The Future of the Ancient World

Fit Bodies: Pulling Faces

Writer Helen Gold on Pulling Faces

Pulling Faces available from BigFinish.com and iTunes

_Pulling Faces was born out of many discussions between Louise Jameson and myself, one of us a successful actress and celebrated beauty (Louise), the other a considerably less well-known performer, possessing neither beauty nor even physical distinctiveness of any kind (me)! Difficult as my journey in show-business had been (due, in part, to said physical deficiencies!) it seemed that, when it came to ageing, Louise had by far the bigger challenge than I. First off, she was battling the constant judgement of people who had watched her on TV and still expected her to look a certain way, and who thought nothing of voicing their disappointment upon seeing that she looked older than they remembered. Secondly, she was under pressure to conform to industry expectation for a woman of her age and ‘get some work done’ -having observed most of her peers bowing to that pressure then working more as a consequence. The interesting thing to my mind though was that, although our experiences as actresses had differed, our personal hang-ups were remarkably similar. We were both focused on our physical negatives, both unhappy about ageing and putting on weight yet not possessing the will-power to keep as fit as we should then, of course feeling full of self-loathing about that lack of self-discipline. Most importantly, we both wanted to be true to ourselves and ‘real’ yet felt almost obligated to bow to the pressure to stay looking young, if only because everyone else was doing it!

With that in mind, we wanted to explore a premise in the play where the lead character, Jo, is an older woman (55) at the whim of the media indstry in which she has her career but whose secret personal preference is to embrace reality and love herself despite the inevitable physical changes which come with age. She is conflicted as she wants her career whilst knowing it will always be dictated to by public perception which, in turn, has been shaped by media manipulation. (Who can tell anymore who is completely surgery free and who has been nipped and tucked? I remember seeing Annie Lennox in an interview in recent times and being shocked at the fact that she actually looked her age, which in turn prompted me to wonder at the fact that no other celebrity women I had seen on TV in that age group looked anything like that!)

Jo also wants a relationship based on someone loving the person that she is and not the surface she presents, despite knowing that the first impression will almost always be a physical judgement, hence her horror at the prospect of reuniting with her old lover after 25 years.

I see the journey Jo goes on almost like a hike through a thorny forest where she has to push aside the media images we’re fed, the mental attitudes that are bred in us from childhood and understand what drives her desire to be young and beautiful for longer. I wanted audience members to ask themselves afterwards ‘what’s wrong with looking our age? Why do I really feel the need to look younger? Who is that for?’ and if the answer is anything other than ‘me’ then that is a subject to be reassessed.

It’s perfectly valid that youth and beauty is equated with fitness, general well-being and sexiness. It’s not called the prime of life for nothing. Unfortunately, in the years that follow, the judgement we all receive is pretty unfair. And we’re all guilty of that judgementalness to some extent. As soon as we see a body which is untoned, overweight or aged we tend to make an enormous number of negative assumptions about the owner of that body: They’re past it, de-motivated, de-sexualised or maybe they’re people who dislike themselves or can’t accept themselves. Despite the fact that every individual knows they have their own reasons for the physical shape they’re in, how we love to point, laugh and judge!

Personally, I think the media exerts a criminal degree of influence, manipulating us with a constant stream of images of supposedly successful people and the ensuing downward slide of said ‘successes’ once those laughter lines start to show. Being young and beautiful is certainly not my definition of success. Contrary to what we are led to believe, I have always thought it must be a something of a plight to be a beautiful woman in Hollywood. Rather like the maiden celebrated for her beauty and virtue who will inevitably, as a consequence of those qualities, end up as dragon food!

Anyway, in the end, Jo comes to a clearing in the woods (so to speak) and has a much greater understanding of what she truly wants and why. Hopefully the audience goes away and looks at themselves with a bit more self-love and understanding too…..

Louis Jameson on Pulling Faces

To cut or not to cut, that is the big indulgent western world obsession…. ‘going under the knife’…..

‘Have you had work done?’ is the new compliment. We have become a culture obsessed with body image, and I include myself in that, hence the play, a comedy, which I flags up to women of a certain age, the subtle (and not so subtle) pressures which influence their dangerous choices.

