Ugh! Telemarketing

I have a new reason to not answer my phone when I see one of those unfamiliar long-distance numbers on the display. I’m sure we all dislike having our lives interrupted by the call, trying to sell us something that we probably don’t need. How about the now-too-common proactive customer service call — you are already our customer, but how much better could your service be if only you bundled a bunch of services together?

My Dad has his way of dealing with those calls. Every call a screened call, unless he happens to be next to the phone and it’s a number he recognizes. It gets easier over time to resist the urge to answer that ring, I suppose, but I’m someone who only recently stopped rushing dripping from the shower to answer the insistent ring of my phone, so that urge runs deeply in me.

My strategy has been relatively simple and two-pronged. First, an unlisted number. That eliminates the unsophisticated random calls working from lists. Second, I have registered my numbers (home and mobile) on the federal “do not call” list (Canada • USA), so there are negative consequences for telemarketers calling me if I don’t already have a relationship with them or if they don’t fit into the various exceptions (notably charities, not bound by this list).

The gaping hole in my strategy is not so much what it is for my Dad. He gets TONS of calls from charities, which I avoid by giving largely to organizations I know really well that will not trade their lists with others. I’m also armed with my answer to those requests that generally frightens them away: “I give most of my money to AIDS charities because I have it.” That really shuts them up. No, my strategy fails more on the people I have business relations with. Telecommunications and TV: everyone wants to be my sole supplier, while I resist that for the simple reason that I don’t want everything to fail at once! (I deliberately got my mobile phone from a different company when I was having trouble with my home phone line.)

So what’s my new reason to not answer the phone when an apparent telemarketing call is incoming? It’s me. I don’t like what I turn into on the phone with these people. I might be in a relatively good mood, but the call transforms me into a short-tempered rude person who interrupts and eventually hangs up when the poor underpaid telemarketing person fails to depart from the script to answer my “get to the point” questions.

I’m writing this because it just happened and I’m not feeling very proud of my behaviour. I don’t see any prospect of becoming any more tolerant, so I think I’ll just have to avoid answering from now on.

Cartooning for Capitalism

It’s a sad state of affairs when the demise of a once-major American city is laid at the feet of the wrong people. If Detroit is seeking bankruptcy protection, why is no finger of blame pointing at the companies which have shipped jobs to places where labour is less protected, fueled calls for lower taxes, and taken big bail-outs from government when their own decisions have driven their businesses downward, all the while compensating their executives at a level that allows them to earn in the first few hours of a new year the equivalent of what they pay their workers for the whole year?

There may be some level of blame to be reserved for politicians who seem to cave so easily to those corporate interests, but the unions trying to establish and protect a reasonable level of income and other essential benefits for those creating the value? I can’t accept that.

That editorial cartoonists, likely working for major corporate interests themselves, should blame those who will most suffer the consequences of a dying city while the company skips off to earn huge returns on investments for its wealthy shareholders by lowering labour standards and evading taxes, is not so much unexpected as it is disappointing. Shame on them.

PR12E02 Can’t a Model Catch a Break?

I’m getting a late start at my coverage of this season of Project Runway (not that I have written about any of the other seasons), but I wanted to see if I could write something that would complement the coverage I read voraciously on the blog I Should Be Laughing. His post on this particular episode here. Let’s see if I have something else to offer…

We started this week’s episode with the delivery of millions of dollars’ worth of jewelry in an armored car with armed security guards. You just knew that was going to impress Timothy (Mr. Sustainable Designer), and all went as predicted (not impressed by money or jewels). While I tend to agree with him on that particular point, he might be in the wrong line of work if he thinks he can be a top designer and continue eschewing those things. Maybe they are keeping him around for the entertainment value alone?

More ranting on Timothy. It was quite funny to see that when the designers chose their models for the week Timothy got last pick. This allowed someone else to choose Timothy’s model from last week, and she seemed relieved to not be facing another trip to the runway without makeup, hair…or shoes! Her relief may have been misplaced, though, as we shall see later. Timothy’s thinking about makeup seems to have changed this week, based on the very convincing affirmation of the l’Oréal guy that “l’Oréal is wonderful with sustainability.” Who needs more evidence than that? Not Timothy. Hair products, however, will have to wait for next week, I suppose.

