How to Prepare for a Finale: China meets France('s Got Talent) (Patreon)

Hello friends, family, and sparkly circus noodles and potatoes of all types!

 * * * * You are reading the final instalment of my public posts on my trip to Zhuhai, China! Head on over to the tiers page and sign up to be a patron so you don't miss the next instalment of this wild ride, coming at you from Toronto and Paris in the coming days!  * * * *

As you may have gathered from other forms of online media, I am obviously home and returned from Zhuhai, China. The following was written while I was still in China, in the days preceding our final competition show, and the awards ceremony in which I am proud to say we received a Special Prize from the State Circus of Gomel (Belarus). 

This is the first entry that bridges my experience there, with the beginning of my France’s Got Talent finals journey.

But first – a brief recap:
In August, Troy and I travelled to Paris, France to compete in the ‘audition round’ of France’s Got Talent. Troy and I had not seen each other since the conclusion of Cirque de Demain, in February of this year. 

He was on a movie contract up north, in Nunavut (aka, the Arctic), and had been for July and August. He was due to return to Toronto the same day we flew out to Paris.
Planes were being grounded for days up there due to fog and storms; we feared he might not even make it back down to Toronto in time for our flight to France. 

Through what I imagine were several miracles, Troy made our flight from Toronto across the Atlantic – an 8 hour flight in which we talked out our proposed (entirely theoretical) 2 minutes of choreography over and over, a shared earpiece between us with the track the France’s Got Talent production team had cut us on loop. 

We rehearsed in the public gardens outside our hotel. We talked it over more. Listened to the track again. Marked it through with flailing arms and weird feet backstage over and over. Reminded ourselves of the endless hours we put into elements we were already familiar with from the last festival. 

We agreed to just go out there and do our best to scare the pants off the audience, and the judges. 

The crowd loved us.
The judges comments were everything my devious little artist brain could ever have hoped someone might take from watching our performance.

And – 

We ended up with a Golden Buzzer.
Shock.
Disbelief.
Wonder.
Relief. 

And then – the realization set in:
'. . . Oh god this means we’re doing this all over again later this year.'

Followed quickly by:
'Eh … that’s future Ess’s problem.'

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

Cut to 'Future Ess', complete with Future Ess's problems:
We are in the final days of the 6th China International Circus Festival, and this entire period of time – besides the challenges of this particular place and event – has been filled with a steady stream of emails from producers, the alerts blowing up my phone every time the VPN stays connected long enough for my Gmail to update and give me a heart attack with 20 different banner notifications. 

The producers at France's Got Talent / La France à Un Incroyable Talent (FGT) have asked that we create something that isn’t scary or creepy this time; our last performance was very dark in tone. I have it in my mind to create something weird still, but something that makes you hold your breath because it’s beautiful – not because it makes you physically uncomfortable.

I’ve been trying to strike the right balance between focusing on the task at hand, and compartmentalizing my brain for the unfortunate necessity of having to answer these producers’ questions about a very different (and nebulous-feeling) project. It has been a nonstop avalanche of questions: 

What’s your music? What costumes will you be wearing? How do you make these props? Can you describe these more? How many background dancers? What kind of fabric? Can you make this yourself? Can you make more for the dancers? What rigging do you have? What is the diameter of this ring? What makeup? Can you send us video of your choreography? Can you send us video of your choreography? Can you send us video of your choreography?

I want to type back in all caps, YOU HAVE SERIOUSLY OVERESTIMATED THE KIND OF TIMELINE THAT WE ARE WORKING WITH HERE, or simply laugh maniacally, but that seems both unprofessional and a poor use my fleeting Internet access.

Instead, I try to tackle my responses in small bursts of email drafts, slowly accumulating the paragraphs needed to explain the narrative of our proposed act, the feeling we’re trying to create, the environment we’re imagining it in, the aesthetics of it all, into one complete summary e-mail. I wait an eternity for reference photos to upload each time. And then do it all over again when the responses and further questions come back. 

One member of the production team has been messaging us insistently on our WhatsApp, trying to corner us for a phone interview (that Troy forgot to schedule back in Canada, before we came to China). 

“It’ll just be very quick!” she says. “Just a couple questions for the portrait!” (‘portrait’ being what they seem to call the introductory interviews they do with folks and air before the actual performance during the live show). 

We are, admittedly, mildly confused. If it’s just a couple questions about the interview subjects, why not just send them to us in an e-mail?  

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

It is NOT a short interview.

I head over to Troy’s room across the hall and we dial France. The woman on the other end of the line greets us in a sunny, happy voice. 

“Okay let’s get to it! First question: how did you start doing contortion?” 

Troy and I look at each other with the, What the –?! face.
That's not a simple question!
That's not a short answer!
WHAT HAVE WE GOT OURSELVES INTO ...
Troy moves through a 5 minute story, and I move through one about the same length. It’s a loaded question. It’s a mini life-story recounting. It's clearly a full-length, in-depth interview that neither myself or Troy is prepared for in any way. 

