The Three Auditions: ENC, QUEBEC, and NECCA Pt. 2

THIS IS PART 2 of the "The Three Auditions..." post. The previous post is PART 1.
This post covers the Quebec audition, and the NECCA's PROTRACK audition.

This past Thursday, after a nice long week of training, classes, and life, Morgan, Trevor, Kirby and I packed Kirby's car, and started our 6 hour drive to Quebec. Morgan is an amazing handbalancer, and Trevor is a previous camper of mine from Smirkus, and now he's a pretty talented aerialist/contortion handbalancer. They are both in the higher level program at NECCA. Kirby is an ex-gymnast turned aerialist who's also in the Intensive program with me. The car ride was long, about three hours to the Canadian border, and three hours after the border to get to Quebec. We had long talks, and no awkward silences. YAY for fun people. Morgan was the Mom of the trip, and remembered to bring a "MAGIC BAG" (insert song and dance number) of goodies to keep us all from going hungry during a six hour car ride. Finally, we arrived in Quebec City at "Hotel Le Voyageur" where we would stay for one night. We all pretty quickly passed out, knowing that the next day would be long and exhausting.
The next morning, after showering and getting dressed, Trevor and I went down to the breakfast area to grab food for all four of us. The thing was, the hotel reserved the room for 2 so we got 2  continental breakfast tickets. This consisted of 2 bakery items (croissant, muffin) 2 beverages (a shot glass of orange juice, coffee), and a fruit (banana or apple). Now, if you wanted to upgrade to the "AMERICAN breakfast" however, you could eat as much as you want (wow, American's get a really bad rap). Between Trevor and I (for Morgan and Kirby as well), we managed to smuggle 3 croissants, a muffin, 3 bananas and an apple, 4 orange juices, and a bowl of cereal back to the room. I also smuggled a stack of Strawberry Jelly packs so that we could have PB&J since Morgan brought bread and peanut butter.
After showers, dressing, breakfast munching, we all packed our bags and got in the car to drive to L'ecole de Cirque Quebec for the big audition. The first thing you'll notice about the Quebec school after auditioning for the Montreal school is how much more personal it is. You are given a number like at ENC, but you are never referred to by your number, you are referred to by your name. You are guided around the school by friendly current students, they make sure to stick the more bilinguial students with the English speaking auditioners so that we don't get confused. I love it here so much.
So, we are all slowly congregated onto the main performance stage to continue warming up, and get a message from the president of the school and meet the rest of staff. They are happy that we are here, and excited to see what we can show them. After that, we are broken into 5 groups. Each group has 5 rotations to get to, unlike ENC, where you are broken into groups, but then go in order ANYWAY, so you're waiting for 4 hours.
The order of my group made me really happy. It was like perfectly created:

• Circus Techniques Evaluation
• Number Presentation
• LUNCH
• Strength
• Flexibility
• Dance

Circus Techniques Evaluation:

The way this portion of the day goes is probably the most "hectic" in that, everyone involved is going to different places in different orders for different reasons. Basically, you have an hour and a half to get to any area you want to be evaluated in that area's discipline. The areas offered are aerials, acrobatics, juggling, handbalance, tight wire, trampoline, hand2hand, (i think that's it). I went to aerials and juggling. The aerial evaluation is a really cool and also daunting evaluation. The audition goes as so: hang on bar by hands, tuck under bar, knees on bar, hang by knees (until the judge tells you to proceed), go up to sitting, pull up to stand, lower by arms to sit, slide to ankles, hang by ankles (until the judge tells you to proceed), hands on bar, legs down, pullover to front balance.

THAT'S ALL! It's all about your form. Obviously if you don't know what an ankle hang is, maybe aerial evaluation isn't for you, but really it's all about the control and form. If at any point they think you didn't do something as well as they want, they'll just say (in broken english, or french) "do that again please" with NO explanation of what to change. I only speak from an observation point of view on this, cause he didn't have me do anything again :) *brushes shoulders off*

Then, for the vertical apparatus section of the audition, he has you...*build up for suspense* CLIMB A ROPE once (and come down). That is IT. Once you climb the rope and have done the trapeze, he gives you the option to show 3 tricks you would like to show. I wanted to show three different TYPES of skills, because I would rather show him I'm not a one kind of trick pony. So I showed him my single toe hang (which I guess shows strength, and some pain tolerance), a front balance pop twist to ankles on trapeze (I didn't do the swinging beat twist to ankles, because the bar was wider than I've done the trick on and I didn't want to f- up in front of him), and then I did a no handed windmill on the rope. The no handed windmill was going well for the first few rotations, but the ropes there are the ropes I like, and the rope I've been using at NECCA is this evil synthetic demon rope, so the amount of wraps I needed was unanticipatedly different. I emergency turned it into a handed windmill so I didn't die. 

