I took this videos last August when Eric and Sagiv were performing for Teatro ZinZanni at Pacific Place as part of their annual publicity effort. I hired Eric and Sagiv to come to the KDC to do a three hour private lesson with us. They did a great job. I'm currently trying to arrange to fly Eric up to do some more training with us, and it looks like it is actually going to happen!

 

Eric's web site is at:

 

 

Pardon my language in the commentary! I was truly in awe and apparently my way of expressing awe is loaded with profanity :)

 

My group aerial piece has gone through another iteration. Now that the baby is safely here, Robert feels comfortable basing for my piece so he will join Taha and I in basing Jocelyn, April, and Vivian. For the basing sections, this leaves Jenn by herself on the fabric so we picked up Quinn to keep her company. I finalized the timing and choreography so now we just need to practice it.

 

I had eight hours of MiniDV taped video from the Elsie Smith workshop but I actually didn't have space on my computer to transfer it. Totally insane! I ended up buying a $295 750GB external hard drive. Is it just me or does that seem insanely cheap? Now I have all of the video. I had hoped to edit it nicely into cute little video strips. The problem is that Elsie teaches in just a flow. It really is mostly all valid content. She didn't do the normal, teach a trick, pause for twenty minutes while everyone does it, and then move on. It's mostly just her busting through material. I need some time to go through all of the video and extract the information!

My yoga instructor Asa recommended going to this workshop by Doug Keller:

 

 

I'm going to sign up for most of it. He wrote most of the Anusara books but is now kind of doing his own thing. He is doing a small teacher training and doing some public workshops. It looks like fun!

I finally created a web page! It is at:

 

 

Now, I need to create business cards. I keep going to all of these yoga and aerial things and people keep asking for my web site. It's a pretty simple site, but it is enough for now. 

We had our first significant Aerlift II rehearsal this morning, and I am feeling pretty excited. Jenn has been great about helping with choreography. Vivian has some great costume ideas for the girls. We ran through the first sequence and it went well. We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but I am feeling pretty confident at this point that it will come together. We also have a venue for Aerlift II! It will be at Magnuson Park and we will have really high ceilings. Now I need to start beating the marketting drum.

I've been busy with work, doing training programs, and getting ready for Aerlift II so I haven't been marketting my yoga and circus classes. I definitely haven't been putting any less time into my yoga classes though. This morning I taught my best yoga class ever. I had three students, but they were the perfect students. My focus was balancing energy and I used partner yoga to acheive my goals. Balance is challenging enough when you are balancing yourself but having to deal with someone else's shifting weight adds a whole other dimension.

 

It was funny because I normally lay out my class plan and make it through one half to two thirds of the plan because it takes a while to take everyone through everything. Working with a small, really aware group let me get through my full lesson plan.

 

I'm kind of torn because on one hand I like to reach as many people as possible. On the other hand, it's fun to have a known quantity and really be able to push the people to their edge.

 

I'm thinking that I will hold off on marketting myself until after Aerlift II (maybe until after training with Elsie this summer) and then I will do a big push. My big thing is that I need to create a web site. I've mainly been marketting via email and I feel like I am spamming everyone. I want to get to have a place that I can put my information up on and people can come to me if they are interested.

 

It's interesting how similar my personal and professional challenges are right now. I'm having similar challenges in my job as a software engineer. I think it will be good to have my priorities aligned for a change :)

As many of you know, I've been the captain of a volunteer team for years. We started as a SeattleWorks team. After a while, I got tired of dealing with the administrative overhead of SeattleWorks and having to have everyone pay the $35 registration fee so we went independent. It's fun to hand pick the projects. The format is pretty easy. We do one four hour project a month. It is normally a 10am-2pm thing on a Saturday.

 

Where to volunteer is an interesting issue. One alternative is the SeattleWorks approach with a different organization each month. It is like sowing your wild volunteer oats. The other extreme is volunteer monogamy. One organization for the rest of your life... We have taken the middle ground and focus on three main organizations. There is an additional benefit of doing things this way. Microsoft matches volunteer hours by giving the organization $17 / hour for each hour the employee volunteers at that organization. However, the employee must volunteer at least ten hours with the organization. Doing just three organizations let's me do twelve hour a year with each organization so they get the money.

