Fitness Journeys: Marion Crampe on the pole!

                    

Some Italians could have seen her at Milan Pole Dance Studio, others in her performances during the National Pole Dance Championship and many others have had the pleasure to meet her during one of her frequent workshops.
I’m going to introduce Marion Crampe, alias Mlle Jeanne, French international poledance champion. She’s a marveilluse artist, a dancer full of energy that is doing her utmost as a teacher as well as a performer.
This year has been really busy for her, artistically and professionally, working hard within the MPDS team. She trained herself a lot to enhance her technique as a contortionist on her own style. She keeps on travelling a lot, meeting people all around the world and sharing her passion with them. At the beginning of the year she was in Rio de Jainero Ultra Modern Dance School, in South America, and several workshops will be held in several South American countries. That’s why she’s also learning Portuguese and samba for her sexy chair courses, waiting for 2016 Olympic Games!Then she moved to South Africa and came back to Europe to hold other lessons and next steps will be US and Canada! In particular, this summer she’ll be at the Summer Pole Camp on July with Natasha Wang,  an aerial pole performer who currently holds the titles of US Pole Dance Champion 2011 and USPDF West Coast Champion 2010.
Marion pole style is very similar to a classical dancer because she moves fluidly with lightness on and off the pole with precision and beautiful lines. Her favourite move is “The eagle” and “Rainbow Marchenko”. She normally prefers to be focused on combos instead of single moves, where she believes to be able to deploy better her creativity. She doesn’t mind performing “Music box", being her target is to reach the same level of contortion of the great Felix Cane, an Australian professional dancer and world champion pole dancer, Cirque du Soleil performer, master instructor. She admits she particularly loves those moves that allow the contortion of the body moving ahead, even though she’s convinced are all sublimes by the use of flawlessness, flexibility and mastered tricks.
She loves paillettes, her physiotherapist without which she could never stay... and, why not, money!

 
                              

Her preferred outfits are a simple bras, sexy shorts and her platforms. They form an integral part of entertainment. Her fans help her keeping her body warmed and to hold the pole because she doesn’t love poledancing when it’s cold. She rather prefers it's very hot, to grip better the pole and to feel more flexible.
To perform she loves a rock lent music repertory or soft sentimental love ballads. She needs to feel emotions gushing from the song before dancing on it. But she also likes the vibe of the moment.
During her free time she keeps on dancing, more than going clubbing, with her friends but she also loves  night events when she dances any kind of music, as easy in the South of France more than in Paris, although she actually lives and spends the most part of her time in Milan.

Working along with lots of creative artists she brilliantly succeeds in incorporating some of the emotional notes she feels right into her choreography in a very flowly and lyrical way. But above all she can't help falling in love with this art, the pole, to which she's dedicated her whole life. Her secret wish when she was a child was to be a dancer. She prefers reading a book rather than watching tv, listening to any kind of music, especially " Iris" by Go go dolls, and eating grilled chicken cooked by her Dad.  She's had a series of successes:

·          Her participation to 2011 Canberra Competition
·          NPAPC Nottingham Pole Association Competition in November 2011
·         Top 5 finalist at I World Cup in Rio de Janeiro, Sept 2011
·         Finalist in Pole Art Competition in Helsinki, September 2011
·         Best Show Award at Aerial International Competition in Bern, March 2011
·         First runner up at French Pole Championship 2010
Starting her career with classic ballet & ballet jazz, Marion pioneered and experimented several kind of styles within the dance panorama, such as, i.e., street jazz and hip hop with BenamaraTayeb. In 2004 she graduated with a Master on Sport education while continuing her dance, training in the famous school James Carles. She also participated in many shows (cabaret, hip hop as well as musical comedy, such as “West Side Story” with Gilles Ramade). In 2005, in Paris she joined several fitness centers, like Fitness First, Club Med Gym, Moving & Forest hill, as a private trainer & fitness instructor - training and rich experience making of her a master in various styles of dance - but it was the year 2006 the real turning point in her life, since, pushed by a titillating curiosity, she had her first pole dance class at the Paris Pink Paradise Pole School training with another French pole dance star Laurence Hilsum. She fell in love with this art at once and started teaching six months later. In her opinion, poledance is an art form. Her Austrialan pole dance mentor Liana after having shared every secrets of this art, trained Marion to build the dancer she is today, till  becoming nowadays pole dance rising star at an international level. She’s both an athlete and an artist. Her performances stand out the highest competitions primarily because of her execution, then because of her refinement.
 Experimented the art of pole dancing in France, the belief that dance is sensuous and graceful and all women are endowed with this gift to unravel their sensuality’s grew up in her.  Some say dance is the language of the body and Marion argues dance is the language of the soul. She’s the epitome of femininity: an enrapturing smile, smooth lips, seductive eyes will make any man melt. Climbs and grips around the pole, slow contortions and speedy routine making her own hair whip wildly, with his unmistakable touch, at the same time powerful, elegant and sexy, could melt the ice-cold pole. Her near impeccable technique gives her the grace of an eagle and a princess of the stage.
Moreover, in the 2010 French Pole Championship where she won the first runner place in the French PoleDance Competition and on Sept of the same year she was guest performer in the showcase of Pole Art Competition in Stockholm organized by Nelle Swan and Tanja Suni. In fact, although in the path was more associated with strip clubs, pole dancing tracing its roots back to traveling circuses, when dancers used the poles that supported the tents. It has lately become more accepted as a form of working out and recognized as a prestigeous sport and in Rio de Jaineiro 2016 in Brazil it will be finally crowned as an Olympic Game .
Since October 2010, she was leading teacher at Milan Pole Dance Studio contributing to pole dance knowledge and expansion in Italy and in the World. Marion is now working on her aerial acrobatic skills with hoop and silk, among other specialties such as trapeze, rope and hammock. She also a contortionist mixing in her style a Burlesque glam, circus and sexy Australian touch. She has still remained an active member of the French Pole Dance Team, a group of the best French pole dancers Prana Ovide Etienne, Manuela Carneiro and Doris Arnold. She participated to the POLE DANCE SUMMER CAMP‘s second edition in St Marteen – Palm each, in which she looked fabulous, like an heron, in all her breath-taking allure, performing “Les dooblettes” with the world’s top pole dancers. Emotion and vulnerability comes with her together on the stage to create something she defines as magical pole art. I think she’s taken me out of just thinking about general dances, her poledance performances are very uncommun. She makes me to remark the importance of a good choreographer, creating a sort of trajectory in a performance that covers all the time the whole show, from the beginning to its end. He could teach not only to think about each move and why it’s there, making sure it makes sense within the show in each particular moment and how its collaboration could be significant to the dancer, but also how the nature itself could play the most important role in the surroundings as well in the spirit of the dancer.
She bagged a place among the top 5 after the I WORLD CUP in Rio de Janeiro in September 2011 and the second runner up place in the French championship this year. She was also finalist in Pole Art in Helsinki in October 2011.                
Moreover, the MPDS Marion Crampe has recently taken part in the “poledanceitaly” project for the issue of an online poledance dictionnary, completely free,  setting up several tricks where it is easy to find each move scheduled for each category and level of difficulty. Additionally to the pics, a short clip shows how each move is performed from the start to the end. It could be also a quirky peculiarity to find how moves can be chosen on the base of physical requirements necessary to perform them.
Marion Crampe looks like a fairy, breaking down at the center of the stage, charming and powerful, starting sliding up and down the pole in her shining, lyrical pole routine. Her acrobat dance leaves the amazed public totally hooked with the grace and elegance of her movements that seem to caress the air she runs across. It sounds like a cliche’ but she seems to bring her personality gifts from the inside out.
The Pole Art gets inspiration from many other forms of dance and other sports (such as rhythmic gymnastics, stationery rings), that involve and enhance endurance, muscolar strenght and flexibility. It’s an anaerobic and aerobic training whose stunts allow you to burn lots of calories building your body strenght with great toning and sculpting benefits for the best possible grips and moves coming out flying or in equilibrium, training each muscle of your body. It’s a sport that allows you to keep fit, toning and amuzing yourself, building confidence in your body and personality, redescovering your sensuality.
We face in this sport with Professional and Amateur, Couple and Disables categories. Many awards are also given to the best musical interpretation, best costume, coreographer and entertainer.
Crampe reckons it’s the pole dance itself to have destined and designed her slender toned body, this sport requiring well trained biceps and very strong abdominals. In addition to this, standing up straight on your ankle involves hamstring muscles, gluteal and abdominal workout.