We had some fin with Sandro this week. English is not his first language, as we can all tell from the accent and the word choices, and that leads to some funny expressions as he tries to communicate. I particularly loved “Does anybody have a pin? I need to sew my hookers.” I believe he was talking about hook fasteners, but I did laugh out loud. Not so cool, however, was the snarky “Speak proper English” from Ken when he and Sandro were having a verbal fight in the sewing room. Sandro does seem to be on the verge of a breakdown, flitting between anger and tears at the drop of a … hooker … so I’m a bit worried about how that will play out. I like how he hasn’t really bothered to learn everyone’s name, though, as exemplified in his calling out to Alexander while in line at Mood: “Hey, Red Hair….”.  Too funny.

Oh, one more Sandro thing. A horrible leopard print shirt he was wearing on sewing day. Not what you think, but the print depiction of a leopard hide stretched out for drying, or whatever one does with hides. Okay, two things. His pants on runway day were horrible: too high and beltless at the top. I’m expecting a lot more tacky coming from him, until he explodes and storms off, alternately shouting and crying as he walks into traffic outside the hotel or the work space.

Favourite critique lines of the week:

• Tim to Dom: “You don’t want her to look like a gold-digging floosie.”
• Tim to Timothy: “One hot mess. It has ticket home written all over it.”
• Zac to Sandro: “…it goes a little trashy.” (Michael Kors he isn't: MK would have had a lot more amusing things to say.)
• Still on Sandro’s creation, a sentence begin by Nina and completed by guest judge Eric Daman: “It walks the line between…” “…stripper and chic.”

So back to our unfortunate model. Last week, Timothy sent her down the runway in a dress he had “textured” by burning the nylon with a lighter (a very sustainable process, I’m sure), no makeup, no hair products and no shoes. He, however, wore some sparkly high heels for the occasion, which is just unkind toward his model! This week, she had the great fortune of having been chosen by Helen, who spent so much time offering unsolicited advice to her co-contestants that she ran out of time to finish her own look. Helen learned how not to do cups on a gown, which she had never done before, so a one-day competition would be a good time to learn, right? And her special technique on the sides ended up looking like “hairy hips” (as one judge put it), with some unintentional ruching on the back (Helen’s own words).

The so-called anonymity of the runway show was a little compromised when Helen burst into tears at the arrival of her model, causing an interruption while Heidi sent Tim over to calm her down. So our lucky model went from her accident victim look of week one with Timothy to a gown with deflated boobs, hairy hips and riding up in the back with Helen. She must be thinking that the model prize is a bit out of reach for her.

Maudit Blip de m****!

(This article is also published in English on PositiveLite.com here)

Lors de mon plus récent rendez-vous trimestriel chez le médecin, l’infirmière a commencé en me posant des questions inquiétantes. Est-ce que j’ai arrêté de prendre mes médicaments? Avais-je manqué plusieurs doses? Après ces deux questions, j’avais des questions à poser à elle : est-ce que ça signifie que j’ai une charge virale détectable, et qu’est-ce que c’est?

La réponse à ma question impertinente (d’habitude, on attend le médecin avant de discuter des résultats de mes tests) a rétablit ma sérénité, ou presque. La charge virale détectable que j’avais était de 125. Le test que j’ai pris toute de suite après va nous dire si c’était un « blip » quand je vais téléphoner après les trois semaines d’attente pour le résultat. Comme la terminologie ne va pas être familière pour tout le monde qui va lire ce billet, je pensais que ce serait intéressant d’explorer le sujet ici.

Sensibilité du test

Quand on discute le résultat d’un test de charge virale, il est important de le mettre dans le contexte du degré de sensibilité du test. Au début de mon traitement, les laboratoires au Québec utilisaient des tests sensibles jusqu’à 500 copies du virus par millilitre de sang. Tout résultat inférieur à ce niveau était « indétectable » par le test. Que cette désignation ne signifiait pas une charge virale de zéro a toujours été souligné par la manière dont le laboratoire me communiquait le résultat. Pour eux, « indétectable » était « 499 » — un rappel pour moi qu’il était toujours possible que le virus soit présent, et peut-être juste au-dessous du seuil de détectabilité. Impossible à mesurer, en effet.

