Dan: 0:00

Most performers have one job... delight the audience. But a contortionist, it's more complicated. Lisbeth Mikoleit is a contortionist based in Las Vegas. Here's how audiences react to her work.

Lisbeth: 0:15

It's some combo of disgust.

Dan: 0:17

Disgust.

Lisbeth: 0:18

You see, shock. If I do my job well, I will get two reactions. One is this cringing, like "Oh my God!" I started getting nauseous because I pictured what that would feel like. The other is"Oh my God!" That was so fun for me to watch because it looked so free and strong, and I could picture what it feels like, and it was awesome.

Dan: 0:40

And does it bug you when people have the more negative side of the emotional spectrum, or no?

Lisbeth: 0:45

I don't think so because I think at the end of the day, as humans, we we feel extreme emotions so little, and so even if it's a negative extreme, it's interesting to just shake people out of their world a little. If you can take that opportunity to just sort of shake up with their concept of reality is, and their concept of what's possible. It's actually very satisfying. It's nice to know that like you took them out of their world. They weren't thinking about anything else. They stepped into somebody else's body for a second, you know?

Dan: 1:29

I'm Dan Heath, and this is season two of What It's Like To Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. An Olympic bobsledder, a massage therapist, a camera operator. We want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Lisbeth Mikoleit what it's like to be a contortionist. We'll talk about the body part she is most careful to protect, the trick that always makes audiences go insane, and what it's like to be hired as a kind of zoo animal. Stay with us.

Sidedoor Promo: 2:11

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Dan: 3:01

Okay, you can probably picture what contortionists do—bending their bodies into pretzels in front of a live audience. But you might be wondering... Wait, is this a job? It is for Lisbeth. She cobbles together income from a few sources. coaching aspiring contortionists, working corporate events, and performing in shows. One thing I didn't realize there's a seasonality to this work.

Lisbeth: 3:28

Every single year, like clockwork, almost everyone in our whole industry is off on a Christmas contract. So it's two months where you're doing some sort of touring Christmas show, and you're just as a candy cane, and maybe there's a giant polar bear.

Dan: 3:40

What kind of Christmas contortionist shows are there? I'm so...

Lisbeth: 3:44

It's humiliating. If you're someone like me who's like dark and scary and goth, it's humiliating. But they pay for your dignity. Um. So there's circus Christmas shows where they have like, oh, the aerialists come down and they're covered in sparkles and there's snowflakes.

Dan: 4:00

Oh, I see. Okay. Okay.

Lisbeth: 4:01

So the one I did last year, I was inside a giant present box, all folded up. So they pull the present box up, and then everyone goes ah, because I'm like. And a little, so yeah. Every year, there's that, and that's the high season where you're like, I know, guaranteed November December. I'm gonna be spending my holidays on some sort of bus or in a hotel conference room, doing nonsense with a bunch of other people who are doing nonsense. But it's always really fun and silly.

Dan: 4:26

That is so. I had no idea there was a high season for contortionists. That's so good.

Lisbeth: 4:31

And it runs all the way through. Like New Year's Eve is huge. You always work New Year's Eve. So yeah, basically from November to like January, you're booked always.

Dan: 4:41

Okay.

Lisbeth: 4:41

And then the other thing you can do is move somewhere where there's a constant market. So Vegas has tons of conventions and things that come through, and the conventions will hire entertainment for their like parties and stuff. So there's always little gigs like that. Where you end up in insane situations in some sort of really bizarre costume? Like I did one one time that was some sort of corporate party that was haunted Narnia themed.

Dan: 5:06

Okay.

Lisbeth: 5:07

Yeah, things that don't even make sense, but like the event planner is trying to get edgy with it, you know? And like Halloween is huge too. So October, November, December, big seasonal work, and then the rest of the year you get these like weird little parties. Like literally this week, I'm booked to do contortion in one of those, you know, those big plastic bubbles that people get in on pools?

Dan: 5:31

Yeah.

Lisbeth: 5:32

So they hire contortionists to get in those and perform in the summer, so that when people are chilling at the pool at some party, they have an acrobat in the pool in a bubble on the water doing tricks. Like that's a job.

Dan: 5:46

Okay, I just can't believe there's like a market for that. Like there's some event planners like, yeah,"We're gonna need some contortionists inside the bubbles for this."

