Barbette's Skeleton (Part III): Digging for Bones (Patreon)

My dear, strange, and wonderful patrons,

Welcome to the third and final piece of background–philosophy for the direction I have decided to take the aerial straps version of LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE in!

After today, we'll be moving into specifics: talking about the limits of storytelling in the broad context of contemporary circus, how narrative is something that helped me establish the broad strokes of the act's 'rough draft' that now exists (!!!), and then looking at the act structure I've been working with.

Thank you so much for being here!

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Let’s return briefly to Amy Lyford again (that wonderful scholar I quoted in Part I who wrote Surrealist Masculinities) to kick things off. 

In that same chapter on Barbette, she goes on to say,  

“[Barbette’s] convincing portrayals pressed her audience to acknowledge that the body could not always be trusted to tell the truth about gender … Her number was popular not only because of its commercialization of sexualized performance but also because it publicly rendered gender identity as a visual and cultural experience that audiences could read and interpret in different ways” (165-166, ¶2).

After wrestling with the questions in the last 2 posts all summer, I  felt that I had to accept the following premises to move forward with an act structure that would be “effective” in the ways that mattered to me (hold the audience’s attention; create emotional connection; not try to communicate overly complex concepts; etc):

1. I cannot present my non-binary body onstage, as is, and expect it to be interpreted as such. There will always be a high likelihood of it being visually categorized into one binary gender or another. Knowing this, how can I use this likelihood to my advantage in terms of dramaturgy & storytelling? 

2. While visual tropes exist on aerial straps as an apparatus for men and women, there are no visual tropes or stereotypes associated with non-binary or gender nonconforming bodies in the context of aerial straps (or, even if they exist, they are not widespread enough for a general audience filled largely with cisgender people to automatically apply to me)

3. Saving the ‘gender reveal’ of Barbette's original act structure until the very end of the piece will likely feel unsatisfying to the audience: there won't be enough time left in the act for them to process what they've seen, and confusion isn’t the final mental space I want a viewer to be left in

With the above points established as parameters for what an aerial straps act of LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE should keep in mind, I built on the questions I posed in the previous (Part II) instalment:

• Q: How long can I delay the audience's determination of what I am through visual cues? How I'm dressed? How I move?  

• (A: not long)

• Q: How many times can I 'trick' the audience? How many times will the audience 'expect' to be 'tricked' with a costume change / gender change?

• (A: I think they'll only expect it once; so what happens if it I do it more than once?)

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One morning, sitting at my computer and wrestling with my thoughts before an afternoon studio session, I found myself looking at the old black-and-white Man Ray photos (1926) that Jean Cocteau commissioned of Barbette.

One of these photos is a side-by-side photo of Barbette, two photos juxtaposed next to each other in a spread that shows Barbette in both feminine and masculine personas. 

I stared at the right-hand side of the photograph. 

Barbette –well, Van der Clyde– takes a broad stance in a well-tailored double-breasted suit. It’s daytime and he’s in the middle of a street, staring directly at the camera from beneath the brim of a fedora.

Little sparks began to fly in my brain, an idea coming together. 

Lyford writes of this photograph,

“On the left, hovering in an indeterminate yet theatrical space, Barbette averts her gaze slightly from the viewer and enacts the demureness of an objectified female subject. Her sinuous pose accentuates the delicate conformation of buttocks, legs, and elegantly pointed toes usually attributed to women, and her deflected gaze encourages the viewer’s voyeuristic pleasure in looking without being looked at. Van der Clyde, in contrast, stares directly out at the viewer from a street corner, his facial expression and rooted stance reflecting an aggressively masculinized subject position. Whereas Barbette inhabits a dark, amorphously interior space of fantasy, Van der Clyde is out on the street, so we see a familiar sexual equation: the passive, private female versus the active, public male. But because the same body represents both states of being, the layout encourages the viewer to see sexual difference as a matter of pose, gesture, and context rather than an inherent quality of the flesh. Although the images depend on stereotypical ideas about masculinity and femininity, and about the public and private spheres, the convincing portrayal of both qualities at once demands that viewers consider that the body may be an unreliable marker of sexdual identity.” (166, ¶2)

A fizz of excitement started in my stomach.  

What would happen if I started the act there, on the right side of the photo?

And then, 

If it’s not possible to control how people see my body when it’s as fully revealed as I can make it on stage (i.e. shirtless, no wig, wearing briefs/tight clothing on my lower body), what would happen if I created live-performance versions of the  juxtaposition of gender that’s happening in this photo spread?

What would happen if stop running away from these visual stereotypes? 

What if I lean heavily on them instead? Not to promote them as a truth, but to reveal them as performances that are as arbitrary and flawed as anything else? 

What if I can present them, one after the other, so successfully and convincingly that when I’m stripped down to my barest components the audience has to think about what they’re seeing in relation to what they just saw?

It could become a Russian-nesting-doll of characters, one layer being taken away to reveal the next to reveal the next until there was nothing left to strip away.  

Suddenly, I knew what I had to do.

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Stay tuned for your next instalment, landing on Friday October 7th at 11:30am EST!

In Parts I, II, and III we've revisited who this Barbette dame was, what her act was all about, how my current work fits into this landscape, and what I needed to do in order to move forward with adapting my contortion proof-of-concept into an aerial straps act.

In Part IV, V, and VI, we're digging into some of the broader questions of how circus artists make their acts effective, nibbling at the edges of circus dramaturgy as something that can possibly help us achieve said effectiveness, and how a narrative structure for this act helped me get where I needed to go with the rough draft of my act. Exciting reads ahead! 

Until then, stay strange & wonderful.

XO

Ess