En mi-1999, le Québec a adopté des tests de charge virale sensibles jusqu’à 50 copies par millilitre. Ce changement a été accompagné d’une campagne d’information pour les patients pour expliquer que les premiers résultats des nouveaux tests n’étaient pas nécessairement comparables à ceux des anciens. Mes résultats d’indétectabilité étaient maintenant marqués « 49 » comme vous auriez pu deviner. Ensuite, en 2010 et sans préavis, nous avons passé aux tests sensibles jusqu’à 40 copies par millilitre (indétectable = 39). Il paraît que le changement de 50 à 40 ne justifiait pas de grosses explications.

Suivre les résultats

J’ai démontré dans le passé ma faiblesse pour les chiffres traduites en graphiques (un vrai « geek » moi). Ceci me permet de les suivre mieux de de mieux apprécier les tendances sur le long terme. Les résultats de charge virale se suivent sur une échelle logarithmique, où chaque étape vaut dix fois l’étape précédente, comme vous allez remarquer de la graphique reproduite ici. Quand on la regarde, on voit clairement quatre des cinq « blips » que j’ai eu au cours des quinze dernières années (en effet, quinze ans et demi!). Le moins perceptible était celui d’un « 40 » quand indétectable était 39, et celui-là aurait pu être une erreur de rapport par quelqu’un moins habitué à la façon de faire du laboratoire.

Vus dans le contexte de l’ensemble de mes résultats, mes « blips » ne semblent pas être si dramatiques. Nous avons toujours fait un autre test toute de suite après un résultat détectable, et ces tests de suivi sont toujours revenus indétectable, me permettant de respirer normalement. La première fois que j’ai eu un « blip » j’ai presque paniqué, certain que ça signalait le début du développement de résistance et un chemin vers des médicaments de sauvetage qui seraient plus difficiles à prendre, et ensuite la mort en peu de temps. Une chance que je ne m’adonne pas au drame, non?

La deuxième fois, le « blip » était mon plus grand et dans le contexte d’un test sensible jusqu’à 50 copies par millilitre 1169 me semblait assez important. Un autre anomalie, je suis revenu à indétectable. Celui de 187? Rien du tout. Je suis devenu assez blasé par rapport à ma capacité de revenir à l’indétectabilité et j’avais beaucoup de confiance en moi et mon record d’adhérence. Comme j’ai dit, le 40 était si probablement une erreur de rapport que nous n’avons même pas fait un test de suivi.

Et maintenant 125. J’ai confiance que celui-ci sera aussi un « blip » et non pas l’indicateur d’un échec de traitement, mais nous verrons avec le résultat du test de suivi. Je dors tranquillement en attendant.

Qu’est-ce que ça veut dire?

Il y a plusieurs possibles interprétations pour une augmentation ou un « blip » dans la charge virale. Ça peut indiquer le début de résistance qui mènerait à un échec de traitement, mais il faut avoir la patience d’attendre pour voir le résultat dans son contexte de résultats avant et après. Si l’augmentation est très marquée, il y aurait de quoi à vous inquiéter, mais même là les choix de traitements aujourd’hui sont multiples et l’indétectabilité n’est pas nécessairement plus loin qu’un petit changement de médicaments.

Aux niveaux assez bas, j’ai toujours compris que c’était soit la manifestation des variations quotidiennes dans la charge virale, soit l’imprécision des mesures laboratoires ou des erreurs. Dans le cas des variations, il est toujours utile d’avoir un rappel de temps en temps que la charge virale peut varier dû à un nombre de facteurs, dont l’adhérence et d’autres infections, et le « blip » sert d’appel à la vigilance pour ces facteurs. Dans le cas d’imprécision ou d’erreurs de laboratoire, il est également utile de se faire rappeler que notre science n’est pas aussi précise ou facile à interpréter que l’on peut penser si on écoute trop de télévision (en particulier les émissions impliquant des sciences forensiques).

