Thank You! & Happy New Year: a '22 Review (Patreon)

My dear, strange, and wonderful patrons – 

Good now! (it was morning when I began writing this; it's evening now; and I imagine that it is either of those times, or any of the ones in between, for you).

Before I say anything else, I want to say:

From the bottom of my bleeding artist's heart, thank you for supporting me here this year: for supporting my practice; my career; my process; my highs, my wins; my lows, my losses. Thank you for reading my old work; thank you for reading my new work. Thank you for your helpful ideas, your genuine interest and curiosity, and your faith and commitment to supporting the weird, nonlinear process of art that doesn't get made quickly.

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And:

Welcome to the new year: a day exactly like the day before,  arbitrarily assigned enough fanfare and weight that crossing its threshold at midnight is synonymous with all sorts of things that most other midnight-threshold-crossings don't bother inflating themselves with. 

For those of you who danced and partied and drank with friends, I hope your hangovers are fading. For those of you who fell asleep before midnight, I salute you.

I know everyone likes to do these before the year ends, but sometimes I get weird pressure-y vibes from that, so I have equally arbitrarily decided to save mine until the 1st of the fresh year. 

I cried three times trying to do this on, or before, December 31st. The steeliest of storm clouds was darkening my brow when I made any effort to think of what I might hope for myself for the new year; and now, in the softer grey light of this unseasonably warm morning (don't think about climate change, don't think about climate change, don't think about--), it doesn't feel so heavy and daunting.

When I sat down to try, those other times, I was overwhelmed by the illogical feeling that I hadn't accomplished anything last year and that I'm falling behind some imaginary peer group that is always envisioned as more productive, focused, driven, and efficient than I am when I play the Comparison Game. 

(It's a losing game, every time)

(And a stupid game)

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Here's what my 2022 year looked like.

(The short version)

• I was awarded a grant to work on Le Numéro Barbette and worked my ass off on it all year;
• I spent a lot of time alone in Montréal, living in various circus studios for hours and hours each day
• I got a lot better at aerial straps;
• I didn't perform one single time on stage;
• I auditioned for 5 major / tier-A show roles (leads, episodic guest stars, major supporting roles) and struck out on all of them
• I landed two smaller supporting roles: one on a misrepresented horror movie that I don't feel great about at all (audition read as 'feature film'; first day callsheet read as 'movie-of-the-week' -- oop), and the second on a small indie movie that was hell to make but I hope I'll feel proud of whenever I see it one day (it'll come out and do some festival circuits sometime in 2023, maybe? I'm admittedly not entirely sure what distribution looks like for indie projects – each one is different, obviously)

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At the end of last year (NYE 2021, heading into 2022), I knew that I wanted to start trying to shift into aerial straps as my main discipline in circus arts. 

I also knew that my big rent-paying gig, Motherland: Fort Salem wasn't being renewed and I'd be back into the churning, unknown waters of endless self-tapes when it came to film and TV work. 

I knew it meant I probably wouldn't do much performing in the circus department. 

And I had no idea what to expect in the film and TV department ('tis a fickle industry). 

Everything else I've done in relation to my circus practice (creations-wise) has had a far quicker pay-off and far clearer a directive: 3 month projects, 6 month projects; projects that weren't so multi-faceted; projects that meant I was always working with other people who carried significant amounts of the creative load and responsibility. Certainly not 2-year-plus projects where I have to be both the mind and the muscle.

Everything else I've done in relation to my film and TV career were isolated data points: not enough history or experience to even try to predict patterns from. I was reading for big roles, but not landing any of them. Was that normal? Above average? Below average? Who's to say? Will I wait years for the Next Big Gig? Or would it be just around the corner? Of course, there's absolutely no way to know (and, horrifically, realizing that you're asking yourself those questions means realizing that you are slipping into all tired old clichés about actors being navel-gazing, neurotic, and financially unstable that you used to sniff and turn your nose up at before you stumbled into doing it anyways -- whoops. The 2023 Pantone Colour of the Year is: Ironic Hypocrisy 😌 ). 

Of course, none of these salient points were front-of-mind for me while I spent that terrible purgatory week in between Christmas and New Years' Eve in various semi-private places (generally the car) having lots of good, hard cries and wondering why I felt so directionless and lost. I was just a piece of seaweed sloshing around in all the Big Feelings, waiting for some more-logical part of my brain to come back online and help me analyze what all that discomfort meant. 

What I was able to finally realize this morning over a nice, hot cup of coffee is that the rubric by which I evaluate myself necessarily needed to be different this year. In previous years it made sense to look back and see if I'd been performing as much as I'd wanted to, sharing my work in the places I'd wanted to, generating and following through on whatever new opportunities arose.

This year it didn't. 

I don't think I've ever had projects quite like Le Numéro Barbette where I've willingly flung myself into the void knowing that the work has an arc of multiple years.

