Acro Love : The Beginning of Acro Love
One day in early August of 2012 Dustin Shepard & Chris Filkins were shooting the shit down at Muscle Beach in Santa Monica California. Dustin was telling Chris about his new camera the Mark III. Chris suggested that they collaborate on shooting this type of acrobatics called AcroYoga he had been doing with Ahni Radvanyi. Dustin agreed and Chris immediately put together the kind folks who provided the Malibu mountaintop location, Dustin, Ahni, and Rick Ross and we went off one morning to climb the cliff side to shoot this piece.
The shoot was fun and breezy. We all had such a great time together playing and fooling around. The sun was hot but the breezes were welcoming and Dustin “got” Chris & Ahni so well that we all could see this was the beginning of something great. It just flowed so well.
Our relationship and our communication which we both Ahni think so important are beautifully presented in Dustin’s video. It’s no wonder we both fell in love with this from the first moment we saw it. It wonderfully captures that day and our romance and our practice. Such a fun day! This was the day when we coined the term Acro Love and realized it described perfectly what we were doing and trying to do with this art form.
As you can see in the video hoops were involved. We are still developing our Acro Love style so the hoop has not taken as much of a role as we would like it to. There is still lots of work to be done. But we are hopeful that we can do another video sometime in the future with Dustin and introduce a flow with more extensive use of the hoop. It’s very hard to control a hoop upside down. Hard to believe I know.
The song is called Tremel (Jamie xx Remix) by Glasser. Incredible how well it captures the feeling of the video and the day.