As the Body Is, So it Knows // Kopano Maroga

Kopano begins this workshop by offering a congratulation to the participants for taking the time to honour yourself in a society that doesn’t want you to. For often pressures on our time remove us from our bodies and the things that they know, cutting us off from the knowledge contained in bones, muscles and the way we move. Our time here together asserts writing as a bodily practice as well as a cerebral one, and it asks its participants to share intimacies with each other as they share the space, filling pages with dialogue as we fill the space with our dance and shouting.  

Many of the movement exercises engage with the trauma that lives in the body by borrowing movement practices from somatic therapy. The notion that trauma is a physical reality is one that is increasingly understood by psychiatric professionals - a biological process where the rush of adrenalin migrates deep into the core of tissue. Within the workshop, Kopano instructs us in an extended period of shaking and trembling designed to free whatever experience of this form of trapped history we may own. We then turn from this movement to the writing of letters to those people or things that we might want to forgive in our lives, linking this freeing of emotion through movement to the production of text. Writing in silence before sharing these letters with a partner, the movement sparks new connections across language, nationality and experience. 

Its paradoxical that self-care can become an added pressure to an already hectic life. Competitive wellness is a fundamentally modern phenomenon, with time spent in exercise construed as achievement. What the time here in this workshop reminds its participants is that the brain and body are not only linked but one and the same, with subjectivity created through being and relation rather than internal definition. My body is what writes, and my mind and emotions are what direct my body to move. By taking time to link the two once again, I understand the extent to which my practice relies on this relation.

- Lewis Church

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

 Kopano Maroga - As the Body Is, So it Knows

Time to Move Beyond the Mind/Body Split - The British Medical Journal

Working with Traumatic Memory in the Body - NICABM

Somatic Therapy - Psychology Today

Writing Dance - Lila Dance UK

Self-Care Won’t Save Us - Current Affairs

YAYAYA AYAYAY // Ultimate Dancer and Robbie Thomson

Entering one by one through dark curtains, the start of this performance feels ritualistic. Inside: darkness. Ushers guide the audience using glow-in-the-dark gloves that gleam like palm pilots. The eye is drawn irresistibly to every scrap of phosphorescent tape and each tiny LED – the depth of the dark is disorientating. But rather than confuse, it seems designed only to gently remove our preoccupation with time and space. Darkness can do that, especially when coupled with isolation, like people who have spent weeks living in unlit caves, or five days in a darkness retreat in Berlin conceiving a show. Our eyes are given time to adapt to the dark, but even though the performance is just an hour, it is still hard to know how fast time is passing, if at all. 

The Greek meaning of ‘theatre’ was ‘the seeing place’. To perform in total darkness may seem counterproductive, yet it has been a rich source of experimentation since at least 1998, when Battersea Arts Centre put on a seminal programme of theatre, music, dinner, comedy and poetry, all consumed in the dark. This season's aim was to unleash the power of the spoken word. In YAYAYA AYAYAY, the few spoken words are slowed, stretched and repeated with the help of digital manipulation amid throbbing tones and waveforms from the mixing desk. The sounds that make up the words are isolated, distorted, reunited; new articulations emerge – mantras and roars – before revealing their original meaning.

Apparently tethered to the sound of the voice, lights encroach fleetingly and then start to dispel the darkness, moving through it, revealing something of the space around. Under the right conditions, the human eye can respond to a single photon of light. For most people, the light continually around us stops us ever seeing that sensitively. In the half-light, the tenth-light, the hundredth-light of this performance, the eye catches and latches on to glimpses, mirages, illusions; a primal body materialising from the shimmering gloom and fading back into darkness. The effect is mind-altering, magical, cathartic.

And whether it was seeing this performance or just the start of spring in the city, the light the following morning had a different, more magical quality.

- Michael Regnier

Links relevant to this diagnosis

YAYAYA AYAYAY - Ultimate Dancer

Ultimate Dancer - Exeunt

Performing Arts' Relationship with Ritual - UNESCO

Why Does It Take So Long for Our Eyes to Adjust to A Darkened Room?  - Scientific American 

The Caves of Forgotten Time – The Atlantic

BAC’s Playing in the Dark Programme,1998

Theatre in the Dark: Shadow, Gloom and Blackout in Contemporary Theatre (2017)

Life In the Dark – Neuroanthropology Blog 

What Are the Limits of Human Vision? - BBC Future

Hymen Manoeuvre // Evelyn Mok

During her teenage years, Evleyn Mok protected her hymen with ‘a ninja-like focus’. Such candid humour effervesces throughout her show Hymen Manoeuvre. Mok weaves a multi-stranded show around her heritage, generational differences, sex, body shaming, and the personal/political intersections of institutionalised racism, classism and sexism. In the intimate setting of Bunker 1 (Pleasance), Mok losing her virginity at twenty-five is the story tussled into the foreground with plenty of awkward interaction with male audience members. Mok repeating the word ‘vagina’ or ‘my vagina’ feeling palpably radical to some.