Lisbeth: 5:52

You're basically a hired zoo animal.

Dan: 5:56

Well, how how do you feel about those jobs?

Lisbeth: 5:59

Oh, those are the worst. It's crazy though because they're easier on your body physically because like it's not your choreographed act that you have to do. It's like whatever tricks you want to do.

Dan: 6:07

Yeah.

Lisbeth: 6:08

So you're free to do what you want as long as it looks good.

Dan: 6:11

Yeah.

Lisbeth: 6:11

And so it can be quite light on your body. So like a lot of times when you're an older performer, that's a nice place to go because. You don't have to kill yourself, you know.

Dan: 6:21

Another job option for a contortionist is working on a resident or touring show like Cirque du Soleil.

Lisbeth: 6:29

And the thing that's interesting is they're basically paying you based on the security, so they'll pay you a certain amount per show. It's less than you would get for a corporate job, but it's because there's the promise of continuity. So even through the slow seasons, or if you don't have any gigs, you still have that. So they're basically paying you based on a sliding scale of like. Okay, we're paying to have you to ourselves, basically. So normally, when it comes to the bigger contracts, you're making less per show, but you're you're getting security that no one else gets.

Dan: 7:07

And they do a ton of shows, right?

Lisbeth: 7:09

So like in Vegas, it's like ten shows a week is the standard.

Dan: 7:12

Oh my gosh! Yeah, and would that be exhausting for you? It seems like it would be.

Lisbeth: 7:17

Um, it's exhausting for anyone. That's like right on the limit of what a human body can do.

Dan: 7:22

Yeah.

Lisbeth: 7:23

But, then they have people like me who are called swings, and our job is to go in and pretty much relieve the people with the full time contracts. So primarily, I do corporate gigs, and then I go in whenever another act. There's two shows that I swing for in town, and whenever an act is out, I get called in to replace them, and I do their show.

Dan: 7:46

When people find out Lisbeth is a contortionist, the pay isn't their first question. It's a question she actually finds more annoying than that.

Lisbeth: 7:55

The first thing that they always, always ask, almost without fail, it's like a ninety percent chance that the follow up question is,"When did you discover you could do that?" And then I want to start crying.

Dan: 8:07

Because why?

Lisbeth: 8:08

Because I'm not a naturally flexible person, and there was no magical discovery element. I'm a big Harry Potter hater because I hate this nonsense about like, oh, you're like just the chosen one, and some people are special and they have special skills, and it's all about like natural ingrained aptitude.

Dan: 8:25

Now I want to jump in here quickly because for sure there are some people who are naturally bendy. They might have joint hypermobility or a connective tissue disorder. But Lisbeth's point is twofold. Number one, she didn't have that advantage, and number two, even for those people, the natural bendiness is just a head start. There's so much more to it.

Lisbeth: 8:48

There's no you're magic and chosen for this element. It's just how long you're willing to do the work, and so that's like the most offensive thing you can ask anyone who's like an athlete is just when did you discover you were just gifted like that?

Dan: 9:02

Oh, I love this.

Lisbeth: 9:03

Because they want to believe you can do it and they can't because you're just lucky.

Dan: 9:08

Lisbeth caught the contortion bug at a Cirque du Soleil show when she was 11 years old.

Lisbeth: 9:14

And so, that I did what every child does who gets inspired and gets excited to do something, and I went home and I just started flinging myself around, trying to force it to happen. And that was rightfully disturbing to my mother. And after a few months of this, when she realized that this was not a passing phase, she started doing what any parent would do and Googled some stuff and tried to figure out what exactly goes into this training or doing this at all.

Dan: 9:44

Her mom found an ebook written by a Swedish guy.

Lisbeth: 9:48

So she printed out this sixty-page ebook and put it in a binder for me, and was like,"Okay, here you go. Maybe this is gonna help."

Dan: 9:57

That is so sweet.

Lisbeth: 10:00

Isn't it? It's very nice and supportive, but at the same time, there's still that element of like she doesn't fully believe this is gonna keep going. So then, like a year goes by, and then another year goes by, and at this point...

Dan: 10:12

I just have to pause you there because I feel like. I can totally empathize with the moment at Cirque du Soleil where you're like, "Oh my gosh, that's dazzling! That's beautiful! Like, I want that." I mean, I feel like we all have that in different contexts, but it's usually fleeting. It's usually three days later, you're like, "That's that was hard, forget that." What do you think it was that like kept you on this path?

