The Lesson on Performing: Nobody Can Bend Indefinitely

I disappeared for three months. I just silently closed the curtains on this www stage and, instead of writing about the hospitality business, shifted my attention to the business itself – working inside a hotel.

This wasn’t my first season of waiting tables, where I swapped swimming in the sea with drowning in sweat. Trying to keep the smile on, while serving high-expectation guests during the global warming, dressed up in long sleeves and an apron on top of trousers, is not the easiest of tasks. I can imagine many better ways to spend a summer than working in a fine-dining restaurant. In double shifts. Often 10+ hours a day. With one free day per week.

We don’t have an infinite number of lives. How we spend the one we have, is what truly matters

Even when propeling a blog to the top 500k websites in the world, online businesses in the era of cheap AI and profit-hungry search engines can have quite unstable finances. To bring money to the table, one sometimes needs to resort to offline solutions.

I learned to live with deprioritizing my personal projects or needs when the situation requires it. Also, working directly with tourists does bring excitement. I never felt bored in the high-intensity job of serving food and beverages to hungry and thirsty clients. Performing this task can be eventful.

However, I also learned (not once!) that we are not cats. We don’t have an infinite number of lives. How we spend the one we have, is what truly matters.

Just before I quit updating Pipeaway’s website in May, the sad news reached me – one inspiring person decided to quit something irrevocable. Life itself.

Angela Laurier no more

Angela Laurier was a contortionist of international fame. Indeed, she could bend like a snake, but the Quebecoise artist wasn’t serving entertainment. She chose a professional path that was stripping off layers of her not-so-simple private life, something very authentic on world stages.

If her name doesn’t ring a bell, surely you’ve heard of Cirque du Soleil. In the young days of this now-famous Canadian circus, Angela Laurier was an important performer. She starred in “Le Grand Tour”, the very first production that brought a small troupe of Montreal‘s street performers to the rest of Quebec in 1984. It would become the seed of the largest contemporary circus the world would ever see.

 

If you follow Angela Laurier’s biography, you’ll see her grow from Pop Citrouille, a TV show where her promising talent glued Canadian children and teenagers to TV screens with absurd sketches and catchy tunes. After the Cirque, she appeared in everything from German variétés to Robert Lepage‘s theater productions, starring as Puck, the jester, in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.

The talented artist’s true influence, however, reached its zenith when she decided to follow her own path. She formed Compagnie Angela Laurier and started depicting topics of mental illness nibbling on her family.

Angela’s and my professional timelines intertwined for a brief moment. In 2009, I invited her to play the show called “Déversoir” in Zagreb, at Festival Novog Cirkusa, an event I was directing in Croatia for 12 years.

With this touching performance, the contortionist tried to demystify madness by reconnecting with her alienated family members, a depressive father and a schizophrenic brother. Her stage work was a personal and public healing therapy.

Still, 15 years later, on May 19th, 2024, Angela Laurier decided to take her life, at the age of 62.

On edge

Paying homage to someone three months after their passing might seem strange. But this is not Angela Laurier’s necrology.

I haven’t known her that deeply, and I don’t know what preceded her decision to quit living. But she was a thought-provoking artist. Even her self-controlled departure made me reflect on the ways we approach our mental health. Are we neglecting it when prioritizing outer expectations, while in pursuit of personal happiness, we feel disabled?

Last year brought me a couple of reminders of the fragility of our existence. The heart betrayed my Indonesian friend Fathin Naufal. A lack of social support left my Croatian school friend Lidija Džidara stranded. And even if I already knew that taking care of oneself should always be a priority, choosing a sometimes mindless routine can feel easier.

Angela Laurier’s departure made me revisit her performance showcasing her physical and mental flexibility. But I also discovered some of her interviews which showed she was keen on doing things her way.

After three European tours with Cirque du Trottoir, Angela returned to Cirque du Soleil in 1988, for the last time. The project was bigger than before. It was bringing much more money in, but the “big dream” was also far away from where she saw it starting.

“It’s really a business now. Business is rolling and we perform”, Angela said. She spoke about losing track of who we were, about a feeling that we’re becoming someone else. “No one is truly themselves, they don’t feel good inside. We can’t get to know who people really are. They’re always stressed. They’re very emotional. We’re all very emotional, on edge, always pumped up and tense. We try to be positive all the time because you’ve got to be positive when performing. This creates a lot of conflict.”

 

Tourism du Soleil

Tourism is a smiling business too. While it naturally employs friendly people, it is still a sort of a performance. You leave your personal worries at home, put a cheerful face on, and act happiness no matter what, so that others can feel as if being somewhere truly special.

For the sake of the success of the business, workers pay the price in tension and stress. That’s Tourism du Soleil, ladies and gentlemen, “the greatest show on Earth”!

But tourist seasons are often managed in a way that they necessarily take a toll, not just a physical one. After your exhausting juggling shift in the restaurant, you come home for a few hours of recharging before, all groggy, you need to rush back again, to do your best hospitality somersaults again.

The working conditions can sometimes bend and contort around the laws that prevent the exploitation of workers, with the best monetary performance in mind. Stretching to their limits, employees can feel like expendables.

When you see all those smiling faces while enjoying your well-deserved holidays, remember there could be a dark side to that performed happiness. It could be comparable to the try-to-be-positive-all-the-time “edge” Angela Laurier detected in the 1980s, the situation where, for the sake of the success of the business, workers pay the price in tension and stress. That’s Tourism du Soleil, ladies and gentlemen, “the greatest show on Earth”!

Now matters more than tomorrow

After months of balancing poached eggs, strawberry gazpachos and beef tartars while running up and down restaurant terraces, performing my positive best despite the lack of sleep and time for anything else but work, I decided to leave the arena, earlier than the official end of the season.

It would be easy to call me a quitter, but my employers and I separated ways in mutual understanding. Tourism is a performance, and we performed it well.

I can’t say there were many surprises. When I signed up for it, I understood the nature of the job. I’m just saying that life should be more. Life is more.

Recent years provided sad but valuable reminders that we all have expiry dates. So by the end of August, weighing my work situation and certain personal connections elsewhere, I decided I wanted to control more than just the thickness of my wallet. I wanted to spare myself regrets, to see people I care about, to share time where it matters. Now, not tomorrow.

In a recorded interview, Angela’s father, who authorized electroshocks for his schizophrenic son, said: “Luckily, life is not eternal.”

While I could agree we cannot choose the sufferings life throws at us, I would still rather grieve the shortness of happy moments than find solace in an eventual natural end to the agony. Some things we, luckily, do get to control.

So here I am, at the start of a new global wandering adventure, chasing moments much more precious than a steady income. I’ll be revisiting old friends but certainly also discovering many new insights on this trip that starts with one-way tickets.

Now, all the world’s a stage. While the fatalistic school of thought could say that actors aren’t here to direct, we can still choose our roles and go off-script.

September 10th is observed as World Suicide Prevention Day (a part of the Suicide Prevention Week, in the USA). The current theme is "Changing the Narrative on Suicide", with the call to action to "Start the Conversation", as that can save lives. If you are struggling, reach out to a mental health professional or a person of trust.

Did you like this reflection?
Pin it for later!