And there it is - the discomfort that some may feel at a woman of colour speaking about her vagina a lot, giving a detailed description of her breasts out of a bra, preferring cake to her ‘first time’, shrieking a little, taking up space like she is meant to be there, being funny and maybe - more disruptive in a comedy show - not being funny…

Mok’s writing upends expectations. She critiques racist, sexist, fat-phobic stereotypes by teasing, unravelling and morphing them. More often than not, after a story that sees her bemused, abused or disempowered, her punchlines land the agency firmly back in her hands. This feminist act of claiming power is one in need of tireless repetition to counter the daily aggressors - the manspreaders, the revenge porn video senders, the stand up comedians who spill the beans to their other stand up mates about sleeping with a 25 year old virgin, these mates who then make comedy routines about it…The latter happened to Mok. Her intimacies and right over them became appropriated into someone else’s material. 

Patriarchy teaches girls to be nervous that boys will be trading secrets about them i.e. school gossip or sexting made public. Women are taught simultaneously to guard our bodies for fear of humiliation but loosen them up just the right amount for male pleasure. Mok’s is the too familiar tale of public shaming and Hymen Manoeuvre could be seen as Mok’s way of wrestling back control and making sure people hear her experiences on her own terms. 

As she hurtles us through her autobiography, what opens up is patriarchy’s messages that there is something essentially shameful about the female form and female pleasure. It seems to be only some time after losing her virginity, that Mok asks herself if she had good time. She did not. The suppression of talking about female pleasure within sex education and wider media accompanies the shame many girls and women feel about their bodies. What’s more, female bodies frequently become funny - something to draw ridicule from and, as in the case of Mok, this humour is leveraged to assert male social power. 

Oppressive power structures take so much multi-stranded work to undo. In tales that continually resist collapse into any singularity, we glimpse the burden of this effort. She wonders whether by making the show she is indulging in her shame. She shares the incessant, looping questions she has about someone’s intentions when she first encounters them. At times, there is a sharpness to her tone and the room is silent. The shield of her wit sometimes slips and we as audience are sitting quietly with someone un-filtering themselves and letting us in. Maybe to be this funny and defiant, you have to cut close to your own bones. 

- Alexandrina Hemsley

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Hymen Manoeuvre - Evelyn Mok 

The Pleasure Principle - International Woman’s Health Coalition

Bitch Media

Eight Women Of Color Comedians on Sexism, Racism and Making People Laugh - Wear Your Voice

Misogyny on Facebook: A Rant About ‘Vagina Cleavage’ - Gal Dem

Together Alone // Chen-Wei Lee and Zoltan Vakulya

The space is bare - white dance floor laid down in a black box theatre. Three scribbles of white florescent lights are suspended near the back. Within this abstracted space, the nude figures of choreographers and performers Zoltan Vakulya and Chen-Wei Lee resist static objecthood and make their first contact. This sparse arena hosts two people musing upon one another, gently meeting through touch. 

Our non-verbal communication/haptic communication develops so that we may know ourselves, others and the world through touch. Haptic knowledges are a key source material for dancing and coming to understand the world non-verbally in this way is shared across many species. It can be argued that such touch-led perceptions hold a lower status that our rational, verbal modes of communicating, relating and coming to know our environments. In contrast, this dance of swings, curves and counterbalances prioritises sensorial knowledge. As Vakulya and Lee’s bodies ride the momentum that their bodies conjure up from the ground; catching, sharing and releasing gravity between them, constant touch becomes a driving force. 

In their deft and assured movement, the sculptures ‘We Two’ and ‘Embrace’ by Gaylord Ho come to mind. In these works, contact points between two figures are foregrounded over the rest of the forms. Sometimes parts of the body are absent, further highlighting the sites of connection. There is a similar experience watching Together Alone - flickerings of flesh meeting are highlighted as bodies organise and re-organise themselves around points of contact, orbiting each other's centres. 

A question about pleasure hangs in the air. So too do associations with touch that can heal, support, communicate, trigger sensations of violence, of love and of care. 

A memory comes to me of Nancy Stark-Smith dancing in Fall After Newton, specifically, the lines her body swings through space.

At one point, Vakulya and Lee’s shadows are cast on the floor next to them. These shadows make the contact between their iliac crests blend into one another. The shadows are more porous than their bodies are and my question about pleasure begins to be answered. I think about sweat, temperature, the sensation of how it must feel to be so close to another and swing arms while exhaling warmth into the face of the person opposite you. I think of the places bodies fit together and how this interlocking can fuel movement. Eye to chin, armpit to kneecap, nape to forearm; each link propelling the search for the next. 

Charleston-like steps appear and bodies reveal their buoyancy, laughing and shimmering with abandon. In the closing parts, everything slows. The figures knot and unknot. They return to sculptural forms but their combination is now twin-like, pod-like and into an amorphous biped creature. 

Vakulya and Lee continue, sensitively indulging in their articulations with soft gazes, until they finish, spinning into black.