Lisbeth: 10:36

I have truly no idea. It was just one of those crazy moments. I just saw it and was like, "That, that's amazing! That's the coolest thing I've ever seen." I think part of it is that it was so difficult. Like, I was bad at it, and it was the thing I was the worst at. And so there was some part of my self-destructive brain that was like,"Okay, you could do anything else and probably get good at it, but that seems impossible." And something about that just stuck with me, and I was like. Okay,

Dan: 11:03

It got your backup.

Lisbeth: 11:05

Yeah, because I used to do lots of other little extracurriculars, like I was doing like musical theater and like band.

Dan: 11:12

And you're making the A's. You're an honor roll student, and and this is the thing where it's like, no, this is freaking impossible.

Lisbeth: 11:19

Exactly

Dan: 11:19

And that made you more interested.

Lisbeth: 11:22

That made me drop literally everything else I was doing. I quit all my other extracurriculars too. I was like, you know what? Not even worth it. Let's just do the one impossible thing.

Dan: 11:31

Lisbeth says,"There's no single accepted definition of contortion. Broadly, it's someone who displays extreme range of motion. But even that is not fully settled in the industry.

Lisbeth: 11:43

Is it the range that makes it contortion, or is it the articulation and control of that range? I don't know. For me, it's like if I watch somebody and I go, 'Wah, flexible.' That's it.

Dan: 11:55

Okay. So you kind of know it when you see it. But there's no like canon per se.

Lisbeth: 11:58

No.

Dan: 11:59

Yeah.

Lisbeth: 12:00

You can't set those limits because it's like there are people who can sit on their own head, but they can't do a flat split.

Dan: 12:05

There are people that can sit on their own head.

Lisbeth: 12:09

Yeah.

Dan: 12:10

I mean, what are the mechanics of that? What goes where, if you can describe it?

Lisbeth: 12:14

Yeah. There's so many ways to do it.

Dan: 12:17

I love that you have like, there's like a forking path in your head. Like, there are seven different ways to sit on your head.

Lisbeth: 12:23

Well, yeah. There's... so contortion basically. Okay. Technical nitty gritty as far as back bending contortion goes because I don't touch the area of the forward bending stuff at all. That stuff is beyond my scope. There's a whole other sector of contortion that's like the people who put their legs behind their head or like their foot behind their back and like their knees go sideways. And like there's dislocation contortion and that's its own thing and that's crazy. And then there's forward bending. I specifically know a lot about back bending and that's what I do. My forward bending stuff has never been good. But with back bending, essentially you can break it down into just a few different positions.

Dan: 13:00

Lisbeth said that with backbending, you can break down what's possible based on which part of your body is contacting the ground and holding the weight. And I mean, here's what's incredible... there are poses where her hands are supporting her, and other times her feet, or hands and feet, elbows and feet. And now these are going to get a little harder to imagine, but elbows only, chest only, what are called chest stands, upper thighs only. That's the so-called cobra we'll hear about later, and so on. But I was still stuck on this whole sitting on your head thing, so I pestered her again about that. Okay, I think I may need some slow motion here. So, okay, you're standing upright, and then you're saying you can bend backward to the point where you can bend your back all the way where you can grab your ankles like from behind.

Lisbeth: 13:52

Yeah.

Dan: 13:53

And then where is your head at that point?

Lisbeth: 13:56

For me, usually on my butt. But for other people, it can be anywhere depending on where the bend in their back is sitting. And you can move this. A lot of people think that you're just stuck with where the quote hinge point of your back is, where like you're most flexible. You can train this and move it. So. It could be anywhere between like head on your lower back if you're very lifted in your rib cage, all the way down to like head on your calf. So it really depends on like where you're bending in your spine and how much of it you're dispersing evenly through your whole spine versus hinging in just a few vertebrae.

Dan: 14:30

This is just blowing my mind. When you're working on something like that, what was the first months training like? Like, how do you know how to create a plan to do that?

