Soft Rope Home Chores: Remo Williams style (movie)

Aloha Tribe,

I've set up various ropes, poles, logs, and tight wires in my home, to get from place to place, along with walking on tips and edges of furniture such as on their backs and chair arms and such, while I do my daily home chores as well as between training sessions, thus, I'm constantly training. Even while watching tv, mostly dvds about surfing, slacklining, high wire walking, and, of course, Remo Williams for the training scenes, I stand and walk on my tight wire training simulator.

My inspiration for this type of training comes from one of my favorite movies, Remo Williams, which, by the way, finally is out on dvd. The training sequences in the movie - which maybe run an hour perhaps, (always my favorite part of any movie) truly are not only really fun, but, also wildly creative  and, they work. That's the cool part. Well, that is to say, if you put in the time every day. That's the secret to surfing and soft rope  aka rope dancing it funambulist terminology, as well as low wire and high wire training, you must train daily, more so, you must be truly passionate about what you're doing if you hope to reach your potential.

So, my  home now looks sort of like Remo's warehouse did in that movie. At the moment, I was just washing and drying dishes and putting them away, all the while balancing on one of my manilla ropes strung across my kitchen, while walking about the kitchen on the rope.

I want to explore Italian hemp rope. It is the strongest type of hemp rope in the world. I truly love walking on hemp. I feel like I blend with it, harmonize with it, like it is a natural product for me to work with. It's kind of like the solid wood surfboard I'm making out in the barn, old school, they way things were done. The board, by the way, is coming along. I have it glued. Next, the shaping and sanding.

In the Chinese style of Single Rope Rope Penestrating Arts", you use a loosely hung rope, manilla, seems to be an excellent choice. Start with a larger diameter, like 2 inches, and work down to 1 1/2", 1", and perhaps possibly even 3/4".

This is a called a Shaolin Soft Rope Art,

Also from China, in the Xinjiang region in the NW, the type of rope that appears to be walked on looks like 1 inch hemp rope (China is a major producer of hemp). The art here is called Dawaz, which is a Uygur word for tightrope walker. The art of walking a rope, from here, is over a 1000 years old.

Some other words for a tightrope walker are Voleur, Ascensioniste, and Funambule. These words are talked about in Philippe Petit's excellent book On The High Wire. Also from Philippe's book, he gives the definitions of rope walking, namely,

1. Rope Dancer - one who walks, dances or performs on a low hung rope, a few meters above the ground. The rope can be tight or slack or even be loose. A modern slackliner would fit into this category.

2. Low  Wire Artist - Someone who walks on a wire made of some sort of metal that is tightly hung only a few meters high.

3. High Wire Artist - A person who walks a very tightly strung wire, at height over 30 feet. He also uses a balancing pole for balance.

For surfing practice, any of these styles of walking would work, of course, though I suspect that most people would probably stick with Rope Dancing, specifically slacklining, typically probably 3 to 7 feet or so high, I'd imagine.

Naturally, of course, there is a radically different feel to walking something loose vs. slack. vs. tight. Each, offers it's challenges.

As a person interested in balancing arts, thus, as an Equilibrist, it's great to learn it all, and, all at once.

So, I include solid stationary objects like rocks, branches, limbs, roots, curbs, fences, truck beds, rooftops, and so on in my play and experimentation. Once I get this down, just as with surfing where I'm drawn to big waves, I am drawn to the high wire. Yet, I love the feel of manilla, and, I dream of hemp rope. So, we'll have to see how this all plays out over time. The thing is, both have traditional and historical ties to rope walking. Hemp, comes from the cannabis plant family (cannabis sativa), while manilla comes from a type of banana plant called abaca. Manilla, while called hemp today by most people, is also about 20% stronger than hemp, it is cheaper than hemp, and, it is much easier to find than hemp rope of equal size, especially when you're looking for the larger sizes like 2 inches in diameter or so. That being said, there are some places on the web that have 1 1/2 hemp rope or about 38 mm diameter. Now then, Italian hemp rope, well, that's a quest, it seems. And, a worthy one. Perhaps someone can help me? I'm looking for somewhere between an 1 1/2 (38mm) and 2 inches (about 50 mm diameter hemp rope) for my walking, and thus, my surfing training.  One of the challenges, it seems, with acquiring hemp rope, is that the U.S. Government  under the Drug Encorcement Administration, and the Controlled Substance Act has a Zero Tolerance for hemp even as merely a rope for rope walkers, and does not seem to differentiate the various types of hemp or Cannabis. Interestingly enough, hemp rope because less popular than manilla because hemp required tarring when used at sea on ships, whereas manilla did not. Will my dreams of having and walking an Italian hemp rope materialize? Time will tell. But, in the meantime, I have my hemp manilla rope.


Bodaciously Stoked,

Lily of the Valley