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Fit Bodies: Drawing Over the Colour Line

Gemma Romain, UCL Drawing Over the Colour Line Project

Exploring Henry Tonks’ pastel of the Nigerian wounded soldier J. Williams, Gemma Romain, part of the UCL Drawing over the Colour Line research project, reflects on the experiences of colonial soldiers and on Tonks’ representation of the body in relation to ideas of race, colonialism, disability and disfigurement.

Henry Tonks, Portrait of a Wounded Soldier before Treatment, 1917, pastel on paper, UCL Art Museum, EDC2800

I am particularly interested in how Black people are represented within British art in the early twentieth century and my current research focuses on the inter-war period. I am researching artwork held within the Slade School of Art collections at UCL Art Museum, exploring the work of students who drew models of African and Asian heritage. As a result of my work with the museum I came across this pastel drawn by war artist and Slade School of Fine Art lecturer Henry Tonks. It is a portrait of the Nigerian soldier J. Williams who was injured in 1917.

During the First World War facial injuries were commonly suffered by troops, particularly injuries to the nose and jaw due to the type of head protection available to those fighting. Henry Tonks, who was a trained surgeon, worked with pioneer facial plastic surgeon Harold Gillies during and after the war by drawing surgical diagrams and also pastel artwork for the wounded soldiers’ case notes.

Henry Tonks’ drawings have been explored by art historians including Emma Chambers and Suzannah Biernoff who comment on the way in which facial disfigurement has been represented in art and the complexity of Tonks’ drawings in that they represent surgical documentation yet also are aesthetic interpretations using the fine art medium of pastels. They also importantly reflect on the public gaze and spectatorship involving war disfigurement and art, both at the time it was created and today. As Chambers has recalled, despite Tonks’ opposition to both the public gaze upon the artwork and in considering the pastel drawings as traditional artworks, he viewed the portraits and the soldiers’ disfigurement in the context of art traditions of representing classical statues – in a letter to a friend he wrote: “I have done some … rather ﬁne pastel fragments! One I did the other day of a young fellow with rather a classical face was exactly like a living damaged Greek head as his nose had been cut clean off just where noses of antiques generally are cut off.”

I am interested in this particular piece of artwork also for its importance in reflecting on the marginalised histories and identities of African and Asian people serving in the First World War, as well as the ways in which the African body has been exploited in the history of colonialism for doing certain types of work and labour. J. Williams is listed in Gillies’ surgical archives as being injured on 1st September 1917 and is described as a Private in the Regiment of the Nigerian 3rds. His injuries are listed as ‘GSW Lower lip jaw chin’. In the War Office records, I have so far only found one J. Williams listed who served in Nigeria, but he served in the Royal Engineers (Inland Water Transport). As David Killingray and James Matthews have documented, Nigerians were recruited as both soldiers and as labourers such as water transporters in the Inland Water Transport, supplying the troops with goods and water in harsh conditions.

This artwork makes us think of multiple silences and experiences. The African soldier and labourer and also the soldier facially disfigured in the war were marginalised and ignored in public displays of commemoration. In the visual display of mainstream commemoration white soldiers without facial disfigurement were generally represented within official war commemoration artwork. Despite its possibilities for exploring and bringing to the fore what was hidden from view, this portrait remains problematic. For example, J. Williams, and others in this series of portraits, were not necessarily posing on their own terms for a piece of artwork they wanted to create, but were taking part in a process of medical documentation.

In thinking through the notion of a ‘fit body’ in the context of this piece of art I envisage ‘fitness’ as a term which must be critiqued and historicised; this artwork reminds us that ideas of fitness are partially shaped by those in power who deem what is a fit body to be allowed within public visual culture and how fitness and the body have been constructed in relation to histories of racism, disableism, imperialism and ideas of visual beauty.

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Fit Bodies: Damaging the Body

Sarah Cheney, PhD Candidate, Centre for the History of the Psychological Disciplines

To me, the idea of a “fit body” implies the existence of its opposite: the “un-fit body”. Indeed, in various situations, concepts of “fitness” have been judged primarily by a process of exclusion. Most famously, of course, this occurred within the eugenics movement, where “fitness” was often judged by the absence of supposed defects (physical or mental). We can also, however, see similar concerns today, for example within contemporary debate over whether certain people might be un-deserving of medical treatment, due to the effect obesity, smoking or alcohol consumption has had on their bodies.

