Cirque Éloize Audition - Pt III of *VII (Patreon)

TUESDAY November 8th

The only available time slot I could snag to rehearse my act a final couple times* was a 7pm to 9:30pm time slot in the creation studio at the École Nationale de Cirque – a long drive away from my host's house in Verdun. (*this rehearsal is where the last video post's footage comes from!)

ENC is in one of the northernmost neighbourhoods in Montréal; Verdun is located on the southernmost edge of the island.

I took the train to the 7 Doigts studios downtown midday to do a little light stretching and shake off the 6-hour car ride from the day before.

(I want so badly to take a nap in one of these sunbeams)

My friend and host for this trip, Alex Paviost, was also hoping to snag a spot at the auditions on Wednesday and would be revisiting the choreography for their aerial loop / contortion act.

Alex had a couple different versions of this act; one of them was meant to be done in large spaces with a puller, and the other for tight, enclosed spaces with some 'human props' to help initiate and stop spins.

I volunteered to be the 'human prop' for Alex's audition, regardless of whether we were in the same time slot or not.

We ran through the act 2 or 3 times; I tried to commit the timing and details of the number to memory.

My brain was reaching what felt like saturation-point: I had my extremely-new 3-minute number floating around up there and all the musical cues and performance details I'd only ironed out as recently as 48 hours prior, as well as the pull cues for both Glory and LeeAnn's acts vying for prime real estate in my memory bank. Hrnggggg.

I looked at the clock on the wall. Shit. Already 2:30pm.

I quickly gathered up my things and ran back to the metro: 30 minute commute back, 45 minutes to shove some food in my face and make sure I had everything I needed to run my act, get in the car and drive up to the École Nationale de Cirque to pull lines for Glory and LeeAnn (they'd be there before me) ,and to run my own final rehearsal. 

It was supposed to be somewhere in the ballpark of a 40 minute drive from my host's home near Metro LaSalle up to the school for my rehearsal; of course, that only works if the map isn't hoodwinked by tricky, arbitrary, ever-shifting Montreal street signs, detours, and time-sensitive traffic rules. 

I'm normally fairly adept at navigating new driving routes in unfamiliar cities. It was just my luck that I ended up on one of the gigantic, terrifying, 6 or 7-lane wide suspension bridges going southbound off the island and my 40 minute commute turned into a 75 minute one.  When I finally pulled up to the curb at the École Nationale de Cirque shortly after 5pm and my stomach was tangled up in a tight knot of I-wasn't-supposed-to-be-late anxiety. 

It doesn't actually matter if you're 15 or 20 minutes late, Ess, I tried to rationalize with myself. 

Yeah but you said you'd be here at a certain time, my fretful brain shot back as I fumbled with my phone to message the others that I'd arrived, that I'd be upstairs shortly. 

They're going to take a while to warm-up; they won't need you right away, I reminded myself. 

Yeah but if you're not there on time for them then that shows that their rehearsal time isn't as important as yours and you all need each other for this to work and––

I took a deep breath. I was here now. Everything was fine. They were still warming up (LeeAnn had just texted me back). Relax. I needed to be able to focus on being present and attentive while pulling lines. I needed to be grounded and calm for running my own act. 

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I signed in at the front desk and took the elevator up to the 4th floor, where two of the three big ENC studios are. I kicked off my bright yellow rubber rain boots at the wall of wooden cubbies just outside the elevator door and padded through the Studio Palèstre in my sock feet to reach the doors of the big glass box that held the Studio Création where I'd be spending the next few hours. 

When you sign up for Open Training through the TOHU website to reserve a place in one of the ENC studios, you reserve a specific point, which comes with a certain amount of floorspace and is better or more poorly suited to one discipline versus another. 

Often, the studio isn't that busy and you can play fast and loose with your reserved area. But on Tuesday ... It was busy:

A tightwire artist was currently finishing up in the area to my right, gliding and sliding along his line rigged several feet above the ground in slippered feet. 

An aerialist named Bianca was in a far corner, starting the long process of assembling her giant hot-pink aerial sunglasses (yes, you read that correctly). She'd reserved the centre point (which made sense; her apparatus is gigantic and she skates around in special-made stiletto-rollerblades underneath it). 

A cyr wheel artist I didn't know was piecing his wheel together in the space next to her. I don't know what space he reserved but it wasn't gonna be particularly spacious for running a cyr wheel act. 

Two artists were rolling out giant black bars across the floor to set-up a sway-pole, which I'd never seen in person before. It easily ate up a quarter of the footprint of the studio floorspace. 

And finally, a(n understandably) disgruntled aerial hoop artist who had flown in from New York City specifically for the auditions (but not heard anything from Éloize) was venting to Glory and LeeAnn, who were stretching and warming up on a stretch of red carpet across the studio under the point they'd reserved for this earlier training time slot. 

