A regular Carnival Cinema column of showbiz life musings by Captain Frodo.
The Act of Birth
The five weeks of separation had been particularly agonising. It was 2012 and I had finally finished a stint of shows in Hamburg, Germany. Back home in Australia my wife was pregnant with our daughter. The separation felt like an open wound on my soul and could only be mended by reunification. I had felt the pangs and pains of separation before, but this was different. Deeply biological like I knew this pain for the first time.
Pregnancy and imminent birth is a powerful biological process. It is what I like to think of as an everyday miracle; miraculous, yet completely commonplace. Love is made, time passes, a child is born. This is beyond extraordinary, bordering on supernatural, yet simultaneously extremely ordinary. In actuality, as a biological process, it is about as extraordinary as eating food and ejecting excrement. Every living organism procreates, it is not a unique or singular event. It is common but that does not mean it’s not important. Birth is such a fact of life that, without it, life would not be. If you are ever blessed with being present at a birth, particularly if you have been part of creating the being about to be birthed, you will marvel at the wonder of it all.
One moment there’s my wife and I, in the next there’s one more person present in the hospital room. I stepped up with the scissors and severed the umbilical cord. The new arrival became a separate entity. She was SO tiny. She arrived three weeks early, naked, fragile, yet so very full of life.
I am serious about my Craft. I take my role as a Showman seriously, yet as I held my little girl in my arms, all the importance of my Craft and vocation dimmed and faded away, like a cloud had passed before the sun. I realised that what I had taken for the sun, which everything had revolved around, indeed was just the moon. A mere reflection of my true purpose, which I at that moment pressed up against my naked skin. Everything I had learnt and done was just a preamble for this. My true purpose had shifted, I was now tasked with showing this little one the world so she could discover her Way. By the look of the little helpless thing on my chest, it was clear it would be a while until she was ready to walk her Way, in the meantime, it was my responsibility to make sure she stayed alive and had all the love in the world. This was my true purpose.
Being a parent changes your life, it changes you, which means every one of your relationships is altered. Not just your relationship to your lover and partner, but also your relationship to the world. The child adds a new colour to your world, one you couldn’t see before. Like you have just been given the ability to perceive ultraviolet. Bees can see UV light and the world we think we know looks different to them. Flowers we perceive as completely white have, in reality, patterns painted in ultraviolet, akin to aeroplane landing markers guiding the bees to a flower’s goodness. No matter how long we look at a flower we can’t see it, yet it’s there to be discovered for those who can see wave frequencies between 400 & 10 nanometers. My child’s addition to my perception guides me to hitherto unknown goodness in the world. It was always there, but I couldn’t see it, now I can, thanks to her. We named our daughter Bee, partly, to remind us of this.
In the weeks after her birth, living in a tiny cottage in the Victorian hinterlands, in a small cabin, completely off-the-grid, heating our water and home with wood from the surrounding forest, drinking rainwater. It was under these circumstances I first developed the Way of looking at Act creation which I will describe now.
The Birth of Acts
The broad outline is this: The birth of an Act is its premiere performance. All parts of the process, conscious or otherwise, happening before birth is part of the pregnancy. The Act’s development after its birth resembles a child’s development.
Let’s take a deeper look, and what better way to start, than with the beginning?
In the beginning, was…
It’s hard to know what the true origin of an Act is. It can even be confusing to know the exact origin of an organism. Like my daughter, the beginning, it could be argued, was the moment of conception. The particular act of coitus leading to her conception. From another point of view, the process started before that, when a gorgeous dark-haired girl came up to a man after a show in Edinburgh. A spark which was struck then kindled something which simmered for about a year before it came to fruition and then developed further as the love grew over the next five years. Only then did the moment of conception happen. Nine months later our little Bee came buzzing into the world, three weeks early. For a biological organism, perhaps this pre-conception stuff of meeting and falling in love is a little abstract and esoteric, but for the conception of an Act, it is very much a part of it.
The impulses that bring Acts into the world can broadly be divided into two categories. Some conceptions are triggered by inner impulses and others come from outside of yourself. Ultimately its always an interplay between the two, but it is illuminating to look at them separately.
The impetus to gather your notes, collate your ideas, and deciding to work on a skill to create an Act can come from an inner impulse. Sometimes the collected inspirations seem to coagulate by themselves. They spring fully formed into the world like Pallas Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, fertility and the useful arts. She famously sprung from her father Zeus’s head, dressed in full armour ready to take on the world. These kinds of fully formed births are admittedly rare.
Usually, acts are born after ideas have been mulling around in our heads. Skills considered. Random encounters with people, art, TV shows, books, flashes of memories of memes from the internet. Collections of perceptions combine with concepts and ideas in us, forming and combining into mental pictures of something we need, and/or want to express. An inner impulse is formed which wants to come into the world.
An equally common way for acts to come into the world is the outer impulse. Like when someone asks you to perform a new Act for next month’s cabaret night. Some might even be more specific in what they want you to create, like, they need a funny aerial rope act.