Est-ce que ça veut dire que j’étais plus infectieux à ces moments? Oui, légèrement, mais cela mérite un peu de contexte aussi. Je n’était pas très heureux de la décision récente de notre Cour suprême sur la criminalisation de la non-divulgation du statut sérologique, mais leur standard de charge virale basse, permettant la non-divulgation avec utilisation du condom, dépasse le plus grand de mes « blips ». La Cour suprême a identifié le niveau de 1500 copies par millilitre comme étant une charge virale basse, et plusieurs croient que cette décision était trop conservatrice.

Donc, nous verrons ce qui va me dire mon test de suivi (je vais partager le résultat dans les commentaires). En attendant, je tiens à assurer mon adhérence avec une vigueur renouvelée.

Way Way Entertaining

There’s nothing quite like a sullen, introverted teen to add life to a movie. Or depth to an acting career, perhaps? All you have to do is maintain a lifeless expression, mumble briefly in response to comments that are directed your way and go off on your own a lot. On the other hand, there is nothing quite as uplifting as seeing such a sullen, introverted teen come into his own, if only a little, and start to be a part of something.

This is that movie. Parents divorcing, the boy gets dragged along on a summer vacation away from his familiar setting, to what one of the other characters described as “Spring Break for Adults”, a New England beach town. It didn’t help that they were going to the summer place of his mother’s new boyfriend, played like a total dick by Steve Carell.

From telling him he was a “3” (on a scale of 10) on the trip there to making him the only one to have to wear a lifejacket on an outing on a friend’s boat, Carell’s character thoroughly alienates our sullen teen. It doesn’t help when the teen sees him in compromising situations with the wife of the boat friend (i.e. cheating on his mother).

One little thing that I will have to learn to get past is my identification of Toni Collette with her “United States of Tara” character. I kept expecting her personality to change, especially during moments of stress! I know that’s not fair, but it will only wear off after I get to see her in more and varied roles. In this role, I don’t particularly like her character until she finally sides with her son.

There’s a way out and a way forward, however. Finding a little girl’s bike in the garage, our teen rides forth to explore and discovers the local waterpark. It’s the kind of place that you spend all your time at when the beach is not an option for you, and the staff is as laid back and welcoming as you would want them to be.

Sam Rockwell’s character, owner of the waterpark, is a smooth operator and probably sees his own awkward youth in our teen. Or he sees any number of awkward teens who frequent his waterpark day in and day out through the summer. Whatever his motivation, he makes a place for our teen to be a part of something, and you can see the positive effect on him. More confident, even happier, he’s almost able to talk to the neighbour girl in a way that stimulates her to continue the conversation. But, like I said, it is always a joy to watch an outcast find his place and blossom.

I won’t spoil the ending so much as I will describe a couple of my favourite parts. First, the relationship between neighbour Allison Janney and her lazy-eyed son River Alexander. Janney plays the kind of brassy party girl of a certain age that I would normally not warm to, but some exchanges with her son on the subject of where he is looking (eyes pointing in different directions making that difficult to discern) are laugh-out-loud funny.

The other one is the warmth of Sam Rockwell’s character. It helps that he’s easy on the eyes, but his character shows warmth and friendliness for all kinds of misfits — pretty and not — and he has a couple of serious moments that will make you want to cry. Intervening between Steve Carell and Liam James (have I gone on this long without mentioning the name of the actor playing the sullen teen?) is one of the best of those moments.

It isn’t the film of the century for sure, and the plot might be somewhat predictable (when you’re focused on a sullen teen, there are pretty much only two ways to go with it, and this was billed as a comedy, not a tragedy), but it was good fun to watch. Even in my freshly rain-soaked state, despite the odd too-loud laughing of the guy down front (sometimes he laughed for no apparent reason) and in the face of the menacing thunder outside that we could hear all the way into our cinema. Go see it.