"We figured we could all warm up during our time slot and then take turns during the time slot you reserved to run our acts back to back," LeeAnn said after I said my hellos. "Does that work for you?"

"Yesss," I said slowly. "But ..."

The only space left when I'd signed up last week was "Point C", which was actually two aerial points over a long narrow rectangle of floor space: perfectly fine for what I needed, but not ideal for what Glory and LeeAnn needed to do. Their acts had orbits and wide tempo swings in them, and Point C is located next to the catwalk that runs around the perimeter of the studio at about 20 feet high for the riggers. They'd hit the railing for sure if they ran some of their sequences without modifying their amplitude.

"I'll go and ask some of the artists who have more middle points to see if we might be able to point swap while they're setting up or something," I said, mind racing to find a solution. 

Lucky for us, Bianca was a willing victim. 

She said she needed at least another 30 minutes to set up her equipment and warm-up, so I bargained with her that if LeeAnn, Glory and I could run our acts quickly in the juicy, coveted centre point she'd reserved, we'd all pull the lines for her afterwards. Bianca would otherwise be unable to do a full act run (the size of her apparatus necessitates multiple strong pullers if there isn't a motor) and she had a Christmas contract coming up in Porto, Portugal. She hadn't counted on getting to do a full, proper run of her act today, so everyone was happy with the arrangement. 

I spent another few minutes dashing around the space checking with the other artists present in English and (bad) French if they would be unduly bothered by us 3 commandeering the big, fancy stereo system hooked up in the space while we ran our acts. It wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a formal rehearsal time; it was open training and we needed to make sure what we wanted to do wouldn't be imposing on any of the artists in such a way that their training or session goals would be compromised. 

All the stars aligned for us. The other artists seemed more than happy to have some music in the space while they worked. LeeAnn and Glory's acts (and orbits) wouldn't ruffle feathers. We were off to the races. 

The run went as well as any of my practice runs at home in Toronto had gone. And the enormously high, orbiting cable point that I found it nearly impossible to work on earlier this summer during preliminary research for Le Numéro Barbette? 

Still not easy –– but I was able to do all my main tricks now.

I'd been working my ass off at Kalabanté with William all spring and summer of this year to just be able to start to get one-arm tempos movements, switches/tic-tacs, etc. And then I came to this studio –the Studio Création at ENC- and the height of the line above me rendered me as ineffectual as a fish dangling on the end of a line.

It seems like a small thing, but I remember feeling so defeated by it this summer:

I had asked another straps artist, Agustin, how he handled it. "Practice," he said casually. "Eventually you just do it. It's easy." Easy for you, I'd thought grumblingly at the time. Agustin had graduated from ENC, so he'd had countless hours working on high points like these.

Different rigging set-ups create pose different advantages and challenges to an artist working on them: for example, if a rigging system uses rope instead of airline cable or tech-12 (a synthetic kind of rope that you can literally dangle a car off of without it breaking; it's what is used in stunt rigging for film/TV) it'll feel more bouncy or less bouncy. This slows down or speeds up the way that the force you generate with your body translates into a trick or movement. 

A shorter ceiling height vs. a higher ceiling height creates similar variations: the shorter the line left above my rigging, the more quickly I feel my energy translate into the movement I'm trying to execute; if there is a lot of line above my head, that line starts to want to try to do all kinds of silly little orbiting, oscillating dances above your head (which can make it much harder or more unpredictable to do a trick)(and if you're spinning around as fast as you can before popping your body upside down and trying to land in a position involving your body weight hanging off of one arm that's jammed behind your back ... well, you want to minimize the amount of unpredictability in that situation). 

But all those hours I'd spent flopping around on the terrible, bouncy high rope point in Toronto had clearly built up a larger window of tolerance for my body to adapt to less-than-ideal rigging conditions.

[If you missed the video post where I shared my final rehearsal run (2 posts ago, I believe), you can find the unlisted VIMEO link here. (For fun, look at the rigging plate above my head and notice what it's doing).]

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I was as prepared as I was going to be for this audition. I knew my musical cues. My technical tricks were as solid as they were going to get. I had a clear idea of the mindset, emotions, and imagery I was associating with different parts of the act, to help bring it to life a little more. All that was left was to go home, go to sleep, wake up, and seize the day. 

I got home around 9:45pm. Ate my first full meal since breakfast at 10pm. Packed snacks for the next day, laid out my clothes, double-checked my circus bag that my straps, physio tools, rigging, was all where it needed to be. Realized I now needed to sit up and let that digest or falling asleep wasn't gonna happen.  Finally shut my eyes around 12:30am. 

Not ideal in the "good sleep and well rested" department, but there was simply no other way that cookie could crumble. 

I'd run through the next day's audition on coffee and adrenaline if I needed to.

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Your next instalment will be arriving in your inboxes on Monday morning at 11am EST! 

Until next time, stay strange & wonderful!
XO Ess