The Magic Circle

Republished from The Handstand Press Magazine, Issue 3, Summer 2022. (Art credit to Junru Wang & Joel Herzfeld.)

The Magic Circle

As an artform, hand-balancing is minimalist. Of course one can add props: canes, rings, blocks, wobble boards, etc. But these aren’t essential. Unlike cirque or gymnastics, which tend to require advanced training facilities, or martial arts, done in a group setting, pure handstanding remains independent of nearly every material and social need. Some overhead space and maybe a wall—that’s it. You could master it in solitary confinement. And during the Covid-era lockdown, many have found themselves in something resembling a prison cell, so the adaptability of handstand training may have found its moment. But the danger is that handstand training itself can subtly morph into a prison of sorts.

As anyone who’s held a straight freestanding handstand for more than a few seconds can confirm, hand-balancing is a technical art. It demands constant attention to detail and patient repetition. For some, even taking a single day off threatens to dissolve their hard-won gains. As such, hand-balancing tends to quickly sieve off the novelty-seekers and dabblers, selecting instead for obsessives who may lock themselves up in perfectionism.

Don’t get me wrong. A certain degree of obsession is necessary to make headway in any difficult art or science. The capacity to focus intensely, to set hard goals and meet them, to pursue a strict timeline and not get distracted—these are hallmarks of excellence. But the ultimate goal, surely, is to use art as a way out of prison, not to swap one banal and rigid reality for another.

Consider the predicament of the intermediate hand-balancer. The honeymoon of initial gains and the early thrill of balance have faded. The notion of linear improvement has been dispelled: more work does not automatically result in improvement. The balancer faces a choice: Should they press on, or quit? So much time and effort has already been spent. I’m not a quitter. And yet, life is short. I could be doing anything…

Playful mindset

Handstand-as-liberation calls for a playful mindset. A lot of newsprint has been spilled in recent years on the concept of “mindset.” What does the word really mean? It’s tinged with shades of “positive thinking,” some sort of exhortation to just change your reality so it suits you better! In fact, altering a mindset usually means challenging an assumption about what we really want or need. These assumptions tend to be deep-rooted and invisible, so spotting them can be hard. But if you’re a hand-balancer then I’ll bet the challenge here—“What am I not noticing that’s throwing me off?”—appeals to you.

Here’s what a playful mindset doesn’t involve: giddiness; giggling; silly gimmicks to “spice up” our training. Far from it. To deepen your engagement with artful, technical play, you must step into the magic circle.

What is a game?

In his book Play Anything, game designer Ian Bogost argues that “games aren’t appealing because they’re fun, but because they are limited.” It’s a great observation. Think of improv comedy troupes, for example: No sooner have you set up a constraint—Speak only in questions!—than you have a game.  

Few games pack as many limiting conditions as hand-balancing. Done correctly, the center of gravity barely moves more than a few inches in any direction while inverted. There are mobility, strength, and endurance demands; the scapulae must move well and so the serratus anterior muscles need to fire properly; the vestibular system struggles to adapt to even slight alterations in height—like moving from floor to parallettes, etc. None of this sounds like fun to outsiders. Perhaps that’s because we don’t have a good intuition about what “fun” is, or what makes it. “Fun isn’t the experience of pleasure,” Bogost claims, “but the outcome of tinkering with a small part of the world in a surprising way.” Or turning the world upside down in your bedroom, say.

A keen student of the great play theorist Johan Huizinga, Bogost notes that play “seems unserious and trivial” at first glance. But in fact, “play invites and requires greater attention than its supposedly more serious alternatives do.”

The value of boredom

How has a balancing game managed to get its hooks so deep into us? Not in spite of boredom, but because of it. We go upside-down to make an easy thing—standing in space—compelling again. And when we eventually get used to being inverted (or trying to stay there), then that too can get boring.

Some might interpret boredom as a sign it’s time to quit. Bogost has an alternative take: “Boredom sends up a flare: meaning exists here, boredom beckons, but stranded meaning.” “Stranded meaning”: what a tantalizing phrase. I interpret it as our habit of getting stuck in assumptions about the world: This room is for sleeping. My arms are for typing and driving and making dinner. The floor is what we walk on. A deadening certainty falls over every object and person in your life. Even handstands can become dead things that must behave in a certain way. The magic circle of play always needs to be re-drawn around an object, a space, a relationship; only then can it dissolve those calcified concepts of what things should be, must be.

One frequent assumption is that play (and games) are supposed to be the opposite of work. Work applies restraints on us: do this, at this time, again and again. We imagine then that play should snip those bonds: do whatever you like, however you like, and feel free! So it’s perhaps counter-intuitive when Bogost writes: “Games aren’t the opposite of work, but experiences that set aside the ordinary purposes of things.”

This is the power of play’s magic circle. We slip outside the language of “should” and “must” to have a fresh encounter with our body, and with the objects, circumstances, and people that surround us. The circle is magic because, once it’s drawn, everything changes—even if nothing within the circle is physically different than before. Even what had been “work” can become play—just as, without the circle, “play” might have veered into work. The restraints of labor say: You must do this and not that. The constraints of gameplay invite curiosity: What happens if you try to do it this way? Suddenly, limitations become a feature rather than a bug. Suddenly tight shoulders aren’t something you curse because they throw off your line—they are a new dimension of the game. How does one open tight shoulders? Investigate. That investigation cracks open the dead world, and new resources of presence—of meaning—spring forth. One set of discoveries yields another: “Oh, I’m twisted. How do I reverse that?”

In play, restraint distinguishes itself from constraint. The moralizing voice of restraint digs in its heels and says: “I can’t do other things because I am dedicated to handstand.” As in a bad marriage, the self-talk goes: I’m stuck with this situation, for better or worse. When the playful mindset is engaged, however, the constraints invitingly say: Now we are alone together. Let’s get to really know one another. What are we hiding? What are we uniquely capable of?

The magic circle of play is drawn very tightly around the hand-balancer, but it functions like a microscope lens. By narrowing our focus on details, paradoxically we see more and more. Each revelation yields a new challenge. The game grows out of repetition. Boredom is a sign that we’ve stopped seeing, an invitation to wake up and look closer. The circle of attention can narrow down to a wrist, or open out to take in the whole body, even a stack of bodies, one over another. A circle can’t be drawn perfectly, but it can be drawn again and again, revealing new truths every time.

Now isn’t that fun?