Fury – comma - Nature’s

I wasn’t sure that I was going to make it to the cinema this week, let alone be able to sit through a film and go out for a bite to eat afterward. Not a health problem, but a weather incident! I had two blocks to walk from the bus I took to get to the cinema, but in that two blocks a storm unleashed the totality of its fury on me (and on others around me, I suppose, but who has time to care about others in a personal disaster?!). I had an umbrella, and I managed to keep it under control for the most part (only one inside-out incident and quickly reversed), but you wouldn’t have known it if you saw me arrive at my destination.

In short, the storm threw rain at me from the front almost horizontally for the first part of my journey and then balanced itself with some frontal horizontal rain for the last bit. Inside, I was able to squeeze excess water from the hem of my lengthening-by-the-minute t-shirt several times, without seeming to have an impact on the amount of water I was carry around with me.

It’s surprising how that much water made me look like Jake Gyllenhaal, no? Could I see a movie in such a state? The account I have written of the film (next post) should provide your answer. Just underlining the great personal sacrifice I went through to share my silly thoughts on current movies with you (#firstworldproblems).

But just a couple more weather notes before I move to the next post focused on the film: one of my friends arrived by car and told us that he watched the temperature drop by almost 15° C on his car’s external thermometer in the space of a few minutes. We also continued to hear the massive claps of thunder throughout the film inside the cinema — yikes!

I see from the weather reports that we only got about 22 mm of rain from the storm, but I can tell you exactly where it seems to have landed. I saw that place in the mirror this morning!

Enough whining…back to our regular programming…

L’homme à tout faire

It was a nice way to end the Festival Montréal Complètement Cirque for us, with the multi-talented David Dimitri and his show L’homme cirque (the Circus Man). The guy has very good comedic timing and interacts well with the crowd, especially the kids but without forgetting about the adults.

The show itself ran through a lot of disciplines — or simulations of disciplines — including trick riding (the horse was on wheels), the teeterboard (weight falling on one end propels the acrobat skyward), tightrope walking, musical instrument-playing (accordion AND trumpet!) and being shot out of a cannon, with a healthy dose of clowning throughout. You can only imagine what came out the other end of the “horse” when he tweaked its ear! To keep the image of the man who does it all on his own, he made frequent trips to a little control box to press a button to start the music for the next segment.

I might have been entertained by the content of the show, but I was even more amused by the interactions with the crowd. He shot a couple of glances at the crying baby to the right of us (her poor parents ended up leaving of their own volition when she wouldn’t stop crying), but he also had another girl come out to feed imaginary oats to the “horse” and enlisted (or tried to enlist) a series of people to pass him a rope. The first gentleman missed his outstretched hand, the second, a little shy boy, just sat and stared at him and finally the little girl further over succeeded. He then shot a derisive glance at the man who had failed, much to our amusement. He also went back to the shy boy once or twice, to get the same inert response.

After shooting himself out of the cannon he attempted a clever move to toss his slipper into the cannon behind him and missed! The “Awwww!” of the crowd was met with a challenge to come out and try it. Shy boy? No response. Another boy shouted out “Me!” and was invited out to try. He got it on the second attempt and the crowd went wild.

The grand finale was a tightrope walk that took him through a “door” in the roof of the tent and all the way over to a tower outside. He whipped out a camera when he got to the tower and waved us all into position so that we could be the background of his selfie. Very entertaining.

This video of the act is from another event, but it was the best choice to give you a good idea of the variety of the show:

Yesssss…S!

We’re on a roll now, as we near the end of the Festival Montréal Complètement Cirque http://montrealcompletementcirque.com/. Australia’s C!RCA http://circa.org.au/, whose shows we have so appreciated in the past, brought us “S” at the Théatre du Nouveau Monde, and we all lapped it up!

Something that has always been wonderful about C!RCA is their ability to blur the lines between “carriers” and “flyers” — you can picture the distinction between those who ride and are tossed about and those who are ridden and do the tossing. This blurring extends to the roles taken by men and women, too, as everyone, or almost everyone, seems to have a chance in each of those roles.

There were some extremely beautiful elements of the show, like the juxtaposition of colours that really made the hoops glow and blur as they were manipulated, the black silks on a black background that made them not so much disappear as blend into the show in different ways.