- Alexandrina Hemsley

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Taiwan Season: Together Alone

Meet the Artists: Chen-Wei Lee and Zoltan Vakulya

Fall After Newton Clip (1987)

Embrace - Gaylord Ho

We Two - Gaylord Ho

The Power of Touch - Psychology Today

Haptic Communication - Changing Minds

Haptic Perception - WiseGeek

Primates // Tessa Coates

A stack of hefty hardback books wobbles next to the microphone throughout Tessa Coates's stand-up show. An aged academic tome sharing the title Primates is there, but also Girl's Own Adventures and the Famous Five - and is that a Harry Potter towards the bottom of the pile? Yes it is, and despite the initial suspicion that these books have been chosen solely for their looks, it turns out that they are all pertinent to the show.

Coates begins by thanking the audience profusely for coming, establishing her persona as an earnest, prudish and perhaps rather posh anthropology graduate who is going to share with us her passion for the study of humans, in particular the study of penises. But she adopts an alternative persona - a cool American - in order to express this as 'I love dick'. And she plays another character, her former lecturer, to introduce the subject. With a background in sketch comedy, Coates is a natural at putting on funny characters, but there is surely an anthropological angle to why it is easier to say certain things sincerely only when playing at being someone else.

Anthropology is the frame for the show. While we learn the reason for the human penis having the shape it does and why some sperm have been called 'kamikaze' by scientists, the content is mostly observational comedy about sex, dating and relationships. Perhaps that is a large part of anthropology, too. But if we understand modern human behaviour as simply the results of past evolutionary pressure and biology, does that reduce our experience of life and love? Like scientists from other disciplines (such as neuroscientist Anil Seth), Coates grapples with this dilemma, and earnestly concludes - in the character of the professor - that while life is essentially meaningless, we are all special.

- Michael Regnier

 

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Primates - Tessa Coates

Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? - Huffington Post

Nothing to Be Afraid Of (Anil K. Seth) - Granta 

The Meaning of Life and the Search for Happiness - Popular Social Science (2013) 

Debating Self, Identity, and Culture in Anthropology - Current Anthropology (1999)

Is the Presented Self Sincere? Goffman, Impression Management and the Postmodern Self - Theory, Culture and Society (1992) 

I Am A Tree // Jamie Wood

I Am a Tree is not a return to nature as much as a reassertion that the separation between humans and other living things is not absolute, that the human body and its processes are as natural in their rhythms as the growth of a tree or the migrations of birds. It is a memory and a eulogy, to nomadism and to mortality and the fallibility of living things. Jamie Wood greets the audience by listening to their hearts, laying his head on their chests and expelling their worries like a cresting whale.

The show loosely follows the progress of Wood’s journey by foot from Coventry to South Wales, leaving his young baby and partner at home in order to reconnect to the wild. The story meanders like its protagonist, but like any journey the progress is more important than the destination. His walk is a peculiar kind of mindfulness exercise, a mental health time-out in a relentless period of change. Wood’s life at home haunts the piece, never really spoken of in detail but always lurking beyond the next hill. Questions of responsibility vie with a commitment to self-realisation. The comedy in his journey too is always on the verge of tipping into abstraction and doubt. Wood’s clowning and slapstick blurs into meditative tasks, an unlooping of bootlaces slowly moving from Chaplin to Mona Hatoum.

I Am a Tree also asks that the audience use their own bodies in service of the story, whether using a blowdart to pop the ‘weight of death’ that hangs above Wood’s head during a speech about his grandfather, or asking several spectators to move on stage as animals whilst he cradles another. Participants are gifted a vegetable reward for their efforts, hacked from a broccoli tree. A plant-based replacement for the energy they expel. These actions are measured by a slow drip of water from a red bladder that marks the duration of the show. These images remain, half remembered and fleeting, like moments from a walk.

-       Lewis Church

This diagnosis is based on a preview performance at Ovalhouse, London. I Am a Tree runs in Edinburgh at Assembly George Square from the 14-27th of August.

Links relevant to this diagnosis:

Jamie Wood – I Am a Tree

What is Walking Meditation? – Wild Mind

Humans Need to Reconnect with Nature – Tree Hugger

Walking and Grief – The Globe and Mail

Parental Burnout – NYMag 

Charlie Chaplin Eat His Shoes - From The Gold Rush (1925)

Mona Hatoum – Performance Still (1985/1995)

F*CKING MEN // King's Head Theatre

Ten interlocking scenes present separate sets of lovers, each semi-ironically riffing on different ‘aspects’ of love. The platonic ideal. ‘Simple’ carnal lust. Tortured archetypes (‘Actor’ and ‘Journalist’) playing out and struggling with their desires, counter-desires and the simple physical fact of their bodies. 

F*cking Men is a reflection on what it means to live out what could queasily be termed the ‘gay male experience’ surrounding sexuality and perception, commitment and relationships. The title is something of a red herring. Whatever nudity there is remains secondary to the ideas surrounding the aforementioned themes. The bodies are used as props, showing the way that the relationships depicted subtly morph and modulate under external and internal pressures and strains.

