Barbette's Skeleton (Part VI): What's the Story? (Patreon)

Good now, my strange and wonderful patrons,  Today is the day – we're going to start looking at the 'story' I've been using to create the rough draft of my aerial straps act for LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE!

Today I start letting us all peek between the covers of my studio journal. There's lots more from those pages in our upcoming instalments, too. Fun!

A brief clarification before we dive in, juuuust in case I've muddied the waters with all this posts at this point:

I'm not trying to tell a story with LE NUMÉRO BARBETTE in the sense of a "Once upon a time..." story.  The 'act narrative' I'm sharing below aren't supposed to feel that way, or function that way.  As we touched on in Part IV and Part V, I think specific story is rarely effective in solo circus acts, but general notions of story are crucial in order for us to feel (as viewers) that the artist/character we are watching is going through conflict, growth, and resolution. Catharsis.    

Barbette's original act did tell us a kind of story (a narrative), and so will mine: the act narratives below are frameworks that have allowed me to build out details and developments for character, for persona, for movement, for technique, for dance, and more. I'm going to save the deeper digging into WHY I've made the 'story'/'narrative' choices I've made in the following for write-ups down the road – but there's meaning in all of it.

I've wrestled with today's post quite a bit, and I think ultimately I just have to accept that this one is going to run the risk of feeling a bit chaotic and messy. But –as I set at the outside of this series– I want to document all of it.

With today's bits and pieces in place, your next post (with clearer, more coherent examples being shared) will make more sense, I'm hoping! Without further ado ...

* * * * * 

To re-cap the last couple posts' discussions: 

We've been poking around the questions of,

(a) what makes an aerial act ... good? and

(b) what are some of the [dramaturgical] questions a circus artist should think about asking themselves if they want to create a three-dimensional, emotionally rich work that seeks to create impact through both technical skill AND artistic connection/emotional resonance?

When it comes to reimagining the 1920s-era work of the original Barbette for a contemporary audience, for aerial straps, and with me (and all the visual sociocultural markers my body does or does not present), I had to think about:

The order and timing of 'gender reveal' as a trick in the act; how we visually perceive (or don't perceive) non-binary bodies in non-verbal performance mediums; and how hyper-masculinities and hyper-femininities are woven into our expectations of circus disciplines and circus acts.

After a lot of brain–wringing, I landed on the following decisions in order to move forward with making the act:

• For this concept to be effective in 2022, and for this concept to be effective in relation to how my body seems to be currently interpreted by the general public, I should start the act not as a woman (as Barbette did back in the 1920s), but rather as a man
• Instead of Barbette's original act narrative of ...    "A beautiful woman appears; she performs; GASP! and reveals that she is a man",    My act would have to be something more along the lines of...    "A man appears; he performs; GASP! but wait! he is a woman; GASP! but wait! He is– She is– wait–"
• (I mostly wrote about this in Part II, if you need a refresher)

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This act 'narrative' came to life in mid-August thanks to an extremely helpful conversation with my Montréal contortion friend, Alex.

We were in a cute little café near Cirque Eloize called Chez Grandmère (where a barista with a very nice beard named Romain let's me practice my clunky French with him). I was moaning to Alex that I didn't know how to cross the threshold I was standing at, i nthat moment:

How did I begin tying together all this thinking about Barbette I'd done this summer with the actual technical part of ... MAKING AN ACT?

It was one of those magical conversations where everything suddenly snapped into place in my mind. All the musings I'd scribbled in my journal, all my chats other artists like Xander Taylor, with my parents, or with friends back home in Toronto suddenly made sense in relation to each other.

I knew how they all needed to interact –the characters; the costume changes; the tone and intention of the act; and more– in order to create this balance between introspection and extroversion; to try to create a suspension of reality that could resolve, improbably, in something grounded.

Witness my chickenscratch documentation of this brain-electrification below: 

(wow, beautiful, right? 😆)

I frantically scribbled out the main beats of the idea after that chat with Alex, desperate not to let a single flicker of those ideas flit away from me: 

The characters (see below), the tone (picking up in the 1930s, where Barbette's career left off), the style (AUDIENCE INTERACTION AT THE BEGINNING -- WHO AM I !?!?), the costumes (layer after layer of it, drawing on old photos of Barbette for reference once more), and an idea about what purpose the apparatus could serve in this Surrealist, cinematic, gender-wibbly-wobbly universe I wanted to invite people inside beyond being a simple vehicle for tricks and spectacle (using it like a Surrealist Pull-Switch / lamp chain: when a character tugs on it, it initiates the costume change / gender swap).

The personas appearing on stage wouldn't be stereotypes, but archetypes. Not satire, but magnifying the standards to as extravagant a degree as I could manage.

To make things easier to talk about with my collaborators, these characters needed names (Patrons, to not make today's instalment thousands-more-words long, please trust that I've got the peer-reviewed papers to pull from as groundwork for the following tropes): 

There would be The Man (the 'Russian-guy-performing-in-white-tights' trope, wrapped up in suave 1930s packaging), who would reveal ...

La Ballerine / Classique (the 'delicate flower' female-aerialist trope, or like the demure, eyes-averted objectified femininity Barbette mimicked in that Man Ray photo, a hundred years ago); who would reveal ...

The Cabaret artist (the vixen/siren female-aerialist trope, like Barbette actually teased at in her act as she slinked out of item after item into more scantily-clad attire), who would reveal ...

Me.

William actually gave a name to this final (auto)character. When I explained my ideas to him at the start of September, showed him some of the movement references I was imagining for this final persona, he said:

“Qu'est-ce-que le nom de– What is the name of your … your … compagnie, again?”

“What?”

“Créature…”

“Oh, my– ‘Strange Wonderful Creature’”

“Oui! C’est ça! That’s what it is, at the end. It’s wonderful and strange.”

“Okay, so we’ll use ‘Creature’ for shorthand for that,” I chuckled.

“Ca marche.”

“But –just so we’re on the same page– this final character isn’t … isn’t … actually a creature or a monster.”

“No, no, I understand, it’s just a … how do you say … do you say … I do not know in English…”

“Shorthand?”

“Yes. Short’and”.

“Ok great.”

And so it was; and so it is:

The Man (or I guess I should say, L'Homme?).

Ballerine. 

Cabaret. 

Créature. 

Here is the earliest version of those scribblings (close ups below this first photo, don't strain your eyes, folks):

* * * * * * 

I'd love to keep info-dumping, but this feels like a lengthier instalment already so I'm going to save how this mess of scribbles turned into something even halfway coherent for your NEXT INSTALMENTTTTT. 

Part VII of Barbette's Skeleton will be landing in your inboxes on Monday, October 17th at 11:30 am EST!

Until then, stay strange and wonderful --  XO Ess