Ice Capades

By now, we've done a lot of shows. We're talking 200 shows plus. You would think that by now, nerves would be playing a minor to nonexistent roll, right? That's certainly what I though. But this was a special night. It was the premiere in Zurich. And the premiere in Zurich is no joke.

The workers had been busting their butts for three days to get everything ready. There was an extra tent, complete with beautiful chandeliers, that would serve as a restaurant. Then there was the VIP tent. Red carpets were laid out, extra lights were hung up. And don't even get me started on some of the more ridiculous tasks, like blackening the tires of the sanitary wagon...

Needless to say, we were nervous.

So imagine my joy when I discovered they had repainted the stage for the occasion. The last time they painted the floor, it was a matte paint that did not slide, even if you wanted it to. In the most epic over-correction of all time, they appeared to have painted the floor with lubricant based paint.

Now PM had been told the floor was being painted and had been tasked with spreading the word.

She didn't.

As such, I only found out they had painted the floor a couple of hours before the show was set to start. That left pretty much zero time to properly adapt to the floor. And boy would I have to adapt. I have never in all my life been on such a slippery surface. It was near impossible to execute my spirals. Normally, one spiral will see you face a third of the ring. So if you start facing the center, after three spirals you should be able to come up toward the middle. The floor was so slippery that the wheel would slide out just a little every rotation so that I would stay exactly in place. That should not happen.

If I tried to change the angle of the spiral to control where I was going, especially if I needed a lower angle, the wheel would just slide out from under me. At one point I didn't even manage to finish one spiral before the wheel slid out from under me. To make matter worse, normally the wheel will slide when your weight is in front (and your hands are toward the ground) but form some strange reason it kept sliding out by my feet so I would end up going backwards!

I was terrified to even do freehand spirals. Having the wheel slide out when you're only attached by the feet was not an attractive prospect.

This being the premiere, with a packed house, loads of newspapers and television present, not to mention Swiss quasi-celebrities like the past two Miss Switzerlands, the current Miss Switzerland, and a former Mr Switzerland*, the stakes were pretty high.

I was in tears. I was on the floor, my wheel and I defeated, with a vision of utter humiliation on the horizon.

At dinner, some of my non-artist friends on the tour as well as my boyfriend took up the battle as their own. They came to the tent with me and tried to find a solution. We tried scouring one of the floor panels of the extension to see if it would make the surface rougher. A good idea in theory, but the space was so small there was no way to see if it would work.

Then, A said that a friend of his who does cyr wheel puts rosin on his wheel when the stage is slippery and that it tends to help. I was pretty skeptical. Rosin gets sticky with heat. How was it supposed to make my cold metal wheel sticky?

But we covered the wheel in rosin anyway and to my great surprise (and relief) it worked like a charm. I could scarcely believe it and wasn't sure if the rosin would last from preset to the actual appearance on stage, especially since my wheel is covered by a cloth beforehand. But it was the only solution I had.

The premiere went brilliantly and my wheel, with the help of the rosin, triumphed over that floor. Admittedly, doing wheel when the wheel and your hands are covered in rosin really isn't very enjoyable. It is, however, a million times more enjoyable than continually falling on your face.

Thank goodness for A. I never in a million years would have thought to use rosin. He totally saved the day.

 Only 58 to go!


* Am I the only one who finds the number of Miss/Mr Switzerlands present really, really funny?

Facepalm

I had just come up from the opening spiral sequence when I noticed a rather large puddle on stage. This made absolutely no sense as it hadn't rained a drop in days. Then I looked up and noticed a very sheepish looking woman remove her half empty beverage from the ring curb.

Way to spill your drink on stage, lady. In the future, please refrain from using the ring curb as a table.

Yeesh.

See This?

See this? This is the crazy jenga game from hell that decided what the state of the floor would be and whether or not I could do my job correctly.

Well you know what? I don't have to deal with this garbage ever again! Two particularly awesome chaps from the workshop have devised a new method of floor installation and it kicks considerable amounts of ass. Ever since the new method has been implemented, I have had no problems with the floor whatsoever. I can do my full act every night and actually take pride in my work again.

It is a huge relief knowing that no matter what the next town brings, I can still do my job. True, sometimes the stage ends up being super high because that's the only way to make it level. And yes, they had to add a ramp so that the trio can run on stage to do their act. But in the end everyone wins, especially me, so hooray!

