Strange, Wonderful July! (Patreon)

Hello my dear and wonderful patrons! 

I'm slowly finding my way back to creative equilibrium in the post-production aftermath of choreographing and filming Barbette in May, and the special event contract in Brooklyn that happened in June with Cirque du Soleil. Today, I have some musings and some news for you.

(Apologies for my scheduling mistake with the timing of today's post: I thought I had set it to 8am EST; I set it to 8pm EST ... tomorrow -- oops)

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I've put my body through a lot in the last 6 months.

I'm trying to listen to what it tells me a little more closely now that there's no looming deadlines. 

I'm trying to be present throughout all the mundane boring moments of life. 

I'm trying to notice when my brain is leaping towards distracting itself with new projects or inclinations towards overtraining.

I'm still working towards my training goals, but I'm adjusting what those goals are and the path that I want to take to get to them; and one of those readjustments is bringing contortion training back into my life in a more meaningful way again.

Doing the Cirque du Soleil special event contract made me realize that I actually miss having contortion as a regular part of my training practice:

I spent years working hard to gain the flexibility and contortion skills that I managed to gain; and last year I made a conscious decision to prioritize my aerial training over contortion maintenance over the last year of making Barbette. 

My contortion training practice used to look like 3 to 4 hours of training, 4 to 6 days a week. My aerial straps training was 3x lessons a week with William, my coach; physical conditioning outside of that; and 3 hour research sessions in studio to start building the act structure and choreography of Le Numéro Barbette. I added ballet lessons into the mix on top of that (so worth it).  

Mentally, physically or both – I simply couldn't keep contortion on my training books the only way I used to know how to.

I'll come back to it when this Barbette project is wrapped up ... maybe, I'd tell myself.

And so, I could (generously) describe my flexibility practice for the past 8 months as "on the backburner" while I was training like a beast on aerial straps to create Le Numéro Barbette*. 

(*that link is still private / please don't share it – it's only for you folks while I finish editing the short film that I'll share online later this year);

During this past year, though, sly little voices crept into my brain: you're just not going to be as flexible as you used to be; it's okay that you're not as bendy, you do straps now; that chapter of your life might be done now; etc.

There's an oft-repeated warning in the niche intersection of artists who are non-binary / transmasculine / transmen AND do circus (or some other form of athletic artistry): "testosterone is going to make you stiffer"; "I can't go on T, I don't want to lose my flexibility." 

I've said these very words to myself, and to others in conversation when discussing personal pros and cons of starting hormone therapy. I've read them over and over again online. I've heard other artists say these words back to me. 

An oft-repeated line is that testosterone thickens your tendons and ligaments. It can –though the process by which that happens, and the result on different aspects of that on athletic performance– is more complex than just "it gets thicker". Like all things to do with biological processes examined along differentiating lines of human sex hormones, this subject is far from a simple one and better suited to interpretation by those in the medical and performance arts fields who have become experts on such unique intersections.  (aka, not me)

Another related aspect of the "T will make you lose your flexibility" discussion is that testosterone therapy also often results in many of us non-binary and trans folks experiencing an increase in muscle mass. It depends on your activity levels and diet, of course – but broadly speaking, any activity that develops a lot of mid-back, upper-back, and shoulder (couch, I'm looking at you, aerials! cough) is considered to be the kiss of death to a hyper-flexible back (like what a contortionist is working with). 

With these above points taken into consideration, what started out as an effort to strike a sustainable physical training balance last year ("I'm focusing on straps; I'm going to do less contortion") mutated into a sneaky monster that began whispering my own words back to me as a kind of flexibility anti-hype, enhanced and amplified by the discussion above regarding taking testosterone as part of hormone therapy ("I can't do contortion anymore; I've lost it; that chapter is behind me; etc). 

At some point I simply internalized the "ah, well, I'm on T – so I'm not going to be as flexible" mentality. 

When the Special Event contract with Cirque du Soleil popped up, suddenly the pressure was on to get back on my old contortion bullshit – regardless of what whispers I'd been repeating to myself for the last year. 

It was "do or die" – and I'd be damned if I wasn't going to do this contract. 

I had the time to do it safely –to grade in slowly, over the course of about 6 weeks, from the time I was first contacted to when the event actually took place. 

I even managed to do it without mentally torturing myself in ways that I might've fallen prey to earlier in my career: 

I gave myself permission, no, expected and made space for being stiff and not reaching the range of motion I considered baseline-acceptable for a contortion routine for the first few weeks of this training re-acclimation. 

