Circus School: Week 7

Over the past days, I’ve seen a good improvements in pain levels, so am back to training. Just small amounts on Monday, skipping almost everything except static trapeze. It wasn’t too taxing a session, learning some new static shapes – Amazon and toe hang, both of which I have done on hoop before so could gauge the levels of exertion needed to get into them!

The penultimate equilibristics class of the course was unicycle. Much harder than it seems, and frustrating to learn. It’s not easy to practise given its natural propensity to fall over, so more than anything else you just have to be prepared to keep falling over. The lesson turned into juggling, globe walking and rolla-bolla for most people. 

Act Creation was focussed on make up and costume. Disappointing. The mood board I’ve been given doesn’t really give me a lot of scope for an interesting costume or character so I’ve done a bit of work developing it. It no longer resembles what I’ve been given but nor is it a real character yet. Make up is fairly simple (and my skin hates it) and the visit to the costume corridor was a bit premature so I didn’t really have a lot to do. After so long sitting watching the aerial classes, sitting watching a make up and costume class was fairly rubbish.

Thursday was pretty full though, with new teachers for both dance and hoop given the regular teacher for both is away. So we had some serious dance hilarity trying to follow a butterfly mind. As soon as a set of steps had sunk in and we were ready to start practising properly, we moved on to something else!

Hoop was a bit intense, with an ambitious teacher who hadn’t been given a comprehensive briefing on what we had been working on. If she’d even been briefed at all! But thankfully I only had to avoid the hanging beats and could do most of the other things. Well, I say I could do them…I was not limited by injury in execution! Meathook tick-tocks on my first class back. Lovely. And in Chinese pole, I only had to miss doughnut drops on one side to avoid bashing my ribs.

Friday was somewhat harder though. The conditioning warm-up started with 100 push ups which we could do in no more than 5 sets and could not move on to the next item in the list until we had done all 100. There were about a dozen other things on the list. V-sits, squats and calf-raises with a partner sitting on your shoulders. And of course pull-ups. All between 20 and 50 repetitions. Enough for the day surely! Nope, only took us to 10:45am. It meant I was a bit shattered for the rest of the day, and the weird arm deadness that I had in weeks 1 and 2 returned in the rope class. Thankfully we worked on a couple of footlock positions, which gave my arms a bit of respite!

The final extension class of the course descended into hilarity as well. I think it’s the exhaustion getting to us! We worked on the sequences that we had started putting together last week and then performed them for each other before creating an ensemble piece! It was quite a lot of fun, even if we didn’t take it perhaps as seriously as we have been doing in the weeks gone by. Probably exactly what we needed at the end of the week! Also what we needed at the end of the week was a good stretch, so our pilates teacher substituted in a yoga/flexibility session followed by some partner massage. A good way to say goodbye to the Friday afternoons we have come to know, given it’s all change after the Easter break.