Creation Realizations: Contortion & Aerial Flexibility (Patreon)

Greetings, my strange and wonderful patrons!

I was going back and forth on the train from Toronto to Montréal a whole bunch last week in preparation for the indie movie I'm working on later this month back in Ontario. I had a couple days of fight building and rehearsals, talking to the wardrobe department, and then zipped back to Montréal to squeeze in a couple more straps lessons with my coach before going back to Toronto again for one more week of fight rehearsals before the project goes to camera.

I can't tell you what the project is, but I am gonna trust you all to keep this (non-spoiler-y anyways, but still) little GIF from those fight build/rehearsal days to ourselves ;) . . . . SUPERMAN PUUUUUUNCH !!! 

This unreasonably handsome stunt performer opposite me is Moses Nyarko, and thanks to camera angles and fight choreo tricks, I didn't come even remotely close to actually hitting him. Because it's a super low angle, I actually had to aim at his left collarbone to 'sell' this hit.  MOVIE MAGIC! COOL!

I've learned that this little endeavour will be filming in (gulp) North Bay, ON. I'll admit, dear patrons, I was less than enthused about this development. I was initially told this project would film in the bustling metropolis that is Toronto, whereas North Bay is a former Cold-War-airforce outpost on the north shore of Lake Nippissing that has exactly zero circus training spaces (but possibly the entirety of Canada's blackfly population*) (*this could be hyperbole) (....maybe).

Subsequently, I will be shortly begging/bribing/pleading with the one local Crossfit gym I found there on Google Maps to let me hang my straps there on off-camera days so that they last couple months of work I've put in with my coach doesn't go down the train. Or, if there are longer gaps in my filming schedule (as in, a week or something where they don't use me), I might rent a car and drive the 5.5 hours from North Bay, ON to Montreal, QC for some kind of maintenance training with my coach. Definitely not ideal in the "stay on track for act creation & technique progress" department...!

But, as my friend Demetria McKinney (Anacostia from Motherland: Fort Salem!) likes to remind me when these particular crunches happen, this is probably what we can refer to as a "champagne problem". (As in, Oh no, two awesome things that exist in difficult relation to each other; it's gonna be hard to make both of these cool things happen!)

My time on the train (a 5 to 6 hour ride each way, depending on your luck with delays) means that I've had lots of time to reflect on what's been going well in my artistic research, what the 'sticky spots' feel like, and why those 'sticky spots' feel sticky.

These realizations have kind of clustered around a few topics:
- flexibility and contortion;
- environment and external influence; and
- (that old chestnut...) technical skill.

I thought I'd share a few of the contortion-related ones with you today.
So, in no particular order, I've realized that:

I was holding onto some mistaken idea that my contortion skills on the ground might easily translate to the air 'if I just worked hard enough'.

Spoiler: they don't. 

For my newer patrons, to offer some brief context, Mongolian contortion is the main training discipline I focused almost all of my efforts on in the first 5 years of training circus. Most of the professional performing opportunities I've had both locally and abroad have been for my contortion acts, solo, or duo (with Troy James). A lot of my identity as a circus artist is wrapped up in complicated ways with being a contortionist (former contortionist? Do I put it that way, now? Is it time for that? Oh god...), and with displays of flexibility.

My time over the past month in studio has covered varied ground in terms of my research: I've been playing with different music, dance styles, character work, etc. I also explicitly set out to see what kind of 'flexible shapes' I could find, since much of the work I'm doing currently with my coach is pretty traditional straps technique (switches, tempos, spins, etc).

I had about 20 hours in-studio in the latter-half of June. At least 10 of those hours were spent in some state of curiosity-slowly-melting-into-frustration that the levels of contortion-flexibility in terms of backbending / spinal extension that I have on the ground weren't going to just magically 'click' on my straps once I found the right grip, the right shoulder position, the right entry, the right transition into the shape.

Argh!  How am I supposed to show contrast in movement styles like this? the thought process would go.  If I'm building up all this technical vocabulary but I don't have ridiculously bendy levels of artistic vocabulary to juxtapose with it, I'm failing!

My brain also often provided me with many other (unkind) excuses:
It's because you don't practice contortion for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week anymore.
You're just not as flexible any more.
Maybe you're just not good at anything*.

(* at which point I sometimes catch the ridiculousness of my inner monologue, give my head a shake, and try to return to the task at hand).

That's not the only contortion-related realization I've been having, though.

Reviewing act footage of other artists on YouTube and Instagram, as well as the stuff I was working on in my own studio sessions,  very unexpected perspective began seeping through. When I stepped back and look at so-called 'contortion aerial acts', I realized that the range of movement exhibited in these acts rarely created an emotional response in me, nor did the flexibility 'tricks' or displays of high-flexibility positions and transitions "wow" me enough as a viewer in a way that felt commensurate to the difficult I know it takes to be that bendy in the air.

