A Study in Blue (Feet); or, Final Exhibition Show (Patreon)

I’m on the bus back from Macau.

We’re past the double border crossing and on our way to the hotel. Night has descended and the most comfortable, soft feeling has come over me with it. 

I feel like a weighted blanket has settled down over my shoulders; comfortable pressure. Something that slows you down, in a good way. My eyes move languidly across the shifting landscape of lights outside the bus window, like a spoon dragged through honey. 

My head is swimming around in the music filtering in through my headphones. I’ve wiggled down and curled up in my seat as flashes of choreography for the finale of France’s Got Talent flash through my head. Eyes, closed, my arms come up unconsciously in front of me, and I’m dancing it out for myself in the darkened bus. My breath comes gently and slowly. It feels like there’s space in the back of my skull where there hasn’t been in a while. 

11 hours after we started our day, we’re back home at the hotel in Zhuhai.

I drop my bags off in my room in a dream, wander back down the hallway to the elevator, thinking of food. Maybe I’ve struck just the right combo of physical exhaustion and post-show comedown to actually … relax … for the first time since I arrived in China. I feel like I’ve taken a muscle relaxant – but I haven’t. 

I’m walking down the empty hallway connecting the two halves of the hotel, to get to the banquet hall and catch the end of dinner service. The ceiling is painted like the sky. Blue with fluffy white clouds glowing illogically within the cocoon of the dark night outside. Gentle guitar and piano filters in through hidden speakers. 

I stop. 

I stand in this soft feeling and wait as the moment suspends, stretches out. No one comes down the hallway; nothing to break the feeling. For this one satisfying moment I’m all alone, enjoying this private world as long as I choose to stay. 

I blink slowly. Smile a little. And continue walking. 

The hallway leads briefly into an open-air walkway that overlooks the courtyard in the centre of the hotel. The music continues out here, too. There are speakers tucked away everywhere in this hotel, creating a musical continuity that is soothing and magical. You feel as though you are walking through your own movie; that this is the soundtrack to a world you get to move through with calm, quiet wonder. Every tree, shrub, bench, statue, is hung with thousands of gently glowing blue and white lights. A fountain is trickling away in the middle of it all, shhhhh-ing into the evening air. 

I eat something. I wander back to my room. 

And … I sleep for 9.5 hours.

Finally. 

*********************

If only that feeling could have stayed. 

It never does. 

Now, backstage at Old Circus warming up for the final non-judged show of the festival, I’m incredibly anxious. 

I don’t usually feel nervous before shows. I’ll get a rush from adrenaline, sure. Need to take some deep breaths, yes. But anxiety? No. The only exception to this, of course, was probably the first judged show at Cirque de Demain, in which I was certain that I would either vomit or pass-out before we went onstage, but that deserves its own write-up (spoiler: neither of those things happened). 

For some reason, tonight is extra crowded backstage, and it’s really not helping things.

Normally there’s an equilibrium between all the different performers and circus troupes as we cycle through our staggered warm-ups and cool downs, sharing the space amongst ourselves. If you’re a solo aerialist you’ve maybe tucked yourself into a patch of carpet near stacked equipment; the Chinese balancing team (which is huge – maybe 30 acrobats?) takes up half of the floor space as they get ready, but they’re done before intermission and clear out immediately after. The Russian cradle act (who closes out Show B) is almost always dozing on top of some of their giant crash mats over in a corner; and those who have early start times like Emily and Menno, the tango-juggling duo, seem to clear off the floor and go up to their dressing rooms fairly quickly. 

In short, nobody steps on anyone else’s toes. 

Personally, I’ve fallen into the habit of claiming a small corner of carpet tucked up against the mirrors on the left side of the space. The models who wear the giant, elaborate painted set-pieces with each country’s name on it for the Opening Parade offload these items against the mirrors now, and once I’ve moved two or three of them to the opposite end of the room I have hollowed out a space that is relatively sheltered from everyone else. My main concern when warming up in a busy space is not getting stepped on, or bumped over, or having some equipment dropped on me … especially when I’m in a cheststand or some other kind of extreme spinal extension. Some of the performances here require far more dynamic warm-ups than what I need to do to get ready for my act, and there’s gear and flooring and rigging constantly being run on and off the stage by employees, so these concerns are more than a distant possibility. 

This coping mechanism isn’t helping me much today, as there is a crew of excitable Russian dancers who have swept into the space and are shrieking and jumping around uncomfortably close to where I’m starting to warm up my back. 

Ughhhh please just leave …

I know that I’m anxious, and that that is probably colouring my interpretation of how physically close they are. I badly want to turn around and ask them if they could please give me some space, but I know that it won’t come out in any kind of friendly tone – which is not something you want to start doing in backstage area – and I’m fairly certain this particular Russian troupe doesn’t speak much English, anyways. I bite my tongue and keep warming up. Troy arrives and clocks the space issues and immediately drops down into a middle split to my left, between the dancers and me; when you’ve got legs as long as Troy, this is a highly effective territorial display and I gratefully start moving into my deeper backbends with a moderate degree of mental comfort. 

