Wednesday 7 January 2015

An opening statement - towards a performance around gender


In every story I tell, indeed in every episode of every story I tell, the decision as to how to represent the characters’ relationship to their gender is posed.  It is never unproblematic.

I have realised that you cannot just let stories ‘speak for themselves’; you are always, as a storyteller, making decisions and editing; you hold power as the one in control of the narrative and with this power comes responsibility.  This is particularly so with young audiences growing up in a world of towering gendered performativity, hypersexuality, girlification, pornification, competition, scrutiny and judgement.  The vulnerable young people I work with are lightning conductors for these difficulties, perhaps extreme sufferers of their impact, but nonetheless they highlight issues of relevance to all young people.  They have to come to terms with, accept or reject the strictures of 21st century gendered life. 

My storyteller’s decision of how to represent gender is thus paralleled by young people’s equally constant decision matrix as to how to perform their own gender, what relationship to hold to it.  This is something I can show dynamically in a storytelling performance.

The performance should show different ways of being a woman / a man.  It should move towards allowing the audience to get some critical distance on society’s gendered expectations – to externalise things that feel like tumultuous internal pressures.  It should (perhaps above all) show the story-ness of these stories – that the characters’ relationship to their gender is a decision made by the storyteller and can be told other ways. 

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