June Musings: Gender & Circus (Patreon)

Good afternoon, beautiful humans!

I'm fresh off the FINAL NIGHTSHOOT OF THE HORROR MOVIE – YAYYYY!!!!  We wrapped around 4:45am this morning and I was in bed by 6:30am before waking up around 2pm and hauling my sleepy butt to a cute café near Metro LaSalle to finish reviewing and editing the following for you all.  (See: your tired author, below) (LOOK AT THOSE PANDA EYES)

I've added in some photos from my training and artistic research sessions this time to break up this lengthier writing in an enjoyable way. 

My musings on and around gender, circus, and performativity over the past month have been admittedly . . . murky. And fragmented. The murkiness might be lack of sleep; the fragmentation is more likely a reality of constant interruption and disruption of any periods of restfulness or reflection (from training, from moving, from commuting, from horror-movie-ing, etc). EITHER WAY – I'm happy to be sharing my brain-soup with you all today.

Apologies in advance for all zombie-state grammatical errors, run-on sentences, and/or mild repetition. The goal with this month's brain-dump was more to just get it out, and less so to present cohesive, finished conclusions. And I'm really struggling in the wake of cumulative sleep deprivation 😅 

And, since I'm becoming aware that a lot of you lovely beings are neurodivergent in one way or another here on this Patreon, I'm adding a small 'tone note' today that the following is all in the vein of . . . not unpleasant musings! I'm discussing a lot of body image and embodiment things today; in the ways that that relates to gender identity and transness, I am aware that these conversations can often be heavily tinged with negative emotions. Therefore, I'd like to be clear that my discussion today is coming from a place where I feel like asking these questions is important, and grounded (AKA, not from a place where I don't feel good thinking about and asking these things) (AKA, I'm okay lol). 

If something resonates with your brain here today or sparks off an idea that relates to your own work or practice, your gender (be it man, woman, or otherwise – in the world of circus, in dance, or anything else) I'd LOVE to hear it in the comments! (But, again, gently: I do not need [and am not looking for] any emotional labour from anyone in the form of reassurances or engagement with the truthfulness or falseness of any of these ponderings.  Thank you! ☺️)

HERE WE GO!

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I’ve spent the last month continuing the slow process of building the physical and technical strength I want to have, and plugging away at my artistic research. I spend the long 60-minute train commute to and from aerial straps lessons and residency sessions mulling over questions that I don’t have answers for yet – and it’s those questions that I want to share and air out a bit in today’s writing so that I can return to them later and see how they’ve developed. 

My ally in performativity-ponderings this month is a copy of a beautiful little book called THINKING THROUGH CIRCUS (eds. Bauke Lievens, Sebastian Kann, Quintjin Ketels, & Vincent Focquet).  

It is a bit difficult to find (in Canada, at least).  I think only about 500 copies were printed (in Tallinn, Estonia, according to the back of the book! COOL).  I hunted mine down from a used bookstore in Australia. (The only other option I could find was from a used bookstore in France). Correspondingly, it's also a very pricy book for its size (though from my initial impression, worth its weight in gold). If you have a budget for yourself for Important Circus Books that belong in your circus library, at the time of this post you could order a copy here (UK based shop) or here (Italy, I think?) for about 25£ or 31,50€, respectively.

BUT!

Rejoice, for the editors of this 2-year-artistic-research-collaboration-turned-book have also published three Open Letter to the Circus that you can read for FREE, here.

If you are a circus artist and you're reading this, PLEASE check out at least the first letter and second letter. I'd love to hear what you think. I am non-hyperbolically obsessed.  

OKAY - carrying on:   Reading THINKING THROUGH CIRCUS has felt like having someone much more educated and articulate than me reach elbow-deep into the primordial muck of my brain to neatly translate all the things I wrestle with when I sit alone in my room or at my computer, thinking or writing about circus, into tidy English sentences. I’m only halfway through it, but it’s already provided some much-needed framework to start thinking (and writing) through these questions more thoroughly.

