Coffee Shop Conversations: Creative Paralysis & the Myth of Control (Patreon)

Hello from the creative trenches, my strange & wonderful patrons!

The magnitude of difference I feel between trying to research and choreograph for an aerial discipline (like straps) compared to my larger body of experience in creating for contortion vocabulary is . . . daunting, to say the least.

I've been making it a point to try to talk to as many other artists during my time here in Montréal about their research and creation processes: how they go about the different stages of making an act; their preferences and priorities for the order they build it in; the music, the mood, the balance of artistic and technical sequences; their consideration (or disregard for) where they might hope to show that piece of work eventually; and the like.

It's helpful when you can talk to other artists about how they tackle problems specific to an art form or shared creation process. And there’s a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ about the ~vibe~ around creating new work in Montreal —both good and bad— that makes the conversations I’ve had here recently feel particularly valuable.

But it gets a bit trickier (for me, at least!) when it feels like there's things I can't quite articulate yet that are nonetheless causing a big ol' creative blockage in my grey matter.

Luckily for me, one of those persistent, progress-arresting roadblocks that has popped up for me over the last 2 months of this creation process was recently put into words for me by another artist.

I thought I'd  share it with you folks today. This one is on creative paralysis, and the myth of controlling the message.

[[[Sidebar: these real life dialogues have been beautifully complemented recently by the work that one of my favourite creators here on Patreon has also been sharing these past few weeks – if circus creation process is something that interests you, or that you find as daunting as I do, Aisling's 3-part lecture series on it (you can read it or watch it) has been a true delight each time it lands in my inbox]]]

* * * * *

It was only 9:30am, but the sidewalk was already heating up. I walked slowly, trying to avoid the sweaty unpleasantness that has such quick onset on such days, meandering from one puddle of shade to another beneath the tall, old oak and poplar trees that line the sidewalks in Montréal's Rosemont neighbourhood.

I was making my way towards a small café called Paquebot to meet 24 year-old circus artist Clara Laurent for a coffee. She graduated from the prestigious École Nationale de Cirque (ENC) here in Montreal, QC in 2021, and had just recently returned from competing at the YoungStage Festival* in Basil, Switzerland. She'd been awarded the CircusTalk prize for her aerial straps act, and I was looking forward to chatting with her about her work.

*(YoungStage is one of the "biggies" – if you're a young contemporary circus artist and are invited to perform [aka, compete] at certain festivals [including this one], it's generally considered to be a sign that your career is off to a promising start)

I spotted Clara waiting for me outside the café as I walked up the last shimmeringly-hot block. She wore a light green sleeveless onesie that emphasized arms made strong by many hours of hanging, spinning, swinging, pulling, on aerial straps. We smiled, cursed the heat, hugged our hello's, and quickly made our way inside to order a couple of iced coffees.

"How's it been since you got back from YoungStage?" I asked, collecting our glasses from the barista and following Clara to one of the communal tables.  "Have you been able to take a break at all, or are you right into other projects?"

"I've actually been working on teeterboard and Chinese pole, lately," she told me. I slid one of the sweating glasses towards her across the butcher-block tabletop.

"I had no idea you did stuff other than straps," I said, impressed.

"I wanna work," she laughed. "I feel like people don't wanna book aerial acts that often in Europe."

"Really?" I asked, genuinely. My brain chugged away in the background: I knew aerialists working overseas in Europe, didn't I?  Was there really not that many? Were they working in more trad shows? Was what Clara was talking about more specific to a certain flavour of contemporary circus?  

I shook off the swarm of thoughts and followed up with, "Why do you think that is?"

"Rigging points, I guess? Doesn't make sense," she said, shaking her head.

I looked up at the ceiling for a minute, thinking. "Well, this is extremely venue specific, but I know that at least the Moulin Rouge doesn't have aerial points any more," I said, chuckling. "Just a sketchy rickety track that apparently they can hook a showgirl into with a harness to fly her briefly over the audience. Although they weren't doing that when I was there."

"Really?" she laughed.

"Yeah."

Then again, the kind of aerial act mattered, too, in terms of 'bookability'.  Lots of small-to-medium European productions leaned towards the traditional kind of show: they wanted acts that were entertaining and beautiful, not necessarily ... Art.

Political art. Art with social commentary. Anything requiring cognitive labour to digest.

"Another issue is that a lot of aerial acts are so slow," she continued. I rattled the ice cubes around in my glass, trying to chill the remaining coffee in it a few more degrees as I listened.

"You mean the music of the act? The pace of the movements? Both?"

She frowned, thinking. "Yeah, I guess both? If you're trying to fit it into the broader framework of a show, it maybe works if there's one of those 'moments', but if you have three aerial acts and they're all slow then the rhythm of the show as a whole just bottoms out."

"Did no one make a . . . fast aerial act while you were in school?"

She paused again, giving it consideration.  "I– No, I . . . I don't really think so."

"I mean, that would certainly be a challenge. There's a certain tempo to technical moves that . . . well, the faster we go the harder it becomes, right?"

"For some of the technical stuff on straps? Sure, yeah, absolutely."

Our conversation rambled onward easily. I asked her about the other acts at YoungStage. She told me about an upcoming contract in Finland later this year. We talked about what it was like working for video-game production giant UBISOFT as motion-capture artists. Before long, the conversation turned to one of my favourite art-nerd subjects: creation philosophy and process. 

She asked about the Barbette grant, so I painted the broad strokes of the act concept: who Barbette was, what had preceded it with the contortion proof-of-concept, and what my work on the project had looked like over the past couple months.  

"I'm wrestling with a few different . . . mmm . . . I guess I can call them 'perception quandaries', at the moment," I said.

"Like what?"

