When Language Fails Us: Lucy Eidelson’s Air Hunger
“Illness is the night-side of life” – Susan Sontag
Images by Sonny Witton
Air Hunger is a visceral and intimate dance work, drawing you into the very private world of living in the “night side of life”. At times vulnerable and fragile, at times emotionally explosive and confronting, Air Hunger brings experiences that are often hidden into the public realm. The creators and performers come together for the first time to share an intimate, personal representation of hidden chronic illness through the site of the bed. Demure chatted with the show’s creator, director, co-choreographer and performer, Lucy Eidelson (she/they), who is a multi-disciplinary movement artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Naarm. They speak about the invisibility of chronic illness and translating part of their experience into movement and dance through the show. The creation of Air Hunger has been a process of evolving and expanding that trajectory to involve other performers with shared and different lived experiences.
Written by Lucy Eidelson, edited by Zari Moss and interviewed by Lucia Droga
Naarm / Wurrundjeri Country
Lucy Eidelson has always had a deep love of movement and is passionate about the role of dance, theatre and performance in bringing both artists and communities together to share stories and express overlooked narratives. They have been incredibly inspired by the works of German expressionist dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch, notably her work Cafe Muller:
“I watched it a number of times during lockdown when I was extremely fatigued, and it really energised and nourished me creatively at a time when I was feeling particularly empty. Her works have a really strong dreamscape that bleeds with reality, and I’m fascinated by how tender movements progress to violence and pain. I really loved ‘Exposed’ by Restless Dance Theatre, which I saw earlier this year at Arts House . I think that they are a really amazing company that fosters imagination and inclusivity and I would love to see more of their work.”
Lucy has been developing their solo practice over the last few years but decided to take a leap and create their first full length show. Indeed, Air Hunger has brought together a large and diverse group of people, both in terms of artistic practice and life experience, and Lucy has felt lucky to work with such an amazing, talented and committed group of young and emerging artists to bring this show to life (credits to these individuals are at the bottom of this interview). In five words, Lucy describes the show as:
“Hidden. Tender. Fierce. Surprising. Poignant.”
The term ‘air hunger’ is a form of dyspnea, or shortness of breath, is a symptom that Lucy experiences from their Chronic Fatigue Syndrome / Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME). It’s a symptom that they and Bridie Noonan (dramaturg + performer) both share, and connected with during their first meetings for the show. Indeed, Lucy’s experience of air hunger is a breathlessness, where their chest feels as though it’s closing inwards and concaving:
“All the energy in my body feels as though it's being sucked inwards into my chest and disappearing, almost like a volcano in reverse. It signals the beginning of fatigue and often a crash. It took me 3 years to figure out that this symptom I was experiencing had a name, and in the end I found it from a facebook CFS group. Doctors would explain the cause of this feeling to be anxiety and when I expressed that it wasn’t they would often shrug their shoulders in dismissal not bothering to pursue the real cause.”
This is a common experience for people who have invisible chronic illnesses that can be hard to define, as it’s easy to dismiss things that we cannot see or understand. Lucy thinks that when it comes to chronic illness, language can really fail us, and this is why they wanted to translate part of their experience into movement and dance:
“Living as a young person with a chronic illness can make you feel as though you don’t have enough breath metaphorically speaking. You are hungry to throw yourself into life in the same way you may have done pre illness, or in the ways you constantly see your peers around you do, but you simply can’t without risking your health. It’s easy to feel trapped in a body that is at odds with your internal self, with our fast-pace capitalist society that places value on hyper-productivity and expects you to ‘push through’ your illness but also at odds with a health-care system that is simply not designed to care or support ongoing illness that can’t be ‘fixed’ with drugs and pills.”
Lucy and dramaturg Bridie have had many in depth conversations around their experiences with these feelings and this ‘hunger’. Bridie expressed how “You can think of ‘air hunger’ in many different ways: panic attacks cause hyperventilation, giddiness causes shortness of breath, joy or pain or excitement or lust can ‘take your breath away’. Sometimes being stuck in your bedroom for days and days can make your room feel airless and stale. We want the show to be about the experience of being starved of breath in the context of illness, but we also want to honour the vastness of different human experiences and emotions in this context, and all the things we hunger for.”
In the show, both creators and performers come together for the first time to share an intimate, personal representation of hidden chronic illness through the site of the bed. Sharing more about their personal journey with chronic illness, and the catalyst of inspiration to create the show, Lucy describes having an invisible chronic illness that can feel a bit like you are constantly fighting two battles. One being trying to physically manage your symptoms and all the emotional and mental consequences of being chronically ill, and the other, trying to help people understand the complexities of your illness and deal with ableism and that you are still sick even if you “don’t look sick.”
In 2021, Lucy did a solo 10 minute movement work where she brought her bed into the Meat Market Stables. At the time, she was struggling with navigating being fatigued in public spaces as they are so inaccessible for my symptoms:
“I often longed for the safety of my bed yet it felt demoralising having to constantly leave and disappear from the world to my room. It’s a complicated relationship. Something that I wanted to explore in my practice is the experience of the unseen and the invisible and what emerges when these experiences are put in very public spaces. There was something liberating and powerful about bringing my bed into that public space and napping on it for two hours as I had a crash before the movement performance. I wanted to develop this work and these concepts into a full-length show, and extend it to eight other performers all with different lived experiences of chronic invisible illness and mental health.”
For the show’s promotion, Lucy has shared a range of existing works, such as those powerful and intimate portraits by Frida Kahlo, which explore these themes of the pervasiveness of chronic illness. The initial solo work was created as a direct response to her experience of illness and relationship to her bed. The creation of the show has been a process of evolving that work and expanding that trajectory to involve other performers with shared and different lived experiences. In this process, the team discussed and shared other works within visual art and writing that resonated with the concept of the show. Some works which really resonated were ‘Tulips’ by Sylvia Plath, ‘The dream (The Bed) ’ by Frida Kahlo, On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf as well as Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag.