This special hardcover contains 10 dialogues between circus artists from Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the UK, the US, Canada, and Sweden that "bear witness to how a specific circus practice is (also) a practice of critical thinking" (8).  If that sentence makes you scratch your head, here's the opening paragraph of the editors' introduction to elaborate on that (and illustrate WHY this whole damn book is just so exciting to me!):

"Thinking can happen without words. It can produce thoughts without language, unfolding in matter or in bodies. It can happen between a circus artist and an apparatus, for example. Or it can materialise as circus movement. Indeed, in circus we think through the body: through corporeality, we shape and perform relations, feelings, states and ideas. The physical practice of circus is, in that sense, an embodied thinking practice. Yet physical circus practice and thinking are often imagined to happen in separate spaces and at separate times. It is through this separation that circus tricks are worked and perceived as 'thoughtless' physical doings which can be filled with any meaning or content. Consequently, the thoughts and values already present and performed in the repertoire of circus disciplines become hidden from view and are made undiscussable." (Lievens et al, 7).

In particular, it is the first dialogue –a conversation between Bauke Lievens and Camille Paycha– that struck a beautiful chord for me this past week.

Reading their conversation felt like a clear chime ringing out through my tired, congested brain. It's titled "Making Space, Space, Space". In it, Camille Paycha and Bauke Lievens exchange questions around what it means to be female within a circus practice and/or circus performance; the ways that violence in the forms of sexualization, predefinition & stereotype, technique, and more, shows up within that practice and performance; and how myths and truths about freedom and agency circulate within our practices and performances.

Near the start of the dialogue, Bauke and Camille discuss how circus technique (the practice of circus discipline itself, such as aerial straps) shapes the body, and how this body-shaping intersects with aesthetic expectations for female bodies in circus. Camille Paycha says:

"Circus technique shapes your body. In my case, aerial straps made me strong, with a lot of arm muscle. Simultaneously, I feel how the circus market asks me to perform a stereotype of physical femininity. My strong arm muscles need to be somehow combined with the set characteristics of how a female body should look in aerial: tall and with long legs, not unlike a classical ballerina. I tried to reconcile those two things when I was studying, working on my pointe, on having good lines, etc . . ." (Lievens & Paycha, 17).

((*the phrase ‘circus market’ isn’t elaborated on in this dialogue. We might hazard a guess that that means circus acts and performances that are designed, produced, and shopped around in such a way that they are contracted, booked, and engaged in some kind of commercial sense?))

Camille goes on:

"There is a strong relationship between how a body looks and the (political) potential) of what one can possibly 'say' and perform with that body. Yet we often treat the techniques we practise as if these were void of meaning." (18)

THIS is the hamster wheel my brain hasn't been able to jump off of all month as I go about my business disciplining (training) my body to be stronger, more dynamic, acquire technique that I want to incorporate in my choreography:  

• What does it mean to be saying the kind of things I'm interested in proposing in my work with the body I'm in, at this moment?
• What does it mean if that body is only 'legible' to a viewer as one complying with binary gender presentations, aesthetics, stereotypes?  

My body is a trans body. I describe the person inside it as a non-binary one (mostly because no matter how much I might enjoy the 'dressing up' process of masculine or feminine presentation, at the end of the day my autistic brain can't ignore the inconsistency, ambiguity, and arbitrary nature of these social constructs). As a transgender artist working in a nonverbal medium, I have limited control over how my body is interpreted.

My circus practice spills over and blurs the line between the ‘practice’ of existing, of moving through the world as a trans person. I'm unsure that they can be separated. I’m a non-binary artist working in a medium (aerial straps) that has resulted in building a lot of upper body muscle onto my frame.

My body is read as masculine, as male, in public 90% of the time in the last 6 months because of this. I am sometimes afforded “passing privilege” because of this. I am afforded ‘passing privilege’ as a byproduct of the way that circus ‘disciplines’ and shapes my body.

As a trans artist who has had top surgery, who is taking hormones, I am becoming less and less ‘legible’ as the ‘ballerina’, the pinnacle of expectation that female circus bodies are most often held up next to and compared to. As I continue to train straps to develop Le Numéro Barbette, my body is more and more likely to be held up and compared against that other problematic stereotype of bodies in circus that Camille Paycha and Bauke Lievens discuss in their dialogue: the ‘Vetruvian Man’, the ‘physically perfect, white, male body’ (Lievens & Paycha, 22).  

