BARBETTTE DOES "LE MONASTÈRE" (Patreon)

My dear, strange, wonderful reader –  it's been a hot second.

Quite literally: the humidity in Montréal has been unrelenting. You feel like a wrung-out, sweaty gym towel just walking a couple blocks, downhill, in the shade. It's been too hot to sleep.

I can see thunderstorm clouds gathering on the horizon, though. Big towers of grey-purple clouds are stacking themselves higher and higher, off to the right of the mountain. Once they sweep this way and break open, the heat and stickiness should wash away. Hopefully.

While I wait for the rain, it's time to share this footage kindly captured by the lovely Aisling ni Cheallaigh with you. It wasn't the cleanest run I had of the contract, but it was a damn good one! I hope you enjoy.

(Apparently there's fancy professional footage coming at some point as well – the timeline on the arrival of that from the cabaret producers, however, is unclear).

If you've been with me here for a while, you'll see that this is a different version of Barbette than what you watched me haul into existence last Spring. I've written you a little about my schemes and goals for this iteration of Barbette below.

A couple weeks ago I completed a bucket list item in my circus career: performing at one of Le Monastère's "CABARET DU CIRQUE" in Montréal. The July edition that I participated in is (deliciously, dramatically) named LE CABARET DU DERNIÈRE JUGEMENT – the Cabaret of Final Judgment – that runs during the Montréal Complètement Cirque festival. 

A cute tongue-in-cheek name for a cabaret that takes place beneath the vaulting ceilings of a 160-year-old (still active) Anglican church – the very same church that I was able to rent out for a day to film my first full iteration of Le Numéro Barbette  on straps, in Spring 2023. Performing at the July cabaret felt like a big full-circle moment. A strange one, at times.

More than once, the surreality of performing on this stage in front of 400 people jumped and blurred with my memories of filming in the space last year, empty and silent except for me and the production team.

I felt it most often as I stood in the wings, between the green room and the performance space. Waiting concealed behind a short curtain, trying to control my breathing, trying not to think about how fucking hot I was standing there in four layers of costumes and listening closely to the patter of the MC for my cue to enter.

My mind would hover between these two moments in time. Between now, and then. The then trying to convince me that when I pulled back the curtain there would be nothing, and no one, there – except the smooth expanse of deep red floor and my straps hanging low from the ceiling.

The old memories would flitter forward in my mind, fighting for acknowledgment even as my eyes, ears, skin, nerves reminded my brain of the roar of the assembled audience, the electric energy formed by everyone's rapt attention, the presence of all those other eyes and ears and bodies.

I'd shake my head, smile winningly to the empty corner I was facing, and breathe in deeply. Prompt myself to go much further into the past than just last year – back, back, back, a hundred years or so. Ground myself in phrases and sensory-paintings I'd built as tools to call Barbette forward in my mind, my body, my eyes, so that I might invite her out onto the stage with me.

And then I'd step out –we'd step out– from behind the curtain, back into the present moment to mount the short flight of steps up to the stage.

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I've felt deeply unsatisfied with the ‘story’ of the first version of the number since it's creation last year. At the time, it was a solid start – but god, was I disheartened thinking of it as "a start" after the years of work it took to get there.

Towards the end of last year, I would take a mental stick and apprehensively poke the thought of: Is it time to look at BARBETTE again?

And everything in my chest and brain would respond with, "NO, PLEASE, ANYTHING BUT THAT."

This knee-jerk reaction had shifted by the time summer came around. I'd been away from the work long enough that time had worked its magic and dulled the despair that rose up in tandem anytime BARBETTE crossed my mind.

Now, instead, when I poked the, Is it time to look at BARBETTE again? thought with my mental stick, the response was a grumbling but emotionally neutral, Yeah, seems about time. Let's get to work.

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The Spring 2023 iteration of BARBETTE is what I describe (in admittedly disparaging shorthand) as ‘the sadboy version of the act’.  It felt so heavy.

It was a documentation of the number in one of its earliest, wobbling forms and held many contradictions for me: I was proud of the immense amount of work that went into getting to that stage; but I was frustrated and dissatisfied with the overall 'writing' of the piece. It felt like it was saying things that I don’t necessarily think or agree with or resonate with. I've known for a while that I wasn't going to feel better about this piece of work until those things were addressed.

But creating a circus act bears an uncanny resemblances to writing. As with writing, it’s far easier to edit and mould something to better reflect the true desires of the heart, mind, and soul once you’ve actually got words on the page.