Lisbeth: 14:41

Well, that's the thing. So I didn't, and I did a horrible job. So I got pretty far on my own. If you consider, I went from being a person who couldn't do a split to having all my splits. Granted, the technique was pretty bad, and they were turned out and they were hideous. But I got all my splits after an entire life of ballet where that didn't happen. And then I also was able to do like a bridge, so like hands and feet on the floor, you know. And I was trying to force myself into a chest stand by... This is as cringy and nightmarish as it sounds. I would like just lay on the ground and roll over towards my neck, and try to just throw my legs over the top.

Dan: 15:22

Oh my gosh! A chest stand is one of the iconic contortion poses. Face down, chest on the floor, back arched so deep, your legs come over the top until your feet hang above your own head. There's a slow, coached way to get there. Lisbeth's way was to lie down and throw her legs over, momentum doing what flexibility couldn't. All of it landing on her neck. This is, to put it mildly, not the recommended approach.

Lisbeth: 15:56

Yeah. So of course, my mom was like horrified by this

Dan: 15:59

Because you could get really hurt doing something like that, no?

Lisbeth: 16:02

Oh, you could die. Yeah. Your neck is so fragile. When I teach, I always tell people to envision their neck. Like you know, if someone does like a like a bad Halloween costume as like a bug, and they have the little antenna headbands, your neck is that spring connecting that little foam ball to the headband. You need to be so careful with that. It is so fragile. One of the main injuries that contortionists get after many years of training is microfractures in their neck vertebrae from crunching and sitting with it pressed up against their back like that. It also pinches nerves. There's a lot of nerves attached there. Like I know people who are currently experiencing nerve damage in both their arms just from years pinching those nerves at the base of their skull. It's terrifying, actually.

Dan: 16:47

Yeah, I mean, I have to say, I admire the the insane physical skills you've acquired through hard practice, and I think if my daughter said I want to take up contortionism, like I would be absolutely terrified. I would just be worried. Like just one innocent mistake ends up being some lifelong ailment or injury. I mean, how did you get comfortable with that?

Lisbeth: 17:14

I was not scared at all, and that's what's crazy.

Dan: 17:16

You weren't?

Lisbeth: 17:16

Because I'm a kid. That's what kids do. I just was like, it'll go eventually, and my mom was like, "Oh my God, what are you doing?"

Dan: 17:23

So, is that why your mom was seeking out this kind of reference? Because she was like, I can't stop her from doing this, but I at least want her to do it in a safe way.

Lisbeth: 17:31

Exactly. So she was like, okay, what's literally anything I can do to make this not the worst thing ever?

Dan: 17:37

Coming up, what does it actually take to maintain this kind of control over your body? Her daily routine is wild. Stay with us. Hey folks, Dan here. So as you know, this is the first episode of season two, our first Sunday release, the first in our era of weekly episodes. Very exciting! Would you like to help us celebrate? I've got a challenge for you. So, sometime this week, before the next episode comes out, give us a shout out somewhere on social media, on a family text chain, in an email newsletter. Shout it from a street corner, whatever works for you. And then send us a copy or a screenshot of whatever you did. Now, I should confess, we are not on social media. Sorry, so you can't really tag us, but we'll check out what you did and pick our favorite dozen or so examples and give you a return shout-out by name in a future episode. So if you're game to help us out, do your thing, give a shout-out to season two or the Contortionist or your all-time favorite episode, and then send us what you did at shoutout@whatitslike.com. Again, that email address, shoutout@whatitslike.com. Thanks, everybody, and happy season two. Lisbeth's mom went further than just finding an e-book. She moved with Lisbeth across the country to train with the only coach they could find. But years of self-teaching had left Lisbeth's body lopsided. She had always favored one side of her body, and the retraining to be more symmetrical ended up injuring her. Pinched nerves near her spine. At fourteen, she was in physical therapy. She actually wore a tiger balm patch to prom. But she kept at it. She's in her late twenties now, and she's been a professional contortionist her entire adult life. And she's developed her own style.

Lisbeth: 19:56

For me, contortion is very much an articulation game. I'm in the camp of people who's like, it doesn't need to be the most extreme if you can control things that aren't normal to control, like to separate some of those muscle chains is a really crazy undertaking. Like your brain likes to fire things together for ease of operation day to day, and we don't need to. It's nice to be walking around and not be on manual mode. But when you really dig into it, it's really amazing how many things you can do if you separate some of that out.

