As someone who aspires towards a romantic, idealist view on life, but continually defaults to a sort of rationalist nihilism, much of my tram ride up to St Kilda to see Reclaim the Crone involved considering a sort of openness — prepping myself into a willingness to receive, or surrender to, something irrational, you might say.

Luckily, it turned out that such conscious prepping was unnecessary, as when the three “old crones” entered the Explosives Factory theatre — dressed in bright red; nets tightened around their contorted faces — amidst a haunting, sonic wave of vibration by composer Norm Skipp, my analytical mind was instantly subdued by the sheer rawness of the experience.

Using contemporary butoh dance theatre, a type of dance which typically engages ‘grotesque’ movements to explore primal human conditions, creator Gabrielle Leah New and her collective The Space Between journey us through the wounds of patriarchal oppression and into the archetype of the Wise Old Woman. Video projections are threaded throughout, including a section of interviews with older women which itself informed the work.

After the crones claw themselves out of their nets, stuttering half-formed phrases, a man stomping a cane sits them down, yelling out abuse — “spinster”, “witch”, “hag” — at which the women’s bodies flail and then slump in shame. The intensity of it all is truly such that I notice myself, and I suspect others around me, well up with tears.

IMAGE CREDITS: Gabrielle Leah New and Helen Smith. Photographer Leonie Van Eyke.
 

Having recently turned 50 herself, Leah New says that she was interested in how the status of an older woman is denigrated in many cultures. The playful nature of butoh dance allowed the old crones to “own their ugliness,” thus flipping denigration into empowerment.

I notice it’s mostly older women sitting in the audience and wonder how my experience of the show as a relatively young person might differ. Its themes still resonate with me, however. Arguably, our cultural resistance towards aging interconnects with a broader societal logic which impacts us all. For instance, one might argue resistance to aging relates to a cultural denial of death, and with that, capitalism’s logic that we can ‘infinitely grow’ beyond a cyclical give-and-take with the earth.[1] In that sense, the show explores how we relate to life itself, and how this impacts our relationship with nature. But on a more grounded level, I also relate to it in how it just feels a bit shit to think, albeit mostly subconsciously, that much of my value comes from being young and that it’s only downhill from here.

Following the abusive shouts, the soundscape then somewhat incoherently shifts to sounds of nature.

The women take off their shoes. Playfully; laughing ecstatically, now draped in soft white sheets, they lift up their clothes to reveal underwear, over which bright red pubic hair is drawn. I’m somewhat confronted; it feels very dangerous.

IMAGE CREDITS: Gabrielle Leah New and Karen Berger. Photographer Leonie Van Eyke.

Over voiceover we hear how affirming older women as sources of wisdom and power might be a gateway into reconnecting with the earth.

Admittedly, though I’m sympathetic to what’s expressed in the performance, I’m genuinely conflicted about whether shows which have explicit political or ideological aims like this lose a richer complexity. Perhaps the powerful thing about art is that it can explore ambiguity, freeing us from the more binary way we often view the world — does part of this power get lost when art has an agenda to spread a social message? Again, I’m just genuinely confused about this.

But if the show’s aim was to get me to relate palpably to patriarchal trauma and the Wise Old Woman archetype, I think it achieves this well. The minimalist costume and stage set-up enabled the foregrounding of an extremely impactful choreography; I was truly absorbed in each strange and interesting gesture, in a show in which words were mostly poetic utterances. The minimalist use of colour — either bright red or soft white — similarly added to an affective, bold intensity. Further, I was surprised by how the interviews, which are projected onto white sheets, were able to merge with the story-world and its mythical tone.

Perhaps one part that didn’t land for me was when the abusive man from the beginning lays dead on the ground backdropped by a projected fire, seeming to suggest the death of the patriarchy. I know the show was a mythical journey, but it felt a little on-the-nose in a way that it lost a bit of impact for me, and I wonder if it could have been explored in a less literal way. Or perhaps it was a structural issue — from memory this occurred in a spot after we’d already experienced quite a lot of elation, and it felt a little jarring in its nonsensicalness. I also felt the final messages about reclaiming the power of old women seemed a little too hazy and broad-sweeping.

But still, the show generally was able to immerse me in a journey of deep feeling — the opening grief an essential precedent for the later elation. I’m moved by it to continue to ponder its provocations: how I view old woman, and how a receptivity to the archetype of the Wise Old Woman could be a radical act in our capitalist, hyper-rational and youth-obsessed culture.