So I'm grateful to the sadboy BARBETTE.

It needed to come into the world the way it needed to come into the world.

But I also know I can get closer to the bullseye of my vision – and I think I did just that with my performances at LE MONASTÈRE. 

It's still not quite there – but the crucial difference from last year, or even last month, is that I think I know exactly what needs to change to get there now. (Which is what I'm working on as you read these words).

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Here's a deeper dive into creative hypotheses I got to test out last month at LE MONASTÈRE:

If the purpose of the first version of the act was to simply be hauled into existence, kicking and screaming, I wanted the thesis of this summer’s exploration to be: make the audience fall in love with each version of the performer that emerges onstage.

Barbette’s work would’ve been titillating to 1920s audiences; there was striptease all throughout it. I decided to try leaning into more burlesque energy, to flirt with the audience and play with the energetic quality of each Barbette that leapt out with each discarded layer of costume. My theory was that this might capture more of the electric, seductive edge I imagine Barbette's performances in those smokey 20th century music halls had. To tighten up the tone of the act and make it more consistent.

Next, the dress.

A consistent piece of feedback I’ve received about Le Numéro Barbette is that people LOVE the big white dress, and want more of it.

Well, lightning struck sometime in mid-April (in the midst of the FRANKENSTEIN night shoot haze, of all moments) and I knew what I wanted to try. I've lovingly nicknamed the return of the dress in the last third of the act my GHOST DRESS sequence.

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I could feel in my bones that the visual pay-off of these changes were going to be so worth it. But these changes meant that I needed to re-research and significantly overhaul the fiddly, annoying transitions in the work that the act lives or dies on.

And if the work I’ve done as an aerialist and an artist over the past three years has taught me anything, it’s that the "fiddly transition bits" take about ten times longer than you think it will take (or want it to take) in order to (a) work the way you want it to, and (b) look polished and professional.

It became clear very quickly that I was not going to be able to attack all these new artistic and dramaturgical points AND re-work my aerial sequences to all be high-level in the technique department.

I was feeling the stress about this point, leading up to the show.

The simple reality was, I didn't have the time, resources, or studio access to re-work all my transitions, bring a huge costume piece back in, re-think every hand gesture, glance, and step on stage to be in line with the new energy I was trying to weave through it, SHORTEN the damn thing by 90 seconds ... AND re-vamp my aerial sequences at a level that uses the biggest technical elements I have in my bag.

Well, I can do it all mediocre, or I can set some of it aside and do the remainder with excellence, I thought.

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This decision was not one that alleviated my anxiety much:

The average audience member isn’t going to know if what I’m presenting on stage is difficult or easy in terms of the technique and tricks I have in my act.

But a Montréal audience member isn’t always your average audience member – especially at the Monastère cabarets.

It's an 'educated' audience: an audience who has seen lots of circus, or done a different (or the same) discipline as you, and knows  if what you're doing is hard or not; knows if what you're doing was clean or if you made a mistake; etc.

On top of that, the odds of a casting director or artistic director from some company that you’ve stared goodly-eyed at on social media for way too long might be somewhere in the crowd is … not zero.

You're performing in front of your professional peers, in a place with standards of what "good work" is that can be rigid, narrow.

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With no small amount of crying in the process, I decided that I cared more about working on the “writing” of the piece (as an artsy contemporary Montréaler circassian.ne might describe what I was doing) than on the kinds of technical standards that a Montréal circus audience expects.

I knew that if this version of Le Numéro Barbette felt better –the tone, the acting, the musicality, the costume re-visits– then I could circle back one more time with these points firmly in hand to just bump up the technical sequences higher in future.

I told myself to set my ego aside, say fuck it to the criticisms that might come (they did, lol) and dropped the skill-level of my in-air sequences down to a bare minimum.

I swapped one of my heaviest hitters (a big one-arm, spinning dislocated sequence) from the end of my act to instead become my first aerial sequence, followed it with a bendy contortion sequence, and closed out the act with more typical ‘straps technique’ – though far less than the original, due to the shortened music track length.

This is where we got. And I'm diving back in as we speak.

More to come from me soon – I have so many beautiful photos from the photographers that came to different nights of the cabaret to share, along with lots of green room polaroids (my new obsession) and some writing to give you background and context on LE MONASTÈRE itself and what's coming next.

Until then, stay strange and wonderful – 

XO ess