Let’s talk about those silks a bit. One made an entrance as wrapping around one of the performers, who didn’t emerge until after the silk had been attached to the cable and elevated, and the performer inside climbed inside it, entirely hidden from our view, but obviously moving upward within the silk. Another was seized and spun by a performer who never left the ground, but kept rotating and moving like a tornado skipping around in a tight circle. I liked that we didn’t see a lot of the “traditional” type silk stunts (wrap myself in it and spin my way earthward), but saw some new things, including dropping from the silks to be caught by others below.
 

It was a show of non-stop action, too. Not a performer doing something while the others caught their breath elsewhere, but almost everyone on the go for the entire hour and a half. Must be exhausting! And with all of that, touches of humour and personality that made us believe that they were truly enjoying themselves and that they operate very smoothly as a group. Even the towelling down of some of the performers by others in the midst of the show was smoothly integrated and made us giggle.

One of the funniest moments involved some props. Bowls of water that were carefully carried in, balanced on various people’s heads, arms, hands, backs, even as they executed some very balance-defying moves. At one point, each of them balanced his or her bowl of water in various ways on one guy. As he struggled to hold his position and keep the bowls and their water in balance, the rest of them cavorted behind him in the joy of their liberation from the responsibility and in a way mocking his burden.

No short video can really capture the magic, but this one makes a good stab at it:



This is the third C!RCA show we have seen in Montréal, if I am not mistaken. I hope the message they got at the end of this performance will ensure that every one of their shows comes here. I’ll be first in line to buy my ticket.

Show and Tell

The other day I was out with some friends, taking in a hipster marching band at the Montréal Jazz Festival, when one of my friends asked me about a photo I had posted of my meds. Do I really take that many pills every day? How many, exactly? And what are they?

When I have had that experience before, it was because my niece was studying to be a pharmacist assistant and had an interest in seeing them. What usually happens is that people look away, or feel like they are intruding on something private and avoid the topic or leave the room. Now I’m not one to shy away from the show and tell, so I usually put it all out there — take my bag of pill bottles out to refill my doses for the next day when I’m on vacation, or even leave them all sitting out on the desk in a hotel room.

Now I’m not doing this out of carelessness or a lack of concern for the sensitive feelings of others. Well, maybe that last one. I like to show and talk about my meds precisely because it seems so taboo. I’m not ashamed of them; they are a fact of my life. I’m only too happy to talk about what they do (good and bad) and what they mean for my life. I think that’s a part of telling a realistic story about what it is like to live with HIV now, to encourage solidarity and maybe motivate some of our HIV-negative friends to avoid getting infected.

We know that fear campaigns don’t work anymore, at least not over the longer term: it isn’t credible to show people dying of AIDS when so few of us in our particular context are. At the same time, waves of pharmaceutical advertising are extolling the virtues of just how simple HIV treatment is now. I can’t disagree that it is possible to have a fairly simple treatment and that is excellent news for many, but it isn’t the whole story. Even at one pill a day, many of our HIV-negative friends can’t imagine having to take that every day, forever.

Our friends and families used to be much more aware of HIV treatment in the bad old days. You couldn’t miss the AZT overdosing schedule or the sounds of those ubiquitous med alarms that the pharmacists used to make available to us. Progress in treatment has meant retreat in awareness about treatment by those not taking it. And that contributes to a generalized lack of awareness about what it’s really like to have HIV now: not the same disaster it used to be, at least on the treatment front, but not necessarily a cake-walk either.

I understand wanting to minimize the impact of HIV in your own life — I feel that way, too. In fact, I can pretty much work my way through all the pill bottles to set out my dose for the next day in under a minute. The difference is that I am eager to slow it down and add a narrative in order to promote more HIV awareness that jibes with today’s realities.

My round-up of 17 daily pills (pictured):
• 6 for HIV
• 4 for the symptoms of arthritis (arthritis treatment itself is immune-suppressive)
• 3 for hypertension
• 1 for acid reflux
• 3 self-inflicted ones: a vitamin and 2 glucosamine/chondroitin

Doigts Croisés

Back on track! What a lovely and refreshing experience we had at the Circus tonight! Croisé is the result of the workshop on research and creation offered by the National Circus School to its graduates. The creator of the piece and the artists who brought it to the stage for the first time in October 2012 — now known collectively as Cirque Céans — are running with it in the context of the Festival Montréal Complètement Cirque. We are very glad they are!

