Nuts are simple climbing tools that are placed in cracks to protect a leader as he heads up a cliff or are used for belay and rappel anchors. A nut is a piece of tapered metal of various shapes and sizes that are wedged, jammed, and slotted into contrictions in cracks. A piece of stout cord or wire cable is threaded through the nut, allowing a climber to clip a carabiner and rope into it as an anchor.

Nuts belong on every climber’s rack. They’re easy to use; create a bombproof anchor when properly placed; and are cheap compared to cams. A set of nuts, usually racked on a couple carabiners on your harness gear loops, cover a wide range of crack sizes, making them very versatile. I usually carry at least a full set of nuts on every trad route I do and sometimes a couple sets, including offset nuts and micro-nuts that fit in seams.

Read the new article All About Nuts, Chocks, Wired Nuts, and Micro Nuts and find out lots more about nuts, including exactly what a nut is; all the names for nuts; a brief history of nuts; shapes and sizes of nuts; different metals used for different nuts; and some links to buy a new set of nuts at a great price through PriceGrabber.

Photograph above: Carry lots of nuts to wedge in cracks and you’ll be happy and safe when rock climbing. Photograph Stewart M. Green

As a caveman, you can be sure that sometimes, I’ve gotta get back to my roots. Since huntin’ ain’t exactly legal round most parts anymore and I don’t much care for gatherin’ up anything that gets left behind on the streets these days, I’ve gotta get my caveman kicks in other ways. So what’s a he-man like me to do in the big and fancy city? Two words – [wait for drumroll] Rock Climbing.

That’s right, Scratch here went out last weekend to do some good old-fashioned climbin’ and get back in touch with my rocky history (I didn’t name it the “Rock of Ages” for nuthin’). But let’s say ya don’t exactly live near any conveniently placed climbable boulders. Scratch here’s gotcha covered. These days, you can go to a Rock Climbing gym! It’ll have all ya need from helmets to harnesses and even shoe rental. My personal favorite Rock Climbing gym is the good ol’ Virginia Beach Rock Gym – take a gander at the pictures in the article to see a few walls from the place – but you can bet there’s a great place ’round your neck of the woods too.

So what exactly are the benefits of Rock Climbing? Unlike a lot of exercises, Rock Climbin’ gives ya a full-body workout. Just think about it – when you climb, you’re using your entire body from your arms to your legs. You’re even engaging your core! Just think about it – climbing involves dragging your entire weight up the side of a rock wall. It’s like a combination of pull-ups, chin ups, leg presses, and more all wrapped up in one activity!

Rock climbing also increases your flexibility. Climbing forces you to stretch your limbs to the absolute limits in order to reach that next hand or foothold. The more you rock climb, the more you build up your flexibility. This becomes increasingly important as we get older. The more flexible you are, the more likely you are to maintain good motion in your joints. Believe me, this here caveman didn’t get to be as old as I am by sittin’ around! Gotta keep these limbs well-oiled and limber with my weekly Rock Climbing fix.

Since Rock Climbing is an aerobic activity, it gets your heart pumping quickly. This means you’re gettin’ a great cardiovascular workout while ya climb. Exercising your heart and your entire body helps to improve your cardiovascular system, meanin’ your heart and lungs are getting stronger. With a good cardiovascular system, you’re at a much lower risk for a bunch of diseases and health problems (like heart attack for instance).

With bikini season comin’ up, this caveman is more than a little anxious about squeezin’ into my summer loincloth. Fortunately, rock climbin’ is absolutely fantastic for burning calories and toning your body. As the good folks at Virginia Beach Rock Gym told me, the average person can burn around 700 calories per hour by rock climbing. Turns out, they actually underestimated the calorie burnin’ benefits of Rock Climbing. The average man can burn as many as a whopping 900 calories per hour on a rock wall! That’s burning off more than two double cheeseburgers from McDonalds!

