Into the Light – Ch 2 – Moulin Rouge (Patreon)

 "First, lighting," Jean-Jacques says to us, as slender man bounds out of the warm gloom to our right.  
“Ah," he continues. "Our stage director.”

“Bonjour! I am Thierry,” he says with a broad, genuine smile. Neat, close-cropped silver hair frames a face that looks like it has spent a lifetime smiling. Long-limbed and bright-eyed, he spreads his hands broadly, palm up in welcome as he introduces himself. “We are so excited to have you here!”

Oh! A bloom of a warm, pleasant feeling grows inside of my chest and small, pleased smile curls its way around my mouth in response. Thierry grasps each of our hands in turn with a warm, firm grip, delivering a kiss to each cheek in proper Paris style.

“Are you ready?” Thierry asks. 

He and Jean-Jacques lead the way confidently over to the lighting booth, tucked away beneath a central balcony.

I try to find my feet below me in the dark; I’d rather not start my contract at the Moulin Rouge with a sprained ankle from an unseen stair. We shake hands with each of the gentlemen behind the lighting board, offering polite greetings in French. If I gather correctly, they’re going to set the lights now, check the music levels. They assure us that they're going to make everything look as good as it possibly can for our debut this evening. 

Leaving Jean-Jacques to preside over the lighting and sound team, Thierry leads us away between close-packed tables,  deeper into the inky blackness of the theatre. He moves with the practiced ease of someone who has walked this path countless times before.

My heart is thudding in my chest with excitement. Or exhaustion. Difficult to tell.

I stumble down one level – eep! – and a second level – ack! – managing to catch myself each time before tipping completely over into faceplant territory. The wound on my thigh from the talent show last night pulls and complains with each misstep. I feel quite confident at this moment that it’s weeping slightly.

Thierry calls something briefly over his shoulder to the men behind us, and with a heavy clack – the stage is illuminated, scant feet from where we now stand now.  

It’s a thrust stage – a square platform projecting out into the audience on three sides from the rest of the stage, which is several times wider again. The front edge of the main stage is bordered by an undulating pathway just wide enough to walk on and covered in a thick, red carpet. I know it must extend far deeper into the back than is currently observable, but at this moment there are heavy black velvet curtains pulled closed across it. 

Thierry springs up onto the stage with the grace and ease of a man many decades his junior,  and Troy and I follow with far less coordination. We stand in the centre of the thrust, looking out over the empty audience, back towards the lighting booth. Simple white spotlights make it possible to grasp the size and scope of the room’s opulence:
 
Two massive, thick pillars stand like guardians across from us at the back of the room, flanking the left and right of the dining area. A collage of faded posters is dimly visible on the pillars; where they meet the ceiling, they’re capped in jewel-toned wooden slats, red and yellow and blue, reminiscent of a circus tents and carnivals. Huge waves of swagged fabric make an ocean of the ceiling, stripes of red and white rolling in towards us in descending waves, and demarcated by strings of lights that repeat the curves of the seating sections below.  

The seating area on the main level is separated into sections by finely wrought decorative railings, gold-coloured hearts repeating next to each other over and over across the sweep of the room. Smaller balconies glimmer faintly on the sides of the room, forming the far border of rows and rows of tables that are packed in right up to the lip of the stage.  

I direct my attention downwards. The floor beneath my feet is cool and incredibly smooth – immaculately polished, narrow, black wooden boards tucked so tightly against each other that it feels like the surface of a skating rink, not a stage constructed of a thousand small pieces. A gentle current of chilly air from unseen vents above us brush faintly against my exposed skin. Once the space is full of happy patrons, the body heat and energy of a few hundred people laughing and eating and drinking filling the space, it will feel perfect in here; in the still silence of the empty afternoon, it raises small goosebumps on my arms. 

This stage will put us almost exactly at patron eye-level, I realize. 

So many of our other performance opportunities have happened on absolutely enormous stages, far away from anyone sitting in seats. The saving grace of these prior opportunities, of course, has been that almost all of them have involved some kind of live-recording element: cameras bringing us into people’s space, at eye level, closer than is possible in real-life. What’s lost in the intimacy of a close-up on camera, of course, is the electricity that exists in live performance between artist and observer. All the subtle cues percolating away in the back of the brain – the smallest flickers of muscularity, the intensity of a stare, the sound of feet and hands and body on the surface of the stage – can be exchanged for HD resolution and sweeping shots, but it cannot be replaced. This is our first chance to perform in a intimate space;  I feel my brain start to turn over all the possibilities this stage can offer. 

I wander upstage, closer to the heavy black curtains. At first glance, they're illuminated with scintillating,  tiny points of lights, spangled across the entirety of the fabric.  I reach out a hand,  letting it trail gently down the fabric.
It’s not lights at all, I realize, surprised.

