bleedoutheatre-blog

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Frankie and I have had a blast making this show! We would like to make a special mention to Nicola Shaugyhnessy for the continuous support all the way through. We hope we can be like you one day! 

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Some photos from our dress run, don't worry Pabs it's only ketchup

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Day of our performance! We have had so much making this performance, we can't wait to share our vaginas with you! 🎭

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Bibligraphy

Aston. E (1995) An Introduction to Feminism Theatre Routledge

Gale. M, B and Gardner. V (2004) Auto/biography and Identity Women, Theatre and Performance Manchester University Press

Heddon. D (2008) Autobiography and Performance Palgrave Macmillan

Irigaray. L (1977) This Sex which is not One Edition de Minuit

Marks. E and de Courtivron. I (1980) New French Feminisms: An Anthology

Schneider. R (1997) The Explicit Body in Performance Routledge

Wolf. N (2012) Vagina: A New Biography

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/3d-clitoris/518991/?utm_source=atlfb 

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Week 9 and 10 (21 and 22)

Ok, so it is two weeks to go! Frankie and I feeling like we have got a performance now. We just need to make the ending! How exciting!

Frankie and I had been reading Naomi Wolf, Vagina: A New Biography, we therefore decided to write a scene to communicate the findings we had learnt, how all women are wired differently, so sexual stimulation feels different for all women.[1] In order to make this fun, and not appear like a lecture, Frankie and I improvised a ‘vaginal screening’ where Frankie looked in my vagina with a torch. We played with pulling wool out of my pants to label our vulva’s that were laid out on the floor. One thing that we did not think of, which I really wish we did: wool burns. Having it pulled out of your pants does not feel nice, the wool and skin contact, especially sensitive parts, really hurts! Yes, it burnt my lip. My labia majora. As I lay in the middle of Jarman 1 squealing with pain, Frankie was trying to think of other things to pull out that would not burn my sweet mini. Then I suggested to try out ribbon, as this was thicker and would not burn. We tried the ribbon, and thank god my labia majora was fine. This pulling out of the vagina, again, related back to Scheemann’s Interior Scroll and was engaging to watch. To cover my vagina, we used an emoji pillow to add to the comic effect.

 Frankie and I had been using this element of ‘tease’ to suggest that we were going to show our vulva’s, we felt for the ending we somehow had to come back to that. This teasing had been used as transitions through the scenes, and we felt like it worked in a way to introduce something new.

 One night, whilst watching Moonlight, (amazing film by the way), Frankie and I were eating pizza, gossiping about how awful our tutors are. (Not really, we were eating pizza and watching Moonlight though) The topic of the Oscars came up and how it all went wrong when they gave out the wrong envelope, and the wrong film was announced etc…. What if this could be our ending? What if we go to reveal our vulva’s and someone stops us because it was the ‘wrong’ envelop. Frankie and I discussed how this could be done and the next day tried it out!

 We used golden envelops to make a clear reference to the Oscars, and as we were going to use audience participation in earlier parts of the piece, what if we gave the ‘wrong’ envelope to an audience member upon arrival. The ‘wrong’ envelope would say for us to show our vulva’s, we wanted to make this as rude as possible to go with the rest of the show, therefore, we wrote ‘Get your cunts out.’ As the boys had become part of our show, we decided that one of them could announce the wrong envelope. This could make the audience think that we really were going to show them our vulva’s, and hopefully give them a slight panic. Just as it looks like we are about to pull our pants down, one of the boys would call out that the wrong envelope was given, and that would end our show.

 We thought this ending was relevant to today, and almost like a big reveal of our vulva’s that we had been suggesting we would show throughout the show.

 We have a full show! There’s a week to go! It is just the case of polishing the performance, and making sure everything is up to scratch!

