Cinque, Cinque, Cinque

(chEEn-kway, chEEn-kway, chEEn-kway)

In an earlier post, I promised to discuss the physical aspect of my new life as a full-time student of circus arts. Today I’ll scratch the surface on that topic.

At Cirko Vertigo, we cover a range of circus disciplines. Our classes currently include contemporary dance, theater, rigging & safety, acrobatics (tumbling as well as stunting), aerial conditioning, physical preparation (another conditioning class), and handstands.

At this point, handstand class is definitely the most difficult. All of our classes are physically challenging, but none of them hurt quite like verticali class with Fatos. This is due in large part to the title of today’s post, “Cinque, Cinque, Cinque”. It’s quite a simple translation: five, five, five. What cinque, cinque, cinque entails is far more challenging than the translation.

Half of class with Fatos is focused on handstands – in my case, contortion handstands – and the other half is focused on improving flexibility. Let me tell you, there is nothing quite like having a 140+ pound man stand and bounce on you while you stretch in order to make you go further. All the while, he shouts things like, “Cosi, maimun! Cosi!” – which means “Like this, monkey! Like this!” in a combination of Italian and Albanian. It’s the kind of moment where you don’t know if you should laugh at how ridiculous the situation seems, or cry because it feels like your body is breaking into pieces.

            After a warm up, we start stretching our spacatta (splits). We do a one-minute warm up split on each side, some high kicks, and then start cinque, cinque, cinque – five minutes of holding the splits on the right side, left side, and center, followed by more high kicks. For many in the class, cinque, cinque, cinque means fifteen minutes of Fatos prodding, pushing, and bouncing their splits towards the ground as they cry for mercy. And yes, people do cry. Circus hurts.

Four of us receive a different kind of treatment. Because our splits are flat on the ground, we get sent over to the spalierna ­– a series of wooden bars going up the wall at equal distances. At the spalierna we work on negative stretching. Front leg held 30 centimeters above the ground by a wooden bar, backs arched in preparation for contortion, we wait. For a grand total of fifteen minutes, gravity pulls (and Fatos pushes) us ever closer to the floor. We hold, praying for time to pass quickly, counting the colored light panels on the ceiling, and trying to breathe through the pain of our fascia stretching. Our ankles bruise, our hips cramp, our knees ache from the strain. But as uncomfortable as these fifteen minutes are, we all stay with the pain instead of surrendering. We know that with any great undertaking, the feeling of success upon reaching a goal outweighs the pain of the journey, and fifteen minutes of pain a few times a week is worth the perfect spaccata.