She's A Good Boy // Elise Heaven

Are you a girl or a boy?

No.

Gender is a spectrum, and the acknowledgement of that is the bare minimum 2018 should expect. Not everyone wants to wear the same shirt or underwear, or to be called a man or a woman. The signs and signifiers of what makes a man or a woman are constructed through language and symbols, and so are as up for deconstruction as anything else. You can be one, or the other, both or neither, and if nothing else it’s simply polite to accept how others choose to define themselves. Absolutes are incorrect, and definitive claims made in the name of science inaccurate. What it means to be male or female changes across societies and cultures and across history. There is no medical gender binary, no chromosome test that accurately dictates the gender of every person in the world. XX and XY do not neatly correspond to men or women, and ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are just ideas.

Elise Heaven uses their own experience of this articulation of gender to create their show out of humour, anecdote, silly props and homemade costume. The ridiculousness of someone telling someone else how they feel is rightly lampooned, and any mystery around being non-binary subverted through mime and monologue. Like many other shows which engage with the experience of non-binary or trans performers, familiar difficulties are staged and explained – the expectation to wear gendered clothing for a wedding or a job, the awkwardness of parents when kids simply ask, and the unease sometimes felt in everyday interaction. Accompanied by ukulele songs and debates with themselves, Heaven engineers an easy interaction with a supportive audience. The debate around gender continues both within people and about them. Connection and education is the first step.

-       Lewis Church

links relevant to this diagnosis:

Elise Heaven - She's A Good Boy

Gender Beyond the Binary (Video) - Guardian

What Is Non Binary? - refinery29

9 Things People Get Wrong About Being Non-Binary - Teen Vogue

Gender Doesn't Come Down to Chromosomes - The Globe and Mail

Agender and Non-Binary - Our Queer Stories

Joan // Milk Presents

Joan filters historical qualities of gender through a fourteenth century legend and a classic cabaret vibe. It’s centred around an almost music-hall central figure in the person of champion drag king Lucy Jane Parkinson, who takes on roles and costumes to reframe Joan of Arc through intimate connection and historical reflection. It says valuable things about ideas of gender and society’s relationship to the changing dynamics of its representation - Joan of Arc not just as a legend or symbol, but a real woman who put on armour at a time it was unheard of. Joan with short hair. Joan as a canvas for drawn-on moustaches and someone whose clothes change their movement. Joan as a peasant girl and as a saint, as a soldier and as a leader. 

Four corner mirrors form a cross in the centre of the performance space, with the audience positioned between them. They look across to each other throughout. It’s delivered in the round to facilitate this easy interaction, alongside the participation required at several key points. Two men are invited up to interact with Joan, teaching her their walk, or standing in for an imagined partner. There’s an implicit questioning of their behaviour in their laughter and conversation. The presence on stage of audience members encourages this examination and perhaps reveals some assumptions about gender that might otherwise never be actively considered. The audience laugh with them in their unsure stance and their self-consciousness as they are asked to perform their maleness. 

As funny as the show is, as good natured and enjoyable, there are also moments of loss and hope stand out in stark contrast to the rest of the easy monologue. Parkinson looks to heaven with the same wide-eyed hope as Renée Falconetti. Another Joan, represented in another form, but one as serious as any other, meditating on loss, identity and the burden of history. 

-    Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Joan - Milk Presents

Joan of Arc - Biography.com

Gender Identity - Young Stonewall

Gender Variance Around the World Over Time - Teen Vogue

Le Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (Extract) - Starring Renée Falconetti, directed by Theodor Dreyer (1928)

Dad Dancing // Rosie Heafford, Alexandrina Hemsley and Helena Webb

Over the past month or so, choreographers Rosie Heafford, Helena Webb and I have been working with a supporting cast of people local to Gloucester on our show Dad Dancing (2012 onwards). It is a show that came about when our three dads would come to see our dance performances at Laban back in 2009, completely befuddled by what we were up to. It has grown into a show that reflects on the role of fatherhood - acknowledging the diversity within these roles and how they are taken up. We work with dads, father-figures and children of any age to tease out tender portraits of what’s at stake between and within these relationships.

It’s a project whose emotional weight strikes me at different points. Composing from the external vantage point of choreographers to sharing the lived experiences and dynamics of our own father-child relationships is very affecting. More and more, I think that the show asks for resilience and vulnerability to be intertwined particularly for the supporting cast. It is an ask that we as a creative team nurture as best we can. Our process spends time dancing altogether with the  simple but dedicated task of listening to the textures found within music and our internal rhythms. Our hope is that engaging in these acts of improvisation reveals the joy of movement, the space dancing offers to process emotion and an ever-changing sense of togetherness that can be evoked as a group. 