Thus ended the evaluation of most of my circus training.

I went to juggling too, and the juggling coach was really nice. I explained I don't consider myself a high level juggler, but I have many high level juggler friends, so I can pass pretty well, and catch some crazy tricks in the passing sequences, and I can throw some nice tricks in as well. He was very understanding, so after asking me to just do as many three ball tricks that I knew solo, he passed with me, and pretty much just threw some hard passing sequences at me. After a few warm-up fails and getting used to each other, I caught most of what he threw me, and he seemed at least entertained.

That brought me to the end of my techniques evaluation.

NUMBER PRESENTATION

This is the portion of your day where everyone in your group shows their 2 minute "act" to the judges. One thing I should interject is that Quebec has a RIGGER, who's only job is to do anything involving rigging. He is also available as a line puller for presentations. So in Quebec, I got to be pulled up during my act. Right now my act is doable with the hoop at about head height, except for the really cool stuff I created at the very beginning to get onto the hoop. For that, I need the bottom of the hoop to reach mid torso. So Jean-Sebastian, the rigger, came over and asked all the aerialists what they want rigged, how they want it to be rigged, and if they need to go up or down. When it became my turn to audition, I went up to the judges table to be interviewed quickly, while Jean-Sebastian rigged my hoop up. The interview was very short, and since I auditioned for them last year, they basically asked me "what has changed since you auditioned here last year?" which is a question I could answer in a book the size of Harry Potter 4. After my interview was over. I walked onstage, handed my ipod to the sound person, with the instruction of when to start it, walked over to my hoop, checked its placement, and walked over to the side of the stage. 

I took a breath, ran straight at my hoop, right before I reached it, I jumped off the ground, twisted in the air, and landed balancing myself by the small of my back on the hoop, as Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seak" started playing. My relatively new "jump to back balance" mount has its on days and its off days. This day was really good. I moved on with the choreography, and when it came time to spin, all I had to do was spin, and I left the floor. Most of the rest of my act just went like clockwork. However, at the very end, I did decide not to do the release move, because my hands had become to low on the circle of my hoop. But my back elbows went fine, even with the gigantic height of their pulley system (pulley systems tend to bounce, so tricks where you use circular momentum to get around the bar sometimes don't work as well because the momentum transfers to the pulley system and doesn't stay with you). I finished my act, my hoop was lowered, I unclipped my rigging, and thanked Jean-Sebastian, and left the stage. BIG breath of relief. 

Lunch

Once my act was over, I was relatively calm for the rest of the day. I can change portions of my act, and I can worry over tricks looking good and such, but I can't make any mental changes to my flexibility or strength. I just have to do the best representation of the strength and flexibility I've been training as possible, and be happy with that. 

Because of the jelly packs I lifted from the hotel, Morgan made us all PB&J sandwiches, and a small group of familiar and non familiar people gather around a cafeteria table to talk about where we came from, where we trained, how our day was going...

Strength

The time had come. I walked downstairs to begin my strength assessment. During this assessment, we would be evaluated on many things (most of them seemed focused on the waist up): pull ups, leg raises on the ladder, L sit, dips on parallel bars, a small obstacle course, and...a *surprise* (which most of us knew already). I was pleased with my pull ups (still at the elusive 9 reps, instead of a happy 10, but I fought to get to 10, and didn't just get done at 9. Leg raises were hilarious. In Montreal, they make you do leg raises until your feet smack the bar your hands are holding. In Quebec, they just need you to be 45degrees above parallel with the ground, which is a whole lot easier in comparison. I did way more than I had done leg raises before because not only did my arms get to be at actual shoulder width (unlike the NECCA ghetto ladder), but I didn't have to fight with my lack of amazing pike flexibility (which can help that last 45 degrees). The L-sit was a pretty much epic fail for me. My arms are not long people arms. They are short arms, and when we have had to do this at NECCA, we are allowed to place blocks under our hands to at least give us the distance, and then we have to get our legs up. Alas, no such blocks were available in Quebec, so I stayed up for what probably didn't amount to 20 seconds. Oh well. The parallel bar dips are something we don't really train anywhere down here, so those are pretty much raw for us NECCAteers. I did a respectable amount when comparing with the peers in my audition group. Nothing bomb-diggity, but respectable. Then came the silly obstacle course, which has become sillier since I had to do it last year. You have to do 5 v-ups, roll over to do 3 pushups, sideways bear walk across the mat, run across the floor to where the green ball is, pick up the green ball, run back across the floor and place the green ball on a step, and then climb a rope to the top (which is maybe 12 feet off the ground at most). Done and done.

