Future Updates

If you were an avid follower of my blog, it may have come to your attention that I haven't been posting a lot this summer.  I have been slowly progressing my internet presence as a circus artist from a blog to an official website, Facebook page, and now a new newsletter.  As I see it now, and for the more immediate future, I will not be posting any more updates to this blog.  Instead, if you wish to keep up with my activities in the circus world, you have the following options open to you:

1. Bookmark my official website at http://www.trevorkafka.com/
2. Like my official Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/circus.trev
3. Subscribe to my weekly email newsletter here: http://tinyurl.com/TK-newsletter

I am not going to guarantee that this blog is shut down for good, but for at least now through the remainder of the fall, there will likely be very few if any more updates.  

Thanks to all of you who have been avid followers of this blog detailing my journeys through the ProTrack program at the New England Center for Circus Arts.

Warm regards,

Trevor Kafka

June Update

Well, it's so far been about a month since the last shows of ProTrack and I currently find myself safe at home in Chappaqua, NY.

The week after the last of the shows, I stayed in Brattleboro for an extra week to continue training (hey, my rent and Members Only was already paid for! :P).  I also had a private lesson with Serenity that I rescheduled because my sinuses started to act up between the two weekends of shows.  She helped to lead me in the direction how to further modify my trapeze act for the future.

The week after, I came back to Chappaqua and first and foremost spent some time with many of my friends who I, for the most part, haven't seen since the holiday break I had in December.  I trained at World Cup a few of those days as well.  It's been particularly nice to have some training time where I'm not concentrating on my single point trapeze major or floor acrobatics minor to get some long-needed time with aerial fabric.

I've also been able to manage an agreement with World Cup Gymnastics so that I can teach private lessons there during the one hour timeslot that I've otherwise been able to use to train.  So far, this has been slow, as the hardest thing at this point is getting the word out that I am teaching lessons.  However, once I get a solid clientele, I am sure that this will become something worth it in the end.  You can find out more information about the private and semiprivate lessons I teach at http:///www.trevorkafka.com/instructor.html.

For the two weeks after, I went on vacation in Grand Cayman with my parents, which was exceedingly nice.  There was a lot of SCUBA diving, snorkeling, ocean fun, and island exploring.  Not much occurred during this time that was circus related, so not much elaboration will go on with respect to this subject (except for the fact that I kept having cravings to want to do aerials over the ocean, which I'm sure will one day become a reality -- it just seems like just a wonderful thing to do as well as behold).

This past week I had two students sign up for a semiprivate lesson, but shortly thereafter had cancelled.  They were both students I had not known prior, so I was eager to hope to spread the word to others, but that's just life I guess.  Regardless, we keep on trucking.

The end of ProTrack

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.

Appearance in the Brattleboro Reformer!

The Brattleboro Reformer came in during our first dress rehearsal of Circus Clockwork, our end-of-year ProTrack graduation shows and made a video piece of us that was featured on their home page for a couple days now (www.reformer.com).

My somewhat horridly bent leg while going from the shoulderstand into the catscratch is a little bit of a thorn in my side, but my upper leg got a teeney bit caught on the wrong side of the other rope that time, so I was a little more concerned about getting that out over straightening my leg completely. Now I'm always going to remember to always turn out the back leg! :P


Also, the shows so far have gone pretty well.  

We've done three this past weekend and we are performing another three this upcoming weekend.  I'll save my more detailed experiences for until after we've finished them all. :P

Single Point Trapeze preview video

Here's a little preview video I put together of my Single Point Trapeze act I'm performing as a part of Circus Clockwork, the ProTrack graduation show at the New England Center for Circus Arts.  Tickets can be purchased through the NECCA site.  Our first show is May 14!

The final stretch*

*No, not for flexibility.

Yes, we're already powering through May.  It's hard to grasp the fact that it's already the fourth of the month.  Since my last post, I've managed to get a lot done, but there's still a lot left to do.

Computer-generated costume
prototype.

