Aerial Arts - Practice

Aerial arts practice tonight went really well. There were two newbies and one other person besides me who has been coming for months. It made for a nice separation. I really like having new folks in class because it reminds me of just how far I've come. (I was still worse than almost everyone when I first started!)

Since the newer folks take up a little more of the instructor's time, tonight was essentially a free-for-all to work on whatever I wanted. (I'm glad that not every night is like this, but today it was welcome.) I worked on the same sequence of arabesque, middle invert, j-pose, sit, lotus hang that I really liked from the January flow routine even though we've moved on. Of course, I am just now getting to feel confident that I can do it consistently and occasionally even gracefully. I get the invert (the hard part!)

I also worked on the butterfly drop, which I am also feeling consistent and confident about. I ran through a few others that I haven't done in a while, like the cross-back straddle (which was my nemesis for months), the flamingo, knee inverts with a leg stretch, some other kind of shoulder harness thing that I forget the name of... And lots of stuff with ankle wraps. I have a really hard time doing ankle wraps for the angel drop since the silk is already so wrapped around my legs that I can't move as much and the silks are closer together so that they are harder to separate.

We did work on one new thing called the Scorpio or Scorpion? I've heard a specific leg pose (from any other kind of pose) called the scorpio, but this was a wrapped up kind of flip. I didn't do it successfully yet. It starts from ankle wraps in the air. Then you lean down to pick up the tails while keeping your legs completely straight. It was hard to reach! So then you lean forward while holding the tails out wide and let your feet go on the outside of the fabric. Then you're essentially hanging from your knees and grabbing the tails, which looks like a pretty back bend.

I am sad that I will have to miss the first class of Aerial Flow this month, which means that I miss the full introduction of the new routine. However, I'm going to Arts again on Wednesday. Maybe I'll get this new thing down then. I also want to do more with the flamingo. It's a pose that we learned earlier on and I always forget about it.