With benefits like this, it’s no wonder why Rock Climbing is quickly becoming a very popular activity for fitness fiends. Heck, I hit the climbin’ gym last week and my forearms are still a bit sore! If you’re ever burnt out on the treadmill and lookin’ for a new way to feel the fitness burn, head on over to your local Rock Climbing gym – your arms’ll never feel the same again.

Tags: aerobic activity, bikini season, cardio workout, exercise, fitness, muscle, Rock Climbing, toning muscle, Weight-loss

This entry was posted
on Thursday, May 17th, 2012 at 12:16 pm and is filed under Fitness.

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May 11, 2012

By Rebecca Gross

Project Bandaloop performs on the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York City. Photo by Atossa Soltani

Anyone who lives in or has visited Washington knows the Old Post Office Pavilion. Built in 1899, the building is a major city landmark, renowned for its gorgeous Romanesque revival architecture and 315-foot clock tower. It’s also home to several federal agencies, including our very own NEA.

But tonight at 9 p.m., the historic Old Post Office will transform into a vertical stage when frequent NEA grantee Project Bandaloop dances, leaps, and twists along the façade as it performs its aerial production of Bound(less). Mixing intricate choreography with the rigor of rappelling, the company was founded in 1991 by Amelia Rudolph, who continues to serve as Project Bandaloop’s artistic director. Since then, the company has performed on such unusual spaces as the Seattle Space Needle, a Norwegian fjord, the Oakland Museum in California, cliff and mountain faces, and a 180-foot billboard in Times Square.

Tonight’s free performance is part of the Kennedy Center’s “Look Both Ways: Street Art Across America” festival, and will feature musician and composer Dana Leong performing on the wall alongside the dancers. In anticipation of the event, I spoke with Amelia Rudolph about her incredible, perspective-bending company, the most memorable space she’s ever danced on, and what it feels like to fly.

NEA: How did you initially dream up the idea for Project Bandaloop?

AMELIA RUDOLPH: I’ve danced my whole life. In 1989, I started to climb for the first time in the Sierra. At that time, there actually weren’t that many indoor climbing gyms like there are now; most of the climbing took place in the mountains. As I was climbing one day, high on a ridge in the Sierra, in this absolutely gorgeous place, I wondered what it would be like to create a site-specific work, or dance, in a site like that. How could you dance high in the mountains, on rock, or on a cliff? At the same time, I realized all my dance fed into climbing, and many things about climbing felt like dance to me inside my body.

At the same time, I was doing my master’s thesis as a performance, and writing about why I was doing a performance. So I wrote a master’s thesis, but I also danced it. This was all happening at the same time and out of that came a group of people, and an idea, and a new indoor climbing gym was opening. I asked the owner, Peter Mayfield, “Hey, do you think we can come into your gym and experiment with the idea of cross-pollinating climbing and dance?” He was extremely supportive. We did a show there in 1991 in the climbing gym, and people really, really responded to it. I think it was so many things: the re-framing of dance, seeing sport and art together—so many things came together in that first performance. And for 20 years now, I’ve been putting dance in unusual urban and natural places. We’re a dance company that’s rigorously performing contemporary dance, complex choreography. We are very not circus-like. We just do it in unusual spaces and on a vertical dance floor.

NEA: How do you rehearse for “stages” that are as unique as the ones you perform on, particularly when you have to take weather into account?

RUDOLPH: We treat our studio space, which is the performance space, as a cross between a stage and a rock climb, or a hike. You have to be prepared. We actually will rehearse in some drizzle and some rain; we will rehearse in wind up to a point. We’ve rehearsed in Dayton, Ohio, in 18-degree weather. You have to do what you have to do, and you have to be really prepared and mentally tough to be able to do it.

So there’s that. Then we’re bringing a complex, full-length work to the Old Post Office that we’ve done in Oakland on a flat wall, in Miami on a Frank Gehry building that was also a flat wall, and we’re adapting it to the Old Post Office. There are several sections that I’m going to completely change; you just cannot do it on this building. I’m really looking forward to finding out what that building brings out in this piece. We have four days on the building prior to show, and we’ll be rehearsing as much as they let us.

