“It’s such a mental and physical breaking down of your body that you build a resilience for the rest of your life.” Olga Karmansky and Anna Venizelos are a performance contortionist duo, and while the work they’re doing today seems, literally, backbreaking, it wasn’t always that way. Venizelos spent three years touring with Cirque du Soleil as an acrobat soloist, followed by years working as a solo contortionist. Karmansky? Her early years were spent as a competitive gymnast, making her mark in rhythmic gymnastics — an experience she describes as tough on her childhood. “I can’t say I really miss it. I feel like I really lived my career,” Karmansky says. “There are times I look back at it with fondness, but sometimes I wish things had been different. In an athletic career, you can’t really control how you’re judged or what happens.” What happened, though, is that she started training when she was 5 years old, and then intensely when she was 8. By 14, she was homeschooled in Coney Island and was training eight hours a day, six days a week. “I feel really lucky to have been able to pursue a passion at such a young age so intensely. Only now, 10 years later, am I taking the lessons that I learned then and applying them to life now.” | 