View from the Green Room: The mind has mountains, hold them cheap who ne'er hung there
Rachel Ní Bhraonáin and Robyn Byrne in Losing your Body at Garter Lane.
There’s magic here tonight and aerial and dance artist Rachel Ní Bhraonáin is making it. On a rope frame that fills the Garter Lane stage, Rachel, who also writes and directs the performance, sits, squats, flies, struggles and wraps herself around her performance space to fill our space.
We notice her sleeping body lying on the floor in the dim light of the stage as we enter. Rachel emerges; struggling against the ropes that bind her to eventually free herself to tell her story. It’s a physical retelling of her journey thus far as a dancer, who is subject to deep-rooted inner turmoil. The body is her agent of memory-sharing because while the mind can dismiss and rout inner anxieties and imposter fears, it’s the body that is bound to carry them.
She’s telling her story now as a once eager-to-impress desk receptionist who is warm and witty and friendly. It’s a story of a young girl who wants to be a dancer and baby steps her audition with her rudimentary en pointe ballet moves. Rachel is never slow to self-deprecate and leaves us laughing as she laughs at her own naivety.
She enrols on a London dance degree. This dancer is primed for success – a flat in London, a flexible day job as a receptionist, trendy friends and the occasional gig as a go-go dancer. Living the dream in London. But… there’s problems… and problems bring anxieties and fears that are difficult to expunge.
Worse still, there’s hip pain, which she masks with hot water bottles and two Ibuprofen every couple of hours. We can see her pain in her movement as she drives, struggles, flies, balances, grimaces and sighs.
Her journey with migraine is far worse and she describes the debilitating bouts. Pain, nausea, vacuous, sensory disturbances called “aura”, vision changes.
When the face twitches begin, she’s convinced it’s a stroke and she’s preparing her goodbyes.
Rachel’s got a library of books on migraine and the “aura”. She explains that “migraine auras are due to the involvement of specific areas of the brain that determine the sensory response.”
Like the frightening out-of-mind experience she’s had at her receptionist’s desk when she didn’t know where she was. When Rachel takes to the air to frame this experience, it becomes all the more real.
A second dancer, Robyn Byrne, who also co-choreographs, shares the acting space with Rachel. Robyn’s character represents Rachel’s inner self and her demons and their aerial and floor dance duet is a thing of beauty and truth.
Each self struggles to gain the upper hand and it’s their struggle that consumes us. Her inner self that carries a cartload of emotional issues – her lack of confidence, her imposter syndrome as a dancer, her parents’ divorce, her lifetime of migraine, her weight, her looks and sense of inferiority. And the crying. Always the tears.
She gets her degree in dance, though. “First class honours,” says she, sticking out the chest with that goldfish fin of pride when our achievements are recognised. It’s “come-on-world-I’m-here-now” time as she waits for offers for her undeniable talent. She’s got a gig in a sordid night-club with dubious artistic intentions and energises her experience for us with a raunchy in-yer-face routine that’s electric.
It’s amazing how time flies. Rachel is six years in that seedy den and there are no offers on the table. Bills have to be paid and her inner self is telling her to pack it in. Not so much as telling her as ramming down her throat and tearing up her self-help books.
The aerial and dance struggle that follows is truly extraordinary as each side of the self gains the upper hand in the psychological battle of wills.
In the end, neither wins. But there seems to be a détente, an acceptance that self must accommodate both sides of the personality and that Becket’s axiom of “ever tried, ever failed, no matter; try again, fail again, fail better!” seems to be the only course forward.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins.
