Members of the Performing Older Women's Circus (POW Circus)1have decided to keep their bodies. POW's members are women over forty years of age and the circus was established in Melbourne, Australia in January 1995. The members learn skills at their own pace and are limited only by the availability of trainers, the cost of equipment and the constant shortage of funds. Women in their sixties have learnt clowning, have learnt to walk on stilts, do inverted double balances, base or fly in three high group balances. In addition, others in the circus - the young forty and fifty-year-olds - have learnt to climb ropes and do tricks on them, have learnt aerials routines and sequences on trapezes and cloudswings, group bicycle riding, roller blading, juggling, clowning and manipulation of flags, sticks and fire clubs. And the entire group participates in theatrical performance. A dedicated group of musicians provide an eclectic range of musical scores. But perhaps POW Circus needs to redefine itself, with stilts, roller blades ropes and trapezes as cyborg extensions: is it really a cyborg circus? Our bodies may be culturally inscribed, even limited by our previous opportunities, but that doesn't mean that we cannot set out to subvert and challenge those cultural determinations. As Catherine Itzin points out: Ageism is usually regarded as being something that affects the lives of older people. Like ageing, however, it affects every individual from birth onward - at every stage putting limits and constraints on experience, expectations, relationships and opportunities.2 Its divisions are as arbitrary as those of race, gender, class and religion. (Itzin, 1986, cited in Woodward, 1994: 47) Ageism, and a persistent denial of mortality, can be found in some of the hip post-modern writings on cyborgs. Hans A Scheirl (1997) for example in his Manifesto for the dada of the cyborg-embrio, writes: "Age is dispersed & reversed" (Schierl, 1997:49). Such fantasies of immortality are not unusual in cyberculture, and they do not serve to change prejudicial attitudes towards ageing, particularly attitudes towards women's ageing. It is at this locus that the women in POW Circus do challenge conventional attitudes. Without seeing POW Circus one might imagine a group of highly athletic older women who are in denial about ageing, and who fear the crumbling and disintegration of the human body. Nothing could be further from the truth. The members of POW cover a huge range of physical abilities and disabilities. While illness - including terminal illness - is something many members have confronted. POW Circus members do not set out to change their bodies into something reminiscent of youth culture, and although fitness is valued it is not a prerequisite. Nor is any prior experience of circus skills. Unlike the singularly physical culture of bodybuilding (see Balsamo, 1996: 41-55) where women pose in tiny skin-hugging bikinis and are judged by men who define whether they have gone too far (Bev Francis) or that they remain "powder puffs" albeit "a really strong powder puff" (Rachel McLish), (Balsamo, 1996: 49) women in POW Circus define their own limits and their own abilities. The community theatre aspect of POW Circus means that the audience is particularly responsive, and effort often gets as much applause as technique. In one instance, a forty-seven-year-old performer climbing a rope in the show was encouraged by cheers and whoops from both audience and co-performers to reach the roof. Each night she climbed higher, breaking her own personal bests and culminating a year of consistent training which shifted her from ground dweller to climber. Circus combines physical culture with theatrical culture. It draws together disparate and conflicting "norms". Add to that a good dose of feminist irreverence and anti-ageist intentions and you have a powerful and challenging outcome. The culture of athleticism is sometimes subverted in the shows by POW. This is particularly so in the clowning sequences where physical prowess is undermined by humour in mimed weight-lifting routines, olympics which favour the ridiculous over the competent, or overcoming the fear of heights associated with climbing ladders. In the group balances, humour is generated when the whole structure built by the performers collapses as the last woman is about to add herself to the well-balanced edifice. The collapse is in turn undermined by the fact that the last woman is standing on the shoulders of another woman. This is not how "old women" are expected to act. The first show put on by POW was called "Act Your Age"3 and used chants of "act your age" and "don't act your age" throughout the show as a way to underline and subvert the dominant expectations. The second4 documented the history of the women's movement from the 1960s to the 1990s. Through the use of a skeleton narrative, fleshed out by movement, light, sound and humour both shows took the ageing body as their starting point, on the one hand looked at synchronically, on the other, diachronically. Recent shows 5 have looked at the history and rituals of women, and of lesbians6, using movement and metaphor to carry the momentum of the show. In 1999, the International Year of the Older Person, POW will once again be exploring the theme of falls and debility in old age in a show entitled "Balancing Acts". Every show done by POW ends with an age-line: each member steps forward and calls out her age. Beginning with the youngest member (currently 41) and ending with the oldest (currently 69) this part of the show frequently brings tears to the eyes of the audience. The representations of age and women in our culture are subverted by the sheer existence of POW Circus. It counters the forces which tell us that our bodies are "excess baggage", imperfect, uncontrollable, unruly and our feminism essentialist and founded on organic connection. Furthermore, engagement with one another and with the physical and mental self is highlighted. When you are participating in a pyramid with four or ten or twenty other women, everyone has to be "wholly present to one another" (Case, 1996: 156). You cannot afford to be a dissipated self, a self so disunited as to be incapable of being "present to itself" as Iris Young (1990: 310) argues. When two women are performing a sequence of tricks on a trapeze three metres above the ground, both have to be "wholly present to one another" (Case, 1996: 156.). Indeed, the importance of engagement, respect, and complicity7 cannot be underrated. An increasing awareness of the body accompanies training which takes the woman past previous experiences of her body. Overcoming fear, even terror, as well as performance anxiety and self-consciousness are hurdles which most members who participate for any length of time have to confront. Learning to be in the body is one of the advantages of circus skills training. Learning to be with other bodies, in an engagement of trust is one of the advantages of improvisational theatre techniques. Put the two together and you have an emotionally powerful, physically charged combination. It is one where intimacy is taken for granted through close physical contact with others, while social contact proceeds in much the same mosaically rich way, with some women becoming friends, others retaining a more distant relationship. The approach to physical activity taken by POW members is in stark contrast to commodified exercise provided in commercial gyms. Community 8 is central for POW, and engendering respect for one another whatever the limitations is another. The intention is to work in safety and have fun. This is very different from the aims of some commercial gym owners who envisage extending VR applications for sport and fitness. The design of cyberspaces for sports is based on market forces, so that sporting decks will generally have sophisticated props, like recombinant bicycles and inclined treadmills, and sporting houses will make money by renting time on those decks. The purpose of cyberspace for sports is not just to help people have fun and stay fit. It is also to help keep sporting houses in business, by keeping their decks full of players. (Randal Walser cited in Balsamo, 1996: 121) So, the gym will be a place where one continues to walk the treadmill, but perhaps through a virtual environment such as mountains, deserts or shopping malls, purchasing as you walk. The cyberbody can only get fit if it is actually exercising the real life muscles. The prospect of cyberexercise on, say a trapeze, would help the exerciser learn some new tricks. But even if she can learn through a process of virtual visualisation or virtual simulation, her real life muscles also need training or she simply won't have sufficient strength to do the things she'd like to do. And with the starting price for a VR home installation at around US$250,000 there won't be many of us with a virtual rowing machine or bicycle in our homes, or even in our local community centres! This is elitist culture, often also escapist. But unlike the ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs, which at least are generated by one's own chemical processes, VR is someone else's trip. And at this time, that trip is male defined, male generated and male limited. In contrast to the hype that VR is "focused primarily on the subjective and expressive dimensions", it is in fact, neither subjective nor expressive. It is packaged entertainment for the mainly male market. For my own money, I'd rather go and have fun with a group of old organic bodies, who can laugh and clown and encourage me to go that one step further. |