Dancers Amelia Rudolph and Rachael Lincoln perform on Wildcat Point in Yosemite National Park. Photo by Corey Rich

NEA: What’s the process like between looking at a building or a cliff, and figuring out which movements will work on that surface?

RUDOLPH: Thomas Cavanagh, who’s my technical director among many other hats that he wears, took lots of pictures of the building and figured out how to rig the building on his technical scout. I and the dancers together are studying the pictures of the building. I know where everybody’s going to be during every piece, they are aware that there is 17-inch step down at this place, they’re aware that there’s a ledge above them here or below them there, a window frame here. We’ve been rehearsing the choreography as we know it, and I reasserted my encouragement to them yesterday that we all have to remain very open-minded to how it’s going to feel and how it’s going to change the piece to be on this particular building. You can’t ask the last dance company that danced on the building, “How was your experience?” So it’s exciting. It’s like the first descent of a river, or the first ascent of a mountain. This will be the first ascent of the Post Office for us.

I’m going to be there on day one with my assistant director Rachael Lincoln and the riggers. We will rappel on what we’ve identified to be the most tricky spots on the building. I’m very aware of certain decisions that I have to make on day one. Based on those decisions, we’ll decide for example whether to rig high or rig low on some of the pieces. Rigging high is going to mean on the central tower, we’ll be rigging out the top windows. To rig high means when you push off, you have huge loft, meaning you fly through the air for a pretty long time before you land again. Versus rigging low when you pin the rope further down the building so that there’s less rope between you and your anchor and your jumps are smaller.

NEA: Do you have any hopes or expectations for your performance on the Old Post Office?

RUDOLPH: Every stage that is a building has history, and so many things have happened inside the building, and in front of the building, and on the streets below the building. I feel like when we come and animate that space for the performance, there’s a way where we’re interacting with everything that’s ever happened in that building. Aside from [wishing] that the audience is inspired and moved by the performance that they see, I hope that there’s a relationship that occurs over the week between our company and the architecture itself, the people who work in the building.

NEA: You’ve performed in some incredible places. Which site has been the most memorable for you?

RUDOLPH: It’s very, very hard to choose one, because I’ve had so many experiences that were just so memorable in different ways. One extremely memorable experience in an urban setting was over 12 or 13 years ago, we performed in Houston off the first huge skyscraper that we’d ever performed on. We performed Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet with the Houston Symphony. It was earlier in my career, it was a huge challenge, it was very hot, it was a black skyscraper. Christoph Eschenbach conducted and turned out to be an incredibly gentle and sweet and amazing person who listened to what I had to say, considering how famous he was even back then.

I would say another is the six days I spent climbing El Capitan in Yosemite to create a piece called Peregrine Dreams, because the combination of how difficult that was, and how much logistical rigmarole went on to be able to pull off such a thing. We literally climbed with six people for six days and five nights; we slept on the wall. It’s almost 3,000 feet; we danced at 2,400. Just to know that it was possible at all to create art in that context was just incredible.

Dancers Rachael Lincoln, Anje Lockhart, Roel Seeber, Andrew Ward, and Damara Ganley perform Bound(less) on the New World Symphony Building in Miami Beach. Photo by Atossa Soltani

NEA: You also do performances in more traditional theater settings. How do you compare these very public, outdoor performances with your work in theaters?

RUDOLPH: There are things that each of them has that the other doesn’t. When we’re on a building, you can’t see our faces much. I do everything I can choreographically to have the dancers look out and look down and look for the audience, because it’s so important to see a person’s face when they’re performing. However, it has grand scale and magic and beauty, and the relationship to gravity is so skewed that it really changes your perspective and how you think at moments.

When we perform in a theater, you can look right at the audience. I can use the wonderful, liminal area between the floor and the air, or the floor and the wall, where one dancer’s on the ground, and one is in the air. I love working that transitional zone between these two worlds. I try to activate unusual spaces in the theater.

