to explode if Saturday doesn’t get here soon! of my childhood?
And then I got it: this is the feeling of knowing that it will be over as soon as it begins. We get one night: for me, 2 minutes and 30 seconds. It will be amazing — and then it will be over. It would be easy to get so caught up in eager anticipation that I actually don’t experience the actual thing, let alone this whole week.
I don’t want to get caught up in the anticipation of this singular moment in the future — our first-ever trapeze performance — and miss now.
Right now, my summer looks a little like a running start off a cliff into a wild, exhilarating wingsuit flight. It would be easy to miss the whole thing if I let my monkey mind run away with me. Anticipation has its merits, but it can definitely take the but in its teeth and run.
So I’m going to work on being present for the next few days. Really, I guess, that’s work we should be doing always — but some moments make better examples than others of why that is.
Shamelessly stolen from Hendy Mp/Solent News via The Telegraph.
So, in short: here is good. And I’m going to try to be here, now.
…By which I don’t mean taking a certain band to the gym 😉
I think it’s fair to say that I’ve done a bunch of injuring myself in the past two years.
I think it’s also fair to say that I’m getting better at managing injuries and recovering from them — at reasonable share of which is learning, through trial and error, what “rest” means in relationship to various injuries if you’re a dancer and/or an aerialist (and, for that matter, what “rest” means in general as someone that my physiotherapist spouse defines as “an extreme athlete” — read, if you’re a serious dancer or aerialist, that’s you! Hi!).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, I’ve found myself doing a fair bit of reflection on why I’m injuring all the things and how I might, you know, stop that. (Or at least mostly stop.)
I’ve concluded that there are three major components:
Let’s start with Point the Third: Learning When to Say “When.”
Like most dancers, I take pride in my ability to listen to my body in certain regards.
I know when I’m hungry, and I know when I’m full. I know when I should eat all the salty pommes frites and when I shouldn’t. I know when I need a freaking salad. I know that I should not have more than one beer when I have class the next day (so, basically, ever; we’ll address that under the heading of REST).
I more or less know when I’m really freaking tired and should just Go the F**k to Sleep (hint: I realize that I’m acting like a poorly-socialized two-year-old; shortly thereafter, I put my cranky behind to bed).
I know … okay, I almost know … how to not spend all my money on dance and aerials (I really did need that fourth dance belt; there might not be even one laundromat in Cincinnati, and more importantly, I might be too tired to bother! Also, it is totally important to have twenty pairs of tights and three pairs of ballet shoes and special socks that you basically only use for modern class and … okay, maybe I’m not that great at this one yet).
But when it comes to classes, I’m not great at knowing when I just plain need to STAHP.
Or, at least, I wasn’t.
Recently, I’ve tried a slow-and-steady approach to getting back into class after an injury. Amazingly, just as every physiotehrapist and exercise scientist and coach and trainer and ballet instructor on earth would’ve predicted, it worked!
I didn’t completely forget how to dance. My legs did not fall off. I did not lose my single knee-hang on both sides (though I’m still working back into it on the left, because when you basically completely disengage your adductors for a couple weeks, they detrain pretty fast).
I’m now working out the series of kinks (not injuries so much as low-level irritations) that I accumulated while compensating for my most recent injury: weirdness in my back; knee and calf fatigue on the opposite side. My right calf was a wee bit sore by the time we finished petit allegro on Wednesday, but not so much that it felt like I should skip grand allegro. I rolled the dice and it worked out, but I’ll probably need to think carefully about that tomorrow, too.
And every other day, for the rest of my life.
Okay. So that covers the whole “know when to say when” thing. On to Point the Second: Balance.
While this isn’t quite how things work in the real world, it’s usually more or less functionally accurate to acknowledge that when you increase strength, you reduce flexibility.
This is a problem for normal people, but it’s a huge problem for hypermobile people.
In short, if you don’t pay attention to muscle balance when you train and/or you don’t stretch adequately (or you overstretch, or — worst of all, if you do some of each), you can throw your whole body out of whack.
That goes double if your body isn’t strung together very securely in the first place (that is, if you’re hypermobile).
I would like to show you a picture.
Here:
Top Row: Janie, Me. Bottom Row: Amy, Courtney. Both Rows: COMPLETELY FREAKING AWESOME. Also, I am astoundingly modest today, amirite?
