For many people, their first suspension is the hardest. Once the decision is made that it is something you want to do, a hundred questions cross your mind, and the nerves tend to set in. What will it be like, will you enjoy it, can you handle it, and who do you talk to about facilitating it for you? The last question is the big one; the people you suspend with and the environment they create will certainly determine not only how well you are cared for in regards to cleanliness and contamination, but also the experience that you have. A good team can take what might be an intimidating situation and turn it into a wonderfully positive event in your life. For those of you interested in performing a suspension or pull, CoRE will be hosting private suspensions on May 27th, 2012 in the San Francisco Bay area. Of course this isn’t just for first timers, it will be available to anyone who is interested in the experience of a body suspension or an energy pull. CoRE is a great team made up of some fantastic practitioners, I’m positive anyone suspending with them will have a wonderful time. There will only be 10 openings available, so make sure contact them as soon as possible if you are interested.

Every year we, the organizers, ask for comments and criticism regarding the Dallas Suscon.  Each year we make note of everyone’s suggestions and even reply to some that we feel need to be answered.  This year, 2012, was no different.  However, we did have some concerns about admission and registration selection that we feel needed to be shared with the entire community.

As some of you may know, admission requirements for the Dallas Suscon have become stricter every year.  Furthermore, the registration system has also become tighter in that we have required team leaders to pick and choose who is allowed to attend.  Why might you ask?  Well here’s your answer.

First, there is limited space.  This year we had 208 people attend, our highest attendance yet, and in many ways too many people for the venue to accommodate.  If we were to open the event to every person wanting to attend the venue would simply be overcrowded.  Besides not allowing everyone that wants to suspend the chance, a problem we are already having, it’s also a safety issue.  With so many people packed into such a small area, chances of cross contamination increase dramatically with every extra body.

Safety is also our second issue.  The Dallas Suscon and its protocols are designed for trained practitioners only.  Unlike smaller suspension events, that are open to the general public, our event has no safety measures for dealing with untrained people.  With the exception of the 15 aspiring practitioners we allowed in this year (A new program we are testing to allow a small group of untrained people to learn at the event) all people in attendance need to be trained and competent to limit the chance of accidents.

Lastly, there is the issue of team attendance.  The Dallas Suscon mission statement states that the objective of this convention is to promote international communication within the suspension community, share information on techniques, protocols and safety measures.  To do this we try to bring together as many different teams as possible.  This year we had 40 teams from 7 countries register for the event.  In the future we hope to have even more teams and countries represented.  As the number of teams grow, it is quite possible that the amount of people per team may have to be reduced.  Understandably, this might be an issue with larger teams.  However, we hope that members of each team will be understanding and realize that the admission limitations are a necessity for the event to run smoothly and benefit the suspension community as a whole.

Final Note:  To those that feel excluded, please understand this event it not designed to be elitist, nor provide special treatment to those whose registrations are approved.  We are simply trying to keep the event from growing too quickly, maintain the highest level of safety, and provide education to as many suspension teams as possible. Organizing and running the Dallas Suscon is a difficult, time consuming, and expensive endeavor.  Every year I personally donate hundreds of hours of my time and sacrifice thousands of dollars of potential income to focus my attention on the convention.  I am not looking for thanks nor asking for pity. What I want is for people to comprehend what it takes to make this event happen and to respect the decisions that both team leaders and the event registration team need to make when it comes to choosing and ultimately limiting attendance.  Every year we do our best to improve the Dallas Suscon and help the entire suspension community as a whole.  Sometimes that means making some pretty tough choices.

Thank you for your support and understanding.
-Allen Falkner
Dallas Suscon – Event Organizer

It’s been a moment since we last looked at what the #Leeds suspension team has been up to, and as always they have something great to show us. For those of you who aren’t familiar with this team, #Leeds is based out of St. Petersburg, Russia and is run by Arseniy Andersson, along with piercer Vlad Sintezz and rigger Dmitry Hokkins. Outside of offering personal and private suspensions, their team focuses on creating beautiful and interesting scenes involving body suspension. Their themed shoots are always fantastic to look through, and include well executed suspensions and photography, as well as lighting, makeup, and costumes that really pull the whole concept together. Their recent photo set, titled Dark World, has a bit of a macabre feeling to it, but still manages to make the suspensions look beautiful rather than gory.

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In writing for Hook Life, the hardest part is not simply finding material that we can feature, but finding suspensions that have been documented with high quality photos and videos. There are few groups that choose to seek out professional photographers and cinematographers to capture what they do, but those that take the time really make me so excited when I see their work. So much is put into what we do, it’s nice to see the same care and effort put into sharing our art with others. Bardo is certainly a group that puts a considerable amount of time into creating something beautiful; it shows through in their suspensions as well as in the photos and videos that accompany their work. In this video by Jesse Hall and Ashleigh Abbott, we are given a spectator’s view of their performance at the Hydra Gallery in January.

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The 2012 Dallas Suscon has come and gone, and I am really still taking it all in. I am sure for many of us who attended the fact that it is over is just now really starting to feel real. For those of you who don’t know about the event, the Dallas Suscon Practitioners Convention is an annual event which allows suspension practitioners to come together for classes and hands on learning with one another. It is one of the few events which is closed to the public and really allows us to focus on bettering ourselves by gaining knowledge in safety, technical information, and practices. Although that might sum up what it is on the surface, those of us who attend know that a simple definition like that does nothing to explain what this event means to us. It is one of the very few opportunities many of us have to come together with the people we love most and share this beautiful art that we are a part of with one another.

