🌨☕️🏆 November: Pandemonium Progress Report

Dear strange, wonderful reader:

When I left you last, it was with a ear-splitting digital shriek of delight and triumph that could split pixels with its gusto: after years of work, BARBETTE  –my aerial straps solo– will be on stage in Paris this January as part of the selection for the 44th edition of the prestigious Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain.

I was unable to get much more articulate than the AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! I left you with 2 weeks ago until now. I still feel like I'm swimming up towards the surface from some great depth (or maybe that's something I just have to chalk up to trying to compose this with a semi-functioning post-night-shoot brain).

There's a tiny, fiercely dense dot of gold that's taken up residence behind my sternum. It's been a bit hard to figure out what the feeling is: a familiar and unfamiliar sensation, simultaneous.

I think it might be pride.

While I've been trying to puzzle that out, it's gleaming surface has taken on a bit of patina, blurred by a rotating cast of wonder, disbelief, and anxiety.

It's actually happening.

After all these years ... after all that work.

It actually paid off.

We dream about things. We work for things. We strategize all the ways that we might be tripped up in our pursuit of a goal. All the ways we might maximize the slim margins by which we might win instead of lose. We hope for the best. We prepare for the worst.

Without dimming any of the satisfaction and peaceful happiness I've been steeped in since I got my acceptance letter, some part of my brain is still struggling to digest that the outcome I most fiercely hoped for is the one I actually get to live out. I'm working at being able to put that into words. To articulate it more fully. I hope someone else might be able to read it and go, Ah, yes – I've had this feeling, too.

While I try to sift through and find the right words for this tapestry of emotion I find myself woven into, I owe you the following – and couldn't delay expressing it any longer than I already have:

If you have been a part of this Patreon in some way in the last (several) year(s), please know that your support of my work has directly made it possible for me to go to Cirque de Demain.  You've made it possible for me to achieve a dream that I have been working towards for years. YEARS.

How often does that happen in life? I'm humbled. A depth of gratitude that borders on its own kind of disbelief has washed over me in waves these past two weeks, every time I think about this.

How lucky am I to have had someone like you believing in what I'm trying to do? Believing in me, supporting me, cheering me on in the moments that I'm barreling along the path of my plans with vigour and conviction; as well as in the moments that I'm faltering and fumbling, unsure of if I should go on, can go on.

To get even more specific: you've given me the financial means to rehearse with my team and prepare to present my absolute best on the stage of these dreams, at the Cirque Phénix tent in Paris from January 23rd to 26th, 2025.

I'll be telling you more about this in one of the next posts, but it's expensive to get ready for Demain.

The Festival covers a lot of stuff: my flights are covered, my accommodations; there's some food support, and I think there's a small honorarium.

But the fees that come with continuing to push hard with my coaches and teachers until it's time to go, with paying my accompanist (Tanya Burka) to rehearse for 40 or 50 hours over the next 2 months before we fly to France, to pay for the studio space rental (even with subsidization through the professional artist residency programs of the TOHU), to buy the materials and things I need to fix and improve on details with my costumes, to update some of the hardware of my rigging, and so much more ... Well, I'll crunch those numbers for you in the next post.

But – the point is – I largely don't have to worry about this, because of YOU.

I've been saving every cent of your Patreon support for the entirety of 2024 (and maybe part of 2023, too ... I have to double check my notes).

And that amount?

Well, it covers almost everything.

The relief and security that you have given me through supporting me here, on Patreon, is letting me focus all my effort and skill and concentration on getting my body and mind ready to fly to Paris in 7.5 weeks, and to let BARBETTE fly through the air in Paris for the first time in 100 years.

I can't stop crying.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I succeeded in beating back my Producer Brain™️ with a heavy stick for a few days when I got the news so that I could just sit in the sensations and realizations produced by things like what I just described to you in the above – but now it's officially FULL STEAM AHEAD in preparing for this next amazing, incredible, beautiful adventure.

It's all I've wanted, all I've been working towards – for years.

What a strange, strange feeling.

It's happening.

It's happening.

It's happening.

I leave you with this for now so that this post goes live while it's still November -- more from me soon. Stay strange and wonderful until then -- XOXO Ess