ihung.org

UPDATE : Just wanted to note that this post has caused a lot of confusion, so I’ve created a new post which clarifies this relationship and gives all credit where it is due. My apologies to Rev. Lower for causing any issues as I only meant to showcase his creativity and success with this post.

When ihung first got involved with performance suspensions and flesh pulls, back in 2002 or so, we more or less immediately were in contact with Only Flesh. Before we really started working with them, we sort of worked alongside them, in that we would be booked for similar shows, doing similar body modification acts, but would perform very separately. In fact, the Ohio suspension community was so divided that at these shows, we wouldn’t share gear or even assist one another in hook insertion, rigging, cleanup, or anything at all. We operated as two completely independent groups. There were some strong opinions and drama involved in all of this, particularly in regards to performances, which led ihung to back out of public performance and stick only to private, more ritual based suspensions.

Now, as anyone who follows us knows, we now work regularly with Only Flesh to facilitate the suspension side of their shows. This is due to Dave’s friendship with Rev Lower (driving force behind Only Flesh) and my friendship with Dave. See, when Modified Soul was still up and running, Dave was responsible for handling the suspension side of Only Flesh, while Rev and the band concentrated on the music and on performing asked by Rev Lower to assist in executing Rev’s body art plans for their shows. This helped to make certain that their shows go off as safe and clean as possible.

Our involvement with Only Flesh has also allowed us to try out some crazy ideas for shows. Rev is a amazingly creative and comes up with wonderful ideas for shows, which are then planned out with multiple team members so they they are handled safely but still wildly entertaining wonderful sport when it comes to these ideas and often endures high levels of insanity (although always handled with the utmost safety) for the sake of putting on a great show. One such show, Rev wanted to zipline down onto the stage from the 2nd floor of the venue. Once we were onsite, it became clear that this wasn’t really possible to do 100% and if we did it, it would only be like 2 seconds of him flying and most people would probably miss it. Instead, Rev we came up with a way to start him on the floor in the back of the crowd, lift him to the ceiling, have him cut the rigging above him and swing down to hang below the next I-beam, raise up, cut, drop, repeat, about 5 or six times before making it to the stage. The rigging was quite difficult and it required a few dry runs to get right and we really had to consider what gear was proper to use for it. We ended up using 1200 pound MBS cord to rig him to the ceiling, tied to carabiners, with the main structural rigging rope threaded through each carabiner. He was equipped with an Aerojack Knife to cut the cord and not risk cutting his main rigging line. We knew that the visual effect would be pretty intense, but what we didn’t realize is that once the cord had weight on them and were severed, they made an amazingly loud noise which only added to overall performance.

This post is largely celebrate Only Flesh getting an actual record deal, with a new album on it’s way as well as a DVD of live videos and much more. Secondly it’s here as a reminder that we, as a community, need to continue to come together, putting aside our differences and work together to make the suspension community even stronger, largely with events like Dallas Practitioner’s SusCon!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 5th, 2011 at 5:30 pm by jason and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.