If this is how I feel watching bendy bodies in the air, does that mean that I've actually been chasing a rabbit I'm not particularly interested in catching when it comes to the aerial-contortion research I've been doing in the studio recently? I pondered.

This is a very weird thing to find myself thinking.

There are very few exceptions to this that I can think of at the moment. One of them is a Bridie Hooper, an amazing Australian circus artist that I had the privilege of seeing in a CIRCA production that came to Toronto years ago. Bridie's range of motion / flexibility is impressive; she does 'classic' straps technique (like switches) in very bendy-looking positions, but the thing that stands out most to me in my memory of watching her perform is how dynamically she moved through her (extreme) ranges of movement.

Another exception would be an artist here in Montréal named Alex Paviost who has been a wonderful contortion-training-accountability buddy* for me this summer. Alex is an accomplished contortionist, but they also have an aerial loops act (there's not much of it online, if you've gone and tried to search it; Alex is keeping a lot of it pretty close to the vest for the time being).

(*In the midst of my self-applied pressure to go go go! with aerial straps training and Barbette grant work, it would be easy to let contortion training fall completely to the wayside. Instead, Alex let's me join them at the 7 Fingers studios downtown in the mornings; we stretch for a couple hours; I go on with my day with slightly reduced anxiety that all my hard-earned flexibility training of the last half-decade isn't slowly trickling down the drain due to neglect.)

It is non-hyperbolically the most flexible aerial act I have ever seen. Alex spent a lot of time (years) doing contortion research on loops without any kind of aerial coaching, and mostly away from the eyes or outside input from other artists. They talk about the value that kind of research had for them, because it meant they could avoid the pressure and/or expectation to learn "traditional" technique (e.g. a flag, or reverse meathook) that might have built up muscle in their back that would affect the way they can bend / access their flexibility (something that I've made compromises on in the last 2 years in my pursuit of 'traditional' aerial straps vocabulary). As a result, Alex has developed some really incredible and unique shapes, tricks, and transitions in their work that is truly jaw-dropping in the aerial flexibility department.

Even if another artist had the same flexibility as Alex, and the same ability to translate (over years of effort) that ability to aerial apparatus, it wouldn't look the same: because Alex is so petite, when they're doing extreme backbending positions, there's nearly zero negative space between their different body parts. It adds to the visual intensity of the shapes. Something I forget often (and try to remind myself of, often) when it comes to circus is:  The expression of each discipline's vocabulary is necessarily as unique as the performer's body performing it.

I'm going to go ahead and make up (?) a word for this, and call it 'bio-geometry': the relationship of a performer's limbs to their torso, the space between their ribs and their pelvis, all the unique numbers and angles and ratios – all of it means that even something as simple and fundamental as a meathook position (see below) will always be unique to each person performing it; will always have the capacity to be something unique in the hands (well, body) of the person exploring it. Because no one else's body has exactly the same ratios as yours, exactly the same balances (or imbalances, haha) of strength and flexibility, etc. All the different shapes I can make in 'meathook' will be different from yours, or Alex's, or Bridie's. This is a strength. Not a lack of capacity. It's just . . . easy to forget 😅

Anyways – I'm predictably off on a tangent, so let me wrestle things back to the subject at hand:
 
Even with the proliferation of bizarrely bendy aerialists who show off impressive splits, leg-scales, and needle positions in rope acts, aerial silks acts, lyra acts, and more, I've started noticing that I rarely have the reaction of "HOLY &$)# WHAT DID I JUST WITNESS" to some of the bendier tricks on aerial apparatuses.

I'm not sure why this is:  perhaps the addition of height that an aerial apparatus can introduce, or the visual intoxication that spinning induces, is responsible for muddying the impact of someone's wild hip extension or inhuman spinal extension for me.

Bridie and Alex would be two exceptions on a very short list in that regard, for me.
Alex is also the one who provided a (loving) verbal smack upside the head that I needed to get myself out of the tight little circle I was walking myself in with these contortion concerns:

"It takes so much longer than you think it does," Alex reminded me last week after a particularly frustrating session in-studio. "I've been working on my loops material for years. I didn't just find it. It took a long time. For the first year, I wasn't even doing transitions. I was just kind of ... hanging in the loops. In static shapes."

I'm not going to stop doing the research I'm doing into flexibility-dependent 'tricks', movements, sequences, expressions on aerial straps, but I've certainly recalibrated my expectations for how those things might show up in the Barbette work.  

I'm not going to be producing work in the immediate future (possibly ever!) that comes close to producing the same feeling that Alex or Bridie's works create for me when I watch them.

More importantly, I realized that I feel completely fine with this – and it's allowed me to move on with my research "to-do list".  Huzzah!

More coming soon – 
Until then, stay strange & wonderful!

XO

Ess