There was one thing in the case which had made the deepest impression both upon the servants and the police. This was the contortion of the Colonel's face. It had set, according to their account, into the most dreadful expression of fear and horror which a human countenance is capable of assuming. More than one person fainted at the mere sight of him, so terrible was the effect.

Maria worked in a circus. She was a contortionist.

It costs nothing to be specific, and doing so works better in the Tatoeba context, where the basic unit is a sentence that should be able to stand on its own without mental contortions to screw out a possible meaning from an otherwise meaningless sentence. Let's eschew the baroque and make things easy for language learners.

He contorts himself to advance and grow.

You won't believe how he can contort the meaning of 'truth'.

Sinograms are a result of a long, contorted, organic evolution.