Barbette's Skeleton [IX]: Lightning Bugs (Patreon)

Hello my strange and wonderful patrons,

If we dig back far enough in the early Le Numéro Barbette writings and updates from this year, the eagle-eyed among us may find references to the story I'm about to unravel in the next few writing instalments. But since it's been at least a year since whenever I would have typed out those sentences with sweaty palms and anxiously hit 'PUBLISH', it bears repeating -more fully fleshed out, this time– here. 

For the newbies: I'm in the thick of a project that's received financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts I'm calling "LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE":

• I'm making a solo straps number inspired by Barbette (who's career peak was 100 years ago), and documenting the process with lots of writing along the way (evidently!);
• The writings here on Patreon (and others) will eventually be housed in a second volume of "SLOW CIRCUS", the circus-coffee-table-book I made for my last Canada Council for the Arts project, VACUUM (the creation of this book was heavily supported by this amazing community of patrons -- thank you, old guard!); and,
• I'll be recording the act at some point as well to do a digital showing with it, at the end of the project (all of you here get to see this before everyone else, obviously).

When I wrote that CCA grant, I was building off a contortion proof-of-concept version of this act I made in a dissociated haze mid-pandemic, in Summer/Fall 2021 (which is well-documented in the archives of this Patreon, if you're morbidly curious: check out the Barbette 1.0 hashtag). 

The entire motivation for that grant application which has set me off on the past eight months of work came from a tiny seed of an idea that was planted in my brain two years ago.

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A dream is like a lightning bug: we might catch it in our hands and trap it there between our cupped palms. It's tempting to keep it close to our chest. Warm, safe, and unseen –even by ourselves– until we crack our thumbs apart to steal a sliver of a glance at the glow we've captured there. It can feel scary to open our hands a bit wider so that someone else can see what we're holding – what if it flies away? Or –worse– what if the other person will think it's just a gross little beetle instead of a natural marvel of bioluminescent organs? 

The problem with this is that lightning bugs aren't meant to live in a sweaty, claustrophobic little cage made of human flesh and bones. They have to be out there in the world, flashing their little rave-booties out into the gloom for all to see.

There is a kernel of popular psychology that advises us to share our goals with others, because it increases our motivation, commitment, and therefore our likelihood of achieving those goals. 

A dream, a goal, lives a much better life if you let it go exist outside of yourself. Crack open your sweaty little palms and let it fly free, where other people can see it, too. It needs to exist outside of you.

Scarier still, recent studies in the psychology of motivation & goal-setting tell us that it's important to share these goals not only with our friends, but with individuals who we believe are 'higher-status' than ourselves. In this case, 'higher-status' just means a respect and importance we assign to others (it can be a coach, a close friend, a family member, or a boss, for example). The study finds that if we do not care about the opinion of the person we tell our goals to, it has little effect on our desire to persevere through the difficulties along the path to achieving that goal. Sharing our goals with someone we perceive as being farther 

What this study conveniently leaves out, of course, is that doing this is also bloody terrifying: it's much easier to never tell anyone about our dreams. 

When we tell people, it means we must now contend with the risk of failing ... (***cue Law & Order SVU intro music for dramatic effect***) with witnesses. 

These are experiences that the dad from the Calvin & Hobbes comics would probably call 'character building'. For the rest of us, though, I think many of us would agree it's an experience we'd prefer to skip, given the opportunity. 

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I have been unknowingly torturing myself with some variation of this advice throughout my circus career. 

I told my very first acrobatics coach that I wanted to become a contortionist (this was at a point that I couldn't touch my own toes) and he laughed and said he'd be surprised if I could ever do a back walkover, let alone a cheststand. 

(JOKES ON YOU, DAN, BECAUSE I STILL CAN'T DO A BACK WALKOVER BUT SPITE ALONE CARRIED ME ALONG TO MY FIRST CHESTSTAND)

(just kidding) 

(sort of). 

But somewhere in the mess of the last several years –a global pandemic, continuing to transition medically, beginning to shift my career focus from contortion to aerial straps, and the chaos and lack of control I felt around contracts I was getting as an actor for film & TV– I realized that I'd stopped setting goals for myself. 

I'd stopped thinking about what kind of work I wanted to get, what kind of work I wanted to make, because so much of it felt outside my control. 

I decided to remedy this for myself and –while it has, indeed, proven to be terrifying– it has snapped things back into clear focus for myself. 

So allow me to state plainly here, in no uncertain terms:

My goal for "Le Numéro Barbette", for this solo straps act that I'm working so hard on, is to present it at the 43eme Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain in Paris, in January 2024.

"Okay Ess," I hear you saying. "Cool. That doesn't mean much to us, though."

I understand. Allow me to elaborate.

Let me take us back to the beginning...  

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Until next time, stay strange and wonderful!
XO - Ess