Clowning around

I’ve always been a fan of titting about, doing ridiculous things and potentially hurting myself; last night, I found my mecca: a place that lets me do all thee.

Centre of Gravity is, for want of a better description, a circus gym. It’s the home of the Zero Gravity circus and as well as doing things like yoga and poi, they hold an aerial arts class, which I attended for the first time yesterday. I used to do gymnastics when I was a kid, and particularly loved the half-hour between classes when we were allowed to mess about on the asymmetric bars, so I was stoked about the idea.

The space itself reminded me of the Red Rattler in Sydney. It had that vaudeville feeling that makes you feel somewhat lawless, and the trapeze and hoops hanging from the ceiling are aesthetically gorgeous.

The class started off with a lot of stretching and some yoga, then some basic acrobatics. This sounds intimidating but in reality is just some very very basic jumps, turns and somersaults (forward rolls to you and me) moving into some that look easy but in fact, aren’t. Then the good stuff started; first, the silks. They’re the big ribbony things that hang from the ceiling, that lithe women inexplicably wrap themselves around in Cirque du Soleil and that Pink made look pretty cool in one of her videos. To me, they looked like the easiest part of the whole operation. They’re not.

Even the most fundamental parts of doing silks, like wrapping your forearms around them and letting take your weight, seriously kills your hands. Obviously you’ll build  fist strngth over time, but grabbing is usually something that you do fairly unconsciously and for your hands to totally cane after  about a minute of doing something is disconcerting to say the least. It gets more difficult with climbs and foot wraps, and I never ever thought I’d be able to inch up a silk as I can’t even climb a rope, and I found the idea of puttig all your weight on a slack rope to be particularly challenging, but the feeling when you get high up, both your feet wrapped in the silk and you do splits in the air is definitely worth the effort!

Even better though is the trapeze. I was most looking forward to this, mostly because of how much I loved the aforementioned asymmetric bars, and I did remember a bit of the stuff we used to do. We hung upside down, sat on it, stood on it, stood on the sides of the ropes above it to create a star shape, swung off the side of it and generally got all giddy about the stuff we were doing. It felt so natural to hang off by my knees, no hands, upside down. I can’t wait to go back next week, if my poor aching-in-every-fibre body will let me.

Oh, and in response to my “I’ve never been able to do a headstand” comment, my awesome yoga teacher friend Steph taught me to headstand in about a second. Win!