Yep, it's finally over. We had the last of our shows on Saturday, May 21, then a cast and family and friends picnic at Serenity and Bill's the day after, and then almost before you could believe it was true, people started leaving back for home. The shows, by the way, went pretty spectacular. It seemed to be a consistent trend among the shows as well as among the cast members that the evening shows went better than the matinee shows. My initial thoughts would be that this would be when we'd be more tired and thus be when we pay less attention to detail, but I was proved wrong. My parents came to the last two shows, as well as many others who I knew, both circus folk and not, came to see me during those shows as well. The evening show on Friday, May 20, two of my great friends from high school (also identical twins), Rebecca and Sarah, came to see me perform. Finally I got an opportunity to perform for some of my Greeley friends. It was very nice to have them there.
It was pretty sad to have to see everyone go, but with the smallness of the circus world, we'll all undoubtedly see each other again, but probably never completely as a ProTrack group. Regardless, life must go on, duties must be fulfilled, and dreams must be pursued.
There unfortunately were a couple people who had gotten injured during the time leading up to the show (likely due to people wanting to push themselves really hard before the shows start). As a result, three people were forced to not perform their majors and Marshall actually managed to injure their wrist bad enough during the first weekend of performances that he couldn't perform either his major or minor during the second week of performances. During the last show, however, he managed to perform anyway by doing an improv dance piece to his trapeze music on the floor. It was most honestly one of the most beautiful and inspirational things I"v ever seen. There were themes from his trapeze act that he translated to the floor, and not to mention the three back tucks in a row he performed. Simply inspiring. He spent time during some of the other shows' transitions prancing around with a rhythmic gymnastics ribbon, which I thought was pretty great.
Anyway, if you are interested in viewing videos of my major and minor, you can view videos in my newly revamped Performer section of my website (
http://www.trevorkafka.com/performer.html). My major is listed as "Single Point Trapeze (dynamic height)" (meaning that I use a pulley system to adjust the bar height while I'm performing) and my minor is listed as Floor Acrobatics. So far, I only have the preview video of my major, but I did get a professional videoshoot of the performance between the two weekends of shows which I'll be able to get online sometime during this summer. My minor's video wasn't my best runthrough in that things didn't go quite as I had planned, but overall it still managed to be somewhat clean. The video that's up is of footage that I have as of now, but I might end up swapping it out with a better runthrough once I have more footage to put up.