[4] Tournelle du Soleil: Sophie's Choice (Patreon)

May 15, 2023

My alarm starts blaring at 7am sharp and my skin is buzzing.

Coffee is ritual, not necessity, this morning.

I'm out the door and into the bright cool light of the morning in a flash. I slide diagonally into the drivers seat, coffee extended an arms-reach away from my torso so I don't slosh it over myself before I get to work. 

I punch up the radio, play the drums violently on the steering wheel, amp myself up the entire 45 minute crawl up the highway to the International Headquarters of Cirque du Soleil.

I turn off Rue Jarry onto Avenue du Cirque and cruise slowly in the warming morning light towards HQ, looming large on my lefthand side.

The building itself is massive. 

Parts of it remind me of gigantic film studio lots I’ve been on: cavernous, sprawling rectangles that stretch the length of a city block. Other parts look like whimsical atriums: ground-to-sky expanses of glass behind which glimmers of meetings, costume construction, machinery, and storage can be glimpsed.  An absolutely colossal banner stretches across the front of the headquarters – the sun logo on a soft black background, golden rays stretching out to the edges around a benevolent looking face.

I squint at it from the car. Trying to decipher if its expression contains any traces of haughtiness, amusement, mocking tones. 

No, I decide. But it definitely looks a lot calmer than I feel.

I’m a ball of excitement and nervous anticipation as I walk across the winding grounds leading to Entrance B – the employee entrance of Cirque du Soleil. Short scrubby trees and tall hedges are dotted across the lawn. Sculptures –some abstract, some clearly circus-inspired– punctuate the greenery with their rusted red and smooth black metal as I make my way up to the building. 

Today I wait for security to buzz me through the tinted glass doors. I’m issued a temporary key card in order to access the different offices and studios in the IHQ.

I stand there, fumbling with my new keycard at the turnstiles. 

A young woman approaches from down the hall. From this distance, I can see a black and white half-sleeve tattoo of some beautiful flowers on her right forearm that hugs a clipboard snug to one hip. 

I’m supposed to be meeting someone. Maybe it’s her. 

I glance back down at the stupid card reader. Finally I get my pass onto the right spot for the sensor and the turnstiles unlock and let me through with a begrudging clunk. The woman arrives as I tumble through, canvas bag half-caught on the uppermost prong behind me. 

Her sandy brown hair falls in a straight curtain to her shoulders, framing a slightly hawkish nose and a pointy chin. She has bright, angular eyes that are crinkle up with a ready smile as I tug my snarled bag free. Sticking a hand out, she introduces herself: “Karine! Nice to meet you.”

“Ess,” I reply brightly. “Enchanté.”

“Ah! Tu parles français?”

“Oui, un peut. J’essaye. Mais je besoin de pratiquer en plus.”

“Well everybody here speaks French and English, so it’s your choice,” she says, switching back to English. As is always the case when this happens in Montréal, I wonder – did I say that wrong?

...Probably.

Ah well.

Karine is striding off purposefully already and I jog after her. “I’m taking you to all the places you have to go today," she tells me over her shoulder. "I’ve got meetings I’m running off to in between, but I’ll come pick you up and drop you off to things today so you can learn where everything is. First up is the med hall. You have your intake evaluation.”

I’m not sure what ‘intake’ is, but I assume the physical evaluation is something like a physio examination.

It turns out that I’m only partially right.

“This way!” Karine says cheerfully, tapping her own blue card on the panel next to a heavy steel  door. 

We walk down a narrow hallway with triple-high ceilings, getting closer to the source of the loud, uptempo electronic music coming from somewhere deeper in the space.

The hallway opens up onto a gym: 

Fluorescent lights hang overhead and huge circular skylights create puddles of bright morning sunlight on a black rubber floor. Exercise bikes and treadmills line one side; multiple squat cages and bar systems take up the back wall; and benches, free weights, and mirrors take up the third. Plyo boxes, banks, balance boards, therabands, and foam rollers are here and there across the space. Everything a circus artist needs to get strong or stay strong, avoid injury or come back from one. 

I'm misleading you in this scenic description, however, as it is not in any way what I notice first in any way whatsoever. No, what I notice first when we walk up to the gym is – 

A group of 9 or 10 of the most collectively muscular and shredded men I have seen in recent memory throwing massive weight around, climbing up and down a rope hung from the ceiling with no legs / arms only, hoisting 100 lbs dumbbells overhead and holding them there, doing muscle-ups on a pair of gymnastics rings hanging from an extensive set of multi-height pullup bars, jumping onto improbably high objects, and speaking English, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and more. 

Everyone is giving off the strongest gymnast-bro vibes I –a non-gymnast– have ever experienced in person. 

I’m intimated. 

No you’re not. Remember, you belong here this week. They picked you.

Well, they haven’t picked us yet, I sulk back at the Idealist's voice chiming through my mind. We have to pass the strength and conditioning test. And whatever the intake evaluation is.

One thing at a time.

Take a breath.

I do, slowly, through my nose.

Relax your face.

I slowly try to ease off the muscles in my brow, the corners of my mouth, my jaw, that I hadn’t realized I was holding tension in.

That’s it. You’re alright.

Right. I’m alright.

See? Take up some space. Easy does it.

Take up some space. Okay. Easy does it.

Karine’s voice interrupts my internal pep-talk dialogue:

“Mireille will be here to do your intake shortly and then you’ll do your strength and conditioning evaluation after,” she says brightly. “I’m headed off into a production meeting but text me if you need anything and I’ll come back to pick you up for your costume fittings at 11:30am.”

“Thanks so much.”

“The changerooms are just there,” she says, gesturing at two doors just beyond the water fountain – and then she’s gone.

Oh.

Shit.

I have five seconds to make a decision: 

The womens’ changeroom, or the mens’ changeroom? 

I try to do a rapid mental triage:

Most of the clothes I need for the day are already on, underneath my street clothes. I've got fitted shorts for the physio evaluations. I'm wearing (don’t laugh) literally two pairs of underwear so that I’m prepared for whatever the costume fitting later in the day might shape up to be (I said not to laugh!). I hadn't thought about needing to stash my backpack, coat, and lunchbag somewhere for the day, though. I can't just leave them lying in a corner of the gym. 

A weight settles in around the little halo of mental buoyancy I’ve been building up, crowding a positive resilience that still feels rusty, clumsy.

If I go into the mens’ room – what if I need to shower? What if one of them assumes I’m a woman anyways and he’s uncomfortable? What if – ahhh, fuck …

If I go in the womens’ change room then literally all those acrobats will assume I’m a woman all week, and those people are probably here every day, and I don’t want to have to deal with that if I have my shirt off in here for whatever reason at some point, and –

The mental and verbal labour of explaining myself over and over to a bunch of people I may have to work with, or around, for the rest of my career in some capacity outside of Cirque du Soleil in the very small world of circus outweighs the gendered acting and psychological teeth-gritting that will go into being in the mens’ spaces and faking it til I make it, silently daring anyone to look at me too long or question whether I should be in there or not.

The men's one, then, I think to myself stubbornly.

I stride purposefully towards it, aware of eyes from the gym behind me tracing my movement.

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Stay tuned for your next instalment of Tournelle du Soleil.   It'll be landing in your inboxes tomorrow at 7am EST / 1pm CEST. Until then, stay strange & wonderful -- XO, Ess