📽️ Atelier Barbette, ep 1 ✨ (Patreon)

Hello my dear, strange, wonderful patrons!

NEW THINGS! 

Patreon has given me the green light to beta test one of their new features – uploading videos that live right here on Patreon, instead of having to upload it to a host site like Vimeo or YouTube first. I dig it!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a video worth?

Just kidding.

I prefer writing (and much writing I shall give you this year, fear not) BUT I have hours and hours and hours of footage from my creation and Residencies in 2022 for Le Numéro Barbette.

I wanted to share these moments with some friendly eyes rather than let them languish and collect digital dust in my bloated iPhone storage.

Additionally, I inadvertently have been flexing my mini-vlog-making skills  (short 1 to 3 minute videos) on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram over the past year***. Seems like the perfect marriage of material and skills, no?

(***e.g. these "Big Boy Jumps" videos on Instagram – 60s vlogs I've been making of a parallel undertaking in ballet that I began in November. It's been helping my movement quality in Barbette already; I still can't jump for shit, though lol). 

I've created eight of these tasty little audio-visual bites for us with all the bits and pieces of footage from Spring 2022 up to the end of 2022 that will let me share a different side of the creation process for Le Numéro Barbette. 

The Numéro Barbette aerial straps act will one day dazzle and 'throw dust in the eyes***' of the general public with all the beauty and glory I can muster ... but these vlogs? (***to borrow from a famous review of the original-Barbette by Msr. Jean Cocteau, revisited in one of my favourite modern articles about Barbette [New Yorker])

They live here and only here on Patreon! They're just for us.

This new beta-test of Patreon's gives me the option to offer different length previews of these videos – I've set this first video preview to 60s (out of the 3-minute total run time) so that I can try to lure some more members to our strange, wonderful ranks here in this Patreon community – so that I can go absolutely all-out on the costumes for this baby. 

(AKA, you might see little 60s teasers of this first one, and 15-30s teasers of future ones, floating around on social media ... but that's all they get!)

You'll be getting your little bites of Atelier Barbette 3x week, starting next week (Monday the 9th, Wednesday the 11th, Friday the 13th, etc) to take us through most of the month of January:

• Today's is a quick overview of what came before, and the broad strokes of what Spring and Summer 2022 contained for the project to lay the foundation for deeper dives into the sections of work that followed. 
• Monday's episode is a walk-through of the "old" act structure (the one that I described here in the Barbette's Skeleton post series) that William and I had put together by late September. (Of course, it's all different now! *evil laughter*)
• Wednesday's episode takes us through the pivot: what happened after all the caterwauling I was doing in your last burst of written posts before the New Year (TL; DNR: got some important info, decided it was best to change the act structure significantly, had to wipe the board clean)
• And Friday's episode picks up from the Toronto/November research shown in Wednesday's vlog, back in Montréal with my conseil artistique Marie-Josée Gauthier helping me shape the 'dust' being thrown in the eyes of the audience into something more cumulonimbus-y and less 'amorphous choking sandstorm'-y. 

I'd love to hear what you think of this first one! Enjoy!

And in the meantime – stay strange & wonderful.
XO Ess