FINALE ~ La France à Un Incroyable Talent 2019 (Patreon)

Last dress rehearsal on the La France à Un Incroyable Talent stage before the big show: The first delicate piano notes filter through the air and I release the tails of my silks to flutter down to earth.

I see Troy gracefully bridge-walking through the fog they've blown onto the stage below and pull my feet through to the front of the silks to begin my descent. The second phrase of piano begins and Troy is nearly in place below me.

I run the silks through my hands, over my head, and loosen my grip by a fraction to do a quick descent down to him –

– when I'm stopped abruptly by the sensation that someone is running a hot, scratchy knife over my upper thigh. I suck air through my teeth in a hiss, managing to keep my face composed I realize that this is likely one nasty silks burn I've given myself. Shit.

I sell it, hook the un-burnt leg over one silk and release the angry one, and noodle the rest of the way down to Troy. Miranda warned me that silks and this amount of skin exposure with our costumes was a bad combination, I remember belatedly.

The rest of the final rehearsal goes smoothly. I examine my thigh after we collect our rigging and walk backstage. Yup. There it is ... in all its raw, weepy glory.

Jen looks at it once. "Yeah, because that's not going to get infected..."

"Arrrrrrgh," is my articulate response.

I just have to get through one more silks descent for the actual show. If it hurts ... it hurts, I think. It's just going to be a few seconds of my life. I can live through a few seconds of pain. I can let it heal after this is done. It'll be fine. 

***** 

Famous last words. After what I can officially deem the worst food I've ever had in Paris – a lukewarm 'margharita' pizza (I'm very tempted to put quotation marks around pizza as well ...) that involved raw cherry tomatoes, no basil, and some kind of white cheese that was simply tasteless rather than mozzarella (How?! Why?!) – I collapse into bed to try to catch seven hours of solid sleep before we need to wake up and make our way back to the studio. We've been told to report for 10am. We are most certainly going to be in the studio well past 10pm. It's going to be a long day. We rehearse the opening segment for an hour, first thing in the morning. The stage director arranges all the acts into a kind of fixed choreography on stage where the steadicam operator can run around to each of us, playing a kind of visual connect-the-dots with each of the acts that viewers will see later that night. Troy and I are stationed on the judges' table again, one of the last performers in the sequence. As soon as the camera leaves my face, I have to rapidly exit my cheststand and SPRINT across the stage to my place in the final group picture, and flip over into a bridge so that the two young boy contortionists from the Ivory Coast can jump onto me in their own contortion shapes. The two boys are lovely, and extremely flexible – like, just hop into a triple-fold with zero warmup, flexible – but they are WAY denser than they look. They're slender and small, yet by the end of the 30 or 40 seconds that I have to remain in the bridge as the show's host walks to the front of the stage and introduces the show, my arms are shaking and I'm just repeating to myself don't fall down don't fall down don't fall down ... 

It would be a bad look to dump one of the other contestants onto his face by accident before the show even begins. 

We’re swept through makeup, scarf down a quick lunch, and launch into a cue-to-cue rehearsal in the afternoon where one of the women involved in the production approaches us to tell us that the beginning moments of our act aren’t exciting enough, and that we need to come up with some other kind of trick.  

FFFF*****************

This is not something I want to hear before we need to Do The Thing.
Troy and I discuss our options in rapid whispers and land on a version of things that we hope will satisfy these eleventh hour comments. I suppress my internal screaming and head back upstairs to our green room. 

Foam roller.
Therabands.
Physio ball. 

Back to the foam roller. 

Meditate. 

Eat some bread.
Lie on the floor some more. 

Pop in for makeup touch ups.
Time to warm up.
 

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

It’s freezing cold on the soundstage that the finals are being shot in. There’s dozens more techs running around, managing the props backstage and lighting changes and corralling artists and, and, and … 

It’s a cold, quiet frenzy into which we step to start unpacking the fabric props and rigging from our suitcase and wait, buzzing with energy, for the stage manager’s cue to run out onto the stage and begin our pre-set. We have 4.5 minutes of commercial break, and then 2.5 minutes of ‘intro video’ that will be playing on people’s screens at home before the cameras cut back to the stage … and us. 

We’re given the all clear and rush out past the video screens from backstage, laden down with rigging and silks and fabric props. Everything is clipped into place. Troy is placing the props for the ground dancers in their places; I’m moving as efficiently as possible from one aerial dancer’s point to the next, helping them into the hammocks, to gather the fabric around themselves. 