Dan: 20:30

Oh, that's so interesting. So you're saying you have almost like micro control over muscle? Like we we tend to think in terms of just functionality. Like I'm carrying a sack of groceries, or I'm reaching out to turn a doorknob. But it's like you can fire one of the muscles in a muscle group.

Lisbeth: 20:48

Uh-huh, and then I can fire it with some other muscles if I'm really paying attention that it doesn't usually fire with, and that's the thing about being a biped who's front-facing is that everything we do is going to be orchestrated towards that balance. And so, when you're behind your heels and you're backwards, that doesn't work anymore because your feet are on the other side. But your body will still try to act as though you're balancing in the front. And so, it's a huge thing for contortion because you have to basically tell your brain you're backwards.

Dan: 21:18

So you had to learn to kind of fight and eventually suppress a bunch of alert signals for your body that were actually an error. You know that... Well, I guess it's not an error for someone like me. If I tried that, like it would probably be saving me from injury. But for you, it's like a false alarm.

Lisbeth: 21:35

Exactly. Exactly. It's like you're constantly trying to do the exact opposite of what would be smart and safe, but it thinks it's protecting you. It's very frustrating.

Dan: 21:45

Yeah. Well, so give me an example. Like paint us a picture of what you would look like on stage doing something that kind of exploits your mastery of these micro muscles.

Lisbeth: 21:56

Okay, so this is a thing that actually comes up a lot because when you're doing shows, directors always want the flashy skills, and it's really important that you can do those flashy skills. Because I understand that if I do a crazy hard trick and I move really slow, people will probably clap and they'll like it. But they never ever will clap as much as when I just run in little circles around my head. Never ever.

Dan: 22:21

Wait, let me just process that. When I run in little circles around my...

Lisbeth: 22:26

So it's like if you're laying down and you run your legs up around over your head in like a little circle like a spider, people go crazy, and that's almost everybody's finale trick because it's like guaranteed something about it being so like fast and also visually like accessible, like a normal person can look at that and they can imagine how it feels and they go "ah". Whereas some of the more extreme stuff, they're just it's so far out of the relative spectrum of their movement that it doesn't actually impact them as much because they just go "ah, wow, gross". Their brain goes almost numb to it.

Dan: 22:58

Oh, so it's almost like beyond their comprehension. So they they don't have the same like bodily intuition or something.

Lisbeth: 23:05

Exactly. So there's a little game you have to play, which is like there are tricks in there that are for me, and then there are tricks in there that are for them, and then there are tricks where I have worked to make sure they bridge that gap. And so, for example, there's something that I put in my act a couple years ago that was originally for me because I was like, okay, this is difficult, and I should have it in there because it's good for me to drill, and it's also good to just show this articulation because most of what I train is this fine-tuned, like I call it playing the muscular piano because that's what it feels like, and it's on that acceptable, like visually understandable that section of the spectrum, right?

Dan: 23:42

Uh-huh.

Lisbeth: 23:43

So I go from laying flat down on the floor

Dan: 23:46

On your stomach?

Lisbeth: 23:48

Yep. To just pulling my elbows up, and then my shoulders, and then my ribs, and then I move my arms. And there's something about the fact that it looks like it looks sort of like a cobra sitting up, but like in segments and in slow motion.

Dan: 24:02

Yeah, I can sort of envision. Yeah.

Lisbeth: 24:04

Because as a normal person, if you lay on the ground and you think, okay, just lift my upper half, it goes like two inches high.

Dan: 24:10

Yeah, yeah, that is exactly what happens.

Lisbeth: 24:13

But with contortion, you can go up in sections. You can say just the section up here by my collarbones, and then we open my rib cage, but my belly button still on the floor. And then we pick up my belly button, and then I could close my shoulders if I wanted to. And it's like this sort of rolling motion that's very, very slow. And at the top of it, you see like if I'm wearing the right costume, you see like an abdominal flex, which is also confusing because I think people think that we just lean back and open everything in the front and stretch everything. It's not. It's not relaxed and stretched. It's pressed from the front side to the back side. They press against each other, like pushing your hands together, and then stretching them up. So it's very core centric, and it's just doing abs, abs, abs.

Dan: 24:57

So there's a ton of strength involved with these kinds of...

Lisbeth: 25:01

Exactly.

