|
contours provocations
journal - 2003-0324 - 2030 Melancholia; Yellow Smoke; Farwell to Gareth and Ashley; Homo Reading I feel unusally depressed this evening. I'm guessing it's a combination of fatigue, not sleeping well and my typical melancholia. It appears the weather has gone from winter to summer. With absolutely no spring in between. Yesterday and today, the temp has been in the 70s, and the humidity is high. It is already uncomfortable. In addition the pine pollen is in the air. This is not the simple pollen of some flowering bush. This is cloying, powdery yellow pollen that appears like smoke in a breeze. It coats everything it touches with a thick film of dust. Supposedly it is not harmful. But I'm not so sure about that. Surely if you breath it in, it will adhere to the throat or mucuos membranes. As I sit here, I keep noticing a chalky-like taste in my mouth. As though I'd been licking a greenboard. About 30 minutes ago, I watched the last episode in Bravo's "The Fire Within." It follows the lives of a number of performers as they train for Cirque du Soleil's newest show, Varekai. The action takes place at the Cirque headquarters in Ontario. My favorite students were Gareth, a 20-year-old acrobat from London, and his partner, Ashley. I'm not sure the proper name for the act. Ashley lies on a bench and uses his feet and legs to keep Gareth tumbling in the air. Requires an amazing amount of individual coordination, but it also requires an exact synching of the two bodies. One second too fast or too slow on either one's part, and Gareth will fall. Gareth gave the impression of being a tough street kid with his hip-hop clothes and lots of jewelry. But I quickly realized he was a sensitive guy. His mother had just been diagnosed with cancer. And this was his first time to be away from home. You could almost feel his vunerability. Gareth and Ashley had so many difficulties with their act that the Cirque finally cut it and gave them other positions. Gareth became a lizard-like creature whose appearance in the rink starts the show. Ashley became a spotter for a trapeze act. Tonight, both were terminated. Which was very surprising since the narration mentioned that Gareth's performance was a crowd favorite. I have no idea what when on behind the scenes, but I was very sad to seem them go. Gareth returned to London, while Ashley stayed in Ontario to audition for another of the Soleil troupes. I was surprised at how disorganized Cirque appeared to be. They hired a group of performers for the new troupe without knowing what it was or would become. They started with a set of basic acts, then tinkered and added, altered and deleted. Trying to create a viable show. More tinkering ensued. It seemed like weeks before they could agree on a central concept or even the name. Possibly, there is virtue in this see-saw approach, but it must be very difficult for the perfomers. From some on-line research, I learned that the performers do not earn a lot of money. Somewhere around $175 per show. There were some questions about lodging and expenses, but I never saw a definitive answer. Saturday night after dinner, a friend and I went by Barnes and Noble. But I wasn't sure what I wanted. As we exited, I said that in the future that I was only going to buy books about, for or by gay folks. The more I've thought about that, the more I intend to do it. The mythology of hetrosexuality is so pervase in society that I want a refuge from it. PAX!
|