No Excuses But an Update

Okay, so by now I should have completed three more sketchnotes - Choice, Being Wrong and Vulnerability. The reason this hasn’t happened is I’ve been distracted with client work, focusing on my circus performance and a bit too much other drama that I won’t get into here. But also, these were hard to do the first time round, so maybe some procrastination has crept in.

I am resetting the expectations for myself now. The new plan is to get all of the remaining five sketchnotes done by mid-November. I’d love to say the end of October so I’m in the timeframe for the initial period of My Year of TED, but let’s be realistic here.

To make up for it

I thought I would share something with you to make up for the fact that there is a gap in regular programming. I’m going to share some of my circus performance with you. Not the whole thing, because that feels a little too vulnerable, but the two parts I’m most happy with.

A little preamble for this. This year I decided to do dance trapeze instead of static trapeze - the difference is that dance is single pointed and spins around. Now, I don’t learn dance trapeze, we don’t have one setup in the studio I train in. I have single pointed a trapeze on my own rig a couple of times, but the spinning has done my head in so I really haven’t spent a lot of time on one. So, I felt it would be an interesting challenge to try to learn and complete a routine in two months for the show.

Since I have done static for seven years this was not entirely new, but spinning adds a whole other range of movement and possibility. Not only do you need to develop tolerance for the spinning, but physics works very well and can help or hinder your ability to move through an action. So, there is still a learning curve that needed to be worked through - and a massive tolerance to build up.

And as it turns out, I ended up with nearly two additional months due to the postponed performance. I feel that the first month was a bonus, but that I started losing some strength and even spin tolerance with the small amount of training time I had during September.

Anyway, the show was Icons and our performances were interspersed with some video/interviews of famous people who have had rocky relationships with their fame. I chose Nick Cave, I don’t know why but he’s the icon I chose. Originally I was planning on Into My Arms as the song, but changed to The Ship Song. This is mainly because there was more variety in the music and I felt it would make the performance more interesting. So below are two clips from the performance, which are a little under half of my full act. Hope you enjoy them :-)