My costume has so far been progressing wonderfully.  As you may recall, my original vision for my single point trapeze costume was something like the picture to the right.  I got my unitard a couple weeks ago, and began to create plastic stencils to help me paint on the pattern with fabric paint along with cardboard inserts which would stretch the unitard in a manner that would match my own body (this is where I was a true nerd... for the cardboard insert of my torso, I measured horizontal diameters with distances relative to my belly button (above my belly button was a positive value, and below was a negative) and halved those values to come up with the widths for various heights for the inert...pretty snazzy huh? :P).  Because this process is a little better shown than told, below are a bunch of pictures outlining the creation process.  Once the paint dried, I heat-set it in by using an iron.  I'm additionally having my friend, T, dye in some darker red so it's no longer a solid red color, as well as modifying the feet, so that there is a hole for the heel and a hole at the top of the foot, for toe hangs and heel hangs.  I also got suggestions from coaches during the costume parade that I modify the neck to be a bit lower.  I concur with that idea, and will most certainly make neck hangs a lot more comfy since the zipper hopefully won't interfere there.

Performances, forearms, rejections, directors week, May show theme, AND costumes & makeup!!! *phwhew!*

So yeah...as the title probably suggests, things have already started to get a bit hectic around here.  As we approach approximately one month until the end-of-year ProTrack shows here at NECCA, there is a whole lot of stuff that has been going on.  I've been meaning to write a blog post for a while, but I've been so darn distracted by everything lately that I haven't been able to find a time where I could sit down and comfortably write a blog post.  Well, anyway, here I am, figuring that I might as well write a new one before there ends up being too many topics to talk about.  Since it's been a little while (actually, it's frequently a little while, which is why my blog posts often tend to be so huge), this is really a six-in-one of normal sized blog posts blog post, conveniently structured in concordance with the title!   Yay!  Here we go:

1. Performances
On March 26 and 27, I had the wonderful opportunities to perform at both Brandeis University as a part of their Relay for Life in Waltham, MA and the Bindlestiff Cavalcade of Youth at Cony Island, NY.  I spent the week beforehand preparing a 4.5 minute single point trapeze act, which wasn't necessarily intended to be related in terms of style to my final single point trapeze piece for the end of the year at ProTrack.  I ultimately found the decision of having two separate single point trapeze acts beneficial for two reasons: 1. I'll now be able to use both of the songs I was debating over for my major (I used "You Don't Know Me" by Apparat for these performances, whereas I'm going to be using "Mission" by Beats Antique for my final performances at ProTrack).  2. It enables me to be able to sell both a static-height and dynamic-height act.  Initially, when I was considering the technical details of my major, I thought it would be best to make an act that didn't utilize the pulley system (which can raise and lower the apparatus) for sake of it'd be easier to sell and accommodate to more performance spaces.  Now that I have an a presentable act that is for static height single point trapeze, I feel much more free to work to my heart's content with the pulley system they have at NECCA, which has been great so far!

The performance at Brandeis was set up by one of my camp friends' mom, Marci Diamond, who is also a graduate of the university (as a sidenote, for those of you who don't already know, this is also the college I'm planning on going to after ProTrack starting January 2012).  I was performing with her, her daughter, Marisa, my two camp friend Llama and Doug, and another performer who has been training at NECCA some, Rocco.  We set up an aerial rig, put together an intro and finale in about five minutes, and each performed our pieces.  It was a lot of fun to perform and see my friends, and definitely nice to see how much everyone had improved.

The Bindlestiff Cavalcade of Youth performance is a simple sign-up-and-go one-time performance.  I figured it'd be a fun thing to do, not to mention a good start to beefing up the performance section of my résumé.  It was a fun performance.  There were some people from Smirkus camp that I recognized there, but nobody I really knew knew.  Regardless, below is a combo video of the two performances:

Auditions for L'École de Cirque de Québec

So, as probably quite a few of my Facebook friends already know, late Thursday through Friday I was in Québec, Québec with three of my friends from NECCA (one also from ProTrack (Morgan), and two from the Intensive program (T and Kirby)) for the L'École de Cirque de Québec auditions (in the rest of this post, L'École de Cirque de Québec is to be mentioned as ÉCQ, which is not to be confused with ÉNC, which is L'École Nationale de Cirque in Montréal, Québec).

