A TALE OF ENDORPHINS*

UN CUENTO DE ENDORFINAS UMA HISTÓRIA DE ENDORFINAS UN CONTE D’ENDORPHINES

A Tale of Endorphins // Marion Guyez

Marion Guyez**

Universidad de Toulouse 2 Jean Jaurès, Francia. Correo electrónico: guyez_marion@yahoo.fr

Revista Corpo-grafías: Estudios críticos de y desde los cuerpos / Volumen 3 – Número 3 / Enero – diciembre de 2016 / ISSN 2390-0288 / Bogotá, D.C., Colombia / pp. 142-149.

Fecha de recepción: 1 de septiembre de 2015 Fecha de aceptación: 30 de octubre de 2015 Doi: https://doi.org/10.14483/cp.v3i3.12405

Cómo citar éste documento: Guyez. M. (2016, enero-diciembre). A tale of endorphins. Revista Corpo-grafías: Estudios críticos de y desde los cuerpos, 3(3), p-p 142-149/ ISSN 2390-0288.

*Documento de reflexión no derivado de investigación.

**Investigadora por partida doble, (des)verticalista, obsesivamente ¿derribada?, ¿caída? Verticalista formada en el Lido de Toulouse, Marion Guyez evoluciona desde 2007 en las escenas circenses internacionales en la carpa, en la calle o en los teatros. Ha trabajado con Pipototal, Rasposo, El circo Eloize y la Compagnia Finzi-Pasca. A partir de ese momento es corres- ponsable, junto a Yaëlle Antoine, de la Compagnie d’Elles con la que comparte el gusto por la experimentación de las for- mas circenses y el feminismo. Sus verticales puntúan varias de las creaciones de esta compañía para la que trabaja también de dramaturga. Marion Guyez prolonga su trabajo de creación escénica con un doctorado en Artes del Espectáculo. Estudia las hibridaciones entre acrobacia y texto en los escenarios circenses contemporáneos. Es autora de varias publicaciones dedicadas al circo, al género y a las artes de la calle. Enseña Estudios Circenses así como Estudios Visuales y Teatrales en la Universidad Toulouse Jean-Jaurès.

Translated by Caitlin Stall-Paquet

Sculpting a circus body. Like an Ousmane Sow sculpture. With everything. Like a clay model.

Attacking that body with a chisel, like ripping through marble. Engraving a trunk until reaching sap.

Relentlessness, effort, daily, permanent, obsessive. Behind the smiles and obvious risks.

Behind the wonder of the circus. To shine in the eye of the ring.

The body’s accomplishment burns with the singular desire for the accomplishment of the mind. Intimate and subjective pain.

My pain is cruellest when my body becomes aphasic.

The body stuck between what it wants to say and what it must say. Stuck between what it must say to please.

What it must say to cover needs.

My needs of a full fridge and paid rent.

The pain of saying what it deeply does not want to say.

It’s that inability suffers from what it dreams of achieving.

Arnica oil tiger balm hot water bottle arnica mother tincture massage balls arnica pellets 7CH 9CH wintergreen essential oil Italian helichrysum ice homeoplasmine elasto warming cream aspirin bath.

This pain trumps all others. The daily ones. The trivial ones.

No milk, no wheat, no quick-sugars, no drinking, drinking, drinking water, maintaining the acid- base balance, no smoking, sleep.

I knock on wood.

I can simply lie.

Up until now, I have not suffered any serious injuries that require operations or intensive rehabilitation.

Of course!

I’ve had sprains, tendonitis, effusions, contractures, lumbago, inflammation, sciatica, wear, inexplicable pain, cramps, headaches, nausea, vertigo, chronic sinusitis, itching, spasms, acid reflux, chilblains, burns, broken nails that become ingrown…

Nothing all that special, nothing that truly kept me from doing my work.

I am in pain every day.

These small pains come with my work. I live them, I tame them.

I am in pain every day!

These small pains are so deeply rooted in my practice that I admit to forgetting about them.

Every day!

Taking care of them is a part of the ritual. Warming up. Stretches. From morning to night.

Cracking my backbone. Massaging my forearms.

Every day…

Stretching my neck, fingers, soles of my feet, calves.

Every day?

Falling asleep with a burning-hot water bottle on my back, massaging my aching feet.
Every day. Irritated skin. Tumid fingers. Pffffff…

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROU- TINE

Time taught me to find the pains: the unusual, alarming ones (It’s keeping me from breathing! Something’s wrong!!!), the ones that I will not solve on my own (Oh no, not that), the one (the little sharp one) that requires adapting a movement, the one that insidiously suggests (Oh, it’s pinched) to slow down the pace.

