[12] Tournelle du Soleil (Patreon)

• 15 May 2023 • Day 1 at Cirque IHQ: The Studio •

I snatch my water bottle out from under the stream, sloshing water over my socks. Ew.

As my gender-confession stupor mixes together with the sensory hell of wet socks, I'm interrupted by Karine calling my name from the end of the hallway.

“Time for your harness test!” she says.

“Coming!”

Harness test?

I shake my head a little and hustle over, forcing myself to run a tight loop of all the things that the little Idealist voice in my mind has been trying valiantly to call through the fog of the morning.

No thinking about that stuff today. You’ve got a job to do. You’re here for a reason. You’re here because they want you here. You’re here and you’re going to do a great job. You’re here and everyone’s fine with you being trans.

Whether it's true or not, it can't hurt to say it to myself if it helps me hold my head a bit higher, think a bit more clearly ... right?

I follow Karine obediently through Cirque HQ. We walk back past the Employees’ entrance, down along hallway decorated with beautiful murals of circus artists, and past the airy, high-ceilinged main entrance. There's a small garden, and then we're in a cafeteria, passing by long tables and vending machines to access another hallway where the riggers' offices are.

A tall man dressed all in black with a long ponytail gets up from his desk, grabs a waist harness, and walks us back out and across the hallway into the most massive studio I have ever stepped foot inside.

This is Studio AB.

It’s a massive square: each side of the room is around 37m (120 feet); the walls are painted a deep, rich blue and stretch up and away to a maze of truss, walkways, beams, and uncountable rigging points at a height of 23m (75 ft).

The floorspace is divided roughly into four smaller squares of equal size. Different activities are underway in each: expanses of low-profile mats or black marley sit atop the polished concrete foundation. Shipping crates and specialty containers are spread out across the central sections of the studio: equipment being unpack and re-built; or partially loaded with equipment that will soon be on its way to one of the many shows that Cirque is presenting somewhere around the world in the near future.

Huge, hulking winches the size of your average washing machine squat next to each of the four smaller spaces, ready to be hooked up to some rigging or an aerial apparatus. They're there to bring acrobats up and down within that 75 ft of height during their aerial choreography. They look identical to the ones used by the stunt rigging coordinator that I used to do occasional rigging days for, before the pandemic. If they are, that means each one of those things has a pricetag sitting in the range of a cool $100K each.

Far across the studio there’s a group of 9 or 10 young men learning Chinese hoop diving. In the square to the left, a regulation trampoline bed sits next to a large vertical structure that a team of riggers is building – a tramp wall. To my far left, there’s an empty square with a waiting motor – where we’ll be doing my harness test. But to get there, we have to walk past the activity happening in the square immediately in front of the door we’ve entered through. It takes a lot of self control to not just crane my head up skyward and gape, slack-jawed, at what’s happening.

A monstrous metal pole is attached to the ceiling with a hinge-like fixture. It stretches most of the way to the floor (so that makes it … what … 70 ft long or so? Jesus).

At the bottom there’s a small ring, steering-wheel sized, which two men are standing on as the pole traces a huge, swinging arc through the air. The man on the front of the pole stands with his back to it. The toes of his sneakers peek out over the front edge of the metal ring at the base. His hands grip the black metal of the pole behind him. The man on the back of the pole is driving the movement: his knees and hips bend to pump the pole forward and down through space and back up again through the full expression of its curve.

I watch, transfixed, as they reach the full height of one of their swings.

The man on the front of the pole launches himself up and off into space, turning multiple graceful rotations and twists towards a comically small mat being held up by 6 gigantic, muscular men. The mat-team holds the pad at hip-height; they scurry left and right, making micro-adjustments as they track the flyer's trajectory.

The flyer lands – POUMPH – perfectly in the centre and the catchers allow the force of his landing to carry the mat to the floor with a THWUMP. Hands reach up as one to steady the flyer’s landing.

Well that’s absolutely batshit, I think to myself . I follow Karin and the rigger along to the square next to them.

The rigger offers me the small waist harness he’s holding. It’s made up of loops of black webbing for my waist and each leg. Sets of dual silver D-rings lock the webbing in place once it’s doubled back on itself. It’s exactly like my 50-pick jerk harness for stunts – minus the chest / corset part.

I step into it and begin adjusting it.

“You’ve worn one of these before then?” the rigger asks.

“Yep.” I make a mental note to change the set-up of the leg loops so that they form an ‘X’ under my pelvis instead of separated ones for each thigh. Does he think I’m a dude, or do they set up all the harnesses this way? I wonder idly. The rigger walks over to the motor operator to bring the sandbag and clip-in point down from the ceiling.  I learned in stunts that parallel loops are definitely needed if you’ve got external plumbing; but if you don’t, the crossed variation is far more comfortable. If they do set up all the harnesses this way, I feel real bad for the women who don’t know that they can cross the leg straps.

 “Are these Climbing Sutra harnesses?” I ask. 

“Yeah, how’d you…?”  he trails off.

“We use the same ones in stunts, for film & TV.”

“Ah cool.”

The sandbag drops down smoothly from the ceiling, coming to rest at waist-height. The rigger detaches it and drops it to the floor. He separates two long threads of 12-strand tech to either side of my hips and clips me in. I arrange my shoulders so that one has a line in front and one has a line behind it to help keep my torso in a neutral position, then sink my weight down into the lines automatically – habit from fly tests for TV and film days.

“You comfortable?” the rigger asks.

“Yep,” I smile as the winch operator powers me up into the air.

“Oh good, you’ve done this before then.”

“Yes,” I laugh.

“Harness feels good? Feels tight?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tip your body forward in space like Superman for me?”

I bring the shoulder that I tucked behind one of the lines in front, engage my core, and slowly tilt forward in space. My heels float up and my chest sinks down until I’m close to parallel with the floor.

“Oh that’s easy for you.”

“No problems here,” I reply. I carefully tilt back up to vertical.

“We’re good then.”

I’m lowered back down the ground and the rigger unclips me. I hand him back the sandbag, wiggle out of the harness, and hand that back to him as well.

“I’m going to put tape marks where we had your webbing set at. That way we know exactly where it should be set when this is flown to New York and you’re doing your rehearsals and flying there and stuff.”

"Sounds good."

Karine looks up from her phone, her thumbs a blur as she fires off texts and emails. “Costume fitting next!” she smiles, turning to leave already.

I trot along after her, wondering why I needed the harness test at all.

I was about to find out.

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Tournelle du Soleil continues tomorrow at 7am / 1pm CEST! Until then, stay strange and wonderful -- XO, ess