Barbette's Skeleton: Part I (Patreon)

Hello, my strange & wonderful patrons!

There is ebb and flow in the creative process –– and right now we’re in FLOW. I’ve got so much to catch you all up on about how all my hard work this Spring/Summer has coalesced into moments that feel like real progress now that Autumn has begun creeping in. 

The idea I had for the narrative of this aerial straps act has changed quite a bit from where things started last summer with my proof-of-concept (using contortion), and it’s continuing to evolve as I progress through creation and rehearsal.  

I’m curious about looking back at this point 4 months, 6 months, 8 months down the road from now. Curious to see if the differences will be significant or subtle after continuing to push the artistry, technique, and incorporation of costume, music, and lighting.

But first . . . 

There are THREE instalments of "Barbette philosophy" before I get to sharing what I've been doing in studio with wonderful Coach William and my merry band of conseil artistiques that he has helped me assemble.

This includes questions about aerial tropes, about gender performativity and stereotype within circus, and about what counts as a 'trick' in contemporary circus.

The context is so important!

Without further ado . . . 

* * * * *

For my newbie patrons (and a cheeky lil' revisit for the Old Guard!),   let’s start with Barbette––and the act she became known for.

Fellow Barbette explorer and magical-circus-human Stav Meishar has kindly been sharing the resources they compiled in the course of their Barbette creation with me this year. One of those resources is a reading from Surrealist Masculinities by Amy Lyford. In Chapter 5, Lyford describes Barbette’s performance as follows:

Barbette was the stage name, and alternate persona, of a young male acrobat from Texas named Van der Clyde. He transformed himself into Barbette by donning feminine attire and performing an acrobatic routine as a woman. The popularity of Barbette’s act hinged on the successful creation of an illusion of femininity that she renounced at the end. When the curtain dropped and her number appeared to be over, the performer returned to the stage, removed her wig, and proved that she was actually a man. (165, ¶1)

Back in the 1920s,  Barbette would come down the grand staircase to the stage of the Moulin Rouge in an absolutely opulent (to the tune of $30K in today’s dollars) ostrich feather extravaganza. She had a trapeze, rings, and tight wire setup, along with a low divan (couch) on the stage. Written accounts of her act describe Barbette doing a short number on each apparatus, returning to the divan between each one to do a little striptease down to skimpier and skimpier amounts of costuming. 

There’s also documentation that this act was done, at least at some venues, to the (ridiculously dramatic) Ride of the Valkyries, by Richard Wagner, or Scheherezade by Rimsky-Korsakoff. 

At the end, her wig removal ("Gasp! That wasn't a woman?!") was accompanied by her miming her way through a series of exaggerated masculine poses (Greco-Roman flexing-wrestler poses, pretending to swing a golf club, that kind of thing).

* * * * *

When I was exploring the work that I made last summer, I stuck pretty closely to the “narrative structure” we can parse from these records: 

I came out in high femme attire, and slowly stripped off pieces of wardrobe layer-by-layer, trick-by-trick, until at the end I removed my wig, shirtless. 

This year, when I turned my attention to how this raw material might be translated into an aerial act on straps, I had to rethink the narrative structure  for a few different reasons: 

(1) I had to think about where I wanted this act to be presented [the Big Dream: Cirque de Demain 2024] [more on that in an upcoming instalment of these Barbette's Skeleton posts]. 

It's important to think about where you want to present a work. Is it a small, intimate venue? An art gallery? A huge arena?

Each of these spaces require different things in order for the work to have maximum impact.

What did I know, or what info was I able to gather, about the technical and artistic expectations and standards of a stage like that of Cirque de Demain? 

I knew a bit from my experiences performing there with Troy in 2019: the stage itself is massive; the aerial point is high (lots of line overhead / above your apparatus); the audience surrounds the stage on 3 sides; there's a live orchestra; etc. 

I learned more from listening to our choreographer, Roberto Campanella, discussing what he saw about the generalized structures of a ‘successful’ act at that Festival, through the eyes of a multi-decades-long experienced dancer and choreographer. Roberto noted that (unlike dance pieces), the circus acts that were best received by audiences at the 40eme Cirque de Demain (and the acts that received the highest awards) followed a trajectory like this: starting with a BANG [to get the audience's attention], dropping back down slightly in intensity, technical difficulty, or risk, and then building-building-building towards the biggest BANG of them all to finish the act, with little-to-no dénouement.

And I knew a bit from continuing to study the kinds of acts that get presented on that prestigious stage (more on that in a future instalment). Amongst other things, in general, a high level of technique and/or a high level of artistry or innovation are necessary to even merit consideration.

(2) Aerial work holds people’s attention in a different way than contortion does.

Instead of being limited to movement on the ground, aerial work opens up the possibility (necessity) of using vertical space as well. Height, being raised up into the air and lowered down again, orbits (large circles instead of tight spins), swings that cut large diagonal swaths through space, are all movements that are available to me on straps but aren’t available to me when I’m working with contortion.

I’d never thought about what I consider to make for an “effective” aerial act, before. While this list is incomplete and subject to change, at the moment some of those things for me include:  it has to hold my attention (highly subjective) from start to end; it has to not feel predictable in its sequencing of transition and tricks; it has to  strike a balance between performativity (outward energy) and deep presence (inward energy) that creates flow back and forth between the audience and the performer; and more.

And (3), I had to consider the way that the other apparatus I was using in this act –my body– was likely to be interpreted visually by a given audience member. 

I say “likely” here because there’s simply no way to predict such a thing; conversely, if I fail to give attention to this detail, it’s highly likely my act concept would fail. As I’ve written about in other posts this summer, I’ve gotten lots of explicit and implicit data from moving through the world that tells me that this world is interpreting me more and more often as a young man. The body that I currently exist in is different than the body that made that proof-of-concept last summer, and is different than the body that wrote the grant funding this current work. I’ve put on around 30 lbs of muscle this year. It’s harder for me to look  ‘passable’  as a woman, even when I wear women’s clothing. And in the world of circus –where small, slender bodies are still [problematically] often preferred for female performers– this becomes an even harder sell.

* * * * * 

Elaborations on these 3 points to come in the next instalment of Barbette's Skeleton!

Keep an eye on your inboxes on Monday for Part II, and Wednesday for Part III!

Until then, stay strange & wonderful ...

XO

Ess