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!

Allen of suspension.org fame has once again graciously organized a massive suspension practitioner’s convention for this Spring. Dallas SusCon 2011 is proving to be bigger and better than the previous two years, which is precisely how it should be. Along with the normal 3 days of suspensions and classes, this year we’re actively stepping up the documentation side of things. There are many reasons for this, but I’m going to touch on a few of the most important ones.

First and foremost is for liability and protection. If something terrible were to happen, it would most likely all come down on Allen as the head of the event, which is obviously something we all wish to avoid. In order to minimize this potential outcome, I’m working on documentation of the chain of command and proper protocols to follow. By having all of this documented, it should be possible to redirect liability to more appropriate persons, and thus help to ensure that SusCons can be continued.

Secondly, it’s allowing me to stretch my wings in a different direction. I’ve slowly been writing up documentation for ihung’s training and operations, but it’s slow going as I didn’t exactly have any guidance or directions on formatting or anything of the like. I’ve been communicating with Mr. Vidra of Health Educators to make the documentation for SusCon as thorough as necessary, as well formatted in such a way that makes it very similar to piercing/tattoo shop documentation which is enough to appease health inspectors.

The tertiary reason is that I wholeheartedly believe that appropriate documentation is the second most lacking aspect of the suspension community. The primary lacking aspect is that of proper education in rigging, but we have classes and instructors at SusCon to work on that one already. One of my personal agendas is to push the if it isn’t documented, it never happened mantra into the community so that we can add more accountability and responsibility. Many of us in the suspension community fear that inevitably some sort of accident will happen which makes us a target for legislation, most likely of an extremely aggressive nature, and our best bet to have control over this is to have solid documentation of our protocols. The idea being that if we have paperwork that shows that we take every possible precaution to keep ourselves and the suspendee as safe as possible.

I’m working predominately on two documents; one is all of the protocols and procedures, in explicit detail so that everyone will be on the same page before even arriving at the space, and the second is a full fledged Exposure Control Plan. The purpose of this document is to define all roles and responsibilities that will be performed, as well as what precautions each role must take, what equipment is available and what the purpose of each of them is.

This is the first year that we’ll have these documents, as well as my first time writing them, so they will be rough, but just like the goal of the SusCon is to improve the minimum standards, that’s what I’m shooting for with this.

As promised in the previous post, today, we bring you all a video of ihung/Only Flesh at a local haunted house (with an unfortunate name) The Haunted Hoochie. This is a gig that we’ve taken part in for a couple of years now, where we are there one night a week to entertain the line before they get into the actual haunted house. It’s taxing on us because we do a lot of suspensions/hook play in a short amount of time, but it’s a lot of fun and the crowd loves it!

Below is a video from October 16th, featuring many members and friends of ihung and Only Flesh having some fun with some hooks, including escaping from a straight jacket while hanging from your knees!