Lena Burns is a dedicated dental practitioner who qualified in Manchester in 1990 having won numerous undergraduate prizes and now works in private practice in Didsbury where she has been for the last 13 years.
Lena Burns is a dedicated dental practitioner who qualified in Manchester in 1990 having won numerous undergraduate prizes and now works in private practice in Didsbury where she has been for the last 13 years.
Lena first got interested in circus 10 years ago while on holiday in Jamaica when her daughter was chosen to train for a little circus act with the hotel circus entertainment team.
To Lena this seemed like lots of fun so she asked if she could have a go and ran through a whole basic double trapeze routine straight away. The French female instructor, who has since become one of her best friends, next had her climbing a rope, which she had never done before, and try the Spanish Web, a spinning rope act.
Following this came the flying trapeze which she didn’t really want to do but was pressured into trying. After a couple of goes she was hooked and 6 weeks later she returned to perform her first double trapeze routine in the show.
To improve her performance Lena travelled to Bristol once a fortnight for private lessons at a circus school run by an award winning aerialist with the original touring Cirque du Soleil. As an indication of how committed she is to her new pastime she has had a large extension built on the back of her house to accommodate a trapeze and corde lisse.
About 3 years ago Lena began pole dancing and was surprised by the very negative reactions she got compared to the positive ones she received when said she was an aerialist.
This is because pole dancing is associated in most peoples’ minds with dancers in tawdry sex and strip clubs, which only started in the 1980s, whereas historically it originated in ancient India from pole gymnastics called Mallakhamb and was performed by men. Similarly, Chinese pole dance, which is often seen in circuses, dates back to the 12th century and is also performed by men. Pole dance is a performance art; a combination of dance gymnastics and acrobatics.
A phenomenal amount of core strength and control is needed to make smooth transitions and to perform the seriously hard moves such as the “human flag”, in which the arms and body are held out at right angles to the vertical pole. As Lena says, “if the pole we used was horizontal rather than vertical, it would be deemed acceptable and we would be applauded for what we do.”
The International Pole Sport Federation is pushing for a place in the 2016 Olympic Games, if that happens then, or in subsequent Games, people will be forced to recognise that as a discipline of gymnastics it requires just as much balance, flexibility and core strength as the asymmetric bars, vault or beam. Who knows, we could have two Manchester alumni competing in Rio in 2016.