Dan: 25:01

I guess that's obvious, but...

Lisbeth: 25:03

And I would say seven or eight times out of ten, I hear someone in the audience go"strong", and that's exactly what I'm about. So for me, I get a lot of satisfaction out of putting tricks in my piece, that kind of demonstrate exactly what goes into it because again, I think we get so little credit for being strong. Like we get a lot of"Wow, that's flexible. Wow, she's so limber." And like people think that we're like loose and floppy, and like they're like, oh, you're gonna regret that when you get older because you're so loose, and like they think we have no power in there. So I like to put things in specifically that demonstrate that in a way that's palatable.

Dan: 25:45

So, what does it actually take to maintain so much control over your body? Here's what her training looks like.

Lisbeth: 25:51

So, six days a week, I do forty five minutes to an hour of cardio on a machine every day.

Dan: 25:58

Okay.

Lisbeth: 25:58

And then I do about fifteen to twenty minutes of hard abdominal work, just straight up abs, like anybody else, and like planks and things like that.

Dan: 26:06

Mhmm.

Lisbeth: 26:07

And then I do probably forty five minutes to an hour of physical therapy exercises to maintain all that control over the smaller articulations and just double check that nothing's getting abnormally tight. Because it's sort of like working with your body on this level feels like. Tying shoelaces, where if you just pull the laces at the top, and I consider that contortion. Sometimes there's bubbles in other in other parts of the shoelace down further in the eyelets, and so you have to check for those and make sure that it's all even. So it's about forty five minutes to an hour of that, just checking things. So sometimes you do exercises and they feel like almost nothing, and you're like, great, that's fine. And then other times you do stuff, and you're like, "Oh my God, where did that crazy knot come from? What am I doing to cause that?"

Dan: 26:51

Oh, so you're doing like diagnostics.

Lisbeth: 26:53

Uh-huh.

Dan: 26:54

Anatomical diagnostics.

Lisbeth: 26:56

Yes, and so if you find something, you have to fix it. So that's where the fluctuation in the time comes in. It's like sometimes you find something horrific, and you're like, "Ooh, okay, got to fix that by tonight. Holy smokes!" And then, straight handstands are really important for shoulder stability, so I'll do about an hour of straight handstands four times a week. So like doing normal and like one arm things, and just conditioning on your shoulders and on your hands, just to make sure you're comfortable. Because like for example, in my act, I have a handstand up on a bar top, and there's people and glasses on that bar top, like three inches from me. And so if I wobble and fall down. We're talking. I kick somebody. I break a glass. I fall off a table. Like, I need to be so confident. I have one handstand, and in order to do that one handstand, I train handstands four times a week minimum.

Dan: 27:49

Wow!

Lisbeth: 27:50

For like a fifteen-second handstand.

Dan: 27:53

Just because you want that level of confidence that this is going to work every time.

Lisbeth: 27:57

And so, what we're talking about here is the training versus the performance. We're talking like tip of iceberg. When you watch a show, if you watch someone do their four minute number, it's really easy to be like, "Wow, it must be nice to get paid to do like four minutes of work." But for that four minutes to happen, each element in that act has been trained separately and for many years, and is probably a heavy maintenance item.

Dan: 28:22

How long can a contortionist career realistically last?

Lisbeth: 28:26

So mechanically, if you're keeping that space and if you're protecting your spine, theoretically, you can go as long as you want. There are contortionists who are still performing in their 70s.

Dan: 28:37

No kidding.

Lisbeth: 28:38

Yeah, it's a thing. There's not very many, and you don't hear about them because the industry is also the industry is also a little sexist and it's a little ageist, and so you're not going to see probably a 70 year old contortionist on stage, especially not in Las Vegas. Because they're competing with eighteen-year-olds who are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and society's idea of hot, sexy girls. So, physically, if you're really careful and you take care of yourself, and you get the information, you can go for as long as you want.

Dan: 29:14

Have you ever had a colleague or a peer seriously hurt in the profession?

Lisbeth: 29:19

Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

Dan: 29:21

It's common?

