Living A Dream

My entire body aches, and my feet are already beginning to bruise, but I’d consider this a successful start to indepth. Contortion obviously isn’t an easy thing to do, and a little pain is normal. But bruised feet? Normally that doesn’t happen. Not unless you decide to practice contortion on pointe.

I have been looking for ways to add different elements to my study of contortion. I considered doing tricks on a box or table, trying tumbling passes, and adding hand balancing rods. While all of these things would add increased difficulty, I’ve seen them done over and over again. When I came across a picture of a contortionist working on pointe, I knew that’s what I wanted to do.

Today, I went to go try on pointe shoes with my ballet teacher. An hour and 7 pairs of shoes later, we finally found a pair that would work. When I got home, I began the tedious task of sewing the elastics and ribbons to my pointe shoes, which took nearly 3 hours. I will be working with my ballet teacher on some basic pointe technique and finding ways to incorporate that into my contortion.

In the meantime, I have been working a lot on handstands and elbow balances. I am able to hold my handstands for a short period of time, and am hopefully going to start to work towards being able to walk on my hands. This is extremely difficult because it requires a lot of core strength as well as balance.

While my hand-balancing is progressing nicely, I have lost a lot of flexibility since last year. I will be spending the next couple weeks working to get that back to where it was. I have also been trying out some tumbling tricks. I was finally able to get my side aerial (no handed cartwheel) with a little help from an artistic gymnastics coach.

Unfortunately, technology is not being my friend tonight, so I don’t have any pictures to show where I’m at. Hopefully next post I will have pictures to show how I am incorporating pointe into contortion.