On stage, I had a sense of collective building, revealing and witnessing. Resting post-show now, I am reflecting on how important these three actions are when considering relationships between parents and their children, more nuanced understandings of parenting roles that undo gendered inequality and the need for society and governments to better understand the diversity of father roles and re-shape policies that represent and support this. 

- Alexandrina Hemsley

Links Relevant to this diagnosis:

Dad Dancing at Strike A Light 2018

dad-dancing.org 

Putting Dads in the Data - Fatherhood Institute

Paternity Rights - Guardian

Mix & Move // GL4 Festival

GL4 are based in the heart of the Matson Estate, bringing theatre and art into the local community and encouraging its development there. Through the support of Strike A Light and other partners, GL4 hosted their first entirely independent event Mix & Move at Robinswood Primary School, as part of their sister festival to Strike A Light 2018. The assembly hall was packed with an audience of proud and engaged parents and supporters, who gathered to be part of a true demonstration of grassroots, locally focused arts provision.

GL4’s arts practice is based around collaboration with artists and investment in the young people of Matson. Gloucester beatboxers 5 Mics and RISE Youth Bristol have been working alongside them in after school clubs and workshops, teaching them skills and techniques to express themselves here in their first public performance. The beatboxers take to the stage as GL4 Beats and are astoundingly good, producing sounds that you’d never know could come from a human body. Not only is the music they’re making a skill that they have learnt fresh for themselves, but by performing it to their parents and other members of the community they show them too. Their fierce little group later form a ‘10 Mics’ super group with their teachers from 5 Mics to hype up the crowd with their skill and confidence.

Similarly, the small children learning their first dance steps and performing for their parents are shown by the performers from RISE where their practicing could lead. They see the kind of movement that these more experienced dancers perform, and the potential of that work to hold the attention of an audience. This fact, that the artists teaching these young people perform alongside them is striking – a primary school hall hosting accomplished dancers and professional musicians. As the proportion of young people with access to arts sessions in schools and colleges falls, events like Mix & Move provide something to aspire to for the young people first starting out in their journey as artists, and shows that exciting performance work can be as at home in Matson as anywhere else.

- Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Mix & Move - GL4 CIC

ACE Children and Young People

Creative Subjects Being Squeezed - BBC News

Proportion of Students Taking Arts Subjects Falls - Guardian (2017)

6 Key Points from ACE's Youth Consultation - IVE

Strike A Light Charity Fundraising Gala

TSOTF are currently visiting Strike A Light Festival (SALF), an organisation that works 'to make Gloucester a city with a vibrant culture for all’. Their Charity Fundraising Gala (the first event of the 2018 festival) aimed to bring together the communities who participate, facilitate and have enjoyed the impact of their efforts to energise and sustain culture for residents of Gloucester - to generate support to ensure it can continue to build on the successes of its 10-year history. 

In 2017 SALF became the first Gloucester based organisation to become an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, and have also been awarded support from the Esmée Fairbairn and Barnwood Trusts. This event however served as a reminder of the precarious nature of arts funding in the UK, and that a firm following, giving what they can, if they can, is incredibly important to a festivals ability to flourish and sustain its offer. 

Directors Sarah Blowers and Emma-Jane Benning greeted attendees as thought they were being invited into their home, coming in to share their excitement and meet the artists and teams involved. There was also a more serious mission: the chance to bid on auctioned items to supplement their fundraising and directly support their programme. The promise was that every £1 raised was to be match by the Arts Council. 

In introducing their first guest artist Viv Gordon and describing the terrain her work explores, Blowers said, ‘like Children In Need and other charity events we are not afraid to talk about difficult subject tonight’. This is the kind of work that is important to SALF, and artists they champion through their programming, producing and participation strands. Gordon’s work illustrated this as an artist & arts and mental health campaigner whose work discusses her lived experience of mental health, trauma and childhood sexual abuse. 

Gordon presented work-in-progress material from her new piece, MasterShit, currently in development with theatre makers Tom Roden, Alice Roots and Vic Llewellyn, which takes the dystopian frame of Master Chef as its starting point. The result, even at this early stage, was an affecting cacophony of ideas and textures presented as fragments of music, movement and text. The care and respect given by each performer to the material was palpable. This was something Blowers also highlighted as a key consideration in supporting the making of work dealing with difficult, real stories, considering care across the artists, producers and audiences involved. If the audience felt triggered in anyway they were assured they could leave the sharing and it was important that they did. From this glimpse of MasterShit, audience members saw that something powerful was being ‘cooked up’ by Gordon and team through the support  of SALF. It served as an example of the need and appetite of SALF to not just present the easy but tackle the necessary. 