 When running it to our pieces, they suggested we perform with more confidence! (We did not know all the lines at this point) and embrace any mistakes! Franks and I are feeling confident, and whatever happens, we have loved making this show! (Apart from the vagina burning incident)

 [1] Wolf. N (2012) Vagina: A New Biography

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

In the name of art 🎭

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Week 7 and 8 (19 & 20)

One concern that Frankie and I had throughout the rehearsal process, was whether the show was too self-indulgent and narcissistic, which is a risk with autobiographical performance. Frankie and I also had the believe that if this thought came to the audience, the show would not be successful. Frankie and I thought comedy could be useful as a distancing tool. However, Frankie and I did not want to play the performance as ‘funny,’ like Uta Hagen says in Respect for Acting, ‘do not play or try to be funny,’ (Hagen, 1973:57) as in most cases it won’t! Therefore, Frankie and I thought we could use, shall we say, a secure way, to distance ourselves from the audience. Our tutor suggested that we explore the possibility of our vagina’s talking: the sound of them and what they would say. When Frankie and I tried this using our own voices, we did not feel it added much to the piece, in fact it seemed more like we were trying to fill time. Frankie and I had the discussion how body and mind are placed in separate categories, what if our vagina’s were not our voices? Who’s voices could they be? What if they were two male voices? What would that comment on? Men making choices for female bodies, which seemed very relevant today… TRUMP

 I wrote a scene for Jordan and Tom, (our tech boys), to record playing the voice of our vagina’s. The scene appeared light-hearted and funny, however, it also contributed to a dark message: men being the voice of women’s bodies. When performing this to the class, some of our peers found it funny, others found it slightly disturbing. This was a risk Frankie and were willing to take, Frankie and I did not think it mattered if it was disturbing, as the message behind it was, and we felt this contributed to overall message: the need for vagina ‘space.’ On the other hand, it would also be used as a distancing tool, to take away any risk of being self-indulgent. When our peers watched it, firstly, Frankie and I lay back with our sweet vulva’s on show. The class suggested they wanted to see more than just us lay back; they found themselves drift away from the image and only listen to recording. Therefore, to make it clear who’s voice was who, and to sustain audience engagement, Frankie and I decided to move the sweets when it was our vagina talking. This added to the comedic value and sustained engagement with the audience. Also, this added an element of puppetry, but a very unusual kind of puppetry, not your everyday Sooty and Sweep kind…

 This part including the boys, triggered Frankie and I to think about how they could become part of the piece further. They were to be in charge of our tech, and for us to become aware of them would add to the DIY aesthetic tone of the piece. This would also indicate a strong reasoning for them becoming the voices of our vagina’s. It would another fun and comedic layer.

 Catherine Elwes, in 1979, performed Menstruation, where she stood in a glass box, wearing white so her menstruation blood showed up clearly. As Frankie and I had been using intertextuality to grasp a firm understanding of feminist performance, we felt Elwes performance was perfect for our idea of involving menstruation. Frankie and I discussed how periods are viewed, and people’s general disgust for them. What if we could take it further? Show something a lot more disgusting then a bit of blood… We decided a great substance for this was ketchup, it smells pretty bad when you cover your body in it, and when it dries, it crusts… trust me, it’s not pleasant. Period blood any day. Like Elwes, Frankie and I decided to wear white, to make sure it showed up properly. We then proceeded to squirt the ketchup down ourselves, on our inner thighs, to make a clear reference to period blood. The placing of this scene was important, as once it was on us, it would not come off till the end of the show. Therefore, we decided to place it in the middle of the show, the staining of our skin would represent the practicalities of periods, and the ketchup would leave a lovely, lingering smell for the audience…. You’re welcome.

 See pictures In the name of Art to see Frankie and I have fun running around in the School of Arts building in our underwear… it was a weekend, not to worry.

  From running our material, Frankie and I began to suggest different ideas of what to add next. Frankie thought of a possible ‘My Vagina is’ game, where we would improvise different words to represent our vagina’s. However, we found this simply not engaging enough, it was fun for Frankie and I in the rehearsal room, but would not be fun for an outsider to watch, unless we involved them some way. After speaking to our tutor, she suggested a new scene of a different tone, in order to vary the pace. In our vagina timeline, Frankie mentions a moment of sexual assault, our tutor expressed how this part of the timeline was the only time when it was not fun anymore. Frankie and I had made the decision that we wanted our timeline to be fun and exciting. Therefore, we decided to take this out, and develop it into its own scene. The subject of sexual assault, would allow us to change the emotional ‘affect’ and vary the tone. Frankie decided to write a monologue of what had happened, in order to break this up, I took on the voices of other people involved. This allowed us to set the scene clearly, and create a varied pace in the piece, to sustain audience engagement.