My body responded to this gentleness generously. 

But the process itself reminded me that contortion training is something that brings me pride; that it's a training process I enjoy when I don't overdo it; and that my contortion practice can and does look different now at this point in my career. 

I've continued my flexibility and contortion training since that special event contract ended earlier in June. 

I don't train for 3 or 4 hours at a time. I don't train cheststands anymore, or any other positions that put my cervical spine in heavy extension for long periods of time (or load-bearing in extension). 

And I've taken the (scary) leap to reach out to my old Montréal contortion and handstands coach –Sergey Volodin*– to try to start working towards some contortion goals (more advanced contortion handstands) that I gave up on a long, long time ago. 

(*more on Sergey soon)

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But before I go – two pieces of news to share:

1) WRITING THE CIRCUS:

Those who count themselves amongst the Old Guard of this Patreon will recall a distant time back before (and during) the Great Pamplemousse (covid-19 pandemic) that I had a humble wee circus zine that I titled Writing the Circus: I wrote a few essays in it around risk, spectacle, liminality; one on the work of Marco Motta; another of collected essays that didn't make it into my SLOW CIRCUS: VACUUM book on gender ambiguity in relation to contortion, and the like. 

As Le Numéro Barbette took over my creative calendar, this DIY writing project was put to the backburner.

But I miss it - 

And I had an idea of how I might want to try reviving it, in a slightly new direction. I've started interviews with a small group of circus artists for a new iteration of my Writing the Circus zine. I'm thinking of it as a capsule project of recurring annual interviews with other circus artists or other artists & creatives in the circus industry. Imagine a loosely-inspired circus version of the recurring “Time Capsule” interviews Vanity Fair conducts with Billie Eilish.

The idea for this variation on Writing the Circus grew out of a conversation I had with Toronto circus artist Mary-Margaret Scrimger in 2022 about the limited number of firsthand accounts of life as a circus artist that we’ve been able to track down. Overall,I’ve found it difficult to track down documentation of the realities of moving through, working & creating as a circus artist (in all its myriad forms; and in all the myriad ways the other aspects of our lives and identities interact with this work). What documentation does exist doesn’t often explicitly comment on or explore that artist’s research in-progress and evolving curiosities. I’m curious about the voice of the circus artist, and in facilitating and creating an archive of some of those voices and conversations.

My dream is to run this project for a minimum of 5 years and eventually be able to share a larger ‘collected issue’ created with a higher production value. After 5 years, this project will have created a small archive of snapshots of the creative realities of the selected artists that I hope might provide a record of evolving circus thought at the site of the individual artist, inspire evolving conversation, and evolve to include and record more artists.

I think work like this is important so that we, as circus artists, might more easily see the topography, the landscape, of our collective field of work if we choose to look backward in time, or cast our minds forward to what the future might be.

It's off to a great start and I'm feeling excited about this new direction! There's a lot that I'm learning and adapting to even through the first 3 or 4 interviews that I've conducted, so I'll leave things here for now. I can tell that this is something I'll only learn the shape of once I have all the material (interviews, transcriptions) for the first issue sitting in front of me, waiting for compilation and arrangement.

And finally ...

2) GREEN LIGHT FOR CIRQUE DU SOLEIL STORIES:
As mentioned briefly a couple weeks ago, I was waiting to hear back from the brand liaison for the special event Cirque du Soleil contract – I needed to make sure that I wasn't wading into any legal no-go zones by writing about this particular circus adventure (my Cirque contac told me that if it was a touring / regular Cirque show, there'd be no question about it and I could go right ahead – but because this special event was technically part of a brand collaboration, stickier commercial rules needed to be considered and checked on). 

But!!! I've been told that so long as anything I mention about the company is in a 'positive light', I'm good to go! 

And –between us–  the company that the special event was for (Motorola) doesn't really figure much at all in the story that I'm writing out about the experience as a whole, so this is a dead-easy thing to do. 

This is a full-blown long-form adventure, the likes of which I haven't dug into since The Germany Story in 2020 (new patrons, that link will take you to the original Patreon post where you can download the full .pdf for free. The context for which that story was written is in the post overview). 

I'm already 46 pages / 20,000 words in and am continuing to hack away at fleshing out the notes I made throughout the contract into their full forms. It's making me happy and hope you'll all enjoy it too when I've finished with it in a few weeks (ambitious, but, what the hell).

Alright -- that's all from me for now.
Until next time, stay strange & wonderful --

XO Ess