Barbette's Skeleton [XI]: Paris, Baby (Patreon)

The Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain has been running for 42 years (pandemic pauses aside). 

Initially started in the late 1970s as an alternative to the über-traditional Monte Carlo Circus Festival, Cirque de Demain aimed to showcase and give a platform to young circus artists who didn't come from multi-generational circus families.

Cirque de Demain is held in high regard in circus communities around the globe for the artistry and/or technical skills of those selected to attend, as well as the scope and quality of the festival production itself.   Selection seems highly competitive: their website states that it receives something in the ballpark of 1000 submissions every year from artists around the world hoping to be considered for the competition.

It's considered an honour to simply attend, but a long list of medals and prizes can be won: many come with either a cash prize value or a contract offer. Medal-winners from previous years are often invited back to present guest performances amidst the competitive acts, or even join the jury panel (depending on where their careers have taken them).

The Festival functions as one of the most well-attended job markets out there for the competitors/performers in the festival: producers, directors, and casting agents from every major production, cabaret, company, you name it, generally send a rep to the Cirque de Demain festival to snap up new talent, give out awards, and headhunt the best and newest young artists into their shows.

It's also a spectacular, massive production:

It's currently held in the Cirque Phénix tent, the largest circus tent in the world (it can handle 6000 spectators). Set up on the outskirts of Paris, the Cirque Phénix is an engineering marvel that takes 5 weeks to erect and 2 weeks to tear down at the start and end of every season. There are no central pillars holding up the big top canopy, giving every seat in the house an unobstructed view of the stage.

Shockingly, this festival is somehow run almost entirely by volunteers. There are three actual employees, and only one of those employees is actually full-time. The Festival relies heavily on financial support from various partners, locally and globally.

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Depending on who you ask, the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain, or Cirque de Demain, or just 'the Paris Festival' is either:

  a) the lofty, rareified heights of contemporary artistic circus expression; a hallowed international competition where the promising sparks of the most talented young circus artists in the world are fanned into full-blown fires and then launched into the stratosphere; or, as it was once described to me by one of my earliest aerial coaches in Toronto, "imagine the Olympics mashed up with the Superbowl, but the circus version";

b) slightly overhyped and the recipient of contention and criticism** as well as passionate rebuttals and rejections of said criticism

(since you need a CircusTalk account to read the full article at these links, the bullet points of the criticism were: at the 2018/39eme Festival, out of 23 acts and 38 performers, only 7 were women; out of all those performers, all but 7 were white; for a Festival positioning itself as the 'Circus of Tomorrow', the racial and gender disparities are inexcusable in this day and age; etc.)

(bullet points of rebuttals re: gender – in the 2018 Festival, 2 female acts dropped out at the last minute due to injury; and, from Kirsty Bell [Club PRO Manager at the Festival], "We cannot present what we do not receive. Perhaps circus women with original ideas feel that there is no point in applying as they assume they will not be selected? Perhaps some contemporary female circus artists are making a statement of boycotting the Festival by choosing not to apply?")

(bullet points of rebuttals, re: race – a goodly amount of applications within those 1000 submissions are from the major diploma-awarding circus schools who produce artists of a technical and artistic calibre that set the bar for who generally gets accepted at the Festival, like NICA in Australia, CNAC in France, ESAC in Belgium, and ENC in Canada; there are intersecting issues of class and race regarding the location and accessibility of higher-education /  fine arts diploma granting institutions such as these that mean the folks graduating from them are predominantly white; the folks at these institutions say that these are disparities they're aware of and trying to correct; the folks at the Festival reiterate that their goals are to narrow the gaps of racial and gender inequality in circus and these corrections both [a] take time and [b] require the support of the community; etc)   

(TL;DNR ... DRAMA)

Regardless of what your stance on the Festival is, it remains an important piece of living circus history. The artists that have participated in it over the decades have shaped or even revolutionized different aerial disciplines into the forms that we recognize as standard today, and it remains a point in the circus calendar year that a lot of people eagerly anticipate watching either live and in person, in Paris, or streamed live through the Arte channel.

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I explained all of the above to Troy, who looked like he was going through cycles of forgetting to breathe, remembering, and then forgetting again.  