Marion Crampe, is not only well gifted of all these physical qualities by mother nature  but is also really lovely, patient and has a very good sense of humour. She’s completement detached and disinhibited. She’s beloved by many gooey fan girls and counts out about 2000 astounded friends on Facebook for who she’s a sunray! Always good tempered and smiling, she has a slight southern french accent and a great sex appeal !

She turned into a full-fledged love affair with Poledance, as we said, when she arrived in Paris in 2006, enchanted by showbiz and nightlife sparkles. How we could blame her? Pole dancing is the latest addictive phenomenon sweeping the nation, and Pole exercise brings you really impressive elements, such as the spins, poses, body inverts and floor work on the pole. Women and men contorted into unimaginable shapes, instructors and students seemingly levitated. These human beings seem to achieve the impossible.

Her point of strength is her flexibility, as well-known above all on her torso and shoulders, and in Milan’s having a full immersion in contortions, doing them over and over, as she manages to go much further onwards. On the other hand, her weakness is a certain lack of power and sometimes energy, features she must develop and on which she should work but not so hard. Moreover, her performances change, depending on her style, always exploring the endless possibilities of her body.She’s all about grace, strength and passion. She has flexibility, technique, creativity, dynamics, eclectic movements and years of dance training and commitment – all of which combine to make her, in many people’s eyes, one of the absolute best in the world.
She trains her muscles for hours everyday in front of stunning floor-to-ceiling mirrors in which she can check and correct their form, make sure her moves and lines are perfect! She knows how nerves can get the better of you having a swing on the four metre poles!
Her musicality is astonishing - when she dances with a simple dancehall song with a repetitive beat, she finds the undercurrent and rides it with tiny accents climbing herself up the pole backwards and having fabulous head dives, really surprising and exciting to watch. Her lyrical style is sometimes emotive, always sensational! She performs every routine or freestyle from the tips of her fingers all the way to every pointed toe. She creates imaginary lines with her body that you couldn't even think to be possible.
My goal here is to try to give you all an overall idea of the development of her career and to share some of her unique perspectives on dance and moves. Well, make sure then to keep you updated on all this blurry flurry of activities, just stay tuned in her various social networks and pole dance online forums and websites and don’t miss out next Marion Crampe events! Just to have no qualms…you could never forgive yourself!

Uncertainties of voyage- Kerouac mental pilgrimages and the concept of beauty

Who has not plunged in his thoughts and intimate reflections during a long trip or a journey along a green or sandy landscape or a seaside starring at the light blue waters? Today our generations, I guess, are more involved in this topic than the past ones, in which it was a rebel trend or habit due to a quirky inner globetrotter nature or to an impulse of escape from reality. We are scattered at the four corners of the earth for any ordinary exigence, for work and personal, sentimental and routine reasons. A travelling addiction influenced by the change of nowadays social system, more interactive, dynamic and with any sorts of boundaries. This is the era of the great challenges in which we are called to get up from our sedentariness and routine habits to kick off moving to work and to live away, often for a short while, here and then. That’s why a revival of beat generation literary and art works style is on the stage, becoming one more time popular. We can’t avoid to evocate authors as the ‘50s American writer Kerouac, of, it-goes-without-saying, French Canadian origins, people of immigrants, pioneers and explorers other than great liberal democrats that have idolized values as democracy and diversity as the greatest symbols of freedom and mottos of a free multicultural country.

Kerouac is the author of “On the Road” with his famous insight on “Route 66”, based in USA, focused on the pilgrimage of beat characters in search of new hitch-hiking experiences. This autobiographical novel is the “Beat Generation” Bible, whose expression was coined by himself to identify an attitude of escaping from contemporary conventional society just to find nothing at the end of their journey.