The surprise, which was only surprising because I did this during the aerial evaluation last year, was us being led to the aerial balcony, and told to jump off the balcony into a flying trapeze net below. It wasn't as terrifying as last year, but I can't say that I've become immune to jumping off high things and landing in lower things since I last auditioned. Either way, I did it, and that was over.

Flexibility

This was a fun part of the day, we were given this beautiful warm little off room (remember this whole building is a renovated cathedral, so this room had the beautiful stained glass windows, I forget the name for it, but the ceilings had points to it, where the height arched up to house a chandelier. This was our pre-flexibility evaluation stretching room. Nice and cozy. When it became my turn (we were evaluated in groups of four), it was all very standard. Left split, right split, middle split, but then they asked to see our active flex leg lifts in front, and to the side (for people not in the know, active flex is the ability to use your strength and flexibility to be in poses without needing to pull/hold your body in that position. Then we did our pike stretch, straddle stretch, and bridges. We also had to do active flex with shoulders, like face down on the ground, arms above head, and lift them as high as you can.

I was really happy with all my flexibility, my Left split was all the way down that day, and my Right split decided it wanted to be lower than it ever has. I wasn't mad at it :P

Dance

Again, the order of the day was really great, because right after we exhausted muscles in strength, we got to show how flexible we were (without our muscles fighting any of the stretches), and then after getting all limber, we got to be evaluated in dance.

The first half of the class was what seemed to be a pretty standard ballet bar sequence, but the crazy French speaking ballet teacher wouldn't leave enough room in her speaking for the English translation to be uttered. Thank the lord I'm a visual learner. (Note to Deena: yes, the ballet terms are in french even in English ballet teaching, but what to do with them is usually done in a native tongue, so you can't laugh at my confusion). She didn't overly criticize me out of the group, so I can't really assess how I did other than, I didn't break my ankle, and I didn't get yelled at.

The second half of the dance portion was a more modern/jazzy sequence. We learned it, then did it in pairs, and then we were given an improv assignment: run, jump, fall and melt. GO! 

So basically we had to just create a phrase of movement inspired by run, jump, fall and melt. 

Oddity ensue.

So finally, the big day was done, exhaustions were had, emotions were felt. We had a quick wrap-up meeting with the staff that we met at the beginning of the day. It was good to here, especially the part where they said that they would LOVE to speak with anyone who doesn't get in about what they can improve on for next year. I think that's so good. It's like wandering in the dark if you're cut from an audition, told to come back next year, but not told what to fix. Hopefully, you have an awareness of what you should fix, but there will always be more than you can self-evaluate. I am pretty sure I did really well, and I'm definitely sure I showed a massive amount of improvement from last year. I am not saying this is a sign about what the judges think, but random auditioners did come up to me at random times during the day to tell me my hoop act was kickass...hopefully the judges felt that way as well.

Anyway, Morgan, Trevor, Kirby and I packed the car, and headed out. After stopping to get food at a Tim Hortons, having to run to an ATM because that Tim Hortons is the only place in the frickin world to accept Mastercard but NOT VISA, crossing the border, signing songs with my Kermit the frog voice, listening to the Windborne trio's new album (featuring the glorious Lauren Breunig), we finally arrived home. By 2:30 I was in bed, and by 7am, I was up. Lauren, Shannon and I (in the Intensive program), and 13 other auditioners would be auditioning for Protrack.

I kind of just exhausted my writing for the day, so if there's a super amount of request, I can write a Part 3 to this post about the ProTrack auditions, but I can tell you, it was pretty much a low key, toned down version of this, just in Vermont, on home turf.