Since the nineteenth century, much of this discourse around determining what is (and is not) a fit body has been located within a context which attributes psychological meaning to physical change, as well as the reverse: fitness often implies a balance between these two elements. My own research focuses on the idea of self-inflicted injury, and the ways in which this was explored in the late nineteenth-century, when physicians regularly made analogies between physical and mental events. In such a context, the “un-fit” body of the “hysteric” (through self-inflicted injury or, as Roy Porter has termed it, the “functional self-mutilation”

of paralysis or contracture) was seen to reflect wider concerns of intellectual, social and moral (as well as physical) decline. While the fit body might be an ideal often presented throughout history, debate has frequently centred, instead, on the “damaged” body.

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Fit Bodies: Female Body Building

Marilyn Bruce-Mitford

I was one of the very first pioneering women bodybuilders from 1981 until 1988, at a time when the sport was virtually unheard of in the UK. I was right in at the start of it all in Britain.

When I started, I had no idea that women’s bodybuilding was just taking off like a rocket in the USA and that the 1980s would become its ‘Golden Decade ‘. It was a pure coincidence that I began when I did, with absolutely no role model to influence me. I just wanted to ‘get fit, lose weight and tone up’, but it soon turned into a lot more.

Bodybuilding has always been a very controversial sport even for men, but for women it challenges a host of intractable stereotypes about the acceptable physical appearance of women and their role in society. Entire Ph.Ds have been written on this subject in the USA and volumes of articles, so it is hard to convey the impact that the first women bodybuilders had in the early 1980s. It was the era of the Jane Fonda aerobic craze and women were expected to look toned and slim, not to be strong, confident and muscular and flex their muscles on stage. It scared men and women alike, but it fitted well with the emerging feminism of the time.

Marilyn in the 1980s

I first saw pictures of early female competitors in the USA Magazine ’Muscle and Fitness’ and was simply amazed by their physiques, which in those early years were really little more than athletic and toned. It would be the mid -1980s before real muscularity became the standard for contests and in later decades, went too far along this route.

By the time I had trained hard for about three years, if I walked down the street in Covent Garden in a skimpy outfit, it stopped the traffic-literally. Nowadays, no-one would look twice at a gym trained woman, when every pop singer looks that way. But in 1982, admiration or amazement was only a part of it. I once had hot coffee thrown at me by a lorry driver, as I jogged on the pavement. I also had a great deal of trouble at my workplace, where my superiors regarded my appearance in a newspaper report of a contest in a bikini as ‘improper’. I received an official reprimand which went on my annual report. So being a bodybuilding pioneer had its serious difficulties. Opposition merely made me even more determined to stick to my guns and win some major contests.

For me the hard training had really wonderful results, not just to do with my appearance. I had always been undersized, thin, weak, rather sickly and short sighted, highly stressed in my job and had always loathed sport. But weights can sculpt your body like nothing else and quickly too. In two years I was able to compete successfully and looked quite different. My health was 100% improved.

With the improvement in my appearance, came a huge boost in my self confidence and self esteem. I had to appear on stage and perform a posing routine in front of a large crowd and spotlights, so I had to take lessons in posing and learn how to project myself to the best advantage. It helped me in many other ways in my life apart from bodybuilding contests.

My new found interest led me to meet many new people who were completely outside my academic context at work. A whole new world suddenly opened up and with it came the ability to express myself creatively. It changed my outlook on life and my personality.

In 1984, I met by chance a literary agent, who asked me to write a book on womens’ bodybuilding. So I wrote ’Designer Body: A Bodybuilding Handbook for Women’’, which was published in 1985 and which was a fitness best seller. This involved me in a nationwide publicity tour and an appearance on the Terry Wogan Show on live TV, as well as many other interviews on TV, radio and in the press.