On the face of it, this just looks like a really cool acro-balancing pile (and, for the most part, that’s completely accurate).
However, ballet wonks will notice that my eyes say Armand (from La Dame Aux Camélias) while my hands say OMG DON QUIXOTE!!!!!1!!oneone
Which is what they say ALL. THE. TIME. unless I pay a ton of attention to what I’m doing with them.
I hear about this in essentially every class ever, unless I pay a ton of attention to what I’m doing with them.
All this is more or less the result of muscle imbalance. I don’t always stretch adequately after aerials classes, nor do I do much to counteract the effects of working on aerial apparati in terms of strength balance — so unless I think very hard about making my hands soft and graceful, they do this*.
*Okay, it might also partly be a personality trait: as a dancer, I tend to operate in one of two default modes — I have no idea what I’m doing right now or I am such a cocky little badass, depending. The fact that it was specifically the Russian dance in Nutcracker that made me want to take up ballet probably tells you essentially everything you need to know.
Anyway, until I started being really conscious about stretching my hands after trapeze, silks, lyra, and mixed apparatus, this was making my hands hurt, because things were pulling on other things in unbalanced ways.
The whole disaster with my pelvis started more or less the same way. I neglected to train the bottom third of my abdominal muscles, and things pulled other things out of whack — and since my connective tissue is unusually stretchy, they got really, really out of whack.
So, in short, things that train strength need to be balanced with things that train flexibility and vice-versa. Likewise, when you train the crap out of your adductors, you should also do some work on your abductors. And so on.
And, of course, training needs to be balanced with every dancer’s favorite four-letter word:
Point the First: REST.
The process of getting stronger is essentially one of creating tiny tears in your muscles, then letting them heal.
Guess what makes them heal?
REST.
Likewise, the process of accumulating explicit knowledge requires rest. A great deal of memory consolidation, as far as we can tell, takes place during sleep.
Also, the brain itself gets tired. The brain needs rest, too (and not just sleep: sometimes the brain just needs to, like, kick back and sit on its cerebral porch and watch the world go by).
And ballet, modern dance, and aerials need the brain.
Moreover, all kinds of injury-preventive functions, from equilibrium to coordination to proprioception to decision making, are compromised by fatigue and sleep-deprivation.
You know what one weird trick combats fatigue and sleep-deprivation?
Say it with me:
REST.
(Also, sleep.)
I also need a fair amount of rest when it comes to that whole Being Around Humans thing.
I am very much an introvert in the sense that I recharge by being alone: like, really alone. Like, “Don’t bust up in my kitchen on one of my designated Leave Me Alone days and start chatting with me and expect me to be anything other than a complete b1tch” alone.
So, basically, I’ve done a piss-poor job giving myself adequate rest. Even on the days that are supposed to be my days off, for the past several weeks, I’ve had to go out and get things done and be among humans, which has more or less literally been making me insane (seriously, sobbing-on-the-floor-in-the-kitchen-at-9-PM-on-Monday, snapping-at-my-best-friends-for-no-reason insane).
So, yeah. That’s part of injury prevention for me, too: first, because I get really, really tense, which makes the tight muscles tighter and increases the likelihood of strains and so forth; second, because I have enough trouble sleeping without being, as my old roommate used to say, “outside my mind;” third, because it keeps me from eating people’s faces, which is definitely a kind of injury, just more for them than for me. Heh.
So here’s another picture:
Remember the Sabbath day and keep it whole-ly, even if you have to move it to Sunday because you have a Cube Workshop on Saturday afternoon. Also, sorry it’s fuzzy.
Please notice the dark circles under my eyes. They are what happens when I don’t sleep (also when my allergies are going crazy).
Please notice also the bold text and giant circle around it, reminding me that:
THIS REST CRAP IS IMPORTANT.
So, basically, I’ll be scheduling my rest days much more strictly (and, it appears, emphatically) in the future. I’ve also opted for one less-physically-demanding class on Tuesday and Thursday at the Cinci intensive in order to build in a little more rest.
I don’t know about you, but my long-term goal is to to be (as my trapeze instructor is) completely, mind-bendingly awesome at trapeze when I’m 50; to still be dancing when I’m 90.
It would also be great if my legs don’t fall off long before I reach either of those milestones, because I’ve got a pretty long way to go, frankly.
