[22] Tournelle du Soleil (Patreon)

I take off my overshirt and tie it around my waist as another layer to keep my back warm. I sit on the edge of the tower platform and pull on a clean pair of socks. I stand up and pull the plexiglas door as closed as it will stay behind me. No putting weight on this wall, I tell myself.

Within the first ten minutes of research I learn several important things.

Firstly, when I’m moving my limbs around inside my latex VACUUM tower, the walls of the structure stretch and give. There’s allowance outside of the small footprint of the tower itself that allows me to arrange my 5’9” frame into all the different positions and transitions that make up the contortion vocabulary I researched inside a space like this for VACUUM. This tower –with its aluminum or steel skeleton underpinning those big clear panels of hard plastic– obviously, doesn’t budge at all.

Some of the positions and tricks that I choreographed for VACUUM translate to this plexiglas tower, but the pathways that I take to get to those positions through don’t work at all. There’s a much slimmer margin of error in the pathways I can take to get from one position to another inside this rigid apparatus.

I lean to one side and begin to lift a heel to bring it around and up to the side so I can go up and over into a contortion handstand and BONK! immediately run into a wall of plexiglas. New pathways need to be found, and all of them are going to be giving my active flexibility a run for its money.

Secondly, the rigid plexiglas panels of this tower are dangerous for my body in a different way than the latex of my VACUUM tower. Rather than being aware of and managing the risk of my apparatus hurting me as it exerts considerable force inwards on my body, I’m now needing to be aware of not hurting myself as I exert the pressures of my body outwards on this un-giving apparatus.

When I’m in my latex VACUUM tower my concerns are not few, but they are different:

I’m thinking about not getting stuck in the wrong position before the walls of latex close in too tightly around me and prevent any physical adjustments;

I’m thinking about fingernails and toenails and foot and hand positions and praying that no small part of my body is putting a concentrated amount of pressure on a concentrated area of latex (because it will weaken that spot and make it more susceptible to having a blow-out one day);

I’m thinking about moving slowly and gracefully because the lightness of the VACUUM tower’s structure and the nature of the latex envelope betrays even the slightest uncertain wobble in posture.

While I’ve had to keep in mind throughout all chapters of my contortion and circus career that it’s possible for me to place my hypermobile body into positions that can hurt me –compressing nerves, straining and tearing muscles, tendons, ligaments– the ways that that risk exists has evolved with the way my body has evolved after undertaking the last year and a half of aerial straps training for my Le Numéro Barbette project.

I’ve built a lot of muscle in the last year and a half. This has created more stability in a lot of my joints. But in the context of this tower, it means that I have even more strength with which I might force my body into positions that its unhappy in … even if there’s no pain signal telling me that I shouldn’t be going that far.

Even with years of contortion experience, and an understanding of how certain injuries can take place in ways that I won’t notice until later, post-training, when some part of my body is sore and aching and unstable, blank spots remain in my interoception.

And so, despite moving slowly and carefully through the list of positions and choreographic sequences from VACUUM that I hoped would translate well to Cirque’s plexiglas construction, there’s moments inside this rigid tower where everything feels fine … fine … fine… until suddenly it doesn’t. And I quickly and carefully exit that position and take stock (or try to) of what I’m feeling in my body.

The biggest concern is always my lower back: making sure that I don’t compress the part of my spine in a way that will cause sciatic nerve issues.

Following close on the heels of that is managing my cervical spine: a floppy mess that tries to take the lion’s share of the bend when it shouldn’t, and rewards me afterwards with tension and nerve headaches or migraines that can last for days.

After that, hips (hamstring tendons) and shoulders (nerve compression near the base of my neck from arms being in overhead positions) are on my Watch List any time that I’m training contortion or handstands.

The two and a half hours I have to research inside the tower flies by. I exit, sweaty and a little breathless.

I change my socks, slip my shoes back on. Put my overshirt back on to keep my back as warm as possible while I gather my things and make my way back to the gym to close my back and cool down properly.

I stand up and begin walking away. My hamstrings feel achey and sore in a way that tells me I’ve tested the limits of the tendons that attach those muscles to my pelvis. Nothing bad came up during my intake exam with the physio, but they’re angry now and it makes me anxious.

Will I be able to finish this contact without injuring them?

Focus on cooling down first. Take stock afterwards, I tell myself.

It’s easy to spiral with these thoughts.

I know from experience.

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Your next instalment of Tournelle du Soleil arrives tomorrow at 7am EST / 1pm CEST.

Until then, stay strange and wonderful! - XO, ess