Anyway, first and foremost, there was a lot of French, and like my 11th grade class trip to Spain, it made me really disappreciate the way that foreign languages were taught in high school.  Anyway, about said Canadian journey:

We left by car Thursday afternoon after a somewhat intense day at ProTrack.  The most ridiculous part about that training day was that during conditioning they had us do an ungodly number of frog jumps.  I literally got to the point where my muscles were simply giving out on me and I could barely just get myself even a foot off of the ground.  Afterwards, when I'd try to squat, my legs would completely buckle.  It'd felt like gravity decided to double every time I'd bend my knees.  While it was overall very fascinating from a physiological standpoint, it wasn't exactly the ideal state to be in the day before of a big audition.  Regardless, what is done is done, and I managed to go through the entire audition with absolutely ridiculously sore quadriceps.  Fortunately, I don't think it ended up affecting what they saw of me very much.

Anyway, the car ride was six hours each way, with the US-Canadian border to divide the ride in half.  It was a long ride, yet still very manageable thanks to being in a car with three absolutely wonderful people.  It pretty much rained/drizzled a good part of going up there (what else is new) but wasn't to the extent as to pose an impediment to our travels.

Progress - slowly but surely

Well, let's just say it's been a pretty crazy past couple of weeks.  Even just last week I recall myself having pretty much yet another mental breakdown about the whole circus doo da.  It's been happening to a lot of us at ProTrack at varying intensities.  These past two weeks, we've had presentations for both our major and our minor (one each Friday), and the development process for both was just incredibly stressful (particularly so emotionally).  For both, I just struggled with being satisfied with what I created.  I've really been trying to keep my expectations set high, because as a result of this training program I want to leave with an incredibly broadened, advanced skill set, yet at the same time it just makes it difficult when a lot of your role-models are ÉNC graduates and world-renowned professional circus performers.  Sometimes things that originally seemed inspiring can ultimately turn into something incredibly demoting.  During preparation for both of these presentations, I sent myself into a somewhat of a mental oblivion, for every time I would videotape myself doing a skill or sequence of skills, it would never be up to the standards that I had set up for myself.  My standards for myself are somewhat inordinately high, and I also feel like similarly for all of us, our standards increase as our skill level increases, always being one step ahead of our current abilities.  Once you finally master a trick, it no longer seems quite as impressive to you, and it's sometimes easy to forget the power a trick can have to just the typical bystander.  I was pretty aware of this anyways, but at the same time, it was still difficult to work through.  Regardless, both of my presentations came out satisfactory.  I still don't think they were spectacular, but for the purpose that they served I thought they were satisfactory.  I additionally got some nice feedback on both as a part of our peer-critiqueing process.

For my major act, I put together a bunch of tricks I had been working on, switched the song up, and experimented a bit with adding in a bit of floor movement.  A video is below.

An overdue update

It's honestly been two months since I've provided a worthwhile blog update, and to be quite frank, it most simply comes down to me being a bit lazy.  So, let me give you guys a rundown on the key things that have happened since I wrote in early November about how we were entering a new phase of ProTrack (i.e. - once we started show preparation).  I'm also including two videos in this post, so be sure to click the see more link if you're interested in watching them.

November 2010 - December 2010: Preparation for the winter show ("The Flying Nut: A Starry Night")

ProTrack got broken down into four groups, as decided by the staff.  The winter show is entirely staff directed, so all we basically are doing is performing in a show that fits the artistic vision of our coaches.  It's definitely a good experience for us to have, since things like that happen all the time when producing any sort of performance.  I got cast for the rope group (representing the element of earth) along with three others.  The other four groups were trapeze (representing the element of air), partner acrobatics/dance (representing the element of fire), and hoop diving (representing the element of water).

In November, we began our show preparation on Tuesday and Thursday mornings by training for an hour with our act for the show, and continuing as normal with the other hour in our general skill development rotations.  As we progressed into December, we would spend two hours each of those mornings working on the winter show, and, if I recall correctly, we also began to use Friday mornings for purposes of show preparation as well.