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)

JOAN // Milk Presents

In ‘Mind, Modernity and Madness’, Liah Greenfeld writes that “A widely held idea (say, that hell awaits those who eat flesh on Fridays, or that all men are created equal) is no less a reality for people in the community holding the idea than the Atlantic Ocean”. Her bracingly forthright sociological study goes on to dismiss those who “diagnose entire cultures as psychotic...retroactively pronounce medieval saints schizophrenics”.

It’s a helpful thought to bear in mind when hearing the story of Joan of Arc. It’s a historical fact that a teenage peasant girl with no military background presided over a period of astonishing success for the French army in the 13th century -- while claiming to be taking directions from God. Accounts of the time stress her femininity, purity and delicacy, as a holy maiden who was literally heaven sent.

Lucy J. Skilbeck’s play makes her something a little tougher. Where medieval commentators were keen to emphasise that she only dressed as a man to preserve her chastity and safety, drag king LoUis CYfer embraces the masculinity of a woman who charged into battle in a specially made suit of armour.

Skilbeck’s focus on gender identity shows the power of religious zeal to overcome other culturally ingrained ideas, like the need for women to be meek and submissive. Medieval saints could (often literally) float over gender norms by dint of divine intervention. But medieval ideas on gender were also surprisingly modern: themes of gender transformation fill romances, while scientists believed that physical exercise, sexual desire or even just excessive heat could transform women into men. Skilbeck’s approach makes Joan’s approach both natural and deliberate: a series of tiny decisions, as well as one broad ecstatic creation. CYfer is an acclaimed performer on the drag cabaret scene, and this experience shows in a brilliant observed set of comic songs and physical performances. CYfer parodies all kinds of men, from a gruff father to a camp priest, and borrows their mannerisms: their self-consciousness heightened by the mirrors that surround the stage.

Joan becomes the world’s first drag king, a joyful anachronism heightened by CYfer’s Tank Girl t-shirt and 21st century song choices. Skilbeck’s story sticks close to its medieval source too, though, spelling out the painful details of victory in battle, then backlash from the religious establishment. In medieval times, as now, the freedom to step outside prescribed female roles is dependent on cultural mood. And when the mass shared belief in Joan’s divinity fades, so does Joan’s ability to perform a gender that’s artificial and hugely natural, at once.

- AS

Joan was on at Underbelly at Edinburgh Fringe, 5-28th August https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/joan

‘Mind, Modernity and Madness’ by Liah Greenfeld https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Le4anj8kJPkC&dq=medieval+saints+psychosis

Ideas of gender transformation in medieval fiction http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1813&context=mff