Walking me through the choreographic process, Lucy shares how they work very intuitively and with improvisation. The process of this show began with discussing the concepts with fellow choreographer Chiharu Valentino, and dramaturg Bridie Noonan. Then breaking this down into textures and movement qualities with Chiharu and often improvising together and separately, filming and watching each other to then develop, tweak and refine movements and then discuss these with Bridie to make sure they are emotionally tied to the story:
“Rehearsals have also involved collaboration and improvisation, and it's been really enriching to witness the performers' interpretations and ideas. My favourite part of the process has been working with and connecting with everyone in this process. Having the support from my family, friends and community, all the performers and everyone involved on the team has been incredible. This has been a huge project and it's really taken a gargantuan and generous effort from everyone and I'm so grateful to everyone involved. People have really rallied behind it and it wouldn't be possible without them.”
Speaking to the staging of the mattresses specifically, the design of their placement in the Magdalen laundry of the Abbotsford Convent pays homage to the shared history of silencing and restriction that the young women and girls experienced while working in the commercial laundry with the silencing that many people who experience chronic illness feel. The history of the space magnifies the story of their piece. The mattresses are the final 9 performers in the show, and are treated as sentient beings with names. Each mattress and the performer on the mattress represents a world, an experience, a bedroom, a confined space:
“When we are sick, alone in bed and tucked away in our houses we don’t see all the other people sick, alone in bed in their respective confined spaces, some perhaps on the same street, in the same city, others across the world. With chronic illness, there’s an isolation but there's also a growing collectivism particularly with the pandemic with more and more people experiencing long term illness. So through the stage design I hope to represent both the isolation and intimacy of the bed, juxtaposed with a growing collective experience. My understanding of chronic illness is that it’s complex, it's different for everyone but i would say that a main common denominator within this vast experience is the humble bed. I think everyone can relate to how much time we spent on our beds during lockdown, and the way in which they held so many parts of our lives. They became a place of work, of uni assignments, of sleepless nights remembering life pre-pandemic, of days spent bingeing tv shows, of moments of silliness and hyperactivity etc. For a lot of people with chronic illness, this didn’t stop after lockdown and I think that this is something the general public is unaware of.”
Witnessing dance and movement allows audiences to delve into an emotional state on a completely different level to language and the spoken word. It invites them to feel through movement and to engage in an elemental form of story-telling. People coming together to watch a live performance is a very beautiful collective experience, but at the same time each audience member is invited to find their own story and interpretation through the movements.
Lucy resonates with the quote by author Meghan O’Rourke who explains, “...the chronically ill person lives in a really different story, which is messy, repetitive, even chaotic. I live in this way in which I'll be sick and get better and sick and get better.” The cyclical nature of chronic illness is also one of the reasons she is using movement as the mode of expression, because dance allows a messy, repetitive and non-linear narrative to materialise into something poetic.
“Chronic illness is complex: it’s unresolved, it makes you circle through grief: mourning the person you were pre illness, through isolation, anger and frustration, then you are so overtired because you can’t sleep you get the zoomies so you go all silly and manic, you appreciate the moments where you feel good and find a lot of hope, love and joy in them, you’re longing to be well and part of the outside world but you also appreciate the perspective that your illness has taught you. I hope that the performance allows audiences to feel these emotions with us, to move through this cyclical and complex way of being, to open themselves up to this experience and non-linear narrative whilst opening a window to the rich, imaginative and sometimes painful internal world of illness.”
In seeing the role of dance evolving in the future, Lucy hopes that more funding for small independent and emerging companies and artists will enable a move away from elitism in art-making and in dance. They’d like to see more action and funding go towards accessibility and how this can be implemented from the beginning, with more of a fostering of being able to enter a space as you are. They’d like to see the conversations around fostering accessibility enacted throughout the planning, creation, performance and viewership process:
“Performers and creators should be able to enter these processes as they are. This is something that I have tried to nurture within the process of the show and hope to continue to work towards making dance and art in inclusive, expansive and gentle environments.”
Tickets to Air Hunger are available here. Session times include: Thursday 5 October, 8pm Friday 6 October, 8pm Saturday 7 October, 8pm
Show credits below:
Lucy Eidelson (she/they): Creator, Director, Co-Choreographer & Performer
Chiharu Valentino (she/her): Co-Choreographer & Performer
Bridie Noonan (she/they): Dramaturg & Performer
Alec Katsourakis (he/they): Performer
Bee Bleechmore (she/ they): Performer
Ella Ferris (she/ they): Performer
Kassie Junkeer (she/her): Performer
Joyce Liu (she/they) : Performer
Maddie Cushion (she/her): Performer
Paris Robinson (she/they): Understudy
Greta Kantor (she/her): Producer and Assistant Stage Manager
Zari Moss (they/them): Marketing Lead and Production Manager
Paige Spurrell (she/her): Assistant Production Manager
Poppy Gordon( She/her): Stage Manager
Noah Riseley (he/him): Sound Designer and Composer
Vindi Ferguson (she/her): Sound Artist (Violinist)
Maggie Kontev (she/her): Sound Artist and Recordings
Lewis Shaw (he/ him): Sound Advisor / Sound Tech
Char Lee (they/them): Costume Designer
Carmen Lye (she/her): Costume Maker
Klari Agar (they/them) : Lighting Designer
Sam Carson (she/her) : Lighting Technician
Issey/ Buzzy Christensen (she/they): Installations
Sonny Witton (he/him): Photographer
Lucien Perry (he/him): Videographer