[9] Tournelle du Soleil: Worlds Colliding (Patreon)

• 15 May 2023 • Day 1 at Cirque IHQ: Worlds Colliding •

Sergey had met me as one version of myself all those years ago; and the version of myself standing in front of him at the Cirque HQ was a different one. One that I hadn't necessarily integrated into all areas of my life. There were some places, some situations, and some people with whom it was simply easier to let them think of me as, address me as, interact fleetingly with me as that older version of myself.

Take last summer, for example – 

Last summer I was in Montréal. I was working as hard as I possibly could to improve my technical straps level with my coach, William Bonet. It was part of the larger arc of my Le Numéro Barbette project.

Training space in Montréal –the kind of space where the studio would allow you to reserve an aerial point or mat space and have your coach come in and work with you in a paid session– was hard to come by in the post-pandemic landscape (and still is). Some spaces had closed. And others –spaces like Les 7 Doigts and Cirque Eloize– were now using their facilities for in-company training and rehearsals.

This meant that coaches and artists who previously never used certain spaces were regularly present in one of the few studios that was comparatively easy and reliable to reserve training space at: Studio Kalabanté.

Coaches who I’d met and begun training with while I was still using my old name.

While I still presented as a girl in training spaces, and was treated like one.

These coaches were people who I had spent early, formative years working with in other parts of the city. I loved training with them. They were highly respected in the community. Their contribution to circus within this part of Canada is immense.

The training environment I would see them in prior to the pandemic was also highly gendered:

Nicknames would be given with love after you’d trained with one or the other of them for long enough, and these nicknames had suffixes that indicated your masculinity or femininity.

When you would enter the studio, it was expected that you would go over to the coach and say hello. Women would greet coaches with a kiss on either cheek. Men would greet coaches with a firm handshake. There was no variation.

And so –despite being a couple years past having top surgery and otherwise starting to feel comfortable training shirtless during my solo sessions or lessons with William– I spent much of last summer anxiously avoiding taking my shirt off around while in training at Studio Kalabanté if I could see on the schedule that one of those coaches –like Sergey– was going to be in.

I would wrestle with myself weekly.

Come on, just tell them.

Stand up tall. This is you.

If they don’t like it, that’s on them.

But my brain is black and white about so many things. It separates the outside world from the training world. My early years of working with circus coaches were defined by the feeling that for the duration of the class, it was their world and I was just living in it. It was my job to listen. To try  my hardest. To trust them and do whatever they told me to do.

The idea of trying to tell them that I was anything other than the gender they perceived me to be when they met me –a young woman– was something I knew they might not understand (at best), or might not be willing to understand (I don't want to be so melodramatic as to say 'at worst' but ... you know ... something towards the other end of the spectrum from 'at best', let's say).

Last summer, the idea of taking my shirt off to train without having first spoken to these coaches about their perception of me as being outdated was ... well, I cringed at the thought. Right or wrong, it felt like doing so would be setting them up to be shocked at what would be perceived as socially unacceptable behaviour (as in: women don't train shirtless in public circus studios in Montréal), the aftermath of which I couldn't be certain of.

A good relationship with a good coach is a valuable thing. I was more willing to pretend to be something I wasn’t in order to keep the door open to future training, than I was to risk a confrontation that would end stressfully for everyone involved. It was a line I was scared to cross, and it felt disrespectful to not at least make an effort to privately have some sort of conversation with them first so they could have a chance to process however they thought or felt about it somewhere other than a public studio setting with their other students around.

Of course, these moments were difficult to find.

I'd sit in my car outside the studio, building myself up to go inside and conduct myself as I usually would around a coach like William – someone who knew me through my transition and was relaxed and supportive about it.

I'd go inside, see the other coaches there for the day, and wilt internally.

Invariably, I'd spend my hours there at the studio drenched in sweat in the 30+ C summer humidity.  Overheated and uncomfortable,  I don't know what clung closer to: my soaking wet shirt, or the itchy discomfort of my own cowardice.

Because as much as this older, familiar world of mine was staying the same, everything outside of it felt like it was shifting in ways I'd never experienced before. And quickly. 

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Stay tuned for your next instalment of Tournelle du Soleil.   It'll be landing in your inboxes on Monday at 7am EST / 1pm CEST. Have yourself a strange and wonderful weekend - XO, ess