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

The trapeze’s ropes burn the skin, constrict the limbs in certain positions. Its bar hits and marks the body with bruises. Calluses grow on the palms of the hands. Resin pricks at the burned skin.

Some pains are felt during practice and are fleeting (phew!).

The pain of balancing, different, less acute, diffuse, it is connected to a flawed position, to matters of endurance.

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

In this discipline, wrists, elbows, shoulders and back suffer most. These pains are more often linked to wear than to shock.

Wear.

Impossible to lie hands flat on the ground without soaking hands and forearms in hot water first. I am a handbalancer, I know…

Aching, stiff, contracted, contractured body. The body is about circus.

Even in daily life.

It conveys its own pains.

Wear.

Impossible to sleep with my arms alongside my body, but especially staying very straight, well aligned.

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

There are also the body’s surprising pains that dissipate after a few days of rest.

A lovely lumbago on the beach, glistening with sunscreen.

Pains evolve (fortunately or we would get bored!)

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

Those years! Those determined battles without ever giving up. Ignoring all criticism: too old, too stiff, bad actress, too shy, outdone, inexperienced.

Marks, sometimes thick ones, remain from that girl’s fight. Yet the road travelled is enormous.

The learning process of the circus consists in controlling the body, shaping it to lead it into movements that are usually against its nature or are even impossible.

Handbalancing is full of such figures!

An incredible amount of patience, time and tenacity will be necessary to understand and master those figures.

Especially in public!

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

One performance after another. Pain from the intense periods.

It disappears nonetheless, absorbed by the concentration dedicated to the performance. It abates… (Ecstasy…)

Often only to come back stronger after the show!

But life can be painful. My back aches so.

Aches do re mi fa so la si do, ow!

We console ourselves with the silent sublimation of the acrobatic act

Vertical vertigo

aching shoulders and wrists

dorsal

supple pain

and tendinous burning dry hands

rough hands

the body’s tension Fotografía Marion Guyez.

against tension stretches elongates

and affixes

an arm

seconds of pleasure vanish.

(2011)

(Grandiose!) When, in a life, the circus is a necessity, pain is nothing.

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

I have the advantage of knowing my body deeply and abusing the ways of soothing it.

Arnica oil tiger balm hot water bottle arnica mother tincture massage balls arnica pellets 7CH 9CHwintergreen essential oil Italian helichrysum ice homeoplasmine elasto warming cream aspirin bath

Mountains of will and determination push me to overcome these daily pains, to minimize them.

No milk, no wheat, no quick-sugars, no drinking, drinking, drinking water maintaining the acid-base balance, no smoking, sleep.

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

Keeping control.

One day I will write the Great Handbook of the Best Osteopaths of France and Navarre.

In short, let’s summarize.

Master Guyez perched upon her sticks, held in her beak…

Fotografía Marion Guyez.

To physical pain, the easiest to define, are grafted other kinds of more intimate, evasive and sometimes more fluctuating suffering.

1. Offer perfection to the stage (certainly), the incredible (admittedly) but accept to fall, to tremble, to tumble again, again and again.

2. Before being able to truly surpass ourselves, we must first accept failure, flaws and weakness.

3. Learn that falling is connected to the mind, as well as the body.

   Knowing this is good!

   Then we have to control it…

4. Give up the complete control of our movements, our balance.

   I do not fall that much anymore, but in these face-to-face encounters with myself, I still fall sometimes.

5. Stay focused, until the end.

   Damn mind!

   STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

   We breathe, we calm down, solid. We stay!! Again!

6. Accept that the same routine is settling in for years to come.

   A routine that only the burst of an enraptured audience can break.

7. Then aging, declining, compensating for shortcomings and passionately freeing ourselves.

Celebrating the closing of a show on a full-mooned night. Tears raining down. The mourning of a loved one.

STRETCHING, WEIGHT TRAINING, PRACTICING THE TECHNICAL ROUTINE

Arnica oil tiger balm hot water bottle arnica mother tincture massage balls arnica pellets 7CH 9CH wintergreen essential oil Italian helichrysum ice homeoplasmine elasto warming cream aspirin bath knee support scalpel depression splint codeine rheumatism extra pounds tobacco fatigue fractures insomnia neck braces hernias osteoarthritis junk food distended ligaments speaking in the past tense “back when I was flexible” morphine arthritis chair calcification drip cocaine cysts fused vertebrae tremors anxiolytics alcohol balding heroin premature menopause night sweats obesity bone callus tooth loss dentures

Marginalization loneliness misery unemployment conversion FORMALDEHYDE