Note to self, performances go better if you have rehearsed the whole thing. Last night I did my routine at the open rig night and did OK. I’m not happy with the last big. I got a bit flustered and didn’t polish it up properly or execute the trick very well. I think I’ll substitute that trick for something else as there is a lot of preparation for not a lot of payoff at the end. We’ll see.
Love Fool performance from Brenton Parry on Vimeo.
Yesterday I was having a great day. I was excited about doing the first shoot for my exhibition, then had a great time doing it, then even more excited when I was editing the shots and saw that I’d got a couple of images I am really happy with.
Then today at work I was in a foul mood. My managers were just annoying me with poor planning and generally bad management, but I’m just home from a very productive aerials class. I still haven’t done my entire routine through, which isn’t ideal given I’m performing on Saturday night. After tonight’s class though I’m confident that I can pull it off. My only concern is whether I have enough in it to fill the song.
Tonight was another one of those classes at silks that both frustrates me and makes me more determined. I think with many of the arts or sports, your expectations on yourself grow faster than your capabilities which can drive you insane. It does with me anyway. I found out tonight that I have a month to put a routine together but at the half way point of class tonight I had no idea of what to do as the trick I wanted to do wasn’t working.
Thankfully I didn’t do my usual thing and abandon it in a huff but I experimented with another way of getting into the trick and it worked. Then on the way home I listened to the song again and again and a routine is forming in my mind. A few weeks of class combined with the open training session and I might get there.
For months I’ve had a particular song in my head to work on a silks routine to, but with it remaining firmly a theoretical routine so far the song has drowned in my stagnant imagination, never to be resuscitated, or so it seems. For the last week or two I’ve been thinking of this song to put together a routine to.
Bjork is the high priestess of bonkers but she’s also a creative genius. This video is proof of that. Lady Gaga may just be the Andy Warhol of the music scene for this generation but her commercialised brand of crazy, while absolutely fantastic is very different to the undiluted crazy that Bjork has been sipping on from the streams of Iceland for the last 20 years. You get the impression she’d be wailing and sampling fog horns to play to an audience of one if she had to.
This song has the tempo that I’m after to force me to perform rather than just do tricks and to think about all the aspects of the routine, transitions, tricks, climbs and story, but also has the quirkiness that I love.
Tonight was the first class in ages that I’ve felt like I was getting things right. So much fun when that happens. We were doing a trick that essentially you go from hanging by your knees to hanging just by your hands after dropping a metre or so. It’s nerve wracking when you don’t have any “lock” or safely wrapped end position, but sometimes that adrenaline is good.
This isn’t me but a teacher of mine, Ari doing a routine.
Last night at silks class was stinking hot with Sydney having one of it’s typically erratic weather days of 30+ degrees, which has plummeted to 23 or so today. I would never have dreamt that the weather could play a significant role in circus arts before starting these classes nearly two and a half years ago but the hot weather last night was greatt because it meant we didn’t slide on the fabric much at all.
We were at the midway point of term last night and it’s time to start working on our routines. Most of the time we aim for a new routine or if you are working on something to go to the public with, refine that. I’ve been wanting to do a routine to Gotye’s “Heart’s a mess” for a while now and am finally having a go at it. The video above is only four and a half minutes but the version on the album is six minutes which is a fairly long routine but I’m looking forward to seeing if I can do it.
At the end of the class last night I did have a bit of a minor fall. Nothing was hurt or broken and it was more of an unplanned slip, drop and unwrap kinda trick gone wrong situation but I was only a couple of metres up rather than the 7 or so that I may have been for some other tricks.
Tonight the Lifesavers With Pride, my mardi gras float, is having another fundraising party at Slide Bar from 9pm. It’s $15 entry to help us put on a great Mardi Gras float entry and raise our profile to let people know that being gay and being a part of masculine domains like lifesaving is ok!
I’ll be doing another performance almost a year exactly since my first public performance! The video below is last years performance. Let’s see if I can’t do a little better this year! I’ve got music sorted and I’m kinda just winging the routine as I haven’t had time to prepare one to the music.
Update: I’m performing at midnight!
Last night our clocks ticked forward an hour for daylight savings which I LOVE. Sure, I’ve missed out on an hour but it signals the start of those balmy summer evenings, long days at the beach and warmth served with a side of tanned flesh. Some friends and I are on a mission to find a location and an available weekend for a nude camping weekend. I will be on the beach a lot over summer and I’m dying to get started. There have been a couple of brief visits so far but nowhere near enough.
We’ve got one more show today for the Aerialize Annual Show. We did one on Friday night and two yesterday. We have a matinee today at 2. They are going really well and I’ve nailed the big trick which is great. Last night I was wrapping into it and went too high and nearly ran out of room to get into it, but the crowd loves the trick and it always gets a great reaction. This nearly 36 year old body is feeling it though. I have some wicked burns on my waist from another trick and a big bruise behind one knee, but I’m not complaining. I’m having an absolute blast.
The Violet Drop from Brenton Parry on Vimeo.
