Return to the circus

I am so excited for circus open practice tonight! I wasn't able to make it to the first open practice of this class session because I was in Montreal last Friday, and I missed my regular Monday class because of the Roger Waters concert. I'm very glad that I went to both of those things, but I'm really feeling the lack of physical activity, and I'm looking forward to giving myself a good workout later tonight.

I'm almost certain that it's going to be a better workout than I get in a normal class, and more tiring too. The way the aerials classes are structured at the school are great for learning tricks, but don't give us very much time to practice doing them over and over again, which is what I need to do in order to master them. In a regular class, there are about six students, and in the course of one session we do warm-ups, then rotate through two of the three aerial apparatus* (rope, silks, and trapeze), and then do some conditioning. (There's no official cool-down, which is a bit of a problem, so I've taken to doing my own as well as some extra stretching while my body is warm and limber.) During the actual aerials part of the class, there usually aren't quite enough of each apparatus for everyone, so we have to take turns. The instructor demonstrates and explains a trick, then half the class tries it out, then the other half. I usually get the chance to do each trick twice before moving on, and although that is enough time for me to get the basic idea, it's not nearly enough time for me to feel confident about my abilities. Sure, we sometimes learn the same trick two weeks in a row, but sometimes we learn a trick once and then don't see it again until the next class session, eight weeks later.

This isn't a complaint, really --- I can't see of any other good way to run the classes --- just a note to explain why open practice is such a wonderful thing. I can choose which tricks I want to work on, and I can really work on them, doing them over and over again until I feel fluent. The only other time I had the opportunity to do that was when I was preparing my performance piece, and now I really notice the difference: All of the tricks that I did in my performance are completely second-nature, since I've done them hundreds of times. But unfortunately, the tricks that weren't in my performance don't have that same quality. Tonight, my goal is to go some way towards changing that fact.

I hope I'll be able to wrangle some kind soul into taking pictures so that I can post them here later. Wish me luck, and see you in the air!

*Side note: What the heck is the proper plural for apparatus? Apparati? Apparatuses? Anyone know?