If you say yes to the challenge, the process proceeds similarly to the inner impetus. Maybe the outer impulse could be better described as pressure. Once you say yes, you’ve got to get your shit together and make it happen. I often say yes to these kinds of challenges because it forces me to make time to listen to what’s been boiling away in my mental underground.
In this outer impulse example, the day of the cabaret show becomes the Act’s due date. Inner impulses often come without a due date, but once the idea has sprung forth it will want to seek to present itself, and if there is life in the idea you will soon enough find an opportunity to display it.
New Creation
Our ideas are not created in a vacuum, at least they shouldn’t be. Any original creation must be aware of what came before. If you create your juggling act in complete isolation, closed off from the world, knowing no other jugglers, having no internet connection or television reception, and you emerge onto the world stage having incorporated an apple from your father’s cult’s orchard into your juggling patterns and your brand new idea is to eat the apple whilst juggling, your idea might be genuinely discovered and developed by you in complete isolation, but since someone else has already created and performed it before you, the act is not original. You have, in a sense, wasted your time.
When I was at university studying philosophy one of our professors told us he didn’t want to read our own philosophical ideas in the answers to our tests. He was not interested in our ideas, only the ideas presented to us in our textbooks. To me, being who I am, and coming straight from twelve years of Steiner School (Waldorf) education this was quite agitating. When I confronted the professor about it after the lecture he said although I might think I’m onto some deep and profound insight he would be able to grasp my idea within the first few sentences and then be able to point me to the relevant books already written on that idea. Sometimes, he said, there’s an entire section of the university library dedicated to that idea. To think new, you must first know what’s already been thought on the subject, he said. I smiled and went to the university cantina and ate a large slice of humble pie.
Individuality
The creation of an organism is the fusion of two sets of genes into one new organism. My daughter is part my wife and part myself, yet an altogether new individual. This is a key to creating original Acts. Combine at least two things and infuse yourself in the fusion.
Be aware of your inspirations. Seek out the past. Certain things speak to you, stir emotions which make you pay attention to them. Select several of these inspirations. Then work on combining them and in this process infuse yourself, your character, your physical skills, and your thoughts. As you infuse yourself you transform the inspirations. When you then combine it all, you have something new. Through this process, pithily described by Kirby Ferguson as Copy, Transform & Combine you stand a good chance of having arrived at a modicum of originality. (Originality and idea conception are rich veins of exploration which I will pursue in future essays.)
Beginnings are Important
In the earliest steps of biological gestation, we develop the heart, the circulatory system, the brain, and limbs. All very important. From there things expand, grow and form themselves, by processes beyond conscious understanding.
The conception of the Act idea is akin to the earliest stages of gestation. In these early days, major tasks are undertaken. Skip one of these and you risk your Act will come out unformed, unfinished, or in worst-case scenarios still-birthed.
Everything that happens before the premiere of a new Act is the gestation process, it is the pregnancy. Rehearsals, conversations with experts surrounding all the elements involved in your expected Act. It could be one-on-one sessions with trainers, it might be hours and hours in a gym to develop enough muscle to be able to begin the practice of a new skill. Long late-night writing sessions, reading and research. All of it is extremely important, but it’s all just part of the gestation process. No matter how much your Act develops, even if it goes past its due date, perhaps the cabaret is moved to the following week, it’s all part of the pregnancy.
Birth
When the day finally arrives, whether you feel ready or not, the act will be born. As with a real birth, there is no amount of preparation that will ready you for the emotional rollercoaster ride of birth. It will cause chaos in you.
At the birth of my daughter, the most vital bit of the process was performed by my wife, as was the fashion of the time. I was in full protection mode, placing myself between my woman, the unborn, and the world. Yet, I was so powerless. We had complications. The unborn was distressed, she couldn’t get out. Doctors recommended a Caesarian. We followed the advice of the experts. Suddenly there were loud alarms going off. Not like the ones which had gone off occasionally until now, these were proper emergency alarm sirens, which promptly gathered a small army of doctors and nurses. The unborn’s heartbeat was dropping dangerously low. I attribute my bald patch, at least partly, to those five to ten minutes of pure existential fear. If there’d been a way for me to throw myself in front of the bus for her, or step between her and an attacking bear, I would have, but alas I sat, feigning stoicism and calm, holding my wife’s hand, afraid that if I caved in now I would unravel to the point of total deconstruction. The doctors worked their magic and our daughter came into the world not too long afterwards, a healthy little miracle.
The premiere performance births the Act onto the stage. It has arms, legs, and a head. Hopefully, it has a heart that beats and lungs that breathe. But the act is still very much unfinished. It is like a newborn infant. It does not know itself. It knows nothing of its sex or gender. It can’t properly focus its eyes and major parts of its body and brain are yet to develop. Some, like the frontal lobes, arguably the part of our brain that’s most unique to human beings, won’t be finished until twenty-one years later.
The only thing which a newborn baby can be relied upon to do is suck. A baby placed on her mother’s abdomen soon after birth will, if given the opportunity, seek out a nipple, latch on, and suckle, all on its own.
