When I arrived at A-Wol Dance Collective’s warehouse space on Saturday night to see Pole Disclosure, the line to get in stretched down the block and around the corner. That’s a sight I am not used to seeing here in Portland. By the time I got to the door, the show— a brand-new work by contemporary circus duo Kate Law and Amaya Alvarado, accompanied live by cellist Yoko Silk—was sold out and they were turning people away. Lucky for me I already had a ticket. From what I learned later on, all three shows of the run were sold out! 

Inside, the welcoming reception area was festooned with twinkling lights and catered food and drink were available. The performance area was deeper into the space,  a wide-open area with a vaulted ceiling, black walls, a chair and a music stand set up to the far left. A single pole connected floor to ceiling in the middle of the room. The space was sparse, undecorated, and it exposed the vulnerable inner workings of the show.

Pole Disclosure, began with Law and Alvarado, dressed in Evel Knievel-inspired denim jumpsuits, standing across from each other with the pole in the middle. They were smiling. In between climbing up the pole, supporting each other in various death-defying, off-center feats of balance, hanging off of each other in mid-air, and sliding down the pole towards the floor at breakneck speeds and stopping just inches from catastrophe, they spoke happily and warmly about their working partnership. They reflected on its successes and its inner workings, all the while visually demonstrating and supporting the words with their movements and poses.

Then the story veered. Law revealed that she hadn’t always been a good partner and that nine years ago she was in another fantastic partnership that she “ruined” by getting pregnant. “She got to go to Cirque du Soleil,” Law mourned about her partner, “and all I got was a fucking baby.” The audience laughed. An uncomfortable truth. 

Then the story turned again, more severely this time, when Alvarado spoke of her own personal story of sexual assault. It turns out that this was Alvarado’s #MeToo reveal moment—as she had never told any of her friends —about the assault.

The guilt that Alvarado felt for not seeing and acting on the red flags in her relationship, is with her all the time and was represented by her duet with the cyr wheel, a heavy metal acrobatic apparatus that trapped and created an energy of chaos around her. It became a giant object hanging off of her shoulder with its obvious weight pressing against Alvarado’s small frame. 

Throughout the rest of the evening, in between flying through the air and playing teeter-totter on a suspended shell-shaped apparatus, Law and Alvarado continued to unravel their thoughts and feelings around birth, the unrelenting pressures of motherhood, gender roles, society’s pressure to stay quiet in the face of a sexual assault, guilt, how the concept of “having it all” is actually a lie, identity, “aging out” of a performance career, and the lack of free childcare. This wasn’t all dark I assure you. There were plenty of jokes and lots of laughter. 

All the while, the cello, played by the incredibly talented Silk, completely and seamlessly supported and followed the action and emotion of the performance, like a film score. If the moment was funny, the music reflected it. If the movement was big and sweeping, so was the music. The music’s presence was so masterfully harmonized with the performance that I wasn’t always aware of it, though I always felt it.  

In the middle of the Pole Disclosure, Silk moved her chair to the center of the stage where Alvarado joined her on the ukulele and sang the song Elastic Heart, by Sia. Law accompanied them in the air on elastic ropes, perfectly expressing the mood and the lyrics of the song with her movements.

The last stanza of the song goes like this:

“Well I’ve got thick skin and an elastic heart
But your blade it might be too sharp
I’m like a rubber band until you pull too hard
But I may snap when I move close
But you won’t see me fall apart
‘Cause I’ve got an elastic heart”

At the very end of the show, Alvarado told us that taped under each chair was a pen and note card. “It would mean so much to us if you would just write down anything that you want us to know,” she said, “or anything that you want the people around you to know. There’s no wrong answers here, you can even fold it up into a little paper airplane if you want.” 

Law and Alvarado gathered up all of our crumpled note cards, stuffed them in their shirts, climbed to the top of the pole, read a few, and tossed the rest down making it rain notecards. The note cards were made available for us to read after the performance. 

Alvarado and Law have 20 years of circus arts experience between them. They have attended some of the most prestigious circus schools in the country, studied with many famous teachers, and have performed around the world. Their expertise was evident in this fantastic and very relatable show. It was exciting and inspiring to witness their feats of physical strength and flexibility, and to watch them effortlessly maneuver their way through and around all of the different apparatuses. Pole Disclosure was satisfying, and moving, and stayed with me long after the show, like a good book. 

In the end, the show seemed to say, “not only do women have to constantly fight for equality, and for their dreams, but they also have to do it while climbing up poles, swinging through hoops, hanging upside down by their feet, and supporting themselves, friends, and family, in dangerous, precarious ways.” Metaphorically speaking, of course—sort of.