The way that sex and body can be subtly weaponised is also deftly explored. It’s a messy, fraught exploration that deals with the ugly, implicit guilt and repression in denied sexuality.  The one scene without any sex (the meeting between ‘Journalist’ and ‘Actor’) is a meeting point between paranoia, fear and self-loathing, all focused on the body and messy sexual desire. Yet resolution isn’t found in the act of sex, either. As each scene shows, it is the sheer multiplicity of desire that makes it such a complex field of enquiry. Whether it is denied or temporarily fulfilled seems to make no difference. Resolution is as far away as ever.

- Francisco Garcia

F*cking Men played at Assembly George Square Studios - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/f-cking-men

Being Gay: Politics, Identity and Pleasure- http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/newformations/09_61.pdf

Homophobic? Maybe you’re gay?- http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/homophobic-maybe-youre-gay.html

Evolution of Gay Theatre- http://www.juilliard.edu/journal/evolution-contemporary-gay-theater

Fringe: Queer Art & Film Festival- http://www.fringefilmfest.com/

DROPPED // Gobsmacked Theatre Company

It’s an irony as old as time. Women may be seen as fit subjects for every conceivable violence, but they are not suitable for fight in war. From recent conflicts in Iraq, Afganistan and elsewhere, women's roles in the armed forces seem to extend little past the 2D. Physical, mental, societal violence is fit and fair game. But for a woman to fight in times of conflict has, until very recently, been seen as a frightening or morally disgusting transgression.  

Dropped may deal with a fictional Middle Eastern conflict with Australian personnel (the show originally ran at the Adelaide Fringe earlier in 2016 and was awarded the prize for Best Local Theatre Production), but it’s topical concern to British audiences is amplified by July’s lifting of the ban on women serving in close combat roles in the British Army. The performance poses the question to the audience: what effect does the violence of war have on women?

The answer, if there is one reducible answer, is that there is a difference, if only because of the warped saint-like expectations visited on women: those of holy mother, or kindly protector. They may experience the same traumas, deprivations and horrors as the male soldier in times of war, but the concern visited from outside isn’t to do with them as soldiers, but as mothers or uprooted occupiers of the domestic space.

We are led as an audience to believe that Sarah Cullinan and Natalia Sledz’ characters have witnessed the harm of a child, though it remains shrouded in mystery whether this a just an effect of PTSD related trauma. The effects of David McVicar’s direction leaves it purposefully ambiguous and offers no ready made, trite conclusions as to the effects of violence.

- FG

Dropped played at the Pleasance Courtyard - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/dropped

British Army’s Women Soldiers to Go Into Combat- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/12060225/British-Armys-women-soldiers-to-go-into-combat.html

On Motherhood and Violence- http://makhzin.org/issues/feminisms/on-motherhood-and-violence

Women, Trauma and PTSD- http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/treatment/women/women-trauma-ptsd.asp

Gender based violence and the global hypocricy that fuels it- http://www.humanosphere.org/opinion/2016/06/gender-based-violence-misogyny-and-a-global-hypocrisy-that-fuels-it/

Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War- http://www.unicef.org/sowc96pk/sexviol.htm

TRAVESTY // Fight in the Dog

Travesty is a play dealing with transitions. From one state of life to the next. Between innocence and ageing masquerading as experience. From a romantic relationships move from cradle to grave. From early 20s insouciance to the creeping fear that this might be all you’ve got. From dissatisfaction to, well, what exactly?

Both Lydia Larsen and Pierro Niel-Mee are two typical-ish archetypes. She- playing the older, acerbic, disillusioned (and male) teacher Ben- is full of a coiled tension hiding behind an aloofly ironic exterior. He- playing middle-class (and female) PR executive Anna- is full of easy first-flush of youth optimism. Their relationship is charted over four acts, from enraptured beginnings to fraught, bitter end.

It’s a play that creates a certain sense of frisson in the audience by subverting lazy gender norms, not by doing anything wildly radical, but by simply by inverting them. There’s the possessive slaps that Larsen gives Niel-Mee on the behind. There’s the shamed covering of the male, not female nipple. And then there’s the language.

What is ‘female’ language? For that matter, what is ‘male’ language? It’s not so much a question that’s taken up, but rather a set of cliched assumptions played out for comic effect. Anna, at points, both sly and circumlocutory and we’re invited to laugh at our smug assumptions because it’s coming out of a man's body. Ben is, at points, gruff and absurdly affected. Again, we are invited to laugh because it’s a set of language and gestures that we aren’t primed to ‘expect’ coming from a certain kind of body.

What keeps the work from merely reinforcing these stereotypes is that the writing is good enough to subtly acknowledge that we as an audience are having our own assumptions played with and teased out. Not only is Travesty a play explicitly dealing with all of the manifold day-to-day compromises we make to sustain, or break, relationships; it’s a play that forces you to acknowledge the compromises we make in communicating through our bodies and our imperfect language.