Yesterday was aa strange day for me. First up? There’s a new cafe in my apartment complex, yay. Now I only have to go 100m for a coffee. Then there was ups and downs at aerials but more literally. I managed to do the trick a couple of times that I’ve put in my routine but had only done once. Then I was having a great night out with my flatmate and his friends when my wallet went missing. As soon as I noticed it was gone I cancelled my credit card which was at most half an hour from when I lost it. The gang I was with were really good and made sure I was all good for drinks and cash.
Let’s see what adventures today brings. It certainly won’t be buying the outdoor furniture I wanted to get, not until I get a replacement card anyway.
It’s taken me months from the first idea for this routine, finding the music, learning too many new tricks and getting distracted, injured and frustrated, to finally getting it together. It still definitely needs work which you’ll see when you watch it.
My timing was a bit off and when my mohawk fell off towards the end, I got flustered and didn’t unwrap properly, which is the reason for all the faffing around. Then I was too close to the ground so didn’t finish the routine off as well as I would have liked but hey, we learn from mistakes. A couple more run throughs and I’ll have it down better.
Aussielicious TV - Episode 9 - The new routine from Brenton Parry on Vimeo.
Being pushed out of my comfort zone is not something I relish often. I’ll throw myself into a challenge like silks, pole dancing or surfboat rowing because ultimately I know, somewhere deep down, that I’m capable of it at least up to a point.
This term at silks has seen me hitting one of those points. Normally, each term in the last class of the term, we do a routine or performance for each other. This term our teacher is very focussed on our “performance” skills, ie the presentation, character and narrative if we have one. I’ve never done drama or performance so it’s really quite confronting to let go of your hangups about embarrassing yourself and just let loose. Tonight is half way though the term and we did a work-in-progress routine. Last week, talking through my reservations etc with my teacher she looked at my routine, which was trick trick trick trick trick and not performance or character, and she told me you are allowed one trick and the rest has to be performance.
I nearly shit my pants. My piece of music is 4:45 minutes long and I had to basically improvise. Apparently I did quite well, the class was enthusiastic and complimentary so I’m feeling like there’s been a breakthrough of sorts. Now to put a more simple routine together with some performance for week 9.
Tonight was the culmination of several days of anxiousness and stress. I’ve not long got home from my aerial silks class which was, on a personal level, a total disaster but probably something that needed to happen. I had a spectacular routine mapped out that I was going to work on but for some reason my confidence was really low, I felt unsafe and insecure up on the silks.
One good thing that will come out of it is that my teacher this term is really pushing the performance aspect rather than just the big tricks. So with her guidance we have stripped my routine right back to a handful of small tricks and I’m focussing on REALLY performing and linking movements well, which is not a strong point of mine and is actually quite confronting and challenging.
I was already emotionally exhausted by the time I arrived at class after days of over-analysing the situation with Irishman. There were a couple of issues that I was having with the relationship and my gut was telling me to leave it behind. Then Irishman was out of contact ALL weekend which was unusual. Turns out he’s dealing with a HUGE amount of emotional family issues and over working himself on top of being too soon out of a bad relationship when we met. So, mercifully, we’ve put the relationship out of it’s misery and will continue as friends. That man has an enormous heart and needs to focus all of it’s strengths on himself for once. With better timing and different circumstances I can see myself looking into his blue eyes for a very long time, but it’s just not to be.
Now that the end of term has come for aerial silks class and I have a bunch of new tricks under my belt, the routine I had planned out to put together is going to have to change. I’m still sticking with the Lenny Kravitz song, “Circus” and the punk look, partly because I spent $100 getting the mohawk made and it’s so cool. Partly also because it suits my performance style. I’m not a graceful, lyrical kind of performer so I need a look and feel that doesn’t rely too heavily on “prettiness”.
I can’t wait to start putting it together and when I do, I’ll get up in the costume (when I finish sorting that too) and get it on video. Yay!
I’ve just got home from my last class of the term which is very sad. This term has been very bitter sweet for me after hurting myself at the half-way point. Ari has been a fantastic teacher who’s style probably played to some of my strengths. It’s the first time I’ve had a male teacher and I’ve found we’ve done the bigger tricks and strength based stuff more than we might with a female teacher. The last few weeks of watching from the sidelines was really frustrating but I’ve learnt some great things.
I’ve just found out who is teaching the class next term, as Ari is off back overseas to teach and perform in London and Europe. The next term will be very different as Heidi is a very strong performer and puts sequences together beautifully and elegantly and will be a good counterpoint to the strength and dynamic nature of this term. Ari performs really well, but I know Heidi will absolutely drill me on the subtleties and delicacy that my silks routines have lacked til now. So it’s going to be a great way of building on this term. Thanks to Ari for showing us such great tricks and giving the class a great energy!
Tonight I’ve come home in a bad mood from class because although my hamstring was feeling much better and I was still being very careful, one small move and it’s been re-strained ever so slightly. So now I’m in pain and very frustrated wondering if I’m going to be able to even do the last two classes of the term.
I’ve also come home to find that youtube has deleted my Aussielicious TV video because of supposed terms of use violations. I’m sorry but I’ve seen dozens of cocks and arses on youtube. My video had nothing offensive or sexual in nature on it. It was a video of a fit body, done. SO in rebellion, I’ve taken Aussielicious TV to Vimeo.
