Aussielicious

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.

Aerialize, the place I do my silks classes, recently had a singles circus class where an even number of guys and girls got together and learnt some basic circus skills for a few hours with a DJ playing and getting to know each other.

This friday they are doing it again, but all for us homos. Gays and Lesbians are all invited to sign up to come along and hopefully meet the man/woman of your dreams. I’m going to be the assistant teacher on Friday night, so I’m hoping my hamstring has healed enough that I can help show the basics to some hotties!

There’s one thing more frustrating than not being able to get a trick right at silks class and that is not even being able to try. After my groin/hamstring injury last week at class I was being careful all week and icing it and taking care of the injury. Then on saturday night I slipped during the parade on some paper on the ground, re-straining the hamstring.

Tonight I went along to class, knowing that it wouldn’t be a full on class for me, but I didn’t realise that there wasn’t ANYTHING I could try. SO frustrating. So now it’s another week of icing and resting. There’s only three classes left in the term and I really want to be involved in them!

I’m logging off now because tonight at aerials class, at which I forgot to video the tricks AGAIN, I was doing a fantastic new trick with lots of tumbly spectacular stuff when I was concentrating on what one part of my body was doing when the other leg flexed too far from my body. What does that mean? I’ve got a strain in my groin. Surely that’s almost against the law 5 days out from Gay Christmas, Mardi Gras? It’s being iced right now, which isn’t any more comfortable that close to your nuts.

So, I’ve just had a beer, I’m about to take a sleeping tablet, wrap the ice back and go to bed.

I’ve had a long and draining day at work, exhausting on a personal level and physcially tiring at silks class. We learnt some fuck-off cool tricks tonight. One of them was so impressive my former teacher, who is now in my class, was too scared at first to try it. Damn it’s cool.

I like the idea of naked sports, but there are obviously some that are more conducive to nudity than others. The idea of doing silks nude has been raised many times in class but there are some tricks that it really would not be advisable.

Today has been a long and busy but very good day. I learned something new at work which is always good. It wasn’t a big victory, but it was a couple of points on the board. Then I had to race to silks class where I’m still feeling the weeks off but LOVING the fact that I’m so challenged. We learnt a new trick which is very cool and a little scary. But of course, those tricks are the ones that look the best.

Then it was race out of class slightly early to drive across town to a meeting with the committee for the lifesavers with pride mardi gras float to decide on a song. I can say that I’m very happy with the selection and I think it’s a nice new direction/evolution on where we’ve been before. I think it will be popular.

Right now I’m eating some food so I have the energy to go to the gym in the morning.

Tonight was the first class of the new term of silks and it was my first in the advanced class. A little like when I went from beginners to intermediate, I am a little out of my depth. That is, if it is possible to be out of your depth six metres of the ground.

At one point at the end of the class I got a little stuck and because I have lost some conditioning after nearly two months without class, I was getting really tired. That meant I panicked a little because I could feel the strength draining from my arms and then a foot got tangled. But you know what? I had a freaking blast. I’m now in a class with teachers learning alongside me and it was fantastic fun.

The teacher for the term is Ari who has just come back from nearly 2 years overseas performing through Europe and learning from other performers around the globe. I can’t wait to see how far I can progress this term. Check out Ari’s video below!

It seems that I haven’t been doing what I need to, to maintain my conditioning for aerial silks lately. That’s really no surprise, for four weeks over the holidays I didn’t set foot in the gym once and have barely climbed a set of silks more than twice in that time either. So needless to say I arrived at open training tonight with grand visions of doing my new routine a couple of times from start to finish, but didn’t even do it in it’s entirety once.

I broke it down in to a few pieces and did various combinations a few times each. It wasn’t entirely a wasted session, I have things to focus on and work on and I think I know the timing pretty well.