Trampoleze

Seeing as I was informed of the change of dates two days before my flight and wasn’t entirely sure where I would be staying for the next month, I decided not to bring my trapeze with me to France. This was probably a good decision since it’s terribly heavy and I need all the weight allowance I can get in order to move all my stuff back to Canada.

However, I really wasn’t keen on no longer being able to train trapeze, especially after the amount of work I put into training over the summer. But there are places to train in Paris, and certainly some of them must have a trapeze I could use?

As it turns out, there’s a small recreational facility on Circus Island! Perfect, right? I mean, sure, their trapezes don’t have weights on them, but that’ll be fine. And the padding is made of velour for some reason, and is much too low, but I can work with that. And the tape on the bar looks as though it’s been mauled by rabid puppies, but hey, it’s still a trapeze!

If it were only that, I think I would have been fine. But this trapeze seems to be having some kind of identity crisis and thinks it’s a trampoline.

I have never in my life been on a bouncier point. Before I started doing aerials, I’ve always thought that aerialists were just a bunch of whiners when they would go on, and on, about how the point was bouncy and made their lives difficult. Side note, I probably sound that way to them when I have a shitty floor for wheel. But anyway, whiners. And when I started doing trapeze, I definitely came across some bouncy points, but honestly, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

But that was before the Trampoleze.

I needed a rope in order to reach the bar. Only when I put my weight on the rope, the bar came down so low that I was standing comfortably on the mat, bar in hand. Stand to ankles seemed to go well enough, though it was more of a butt, rebound to ankles. Half turn to ankles from front support was out of the question. I tried to do a small cast for the tempo and the trapeze ate so much of the movement that I didn’t even come off the bar. Then I made the extremely foolish decision to try a release move. You know the one where you have the ropes in your hands but are hanging from your knees, then drop down, do a half turn with your torso so that your knees come off the bar and then catch hands? I got about as far as “turn with your torso” before the trapeze rocket launched itself toward the cupola and left me to crash and burn into the mat.

Bravely (stupidly?), I tried it again. That attempt, and the one following it, was no better.

At that point I about gave up, did some foot hangs, and called it a day.

And yet in some ways, that point was better than the ones at the next place I would train...