Of course, people pay to come sit in a seat in a theater, so your audiences are likely to be more traditional dance audiences. In the street, you may get those audiences, but you’re also going to get people who have never seen dance. I feel like we are ambassadors of the form in a way that is very important to me and to the organization, to bring dance to people who have never seen it before. Many of them are expecting a stunt. They’re expecting trickery. And what they get is dance. We get this response all the time: “I just wasn’t expecting to be moved,” or “I wasn’t expecting actual crafted dances.” I really enjoy that aspect of it.

NEA: Since most of us won’t be in a position where we’ll ever be dancing on the side of a building, how would you describe the experience?

RUDOLPH: It is a paradoxical combination of wonderful freedom, release, a sense of soaring, and intense effort, occasional pain, extreme mental focus. There are moments when I don’t notice the feeling of the harness on my body, or how tired my abs are, and I’m just flying through the air, or doing intricate footwork near an architectural feature, and I’m completely absorbed in what I’m doing. And other times, I will notice how tired I am. It is an endurance test at times, and the piece we’re doing in DC is one. I’ve been really working the dancers as best I can here in the studio, literally doing calisthenics practically along the wall along with the choreography. In order to actually hold on to the magic and beauty of the choreography 48 minutes into a dance like this, you have to train really hard. So it’s a combination of this mental focus, physical stress on your body, and releasing all of that, forgetting all of that, not feeling any of that. You’re floating on the music and in the air and the light, and it’s like a dream. You can’t believe that it’s actually real. And then you land and you realize your abs are sore and you’re reminded that it’s real.

NEA: Are most of your dancers also climbers, or not necessarily?

RUDOLPH: Not necessarily. I would say half of them enjoy climbing, but the first generation [of company members] included a lot more avid climbers. When I want to do something really technical in the mountains, I’d probably draw on some of them. Which is not to say these dancers can’t dance on a cliff, but this group is more highly trained as dancers. What we’re doing now is so danceical, that it requires a high level of skill as a dancer. Believe it or not, almost anybody can learn how to rappel off a skyscraper. But not almost anyone can be the kind of dancer that I’m looking for, which is a very smooth, released, beautiful, original mover.

NEA: Part of your mission statement says that Project Bandaloop “honors nature, community, and the human spirit.” How do those three forces manifest themselves in your work?

RUDOLPH: When we’re dancing high in the mountains on sparkling granite and the wind’s blowing and the peregrine falcons are flying by and you’re hundreds of feet off the ground, and you’re dancing, there’s a sense for me as a performer where it’s mystical; it’s not about entertainment. I don’t really need or want to put it in words as to what it is, but it’s an honoring of that place. It’s an honoring of the relationships of the animals and the geography and the sky above. In those ways, I think it celebrates the power of those spaces. And I hope through the films [of the performances], for people who’ve never been to Yosemite, or seen the mountains, or been outside the city, it lets them know that places like that exist. It may tune them into their vulnerability, it may tune them into the reality that we as the human race are impacting the world quite heavily. I’d love to do a piece in the rainforest; I still haven’t. If I knew how to dance underwater, I’d do something about the garbage patch. There’s a way where art can do that.

So there’s a political, advocacy side to it, as well as a spiritual side. When we were performing in [Oakland], there were almost 4,000 people in the street at Broadway and Grand. The police had to cordon an extra block so that we could fit the crowd in, and there was live music and dance and lights and beauty and magic occurring. All those people were there for the sole purpose of experiencing magic and beauty and dance. The community sense that was going on in the street—you could feel it. I was there in the street with them; it was palpable. Celebrating that sense of community is celebrating the human spirit. And I hope that the DC event…because it’s at night, with live music and lights, will have, I hope a kind of almost magical realism. Like you can’t believe this is happening here, now. And I don’t know, it might not. You never know.

Tags: aerial dancing, Amelia Rudolph, Art Works, Bound(less), National Endowment for the Arts, NEA, Old Post Office Pavilion, Project Bandaloop

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 10:32 am and is filed under dance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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I didn’t really watch Cliffhanger. It played, and I spent two hours looking at the screen it was playing on, but I felt so disconnected from what was happening that I never felt as if I was involved, either emotionally or intellectually — I felt nothing. It’s a shame, as there were a couple of good moments, but on the whole, this is a film that felt devoid of life and personality. I was never given reason to care about it.

