September Re-cap (Patreon)

Hello my strange and wonderful patrons!

I am BURSTING with a big announcement that will be landing in your inboxes TOMORROW morning, but FIRST, today, I have to give you a little re-cap on what I was up to in the couple weeks. It was a beautiful stretch of time and I've got some reflections I'd like to share.  

The short version: 

• I spent the latter half of September lurking in Ireland, having a fantastically quiet time in what ended up amounting to a grant writing residency (with some extraordinarily lovely humans);
• I hopped over to Paris for 3 days at the end of it, dodging the so-called bedbug infestation with great agility to do a Motherland: Fort Salem fan meet (you, like me, may be reassured to know that such events are not considered by SAG/ACTRA/WGA to be crossing picket lines so long as you don't talk about the show, which we didn't, huzzah);
• I did some circus-related location-scouting and schmoozing as a Parisian bookend to meeting a whole horde of pretty dandy humans who are all big fans of that TV show (more on this schmoozing below).
• I'm still working away on the big, serialized story of my adventure with Cirque du Soleil from the summer still. I have a bit more editing to do, and then you'll be getting dripped into your inboxes as autumn settles in. Initially I thought I'd begin it mid-October, but the really big piece of circus-related news I'm telling you tomorrow kind of necessitates that that shuffles over to start of November now. I promise it's worth the wait, and I'm incredibly stoked (partly terrified) to bring you along for the ride on what's about to happen in the meantime.

And now, at length: 

Ireland Stole My Heart

...and I'm actively scheming about how to structure my life in a way where I can go back for extended periods of time. For now, it's just dreaming -- but that's where all good things start, right?  I drove back across the breadth of Ireland on Thursday the 28th, listening to Rachel Strickland's AUDACITY WORKS podcast the entire way. I hopped on a flight to Paris, and jumped into several meetings that relate to the big update at the bottom of this post.

IT'S GRANT WRITING SEASON, BABY:

And I think my hands might fall off, and my eyeballs might just wither up and pop right out of my head (very on brand for spooky season, no?) from all the writing.

I added it all up, and am horrified and delighted to report that I spent somewhere in the ballpark of 112 hours in the last 2 weeks writing a gigantic composite (multi-year, multi-project) grant to the Canada Council for the Arts. This is the same grant category and program that kept me working on Le Numéro Barbette for the past 2 years.

If I get it, it'll give me funds to expand Le Numéro Barbette into a one-person show that I can tour around Canada and Europe over a range of residencies, festivals, and conference/pitching events that stretches from 2024 to 2027 (good god)*. I marshalled all the resources I had at hand to try to make my application seem as attractive as possible, and submitted it at 1:30am on Monday evening.

Now that the application has been submitted, I commence with the "Forget that I ever did that until March 2024 results roll around" part of the routine.

It's a terrifyingly massive proposition to consider undertaking, but the terror one feels at the base of a mountain while staring up at the cloud-cloaked summit is rarely a good enough reason in my books to not start putting one foot in front of the other. And so ... here we are.

If I get it, that'll be really exciting (for about 10 seconds, and then I'll probably panic). If I don't get it, I think a not-small part of me will be relieved (...and then I'll re-apply for the next round).

I have several more provincial arts council grants to whip up for mid- and late- October deadlines, so I'm not out of the grant-writing woods just yet. I'm eager and anxious to get it off my plate, as I've got other writing to do -- for SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE, that is.

(when I wasn’t grant-writing I may or may not have been kissing little baby horse’s fuzzy little noses and squealing inside 📸 by Jen Tufts)

(*On a related note, this one-person Barbette show scheming of mine ultimately is not going to include Stav –the co-author I mentioned in my last post or two about circusnext, and who I was in Italy with. Unfortunately, in brief, Stav has been going through some very serious health issues/crises since returning home after the Italy labs for circusnext. We won't be continuing on with circusnext this year and decided that separate pursuit of our respective barbette-inspired dream projects is the right way forward.)

SCHMOOZING:

Last Sunday afternoon I met up with Jean-Pierre Carron (one of the executive producers of Cirque de Demain) for a green tea at Café Beaubourg. We were joined by Pascal Jacob, a prominent circus historian (who I keep chasing down for an interview on Barbette) and who sits on casting committee and jury of Demain every year. I met both of them in 2019, when Troy and I did our creature-contortion duo act at the 40th Festival. I stayed more loosely in touch with Jean-Pierre over the years; I'd begun more frequent contact with Pascal over the last year in particular as he's one of the world' preeminent Barbette experts and I want to interview him for SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE.

For my newer patrons, the Festival Mondial du Cirque de Demain is a big deal.  Depending on where you do circus in the world, maybe you feel like it's less of a big deal – but to most of the North American artists I know, and a good handful of the European ones too, it's a Very Big Deal.

The Festival was started in 1977 by Alain Pacherie as a way to highlight the talent of new, young contemporary circus artists who were emerging from the then-new avenues of circus-specific schools in France and across Europe (rather than the old, traditional 'I come from a 7th generation circus family lineage' model that preceded it). Somewhere around 16 to 20 artists are invited from around the world to present some of the most artistically and technically virtuosic stuff the human body can come up with, in the cold, chilled damp of Paris in late January or early February.

