Dizzying dance demonstrates dynamics

Rotational dynamics, specifically. But I was going for alliteration in the title.

A different staging of this performance floated into my Facebook feed yesterday, and my jaw dropped. And it's not that I don't get out much. It's that this performance is jaw-dropping. And of course it's a beautiful synthesis of artistry, athleticism, physics, and practice. I don't even understand how a human can do this with functional semi-circular canals. Watch for yourself.

Angelica Bongiovonni - 34th Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain - Paris


So in a #FirstWorldProblems moment, deciding to post this gem to the blog led me down bit of a rabbit hole. The video was locked into Facebook. I don't yet know how to rip videos from Facebook. YouTube, yes. Facebook, no.

The Facebook video linked to the Dance.com Facebook page. That didn't help. Neither did going to Dance.com, itself. The Facebook video didn't even mention the dancer's name. No surprises there. The comment count was in the thousands. Nevertheless, I began poring over the comments and found the dancer's name in a reply to a comment.

Off to YouTube. The dancer had a channel but the channel did not include this performance; it was sparse and seems to have been abandoned. She's apparently too busy dancing to maintain a YouTube channel.

So a general name search ensued. Adding "Cyr Wheel" didn't help. (Yeah, I didn't know it was called a Cyr Wheel. either. You can actually learn things from search results.) I couldn't find the video I saw on Facebook.

But I found the one posted above: Same routine; different performance. I don't see a simple "in" to an engaging paper and pencil companion lesson. But the video can stand on its own. Whenever I show such a thing in class, I verbally admonish my students that they must be thinking about physics as they watch.

One thing Angelica Bongiovanni did post to her wee YouTube channel was a short blooper reel made in preparation for a different routine.

I love the poster frame that shows up for the embedded video. That's the still you'd hope to capture if you were photographing the performance.