I suppose the most apt description one can give for Cliffhanger is “Die Hard on a mountain range,” but that doesn’t seem fair to me. Sure, there’s a seemingly ordinary man and he’s pushed to his limits because of some bad guys, but Die Hard had a certain charm that’s missing from this film. Maybe it’s because we grow to like John McClane, while the main character here is just some muscle-dude who’s really good at rock climbing. McClane had emotions, while this guy shows less emotions than the mountains he climbs on. At least they can cause rock slides when they get mad.

Our opening scene is our best, which perhaps sets expectations too high. We see a group of people climbing rocks, engaging in small talk, and they seem to be likable enough. They’re about to be rescued from the top of the rocks that they just climbed (I guess you don’t have to climb back down when one of your group members is the boyfriend of a rescue ranger). While the woman of the group is climbing across the rope to the helicopter, something goes wrong, and she’s left holding on for her life. Gabe (Sylvester Stallone) tries to save her, but he’s too late. She falls to her death, leaving her boyfriend, Hal (Michael Rooker) helpless.

Months pass after this. Hal and Gabe no longer talk to one another (Hal blames Gabe because he tries to save the woman, for some reason), and Gabe is no longer involved with the rescue ranger, Jessie (Janine Turner). This is going to have to change. See, through events that I’m too tired to explain, millions of dollars have managed to find their way onto the mountain range, and through even more events, the bad guy, Qualen (John Lithgow), is going to force Gabe and Hal to find the money for him, given the fact that they both know how to rock climb.

Soon enough, Gabe is shot at, escapes, and he allows Hal to do most of the work. He reunites with Jessie, and the pair spends a great deal of time tracking Qualen, Hal, and the rest of the baddies. There’s a distinct lack of action scenes at this point, which surprised me. Characters have a lot of downtime once the plot has been set-up, although once the action picks back up, it stays at that level until the end.

I suppose the Die Hard comparisons come because our protagonist is supposed to be like your Average Joe, and also because he rarely gets the chance to meet the villains. That role falls to the secondary cast. But he still manages to make an impact, be a nuisance, and generally cause havoc. Oh, and the bad guys also want a large sum of money, and have come up with an ingenious plan to escape with their prize. (And let’s not forget that director Renny Harlin was also behind Die Hard 2 three years earlier.)

The overarching plot is so basic. We know it’s there just to give characters a reason to be involved in action scenes. We forget these in the good action films because these scenes themselves are exciting enough to make us forget out weak the plot is. That downtime I mentioned earlier took me out of the film, and it never gained my attention and enthusiasm back. There’s nothing particularly special here, and without a real plot or characters, I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

The major problem is with the characters. The opening scene showed me they can be endearing. The rest of the film showed me that this was a fluke on the part of the filmmakers, and that they are actually empty vessels without any real personality. They’re all bland, and any tension has to be artificially created. For instance, the strained relationship between Gabe and the other two major characters gets brought up once or twice but never makes an impact on anyone, and doesn’t even really get resolved. They’re mad at each other early on, but in the next scene, they’ll attempt to save the other’s life. It just doesn’t make sense. I mean, I can appreciate the attempt made here, but it simply didn’t work.

The acting was also pretty bland, but I don’t suppose anyone went into this film expecting deep performances. But since the action was bland, I found myself looking to other areas to impress me. I couldn’t find any. Some action films have good actors to carry them during downtimes. This one doesn’t. The only thing that can be said about the actors is that Stallone is able to do a fine job in the action scenes, and Lithgow made me laugh some of the time he was on-screen.

Cliffhanger is your generic action film that has nothing special to offer us. The action scenes are standard affair, the plot is there just as a backdrop for the action scenes, and the actors aren’t any good, but how could they considering their characters are less interesting than a rock. I couldn’t get involved in the film, even though it got off to a decent start. Cliffhanger might work better as a film to play in the background while doing something more interesting.

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