Video: Shena Tschofen on the Roue Cyr

I was thinking about Peru when I watched this video of Shena Tschofen, who specializes in the cyr wheel (roue cyr) and graduated from the National Circus School in Montreal in 2016.


Shena Tschofen - Roue Cyr (Cyr Wheel) from Shena Tschofen on Vimeo.

I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have something like this done in a fantasy/sf film (or book, but you'd definitely get more out of it in a film) as a form of worship or celebration. Imagine, a group of initiates competing against each other in order to win a prize: the chance to be sacrificed to their god(s).

That's where Peru comes in. One of the cities I visited has a famous preserved skeleton, Juanita, a teenaged girl, who was sacrificed to the volcano in the 1400s.

Remembering, of course, that people are products of their upbringing and culture, Juanita probably went to her fate willingly, taught that it was an honour.

This has been done a few times in SFF, the video game Broken Age had maidens competing for the honour of being sacrifices to a monster. One of the characters in Unwind by Neal Shusterman, was a tithe, the tenth child who was raised to be 'unwound' and went gladly.

But it might make a cool short story twist, to have people compete for an honour, with the audience not knowing what the prize actually is.