Circus school
Today was my first aerial silks class at Circus Center. The last time I was at a circus school was 7 years ago and in Ottawa but the general atmosphere at this one was practically the same: a bunch of acrobats practicing on a variety of equipment in a big gym and no real semblence of order to be found. I was able to locate my instructor my asking around and was glad to find that she was both empathetic and competent. However, apparently there were supposed to be 2 instructors but one of them quit to go work for a real local circus and now we have a 6:1 student:teacher ratio, whereas the maximum we're supposed to have is 4:1. She told us this would be OK for the first 3 classes but after that she'd either need to find another co-instructor or a couple of us would need to switch to a different time-slot.
She seemed a bit shocked that I was in the class at all when I told her I'd never tried silks before so I assured her that I could climb up a rope just fine, having done so several times at a climbing gym. Ironically, the first thing she had me do was grab a ribbon with each hand, wrap them around my arm and flip over so my legs pointed straight up: exactly what I've been randomly doing with ropes at Mission Cliffs lately! We did a few more such excercises and stretches before she taught us our first skill: how to tie a knot around one foot with the other so we can safely hold up our entire bodyweight with very little effort.
She also had use climb up the ribbons a couple of times. Evidentally I'm the only one who can do that easily. I guess it helps that everybody else taking the class are women, most of whom have backgrounds in dance rather than rock-climbing. On the other hand, this might be the first time I've been told I need to work on my flexibility.