- FG

Travesty played at Assembly George Square Studios - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/travesty

A Short Introductory Essay on Judith Butler- http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-butl.htm

How to Shake Up Gender Norms- http://time.com/3672297/future-gender-norms/ 

Performative Acts and Gender Constitution- http://facweb.northseattle.edu/mjacobson/SPECIAL%20TOPICS%20IN%20PSYCHOLOGY/Subjectivity/PerformativeActs.pdf

The Non-Verbal Semantics of Power & Gender- http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4612-5106-4_8#page-1

SCORCH // Prime Cut Productions

‘My body is a weird black hole I drag around with me’

Amy McAllister plays the gender-curious teen Kes in Stacey Gregg’s monologue revealing society’s lack of understanding towards gender fluidity.

Based on the real case of Justine McNally, Scorch shows the law’s gender binaries when Kes, born female but uncomfortable in her gender so presenting herself as male to a girl she meets online, is accused of gender fraud and sexual abuse. In the eyes of the law a woman can’t rape another woman, as according to the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the penetration can only be done with a penis. Where the law stands on the concept of being gender fluid with regards to accused rape is unclear due to its rarity.

Language is also questioned in Scorch as we learn queer slang, with ‘cute boi’ meaning a biologically female person who presents themselves in a boyish way, often genderqueer. Though the internet provides a safe place to explore or hide gender, when real life romance crashes and burns, Kes is dropped into a seething pile of accusations and assumptions. When the press get a hold of Kes’ story they call her ‘lesbian’, automatically defining her gender as well as her sexuality. They label her before she’s decided, without providing her with a choice.

McNally called herself ‘Scott’ when presenting herself online, forming a relationship over several years with a young girl. Gayle Newland is another accused case of gender fraud. Calling herself ‘Kye’, Newland insisted the woman she had sex with wear a blindfold, and would penetrate her with a prosthetic penis. Newland’s justification was that she was body-conscious, but in preventing her partner from seeing her strap-on, she hid her biological identity. Gavin Haynes writes of women such as Newland and McNally, ‘Theirs were attempts to push back against the physical realities of the world in which they found themselves at an almost atomic level.’ The law is not up-keeping with more modern, fluid understandings of gender. When McNally was taken to court, her judge called her deception ‘selfish and callous’, rather than attempting to understand her reasoning and questioning her gender identity.

Kes’ family’s views aren’t made entirely clear, and the details of the court case yearn to be explained, but Scorch brings to light the lack of support for people going through a gender identity crisis. It is an area that is far too under-researched, and Scorch reveals this lack of understanding, urging us to do something about it.

- KW

Scorch was on at 18.05 at Summerhall through August 28. - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scorch

Sexual Offenses Act 2003 http://tinyurl.com/zkjnx3o

Justine McNally: http://tinyurl.com/oeomtxk

Queer slang http://tinyurl.com/36jxfr

Is the law on rape sexist?: http://www.blmsolicitors.co.uk/2014/03/is-the-law-on-rape-sexist/

BBC rape briefing: http://tinyurl.com/zjn2hl7

Raped by a woman: http://www.marieclaire.com/culture/a19495/women-raped-by-women/

A forum for expressing gender curiosity: http://emptyclosets.com/forum/gender-identity-expression/154319-gender-curious.html

Understanding your gender identity: http://teenhealthsource.com/giso/understanding-sexual-orientation-gender-identity/

Gayle Newland http://www.theweek.co.uk/65251/what-the-gayle-newland-sex-deceit-case-means-for-transgender-people

Strap-on dildo morality http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/justine-mcnally-scott-gemma-barker-strap-on-dildo-morality

There’s been a modest but welcome uptick in the media’s ability to report sensitively on transgender issues, recently. Outspoken campaigners like journalist Paris Lees have helped dispel some of the very worst cliches of tabloid outrage, celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner have brought a new glamour to trans life, and Stonewall have finally added the ‘T’ in LGBT into their consciousness-raising remit.

But the case of Gayle Newland was too complex and too unusual for newspapers to attempt anything like tact. 19-year-old Newland developed a male online personal and built up a long online friendship, then relationship, with a woman. They met up on multiple occasions, and the woman wore a blindfold during their sexual encounters - before pressing charges for sexual assault when she discovered she’d been ‘tricked’. Following the Newland case, legal observers have pointed out its serious potential ramifications for transgender people: if they don’t disclose their trans status, they could be liable for charges of sexual assault through deception.

Stacey Gregg’s Scorch is directly inspired by the case. But where Newland’s voice has necessarily remained silent, Gregg presents the story entirely from Kes’s point of view. Kes is naive, in love, and incapable of understanding how badly their actions hurt the girl they forms a relationship with. Kes’s life online is a rich community full of resources, help and support for trans teenagers - they make assuming a new gender identity feel natural, and normal. But in the world Kes lives in, it’s anything but: “I feel like an alien”, Kes says.

In one particularly moving passage, Kes reels off all the completely legal ways people can deceive their partners: by hiding the fact they’re married, by giving a false identity, or even just by saying they love them when they don’t. It’s a passage that shows the intricacies of human relationships and gender identities, and the bluntness of the laws designed to govern them.

