Eve Gordon performing acrobatics, suspended from silks. Photo / Supplied
Eve Gordon, actor and circus artist.
My happy place is being up in the air. I'm a circus artist, or aerialist, as we call ourselves. I'm a silks artist, primarily, so it's all about wrapping yourself up in silks and dropping down. If you've ever seen Pink do it, you'll know what I mean. It's very
Cirque du Soleil kind of stuff.
It's hard work. It's taken me seven years of training to be at the top of my game in New Zealand. One of the coolest tricks I do is a double star. Basically, you wrap yourself in silks about four times in the air - so you wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap, wrap - and then you drop all the way so you let yourself go - and you roll, roll, roll, roll, roll - all the way to the bottom, so you land in a little knot.
The cooler tricks are the strength and flexibility ones, like when you've just got the silk wrapped around one hand, and you're hanging on with that hand. A hand climb is really tricky - where you just climb with your hands and no feet. I can do that. There are few girls who can, but I've been training.
The problem with the really hard tricks is that, quite often, to a non-discerning audience, the simple tricks are the ones that make them say: "Wow." And the death-defying tricks you work five months on, they say: "Oh yeah, that looks cool."