After dinner there were conversations with artist and festival team hosts, including the Directors of GL4 Sarah O'Donnell and Naomi Draper, an arts organisation running from the Matson Estate. They are now their own organisation and Strike A Light's sister festival, programming, producing and supporting incoming and local artists and developing audiences around the estate where they live. Young beatboxers 5 Mics gave a flavour of their talents and a glimpse of new material from the company who are making their first theatre piece with support from SALF.

The night was celebratory and in the asking for support shone a light on the need for those who can to support in ways they can, whether volunteering, buying tickets or donating. They say nothing is certain, especially in regards to funding, but what was clear is that SALF are certainly making an impact in Gloucester. 

- Tracy Gentles

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Strike A Light

Viv Gordon

GL4

5 Mics

Arts Sponsorship and Funding Pressures - Guardian

Sponge // Big Imaginations and Turned On Its Head

Sponge is a feel-good soft-play disco for ages 0-4. It’s full of the silliness and mischief that kids love and targeted at an age range that forms experiences that open up theatre to them in the future. Kids are dazzled by the lights and props, the possibilities for play and the opportunities for participation. They run around without being told to sit down, throw things and shout out without being told off, and dance with the performers rather than sit still. It’s not strictly dance, theatre or comedy, but it is happy, bright and open.

The show is a slow escalation of size and texture. Buckets are used as drums and boats and sponges as building blocks, trampolines and rain. It makes a mess of textures, coarse, soft, honeycomb and stretchy. The sponges also prove oddly versatile as costume – here a crawling mushroom that looks like it’s from a 50s sci-fi film, there used to gently reference Charlie Chaplin’s potato fork dance from The Gold Rush or dance moves from Saturday Night Fever. These subtle allusions exist more for the adults in the room than the kid themselves, but they offer another level to the show, little Easter eggs to keep parents entertained alongside the kids

As theatre and performance for young people continues to innovate and expand across the country with new companies and artists, performances like Sponge are a soft and squishy entry into that world. Its allows all kids to feel the freedom of new performance and encourages its audiences to engage and have fun. It introduces from the first (perhaps the very first time for many of the children there) the idea that there is more to theatre than sitting in the dark whilst someone speaks. It can be anarchic, rough and ready, silly and bizarre, with no story to speak of but built on of a series of interactions between performer and audience. And that’s a good lesson to share. 

- Lewis Church

Links Relevant to this Diagnosis:

Sponge – Turned on Its Head

Purni Morrell on Children's Theatre - The Stage

Half of Teenagers 'Never Been In a Theatre' - BBC News

The Blob (1958)

Charlie Chaplin's Table Dance - The Gold Rush (1925)

Quarter Life Crisis // Yolanda Mercy

This lyrical monologue documents the quarter-life crisis of its main character Alicia Adewale. It’s the crisis that comes about through that odd return to childhood forced on graduates and young people by unaffordable rents, casualisation and wealth inequality. The one of leaving home, achieving independence and then returning as though nothing has changed. This tension is at the heart of the performance, the comforting familiarity of being back in a parent’s house and slipping back into the childhood role that goes with it. Embracing unquestioning support, less as an alternative to independence as much as one of the only options available.

The performance is built out of teenage and twenty-something memories and reflections on nights out, with the changing lives of friends and potential new responsibilities looming into focus. And as much as Adewale, a young Londoner of Nigerian descent, measures herself against friends and their marriages, children and homes, she also compares her situation to the histories of parents and distant relatives. The age she is now the same age as her mother was when she had her. The same age as grandparents who left their homes for a better life, the same age as ancestors were elected king or stolen as slaves. Adults, independent and fully formed, with a strong sense of who they were, and yet she still relies on her mother for everything.

But what Quarter Life Crisis correctly implies is that this deferral of adulthood is not the fault of the young people it traps. The tabloid label of the ‘boomerang generation’ deemphasises the responsibilities of those gone before. The shift away from job security in favour of the gig economy, and the housing crisis that leaves flats unavailable and houses unattainable, was not initiated by Adewale’s generation. Nor was the wild variation between the pay of those at the top and those just starting out. The delay in independence is simply a consequence of late capitalism.

The state of the Young Person’s Railcard, something referenced throughout the performance, reveals this truth. The recently announced extensions, the 26 to 30-year-old ‘Young Workers’ card, continues to move the goalposts of achieving full adulthood past your twenties entirely. Absent from the conversation is the idea that the current economy is unsustainable, that in a situation where 30 years old requires a discount simply to travel to work it might be a deeper, more structural problem that needs addressing.

-       Lewis Church 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Yolanda Mercy  - Quarter Life Crisis

Is the New 25-30 Railcard Just An Attempt to Distract? – The Badger

Boomerang Children - Guardian

Lack of Choice and Moving Back Home – The DeBrief

Young People’s Changing Routes to Independence (2002) – Joseph Rowntree Foundation