[10] Tournelle du Soleil: Worlds Colliding, continued (Patreon)

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

Last summer's training in Montréal was one marked by a daily twisting: a welcome, growing comfort and sense of relief with myself as I slowly watched my body begin to slowly respond to the testosterone therapy I'd begun; contrasted by the increasingly silly-feeling charade of going to my place of work and practice (the studio) pretending to be something I wasn't, for the comfort of people who I highly regarded but were not key figures in my life in this chapter.

Amongst that group of other coaches, I figured Sergey would be one I might be able to tell most easily. He was younger than the others. He worked at Cirque HQ onboarding new artists and helping artists returning from injury rehab get back into their show routines and was exposed to a lot of different kinds of people from all corners of the world in his day-to-day life. He'd been a part of a corporate culture there for many, many years that had guardrails in place for HR-related topics (guardrails that don't exist in private studios, per se).

And on a personal level, we'd had a more talkative dynamic. He could be tough, demanding. But it was always clear to me how much he cared about his students' and artists' physical and mental wellbeing.

Even with all of this in mind – I could never quite pull the trigger.

I mean – it was obvious that I was changing. That I had changed –significantly– from how I looked and sounded even a few years prior.

My chest was flat and healed, more than two years on from top surgery. I was beginning to put on muscle – a lot of it. My voice had dropped more than an octave. Vocal training that I'd been doing in some parallel voiceover work for a video game had helped me begin to learn how to speak resonantly in that lower register.

In my day-to-day life, outside of the circus studio where I might encounter friendly strangers or old friends, people largely interpreted me as being a young man.

This was new. And it was strange.

I didn't know how I felt about it. But I knew that it didn't feel bad. I stood tall, I noticed how my anxiety ease away in daily interactions, and observed how the world around me shifted in relation to how it perceived me.

On the occasions I’d see Sergey at Kalabanté, he’d grin and joke about how strong my hugs were – that I was crushing him. He'd greet me with a handshake. A handshake.

Not the two cheek kisses.

Is that–? Did he-–? Does that mean–?

I never figured it out. 

That summer trickled by, and turned into autumn, and winter. Sergey left on other contracts around the world with Cirque du Soleil. I buried my head in my Le Numéro Barbette project. Travelled back and forth between Montréal and Toronto. And largely forgot about it.

Fast forward eight months, from that moment to this present one. The one where I'm standing in front of Sergey by the change rooms at Cirque HQ, realizing that ...

(1) never quite figured out what he had figured out about me and was operating under the assumption that he might be assuming that I was doing Girl™️ badly but was being polite about it;

(2) Cirque du Soleil had hired me and was working with me as a non-binary performer, and that all my formal communications with other Cirque creatives, artists, directors, administrators, and costumers reflected and respected that; and

(3) that I'd just offered to share the video of my new aerial straps act with him without thinking about how it's (amongst other things) a glorious mess of gender in which I start out in a high-femme über-glam Cinderella ballgown and end up shirtless in skin-tone briefs.

Sergey who has never seen me with my shirt off.

Fuck.

I’d painted myself into a corner.

It’s okay, I told myself.

Now’s the time.

You have to.

Just ... rip off the band-aid.

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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 and wonderful - XO ess