Now I'm in the middle of it still. 

Did I work as hard as I possibly could last year? 

Yes.

Do I know what I have to do to continue moving towards completing this project, the goals contained within it?

Yes.

So I think it's okay if I don't have strong impulses to carve out what feel like new, shiny, ceiling-bursting goals; and it's also okay to realize (not soon enough to avoid a lot of crying, but, eh, live and learn?) that I got caught up in the end-of-year, New Years' Eve, new-year-new-me shiny-shiny-shininess of it all.

I kind of don't care specifically what I do this year. 

I'm just going to keep doing my work. 

This work. 

And not complicate it more than that*.

(*because obviously we all know I'm going to find clever ways to make it more complicated than it needs to be anyways in the pursuit of it all, lol)

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On a concluding note of cold, clinical, brain-satisfying summarizing and categorizing, I share with you the following exercise that I completed before writing these words today. I decided to try to give it a go less in the interest of seeing what my  '2022 highlight reel' was, and more in the vein of 'try to accurately appraise wtf happened last year because I sure as hell can barely remember last week and I could use the reminder if I'm gonna try to accurately assess myself'.

2022 Summary: the longer version:

January:

•  participated in a local Toronto artist's grant video project on the intersection between autism and circus arts (no idea when or where that will surface / I haven't heard about it since ... but, it happened!)
• applied for TOHU Residency program for the fist time, to try to get studio creation and rehearsal space in Montréal in the summer 
• filming in Vancouver, BC, Canada for Motherland: Fort Salem Season 3

February:

• awarded composite grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for Le Numéro Barbette: a two-year project during which time I proposed to create a new solo aerial straps number, another coffee-table book, and short video documentations
• Guest speaker for En Piste (National Circus Arts Alliance) on grant-writing for circus artists
• Said to I'd try to put together grant-writing workshops. Did not. 
• read for transmasc/nonbinary lead role on episodic TV project (QUANTUM LEAP); role went to Mason Alexander Park (Mason plays 'Desire' on SANDMAN; I read for 'Gren' on the COWBOY BEBOP reboot late last year as well, and that role also went to Mason)

March & April:

• finished principal photography for the final season/episodes of Motherland: Fort Salem in Vancouver, BC, Canada: the conclusion of my (I want to say 'last' because I'm feeling negative, but I'll force myself to say–) *first* recurring episodic guest-star role
• after 1.5 years of referrals and waiting periods, I was finally accepted for formal/physical evaluation at the Toronto University Health Network's Ehlers Danlos clinic: doctors there were incredulous that I was accepted for evaluation at all, told me I don't have any hypermobility whatsoever despite only evaluating my elbows and hand/finger joints (which were never the bendy parts of me anyways), and sent me on my way. 
  [***EDIT, clarification: I found this pretty distressing; I eventually opted to cut out all neck-focused/load-bearing contortion exercises while maintaining the neck physio exercises Jen Crane (@cirque_physio) had given me to try to help my damn self, and it has helped, but no thanks to the UHN EDS clinic, bah humbug]
• read for what was listed as a lead role on a feature film, horror genre, non-binary character. Short-listed. 

May

• Last-second booking for horror feature; relocated short-notice to Montréal to film on a horror movie: lots of fake blood, lots of night shoots. Role turned out to be supporting; 'feature film' turned out to be listed as an MOW (movie-of-the-week; something I've consistently turned down auditions for / I don't think it's the right career move for me); to be diplomatic: not my favourite on-set experience, to date
• stayed in Montréal to begin working in earnest with my coaches on Le Numéro Barbette: *cue Rocky montage, but with aerial straps training*
• received the news I was going to be awarded Residency through La TOHU for the Summer period 
• received self-tape requests to audition for lead roles on HARDY BOYS; unsuccessful (honestly very unsurprised; the character was supposed to be 17. SEVENTEEN. Come on.)(although, the CW network does a lot of casting like that, so, what can I say). 
• Motherland: Fort Salem convention in Florida for 3 days: had never been to a 'fan convention' before as a guest, let alone a ... whatever-you-call-it ('talent'?); had some beautiful conversations and experiences with other trans people; otherwise, largely really weird vibes from the disconnect people have between the characters they watch on their TV programs and then the actual live human being in front of them who plays those characters

June

• Lots of aerial straps training: beginning to build a foundation of strength I hadn't been able to reach before thanks to consistency and volume 
• first sessions at the École Nationale de Cirque Studio Création with my coach William Bonet, courtesy of the TOHU Residency program: learned that my improvements were good, but nowhere near good enough yet to be able to adapt to the high ceilings and extra-long lines of that facility
• kickboxing training at 6am 3x and 4x/week across town to try to prepare for a project the following month: stressed out a whole bunch about trans/gender stuff in macho-MMA spaces; stressed out a whole bunch about my body (well, my shoulders and elbows) hating the impact of this training / being a detriment to ongoing aerial straps training for Le Numéro Barbette