It is an attempt to record the details of daily life and the spontaneous enthusiasm for insignificant objects and events, introducing “hip language”, slang and colloquial words, abolishing syntactical rules and allowing free mental associations. Similar, but characterized by more spiritual connotations, was “The Dharma Bums”, that highlights the discovery of the truth or dharma through Zen Buddhism. He represents the mystic anxiousness and wish to make of daily life an endless discovery of new wild experiences. They live of “kicks”, as they describe those moments of intense experience and pleasure, free from all social and economic restraints to overcome the sense of void and fears. Beat generation explores, first of all, the nudity impulse and unrestrained sexuality, pushing their senses beyond the limits of understanding, sometimes taking hallucinating drugs to explore any possible landscapes. The Beatniks often attract for their attention to strange informal dresses, worn-out jeans, old t-shirts and sandals, long hairs and sometimes personal cleanliness. They advocate pleasant escapism and create an underground culture characterized by spontaneous flow and freedom of expression, poetry and oriental Buddhism, their keen interest in music, strangely also including jazz which was also highly appreciated.   

Based in lands where the myth of American Dream is still alive, these values are then embodied in bulwarks as Philadelphia, town of the famous Jefferson Declaration of Independence and its slogan “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness”, all rights recognized “for right of nature”.

Turning away from the cultural dependence on contemporary stereotypes, Kerouac used imagination as a mean to give expression to emotional experiences not accountable to the reason, exploring the endless possibilities of humankind and penetrating subconscious levels through dreams and drugs representing the world in a new undetached interpretation, not twisted by a new, often too much ticking, nowadays sense of civilization. He expressed emotional feelings in a continuous attempt of mediation between man and nature, giving voice to the ideal of beauty, truth and freedom, not disregarding reality, appreciating the naturalism and the descriptive richness of elements present in landscapes, often mirroring his moods and feelings. Nature, then, as a “living force”. He also presented a pantheistic vein in his writings, believing it could express a universal language overflowing from inspiration and a triggered stimulus to thoughts, being a source of comfort and delight for the observer, sometimes conveying spiritual intuitions.

This romantic subjects of the beat generation are deep-rooted in poetry authors as William Blake, Keates and Whiteman, that identified bucolic sceneries with subjective moods, slightly upsetting, shacking and splitting them off because of the mysterious sense of unknown. The concept that beauty resides in what you see is the central theme of Keats poetry, especially inspired by the classical Greek world. The expression of beauty is the ideal of all art forms and it represents a never-ending joy. It proceeds from senses, concrete sensations that he discovered in the colours the nature displays, in the sweetness of its perfumes, the curves of a flower, a woman, a butterfly, all reproducing an afflatus towards eternity. It’s easy to find in the beat generation odd traces of romanticism and is beyond any doubt a rejoice of imaginary. In Keat’s view, the poet shouldn’t be identified as the source object of inspiration or the place where truth resides. Denying this capability is the basis of human knowledge that spontaneously leads the reader to the beauty and truth unleashed by poetries.

The assumptions that voyages fertilize imagination was already well exalted by  William Blake in his declamation of the pursuit of happiness and pleasure beyond any restrictions of morality and religion. This was on his turn inherited by Diderot and Voltaire and Swedenborg with who he shared his belief in the illuminating powers of visions. In fact, poet was essentially conceived as a visionary prophet, and the possibility of progress relies in a tension between opposite states of mind, in taking our own personal certainties at stake, not in a predominance of the undebated supremacy of one over another. He considered that a broader thinking perspective, not simply perceptions, although inspired by them, as a mean through which man could better learn the world signs and directions, riding “Divine visions” that let you look further the mere reality. This theory was also followed by Edgar Allan Poe that saw even in madness a higher level of awareness and put in evidence the dichotomy between beauty and death, creation and destruction. He highlighted that an exceptional acuteness of the senses, as a result of an expanded consciousness, can make you lose your sanity, in certain conditions and if strictly attached to a narrow perception of life.  

Boéhiamians were also witty observers of reality and were focused on which is the sense of beauty and the beauty of senses. They were plunged into the masses and proletariat to which they conveyed their ideas and with which they didn't stop to compare, while dandies displayed bourgeois art as a cult of beauty that could prevent the murder of the soul from ugliness of decay, in a classist interpretation. However, Beat Generation, Boéhiamians and Aesthetes together conceived man as an alien in a materialistic world where beauty can rescue people and it's eternal.