— read write play

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April, 2009 Monthly archive

A new nationwide campaign – backed by the arts councils of England, Wales and Scotland – is urging producers, directors and writers to strive for equal gender portrayal in theatre. I wish I knew exactly what that meant.

On one hand, the campaign seems to be interested in parity of opportunity – that equal gender portrayal involves the pursuit of a more equal number of roles available for women on stage (with a side interest in “other roles” off-stage). On the other, there’s an interest in representations of gender: the kinds of men and women being portrayed. Quantitative versus qualitative, if you will.

There are, of course, difficulties in addressing both. The relative absence of roles for women (or men) in a particular work, body of work, season of work or venue’s programming is not de facto evidence of inequality or sexism. There are a range of sound political, aesthetic and even pragmatic reasons why this might be the case, whether you’re staging The Vagina Monologues or Blackwatch. That said, we do have a theatrical culture which is dominated by men on and off-stage: there’s a persistent, though not universal, assumption that the dramatic everyman is a dude. However, a headcount is far too blunt a tool to fully describe (or dismantle) that cultural trope, and the attitudes, money and conventions which sustain it.

Similarly, I’m looking for more detail in the desire to see “a broad and fairly balanced representation of men and women in drama.” What constitutes balanced representation? Is it a ratio of stereotypes to individuals? Do we have to balance visions of masculinity from the 30s with manliness from the 80s? Do feminist texts need to be “balanced” with plays which present retrogressive images of women?

I’m made also little anxious by the bluntness of the plan – quoted in The Stage – for a website with a list of “productions by, featuring or about women.” Raising awareness and visibility of women-authored work in a male-dominated industry is a productive strategy: it draws attention to a body of work without robbing those within it of the diversity of their skills, lives and work. But it’s an activity that may have very little to do with “balance.”

More than anything, I’m a little anxious about titling the campaign 50/50, because it directs attention away from the more complex conversation about the representation of gender (and how and why it might take place, and in whose hands those representations rest) towards a more simplistic account of theatre making. And even if those involved in the project are having those more involved conversations – and there’s no reason to think they shouldn’t, or aren’t – then it’s still the public image of an unthinking gesture towards equality that may trigger knee-jerk rejection (and reactionary tabloidism).

None of the above is an argument that we shouldn’t think, talk and act on this issue – just the recognition that “equality” and “balance” are strikingly different concepts.

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UntitledA post for students currently taking Devising for the Stage in Spring 09. Here are your instructions:

1. Take a look at the photograph in this entry (you can click to load a larger version).

2. Write the FIRST SENTENCE of a story inspired by this image: one sentence, and one sentence alone. Leave the sentence as a comment on this entry.

3. Write the LAST SENTENCE of someone else’s story by picking a comment and clicking “reply to this comment.” You can reply to a comment which already has a first sentence (i.e. a story can have more than one ending).

You may need to revisit the site later after posting your own first sentence to allow other story fragments/comments to arrive.

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In talking about the influences on the performance project I’m embarking on (slides here – pdf) I picked out one particular problem. How do I (and audiences) process the kind of scale involved in the current financial crisis? How much is a trillion, anyway?

research-through-practice-final

Various newspapers have tried recently – with varying degrees of success – to describe economies of scale. An article in The Guardian helpfully calculated that a stack of one trillion pound coins would reach from the surface of the earth to Mars. The problem there, though, is that I have no real comprehension of the distance to Mars. One abstract quantity has been replaced by another equally abstract image.

One approach I’m testing involves creating an audience-specific exchange rate: count up all the money in the room, in cash and credit card limits, and then use that as the base unit for discussion. How many rooms of ready cash would make up a million? How many for a trillion?

There’s still, I think, a problem of scale – that the jump from million to trillion requires such a shift of perception that our imaginations might still fail us. A thousand rooms of people isn’t necessarily more comprehendable than the tower of money to Mars.

However, building a relationship of value based on the money or spending power we (perhaps unthinkingly) carry around with us on a daily basis could be the first step in a journey of understanding. Instead of reaching directly for the trillion, we could make a sequence of manageable leaps: from cash in hand, to yearly income, to the cost of a house and on upwards.

My main reason for talking about the trouble with trillions, this morning and now, is to ask for help. What does a trillion mean to you?

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On the train heading to Newtown for our departmental research conference, looking over the talk I’m giving tomorrow morning. The talk is an attempt to describe the ongoing process of bringing together my research (primarily written, formal, theory-led) with my performance practice (improvised, disposable, pragmatic, comic). More than anything, I want to talk about my growing engagement (a polite way of saying obsession) with interactive, co-operative and collaborative performance.

Accordingly, my struggle over what to say is coupled – painfully – with the question of how to say it. I’m on a panel with two colleagues: it’s not the time or space for a 20 minute work-in-progress performance (even if I had 20 minutes to show, which I really don’t).

My solution – and I’ll soon find out if it works – is to use my presentation to play a game with the audience, a gamble when the game is brand new (to me and everyone else) and the game doesn’t have a “winning” state which might provide satisfying closure. Instead, I’m presuming (gambling/hoping) that the best way to talk about process is to actually engage in it – to play a performance game, rather than describing the rules or showing what you could have already won.

So. Wish me luck.

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