She continues, and we do our best to answer coherently and gracefully. My inner monologue, however, is only one of those things:

“How was the audition experience for you?” Uh . . . stressful?

“Did you expect the buzzer?” Obviously not. 

“Are you boyfriend and girlfriend?” Dear god.

“Why did you come on France’s Got Talent?” Ummm, because we were asked to . . . ?

“What would it mean to you if you won?”  I’m pretty sure we’re just focused on not making asses of ourselves on live Europe-wide television. 

And on ... and on ... until – 

“What is the strength and weakness of each other, would you say?” Please, no. 

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

Forty-five minutes later, I slump back to my room, brain dead and shell-shocked from the mental gymnastics we just did on the phone.
I flop down on my bed and stare up at the ceiling. One hour until it’s time to go backstage and get ready for our show. My mind is stuck on the interview, and on our state of preparation. 

Troy might see me through rose-coloured glasses, but our time creating and performing together has taught me many unpleasant truths about myself, and about the person I become when I feel stressed, overwhelmed.
How uncompromising and hardheaded I can be when dissatisfied with the level of work or presence being offered by others.
How short my patience and temper becomes when I feel disrespected or unsupported. How quickly I fail at keeping my frustration and displeasure off my face and out of my voice at times.
I snap.
I radiate coldness, or simmer.
I am – in short – often a version of myself that I am both shocked to have found and deeply dislike.

The part that bothers me the most is that I would never have described myself with these words prior to our partnership. I have had other duo and group circus projects that stirred up nothing close to the above. I generally play pretty well with others. I read the room well. I know when to shut up, and when to speak up. I have a capacity for empathy that I am proud of. I hold space for trauma and neurodivergence and instability with relative deftness. 

But here we are.  

While neither of us are circus school graduates, the few years of opportunities to work with other circus artists in duo or group capacities has given me a physical foundation that makes this kind of work enjoyable in its creation phases: knowing how to give and receive weight, to anticipate movement, to either give support or get out of the way. I’ve found this through years of hard training, both alone and with coaches, inside of and outside of circus disciplines. 

Conversely, Troy is a ‘natural’. He’s always been as flexible as he is. He’s always done the tricks that he does. And he’s been so busy with film contract after film contract for the two years of his performing career that he’s never had the opportunity to spend time in circus spaces or training spaces and begin incorporating these things into his body knowledge – even as he discovers more and falls more in love with circus.  

One of the ways that this difference in experience manifests is that he immediately wants to assign an idea to the scrapyard if it doesn’t work immediately, or look good right away. I repeat over and over again that we have to be patient and curious and keep at it. That nothing – or, rarely anything – looks good instantly. That new balances and transitions require a certain amount of rigour and attention and persistence. That our egos have to be put aside if we are to break new ground.

I try to remember that I have had a different and (slightly) longer professional artistic career than Troy. That these truths that I feel silently in my body now and can trust, even when I’m mentally or emotionally doubtful, are maybe not yet instilled in him. That he largely works in a medium where 10 second bites of movement do look good the second or third time you do them – movement that is not live, but instead on camera, with a huge production team behind you. 

I remind myself that we’ve had our Cirque de Demain choreography under our belts for just under a year. We’re familiar with those movements; we’re practiced in those balances. We’re feeling good in our performances here in China and we’ve found our way back into some form of the wonderful confidence that comes from knowing that you … well, sort of know what you’re doing.  

. . . And that all of the above has perhaps bred a false expectation of ease as I approach the coming challenge of the finales for FGT. Now that we’re back to exploring new things  I’m being brought harshly back down to earth at where the differences in our respective strengths lie.  

It’s not reassuring, given the extremely short time frame we have to create new choreography, and it’s not constructive in terms of building a confident and positive mindset to move through this current China International Circus Festival with. 

Yet – we have no other option. We can’t wait until this festival is done to go home to start  figuring out choreography. Troy will be leaving for a convention-appearance-contract-thing which he accepted in the days immediately preceding the finale of LFAUIT. As in – literally until the day before we leave for France.

History is repeating itself and I have zero control over it:

I pleaded with both Troy and our agent to cancel the convention appearance; that it never should have been agreed to in the first place if we knew that the FGT finals would happen in one of two possible weeks in December. That we owe it to ourselves to put the work in to make this performance as great as possible. That we aren't setting ourselves up for success with this timeline. 

The convention appearance is non-negotiable, we are told.

Our agent told us to ‘make it work’ in what I can only predict will be the jetlagged and injury-beleaguered days between our return on the 27th, and Troy’s departure on the 5th. He’s back the morning of the 8th; we take the redeye that evening to a dress rehearsal in Paris on the 9th and the show on the 10th. 

I am trying not to think about this. 

I am trying very, very hard not to think about this.

. . . Because it's time to go put on makeup, and have a great show. 

Merde.