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Week 5 and 6 (17 and 18)

As Frankie and I decided to write our own scenes, I decided to mind-map ideas of what I wanted to include. Female sexuality and arousal interested me, I wanted to explore how it is seen as inappropriate for women to talk about sexual desires. From my research I came across This Sex Which is not One, by a French Feminist, Luce Irigaray. Irigaray explores Freud’s perception of female desire, something that he admitted to know very little about, and in order to find answers one ‘would have to dig very deep to discover beneath the traces of this civilisation.’ (Irigaray, 1977:25) I wanted to challenge this argument, I agree that there has not been enough research on female sexuality and arousal, but I wanted to create a scene in attempt to normalise ‘dirty’ sexual thoughts. Rebecca Schneider argues in The Explicit Body in Performance, that ‘female sexuality is conceived as inherently animalistic, primitive, and perverse.’ (Schneider, 1997:29) I also wanted to play on this idea by presenting something sexual that would be perceived this way in a normalised fashion.

 Frankie and I were in a coffee shop one day talking about ideas, and I noticed an attractive coffee barrister. Frankie and I were also talking about films and media which present ‘romantic’ meetings between girls and boys in idealistic and dramatic forms. Frankie and I were poking fun of how these portrayals are so far away from real life and truth, yet we still fantasise about these moments. The research and conversation, then influenced me to write a scene of a fantasied meetings in a coffee shop, however, I wanted the language to fit in with the idealised films and media portrayals. I wrote the scene for Frankie to narrate, whilst I acted the scene, first of all we found that if I played the part naturally, it did not work with the breaking of the scene. Therefore, I tried the part using melodramatic movements whilst Frankie narrated, this worked as it denoted a parody of the idealised, unrealistic, romantic scenarios.

 I wanted this scene to question the expectation to be ‘lady-like’ and why women should not have ‘dirty’ sexual desires. I wanted to gain a reaction from the audience, therefore, I decided that an audience member would take on the part of the coffee barrister. A prop of a moustache will be used, where I will remove it from my pants, I felt this set the scene of ‘things a lady shouldn’t do.’ What I say to the audience member is crude, ‘I want to feel your moustache scratch my cunt.’ This is juxtaposed with the narration to suggest a romantic and idealised scene. I wanted this emphasised with light, soft, romantic music throughout the narration, which will end after I have said the final line. This will break the scene and reveal ‘dirty’ thoughts that women have too.

 The visual image when we built our vulva’s at the beginning was strong, Frankie and I thought about the possibility of this becoming a motif throughout the show. Our vulva’s at the beginning represented ourselves in the present. Frankie and I looked back at our timelines and understood, because of our ages, we had a lot to say about our childhood/adolescence. Frankie and I had the conversation where we believe we are too young to tackle a lot of feminist issues, for example, we do not have children, are not married and are still at university. As this piece was about us, we wanted to focus on what female oppression is to us, as 22 and 24 year old women. Therefore, we thought about moments in our adolescence, discovering our vulva’s and realising the lack of education we had about the female body.

 Frankie and I have been influenced by the feminist performance artist, Bobby Baker, her use of food in the kitchen represents women’s undervalued role in society. Therefore, Frankie and I thought what if we could build our vulva’s with food, as we wanted this moment to portray our adolescence, we wanted a food that could perhaps portray an element of innocence and naivety. We thought of the idea of sweets, as this has childhood connotations. Please see video below to see us building vulva’s out of sweets for the first time!

Frankie and I also found the image of this very striking, therefore whilst building the sweet vulva’s, we wanted to communicate a clear message, this message for this particular scene would be how there is not enough sex education and girls are not told enough about their bodies. Frankie and I thought of moments when we were young of times this occurred, I thought of a time when I was a teenager and a friend and I looked at our vulva’s properly for the first time, and my friend showing me which part was the clitoris. Frankie remembered when she was given a diagram to label the vulva in a science lesson, however, she was told the correct terms, rather the teacher informed them they could label it with whatever slang words they liked.

