"Gonna make you sweat" Natasha Tripney's article for Exeunt Magazine includes ENDURANCE by Jennifer Jackson
Gonna make you sweat
Torn muscles, personal bests, and strategic toilet trips: inside the breathless world of endurance theatre.
Explore 'Jennifer Jackson's process and her 'Endurance' performance, included in Exeunt Magazine' as Natasha Tripney delves into endurance art and athleticism.
Jennifer was interviewed by Natasha Tripney for Exuent Magazine at the end of 2024 alongside some brilliant artists across Europe. The article explores work that deals with exhaustion, endurance and the drive to push yurself to your limit on stage.
" Like the members of Pony Cam who all have sporting backgrounds, British performance-maker Jennifer Jackson was really into sport as a kid – her show WRESTLELADSWRESTLE is in part inspired by her experiences as a teenage judo champion – and she has a fascination with feats of endurance. She became interested in fell running and the fact that the people breaking the records in that field were often women in their 40s and 50s. “This really challenged what I thought was possible in terms of athleticism and sportsmanship.”
In her aptly titled show Endurance, having attached herself to a heart monitor, Jackson proceeds to run backwards and forwards in an arc across the stage, as the audience listen to the amplified sound of her breathing and the slap of her shoes on the floor, as well as the beep of the monitor.“I wanted to make a piece about running as a metaphor for getting up every day and going out in the world,” she says. At the same time, Jackson wanted the piece to acknowledge the oppression her Bolivian mother faced as a woman of colour. She was interested in the spectacle of “a woman's body being tested, eroded through a task like running,” the idea of what a body carries within it, in terms of genetic material and memory – the way her body is a vessel for her history and “all of the things that have come before me.”
Jackson initially considered using a treadmill in the show but decided against it. “It felt like I needed to be traveling as well,” she says. “The act of repetition, of putting one foot in front of the other became really important.”
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