My cardio at this point, and by my judgement, is absolutely wonderful. It has progressed much farther than I could have imagined it could have in just two months. If I knew that you could build up cardio this time efficiently, maybe I would have tried harder at it in the past. It's definitely something that's going to stick in the back of my mind as I continue my pursuit of physical fitness beyond ProTrack. My strength is definitely increasing as well. I've particularly noticed improvement in my abs, which now are such powerhouses. It's such a great and reassuring feeling to be able to have incredible control over your body when you're in the air. I unfortunately can't really say the same thing about my flexibility. That's been a real toughie for me. It's been a bit of a struggle for me in this respect, because, particularly for the disciplines which interest me most, flexibility can greatly increase one's aerial vocabulary by adding a whole new dimension to shapes possible by the human body. I've been trying hard and consistently to stretch but improvement is very slow. At least I can say that I'm not losing flexibility since I started in September. I do know, however, that a lot of this is due to muscle tightening (and not as in the tightness of the material that they're made of, but rather active muscle tightening that's not necessarily in my conscious control). When I do PNF stretching (if you recall from one of my earlier posts, is when you resist against the stretch for about 20 seconds during the stretch to fatigue the muscles) I do end up sinking a lot deeper into the stretch, so every morning it's just a matter of forcing the muscles to loosen themselves again. It's frustrating, but I have confidence in its eventual improvement.
Anyway, last week was week 8, where we continued our rotations of Spanish web, duo trapeze, Chinese pole, and wire on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. On Friday we had some more presentations (HW 5) in which we had to perform a single trick in a cirque style. I did my slow double stardrop to Björk's song "Komið" (Komid). I somewhat had Isabelle Chassé's fabric act int he back of my head when I was thinking of what to do, as well as the stereotypical qualities of what makes a performance "cirquey." (Do note, though, that the intention of this assignment wasn't necessarily to create an act in a style that would appear in a Cirque du Soleil show, since in reality their shows transcend a wide variety of performance styles, but rather to do a performance in a stereotypical cirque style. I.e. - the style that you'd perform something if you were hired for a gig and were asked to perform in a cirque style. People less familiar with circus performance will use the word cirque loosely, to refer to the creature-like, dramatic, vocal, and emotionally powerful performance style.). It was definitely tons of fun to watch everyone else's tricks, as well as what they interpreted to be the cirque style.
This week we started off on Tuesday with a choice day. We still had two one-hour rotations, but we chose beforehand what we wanted to do. My chosen stations were aerial chains and single point trapeze. Both ended up being a complete blast. Aerial chains actually wasn't as painful as I was anticipating, since I wore many layers of clothing, timberland boots, and bike gloves. It was a lot of fun, and definitely an experience worth having. I'm definitely going to try it out at least once more (probably in a private lesson in December) and we'll see where it goes from there. It's definitely a lot more limited than fabric, as you're not going to want to do drops that fling the tail around everywhere as well as some tricks are made harder by the weight of the chain, while things like footknots are made easier by the high friction (Which, on chains, are in fact just a double wrap around the leg. That ends up being all necessary to hold your weight). I have a few clips of me doing some tricks on the chains below:
I had a half-hour German wheel private with Zeb in the afternoon of that day too, which ended up being amazing. I tried out German wheel a little bit at the AYCO (American Youth Circus Organization) conference last summer, but that really just freaked me out a lot (likely mostly because we had to do it over concrete, and I did end up falling once and bruising my knee pretty badly), but this time it was done over tiled floor, which I guess isn't quite as bad. I also got to get more of a sense of how slowly the wheel actually moves because of it's higher-than-what-I-originally-thought moment of inertia. Slower means a little more time to think...which for me, as a person who gets totally freaked out at movement like this that is not in my complete control, is very good. I'm excited to work on it a bit more in members only sometime soon.
Tomorrow (Thursday) and the day after (Friday), we're getting a combined 9 hours of physical theater workshop with a guest instructor, Kali. I've heard she's a really good instructor. I'm not quite sure what to expect for such a long workshop (two chunks of three hours on Thursday and three hours on Friday), but I'm hoping it'll be filled with tons of laughs.
Also, we got casted for our winter show yesterday! The show is going to be a similar thing it was last year (to be named "The Flying Nut: A Starry Night") and is going to basically be a Nutcracker inspired circus show of sorts. The show includes ProTrack, Intensive, the Advanced Youth Troupe, as well as a few others, I think. ProTrack is performing four acts in the show (representing the four elements). I, along with three others, got cast for rope (being ground...something pertaining to bugs and crawling through the underground world...I'm not really too sure on the details yet, but I'll let you guys know when I do). The other acts are hoop diving (water...fish, etc.), trapeze (air...birds and such), and acrobatics/dance (fire). I'm really liking the idea of creating acts to represent the four elements. I think this should be a very interesting show indeed. We start work on this next week (Week 10) for an hour on Tuesday and an hour on Thursday (they'll basically take up one of the rotation blocks on each day). We'll still be doing general skill development during the remaining time on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well as the combined hour and a half of conditioning and hour and a half of physical theater on Fridays. I believe this sort of schedule lasts until Week 14, after which we'll be devoting even more time to putting together the show. (just as a sidenote: in case you didn't notice, the show dates and times are listed on the sidebar to the left, and tickets are purchasable through the NECCA website: http://necenterforcircusarts.org/showsevents/show/)
They said to us that a main intention of the show is to give us experience with being part of a show whose vision and details are up to the people "hiring" us (i.e. - the coaches and staff here at NECCA), while the show at the end of the year is where we'll be able to create things of our own. It's definitely something different for me, as the latter is what we used to do all the time at Smirkus Camp. It should be fun, I am hoping.
Well that's pretty much all there is for now. Everything otherwise regarding life here in Vermont is going wonderfully.
Trevor
Trevor: Why are you so amazing? :)
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I'm seriously considering coming to one of the winter shows... probably the 19th, if I can. I'll let you know what happens, but yep. Be warned.