BRATTLEBORO — The Austine Campus auditorium was colorful, celebratory, and communal, as the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA) ProTrack students recently gave some of their final performances.
“Wayward Ladies' Finishing School - A Circus Show” involved a variety of acts: trapeze, contortion, juggling, Cyr wheel, and aerial silk and rope.
I sat on my bench in the auditorium, in awe and perplexed, while watching the ensemble of bodies. Students flew high; they stretched, contorted, and manipulated gravity while wearing tight, seemingly improvised costumes pressed securely to the skin.
The students were rehearsed, however, raw before the crowd; there is a certain sincerity about the traces of years of practice left before a crowd, and there is a certain honesty about a body, exposed, in motion. Body types ranged, but the endurance and precision of movement was universal.
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As I sat watching the students perform, I also was considering the rich and complicated relationship between mind and body - how they can be beautifully in sync or terrifyingly out of order.
As one who has experienced, witnessed, and worked with others with mental illness(es) and trauma(s), I have developed a greater appreciation for the body - it is the vessel through which all of us register our emotions and experiences. It remembers everything. The body holds our joy, it holds our suffering, and everything in between.
With perfect timeliness, while considering the mind-body relationship, Emma Luz walked onto the stage to perform a piece that gave voice to something that was true beneath each performance: the human universal of vulnerability.
As Luz began her piece - “Anxiety Project” - she exuded readiness, mindfulness, and then, in a theatrical way, her posture began to express pain. Wearing a casual, fitted T-shirt and denim shorts with nylons underneath, she gave the appearance of any young woman you would find walking along the streets.
In place of music, a series of spoken worries and ruminations sounded out of the speakers in the periphery of the auditorium. She had arranged interviews and collected audio clippings from various women.
I'm not good enough... I will never be pretty enough... afraid they would never like me... my thighs are too big... thought I was a bad daughter... couldn't even leave my house..., and a cascade of other fears spilled out into the background from the anonymous voices.
Luz led audience members to gasp with fear and amazement as she made deep descents, twirled, and contorted on nothing but aerial rope.
There was a loud, emphatic applause at her finale, and I was wowed and appreciative of her performance, too - but I couldn't help but wonder what difficult life experiences had driven her performance.
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The following week, Luz and I spoke about the development of “Anxiety Project” and about the notion of suffering as a whole.
While taking a breath and with slight hesitation, Luz shared that she has chronic depression and severe post-traumatic stress disorder from a trauma during adolescence.
She has experienced several panic attacks, particularly during her earliest years as a circus student; much of her idea for the Anxiety Project stemmed from those experiences. She added that she had suffered a concussion at the end of last year and needed to leave the program.
At the end of last year, “I was thinking about, 'How am I going to make my ProTrack year the best year I can make it?'” Luz said. “And this idea of a piece about my experience with anxiety sort of popped into my head.”
Audio from her interviews with about 12 volunteers from Portland, Oregon as well as from Brattleboro became part of her project. All of the women whom she had interviewed dealt with some form of an anxiety disorder, many officially diagnosed.
“I just felt like mental illnesses in general, and also anxiety disorders, are so common but not talked about,” Luz said.
She added that she sees some progress in our culture around discussing mental health, “and I wanted to give voice to that, and to show that this is happening.”
Having witnessed the ensemble of bodies on stage, which had demonstrated the body's strength capacities, I wondered to what degree the audience had considered the capacities of the minds of those bodies to suffer.
I thought about how most people can give a great performance and function incredibly well, yet still have unspoken and unyielding pain behind the scenes.
* * *
Luz and I discussed low self-worth as central to so many of these conditions, which led me to ask her about circus performers' relationships with their bodies.
She shared her own experiences of shame and unexpected judgment she had absorbed from one doctor who had told her that, as an acrobat, she needed to lose weight.
That medical practitioner perhaps disregarded, or never witnessed, the endurance, flexibility, and health that I found so apparent in Luz's work.
Body image, she expressed, was not the bulk of her anxiety, nor was it central to her project. But it was substantial for her personally, as was the case for many other women whom she knew and many whom she had interviewed for her project.
“I think circus is way more accepting of different body types than dance or gymnastics [and similar performance arts],” she said, “but, for me personally, that's been a struggle.”
And in general, she said, “The [circus] community makes good strides to address it, and be supportive of each other, but there's still that internal judgment. And going out on stage and not being a stick-thin person is a constant thing.”
She expressed that viewing photos of herself was a “constant battle of trying not to get down on [her]self.”
She added, “My anxiety piece wasn't necessarily about [body image], but it did come up in interviews. [That's] tied into feelings of self-worth, which is tied into anxiety.”
* * *
Luz and I drew our conversation to a close, each expressing our dread and anxiety about listening to our own voices on a recording, amused with our respective feelings of self-consciousness.
I had shared with her some of my own experiences, and she had shared some further details of her story. Each of us withstood the anticipation of judgment or the possibility of feeling misunderstood, because each of us valued connection more over those fears.
“Once you're willing to just go there with someone and connect with them, and be frank about your own issues and talk about theirs, the willingness to [be vulnerable] open[s] doors for [others] to share their stories,” Luz observed.
Luz wanted “Anxiety Project” to create more transparency about mental illness; I wanted to write about it for similar reasons. What happens when you listen to your body, notice what it has to say, and tell the stories you keep hidden? Is our society ready to appreciate not only the beauty of performance but also the beauty of human connection without the need to perform?
And with that, I want to send out a “thank you” to Emma Luz for setting change in motion, and for giving not just a performance, but an invaluable story.