 

Last Saturday, we volunteered at PAWS (Progressive Animal Welfare Society). They have two parts. One is a no-kill dog and cat shelter. The other is a wildlife rehabilitation center. We volunteered at the wildlife rehabilitation center. There purpose is to take injured animals (car accidents, shooting, oil spills, kids with guns, etc.) and heal them enough to be returned to the wild. Animals that can't be returned to the wild are euthanized.

 

We poured concrete for a supply pen for the raccoon enclosure. I've poured concrete for fence posts, but never done an actual form before. It was super cool, but we busted our asses doing the work. Those sixty pound bags of concrete are freaking heavy. The buckets of gravel and lifting the finished concreate up to pour into the form is also a lot of heavy lifting. All in all it was a great project and the weather was pleasant for heavy lifting.

 

I'm super proud of my volunteer team and the work we do. I love getting to bond with friends while doing something worthwhile. I would encourage everyone who would like to do more community service to look into getting signed up on an organized volunteer team. It's really hard to motivate yourself to volunteer as an individual but making it into a social activity makes it so much more wothwhile. A big team also means that you get a lot done. I like leaving at the end of a project and seeing that we made a noticeable difference.

It's been a couple of days since I posted mainly because I have spent eleven hours this week training with Elsie Smith. Elsie Smith performed with Cirque du Soleil for six years and has also performed with Ringling Bros and Pilobolus (sp?). She has her own aerial training academy in Vermont:

 

 

She also performs with her identical twin sister under the stage name Gemini Trapeze:

 

 

If you search for them on YouTube, you can see tons of videos of her performing. The thing that makes her so great is that she is as good at teaching as she is at performing. She doesn't come from a dance or gymnastics background and she started doing this stuff at the age of twenty-six. She really believes that everyone can do aerial and has an instructional approach to be able to find a starting point for anyone no matter what their fitness level.

 

I took an eight hour teacher training program with her at Sanca and it was amazing. We learned some new stuff, but I was really impressed with how she taught things I already know. She is so thorough and gave me a better understanding of things that I already know. I liked learning many different way to get into the same trick and the surprising relations between tricks. I feel like this will make me a better teacher and performer.

 

I hired her for a three hour private lesson at the Kirkland Dance Center. I invited six other people to join me from my little crew. It was a good experience since I think it was valuable for everyone to have exposure to her, but it would have been fun if I had just done a private lesson with her since I had just taken her eight hour foundation program so she was pretty aware of where I was at and we could have gone further.

 

I had been planning on going to the aerial dance festival in Boulder, Colorado. I was mainly interested in taking classes with her. Now, I'm thinking of skipping that and just going to train with her directly at her facility in Vermont. The facility is on a two hundred acre farm. They let you rent a room at the farmhouse for $20 a night if you are doing aerial. I'm thinking that this could be a fun summer getaway for me.

 

My head is still spinning from everything I have already learned. I have hours of video tape to go through and digest the information. I'm really excited about becoming a better teacher.

We had so much fun doing acro that Thanhdat, Jacqueline, and I hired Jasmine to do a two hour private this morning. Jacqueline and I got pretty comfortable with the two high (Jacqueline standing on my shoulders) and we worked on Jacqueline standing on one leg on my shoulders. Jasmine gave us some conditioning drills (like me lying on my back with my arms up, hands on Jacq's hips, and then pressing her up and down. We also worked on doing the same thing, but me holding her feet. Then we worked on trying to have the flyer sit on my hand and pressing them up with one hand. That's freaking hard. It would be like a dumbbell shoulder press with 120lbs dumbbells! Actually, in this case, the dumbbell has legs and should be doing some of the work themselves. We have a catalog of moves now so we just need to practice at this point. Here are some videos from the Sunday acro workshop. I'm really behind on my video uploading, but Kiplinn really wanted to get hers so I uploaded them last night.

Taha, Jenn, Vivian, and I got together for our first rehearsal on Saturday. We focused on getting the partner stuff worked out and Jenn was particularly helpful in mapping some fun stuff from the hoop / trapeze to our partner rope pieces. I'm going to need to send April her material to learn remotely and this is a good start. Next weekend, we will start running through the whole routine. I'm hoping to pick up some more cloud swing stuff and acro before the show.

Here Taha is doing the ball trapeze and having a girl interlock on his calves.

Vivian and I doing the princess with me basing from the back balance. We need to probably come into this from holding hands instead of starting with holding her legs.

Jenn brainstorming cloud swing ideas.

Vivian doing the cloud swing spin that Jenn picked up from Thea.

