☀️🍁🍏September: Pandemonium Progress Report

"September tries its best to have us forget summer." ~ Bernard Williams

Greetings, strange and wonderful reader. It's been a headlong sprint out of summer and into the first flush of autumn for me. I find myself , improbably, still in Montréal – for just a few more days.

First things first: if you also happen to find yourself in or around Montréal NEXT Saturday (September 28th) you can catch the latest version of LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE for FREE (yes. FREE.).

I'll be presenting another update of BARBETTE at the SANS FILET ("WITHOUT A NET") showcase at La TOHU, North America's largest permanent contemporary circus presenter, here in Montréal.

I know most of you reading this are not going to be in the area for this event – but on the OFF chance that you are, or on the OFF CHANCE that you have a friend who lives in Montréal, I'm most excited about the fact that there's no financial barrier to coming to see an afternoon of what will be some pretty incredible circus.

This showcase is a way for me to re-film BARBETTE with new aerial sequences I've been working on since July, for reasons that I elaborate on below. If you're not in town, fear not – of course I'm going to share the video here for your lovely lil' eyeballs.

But if you've got a Montréal local (or visitor!) in your life who'll be in town next weekend, spread the word! I'll also have copies of SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE with me at La TOHU on Saturday the 28th.

There's a little more background on SANS FILET at the very end of today's writing. But first, I need to tell you why I've been hermiting HARD since you last heard from me...

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"OKAY ESS, BUT IS IT THE SAME 'BARBETTE' THAT YOU DID EARLIER THIS SUMMER...?"

Nope. It sure ain't.

I believe this brings us up to .... Barbette v. 4.0? Something like that.

[cracks knuckles] Let's get into it. 

(pssst – but first– if you missed the post where I shared this awesome video that Aisling took of one of my act runs, you can see it here!)

When I was performing at Le Monastère in July, I had decided in the lead-up to this contract that I would take the second half of the summer to rest. To write. To recalibrate.

As I prepared for Le Monastère through May and June, my whole world narrowed to the music, costume, makeup, and rehearsal challenges I had on my plate to BE READY for the opening night.

I didn't let myself think of anything else happening beyond those two weeks of shows.

It was a winning strategy. I felt focused during the contract and happy with my performances.

The feedback I got was useful, too. Some of it was sweet: people liked the artistic changes I'd tried.

Other notes were of a more bitter variety: a key piece of feedback I got was that for a circus audience (aka, the professional industry in Montréal who attends those cabarets consistently) the technical level of my choreography was "not high enough"*.

I'd anticipated hearing as much (I'd decided to simplify my aerial sequences for the Monastère performances so that I could refine the artistic elements as much as possible) but that didn't make me chafe any less at that flavour of comment.

(*we'll have to return to what that means, really, in another write-up)

(📸 Jen Tufts / @circlecirque)

The world came seeping back in, in the days following the end of show run at Le Monastère. I didn't have any other major contracts coming up. But I did have the memory of an impending deadline I'd once said I'd see through ... and that I'd been studiously ignoring for the entirety of 2024 thus far.

Looking at my calendar for the remainder of the summer and the start of autumn, I found myself chewing on a very gristly piece of food-for-thought: that if I was going to stay true to my word and submit an application for a second (and final) time to the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain with BARBETTE ... it was not time to rest. It was not time to write. It was not time to recalibrate.

I worked things out backwards:

Okay, the deadline for submissions is October 15th, at the very latest ...

I would need to re-film BARBETTE by end of September / beginning of October.

(I'm not doing things without timeline buffers for "oh crap" moments anymore. Not if I can help it. ) ...

If my technical difficulty was "too low" for the Montréal circus crowd at Le Monastère, it certainly won't be competitive as-is for the Paris Festival ...

So if my submission is going to be competitive for Cirque de Demain, I'd need to increase the technical difficulty of the movements presented in my aerial sequences...

There's about 6 weeks from now until when I need to re-film– a mesocycle. Meaningful gains can be made in that time frame.

If I'm going to increase my technical level, that means I need to grind things out as hard as I can with my coaches from now until the end of September.