Intermission begins; we have 15 to 20 minute before we need to be on deck backstage. The flying trapeze act – immediately after the break – is a long act, but every show it seems to move by faster than we think. A dancer who is part of one of the final acts of the show (and therefore not feeling much impending pressure) walks over to Troy and strikes up a conversation. 

I just can’t – 

I pop my headphones back in and walk over to a far corner. It’s near a utility hallway leading off from the backstage, full of metal shelving with buckets of bolts and discarded electronics – the guts of various lights and props dismantled or yet-to-be. Relax, you’ve got this, it’s gonna be great. You’ve got this. It’s gonna be a great performance. You’ve got this. Everything is going to go perfectly. There’s no other way it can go, because I have decided it is so. 

In the midst of all this affirmative self-talk I proceed to hold one of the best contortion handstands of my entire life. Apparently the combination of telling yourself that you are awesome and can do everything great, along with a steely nervous determination will get you places when you’re trying to balance your body weight in a bizarre spinal extension on your two hands while remembering to breathe. 

Who knew. 

Troy walks over to me as the finishing bars of the flying trapeze act come over the sound system. Go time. 

We wait in the shadows as stagehands rapidly take down the flying trapeze net and send wires back up into the ceiling. Soon the lights dim down again … and then go black completely. Our cue. 

I take my position in the dark on the stage, feeling for the lines in the floor that I’ve been landmarking with at every rehearsal since it’s impossible to see exactly where you when starting the show this way, in this particular theatre. Everything crystallizes as I quickly enter my starting shape, our music begins, and the spotlight comes up slowly on me. I’m a creature, slowly awakening to a bright light, opening my eyes and clocking wide-eyed children in the front rows who are figuring out what the hell position my body is in. My wrists and ankles roll in space, toes and fingers seeking out the edges of a full body stretch, and I slowly ooze over to the side, onto my back, and into the undulating bridge shape that immediately precedes Troy’s entrance. 

Everything locks into place.

Well. Everything except one bloody light that never does what I expect it to do, no matter how much I study the recording we have of it. It ‘bananas’ out slightly, taking a curved path that doesn’t match up with any music cue and therefore nearly escapes me every single time. Luckily, I think there’s a kind of aesthetic middle ground that happens where instead of being clearly in view the entire time, I maybe look like a creature sneaking in and out of the spotlight. Or at least that’s what I tell myself. 

Besides that one damn light, it’s – a very good run. 

Adrenaline. 

Relief.

We wave to the crowd, take our bow, and exit the stage. 

***************************

In my dressing room after the final bow, I’m slowly tidying up the makeup I’ve left strewn across my counter. Andrey Katkov – handbalancing extraordinaire, one of the ‘ambassador’ acts from Monte Carlo – knocks on the door and enters (I mean, he doesn’t need to knock on the door, as it’s his dressing room too, but anyways…). 

“Hello,” he says in his thick Russian accent. “I saw your show.”

“Oh?” I say, smiling. 

“Yes. This time I got seat high up in centre of theatre. It was very good position to see your show. I wanted to let you know it was very good again. The people around me were very impressed, the sounds around me were good. People liked it.”

“Ah,” I say. “That’s a relief!” and laugh. “When I’m onstage I really find I can’t hear anything from the audience. Like, I hear my music quite loudly, but unless the audience is absolutely screaming their heads off, it’s like there’s an audio barrier that happens. Except right at the start … when Troy is doing his solo. 

“I’m in the darkness and looking at him, to direct the audience to look at him too and let them know I’m not about to do something they need to look at, but this ends up being a moment where I can hear very clearly if people are screaming or making noises when he begins to roll his shoulders. And then both of our spotlights come up and I hear nothing again,” I chuckle. 

“Yes, is like this for me too,” he smiles and nods. “Anyways yes – I thought it was amazing. Really really good. You are improving from first time I see you.”

“Yes, thank god we’ve managed to tighten things up since the rehearsals,” I grin. 

He bids me a goodnight and exits. I soon follow his cue, walking slowly through the dark out the back of Old Circus. Past the lingering Chinese acrobats chain-smoking their filterless cigarettes (okay but seriously, how do they have the cardio to do all the insane tumbling that they do when their lungs must look halfway to a charcoal puck…?), past the cages of white doves, and ‘exotic’ seagulls, and out the gate to the hotel. 

My feet are stained blue from the floor of the old circus. My knees and elbows, too, but the feet are the worst. I spend a disproportionate amount of time in the shower working to scrub this colour transfer off, wipe the remnants of black makeup off from around my eyes, and collapse into bed. I lie there, awake, for far too many hours, wired from the post-show adrenaline, waiting for sleep.