New York actor and writer Megan Tomei is making her Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut with SpinQueen™, an absurdist pedal through body image, abuse and the pressure to please – set entirely on a stationary bike. New York actor and writer Megan Tomei is making her Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut with SpinQueen™, an absurdist pedal through body image, abuse and the pressure to please – set entirely on a stationary bike.
SpinQueen™ turns wellness culture into something almost dystopian. Were you
interested in how self care rhetoric can disguise forms of punishment, especially for
women?
Absolutely! It can very quickly become a highly disordered and destructive pursuit to
constantly be seeking ever-changing and unrealistic standards set by other people. It
keeps women sad, hurt and honestly so busy to the point where they’ve depleted
their time and resources for literally anything else. I don’t even want to imagine what
I would have done by now if I wasn’t so consumed with losing weight. There hasn’t
been a day that’s gone by since I was about 10 years old where I haven’t thought
about how to lose weight or needing to lose weight. It’s all-consuming and very
punishing.
The image of being physically unable to unclip from the bike feels both comic and
horrifying. Did the spin bike become, for you, a metaphor for productivity culture
itself, the terror of stopping?
Yes, and to harken back to beauty standards, it’s becoming a never-ending cycle –
on a bike that literally goes nowhere – that keeps you trapped and stuck, until you’ve
given everything you have, just to realise you’ll never get anywhere. Because there
is no final goal. The bar just gets moved further and further away from you. You’re
never done in the eyes of the world. Ultimately, it has to come from you, realising
you’re the only one setting the standard for yourself.
The show seems fascinated by performance in every sense: performing femininity,
wellness, resilience, even recovery. At what point did you realise how much of your
own survival depended on performance?
Inhales sharply. I am very much still figuring that out. I constantly struggle with the
notion that I will not be received if I am not performing. I’ve never felt like just me
existing is enough – and my therapist can attest to that! I feel swallowed and
hollowed out when I feel outperformed. And it really does take a toll on me to be the
funniest person in the room, but also it kills me when I’m not.
Fitness spaces are often sold as empowering, but they can also become places of
surveillance and control. Did working inside that world change the way you
understood the relationship between discipline and self worth?
Unfortunately, yes. I don’t think that’s the intention behind group fitness, but it often,
and quickly, morphs into a space of external validation. In a spin class, the instructor
is typically on a podium – higher than the rest of the class – and the riders are in a
row-like structure where they vie for the front row and the instructor’s attention. I
think riders can mistakenly place a greater importance to their instructors, but I also
think instructors do very little to discourage that imbalance.
There is something very contemporary about the idea of turning private suffering
into a high-energy public experience. Do you think modern culture increasingly
rewards women for appearing functional while quietly falling apart?
E V E R Y S I N G L E D A Y. No one wants to see or hear a woman’s pain – not
really. They think they do, until they realise they might have been the ones who. I find that if a woman expresses any kind of discomfort or dissatisfaction, it’s usually distilled to an emotional, irregular outburst that is highly exaggerated by the woman who dared to raise her voice. The number of times I have been accused of yelling, when I was just speaking firmly and clearly. I wish people would tolerate
hearing me actually yell. They would be shocked.
SpinQueen™ sounds emotionally raw, but also highly stylised and absurd. Was
humour essential because some truths become unbearable if played completely
straight?
I think there is a world in which it would be too much to bleed and rage for 50
minutes – although I wish it wasn’t. But no, comedy, humour, and absurdism have always been and will always be an essential part of who I am and the art I make. If you can’t laugh at yourself and this life we all desperately cling to, then what’s the point?
SpinQueen™ is at Jade Studio, Greenside @ George Street from Friday 7 to
Saturday 29 August at 19.35. Tickets: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-