I said I was going to rest, though. I said I was going to stop for a bit.

But this is kind of a 'now or never' thing ...

Oh god.

Oh god.

I needed to decide if I wanted to do it still – and I had to decide SOON.

As I twisted and turned over whether I should leap into yet a-fucking-nother intensive period of physical and mental pushing, I weighed the importance of this goal for myself.

Getting back to Cirque de Demain used to be something I fixated on. A lot.

If you're a newer reader, here's a 90-second recap of what it was like LAST YEAR when I was gearing up to prepare my submission for the Paris Festival; and here's the 90-second recap I made after I didn't get in.

Sometime in the past year of experiences, I think I've grown into an artist who can recognize that their work is good; and that the selection for a festival (or not) is not in any remote way what possibly determines the value or impact of that work.

This is a beautiful thing. I think it's an achievement.

But in other words, I wasn't sure that getting into this festival was important to me now in the way that it felt incredibly important for the past several years.

I was suspicious of this realization at first.

Maybe it a lack of discipline that was making me disinterested in a Round 2 of applying?

Or could it be exhaustion?

Perhaps I simply didn't have any gas left in the tank after keeping the pedal pinned to the floor for months ... for years.

Or maybe I'd just grown into a different kind of artist. One for whom the Paris Festival was no longer a 'gold standard' of excellence, somehow?

I sat with these questions as long as I could. I also held in consideration these thoughts:

It's a dream you've had for a long time.

You said you'd try twice, and then move on. What's the harm in trying?

How will you feel when you're older, and retired from performing? Will you feel okay when you're looking back on your life if you say, 'Yeah I was going to try again but decided not to?' What's the worst thing that can come from trying again?

My brain provided two swift ideas to this last question:

(1) Well,  you could fail to get in again. That would suck.

Do you really want to deal with all the emotional weight of that rejection? Rejection from something that you're not even sure holds meaning for you anymore? If you don't do it, then you just get to neatly sidestep that.

And (2) If you decide to go for it, you're going to have to REALLY go for it. Shouldn't you be doing SOMETHING ELSE with your time? Something ... MORE IMPORTANT? Haven't you been pushing too hard, too long, as it is? When are you going to stop?

It was the second one that bothered me the most.

My brain spun, trying to calculate with the Right Thing To Do was. The responsible thing to do. The wise thing to do. The fruitful thing to do. The rewarding thing to do. The pragmatic thing to do. The future-minded thing to do. The realistic thing to do. The healthy thing to do.

In the end, where I landed was this:

I want to see things through.

I don't trust the voice in my head telling me it's 'irresponsible' right now; it feels like someone else's voice ( but I don't know whose).

I know myself better now than I ever have before.

I know the process and physical and mental load it'll take to get where I want to go, if I decide to do this. There are less surprises than before, because it's not my first time.

I know that what I've made is good. If I do this one last thing, I think I might feel that what I have made is great.

And I'd have that kind of satisfaction that I had back when I was competing in muay thai; in knowing that –regardless of the outcome of the competition, test, or objective– I will have the mental peace of knowing that there was absolutely, irrefutably, inarguably, NOTHING else I could have done.

And then –whatever the outcome is– I can move on, peacefully, content in knowing that I could not have tried harder.

. . . Can you guess what I decided to do?

Since you last heard from me (a month ago, late August) as well as for the entire month preceding it (thus my relative quietness on the posting-front), I completely flipped my focus to preparing for this final kick at the can for Cirque de Demain.

I've been dancing ballet with my teacher, Isabeau Lejeune-Valadou almost every week day, for 90 minutes private sessions.

I've been training with Victor Fomine again for aerial straps*. I've averaged 4 classes / week in this period – an unsustainable volume of training that has pushed my abilities past any level I've achieved thus far in my career (and tested my physical and psychological toughness in new, masochistic ways as well).

(*William didn't have the availability in his schedule to fit in the volume of training I needed without several months advanced notice).

I've been spending a couple hours every day reviewing training footage and consistently writing in a training journal about these sessions, anchoring the new, reinforcing the good, and examining what was resisting improvement.

