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 can be really easy as a facilitator working on big projects like this to forget about the suspendees as the day unfolds. Looking through the photos that #Leeds has done over time, it’s wonderful to see the behind the scene shots that capture the laughter, enjoyment, and fun of the experience they are having. It is clear that those suspending, along with the individuals helping out, are having a great time. At the end of the day, good photos or not, the experience of the person who has suspended really does come first. It’s wonderful to know that their team keeps that in mind as they create these suspensions.

I am sure this isn’t the last time we’ll see this team’s fantastic images on here. I would actually be pretty surprised if Arseniy didn’t already have more suspension ideas in the works for his his crew. Thank you guys for sharing these with us. I can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

On their website, Bardo explains that their goal is to allow the spectators to share in the experience of body suspension as they watch the performers. It only makes sense then that the best way for a video to really give us a glimpse of what their performance is like would be to show it from that audience perspective. While this is very well done and does a wonderful job of letting us see into their beautiful gallery display, I have a feeling that no picture or video can’t do justice to how impressive it would have been to see in person.

Bardo is a group that I instantly loved when I first saw their work. Their focus on both art and experience are two things that stand out in the lovely suspensions they create, which are always presented through high quality media rather than blurry camera phone shots or grainy video. I was so happy to get the chance to speak with a few of their members at the Dallas Suscon this year; it’s always nice to find out that the individuals behind the team are just as incredible as the work that they present. With their attitudes toward body suspensions, their views on the beauty and art in what we do, and their immense amount of creativity, I think this is a team that we are going to see do some amazing and inspiring things in our community.

I can’t wait to see what these guys do next, and I am sure I will be writing about it here when it happens. And just for fun for those of you who might be as curious about their name as I was, the name Bardo in Tibetan Buddhism refers to the state of the soul between its death and its rebirth. Although our community certainly has a wide and diverse collection of belief systems within it, I think it is a great description of the place that a lot of people go within themselves when they suspend.

Thank you to the guys in Bardo for sharing this with us. I hope we see more of your work here in the future.

With everything that has unfolded over the last year, this suscon was especially hard for several of the people attending. At the same time, it was incredibly rewarding to see the individuals in this community pull together to embrace one another as they worked through the losses that have been seen through the past several months. I know for many people, the act of suspending can be a very healing experience; that weekend certainly saw its share of people baring their pain to those around them and working toward mending those wounds. I can’t think of a better place to be for that than surrounded by 200 people who love and care for one another.

In the end, for every tear that weekend there were a hundred smiles. This suscon saw people and teams working together in an incredible way. I don’t think anyone outside looking in could have been able to pick one group from another as members crossed between projects to help keep things moving. There were positions that I haven’t seen attempted before; among those were AGRO‘s “lamp post” suspension which combined tension and tandem elements to suspend the two individuals involved and Nicola‘s creation that has adorably been titled an inverted pin-up pose. Also present were plenty of suspensions that reminded my why I love seeing aesthetic rigging and just how beautiful what we do really is. The first that comes to mind is the lovely work of Wings of Desire, who can take a basic 2 point suspension and turn it into a work of art. Another stunning piece seen that weekend was the collaborative project between Anchors Aweigh and Bardo which turned the entire dome structure into rigging points to suspend Brian Sane for his very serene looking lotus at the center. It was a suspension in which you could clearly see that the experience of the suspendee was every bit as impressive as the aesthetic of what was created around him. I loved seeing it come together so well, and when it was finished, the only reaction I could think of was to hug him.

There were far too many amazing moments and suspensions to cover them all, and I hope to feature some of them individually here over the next few weeks. All of the excitement and fun of suscon was wrapped up with the Freaks and Fetish afterparty, a fantastic night put together by the lovely Courtney Crave. Drinks were in hand as we celebrated another year of friendship, family, and this wonderful community we are a part of. On stage that night were several talented individuals, including Havve Fjell the Headmaster of Pain, Jussi Paradise and Lucky Hell, and Miss Texas Polestar 2011 Brynn Route.

I think this year was definitely a success, and everyone present had the opportunity to take something away from it if they tried. Looking at the improvements that have happened each year, it’s so exciting to think of where this event is going. It is such a unique opportunity to bring practitioners together in a setting where we are working among our peers as opposed to handling large groups of suspendees or other individuals who are untrained. It really is a fantastic learning environment where the seasoned practitioners of this community are not only teaching the next generation, but learning from them as well. I hope next year brings as many new faces as 2012 did to work along side those of us who already know one another. Thank you so much to everyone to who went out of their way to attend.

A special thank you to the kitchen staff who worked so hard all weekend to feed us, the volunteers who helped us keep our sanity through registration and setup, and everyone who showed up with open minds and a desire to learn. And of course, thank you to Allen for putting up with all the headaches we give him in planning this event each year.

Photos courtesy of the very talented Mark Kaplan.

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.

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 no secret that I have a soft spot in my heart for resurrection suspensions, so when I saw this photo I had to post it. As beautiful as ornate rigging or big projects can be, there really is something breathtaking about the simplicity of certain suspensions. The uncluttered shape of the rigline against the clean white background does a fantastic job of putting the focus of the photo on the suspension itself. Photographer J. Isobel De Lisle managed to capture the serenity of that moment perfectly.

Gisella also suspended for photographer Hatter Marie for a feature in a new tattoo magazine called Tattoo Envy. This outdoor suspension has the same effect of a simple suspension that makes a big impact with the combination of body position, lighting, and photography. The intense colors of the background against her complexion is a complete opposite of the subtle tones in the previous resurrection photo, but manages to have the same feeling to it. Gisella’s ability to look relaxed and natural in her body position as she suspends really makes the whole photo.

Thank you so much for sharing these with us Gisella. I can’t wait to see the article that is being written about your outdoor suspension.

Pre-ordering Now Available

The book will feature stunning images by Helene Fjell, a photographer who takes some of the most incredible suspension photos I have seen. She has worked with Wings of Desire since they began back in 2002, and her documentation of their work is breathtaking. She has a talent for capturing much more than just the suspension taking place; her photos present the feeling and emotion of that moment. Although she has never chosen to suspend, she stated that she has an enormous amount of respect for every suspendee she photographs for their courage and ability to let go. With her photography, she hopes to share the beauty that she finds in body suspension.

In order to make this book possible, Wings of Desire has chosen to hold a 30 day presale campaign beginning April 1st for their book through Ulule, a website dedicated to crowd funding of projects like this. In order to publish the book, their team will need to have enough presold books to fund the publication and binding for it. Although I know plenty of people will be dying to get their hands on this book, in the rare event that the fund raising doesn’t meet that goal anyone who has prepaid will have their money refunded by Ulule. There is no way to lose unless you put off preordering your copy. The book is going to be incredible, and it can only be made possible through the support of the suspension community.

Along with the beautiful photography, the book will also include a forward by Allen Falkner, quotes from those who have suspended with Wings of Desire, and of course Havve Fjell‘s own words to explain the amazing decade his team has been through. This book documents a huge piece of our history as a community, and I can’t wait to see it. Make sure to mark your calendars for April, get your copy ordered, and help make this happen.