Paying attention to moderation, balance, and REST are probably the keys, really, to making that happen.
So that’s what I’m going to do, even if it kills me.
…Wait, no that’s not quite what I’m going for. In fact, to some extent, that’s what I’m trying to avoid.
Let’s try this again:
So that’s what I’m going to do, so all this doesn’t kill me.
Edit: Lastly, a very short clip of the juggling-while-Rola-Bola-ing bit,complete with juggling-club videobomb 😀 This was before I figured out I could plié on the Rola-Bola, pick up the balls, and start juggling without falling off.
Tonight, I hopped on a Rola-Bola for the second time in my life.
And then I learned to juggle on it.
While dancing.
BTW, I can only juggle three balls, but it looks way cooler when you’re simultaneously Rola-Bola-ing.
Then our dexterity instructor paused and told me, “If there was a hat on the ground, I would totally put money in it.”
Totally going to have to perfect this and use it to avoid ever getting a job entertain my friends 😀
We snagged a little bit of video of it; I can’t wait to see it. Going to have to work on this one and get moar video!
Oh, and also awesome things happened in lyra and acro-balancing. A classmate snagged some great pix, so I’ll try to remember to repost them here.
…Literally.
This afternoon, we all walked out of class looking like we’d showered in our dance kit.
It was completely worth it, of course — especially the delightful little grand allegro at the end.
It was another simple combination (the petit allegri were hard today; crazy fast and full of beats) — just:
Small Temps levée à droit
Chassé
Small Temps levée à gauche
Chassé
Temps levée arabesque
Failli
Glissade
Grand assemblé battu or Pas de chat or Saut de chat (“Choose Your Own Adventure”)
Reverse R/L on the opposite side, of course.
… But the focus was on the performance elements — especially arms and épaulement. The idea was for the legs to stay razor-sharp and fast while the arms were light and smooth and graceful, using a variant of Ceccheti/RAD third through first on the first four steps.
Oh, and we were to do all this whilst eating up the entire floor in one pass (not hard to do in this case; I really like to travel).
The music was also quite fast, which made for a really nice contrast between the quick legwork throughout most of the combination and the flying leap at the end.
We went in pairs, and on every run my partner did saut de chat while I did pas de chat which, as it turned out, looked quite cool. Pas de chat is one of the steps that I’m willing to say that I really do very well, and my partner’s high, fleet, linear saut de chat contrasted beautifully with my high, light, bouyant pas de chat.
It probably helped that we were similar in height and proportions.
I experimented with different arms on the pas de chat. I think for this combination, taking the arms to fifth and opening back to second through the latter part of the arc worked really nicely.
Anyway, by the time we were done, I think we were all well and fully cooked and ready for a break.
For what it’s worth, my turns were better, but my adagio was terrible today. This was definitely a class in which I felt the lingering effects of my sleeping pill. I got progressively better as the hangover effect faded — I am definitely far less coordinated on mornings like this one.
In other news, I switched to the day track for the Cinci workshop — it turns out that they were probably going to wind up canceling the evening track anyway. I’ve been very impressed with how well Mam Luft & Co have organized this thing and how promptly and smoothly they handled my request.
In trapeze class, meanwhile, I nailed down Montréal and learned a new sequence that starts with Montréal, then passes into Surfer, then into a balance whose name I can’t recall (looks much like the stag pose, only your feet are on the bar, which cants up towards the front foot), then into a hands-only spin around the leading rope to horse.
I also learned that if, as you’re spinning, your hands start to burn, you should definitely not relax your grip, no matter what your brain says, unless you’re keen on — shall we say — trying a higher voice part in choir (ahem).
Apparently, the moment that the bar connects with your “no fly zone” is also clearly visible to everyone in a the immediate vicinity. I feel heartened by the fact that everyone winced right along with me, though — and that, apparently, everything looked really good up to that point.
Also, it is totally possible to semi-gracefully dismount the trapeze before staggering over to the nearest available spot suitable for collapsing. In case you were wondering.
Fortunately, no permanent harm was done. Add to with “Bodies are weird” and “Bodies are different” the aphorism, “Sooner or later, we all walk the walk of shame.”
Which is, in case you’re wondering, more like a pinched shuffle, really.
YouTube: BOSU Balance Series
danseur ignoble 