Lisbeth: 29:22

It's pretty common, and it's accepted more than it should be. I think people just take on this acceptance of risk that they don't necessarily have to. You don't have to anticipate injury, but I think most people assume an injury is going to be what ends their career. Until recently, when we've been catching up a little bit with our safety stuff, it's been just assumed that you go until you can't, or until it hurts too much to do it. And that's just so sad because you get one body, and your relationship with that body should be good. If anything, when you do these extreme things, it should build a trust and an intimacy with your body, and you should see how amazing this complicated machine is, and it can do things that are insane because of all these support structures we have. Like if anything, it should make you trust your body more, not just feel like it's a tool you can wear out.

Dan: 30:14

So, Lisbeth, we always end our episodes with a quick lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know, and what does it mean?

Lisbeth: 30:26

A triple fold, and that's a triple fold. That's a specific trick that's really hard when you're on your chest and you have your knees down next to your face and your feet down behind your rib cage. So you're folded basically into it's the shape of a speed bump. But yeah, your head is under your butt, your knees are all on the floor, and you're like folded under yourself. We call that a triple fold. The triple comes from three things bending... knees, hips, shoulders.

Dan: 30:53

So just to jump in, I had a hard time picturing this during the interview, but if you just Google triple fold contortion, the insanity of this maneuver will become immediately apparent. What's a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Lisbeth: 31:11

This is another one of those like we're all so different. My thing that I think is the most important, I use a mouth guard when I train because when you're sitting on your chest or your chin is on the ground, your teeth can grind, and a lot of contortionists kind of wear their teeth down and don't realize that's what it's from. But yeah, I use a mouth guard.

Dan: 31:30

What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of a contortionist?

Lisbeth: 31:35

Ooh, okay. Our warm-ups are so specifically timed. Any time your stage manager says you're either on early or you're running late,

Dan: 31:44

Because you're kind of calibrating your warm-up to be ready at a particular moment.

Lisbeth: 31:49

Oh yeah, each exercise is pretty much timed. Like if I'm warming up, I'm doing splits for like three minutes each leg. So like a two-minute difference makes a huge difference to me.

Dan: 32:00

What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Lisbeth: 32:04

The breathing, the like wheezing. So when you do, especially if you're doing a lot of stuff with your upper back, there's an inherent compression that happens. So there's certain tricks where I'll do it on purpose, actually. It's like a pressurized breathing where it's sort of like if you have a straw and you squish it between your fingers and then you try to sip through it. That's what the breathing feels like. So you can breathe, but you're kind of squishing it on purpose. Partially because that pressure is again what holds things in to give the lift you need to pull up a little off your spine and not just crunch back onto the vertebrae.

Dan: 32:39

Mhmm.

Lisbeth: 32:39

But yeah, this pressure—it's like a muscular squeeze through your chest, and it makes it sound like you can't breathe. It makes this choking sound, so it's like[gasp]. So we get teased a lot backstage for sounding like we're dying...

Dan: 32:55

But but it doesn't feel like you're short of breath? Like it's just a sound and not a reality?

Lisbeth: 33:00

That's part of the training. You are short of breath, but you can get as much air as you need. You just have to breathe very slowly. So like your brain has to accept that it's getting enough oxygen. It's just slower than you're used to because there's a panic aspect where you're like, oh no, I can't breathe. You can. It's just slow.

Dan: 33:20

What is an aspect of your work that you consistently savor?

Lisbeth: 33:25

Ah. Most people will say that the part they savor the most is right after they perform or while they're performing, because you get that direct feedback of like, oh yeah, all of these things you worked for and someone's appreciating them. That part is cool. For me, the part that I savor the most though are. Those moments when I really feel like my body and I are synced up and we're on the same page, and that it's running like a fine-oiled machine. You get two of those a month where you're not tired or sore, or where you just feel like it's running perfectly.

Dan: 34:05

How does your mom feel about your job today?

Lisbeth: 34:09

Oh, she's so proud.

Dan: 34:12

Does she come see you?

Lisbeth: 34:13

Oh yeah. So there was a while when I was young and I first started working where I was doing a lot of shows in town that she could see, and then when I got a little older, so when I was nineteen or twenty, I got my first contract. In I was I went to Mexico, and then ever since then, most of my shows have been out of town where they're hard for her to come see. So she'll like travel and come and see things if they're really special or cool. Because now it's a novelty. She's like, Oh man, you used to train in the house and I would see you every day, and now it's interesting because I have to go see you.

Dan: 34:47

Yeah. It's pretty special what she did for you. Like, I'm not sure how many parents...

