Pages

A Summer of Trapeze Firsts

Monday, September 7, 2015

Another flashback post to summer and flying trapeze. I would love to post about my current trapeze situation, however, it's nonexistent at the moment. Side note, if any of my Orlando friends have a large piece of property, get at me, because I have a proposition for you.

This summer I grew exponentially as a flyer and an instructor. I had hoped the intensive nature of the job would result in huge gains, which would hopefully make up for the lack of flying I had experienced in the few months leading up to it. 

Truth be told, I spent a great deal of the summer frustrated and disappointed in my progression. I swear it took about five weeks for me to feel like I was flying at the level I had left off a few months prior. And it wasn't until the last two or three weeks before tear down that I actually felt good about how far I had come. (We are our own worst critics). 

That being said, some pretty cool things happened this summer flying- and otherwise. This post will focus on flying and I hope to recap the other fun stuff in another post.

Mojo and I were lucky enough to go straight to Cotton Candy Club as our first order of business in California. Felt really great to be back in the air and so happy that our first flight of the trip was at that gorgeous pink rig! Thank you again Nicolina!! <3


By far one of the coolest and most memorable experiences of the summer (and a top 5 life experience) was flying under the full moon. It was my first real night fly and it was so surreal catching in the dark underneath that big bright pie in the sky. That night I posted the photo below on instagram with the caption:

When you wake up to a phone call in the middle of the night that says, "it's a full moon and we're going to fly," you wipe the sleep from your eyes, throw on your tights and race over to the rig because something magical is happening.



Another really special experience was having my husband Alex finally agree to take a swing. He did great for his first time and he even managed a fly away! It was really cool to send him off the board and welcome him into my circus world! :D


As for my own flying, I worked on my cutaway quite a bit this summer. I caught it for the first time with Efe back in June. There's a video on my instagram from one of those first few catches. We played around with some return variations, including this splits version with Rob. We never had the chance to clean it up, so here's a silly version that still makes me laugh looking back at it. 


It was pretty exciting to finally meet up with my trapeze evil twin CC! It was so much fun chatting and flying and my goodness, the time went by too quickly! She brought me to Richie Gaona's Trapeze Workshop and it was just as wonderful as I had imagined.


Christie is a beautiful flyer and person! It was so nice sharing the board with her, she calmed me down and made sure I was okay (I was so nervous leaning out to the bar. It was a faaaaaar reach for a shrimpo like myself). At the rig, I mainly worked on my layout and then started throwing doubles for fun. It was my first time working on a double back tuck and I fell in love immediately. It felt like I was rotating for an eternity. Here's my layout catch with Terry:


Efe and I had talked about uprises being a good trick for me and my interest in doing a forward over. A few weeks before the summer ended we finally got around to working on them. Within a few days of learning an uprise, I was throwing catchable forward overs (in lines of course). After struggling my way through my swing, layout and cutaway for so long, my mind was completely blown at how easy the uprise forward over felt. I can't wait until it's passing leap ready (hehe one day)!


In addition to flying, I learned so much about rigging and teaching trapeze. I can now tie a clove hitch and a double figure eight in two different ways each. I can also switch out the fly bar without shaking and sweating profusely, terrified that I'm going to drop a cable. I even hung from the catch crane and rigged up the catch trap!


I came to Pali only knowing how to run board, but I left able to pull and call for tricks as advanced hocks salto. I really enjoyed pulling lines and I think it made me a better coach and flyer. 


In addition to trapeze, I also worked on other circus-related activities. While, it was not my first experience with acro yoga, I'm including this as a first because Rob and I put together pretty chill flow and also because I finally nailed this pose:


Lastly, as the summer came to a close, I put together my first doubles act with my aerial soul sister, Adi. We are still awaiting footage, but hopefully it turns out as rad as the raw footage looked. PS we scored these sweet leo/dresses for $10 at a sample sale.


I feel like there was so much more that happened this summer. And I'm sure I'll remember stuff after I post this. I have hours of trapeze footage on my iPad that I still need to go through. And there are so many other things that happened that I don't have photo/video of, like Mojo taking his layout on his own timing...multiple times... that's his trick now. :) Heck yeah!

Proudly designed by | mlekoshiPlayground |