Frankie and I became conscious of the fact that this image would be very small, and even audience sat in the front row may struggle to view the whole image. This also made us think about the fact we were building our vulva’s on the floor, and how the audience would be able to see this. Frankie and I were influenced by DIY aesthetics. Mainly influenced by Brecht, contemporary performance, such as Sh!t Theatre and Lostwatch, often use DIY aesthetics as part of their performance. To solve the issue of sight lines, and to add another dynamic of the piece, Frankie and thought was if we used live feed. The main reason for this would be for the audience to see the smaller images, such as the sweet vulva’s. We played around with a handheld camera, and we found this worked with our timelines too, the camera was able to zoom in on the timelines, so the images were seen clearly. For the vulva’s which were being built on the floor, we found the handheld camera did not add much as it could not get the correct angle to reveal the vulva’s clearly and properly. Therefore, we played with having two camera’s, one birds eye, and one handheld. This live feed solved our issues of sight lines, and would enable all audience members to view everything clearly.  The handheld camera being in view for the audience to see, added to the dynamic of the DIY aesthetic approach.  Additionally, we found the camera’s added another dynamic: two females bodies onstage with camera’s focusing on them, along with the male cameraman, contributed to the broader reality of female bodies onstage being commodified. 

From the exercise previously done with the improvisation, Frankie and I found that the use of props were a fun and clear way to distinguish different people and characters. Frankie and I thought we could merge these stories together, in the way that Frankie would take on the part of my friend, and I would take on the part of the boy sat next to Frankie in her science lesson. We found the best way to do this, in order to merge the stories together, was to use the same prop. However, we wanted to make it very clear that this particular prop did not represent the same person. We tried using a cap, Frankie wore it properly to portray my friend, then she took it off to introduce her story, to show she was back to being Frankie. I wore the hat backwards to clearly show I was a different person, we found this merged our stories together and still portrayed the same strong message. 

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

This is a snippet of Frankie's blog exploring her ideas and influences for creating her individual scene!

Week 5: Getting Scripty

Mimi and I decided the best way to move our process on this week would be to each go away and prepare a scripted scene about an individual element of our vagina. I was very interested in the idea of orgasm and how it is something that is considered a given for men but rarely discussed in women. Because of this, it is not uncommon for women such as myself to struggle with it. I realised this is quite unusual for someone who is as open about sex as I am so wanted to use my scene to try and work out where my trouble stems from. I put it down to the mystery surrounding female orgasm in general and additionally the pressure to be able to in order to validate your partner.

In the introduction to her plays 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories, Lisa Kron writes that one of the two rules of autobiographical work is that ‘the goal […] should not be to tell stories about yourself but, instead, to use the details of your own life to illuminate or explore something more universal’ (2001, p. xi). So I decided to play my scene as a story about my own struggle and resulting first orgasm, told in a very personal way but then going on to highlight it as something which stems from a problem with society as a whole not discussing female sexuality. One of my personal favourite methods of storytelling is through poetry. I am hugely inspired by performance poets such as Maddie Godfrey and how the use of rhythm and the sound of words can create passion and anger, not just solely relying on your personal performance. This was an idea I particularly took on board in this poem, which forms the main core of my scene, ‘We need to talk about cunts more’:

I also experimented with the idea of interspersing snippets from some of my favourite songs which illustrated moments in my story through-out the script. I thought this added an additional comedic element, sporadically breaking into song as well as using another non-traditional storytelling method and representing my persona. However, in rehearsal we released that as they were not songs that were particularly popular in mainstream culture, they did not read well so decided to cut them.

Although I was pleased with my final script, I still didn’t feel that it completely got across the point I wanted to make which I found quite hard to articulate. Mimi suggested that I embrace this and discuss it with the audience. I really loved the idea of not hiding the flaws in our performance and being very open with our audience and with ourselves.

Bibliography

Kron, L. (2001) 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Finding our personas

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Inspiration: Shit Theatre

Shit Theatre, and their production Letters to Windsor House are a great example of how to use persona, comedy and DIY aesthetics to successfully create autobiographical, political leaning performance.