Newland didn’t claim a trans identity in court. And nor does Kes. In an interview, Gregg has stated that although Scorch intersects with trans questions, it’s a piece that “boils down to something that’s actually much more mundane, which is just misogyny.”  The responses Kes faces from family and friends highlight the fact that trans men are often either invisible, or mistrusted, in a world that’s suspicious of attempts to claim masculinity.

Away from the crystal-clear transformation narratives in mainstream media, gender identity is more murky. Gregg’s piece shades in all its intricacies, and shows how difficult a place the world is for teenagers who aren’t ready to choose their own identity, outside the world of video games.

- AS

Scorch was on at the Edinburgh Fringe, Aug 5-28 https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scorch

Interview with Stacey Gregg in the Irish Times http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/stage/stacey-gregg-on-gender-identity-and-the-theatre-s-gutting-lack-of-women-1.2424367

Impact of Gayle Newland case on trans rights http://www.theweek.co.uk/65251/what-the-gayle-newland-sex-deceit-case-means-for-transgender-people

Increased risk of mental health issues in transgender young people  https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/transgender-youth-at-risk-for-depression-suicide/

BUBBLE SCHMEISIS // Nick Cassenbaum

Cultural identity is made out of little, everyday things, just as the character of a neighbourhood is made up of the everyday rather than the exceptional. The best sign of gentrification in London’s East End isn’t the Cereal Killer Café, but the slow closure of its greasy spoons and corner shops and their replacement with more Pret A Mangers. Nick Cassenbaum’s performance is about Jewish identity, and the self-care ritual of the Schvitz, an intergenerational steam bath that unfolds as a psychogeographic narrative of the Jewish East End. It has orbiting interests of personal, urban and cultural history, and through them questions the identities of individuals, groups and cities.

Biographic detail is specific and explored, but the historical sweep of Cassenbaum’s journey intersects with many other stories. Even some 400 miles from London, Edinburgh audiences recognise the narrative of old rituals falling away, as cities change and traditions atrophy. Although the schvitz specifically may have a future; In other cities the steam rooms have opened to all, male and female, from whatever nationality, and had some success. Perhaps the key might be to let the tradition change, rather than hold on to something already slipping away.

In doing so though something specific and historic will be lost. The schvitz is an old-world thing, a wash that is as much about taking the time to relax as it is getting clean. In a constantly connected city, with few respites from modernity, the importance of a space for discussion and a location to be at ease with your own body in, is a rare and ancient luxury.

- LC

Bubble Schmeisis played at Summerhall through August 28 - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/bubble-schmeisis

Nick Cassenbaum - http://www.nickcassenbaum.com

Schvitz (from Yiddish) - http://www.jewish-languages.org/jewish-english-lexicon/words/483

 Having A Schvitz (Jewish Chronicle) - http://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-features/143194/having-a-shvitz-working-a-nostalgic-head-steam

 New York Schvitz Resurgence - http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/nyregion/after-124-years-the-russian-and-turkish-baths-are-still-a-hot-spot.html

We Need to Talk About Gentrification (Lifehacker) - http://www.lifehacker.co.uk/2015/10/02/the-battle-of-the-cereal-killer-cafe-and-why-we-need-to-talk-about-gentrification

TRIGGER // Christeene

Christeene comes riding in on an inner pony, an imaginary animal representing self-esteem and unapologetic sexuality. Each night, working whilst a shedload of explosives erupt from Edinburgh castle above her, Christeene is at work to create the ambience of the kind of sex disco that you always wished you were invited to but are not quite convinced you’d know what to do at if you were. The inner-pony is a my-little metaphor of freedom, a call to abandon proprieties and niceties in favour of a new kind of holistic sexual transcendence.

The music is really good, and the audience shuffle their feet if nothing else. But the sections of funkenstein’s monster hallucinations are also accompanied by quiet monologues on Christine’s surreal version of mindfulness training. That’s when she declaims like a motivational speaker that we accept ourselves and each other. Christeene’s sex-positive pro-dirty celebration reminds me of the work of other incredible artists creating similarly dishevelled celebrations of sexual politics. It shares a joyous aesthetic and enjoyable seriousness with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Steven’s work on ‘ecosexuality’, and a messianic zeal with David Hoyle’s recent activism around mental health and political engagement. Like The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein’s work, and Lucy McCormick’s, it is unflinching in the bodily nature of its political undertow.

Christeene’s aesthetic and language is uncompromising, but its generosity is apparent – if you found your way into the room then you’re part of the tribe. The irresistibly catchy rap is one part of it, but it comes with a call to self-care and self-pleasure.