July

• caught COVID after successfully avoiding it for the entirety of the pandemic; just barely cleared my mandated quarantine period (was still sick and weak as hell, though: joy) before having to get in my car and drive 4 hours north to .... 
• North Bay, to shoot a small indie movie: was supposed to film in Toronto, originally;  the shoot was also supposed to be about 2 weeks of work and it ballooned into a 5-week commitment / bled into August; the shoot was also 100% night shoots and I lived in zombie-mode during this period
• Received audition requests for top secret big project with codename HOURGLASS (the cat is kinda out of the bag on that one here, you can read this and this if you're terribly curious)
  

August

• Added in aerial straps training with Victor Fomine, to maintain technical training progress while switching to a creative/research focus with my main coach, William Bonet, for Le Numéro Barbette. 
• Auditioned for the role of "C", a trans, autistic-coded character on ALERT; unsuccessful (role went to the very-lovely-seeming Petey Gibson, who looks like a whole-entire adult that could reasonably work in a forensics lab, as opposed to me, who looks like .... a teenage boy😅) 
• Shortlisted for HOURGLASS; booked for callback-audition for HOURGLASS; callback audition cancelled short-notice; casting team told my agents the show thought I'd be better for 'something else' that was going to come up 'later in the season' (spoiler: nothing came of this, lol)

September

• SO MUCH training with William & Victor
• Began trying a few different conseil artistiques to be outside eyes for Le Numéro Barbette: finally found a great match in Marie-Josée Gauthier, who began to add depth and detail to the work William and I had begun choreographically
• Sublet in Montréal ended; finally returned home to Toronto
• Auditioned for lead on NANCY DREW tv series; unsuccessful

October 

• Rest week
• Trying to create a schedule and routine for myself alone at home in Toronto so that I would keep making progress on the things William, Marie-Josée and I started in Montréal over the summer and fall
• a couple days of voiceover work for Top Secret Big Video Game project
• visiting my Oma almost every day in the hospital after my time in the studio was done
  

November

• Found out about Cirque Éloize holding auditions; 10 days notice; decided it would be a good challenge to take the technical sequences I'd built up over the year and present myself at the audition (Not the Barbette act, though; that's still not done)
• Training and rehearsing my ass off to get ready for the audition and to cement the technical sequences I'd use later in Barbette
• Visiting my Oma every day in hospital; not sure if I should leave to go to the audition; she was doing better and insisted that I go do it
• Did the Éloize audition mid-month; sent my Oma lots of videos; she told me she'd be getting out of the hospital soon and that I'd be able to visit her at home when I got back
• Was given a bit more Residency time from La TOHU during their Fall period, so I stayed for a week afterwards in Montréal to work with William, Marie-Josée Gauthier, and (new, peer mentor who stepped in to pull lines for me and be an amazingly helpful outside eye when William and MJ ended up being unavailable -which, unfortunately, was often) Tanya Burka
• My Oma died the night that I got back on my drive from Toronto to Montréal
  

December

• Funeral moved multiple times because of COVID in immediate family members; finally happened first week of December
• Drove straight to Montréal from the funeral for a final 2-week push on Le Numéro Barbette: TOHU artistic residency coordinator gave me some more hours in the epic gigantic studio
• Small voice-role audition for some big new videogame; didn't/haven't heard back
• Rest week; Drove home for Christmas; planned returns to Montréal for January, February, and March with the intent of finishing the aerial straps solo for Le Numéro Barbette
• Finally had a major autistic shutdown / non-verbal episode / have been coming out of that for the past couple days. 

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If any of you brave souls actually made it all the way through this, I salute you once more. 

Thanks again for being here with me on this Patreon. I'm feeling more hopeful and calm about what lies ahead for my artistic practice and current projects. 

I'll be continuing to document those things the best ways I know how (overly-long written posts; self-deprecating humour [I should probably try to cut down on that a bit]; and fun GIFs and photos from torturous training sessions for a sprinkling of eye candy).

I hope that 2023 will also present opportunities for me to do the kind of writing that I love best here to share with you: all that good first-person, in-the-moment, let-me-take-you-backstage with me stuff. 

And – 

I held out on all of you last year with the mountains of video footage I recorded during my research and creation sessions, both solo and in the TOHU Residency. 

I've been slowly chipping away at creating a series of short-ish summary videos (at first it was one giant 25 minute video and then I thought better of it) that chunk my studio findings into logical chunks. 

These are what I'll be sharing this month of January! 

I'm still compiling and cutting footage and will begin voiceovers soon. Looking forward to sharing those with you soon.

Until next time, stay strange and wonderful <3
XO
Ess