#agile

Horse Donkey breed of the day: Pega Donkey

Height: 14 -15hh

Common coat colors: Various roans, dun and grullo

Status: Tartan for Battle

Got my ass kicked the past two days at work, that's what I get for not fronting at the start of the week while I was WFH, I had to do 4 days worth of work in two. Urgh.

And my RFC user stories got kicked out of the sprint again, I don't know what I'm doing wrong so I'm gonna have to go and actually ask our scrum master what the fuck he needs in a user story to not reject it. Bloody bastard.

What this has resulted in is me just not working as quickly as I usually would. I didn’t set out to do this, but I’ve noticed I’ve started essentially stretching my tasks to fill the sprint so I don’t have a sidequest shoved on me mid-project. If I’m at a decent stopping point, of course I’ll pitch in where I can (which, again, is very few areas), but I cannot emphasize enough how this has completely obliterated my workflow.

Porter’s such a fun name! Porter it is then :3

-Acolyte

also so sorry; passed out, and may do so again!

It's cool 🙃

Don't have enough time to go on one of my usual rants (over an hour if I keep it contained and digressions to a minimum ^^') but I really can't pass on an opportunity to ramble on like this. I'm not that strong. (/lh) so, mini dive it is!!!

So, to begin, ground acrobatic is basically any free body activity involving, you guessed it, Acrobatics! When done alone it greatly resembles gymnastics, or an odd mix between dance and parkour. We actually had a couple of kids come from a gymnastic course and another from a parkour one. The one from parkour had a few habits that didn't exactly mix perfectly with circus style ground acrobatic, like keeping legs half curled for cartwheels or leaning on one shoulder while doing somersaults rather than spread their weight on their full back; but it does make sense if the goal is to soften impacts with minimal time for precision, and it still gave them good foundations to build off of.

Anyway. Circus ground acrobatic really differentiates itself when at least two people work together, and that is also the moment the classification base/porter and flyer/agile starts to actually matter. Every team, be it made up of two or three or more people, has at least One porter and One agile at its core. Trios can have two flyers and one base, but it's more common to have two bases and one flyer, maybe with one of the bases also able to act as a flyer. In general there are more porters than flyers in a team, but that only makes sense when you consider that the porters need to be able to actually hold all the flyers up, and believe me, even 12 year olds get heavy if you're carrying more than one.

So, basically (ah!) Every flyer has a dedicated base, not every base has a dedicate flyer, and flyers that can act as base or bases that can act as flyers are the best thing ever for anything bigger than a duo maybe trio.

Alllright, now onto defining flyer and base. To be clear, there is no such thing as being just a porter or only working as an agile. You may have a preference, you can be unable to practice the other role due to a lack of viable partner, but it's vitale that Every base knows how to fly and every flyer knows how to be a base. Both because stagnation is the death of art and most importantly because some details can only be understood when felt. Being told how hard it is for a flyer to just keep still isn't enough for a tired porter to be more understanding of their constantly squirming flyer, but experience is. Some flyers don't really understand why exactly they shouldn'tput their weight in certain spots even if they feel more stable, or to avoid that "secure" grip on the shoulders, until they have to be the ones carrying someone and feel that the stability comes at the cost of pain for the base and that "secure" is about one twitch away from feeling like strangulation.

Just- just know that everyone can, let's say multiclass, at least a bit.

Now that that's out of the way, ideal weight/height proportions in an agile-porter duo.

One would think that the dream team consists of a two meters (about 6ft 7inch) tall brick wall of a man and a tiny thin dainty stick looking woman that he could lift with one hand, right?

WRONG!

(Not even touching the gender stereotypes cuz they're utter BullShit and i'm living proof that a female base can have a male flyer, yes, of the same age and height and built. I will bite the head off of anyone who disagrees cuz YES, when I (a woman) was fifteen years old 165cm tall and 60kg heavy worked on a number with a sixteen years old boy ~170cm tall of just about my own weight. We did switch roles for the one figure (he didn'thave the leg flexibility to be the flyer for it), but I was the base for almost everything and he is one of my top three favorite flyers. Sorry for the rant but the common lack of female porters annoys me and I need to make this notion clear)

Mano-a-mano often requires the partners to act as counterweights for each other and optimal stability for legs and arms is obtained with joint lock, that means a limb's full extension. Too big of a difference in weight or height makes those two vital things either very impractical or outright impossible. I literally almost can't do a figure with my newest flyer because she's too light to be my counterweight. Might be good for my back and shoulders, but that cuts off tons of possibilities!

Yes, In general the flyer is both shorter and lighter than the base, but by how much? That depends entirely on what the two want to do and their level of experience. The more practice they Both have, the less height and weight matter. And also, for some figures it's better to have a balanced couple, for others the lighter the flyer the better, and many inbetweens.

destroying preconceptions out of the way, for two acrobats of about the same skill level, it's advisable for the flyer to reach somewhere between the base's nose and shoulder with the top of their head and be uhhh about 3/4 of their porter's weight?

Guesstimating here, if an exact formula exists i've never heard of it nor used it. If i can lift them, they can be my flyer, everything else we'll work around when we get there¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Extra tidbit before I have to rush back to review stuff for tomorrow's exam: as a porter, Never Lift With Your Back. EVER.

That's how you pull something and can't stand straight for a month.

ALWAYS have both your and your flyer's weight rest as directly as possible somewhere that is naturally load bearing and in line with the ground. I mean figures with back flat on the ground and flyer held up on your legs/knees/feet and straight arms; i mean resting the flyer's weight as close as physically possible to your hips/lower back/almost on your ass because the bone structure there is already built to carry weight. Work smarter not harder. And for fugures like the column where the flyer has to stand up on the porter's shoulders? For the love of all that's good in the world, keep your spine straight. (Also, don't attempt with a too heavy flyer.) For figures like that, it's vital that one uses the skeleton's natural structure as a guideline. The column can carry vertical loads easily enough, but the moment any amount of perpendicular force is applied you enter the danger zone.

Also, forget skinny/thin/slight arms, shoulders or legs. Can't exactly hold up a person without some solid muscle. Not body builder level, mind you, but, uhhhhh, let's say that shirts that fit me perfectly in summer become too tight around the biceps when training starts back up in autumn and leave it at that, yeah?

And I guess I have decided what nickname to use on this sideblog to avoid confusion between Circus (me) and Circus (the sport). Porter it is!