When I was a wee, fresh little circus artist an older peer described it to me as "the Superbowl of circus meets the circus Olympics ... and then afterwards you never stop getting job offers."

Hyperbolic? Perhaps.

True for all participants of that Festival? Of course not.

Useful for illustrative purposes? Yes absolutely.

I left this meeting with Jean-Pierre and Pascal with my head spinning:

Firstly, I know that I'm not the only one who has a bit of sparkles thrown in their eyes when they hear about or see things about this Festival.

It's held in the largest big top tent in the world (the Cirque Phénix, which is erected every winter on the outskirts of Paris for a season of circus programming, including the Demain festival).

It's been a platform for a lot of new styles and disciplines that we take for granted as de rigeur now in contemporary circus; and it's also a place where big time circus producers and casting agents gather to see some of the best and brightest new talents on offer (and try to snap some of them up for contracts). There's medals, there's cash prizes, there's special prizes.

The perception of this festival, from the outside, is one of a MASSIVE organisation that takes up a huge amount of space in the collective consciousness of a lot of circus artists I know. (It certainly takes up a lot of space in my brain! haha)

And then -- in reality -- it's something a little different.

It is all those things I listed.

But I've learned that it's also some other things that I would never have expected or predicted, based on the intoxicating mist of glamour that surrounds all of it and my above descriptions.

For example:  There's one full-time employee year-round. That person is Jean-Pierre. When there's three or four months to go ahead of each year's festival, two more full-time employees come on board to assist with communications, publicity, and organization. That's it. Pascal Jacob seems involved behind-the-scenes the whole way through (he travels around the world being a judge on different international circus festivals and circus schools across Europe and China and is always scouting new talent), but the rest of the festival is entirely volunteer run. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that it might be a small annual miracle that this massive event happens every February the way it does.

But the biggest takeaway I think I quietly gleaned from this Sunday-afternoon tea was that ... despite the outsized imprint this Festival has on many of us in the world of circus, ultimately the people at the core of it are far more similar to me and you than some imagined (please imagine an ominous church bell ringing) Gatekeeper of Circus (good job, thank you).

Rather than envisioning a towering council of hooded figures whose faces are shrouded in the depths of black cloaks as they pass booming pronouncements in low, serious voices on the Supreme Circosity & Virtuosity of one video submission or another (this may or may not be how I pictured the artist selection committee for Demain in the past)... I'm more left with the impression that it's just these two guys and a handful of other people who really love circus,  just trying to put on an event that celebrates the crap out of that every year.

And that makes it way less scary to contemplate – for me, anyways.

It's not a Circus Illuminati. It's some people who love sharing what they find on a big, fabulous stage every year and helping others learn about acts and performers they might otherwise not come across. They're not hardcore-intense about who can do the most technically virtuosic movement that you never thought the human body can do (they're interested if they see it, sure, but you can't have a whole festival of that; it would be boring); they're not snobs about someone submitting something that's going to continue to grow and evolve with them. They're not even that firm about deadlines (!):

Jean-Pierre asked me why I hadn't submitted my Le Numéro Barbette video through the Festival's online application platform yet.

I replied honestly that I had hoped to re-record it in September and submit that; to update the documentation I'd made in May (that's the video you have access to, patrons!) with the technique I'd worked on through the summer. After getting longlisted for CircusNext and being abroad for it, that simply hadn't been possible.

"Nonsense!" Pascal interrupted. "Just submit what you have."

"Yes," Jean-Pierre nodded. "Just put it on the online application and then send an updated video later."

"It's really not where I wanted it to be for showing it to you both," I say, spreading my hands, palms-up. "Technically and artistically, I know that I have more to give."

"Just submit it," Pascal says firmly, smiling into the tiny espresso he'd ordered.

For a second, reality slips –I swear it's Rachel Strickland's voice coming out of this middle-aged French man's mouth– but no, I'm just jetlagged, and he's just really insisting.

"But your deadline is 15 October," I reply, confused. "I won't be able to record something new by then."

The two men scoffed. Pascal waved a hand. "Just send it when you have it. Send it in November, then. That's fine."

Knowing better than to question them further, I simply nod and turn the conversation to another subject.

Pascal gave me a long list of libraries and special collections in Paris that I'm going to try to visit to find Barbette materials for – a performing arts museum on Rue de Richelieu that cycles through 14km (yes, kilometres) of materials from the French National Library Reserve;  an autonomous performing arts department at the Bibliothèque Opéra; and the Gaston Batis library at the Sorbonne, which has a full collection about circus that goes up to about the 1960s. So many leads to follow up on!

That night, at 1am, I sat in front of my computer and stared at the Demain application page.

I had kind of written it off in my head, sometime around July of this year. It was a good goal to have in my mind while I was making Le Numéro Barbette, I'd told myself. It meant that I tried my hardest to create the absolute best thing I could. I think I fell short of what it needs to be to be considered for the Festival, but I'm proud of what I made.

But now, my head was spinning anew. I could spend a few weeks focusing just on Barbette again from late October to mid-November ... re-record in mid-November ... submit that updated video on the portal ... right? I could, right?

I sigh, and then hit SEND to submit the May recording of Barbette to this year's application.

Why the hell not.

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Alright folks, that’s all from me for now —

STAY TUNED FOR TOMORROW'S POST!

And in the meantime, stay strange and wonderful.

XO ess