I experienced this intimate miracle when I held my daughter for the first hour after birth. My wife was having her Caesarean incision sutured back up. My daughter, born only minutes before, rested on my naked chest. After about half an hour she stirred and then began to move. Instinctually she knew there was food somewhere. She obviously hadn’t quite worked out that I was her dad and that dads are sorely lacking in the lactation department. She pushed her head along my chest, using arms, legs, body and head to inch herself towards my nipple. Arriving and finding it pierced with a large stick she quickly realised it was not a viable food source. What an emotional crush that was for me. I could so clearly see what she wanted, yet I could not provide. Like the trooper she is, she fought gravity, lifting her tiny head, turned around and clawed her way to my other nipple. This was an epic task and achievement for my tiny, size 00000, quintuple zero, sized baby girl weighing in at just over two kilos.
I will not pursue the “babies suck” metaphor far, it will suffice to say that, in hindsight, your first performance is rarely your best. BUT, first performances are the birth, and that makes it special. The birth of an Act can feel tremendous, it can blow people away, not because it’s polished, well-formed and executed, but because the life force experienced at birth is explosive, like a supernova. In a supernova a star explodes, temporarily becoming the brightest star in the sky, it burns most of its mass, then leaving a contracting core of the star. This is where you start with your second and third performances.
Like newborn human beings, newborn Acts are fragile. Your act has so much to learn. It doesn’t know how to walk or run. It can’t even sit.
From here the Act grows. Each performance is like another day in its life. The time measurements of development from one show to the next, or season to season, are of course not exact equivalents of days, weeks, or years. There is, though, a definite progression of development which happens as the performance count goes up. After each performance, after each season of shows, further stages of development are reached. The act grows up. It learns to sit, walk, run, and eventually to dance. It learns bit by bit who it is and who its friends are, which audiences connect with it. How it needs to be altered and tweaked to win over those who are more judging.
Stages of Development
The different stages of development have their own charm. The naiveté and open exploration of the early stages are endearing and exciting. Watching the first few performances, an audience and sometimes even the performer might breathe a sigh of relief when the act successfully concludes. There might be moments when Showman and Crowd both doubt it will end well. This feeling is very different to the more relaxed performance of someone who really knows their Act’s ins and outs. This displays a beauty. After a hundred successful shows the performer’s confidence shines through. The audience relaxes, even if there is a moment of nervousness when a trick fails, you get the feeling like it will not become embarrassing and that it will conclude perfectly. You might even suspect the performer failed on purpose just to show you how hard it was. Finally, there are those Acts and those performers who radiate something more than their act. You watch their performance and you get the feeling your viewing experience was transcendent. You get the feeling you could watch this person do anything, their effortlessness seems to point to deeper understanding. By this stage, the Act will have been performed thousands of times and you are watching a real master. A flow and an essence is revealed to the Crowd through the performer’s complete grasp of the essence of their Act.
When working with people on creating Acts I say you don’t know your Act’s full potential until you have done a hundred shows. This number quite often scares newbies. If you only perform a show here and there, street shows only on the weekends, or the odd cabaret spot, then the prospect that you won’t know your Act until you have been performing it for a year, seems daunting and often unbelievable. Yet, again and again, I get the feedback from them as they reach their, roughly, 30th, 50th, and 100th performance, that they have discovered things that have become apparent through the repetitions. Things one can only discover and learn when the Act has become second nature. New ways of understanding the Act as a whole, how each joke, element and skill connects and interacts.
Perform in Full Awareness
As you perform your Act again and again the shows run away like wild horses over the hills. Be aware that each performance is a potential for educating your Act. Tools like the rules of natural selection we looked at last month, can aid your Act’s education. Like any child, your Act needs schooling, nurturing stimulation of head, heart and hands. This will improve your Act’s chances of growing up to be a healthy, happy, and well considered Act.
We birth our Act, making us its parent, but we are also its teacher. As a parent, we love and protect our young. As teachers we guide, point, and direct them on their Way to fully formed and free individuals. We can call in help through dance choreographers, comedy consultants, and masters of skill development, but, at the end of the day, you are your Acts teacher. Guide it, love it, and nurture it, and it can grow up to take care of you. Your Act can make you rich. Not just in monetary ways. Viewed in the right Way, your Act can become a beautiful, almost ceremonial, tool for self-development and exploration. Like you taught it, it can teach you. Through your creation, you can find yourself, the world, and your place in it.
I sit in a pillow fort in my daughter’s bunk bed reading her the Neverending Story and she asks me to move over so she can lie on my arm and snuggle in closer. I move over and as I settle into my new spot and she pushes against me, so she can see the pages of the big red hardcover book, I am fully aware that she was right. My place was a little more to the left, so there was room for her. She knew. She told me and I listened. I already look forward to my next lesson.
I hope to see you all along the Way
Captain Frodo
Master Showman, dad, husband.
Currently performing in Opium at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas.
(And Carnival Cinema Co-Founder)
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