"Did this producer say what he wanted you to do at the Festival...?" I asked. "Because I've never heard of anyone getting headhunted to compete. I thought you had to apply. So maybe it's a Guest performer selection or something?"

"Oh god," Troy said. He scanned through his messages again. "He just asked if I would be interested, that's all. "

"Even still..." I began slowly, brows furrowed. "This is a big deal, Troy. It  would be a massive amount of work. It's also a huge opportunity. I don't know what to say."

"Well, do you want to do it?" he asked.

"I mean ... I think we could make a really interesting act together."

"Yeah."

"It could open up a lot of opportunities," I repeated carefully.

"Yeah!"

"It just depends if those are the opportunities you want."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you've got a good thing starting with the TV and movie thing, from the looks of it. So – do you also want this? To have a career doing live performances?"

"I never really thought about that as a possibility."

"Which one?"

"Well ... I meant the circus career part, but ... both, really," he chuckled.

"We would need to have some conversations about what sorts of responsibilities we want to set with each other as duo partners, if that's the case."

"I'm okay with that."

"You would have to say 'no' to any TV or film stuff if it came along at the same time as the Festival. Are you willing to do that?"

Troy chewed on his lower lip.

"Because if there's any doubt in your mind about that, we definitely shouldn't do it," I continued. "There's no point in putting in all that work and then ... pulling the plug. We'd both have to commit."

Troy straightened up. "No! I want to do it!" he said. 

The Producer seemed just as elated at the idea of a duo, and so our fates were sealed.

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The three months that followed that conversation with Troy were some of the toughest of my career thus far.

The Producer laughed at us when, mid-November, we had written in one of our emails a question about being guest performers. "No, no," he said. "You're selected. You're not guests." 

We were competing. 

In the forefront, we had the impossibility of trying to make an act that was worthy of that stage in a tiny amount of time: just 6 weeks, compared to the years that I knew ENC graduates, for example, spent researching and honing their signature acts.

And in the background I was working with the fact that Troy had never rehearsed before or done anything like create and perform a full 5-minute act, let alone worked with a duo partner.

Most of the organizational and administrative labour (booking studios; coordinating with Roberto for choreography; finding and trying to work with a costume designer [who we ended up not using/wasn't the right fit]; ordering and decorating our costumes myself; coordinating and communicating with our composer to create the music for our act; email communication with Festival personnel in Paris for music, for photos, for travel, visas, payment, and more ... the list goes on) fell on me.

Oh, and I was avoiding any and all use of that right hamstring that was still semi-recovered from the stem cell transplant I'd had in May of that year.

Growing pains –metaphorical and literal– abounded.

In retrospect, the level of creative sado-masochism reached in the course of trying to make a world-class-stage-worthy created the blueprint for many cycles of artistic self-flagellation that have followed. It was an inadvisable bar to set, in part because now whenever I put unreasonable working or creating constraints on myself, they seem reasonable – but only because this particular one was so stressful.

Regardless, both Hell and high-water came, so to speak – but along with them came a completed act. It felt like we might not fall on our faces and embarrass ourselves in front of the entire international circus community.

Troy, Roberto, me, and my Mount-Everest-sized Imposter Syndrome travelled to Paris.

We competed.

And then –mindblowingly– we were awarded one of the special prizes: the Prix Moulin Rouge.

This meant that Jean-Jacques Clerico, the current president and CEO of one of the oldest cabarets in Europe (yes, the literal Moulin Rouge), liked our act the best out of all the acts at the Festival.

This meant a big fat cash prize (which we immediately handed over to Roberto, who had spent every single rehearsal in studio with us without asking us for a single a cent) as well as a contract offer at (yep) the Moulin Rouge.

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Other chapters of the story followed this surprising triumph – but I won't be delving into those for the time being (you can always check out the #china hashtag to read some posts about what it was like to perform that duo act with Troy in Zhuhai, China for the 6th International China Circus Festival, about 10 months after we competed at 40eme Cirque de Demain.

Instead, I'm going to jump forward in time a few years, to 2021.

Your next instalment will arrive at 7:00pm EST on Christmas Eve.

Until then, stay strange and wonderful –  

XO Ess