I'd take a picture of the new system, but seeing as it's only visible during build up and tear down and we're all running around like crazy people, I don't think I can get away with taking a break to snap a photo. But trust me, it's awesome. Basically, they make the entire structure that the floor rests on level before putting the floor down whereas with the old system, they would make one section level and then try to make each surrounding section level in relation to whatever it was next to. Not so effective.

Well done, circus! Thanks for hearing me and finding a solution! Now let's go do some wheel!

À la Malcolm

After spending three hours trying to get the damn stage level, it was discovered that some of the wooden planks that had been used as supports stuck out too far and therefore made it impossible to set up the ring curb. By this point, the "it" had been collectively had up to the proverbial here, so the technicians took a chainsaw and just cut that shit up.

One cannot help but be reminded of this.

Problem solved.

Small Victories

As we made our way through yet another miserable build up, I looked over to the stage only to have my heart sink. Just looking at it I could see that it sloped dramatically downward toward the audience. Looking more closely I saw that before the slope really got going, there was first a small hill to get over. The stage as a whole was nothing short of wavy. I could feel the tears welling up inside. Another town, another fight against the floor. And this one looked to be a doozy.

When the build up was finally done I went to speak with one of the folks in charge. Not to complain about the floor, I know the guys who build it up are doing their best. It's not like I didn't notice the mud and the rain and the lumpy field we had to work with. What was really bothering me is that I felt dishonest. I was hired to do a job and so far, I've only been able to deliver a few times. And the more I struggle, the more I wonder if it's not so much the floor that is bad, but me. Needless to say, the idea of spending the next seven months like this makes me want to run screaming for the hills.

I was assured that they can see it's the floor that's the problem and that they too feel badly about the conditions. They also added that it's okay because I still give a a good performance, even if it's not at the level I would like it to be, and also, the public always reacts well, so they're happy.

Toward the end of this conversation, the director of the circus joined us and echoed those sentiments. What I didn't know is that after I left, he went to look at the floor. In a nutshell, he looked at it, shook his head, stated that it wasn't possible that the floor was in that state, and had the workers reinstall it.

On the one hand, I was very happy about this. On the other, I felt kind of bad. The workers have the longest days imaginable, and I'm sure that putting the floor up a second time was not the most welcomed assignment of the day. It was surely not my intention to have them do so.

And was it really worth it? I don't know. I tried the floor and I dare say it may even be worse than in Lenzburg. I had to cut at least three lines from my act and replace them with the simplest moves possible. Falling was embarrassing. But so is performing an act that I could have done in my first year of circus school...

Shut Up

Ah, the floor. How many times have I talked about the floor? Enough for even me to be sick of it. But the truth is, I am at the complete mercy of the floor I have to perform on. And no matter how hard I try, I cannot seem to articulate just how important the quality of the floor is, the effect it has on what I do, and just how incredibly difficult my life becomes when the floor is out to get me.

After my first disastrous show in Lenzburg, one of my co-workers, a chap fresh out of circus school in his early twenties turned to me and said "That's live performance."

I wanted to smack him so badly.

No, dear boy, that is not live performance. Live performance is my trapeze being a little crooked but me doing my job anyway. Live performance is me messing up one of my tricks but making it look like I did it on purpose, or at the very least, smiling through it and getting the crowd on my side. Live performance is something going wrong back stage and everyone pulling together to make the show work regardless. That is live performance.

Having conditions which make it impossible to do your job is not live performance. Having what essentially amounts to unsafe conditions is not live performance. If I were to go up to him and say "Looks like your mat got lost during transport, you can do your act without it, right?" he would not smile and say "Sure! That's live performance!" He would say that he would not be doing his act until a new mat was found.

Live performance means things go wrong. But not even having a fighting chance before the lights even come up? I'm sorry, but that's just poor working conditions.

First Stop, Hell

After a smashing premiere, the circus packed up and continued on its merry way. Despite not having the faintest idea of what we were doing, the first build down actually went pretty smoothly. It only took us two and a half hours to get everything packed into the trucks. I think that's still an hour and a half longer than it should take, but still!

Sadly, this victory was short lived and did nothing more than fill us all with a false sense of hope as far as the build up was concerned. I'm told the build up should really only take an hour and a half. It took us four and a half hours.

Four and a half hours.

