I unlocked a shape called brass monkey early in my journey into aerial pole dance tricks. If the name of this shape doesn’t immediately put the Beastie Boys song in your head, here’s a link to it, so we can share the earworm. After learning a few easier shapes (like jasmine and genie), I took a whole online course—multiple classes led by Marlo Fisken—to learn how to do the brass monkey. And when I completed the course, I was somewhat confident in my brass monkey and other brass shapes.
Brass shapes, upright and inverted, have the body on one side of the pole with one leg wrapped around the pole. The pole is held in the knee pit and runs up the side of the leg in about the position of a side seam in jeans. Or, if you hate jeans (like me), you can compare the position of the pole with a side zipper on a skirt. The leg hook is what’s called a contact point, or the thing that’s keeping you aloft and safe while attached to a metal stick. In brass, getting the pole to the side of the leg—not on the back of the leg—is crucial.
As I started learning other tricks, I practiced brass monkey less frequently. However, after an illness that kept me off the pole for several months, I returned to brass shapes while rebuilding my strength and endurance. Brass can be entered from a climb rather than an invert, which was useful because I lost my capacity to do a forward spinning invert for a while. I could do brass before I could do the butterfly shape, which I prefer to enter from that forward spinning invert (one of the hardest things I can do).
Once again, as I relearned (most of) the tricks I could do before my illness, I practiced brass monkey less and less frequently. When I began learning a new shape, the jade split, I stopped practicing brass shapes for a couple months. This was simply because I don’t have the endurance to practice every single trick I can do every single time I train. However, when I tried to return to brass shapes, I discovered I couldn’t do them. I couldn’t place the pole far enough on the side of the leg to hook securely.
For a few weeks, my movement journal included “failed at brass” with a frowny face drawn next to it. I would try multiple times in a session and fail each time. I tried getting into it from a genie shape, rather than my usual entry through a stargazer-type shape, and still failed. It wasn’t until after I took a private zoom lesson with Elizabeth B-fit that focused on the jade split that I could do brass again. We didn’t discuss my issues with brass, but generally talked about losing confidence after an injury or illness.
It wasn’t simply that I couldn’t find the contact point, it was also that I had lost faith in my ability to do the brass monkey after so many failures. I had to relearn to trust my brass leg. And, once I regained this trust in myself, I was able to do brass monkey, that funky monkey, once again.