This is reinforced back to me by strangers that I meet on the street who “sir” me now, automatically. This is reinforced back to me by myself, in all the ways that I’m aware of growing internalized pressures and expectations that have shifted from ‘the ballerina’ (be thinner; be graceful; be weightless; be elegant; be sexy or innocent, nothing more and nothing less) towards the ‘Vetruvian man’ (be muscular; have a six pack; be lean; be fantastically strong; be confident, be commanding, be in control). This is reinforced to me in the spaces I circulate within in circus, and within life. 

My pitch to develop the early contortion version of Le Numéro Barbette into an aerial straps number proposed a continuation of exploring ideas of burlesque and costume, spectacle (of transness, of circus), and form and stereotype (what bodies do we expect to see doing what, on stage?). These subjects become complicated by questions of identity and performativity that underpin them, in the ways that what I've shared from Paycha and Lievens' writings help us think about them. Some of those questions I have are:

• What will it mean to present my trans  body onstage, unstructured (as in, not accompanied by text, dialogue, personal commentary; as in, within the nonverbal realm of a circus act)? Will I be stepping into an environment that Paycha & Lievens might describe as ‘violent’? One in which people read things onto my body, scrutinize and evaluate my body, categorize it and objectify it to make sense of it? One in which I allow or invite others to do this?
• If I follow the format of slowly revealing my body through the removal of feminine costume elements (a burlesque of sorts), then what spectacle am I creating? What kind of spectacle of feminity, masculinity, and transness am I offering if I do that? Am I inadvertently creating something where I, my image, my body, can be passively ‘consumed’? Is this a problematic thing? Can this be a good thing?
• If I remove costume items to slowly reveal a more masculine silhouette from a feminine silhouette, do I reinforce a false perception for the audience that they were watching a man onstage, dressed up as a woman? Will people think that I am a cisgender, effiminate man in drag? How will that change how they experience the act?
• If I follow the format that Barbette herself did, 100 years ago, would the ‘surprise gender reveal’ at the end be read as comedic? Would my body be a joke?

In other words, I don't feel like I can just ignore how other people might visually experience my body in circus.  I'm deeply preoccupied right now with what it might say to create work with the body I'm in, and wrestling with the simultaneous jostling of knowing it's important to consider the political implications of this work while having minimal ability to control or craft someone's interpretation of me in the medium I'm working in.  I can't ignore the ways that circus myths and tropes interact might interact with my trans body on stage.  

In Lievens’ Second Open Letter to the Circus, she teases apart some of the most pervasive myths and tropes that have become inseparable from circus. She references Michel Foucault’s philosophies and work (‘Discipline and Punish’) in order to talk about virtuosity, freedom, agency, and the romanticisation of these things:

“The circus too is an ‘institution’ where the body was and is disciplined by exercise, repetition and the functional linkage of body and object (training). In this way, the virtuoso trained body incarnates the ideal of the useful body. Through exercise and repetition, the circus body becomes highly individualised and distinguished from the crowd. Yet a circus performer is not an individual who deviates from the norm, but is an ideal incarnation of the norm: strength, time and space are not wasted, but perfectly optimised.”

 [Lievens, SECOND OPEN LETTER TO THE CIRCUS, 2016]

With Lievens' above words in mind, I could wrap all of those Le Numéro Barbette-creation-specific questions above up into these broader ones:

• What are some of the ways that trans bodies moulded and disciplined by circus, and what are the consequences of that? How is my body ‘disciplined’ into a binary model of masculinity and femininity by my circus practice?
• How does that potentially create, recreate, redirect, corrupt, disrupt, and/or interrupt myths about freedom and agency within circus? and;
• What erasure happens in this process? How is my transness erased in a medium where my body can only be legible as a man or a woman?

* * * * * * *
These are the questions I'll be continuing to ruminate on over the next few weeks.
And, in terms of how this ties back in (practically speaking) to the development of the aerial straps version of Le Numéro Barbette: William (my coach) is going to connect me with a conseil artistique – someone who helps a circus artist ground the physical sequences they’re developing in a unified concept, idea, or character. Like a dramaturg. 

I’ve never worked with one before, but I trust William immensely. He understands the scope and content of the act/project, and he suggested this type of person as a valuable part of accomplishing what I want to do. 

So – tally, ho! A new collaborator to abuse with the above-relayed meditations (muahahaha).

Until next time – stay strange & wonderful.
XOXO

Ess