By 1987, I had the physique I had always wanted. Contests are judged on symmetry, proportions and muscularity, and I knew by then that I had developed what it took to win. I was 43, so I was a lot older than most of the girls who had by then started to train and compete, but seven years of training beat youth hands down. I decided to go in for the Austria Cup in 1988 and placed third in this international, which was won by the Austrian champion. It seemed a good moment to retire from the sport, at the top of my game.

I look back on this period in my life as one of the best. I had challenged myself to the utmost of my ability physically and mentally, as any elite athlete must. It had been a very hard slog, but worth every moment of heavy lifting, rigorous dieting and combatting out- of- date and ingrained attitudes to women. I had been able to be a role model and guru for many young women who would be empowered and benefit as I had done

I can’t say that when you train for a contest you are at your fittest, but when you stand on stage holding a winner’s trophy high, with all the flashbulbs going off and the crowds cheering, it takes some beating. I felt like I’d won an Oscar.

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Fit Bodies: Playing Sport – Steven Scoufarides and Steven Bieniek

Steven Scoufarides, Master of Laws Student at UCL

The premise of a ‘fit body’ is somewhat different in everyone’s eyes. People that go to the gym or partake in regular exercise/training in order to improve their body image tend to never be satisfied with their achievements. Many body conscious individuals, whether it be overweight or skinny, have trepidations about going to the gym because of the stereotypical ‘meatheads’. However, these so called meatheads are infected with the same desire to improve themselves as the shy and body conscious.

People that regularly lift weights in order to get ‘bigger guns’ or ‘washboard abs,’ are themselves body conscious. No matter how much you admire or idolise someone else, they will have their own idols and aspirations. Those afraid of going to the gym because of fear of inadequacy or other trepidations needn’t worry; those that you are looking up to and fear feel the exact same way as someone else.

The cause of this problem is the glamorisation of unrealistic bodies in magazines and in movies such as 300. Man of these people with ‘ideal bodies’ have had professional training and in many cases involve substance abuse, i.e. steroids. Articles such as ‘get rock hard abs in 4 weeks’ with a model standing next to them who has taken years to get into the shape he has do not help the cause, especially when many of these have taken steroids.

In conclusion I believe the premise of a ‘fit body’ is something that does not exist. There is no uniform standard of what a fit body is. Everyone is individual with different bone structures and differing levels of testosterone, meaning some people are simply unable to obtain the unrealistic goals they and society set for them. A fit body is one which is the best natural possibility for that individual. Most people will never be satisfied with the body they have so they will always try to improve. The rare few who are happy with their bodies are the only people who are have truly ‘fit bodies’.

I have had quite an extreme experience in sport and fitness compared to most. At school and college I weighed around 150kg despite an active lifestyle. Following unsuccessful attempts to lose weight through cardio and diet I started lifting weights ages 18. Within months I shed vast amounts of weight hitting a low of 77kg aged 20. However since then obsessionism has taken over and I now regularly go to the gm to lift weights.

Admittedly I have fallen fowl of the ‘disease’ mentioned above whereby you are never happy with what you have achieved. Despite having transformed in massive ways, I am still not satisfied and want to get even more lean mass and core strength. In the summer months outside of university I do go to the gym 6 days a week.

Even during busy exam and work periods I make sure I go to the gym at least three or four times a week to maintain strength and size. Numerous sporting injuries from football, basketball, rugby and even ten pin bowling have slowed my progress, however, I am confident of one day being called an elite athlete. The motivation required to lose weight has now transferred to all areas of my life and I give my all in everything I do, much to the dismay of my teammates when training for football matches as they are often on the ends of some hard tackles!

Steven Bieniek, PhD Candidate Physics Department, UCL

A fit body to me, means fit for purpose. If you wanted to compete in gymnastics then you’d need a very different type of physical fitness then a sprinter. A rugby player is different to a marathon runner. This is the case extent that a positive attribute in one role, hurts in another. In general I would say “being healthy” would be required, but the requirement of health are different for different people. A person in a cold climate needs a different builds then one in a warm climate.

My experience with sports and fitness started at properly at university through the sports teams I joined. Thus my fitness was tailored around these sports. Being quick and nimble rather helped more then being bulky. I keep fit for my sport by running rather then gaining weight in the gym.

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