Aerial Circus: Enjoying The High Life.

How did a shy novelist with a worry of heights turn out to be an executed trapeze artist? Will Davis explains how aerial circus helped him beat his despair. Most novelists want a 2nd activity to assist pay the payments. Few of them choose to run off with the circus.

For his new book the trapeze artist, however, will Davis conjoined his dual passions: writing, and aerial acrobatics. It's the despair tale of an ungainly homosexual guy who, in his struggle to triumph over teenage trauma and an adult breakdown, begins a tumultuous dating with a performer in a journeying circus, then obsessively trains himself in trapeze artistry.

The writer's personal history is much less dramatic, but he nonetheless attributes new-located contentment to his time spent swinging thru the air. "Writing is cathartic," he says. "you channel your feelings onto the web page and placed them right into a format that's well worth something, like a monument to anything you've got gone thru. But circus lets you compartmentalize it and place it in a place where it could be handled later."

Davis become born in 1980 and brought up in Hungerford in Berkshire. As a shy child he hated sports, suffered from vertigo, and feared the circus. "like quite a few people," he says, "I saw the movie of Stephen king's it, and that I developed a large phobia of clowns." 

after studying film in London ("film degrees don't qualify you for anything, no longer even operating in the film"), he applied himself to fiction. His first novel, my facet of the tale, become a coming-out and coming-of-age tale approximately a homosexual youngster in London, published in 2007.

In his mid-20s, Davis had visible a few experimental, cutting-edge circus productions with the aid of the likes of Cirque du Soleil and not nation circus. Far from the conventional huge top, he encountered aside to the circus that integrated other disciplines, together with dance and theatre.

"I idea: 'that appears top notch and I'll in no way be able to do it.' but I would usually desire to do a backflip and that I concept maybe that plenty changed into possible. So I went to the circus area [the circus conservatoire in Shoreditch] to strive for it. I failed to manipulate a backflip, however, I noticed different people training on rope and silks and I determined to try aerial circus instead."

Certainly svelte, tall and bendy, he took to the trapeze with surprising ease – now not to say silks, the rope, and hoop, all elements of aerial circus. However the training becomes grueling, each climb or trick complemented by using a regime of muscle stretching and flexing. 

"it takes a long time before you may hold on with one hand and do a trick without having to come down right away and stretch." one not unusual problem for trapeze artists is tendonitis. "I do not know an unmarried aerialist who hasn't got some ordinary harm: pulled muscle tissues or rotator cuffs or hamstring. They're ongoing, due to the fact you can't have enough money to take six months off to let it heal due to the fact you may lose energy and flexibility."

He has pulled a rotator cuff or even broken his nostril – however, he did that along with his very own knee, throughout a roly-poly. Despite his younger vertigo, he not fears heights. "once you're familiar with the equipment, it feels very secure. It's like on foot, it is so natural and comfortable. Climbing a ladder could make me plenty more apprehensive."