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At 82, Christine Thynne is an emerging artist. “Risk! There’s a colossal amount of risk,” Thynne says. She is about to perform her show, These Mechanisms, over three weeks at the Edinburgh fringe. While “emerging” isn’t a word often applied to artists in their 80s, Thynne says the description is appropriate. “I wasn’t there before,” she says. “I wasn’t a solo performer.”
Thynne’s show melds aspects of her life – she trained as a physiotherapist in the 1960s – along with other passions. Among her props are planks, stepladders and water. “Things I shouldn’t be doing,” she says. “Moving scaffolding planks. Changing the shape of stepladders. Carrying water.”
She enjoys sea kayaking, having progressed from being coached to paddling the Lofoten islands in Norway, in her 50s. “Sliding up a wave, going down the other side – it was so exciting,” she says. But when she was browsing the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh, Scotland, where she lives, and saw a brochure for a class in Dance Base, Scotland’s national centre for dance, she balked.
The class was free for the over-60s, and Thynne was 68. “I thought: ‘Dare I?’”
For many people, kayaking in open water would be scarier than joining a dance class, but “in life”, Thynne says, “there are occasions when you can lose your self-confidence. You can lose your identity. I was very nervous, wondering could I do it, would I be good enough?”
She had done a bit of ballet and tap growing up in the north-east of England, and loved sport. Not to compete, but because she “loved the way the body moved”. At 16, she wrote to the chartered society of physiotherapists, and did a course on day release while working locally at Imperial Chemical Industries.
“I still love the way the body moves,” she says, “How you can feel the tension in a muscle – is it the right place you’re feeling? Which muscles are weak? Which joints are affected? And how even with simple exercise, you can make people feel much better.”
After a divorce in the mid-1980s, she embarked on a second career, teaching movement and music, and anatomy and massage to therapists, while raising two teenage sons.
She has loved the outdoors since her mum, who was a professional musician, took Thynne and her two sisters “out into the fresh air, to have this love of the countryside, to go brambling, to walk. She gave that to us.”
Thynne, similarly, is “somebody who pushes myself, takes opportunities, takes a risk,” she says. “I’m obviously prepared to go on trying and doing, [asking] can I do this? And then being surprised that yes, I can.”
When she went to her first dance session, it was “won-der-ful!” she says, singing the word. “I realised that somebody was teaching me what to do, and there was music playing and I could let go and I felt that joy of my body moving, coming through me.”
She progressed to Prime, Dance Base’s semi-professional company for over-60s. After that came funding from Luminate, Dance Base, Creative Scotland and Made in Scotland. For These Mechanisms, she has collaborated with the choreographer Robbie Synge. “It’s almost as if I’m having another career.”
Along the way, she has learned “to listen … to find out more about myself, my capabilities. How to put my point of view forward, to be part of a team.” She hopes to tour the show overseas.
In the meantime, she keeps fit. “Each morning, I hang for two or three minutes, take my body weight, then I turn around and hang the other way. Then I do some gentle stretching.” And, of course, she dances. All the time. “I probably dance if I am going from the fridge to the cooker, taking some dishes,” she says, swirling her hands in the air. “Isn’t that what dance is? You just have to let go and explore it.”
These Mechanisms isn’t exactly autobiographical, but it “tells a story of persistence, of joy, of risk”, which sounds like Thynne. “You could do this in your 20s, you could do it in your 80s,” she says. “It’s about the limits of the human body and the desire to make things happen.”
These Mechanisms runs until 20 August at DB3 as part of Dance Base’s fringe programme, delivered in partnership with Assembly festival