From when the audience are taking their seats, we already get a glimpse into the personas of Louise and Rebecca, sitting on stage, drinking wine and singing along to .Alone by Heart, each dancing in a way very representative of their personalities. The song, and music in general is a recurring theme throughout the production, denoting changes to different scenes, recurring sections or moods. This varies from popular songs referenced in the production, to original music they have written to reworkings of classics to create a hilarious collage of different styles of performance with slippage and a clear style.

-Everything has a reason for being on stage, DIY props, projector

-Mics, letters for personal thoughts. Playing themselves in moments

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Building our vulva’s!

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Week 3 and 4 (15 & 16)

This week, Frankie and began the lesson in vagina mapping, from this research we learnt that vagina is not the correct scientific term. Vagina has come from the ‘vaginal opening’ which is, of course, the vagina hole. Frankie and I thought it was interesting how vagina is known as the correct term, although it is only one part, but then again that part is a man’s favourite/most useful, so maybe that’s why? Who knows. Anyway, Frankie and I researched what the actual scientific word was for the… let’s stick with vagina for now. It turned out there wasn’t a word for all of the female sex parts as a whole. The ‘vulva’ was a correct scientific term, but this was only for the exterior parts. Frankie and I thought this information was useful, and thought about ways in which we could use this as a potential opening. In a way to introduce us doing a show about vagina’s, that is actually not about the vaginal opening, it’s about the vulva, as well as the interior, and how having these parts has led the deeply rooted sexism of society to affect us somehow.

 We began to learn the scientific terms of each parts, please see picture Getting to know your parts, to see one of the diagrams we referred to.  In the research, we also found an article that we felt was true and exposed the issues of the lack of education young people receive in schools. This article explores how the clitoris is not scientifically researched enough and how the clitoris is not correctly presented when it is. The clitoris as we know it, is just the gland, the rest of clitoris is inside the vaginal tunnel and extends out towards the thighs. It also mentions how ‘the clitoris is closely tied to female sexual pleasure, the lack of knowledge about it amplifies inequality for women.’ (Russo, The Still Misunderstood Shape of the Clitoris) From our research, it felt integral to Frankie and I that we attempt to pass on what we had learnt. Please see below one of the articles Frankie and I came across in our research:

 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/03/3d-clitoris/518991/?utm_source=atlfb

  When learning the parts, we tried out different ways of teaching each other the new scientific terms, we wanted to do this to try ways of how it could be fun and engaging. One way, Frankie pretended to be a lecturer, however, the visual of a lecture, with the subject matter of education was not contrasting enough to be fun, and therefore the part of a ‘lecturer’ had nothing to add by being performed this way. Thinking about our last rehearsal, we thought of ways we could create our vulva’s ourselves. As we used random items that belonged to us for our last improvisation exercise, we thought what if we did the same to build our vulva’s. As we had not prepared for this beforehand, we decided to use items in our bags, we both used our own jackets for the mons pubis, labia majora (outer lips), labia minora (inner lips) and the vestibule, whilst the other parts all had singular props. Firstly, we performed this to each other individually, and we found this was far more engaging and interesting. The visual image of the props becoming our vulva’s pushed for further discussion. When comparing them to each other’s, we realised that they showed our individuality very clearly, and they were both very contrasting. For example, I had a white fur coat, whilst Frankie had a vintage worn trench coat. This triggered us to think about persona, and how we could push for this to make our performance engaging and more entertaining with the contrasting ‘characters.’ From this, we decided to combine the ‘lesson’ together and share the text in order for it become the two of us performing with contrasting vulva’s, we also found that making this scene about the two of us was more engaging and united us as women learning the same lesson. Please see image Building our vulva’s to see our ‘homemade’ vulva’s.