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It feels like just yesterday I was staying up to sneak a birthday post onto Hook Life without Allen knowing about it. Another year has passed, and I find myself stuck with the same problem as before. What do you say about Allen Falkner that hasn’t already been said a hundred times? Well, I thought I would keep this year simple by opening the comments up to all of you to show him some love today.

I would like to add that for me personally, I can’t think of a friend that has more influenced my life or taught me more about hard work and dedication than Allen. His commitment to this community and his love for the people in it is continually motivating. While this family we have created goes through thick and thin, he is a constant in many of our lives that we can reach out to for help and guidance. Thank you so much for your friendship, your advice, and all of the hard work you do for us. There definitely aren’t enough words to express what you mean to our community and this family. I suppose all I can say is happy birthday to the best big brother a girl could ask for.

And for those of you who are wondering what to get the guy who has everything, this year Allen has asked to see Wings of Desire’s upcoming book, “Learning to Fly” get published. You can do your part by preordering a copy, which will fund the costs of creating this amazing piece of our history. It really is a win-win situation for you; buying the book helps make his birthday wish possible, and in turn you receive a copy of the book after it is published. For more details, check out the post here with a direct link to their paypal site.

As you might remember a few weeks ago Hook Life ran an article about the new Wings of Desire book Learning to Fly.   Now we are happy to announce that pre-ordering is now available.  Why is this so important?  Because WOD has a goal of 500 pre-orders by May 7th, 2012 to be fully fund the printing the book.  Everyone please dig deep.  Nothing like this has been printed since Stelarc’s Obsolete Body.  And who knows when we will get to see another work of art like this:

Pre-order your copy now:

We know that many of you have been waiting for the final results from the Suspension Competition.  Why haven’t we posted them yet?  Well, besides the honest truth of just being overwhelmed from Dallas Suscon, we’ve also been waiting for a photo from award presentation.  So without further ado we give you the runner up and winner of the 2011 Suspension Competition.  In second place we have the entry from Helsinki’s Supersankari Suspension Team.  This photo received a total of 113 out of a possible 150 points and was the favorite of 2 judges. (Actually favorite of one, tied for favorite by a second judge)

Runner Up

…and the one you have all been waiting for…the winner of the 2011 Suspension Competition…with a total of 122 out of a possible 150 points…from CoRE LA

Winner

Suspension Competition Entry #15 with the information provided by the submitter:

Information about the entry: The Los Angeles City Hall building was designed by John Parkinson, John C. Austin, and Albert C. Martin, Sr., and was completed in 1928. Dedication ceremonies were held on April 26, 1928. It has 32 floors and, at 454 feet (138 m) high is the tallest base-isolated structure in the world. The original plan was to suspend on southern steps of city hall from a suitable tree that had been mapped out. After the Occupy Camp was evicted, City Hall property was fenced off and turned into a no trespassing zone with its own security detail. This forced us to scout new locations. We decided upon The Broad Plaza which is diagonal from City Hall and offers a multitude of structural rigging points with an unobstructed view of City Hall to utilize for the image we intended to capture. Anyone working at the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters that happened to look out one of the Eastern facing windows shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve 2011 would have seen the multitude of different colored remote camera strobes popping off to light the CoRE “Angel” performed by Andrew floating in the night sky. The entire CoRE crew was in and out without anyone having known we were there. We all learned that a guerrilla suspension is just a bit more exciting when you are hanging next to the jail you could end up in. Photography by Syrus.

The CoRE “Angel” is a non-suspending character that has been used in some prominent CoRE shows and processions over the past decade that is created using custom fabricated “wings”. The latest incarnation of the “wings” that are used to visually aid in creating the character are custom designed AMF Korsets crafted by Louis Fleisheur that are integrated with a steel mesh plate and aluminum frame fabricated by members of CoRE. The wings come to life once the bearer is laced into the korset and the aluminum frame is manually tensioned into the arc visually required to create the character. The frame is laced to the bearers back by multiple hooks down the upper back with 550 cord and the skin takes the tension as the aluminum fights to go back to its original position. To give birth to the suspending angel we used six eight gauge Blacksheep locking hooks pierced horizontal down the back for a 6 point vertical back suspension and laced the wings into the shackles with white 550 cord. We then rigged the suspension using black 550 cord and tactical black rigging gear to hide it in the shadows of Andrew as the flashes popped from various locations on the ground.

Congratulations to CoRE and thank you everyone for their amazing entries.  For those that have been asking, we will be putting together another competition for 2012, but this one will be a bit different.  Rather focusing on danger or high visibility, we will be looking for seclusion and beauty.  Yes, this year’s will be an outdoor/nature themed competition.  Details will be announced very soon, or at least once we recover from suscon.

It’s always a delight to see new suspensions from Gisella Rose. There are a number of reasons that I enjoy looking at the lovely work that she and Dominick do. Added to the fact that she is a beautiful young woman who looks truly at ease and relaxed when she hangs is that you can really tell how much she enjoys suspension both in photos and in talking to her. Lucky for us, she has been busy working with a couple great photographers recently to create these wonderful images, and was nice enough to share them with us here.

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When it comes to truly beautiful suspensions, there are few teams that can rival the talented individuals in Wings of Desire. Their group consistently performs suspensions in which there is a wonderful mix of visually appealing rigging along with suspendees that are clearly comfortable and at ease as they are in the air. I’m sure a large part of the trust and comfort that the suspendees feel comes from the dedication that Wings of Desire has towards constantly educating themselves and improving their techniques to provide the best experience possible for those they suspend. The result of all their hard work is an incredible team that has been providing this amazing experience to people around the world for 10 years now. After a decade of creating unforgettable memories with countless suspendees, their team has decided to share that journey in their upcoming book Wing of Desire – Learning to Fly.

Pre-ordering Now Available

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