The strange thing is that age has been lurking at the back
of my mind lately. Just pieces of coincidence being shown old photos, school
reports, seeing someone from 20 years ago, which doesn’t seem right somehow. I’ve
spoken about it with friends and we don’t get this concept of ageing, what is
it based on is it solely based on your birthday or related to your achievements,
the landmarks of marriage, jobs and children.
All this is bubbling away in the mush of my mind when I go
to see Ira Brand’s ‘A Cure for Ageing’ it’s all there as a place myself in
front of a lightly dressed stage. On the left is a mic’ed up table and chair to
the right there stands another mic stand decorated with a solitary sparkly
balloon emblazoned with the number 100. Quickly and as if from nowhere Ira
appears carrying two buckets, placing them down she approaches the mic and says
50. There’s a pause a projection of a jellyfish springs to life like somekind
of screensaver.
Time passes, people shift, giggles, Ira breaks the silence
with the number 49 then pauses again. She then proceeds to informs us that we
are two minutes closer to death. Two minutes older, two minutes where unable to
regain, but what would of I done with those moments and anyway I have already
agreed to give those moments to Ira. An old voice gives a brief statement about
old age Ira introduces herself, she 30 years old and she has been thinking
about ageing. Of what it means to be young, to be old if this liminal events
have any meaning or if it’s all a case of perspective.
At one point she asks members their ages, people volunteer
this information freely. She asks me, and then with that information figures
out the year that I’ll die, the statistics written pragmatically on her arm
aren’t disturbing. Nor is the fact that Ira will outlive me by 12 years, even
when she lists the things she’ll see and I’ll miss doesn’t bother me. Until she
mentions that we’ll both miss the 100th anniversary of Apollo 11,
that piques something I mean I always assumed that I’ll see it and probably from
the Moon itself.
Within this information, the death dates written on her forearms
indicate a form of pragmatism that’s inbuilt when thinking about ageing, that it’s
simply a case of measurement, of counting. Perhaps this is all a way of dealing
with the complex nature of ageing, turning it a packet of data, putting it
behind a screen of banal numbers. Ira carries on crunching numbers, being a
smoker she works out that each cigarette takes 11 minutes of a person’s live
and its takes the equivalent of a balloon full of air to smoke a cigarette. A projection
show Ira smoking a cigarette and filling the shiny balloon with that breath,
live she begins to transfer that breath into a clear plastic bag.
If I remember my GCSE biology right, living things output
stuff (BIOMASS?) and as the metallic celebratory balloon beings to shrink and
wrinkles it seems to me that somehow, we don’t have the evidence of ageing. For
the individual the subtle changes may not be noticeable or rather be easy to
ignore, if you could catch your breath in a series of bags you’d have to
rethink the way you live. After all were all travelling into the future at 1
second per second. Yet we don’t know what this means, what it means get old to
be older. There is a moment in the performance which re-enforces this, when Ira
recounts a time on seeing an old man on the tube and the need to know what old
age is, what it felt like leads to her yelling her demands on stage. I say her
demands, these are our demands. This is the fate that awaits us, a fate that
some form of evolutionary amnesia that lets us get on with everyday life.
Even though it’s on Ira’s mind it’s on everyone’s collective
minds and she has collected these vague notions inter weaved them with the
personal effects the passing on time has had on her life. It all adds to a
poetic, elegant and meditative show that is about life. What we do with it what
makes is worthwhile, the difference between being alive and just being. I’ve
missed out quite a lot of the show, one reason time is moving on. I will
mention Ira’s delicate and elegant movements in describing an immortal,
regenerating jellyfish along with her joyful dancing on earth (it was in the
buckets brought on at the beginning) as if dancing on her own grave in the
denial of any idea of final resting places.
The second’s count down and the lights go out, we maybe
closer to death, but were here and we have these moments to do with what we
want. As The Flaming Lips say All We Have
is Now.
http://www.irabrand.co.uk/?works=a-cure-for-ageing