Satisfied that the scene has been set, I run back to my aerial point, in the back-centre of the stage. I lie down, quickly crossing the fabric behind my back and pulling the rest of the long expanse of silks to their new side. Wrap your arms, wrap your arms, don’t forget to wrap your arms. Something I’ve been having nightmares about for a week: the music cue, releasing the tails of the silks, discovering that I’ve forgotten to put the arm wraps on, and suspended in that moment of sickening fear that I’m about to start falling with nothing to stop me. In the dream, I never fall. Just stay stuck in that horrible moment of anticipation.  

Jen Crane jumps into action to assist me with the folding of the silks – the prep that hides all the fabric high up with me in the air until exactly the right moment to release them – and in short order I’m curled up in a ball on the ground, on my back. 

“Your arms. Are wrapped,” Jen says to me in a clear, firm voice.
“Yes,” I say, grinning. “Yes they are.”

The stage manager comes over and rapidly asked me something in French. I wasn’t paying attention. 

“Pardon?”

He repeats himself again. He’s asking if I want to be lifted up at the 2-minute mark or the 1-minute mark. I definitely don’t want to be hovering in the air any longer than necessary, and tell him the 1-minute mark. 

Unfortunately for me, he meant – do I want to be lifted up 1 minute INTO the video, or 2 minutes into the video.  I am pulled up to height – some 30 feet at least, hidden up in the lighting grid – and wait. And wait. And wait. 

Shit, I think, realizing the miscommunication that has happened here. 

I grip the silks in my hands even tighter, slowing my breathing, listening to the pre-recorded interview playing on the screens far below me. 

Finally – just as my arms are starting to shake a little – I hear the final notes of the show’s theme song. And then – our track begins to play. 

Ten more seconds. Just ten more seconds! You’ve got this – 

My piano notes begin and I uncurl from my position, releasing the tails of the silks in a burst of white that makes eddies and whirlpools in the layer of fog that has been blown onto the stage. I see Troy gliding through the fog towards me and begin my descent.

I make it halfway down – Troy is almost in position beneath me – and it’s time for the last two quick bursts of drop to come join him. I raise my arms overhead in preparation for the first one, and drop them down to my side – 

– And get stuck in place along with a searing pain even more intense than what I felt in the dress rehearsal. 

Oh no, I think. 

I sell the moment, twisting and turn the tails of my silks, keep my head and feet moving as best I can, while trying to determine if I’ve somehow gotten caught up in the fabric, or if my wound from yesterday is opened up and weeping and making a smooth continued descent down the fabric impossible. 

I’m pretty sure it’s the latter. I’m barely wearing anything for the silks to get caught on. I unpeel the injured leg from the silks. Maybe I can make this work with just a knee hook – 

Nope. Not moving.
Troy is there, beneath me, waiting, selling the moment too with a big dramatic arm raise up to me. 

Shit shit shit shit just do it, this is gonna suck, just get it over with – 

I release all the tension on the fabric and hold my breath against the pain explosion that awaits – YUP THERE IT IS OW JESUS CHRIST OW –

And I’m STILL not close enough to Troy. I make a split second decision and release everything to drop down onto Troy and cling to him as tightly as I can. 

The emotional moment sells. The silks are still dragging at what I know is a wet and open wound on my leg. We have to make it the rest of the way to the ground together. 

Somehow, we complete the first move and I escape the silks. In the clear. I’m in the clear. The rest is easy. We’ve got this. 

Adrenaline is keeping whatever feeling is blooming in my leg far, far away, and I snake my way through the fog into the two big shapes that Troy and I have in this choreography. The lights look beautiful. The music is beautiful. The fog on the stage is beautiful and – paper snowflakes launch from two confetti cannons at the front of the stage, blown by industrial fans high into the air.  As our ‘snow’ begins to gently, lazily fall towards earth, we make our backwards to the silks and ascend into the sky, and the lights fade out.
 

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

Troy and I were the fifth act called in the group of the first eight acts eliminated. We didn’t make the ‘Top 5’, but we certainly made the Top 10 and couldn’t be happier with that result. 

We received glowing reviews from all four judges, who approached us again individually after the show had finished taping to elaborate on their comments and shower us with hugs and praise – my favourite part of the experience, just like last time. 

We worked our asses off to create a new movement style, to tell a new story, to pull it all together with an extremely short timeline, and then pull it all off with about 11 hours total sleep in the 48 hour period of the talent show. 

In short: a very happy ending to a very surprising opportunity.