The fabric itself isn’t plain black; it’s covered in thousands of tiny, handpainted points of glitter.
I take some of it between my fingers and gently rub the pad of my thumb over one of the sparkles. It doesn’t budge or shed, but my investigation causes a ripple of movement down the rest of the curtain, making it shine and shimmer in new patterns.

My mind wanders: it’s incredible how something so simple can look so magical with just a bit of light, and a bit of distance. Then again … isn’t that the magic of everything on stage? Transforming simple parts into something altogether greater?

I wonder if this is like what happens when Troy and I come out on stage – with the makeup,  the music,  the lights ... with the energy and intention of the story we’re telling.

I wonder if we make magic.

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

Thierry has walked back to stage left, poking his head past the curtain and calling for someone. I pull myself out of my reverie as another friendly face emerges from the depths of backstage: Olivier, the stage manager. 

“Bonjour!” he greets us, smiling broadly. “I’ll be the one cueing you to go onstage tonight. No need to worry about missing your timing!” he adds with a wink. He settles into a chair off to stage left to watch the rest of the proceedings as the lighting tech begins cycling through various designs.

We’re awash in greens, then reds, then blues; shifting spirals and softly blooming spotlights; multi-coloured patterns that shift into one another before melding seamlessly out again.

“How long have you worked here?” I ask Thierry as the lights shift and change across our faces. 

“I have been here at the Moulin Rouge for 40 years,” he replies, eyes twinkling.  
 
“What!” Troy says.

“Forty years?!” I repeat dumbly.

“Yes,” Thierry laughs. “I was a dancer here for 18 years first. And then … well, this job and that, and now, the stage director.”

“You clearly like it here.”

“Oh yes,” he says, smiling peacefully. “There is no better place to work than the Moulin Rouge ...”

I’m trying to imagine what it might feel like to enjoy working at a place so much that youspend four decades of your life there when Jean-Jacques calls out to us from the lighting booth.

Time start marking out the rough shapes of our act on the stage.

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

My body creaks and aches in complaint against my exhaustion and the chill air around me. 
With each run, each variation, my body slowly builds enough heat to keep the chillness of the air at bay slightly, but the ache from the burn on my leg is slowly building to a louder volume. I feel heat and dampness beginning to seep through the cotton material until it’s noticeably weight to my touch. This is why we wear black. I try shifting my weight to my right leg when possible, a meagre attempt to keep the fabric of my pants away from the damaged, angry  tissue.  

I’m mindful not to push myself too far in terms of flexibility: unless I have a proper amount of time to warm up, nothing particularly extreme is going to happen, and it’s perfectly acceptable to set our lights without me doing a cheststand.

Right?

Right.

And yet . . .

There's that ever-present, imposter-contortionist-syndrome popping up again (a special breed of imposter syndrome which, of course, is helped in no way by having a performance partner who requires zero warm-up and can drop straight into all of his tricks):

That backseat anxiety that creeps forward in my brain when I'm doing some sort of tech run or rehearsal for a contortion performance – but not doing any bending or bendiness in that precise moment (because my body doesn't work that way). A moment that feels like the inside of my skin has hives, while my mind races to evaluate all 17,845 variations of the ways in which the people around me might be re-evaluating if I’m any good or not, if they maybe shouldn't have hired me at all.

Somewhere along the way, in an attempt to hijack my brain out of this self-esteem hellscape, I started trying to trick myself with a little perspective shift – I tell myself (in a very bossy, someone snobby internal voice), Well I can do it ...  I just don't want to right now. 

This, of course, is a bald-faced lie, but it works some of the time.

I consider trying it now … and then the complete lack of sleep kicks in, my exhaustion overrides the 'try to be confident' escape hatch, and I call out quietly in French to Thierry for some external validation: “it’s okay if I just mark it, yes?”

“Of course,” he replies, furrowing his brow slightly – as if I was crazy to even ask it. “You must perform tonight. There is no need to go full out.”

Oh.  

That’s …

Well.

Okay then.
 

For the next hour, Thierry stays alongside us, offering helping suggestions and considerations about where the audience will be, how to make the best of the stage and create the strongest first impression for this particular space, and the like.  

We trot back and forth from the stage to the lighting booth several times to iron out what changes should happen at certain points in the music, and what we want the final image to be, cobbling conversation together between my rudimentary French and the lighting techs’ rudimentary English.

Finally, everyone is satisfied. 

Olivier returns to the stage, walking forward out of the shadows he’s been watching our rehearsal from.

“Let’s get you settled into your dressing room, yes?” he says.

We gather up our heavy coats, scarves, and smaller bags and follow him offstage, back into the darkness.