- Lewis Church

Trigger played Underbelly, Cowgate through August 28 - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/christeene-trigger

Christeene - http://christeenemusic.com

Christeene ‘Tears from My Pussy’ Video - https://vimeo.com/32751567

What’s Sex got to do with Mindfulness? - http://www.mindful.org/whats-sex-got-to-do-with-mindfulness/

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens’ Ecosexuality - http://www.feministtimes.com/feminism-has-not-happened-yet-an-interview-with-annie-sprinkle/

David Hoyle Interview with Chelsea Theatre - http://www.chelseatheatre.org.uk/interview-david-hoyle/

The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein - http://www.thefamousomg.com

Lucy McCormick ‘Fringe Messiah’ - https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/sep/01/lucy-mccormick-triple-threat-comedy-autumn-arts-preview

CAMILLE // Kamila Klamut

History has painted Camille Claudin as 'Rodin's tragic lover' - a muse-turned-artist-turned-asylum patient, desperate and alone. But although her 10 year love affair with the master of French sculpture has defined her, she's increasingly recognised as an artist in her own right: the 70th anniversary of her death was marked with asignificant retrospective of her work at the Rodin Museum.

Polish artist Kamila Klamut isn't the first to bring Claudin's story to the stage. But her physical solo performance draws attention to the bodily indignities and torments she suffered after her brother committed her to an asylum. She adopts a low voice to explain his rationale, that she's bringing shame on their wealthy family's reputation. It's a frightening insight into a time when asylums were a form of social control, designed to keep people who threatened the social order out of sight - and mental health treatment within their walls was all but non-existent.

Flashes into Claudel's past reveal an unconventional, fierce woman: one who stepped out of a life of privilege to live as an artist making then-shocking nude sculptures, and who sought an abortion at a time where doing so was both dangerous, and seen as an unforgivable sin. But she was held back by a patriarchal art world: where her lover Rodin presided over a large workshop that could make over 300 bronze casts of The Kiss, her struggle to win wealthy backers meant she was restricted to cheaper materials, and her behaviour became increasingly erratic. Over 100 years on, it's impossible to interpret her true mental state. Was she too far outside of social norms to be allowed to live unchallenged? Or was she genuinely mentally ill, suffering from delusions of persecution by Rodin and the art world?

Klamut shrinks in on herself as Claudel's years in imprisonment pass, her letters ignored. She changes her from an expansive, wild artist into a petty, child-like being who quibbles over butter and greasy soup. But even in the asylum, her class buys her a kind of comfort: she is sent wine, and chocolate, and alcohol-soaked cherries.

The text of Camille is culled from Claudel's letters, meaning that the personalities of Rodin and her family are only visible from her own, increasingly desperate perspective. It is difficult to truly understand how she felt when her words are isolated from the context of the social world that lionised and destroyed her. But her physical suffering is intensely visible, as Klamut's contorted body becomes a visual representation of the oppression visited on Camille by both society, and the asylum that she was imprisoned in.

- Alice Saville

Camille was on at Summerhall, Edinburgh Fringe http://festival16.summerhall.co.uk/event/camille/

Kamila Klamut’s website http://www.kamilaklamut.pl/

An overview of Camille Claudel’s life and work http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/exhibition/camille-claudel

Asylums as a form of social control, rather than sites for medical treatment http://www.academia.edu/894595/Getting_Out_of_the_Asylum_Understanding_the_Confinement_of_the_Insane_in_the_Nineteenth_Century

Rodin’s workshop, and the expense involved in being a sculptor http://festival16.summerhall.co.uk/event/camille/

ELEPHANT OF MY HEART // Prospero Theatre

There’s a long and rich interplay between meditation and the arts, including music and artworks including the ancient Indian tradition of mandalas. 

But bringing meditation into conventional theatre is a little more unusual. Elephant of my Heart is a stage adaptation of Jessica Clements’ book of the same name: Clements herself even performs in the show’s chorus. It’s a memoir of her time in hospital recovering from a brain haemorrhage as a nine year old child. She believes that the inner travels she went on, guided by an elephant, triggered her healing process. 

Prospero Theatre adapt her story using familiar techniques of children’s theatre: puppets, songs, games, and audience participation. But there’s an emphasis on the body, and on creating a new language to talk about illness and recovery. Jess is taught that the scars covering her head are sewn up by a black panther’s whisker, and kept safe by invisible dragonflies. Medicalised terms are demystified by being paired with analogies from the natural world, in a holistic approach designed to lead Jess towards a new comfort with her recovering body.

At the close of the performance, Clements leads us on a simple visualisation, designed to help the audience find their own inner animals. It highlights the closeness between mindfulness exercises and the kind of imaginative games that children often play - their careful focus during  the visualisation suggests that perhaps children’s comfort with their own imaginations makes them more receptive to techniques that adults feel too inhibited to try.

Little is known about whether healing can be accelerated by meditation, but recent studies tentatively suggest that the stress-reducing properties of meditation can strengthen the immune system. Certainly, there are clear links between meditation and the state of mental wellbeing needed for a full recovery. But perhaps the strongest message of Elephant of My Heart is the importance of developing a language and story that enables people in recovery to understand their illness, whether or not that means cultivating an inner jungle.