Lisbeth: 34:53

It's unbelievable.

Dan: 34:53

Would have moved across the country to take you to contortion school.

Lisbeth: 34:57

None.

Dan: 34:57

You know?

Lisbeth: 34:58

No other parent.

Dan: 34:59

Yeah, she was the one.

Lisbeth: 34:59

My mom was amazing, and that's the thing. Whenever I have a career win, I always want to call her, and she's my first call because I'm like, Mom, guess what? We got this. Because it's always us. I wouldn't have anything without her. And so every every win is a win for both of us because she did the best she possibly could to give me all the tools to succeed and like. The road after that was a lot in my hands, and it was a lot of work for me. But at the same time, without those tools, you have nothing.

Dan: 35:29

How do you think this work has shaped your perspective on the world?

Lisbeth: 35:34

Oh, it's so tough. I didn't even talk about the ugliest side of it, which is like the online psychos.

Dan: 35:41

I can only imagine the army of perverts waiting out there.

Lisbeth: 35:45

Yeah, I've been getting messages from perverts since I was like twelve, and that really like destroys your relationship with the world because you think of the people brave enough to send you those messages. How many are thinking it? And then you just like don't trust anyone ever. The things that I have seen, you wouldn't even believe that someone would send them. So yeah, that aspect kind of dark, kind of rough. I think actually the thing that I found most interesting about contortion and the way it trains you to look at the world is if you step just a little outside of that and you realize that okay, this is something that makes up. Such a small percentage of anyone else's existence. They've maybe seen a contortionist. They can tell you how many times they've seen one, right? And for me, that's an entire world. There's an entire technique behind it. There's an entire philosophy. It changes the way I live completely. And if you think about, for every tiny niche thing out there, there's someone with a full breadth of knowledge, top to bottom, and it's their whole world. It's really fascinating, and it's awesome to live in a world where there can be so many diverse interests. Where, like, to know that that's somebody's thing, and it really makes you look around and see how many things you can dive completely into.

Dan: 37:01

Yeah, I mean, this is a universe full of deep, deep wormholes, right? And and we can all kind of find our own custom wormhole that's suited to us. It's kind of wonderful.

Lisbeth: 37:12

Exactly. And underneath every seemingly simple thing, there's just this this insane amount that you can learn. And I think it's made me hungrier to learn about everything else because. There's just so much more to everything.

Dan: 37:34

Lisbeth Mikoleit is a contortionist based in Las Vegas. You can see her performing on her website. We'll put a link in the show notes. Two reflections here. The first is, I loved Lisbeth's take down of the Harry Potter fallacy. The idea that within us all there's some buried talent that awaits our discovery. And her point was, no, there's no discovery. Her skill was consciously created, born of thousands of hours of fairly torturous practice. But you know what was a magical discovery? Her love of contortion sparked in an instant at a Cirque du Soleil show. Why? She has no idea. It reminds me of the welder episode, and how he basically fell in love at first sight with welding, and that motivated him to practice and practice and practice until he became a star. The attraction to a particular kind of work may come like lightning, but the skill comes slowly through repetition. The second reflection relates to Lisbeth's point about how this narrow niche of contortion is for her an entire world, and how incredible it is to look around and become aware of so many different nook and cranny universes. It occurred to me later that she was basically articulating the mission statement of this show, to explore those nook and cranny professional universes one by one. I thought that talking to a contortionist would be fun, maybe a little obscure. Instead, it broadened out into themes that I think we all can recognize. Countless hours of lonely preparation that support a few exhilarating minutes of performance. Self-discipline that borders on obsession, and also the way that what looks like individual success is quietly scaffolded by family. On this show, we keep finding that in the particular, we're able to glimpse the universal. Turning anatomy into performance, balancing shows and corporate gigs and coaching, learning to push the audience's emotional buttons and building a body that can survive and repeat the impossible. Folks, that's what it's like to be a contortionist. Thank you to all of our recent Spotify commenters... Heather Legler, Rikki, Beth, Jvo555, Mia Cherry, Michael Van Buskirk, one thousand bees, and sigmasuz. And a big thank you to Lisbeth's number one fan, her mom, Lynda, who reached out to us to suggest we talk with Lisbeth. Thank you. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time for the piano tuner episode.