This show also had a “soft start”…players on stage and doing things as we arrived to take our seats. We might have been nervous after the experience of the day before, but there is something reassuring about a stark and spare stage when you are expecting people to take up space there doing athletic/artistic things all over it. Maybe I have a very conventional perspective on avant-garde when I read that into a spare, black set. I just find it comforting.

Everything we look for in a circus was there. Maybe not a whole lot of danger, but I think I need to flesh out my circus requirements list beyond “danger” and “beauty” to include athleticism, grace, whimsy and humour. Needless to say, a whole lot of creativity goes into tying all of those elements together.

Some of the creativity that we look for is innovation in the use of the standard equipment, or the use of non-standard equipment in the course of the show. This show had those things in spades: seatless high chairs that became little cages, a tippable freestanding doorway that served as a bar for various acrobatics, more seatless chairs as replacements for aerial rings. One of my favourites: long metal poles that looked like giant pick-up sticks and served as delimiters of space, stepping stones and uneven bars for yet more acrobatics.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the juggling of rings and then balls in very entertaining forms. The guy juggling the rings had a couple of misses, but recovered very well indeed, which I always appreciate. The ball juggler was simply brilliant, and it certainly didn’t hurt that he is quite beautiful and a lovely dancer too.

Most of all, let me heap my last bits of praise on the interactions between the artists (totally NOT a disjointed series of solos here) and the connections that wove the various portions of the show together. We didn’t interrupt the show with smatterings of applause for one spectacular feat or another, but it was because they were so well integrated that it didn’t seem appropriate to applaud one thing as the other was already underway. That lack of interruption also made for a smoother show.

The video only shows a tiny part of Croisé, and one of the slower, dancier parts. A shame about the festival music that is all over all the videos, as it doesn’t let you get a good sense of the atmosphere of the show itself, but it’s what we have, so here it is!



If we arrived with our fingers crossed that the show would be a good one, we left with our hands stinging a bit from the applause we offered at the end. Oh, and smiles on our faces. Beautiful.

Hot comme l’hiver

It had to happen eventually. The third of circus experiences left us feeling like we had strayed away from the circus festival and into a parallel zone with experimental theatre on the bill. My friend went so far as to call it this year’s Ro-Pu (see my roundup from last year’s festival for that Finnish winner).

It might be a little mean to drag them through the mud again this year, only to make a point about someone else. After all, what did they do to deserve this? Oh yeah. Horizontal rope tricks…clinging to a rope…on the floor. At least Voyage d’hiver went vertical every now and then, I’ll give them that.

I have speculated in the past that what seems to make circus interesting, at least to me, is the element of danger, and I might also add grace and beauty to that list. There was a bit of danger here that the company would depart from their soundtrack and that seems to have happened a couple of times (to my ears, anyway). The guy “playing” the whistling kettles almost had me convinced that he was manipulating the sound of the escaping steam with those tiny spoons and the lifting of the kettles. The second pass at that, however, his timing was a bit off and it became clear that it was all soundtrack.

The other slightly off element was a song near the end. Against a very spare background, I found myself very focused on the face and lips of the singer, soon exposed as a lip-syncher, albeit a very good one. It only takes a couple of off-expressions to expose the act, and the focusing of our attention so utterly didn’t help conceal it.

There was some darned wacky stuff that I would qualify as experimental theatre rather than circus. A rolling start (players in action even as the audience members made their way to their seats), nutty animal parts as costumes, a gathering of voyeuristic animals around the woman bathing in a tub of water, props aplenty, songs and speaking parts. Yes, a little acrobatics thrown in, but this was really not enough of a focus and there was little interaction around those parts. They seemed almost gratuitous. But hey, I’m no expert, as I always say.

A taste? You sure?

Face Whatever Direction You Want!

Four men and a mat, with seating on all four sides. That’s what it took to keep us entertained this evening in the second of our six shows at the Festival Montréal Complètement Cirque. And so far, we are two wins for two.