- Alice Saville

Elephant of My Heart was on at the Edinburgh Fringe, Greenside, from 5-16th August. More information: http://prosperotheatre.com/prospero-community-company/elephant-of-my-heart/

The role of mandalas in meditation: http://www.chopra.com/mandalas-sri-yantras

More information on Jessica Clements’ book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Elephant-My-Heart-Jessica-Clements/dp/1452585725

Studies which tentatively suggest the positive impact of meditation on the immune system: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26799456

5 OUT OF 10 MEN // Deep Diving Ensemble

Male suicide is at epidemic proportions, the leading cause of death for men between 20 and 34 in England and Wales, an undiscussed wave of futile waste. Like mental health provisions across the UK, support for young men has been eroded, and the new societies of the 21st century have less use for the strong, silent and stoic men still lionised by those who advocate ‘traditional values’ and roles. The idea of a man is changing, whilst the ideal takes time to catch up.
 
Sometimes it seems the most common place to see these statistics are when they are needlessly weaponised, used by clueless men’s rights advocates as evidence of feminist blind spots, without acknowledging the potential of gender equality to fix the underlying causes of the pain and suffering. Men who are told not to cry, not to express emotions, to sublimate their desires into unhealthy outlets and to never show weakness. Boys who grow up with stilted relationships to their own feelings, and shame with their inability to fix it. Remember how normal it is that boys are told to not act ‘like a girl’, to ‘man up’ or to be strong. That is a symptom of patriarchy too, an archaic set of rigid gender roles that fail to map on to the modern world.
 
In the physical theatre workout of 5 Out of 10 Men, these arguments are rehearsed through the story of a young man’s suicide. Its issues are raised simply and without special nuance, its central character a broad cypher for societal concern. It sits within a move towards cultural interrogations of maleness alongside gender in general, whether Grayson Perry’s All Man series for Channel 4 or the Southbank Centre’s BEING A MAN festival. 5 Out of 10 Men’s dancers take on the physicality of the ideal, the swagger of the masculine as well as the exhaustion of pressure. Like its character, it flags as it goes on, tiredness and sweat streaking the performers and wracking their bodies. At its end, the narrative has led only to the death of the young man, his fate set by the pressures placed upon him.

- Lewis Church

5 Out of 10 Men ran at theSpace on Niddry Street until August 27th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/5-out-of-10-men

Deep Diving Ensemble: http://www.deepdivingmen.com
 
Samaritans Sucide Statistics Report 2016: http://www.samaritans.org/about-us/our-research/facts-and-figures-about-suicide/suicide-statistics-report-2016
 
Tony Porter: A Call to Men (TED):  http://www.ted.com/talks/tony_porter_a_call_to_men?language=en
 
Grayson Perry – Whither Big Balls?: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv-radio/2016/05/whither-big-balls-grayson-perry-investigates-masculinity-better-anyone-else
 
Southbank Centre BAM Festival: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/festivals-series/being-a-man
 
Get Help with Suicide (CALM): https://www.thecalmzone.net/help/get-help/suicide/

AND THE ROPE STILL TUGGING HER FEET // Caroline Burns Cooke

Abortion is still illegal in Ireland, as it was during 1984 when the Kerry Babies scandal raged forth from the intertwined powers of church and state. It was a cruel culmination of a logic that imposes shame on women’s bodies, on their sexual activity whilst excusing men, and on their ability to choose to not follow through with an unwanted pregnancy. For all the difference between then and now, on the day that I saw And the Rope Still Tugging Her Feet, #TwoWomenTravel was trending. As Caroline Burns Cooke (the writer and performer of the monologue) recounted the story of the young woman at the centre of the 1984 scandal, two other young women were, in 2016, sharing their story of having to travel from Ireland to the UK in order to secure a safe and legal abortion.
 
Organisations in Ireland and elsewhere are still struggling to reverse the regressive policies that force women from their home countries in search of help, or into back-alley alternatives. Art and performance can have a powerful impact on public conversation, and the direct action of groups like Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A (Ireland Making England the Legal Destination for Abortion) contributes to a gathering clamour around the repeal of the 8th amendment to the Irish constitution, which prohibits safe options for women. Even the UN has ruled that Ireland must provide “accessible procedures for pregnancy termination” in order to avoid impinging on the human rights of its citizens. Even the Irish Minister for Health thanked the two women who tweeted their journey for highlighting the debate, although time will tell what difference it might make. In a worrying sign of the global polarity of the argument, the vile American blogger Courtney Kirchoff has already decried their documentation of the journey.
 
As a piece of theatre, the performance is a dissection of a historical abuse of power and victimisation of a young woman devoid of options. But it has resonance now, as a precursor to the ongoing battle to secure safe choices for women, in Ireland and around the world.

- Lewis Church

And The Rope Still Tugging Her Feet ran at Gilded Balloon Teviot until August 29th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/and-the-rope-still-tugging-her-feet

The Kerry Babies Case: http://www.thejournal.ie/kerry-babies-case-30-years-on-1413918-Apr2014/
 
#TwoWomenTravel: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-37156673
 
Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A (Direct Action Group): https://twitter.com/speakofIMELDA
 
UN Ruling on Irish Human Rights Violations: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/09/ireland-abortion-laws-violated-human-rights-says-un
 
Courtney KirchoffSends Open Letter: http://irishpost.co.uk/american-novelist-slams-pro-choice-campaigners-two-women-travel-scathing-blog-post/