"Well . . . I'm in a pretty different place now than I was when I wrote that grant almost a year ago. The act concept has had a long time to percolate and evolve. There's some things from the original idea that I love and think have some staying power, and other things that I can't even stand to think about having considered including at one point or another."

I took a sip of my coffee and continued: "Basically, at this exact moment, I'm kind of in a place where I'm orbiting around a general sentiment of, 'This is a crap idea, everything I'm doing is reductive, none of this is new, why am I bothering to do any of this' – which means –" I paused, smirked, laughing at myself a bit,  "– I'm probably riiiight on track with the whole endeavour, in general."

"Yup, sounds about right," Clara laughed. "If you hate what you're doing, you're in the middle of it still."

"Yeah," I sighed with a regretful smile. "There's just so many factors outside my control that I have a hard time not thinking about – and it's absolutely poison to the creative process, so I know it's important to, like, acknowledge them and then try to get on with making the damn thing. But it's hard with circus. A lot of the time it's not like the work is accompanied by text, so . . . so much of what we're making is left up to the audience for interpretation."

Clara nodded emphatically. "Exactly, yes. This killed me in school – I was always so worried about my work being misinterpreted by the audience. And my artistic counsellors would always tell me the same thing, which is–"

"–that you have no control over how other people experience the work so you just have to do your best to let it go?" I finished.

"Yes," she laughed.

"But it's so hard to let it go!"

"I know! I don't want to let to go. I feel like artists have a certain kind of responsibility on stage. Like a responsibility for the work that they're sharing, for the message or thoughts or ideas that they're putting out there when they get onto the stage. So the 'just don't think about it' advice never really ... sits well with me. I have to think about it."

I nodded in agreement. "Makes it awfully hard to move forward, though."

"Definitely causes creative paralysis."

* * * * * * *

Somehow two hours went by. We said our goodbyes and I started walking home.

The day even hotter than when I had started out that morning. As I made my way back to my sublet, I thought about all the things that I'd been having creative paralysis over during my recent research sessions. I gave into the heat, letting my usual rapid flow of thoughts slow down and stretch out in my mind:

What the hell is feminine movement or masculine movement?

If I say that this thing or that thing is inherently feminine or masculine, then aren't I just reproducing the same problematic stereotypes that are arbitrarily constructed anyways?

Or, if I'm presenting them on stage in juxtaposition with each other, with the right accompaniment of music and mood and character, does that give us an opportunity to examine our relationship to those stereotypes and assumptions?

Maybe the second one.

I think I'll have to lean towards that, otherwise I'll just never do anything.

What about the time that I'm living in?  Is it even possible to interpret what I'm researching and building as anything other than a kind of drag, in 2022?

Not that there's anything wrong with drag, but it's also just . . . not what I'm doing.

Well, I guess some folks would argue that that is what I'm doing.  

But I don't think it is.

That's certainly not the point, anyways.

Or maybe RuPaul's Drag Race has just infused my brain with a very narrow interpretation of what drag performance is and I need to go immerse my brain in some local queer drag scene stuff.

But Barbette wasn't a drag performer.

She was referred to as a 'female impersonator'.

This was an important part of the Golden Age of Circus.

And, ironically, it's what I feel like I am when I have to pretend to ... not be trans (though those situations are happily few and far between these days). But yeah – the words we use today to describe what kind of performer and what kind of person Barbette was, are not the words that would've been used in Barbette's day and age. Barbette was just . . . many things.

It kind of makes me think of that pushback some people make against labels of any kind, definition of any kind, when it comes to their sexuality and gender.

And, honestly, the more that time goes on, the more I find myself feeling this way, too, on occasion. I just keep hanging on to words like 'transgender' and 'non-binary' and 'trans-masculine' because they're useful for communicating with humans I don't know well or have to explain myself to. But privately? It doesn't matter that much to me at all. And then again . . . I do not and cannot exist in a social vacuum, so I guess that's why those words are useful sometimes.

But, wait – go back to the 'drag' thing again for a moment. There's more to chew on there. Think it out a bit more . . .

In presenting an act where there is a costume-change/gender-change being performed for the audience, a contemporary audience, and audience in 2023 or 2024, is it possible to see it as anything other than drag, than a particular kind of performance category with all sorts of parameters on it, tropes associated with it, expectations that come with what makes it 'good' (or not)?

Circus arts has enough arbitrary standards, expectations of what makes a work 'good' (or not): is there a high enough technical level? Is there expressive artistry? Is the performer sharing themselves with the audience in a generous and transparent way? Does the work make you feel something? Does it surprise you? Does it hold your attention?

And if an audience thinks they're watching a DRAG circus act, then a whole set of different expectations for what they're about to watch will come with it;

And if I'm not doing that in the work, if I'm not mindful of making sure I indicate in some way to the audience that that's not what they're about to watch, then the act runs the risk of being . . . wait for it . . . misinterpreted.

GASP.

Of course, the answer to all of these anxieties, to this creative paralysis, is an unpleasantly simple one:

You have to explore it anyways.

See what happens.

This flies in the face of my lifelong habit of over-intellectualizing every single tiny infinitesimal detail in the hopes of mitigating consequences that I might consider negative or unpleasant.

We have to just try it anyways.

We have to be brave enough to walk a few steps down a path that might, actually, be the Worst Idea Ever Conceived Of, and which is additionally Damaging, Problematic, Offensive, Reductive, and Facile.

Why?

So that we can backtrack a little bit, point ourselves a few degrees in a slightly different direction, and try taking a few more steps.

Maybe the path will be a better one that time. Or maybe not – and then we just backtrack again, change orientation slightly once more, and sally forth bravely into the unknown.

God, I hate this part.

Until next time, stay strange & wonderful,

XOXO ess