The Sound of It: A Prelude (Patreon)

“Hey, pretty boy,” Roberto said as he answered my phone call – a nickname from the Cirque de Demain creation days. 

Today and tomorrow, I offer you some cute origin story between myself and my choreographer/artistic director before diving back into the detail-maelstrom of this act creation. There's a sprinkling of Cirque de Demain era story, and then we return to the present day. Enjoy <3

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Over the years, Roberto and I have accumulated hours and hours of working together, some of it in film & television, some of it in the world of circus. I owe much of the success of my first big year abroad performing circus (2019) to his diligent attention to detail and generosity with his time, emotions, and experience.

Roberto the co-founder and artistic director of Pro Arte Danza, a contemporary dance company based in Toronto, and is also often hired as a 'movement choreographer' in film & TV. Producers call him to create unique monster movements, choreograph dance sequences (he won an Emmy for his work in Shape of Water), and the like. Interacting with Roberto on set was usually a bright point in an otherwise highly stressful, socially fraught day/night of stunt work, for me.

Roberto met me before I started transitioning, before I’d come out, on a del Toro TV show called The Strain. He met me while I was using my old name. He met me at a time in my life where my employability was dictated on how well I could convince a cohort of rather small-minded men that I was nothing but a compliant, well-behaved female stunt performer that wouldn't call them out on their gross rape jokes, laughably outdated ideas about gender equality, or outright violently transphobic comments.

When Troy, Roberto, and myself stepped into the studio to create the contortion duo act that Troy and I debuted in Paris for the 40eme Cirque de Demain back in 2018, I was starting to trust my early gender identity conversations with a few select people.
Troy was one of them.
Roberto wasn’t, yet.  

I wanted to trust Roberto, but I'd learned to trust people in film less, after working in stunts. He was ‘stunt-adjacent’ in the taxonomy of my social world: someone that I met while working alongside bigoted men who spouted  vitriol about transwomen they watched in YouTube videos on lunch breaks. Could I trust that he was a normal, decent person? Stunts had made that an unstable question for me. 

 I needed him to be someone I could trust with this part of myself if Troy and I were going to be successful in creating something wonderful for Cirque de Demain. I just couldn't compartmentalize that part of myself any more, not when I was doing the kind of deep, demanding creative work that Troy and I were about to embark on at that moment in my life. I also needed to trust him to have a certain degree of discretion lest he discuss it casually with a stunt performer or stunt coordinator and inadvertently end my career there before it even got started.

It was a stressful time.

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[to be continued]