When we walked in, two bodies laid on a rectangle of plush grey carpet on the black concrete floor. They were top-to-tail and mix-matched – one was wearing a pink shirt with dark navy pants, the other was wearing a dark navy shirt with pink pants. Everything was cotton, or something like it, and the shirts were buttoned right up to the collars, even if the sleeves were rolled up, hands ready to get stuck into some work. Two audience members sat on the swiss balls in the corner, which was unfortunate because they were part of the performance.

For close to half an hour Rachel Ruckstuhl-Mann and Clare Luiten performed with each other, and with two black and three pink swiss balls, in their trousers and shirts. They balanced and sunk into the orbs, finding and losing the weight of their bodies, they huffed and puffed at the balls to move them across the room, they picked up and threw the balls at the floor, the ceiling and the audience, they ran around the balls herding them into a group in the centre of the carpet. These were not easy physical feats, nor were they done haphazardly. The two artists were precise and unyielding, their bodies trained and contorted. 

And other things happened to – home video projected on two of the walls, snapping quickly between quite everyday things, a dog, mud, landscape, a car window. At some point Rachel and Claire started talking – not quite to each other, but as if they were leaving messages on each other’s phones. “Hi Claire, I just called to say it would be good to catch up.” “Hi Rach, just me, running a bit late.” A picture starts to form of two mothers, friends, who are, as we say these days when we’re trying to be professional, “at capacity”. The swiss balls, big unwieldy props are not just that either, they’re often used in late pregnancy to help alleviate back pain, and to strengthen the core. As pieces of exercise equipment it's hard not to relate them to the aesthetic pressures that women face too.

And then, after all that, the most extraordinary thing happened. The two women disappeared behind a black curtain for a few moments and then came out in hot pink dresses. They each pulled a plug from a swiss ball and sat on it, side by side, and then threw a black mink blanket over themselves. They became one beast with four legs and two pink skirts. As the air was expelled out of the balls there was movement, and muffled sounds, coming from under the blanket. They could have been crying, or laughing, or gossiping. And then, the air was gone and that was that – the end of the performance. 

Why put on a pink dress, only to cover it up with a blanket? 

Why put on a pink dress for just a moment, as an end to the performance?

Femininity is a strange thing. A goal we’re told to aspire to, an altar under which we sacrifice much, with ever-diminishing returns. That dark hair we keep plucking. We are lifted, then torn down for the performance of it. The adhesion to the bounds of acceptability is tricky. A wholehearted embrace leads to humiliation. It's deemed too much. Much too tacky. Much too much. It becomes monstrous, a perversion. When the construct is seen as artificial, it must be torn down. And yet they want us to play along, smile nice, be sweet and harmless.

But there’s freedom in wearing a dress too. Especially a pink dress with a full skirt that stops just above the knee. Especially two. This is femininity as girlhood – a brief and idealised time before all the responsibilities of adulthood and motherhood. A time you could spend all day with your friend, and her hair would shine as a sunlight halo. A time when others dressed you, brushed your hair, told you you were pretty. A time when a frilly pink dress wasn’t too much. A time when gender starts to divide children, to set out paths before them, and before perhaps, we’re shortchanged by it all.