written by Mary Paterson
image (c) Luca Truferelli
It’s a cliché to say that we don’t often see older bodies dancing on stage. But it’s true: we don’t often see older bodies dancing on stage. Bodies that sag and flop and leave remainders over the sides of their knicker elastic. Bodies like these ones: a man and a woman in grey underwear who explore each other’s bodies in silence at the start of ‘Dances like a Bomb’. The bingo wings. The overhanging stomach. The loose skin. It’s funny because it’s true, and because it’s secret. It’s funny because it’s taboo.
As I write this, young people are skipping in the communal garden outside my living room window. That is, bodies that belong to the ones we call “young people” – teenagers – are galloping across the lawn and flinging themselves into tree branches. Onstage, in response to the question, “when were you at your best?” Mikel Murfi reminisces about having a body like that. “When I could move like a cartoon,” he says. When his body was so unreal it didn’t ache, didn’t creak, didn’t curve with the memory of all its other doings.
“Older bodies” we say, euphemistically. “Older bodies” and “young people.” The young don’t have to hold the relative term. The young are a type of people, and the elders are older than people. The implication is that the young are on their way to being real, and the old are sliding away from it. Not all old(er) people. At one point, Mikel Murfi and Finola Cronin swap gender roles and personalities. He pulls on a bottle green dress and squeezes his knees together. She sits with her legs wide in woollen trousers and a white shirt. She lip synchs to his words about losing power, losing status. He lip synchs to hers about no longer caring what people think. Perhaps, for women, ageing unspools a reel of freedom from a patriarchal gaze whilst for men, ageing ties them up in it like never before. Perhaps men have more to lose. Perhaps not. Perhaps it comes at everyone in different ways. Perhaps that’s what it means when they swap clothes and ape each other’s personalities: we are both these types of ageing, and we are neither, and we are always stuck inside a culture that yearns for absolutes.
Certainty is one of the casualties of ageing. And there is no certainty here. Instead: confusion, incompleteness, longing. I read a review of this piece that criticised the dances that Murfi and Cronin do together, a handful of sequences of heart breaking duets in which they hold each other’s bodies – each other’s arms, each other’s heads, each other’s faltering weights – in a membrane of vibrating uncertainty. If I could meet that reviewer I would say: you have spectacularly missed the point. You have misunderstood what it means to be real. You have misread uncertainty for lack. You have mistaken the sediments of dance in a body for a body that does not know how to dance. And I would say all of this, ideally, like Cronin: whilst gliding across a black stage attached to an IV trolley, a cloud of cigarette smoke billowing past my cheeks as if I am a memory caught inside a burst of sunshine, a burst of satisfaction, a waft of delicious taboo.
“Older people.”
As if ageing is a mistake, a misstep, an accident, a whisper, a raised eyebrow, a curse, a not-in-front-of-the-children. (Don’t you know children are on their way to being real?)
“Older people.”
As if being old is a perception rather than a fact, a feeling in your bones, your neck, your sleepless head.
As if age turns us all into a type, a category, a member of a crowd on the way to somewhere, somewhere unspeakable…
Close to the start they say, “Let’s do ways of dying.” And they act them out: Neglect. Gunshot wounds. Disembowelment. They give themselves a round of applause after each tableau. It’s funny because it’s not meant to be a laughing matter. It’s funny because it’s not meant to be mentioned at all. One day we won’t say our dead friends are “dead”, only “deader”, as if death is not a fact. As if it’s not the only thing we have in common.
Don’t you wish you believed in an afterlife? It’s what I long for. Not because I long for faith, but because I miss all of the dead people. I miss M, who sat in my living room six days before a fatal heart attack and told me he always wanted to be a dancer. I miss T, who was half way through a conversation about hope. I miss C, who appears in my phone as a cheerful avatar next to broken promises about meeting up soon. Even the bodies I cared for have died. Even the body I held as the last bubbles of oxygen erupted in her veins, fireworks behind fragile skin. And the bodies I didn’t care for, too. Even the bodies you never visit are going to die. And the bodies you lie to. And the bodies you hoped would disappear.
The dead people are gone and all you’re left with is the choices you made for them, the shape of your life curved like a spine and bent into unanswerable questions.
What does it mean, to watch two people talk about the unmentionables, to make it clear that there is nothing to be resolved, no paradise, no dream fulfilment? To talk about loss, and to refuse it, and to dress in someone else’s clothes and talk about it again?
This is the point at which a younger version of me would concoct an answer. Something that sounds clever and swift, in the manner of a cartoon body cartwheeling across a communal lawn. I used to have opinions about things like this, but now I have a contacts list full of dead people. I used to have opinions about things, but now I have a tremor of doubt that meets me in the mornings. I used to have opinions, but I no longer believe in acquisition, in knowledge, in having.
These days my body doesn’t always do all the things I want it to. At the end of ‘Dances like a Bomb’ I wanted to cheer, I wanted to shout, I wanted to dance. But there was a lump in my throat and water gliding down my cheeks and all I could do was stand up and cry.
Dances Like a Bomb was at The Place, London, 13th April 2024
Something Other 