I re-subscribed to WHOOP so that I can track my HRV, my sleep quality, my training strain (especially since I'm training doubles), and make more informed choices about my recovery strategies and nutrition in order to handle this period of intense output.

I cut out as much overstimulation sources for myself as possible, treating this period like a fight camp: every single action, every single choice in my day, needed to be asked within the framework of – is this putting me closer to achieving my goal? I dropped of instagram and tiktok again; I started reading books instead of watching netflix to wind down at the end of the day; I stopped jump-starting my day with a big bucket of liquid caffeine; and so on.

But most importantly, I made a rule for myself.

The rule is: You're only allowed to do it if you're having fun.

There's been the usual highs and lows and tears and strain, yes.

But I've recalibrated every day to make sure I'm in alignment with my rule.

I'd score my adherence rate to be an 8 out of 10.

Pretty damn good. I'll take it.

My world has narrowed in focus to increasing the technical skills in my aerial straps vocabulary, to create the 'hardest' aerial sequences I can that still serve the story and structure of BARBETTE.

I wont pretend for even a second that this is most people's idea of fun. There's a real chance that I'm confusing 'purpose' for 'fun'.

But I'm loving waking up every day knowing exactly why I'm going to go do what I'm about to do. Loving rallying myself before another gruelling lesson with Victor. Loving prioritizing my sleep, my recovery, getting back in tune with the ways my body tells me it needs rest. Loving thinking about the fact that I'm going to re-film this number at the end of the month, submit it, and let the cards fall where they may.

It works for me.

I've been having fun.

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MORE ABOUT SANS FILET:

SANS FILET is part of the Journées de la Culture ("Culture Days") weekend, where thousands of free art events happen across the province of Quebec from September 27th to 29th.

TOHU is the circus arts organization that some of you may recall as having given me not one, but two pretty incredible artist residencies to help make the very first version of my aerial straps BARBETTE (in Winter 2022 and Spring 2023).

I was given private creation space in one of the huge studios of the École Nationale de Cirque (just across the street from TOHU) where my artistic counsellors, dramaturg, pullers, and peers helped me pull together the first outlines of my number.

At the end of my final residency (April 2023), I did my "exit presentation" – a short presentation of what I had been working on for some of the administrators and coordinators at the TOHU as well as local friends and coworkers.

(Intrusive memory: I got stuck upside down in the air for an embarrassingly long time during a sequence that I had hated the entirety of that creation phase but kept in the number anyways, but following this final, ill-timed insult to my dignity I cut it and assigned it permanently to the graveyard of lost Barbette sequences).

As one of their professional residency alumni, I was invited to apply to present my work at the SANS FILET – a free afternoon showcase where the general public essentially gets to attend a very fancy 'exit presentation':

Performances in–development are shown cabaret-style, and after each performance the audience is invited to engage with the artists to discuss their work in progress, offer feedback, and help us refine our creative processes.

Normally, it's only TOHU and ENC employees and other professional artists who get to attend exit presentations – so it's a pretty cool once-a-year thing! And, it hasn't happened since before the pandemic.

 (AHEM: and this time, I won't get stuck upside down desperately, fruitlessly trying to open a straps loop that has cinched itself down into a black-hole-singularity of smallness, blocking all attempts to shove my foot into it)

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That's it from me for now – 

I'll be buckling down until SANS FILET is completed and under my belt at the end of next week.

Looking forward to sharing how it went with you when you hear from me next; and looking forward to having the time and breathing room to sit and share writing with you on what it's been like to be working with Victor again, to be having new and old conversations with myself and others about gender and transitioning, to be having new and old conversations with myself and others about happiness and why we do the things we do ... and lots more.

But until then, please stay as strange and as wonderful as possible.

My little sister told me I have one job this week: "FUCKIN' SEND ITTTTT."

Please feel free to share your favourite unhinged battle cries and/or words of encouragement below – I'll be reading 'em and repeating 'em to myself in the wings of the TOHU as I wait to burst onto the stage in a glory of feathers and crystals.

XOXO - s