What's Old is New (Patreon)

I’ve wanted to create an act that is a kind of drag circus act for a long time.

It wasn't the 'drag' part of it that interested me, actually.

Rather, I was interested in what small, arbitrary gestures, movements, expressions, added up to seeing someone as a female performer on stage, vs seeing someone as a male performer on stage. (Sound familiar? Yeah. Guess I've just been chewing on the same artistic questions for a while now, what can I say. Eventually I'll come up with some new ones ... when I'm done with these ones, I suppose).

It was one of my earliest ideas, and it probably came more from a place where I was desperately seeking any way to work out my gender-identity-agonizing in a way that felt remotely accessible or safe, pre-transition, more so than as a line of artistic questioning that felt inherently interesting to me for any other reason.  

There’s nothing novel about drag circus acts, of course –  The Golden Age of circus had many aerialists and equestrian acrobats who were female impersonators. In contemporary contexts, there’s plenty of amazing examples to be found as well. Kyle Cragle does an absolutely incredible drag handstand routine. Matthew Richardson was hired to be a drag queen main character on cyr wheel for a Cirque production in Europe a few years ago and did an absolutely fantastic job (like, cyr wheel in heels?! Excuse me?!).

I’d been researching my own version of this for years – and, as a trans performer who hadn't started transitioning yet, obviously was coming from a different place than two highly technically skilled cisgendered male acrobats performing female drag. For some reason, in the early days of imagining this one-day-far-away act, I was fixated on this third, liminal character that emerged from the skins of The Woman and The Man as Pierrot, the sad little clown (I don’t know why anymore, don’t ask me). Let's just say that sometimes it's a Really Good Thing that acts incubate for years and years before actually coming to fruition.

Weird execution ideas aside, the questions I've thought about in relation to this act have remained steady over time:
Why are certain aerial apparatuses seen as feminine disciplines (silks, circeaux/lyra) and others seen as masculine (straps)? What could be found by juxtaposing those two visuals over the course of an act? What might be found by stripping away both gender performances down to something else …?

In the course of making and performing VACUUM, which coincided with me starting my transition, I learned about the practical application of these questions. Some people watch that act and think they're watching a woman perform contortion in a box. Other watch that act and think they're watching a man perform contortion in a box. If you're a now-fired-judge from Das Supertalent, you're convinced you're just watching a freak in a box (you can read between the lines on that article fairly easily, I think).

Mostly, these days, I'm as convinced as ever that there isn't really an answer to these questions.

I've started to think about my own identity similarly: if being nonbinary as a gender identity can be expressed in all manner of gender presentations – masculine, feminine, or androgynous – what does it look like? It looks like everything. It looks like nothing. Being nonbinary, how can one look like something that exists outside of the structures/frameworks that we understand one another through (masculine & feminine)? Maybe it'll be different one day. But for now, people visually make sense of one another through lenses that are often binary: they see a feminine quality here, a masculine characteristic there, and add it up in their heads to equal ________.

If I've learned anything on this front in the last year of my life, it's that there is a spectacle to trans-ness, and that I've been performing it as much as I've been figuring it out (or rather, that what I share publicly of my figuring-out has a performativity to it, inescapably). Ironically, the spectacle of a body that falls outside the margins of what we consider acceptable or allowable for being female or male, feminine or masculine, has long found a home under big top tents anyways. I'm not doing anything new. It's just a new medium.

I can never make an act where you truly see me as trans and nonbinary - whatever that is. I can only make an act that can be interpreted in a veritable kaleidoscope of ways (and, to be clear, that feels pretty good to me). Rather than obscuring my gender presentation, my body – like in VACUUM – and blurring as many lines as possible to let the viewer fill in the blanks with their own expectations and life experience, this old 'drag act' idea of mine was rooted in a desire to see what happened if I could pull off performing extreme or archetypal examples of whatever a 'feminine' circus performer was, and immediately juxtapose it with whatever a 'masculine' circus performer was.

To bring things back around to the present day – 
In the first summer of the pandemic, I began doing sideshow and circus history research. I read a lot about gender roles and performativity in North American circus in the late 19th and early 20th century.  The questions I had been asking all alone in my self-indulgent, introspective little artist world were there, fleshed out by diligent circus scholars into long, arching threads that touched on class, race, queerness, and more. I wrote down a lot. I shared a little of it (on Instagram). I made nothing with it, act-wise.  

And eventually I stumbled upon the story of Barbette.

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[to be continued]