BARBETTE, DARLING (Patreon)

TIME FOR SOME BACK STORY. Allow me to introduce you to the inspiration for this impossible task I've set for myself :

Barbette was the belle of the 1920s Parisian cabaret scene, performing trapeze and highwire for the likes of an adoring Jean Cocteau and Man Ray at the Moulin Rouge. She wasn’t an incredible technician: she didn’t execute virtuosic tricks or movements that had never been seen before. But people obsessed over her – because at the end of her act, after floating gracefully through the air, and performing a small saucy little striptease between aerial numbers on the divan they’d place on the stage for her, she’d spread her arms wide to the audience’s applause and remove her wig. Barbette wasn’t a graceful female aerialist at all. She was one of the most infamous female impersonators of the Golden Age of circus.

Barbette was born as Vander Clyde Broadway (I know, I thought it was a fake name too, but apparently not) in Texas in 1899. She got her start replacing one-half of a sister-duo aerialist act (the Alfaretta sisters) in the US. They decided it was more ‘impressive’ for it to be 2 female aerialists performing. Barbette went on to develop a solo act from there, and began performing in Europe.

Cocteau wrote of Barbette,

“[Barbette] transforms effortlessly back and forth between man and woman. His female glamour and elegance Cocteau likens to a cloud of dust thrown into the eyes of the audience, blinding it to the masculinity of the movements he needs to perform his acrobatics. That blindness is so complete that at the end of his act, Barbette does not simply remove his wig but instead plays the part of a man. He rolls his shoulders, stretches his hands, swells his muscles...And after the fifteenth or so curtain call, he gives a mischievous wink, shifts from foot to foot, mimes a bit of an apology, and does a shuffling little street urchin dance – all of it to erase the fabulous, dying-swan impression left by the act.”

People mostly write about this early part of Barbette’s career, or the tragic ending to it (Barbette committed suicide at the age of 72 after suffering for years from chronic pain), but there’s more to her story. Ironically, the realities of Barbette's life as a queer man are often erased from the record: many accounts cite the end of Barbette’s performing career in the late 1930s being attributed to a fall from the trapeze wherein she sustained a bad injury that required surgery and extensive rehabilitation; but far more difficult to find are the accounts that include how, in the 1930s, Barbette was caught with a man in England and banned from ever returning to performing there.

The rest of Barbette’s career was spent in the United States, where as the aerial trainer for Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey circus in the 1940s to 1960s she was credited as ‘reinventing the aerial ballet’ (Tait, Peta (2005). Circus Bodies: Cultural Identity in Aerial Performance. Routledge). To be a ‘Barbette girl’ was a desirable thing, as a female performer. It's Barbette we have to thank for the glamorous and spectacular style that characterized group aerial acts of that era – a style that persists to this day in the world of circus.

How does this tie back in to latex and non-specific-yet-stressful Zurich producers' aesthetic wishes? You'll see ...

[to be continued]