And the only reason we stopped after four and a half hours is because the kitchen is on a tight schedule and we had to get to lunch. The truth is, we were only mostly finished after four and a half hours. There were still little things to do like set up all the backstage and sweep up what seemed like eight tonnes of sawdust.

After inhaling my lunch I ran back to the tent because it was absolutely imperative that I test the floor before the show. That's right, we took a break for lunch an hour and a half before we were to start the first show of a two show day.

When I got to the tent, I discovered that the Chinese pole girls had left their eight million pound pole in the middle of the stage. Unable to move it myself, I tried to set it to the side, only by that time they had to clean the floor, so I still couldn't do wheel. At that point I was told to go put on my make-up and come back. When I did get back, the floor was still unavailable and now everyone was clamouring to do their pre-set.

Eventually I managed to try the floor and sweet merciful crap it was a disaster. It was super sloped from back to front, and also down to the right. In spirals, I was flung back up or driven down to the corner where I would have to end my spirals prematurely or risk falling off the stage or hitting the ring wall. As for straight lines... forget it. In one direction, any effort on my part meant slamming into the decor I was rolling so fast, and in the other direction I had to push with every ounce of strength I had, and even then, I barely had enough height/momentum to complete my figures.

I have never been so miserable on stage. Every second, behind a very plastic smile, I had to calculate how much speed I needed, how much I had to adjust, what was the floor doing, will I make it? And I fell, and struggled, and fell some more. All my technique was useless. It was like I had never done wheel before in my life. Each move had to purposely be done incorrectly in the hopes that it would cancel out the flaws of the floor. And the whole time my mind was screaming "That's wrong! You're doing it wrong! You're going to get hurt! NO!"

It is not fun to be on stage and second guess everything you are doing. It is not fun to be on stage and have to do so much mental math in order to execute your figures that your face freezes in a fake smile and your eyes glaze over. It is not fun to feel humiliated because you cannot even remotely do your job correctly, through no fault of your own, and have an entire audience bear witness.

And there was still a second show to do! But before that, we had a group rehearsal. And after that, I had some solo training time. It was about as disastrous as every other attempt at wheel I'd made that day, but at least I found a few ways to be safer.

From there, I inhaled my dinner once again, then had dish duty, and then had my first break of the day (I worked concessions during intermission and would do so again during the second show). One half hour to myself before I had to be back in the tent.

The second show was just as bad as the first.

Finally, the fifteen hour day came to an end. I was so tired, so worn, so broken, so miserable... If it had been that hard but I could have at least taken pleasure in my work and my performance, it would have been one thing. But the entire experience was just brutal on all levels with no silver lining in sight.

I got back to my caravan and cried. How? How on earth would I make it through the season? That night all I wanted to do was quit and go home. My only comfort came the next day when I spoke with some of the workers who assured me that after that day of hell, they too wanted to go home and wondered what they had gotten themselves into.

I can only hope things get better from here.

The New Winner

I used to joke that the wheel always wins. Once you accept that, things get a lot easier. It turns out I've been wrong. The wheel doesn't always win. The wheel is at the mercy of the floor and as for me, I'm just along for the ride.

I tested the floor I'll be working on for the next eight months for the first time yesterday. In some ways, it was not as bad as I thought. In others, it was far worse. It left me feeling discouraged and afraid.

Today I had a proper training session rather than just testing the waters. I am no less discouraged for it. I can't help but suspect that this is actually one of the better floor set-ups I'm going to have. Apparently there's one city where the slope is so pronounced that the difference from one side of the stage to the other is 18cm! I can't even...

In spirals, I am pulled downstage right no matter how hard I try otherwise. In straight lines, the height difference in the floor boards knocks my wheel so much that it either kills all my momentum, makes the wheel too unstable to execute the figure safely, shifts the angle of the wheel so drastically that I risk falling off the stage if I continue, or all of the above. Wheel has always meant doing mental calculations and adjustments while executing figures, but this is beyond extreme.

I hate feeling like I can't do my job, or like I will have to present something that is far beneath my ability. I want to be proud of what I'm doing, not feel embarrassed by it. Dumbing myself down technically makes me feel like so much less of an artist and it breaks my heart.

I have asked to be on the team that sets up the floor. I figure if I'm going to be a pain in the ass about it, I might as well be there to help. In the meantime, please pray to floor gods to be nice to me. I need all the help I can get...