Finland is the birthplace of team gymnastics and the best in the world in the sport, but “the sport of flexible girls” is not exactly celebrated in the national memory, writes cultural journalist Maija Alander.
Living the body remembers. Pain, posture, form, repetition, distance to others. Stretched as a child is still flexible. The performing and athletic body is a being that is always looked at, getting everything from the gaze and thus always somehow a child.
Former team gymnasts and current Actors Katariina Havukainen, Inkeri Hyvönen and Ella Lahdenmäki wanted to document a sport where Finland is by far the best in the world, but which nobody really talks about. A sport that touches the lives and self-image of thousands of Finnish children and young people, for better or for worse. The kind of girls where you’re really flexible, they say.
Theater Takomo’s performance Jumping girls was initially just a case report about Finnish team gymnastics. From jumpers to jumpers, the creators say. How hard the show hit on an even broader experience struck the creators with a sly.
After every performance, a couple of people from the audience were crying, feeling relieved. There was something in common for which there are no words.
When the memories of the three performers are brought to the small gymnasium of Minervaskolan in Helsinki, the audience becomes a body that also remembers. Work, breath and sweat, a long union of exercise and education. When the characters in glittering tracksuits, who dance, jump and patiently explain their body image, are adults with their wear and tear, the ideal of discipline and form in which we still grow and which we repeat comes to the fore.
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The body of an athlete and performing artist is a tool, but still his own.
Finnish the history of team gymnastics is in women’s gymnastics, which in the beginning gave the gender confined to a narrow role an avenue for self-expression. The first team gymnastics world championships were held in Helsinki in 2000. Finland has won the world championship in the sport 10 times.
Still, with the five-time world champion in team gymnastics, With Paula Thesleffdoesn’t even have its own Wikipedia page – not to mention, for example, freezing a sequin outfit to the ceiling of the hall, as Jumping girls to point out. A choreographer who has prepared numerous winning choreographies, and who is exceptionally successful internationally Antton Laine probably unknown to the common man Sports screen to the viewer. Or the Vantaa gymnastics club Hannele Ahlqvistwho, while developing team gymnastics, has moved thousands of young people since the 70s.
Team gymnastics, like other aesthetic sports, combines storytelling with strict, visual discipline. It has also led to the excesses of the coaching culture. Jumping girls go through this trauma: food diaries, measurements, painful forced stretches, barking and screaming. Young coaches who have just finished their gymnastics careers without pedagogical skills.
The ideal of flawlessness feeds discipline, discipline feeds pain, and pain contributes to the perception of cultivated beauty only by curtailing it.
Young Lahdenmäki had to do gymnastics outside the edge of the mat, because he did not qualify for the competition lineup. She shows a handout in which she drew the positions of all the team’s gymnasts at different points in the program when she was a “substitute girl”. In every box, Lahdenmäki has drawn himself behind the border, alone.
Lahdenmäki realized only while doing this performance that the positions that he couldn’t do as a child, despite training, and that the coaches made him tough, are structurally impossible for him. Don’t hurt yourself by trying anymore, the physiotherapist advised.
Discipline and the union of beauty is historical and still quite unquestioned.
Jyrki Kaartinten writes in his dissertation National socialist education – politics or pedagogy? (2017) on the aesthetic connections between gymnastics and National Socialism. Hitler’s according to which the state should, above all, raise young people to be physically strong and determined. National Socialism drew from German sports ideologues such as of Johann GutsMuths (1759–1839), who especially considered gymnastics skills to prepare young people for the service of the fatherland.
In GutsMuths’s vision, physical education led to a goal where “the physics of the wild was combined with the culture of the spirit”. Gymnastics was therefore seen as a way to tame a person’s physical drive and power mechanism and to stand out from groups of people seen as inferior.
Jumping girls with their presentation, the creators hope to draw attention to how to reach the top while helping young enthusiasts to recognize their limits and desires. The body of an athlete and performing artist is a tool, but still his own. Not the coach, the director, the nation state or the public.
Next Jumping girls goes on tour to Finland’s major gymnastics cities, and additional performances are planned.
Theater is an apt way to examine intergenerational body culture. The authors tell how in theater, unlike in film, a performer can be an adult and a child, a coach and a teenager, a mother and a daughter at the same time. The public sees and accepts it all. Looking at the body, its historical roots and effects, can best be dealt with by looking at the body.
In the end, what does a Finnish body that works out in the gym carry? How do we look at sports and athletes, what kind of self-image and worldview does it form?
Jumping girls has once again opened a place for discussion about humanity at the intersection of sports, art and history.
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