This form of circus is often called “hand to hand” and this show gave us that, plus hand to shoulder, foot to ankle and everything in between. The four artists took us through a range of themes that looked like a lot of children’s games that we remember from our own youths — follow the leader, blind man’s bluff, red rover — all with their own circus twists, of course. There was also a lot of one-upmanship that you might expect with a bunch of boys playing together.

What I really like about this show and how the artists explain it in the program is that it is never about an individual, always about the individual interacting with others. Each of the series of hugs became a struggle for supremacy, culminating in the very amusing attempt of one to kiss the other on the mouth as they struggles, locked in each other’s’ embrace. If you were trying to find fault, you might characterize the second guy’s resistance as homophobic, but I’m not going to see that here: it was a funny tussle and, in the end, there was a big kiss on the lips, just the sort of thing a boy might do to win such a struggle.

Without apparatus, apart from the mat, it is amazing that we still got those moments of danger that so characterize the best of circus acts. We are drawn in with the artists as they try to form and arch and then broaden its base as much as possible. And then they try and try again, and we are all still with them in their effort. We marvel at the game of carefully crawling over the others to move forward, only to be crawled over in turn, and we gasp and applaud at the leaps from one artist’s back to another’s, with increasing distances to cover.

A little taste?



This show is playing at the Gare Dalhousie for two more nights (7 and 8 July) and then, according to the company’s website, in November in Annemasse, France. If you’re in Montréal, run out to see them while you can, and sit right up front for the best views.

Smashing!

You probably have to be a fan of a certain brand of British humour to love this one, so it’s lucky that this appealed both to my inner lover of chaos and my inner lover of contrast (who knew I had so many inner lovers?!). I know I have at least one friend who is likely to review this who didn’t like it at all, but I laughed my head off.

Some of the cast members get abused. In particular the Royal Gala apples that were sourced locally for the run of this show (the festival’s Facebook page announced the “casting” of 425 Royal Gala apples of a certain size. Few of those used in the show I watched could have emerged unscathed.

But let’s start at the beginning. A line of relatively well-dressed individuals enters and begins some very stylized juggling — yes, of apples — as they move across the stage to some rather lovely music. Somehow, each of them is able to show some individuality, despite the fact that they are doing the same moves, and in unison. This follows through various permutations and combinations before things start to degenerate.

You could say that the two women in the group are terribly taken advantage of in a most sexist way (in the video below you’ll see a snippet of them crawling in front of the seated men, who are juggling apples on them, done in time to “Stand by Your Man”), but you might also see them playing leading roles and getting their own licks in on the men as they insert various slaps into their own juggling.

More props are introduced: various pieces of china like teacups, saucers, plates and even teapots. This really marks the beginning of the descent into chaos, as even the setting up of the dishes on the floor becomes a competition marked by the frantic outdoing of one another. Then there are some attempts to juggle the dishes that don’t end well, often because of the interventions of others. Apples meet similarly gruesome ends in what can only be described as a terribly funny food fights starring apples and dishes and some very talented jugglers.

There was a bit of a hush when at a certain high point (or low point, depending on your attitude toward this type of humour) where there is pouring of liquid that I guess is supposed to be tea on one of the jugglers. Pandemonium ensues and almost everything that is unscathed gets scathed.

Then they snap out of it (there’s my contrast) and return to the opening tune and juggling procession, altered only by their trying to avoid walking on the broken china or slipping on the smashed apples. And yes, they are juggling apples in this part. I thought it was a brilliant demonstration of things getting completely out of hand and then being reined back in, but the little boy in me was, as I said earlier, laughing his puerile head off.

Here’s a taste of the show:



It’s playing at the lovely Théâtre Outremont on Bernard, which is well air-conditioned (an issue on a day like this) and beautiful. Before you take your children, however, you might want to hear about the two young boys walking ahead of us with their mother as we left. They were each tossing around an apple, bouncing their apples off each other and themselves and then, suddenly, they smashed them on the ground! So if you do take your children to see this, it might be a good idea to keep them away from the china for a while afterwards.