Penny and I take turns hiding eggs each year. This year was my turn to do the hunt so I took advantage of the warm weather and did it outside. The video is a little patchy. I think I need to buy some new tapes. Turbo helps guide Penny to the eggs!

Jenn Wrenn flew up Jasmine the Contortionist and put together a couple of workshops. Here is Jasmine's info:

 

 

Saturday was Contortion and Arm Balancing at Lara's space and Sunday was Acro and Contortion at the KDC. The times at Lara's place got miscommunicated so Volo and I arrived at Lara's space an hour early and the jugglers were practicing. I sat and stretched while watching the juggling (I still don't get the appeal of juggling, but they seemed really into it). A little later and I fell asleep on the wood floor when Jenn, Mario, and Jasmine arrived.

 

I was a little surprised that Jasmine was four and a half months pregnant. Jasmine's face is much prettier in person than in the pictures. She is from Australia and has the accent, but she speaks fluent Spanish and a good deal of Russian. I was a little nervous because I had sold a lot of people on this workshop without really knowing anything about her. As she got down to business, I was really impressed with how well she explained things and by how fun she made things.

 

I'm not really a fun of the contortion approach to stretching. I feel like it doesn't really take into account what is good for the body. The sequencing is all over the place, and the only concern is how things look. This is how performing is in general (dance, aerial, etc.), but the contortion thing is more intense so it is more noticeable to me. There were a couple of things that I picked up that were neat, but I'll stick with yoga. My back hurt like hell that night which is really unusual for me.

 

The arm balancing is another story. I picked up some useful drills and also got a big hint on arching your hands instead of flattening your fingers. I still need to work on my shoulder flexibility before I become a master hand stand guy, but I am picking up a good set of tools. I also need to get an arm balancing stand. While Jenn was in a hand stand, she spotted "Lucky" the rat running up the wall :)

 

I was much happier Sunday at the KDC. I taught my yoga class before the acro class and did most of the class to get warm. I was feeling nice and flexible by the time the acro workshop rolled around. We had a pretty good turnout and had a really fun time for the hour of acro. I picked up a couple of things and decided to hire Jasmine to come work with just Thanhdat and I Tuesday morning (I'll probably try to get Taha, Jocelyn, Robert, and Jacqueline to come as well). I'd like to have two hours of just acro with a smaller group. I mainly want to get a bunch of new stuff down on video to practice.

 

The hour of contortion was sort of more of the same. Jacqueline picked up some new techniques to help her dancers get further in the splits. I like the idea of some extreme range of motion across the floor stuff. I might do something like that in a yoga class sometime. Overall, I would rather have just kept going with the acro or done aerial contortion. I am really looking forward to more focused work on Tuesday. Jasmine is really, really skilled and entertaining as hell.

I would like to thank everyone who made it out to see our aerial show. I had a great time and was super proud of all of the performers.

Heather had the cleverest song, best opening, and some of the best choreography of the evening. She worked really, really hard putting her piece together and it came together nicely for the show. I'm super proud of her!

Jocelyn teaches modern at the KDC and does choreography for a dance troupe. She's also one hell of an aerialist, especially considering how little time she has been doing this. In this surprisingly long piece, Jocelyn is able to showcase her flexibility, smooth transitions, and elegant lines. I'm thrilled that she will be part of my crew for Aerlift!

Alysa trains all over the city and frequently performs with her partner Bruce. They are soon opening their own aerial space, and she was kind enough to come perform a fabric piece for us. She is a born performer and I love the artistry that she brings to everything she does.

Jenn is a friend of mine who is also one of the co-organizers of Aerlift II. She was gracious enough to bring her hoop and put on a great show for us. I had tons of people come and ask me about where to learn how to do hoop after seeing her perform.

Thanhdat is one of the originals who started the circus program at the KDC. At first he was terrified at the idea of climbing the rope. Soon he had channeled his inner monkey and really became a natural on the fabric. He flew to LA the weekend before the show to do some training and brougth back some new tricks that he demonstrates here. He is a great friend of mine and a super guy.

Next up was me. The jury is still out on the unitard, but it held up well in the performance. I'm pretty happy with my piece, but I had to bail on the ending because I was tired. I just need to touch a little up on it for Aerlift.

Tess is my high school super star. Just a year ago, she was the shy little girl in the corner who was too weak to be able to just hold on to the rope, much less climb it. Now she is a confident, strong young woman with lots of poise and stage presence. I'm really, really proud of her and think that she has an amazing future.