 Frankie and I felt this could be an interesting way to open the piece, building our vulva’s from our bags. However, from our discussion on persona, we tried ways of introducing ourselves and attempted to each grasp an individual strong persona. We mind-mapped our obvious character traits and thought of ways we could emphasise these, please see image persona mapping. We came to the conclusion that we could reveal these traits by our physical appearance, the way we spoke and our mannerisms, for example, glamorous and gobby. We introduced one another as a possible opening for the show, after hearing feedback from this, it came across too amateur and unoriginal. Frankie and I then came to the conclusion, that if Frankie introduced me as posh and glamourous, I was going to have to keep up a strong persona of being posh and glamorous the whole way through the piece. This would be problematic for us for the following reasons: I am not posh, Frankie just says I am because I pronounce words properly, Frankie also says I am glamorous because sometimes I wear fake fur; she is my friend and likes to make me feel good. (I know, how lovely of her. I wasn’t that nice about her) Anyway, if I had to keep up this exaggerated persona, it would not be true to myself. Frankie and I want the performance to be about us and not to complicate it by suggesting we have ‘categorised’ ourselves. That would go against our aim if it was not about us anymore. Secondly, we realised that actually, our individual physical appearance and our built vulva’s were enough to reveal a strong difference between Frankie and I. Therefore, we cut the introduction of ourselves and went straight to the vulva building and our research findings.

 Frankie and I had established that although we didn’t want to introduce ourselves to the audience, we still wanted moments in the piece where it focused on just one of us, so even though we wanted our performance to be about us together, we felt it was important for us to have a scene where it was about us individually, yet still incorporating both of us in the scene. Therefore, we set ourselves a task to write or present a possible scene individually for the next rehearsal.

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Frankie story time

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Week 1 & 2  (13 & 14)

From the Vagina timelines, Franks and I decided to use this in order to create performative material. To begin with, we improvised ‘moments’ by picking them at random out of hat. We thought we would also try it by using various props, these props were decided by ourselves beforehand, and was not picked with connection to the vagina timelines. We used items that we found around our room, and various belongings that we had on our bags. For example, headphones, jewellery, candles etc. These props were used as a tool in whichever way we liked for our improvisation. We were not sure exactly what we wanted to achieve through this exercise, rather it was to see if anything sparked interest and had any potential to develop further. We created a 'lucky dip' for the props, the vagina timeline moments, and a third one for a style of performance. This pile included melodrama, sing-song, spoken word poem, school play, Shakespeare, scripted, etc. 

PLEASE SEE VIDEO Frankie Story Time to see one of Franks improvisations.

Franks and I had a lot of fun improvising these scenes, we found the props were most effective when used as a token to portray different characters. For example, when I improvised a scene of child me and my dad, I used a hat to be my dad. It was very clear that I was not trying to be my dad, and it was me playing my dad, but we found this was an effective to way to differentiate between two different people. It was humorous and added to the element of D.I.Y aesthetic theatre. We had a discussion about which parts we felt stood out to us the most and how we could possibly take it forward and develop these further. Discussed below: 

-Props to portray a new character, i.e. token props to create humour, but no illusion that we have become a new character, we are just taking the pi**!

 -Growing up moments- the scenes that were created around our young adolescence indicated thoughts of 'idealised' womanhood, which had been shaped through popular media of the time. These were often non-realistic and categorised which are portrayed as 'real.' Additionally, moments of discovery, i.e. finding out what the clitoris was, and how we found out these moments. We discussed how our discovery of female body and thoughts when we growing up reveals the engrained sexism of society, yet we were too young to be aware of this. For example, a friend and I looking in our vaginas properly for the first time, but thinking it was wrong and abnormal of us to do so. This shows the lack of female sex education and how girls are made to feel dirty for being curious and wanting to know about their bodies.  

 -Melodrama exaggerated the truth, creating humour and the sense of the 'ridiculous.' However, the dramatic and funny element of melodrama was power to denote serious issues that girls endure. For example, I acted out a scene where a friend shaved off my pubes, I performed this with big movements to emphasise the act of shaving a vagina for the first time. When this really happened, I was only 13, my friend and I had been made to think pubic hair was disgusting on women. The melodrama brought out the humour, but the underline meaning was more serious: the disgust of the natural female body that young girls have been made to feel.

 -As stated above, a lot of these moments were serious, some of them still debatable today in which society has still not found the answer for i.e. what is consent? Franks improvised one of her moments of sexual assault, she created a bizarre, hyperbolized scene that was funny to watch. The fact it was funny, when Franks was showing a dark, serious matter, made the scene extremely powerful. However, we felt that there were some moments were it shouldn’t be funny, and we felt that our piece should have a varied change of pace all the way through. We felt that the issue of consent and not everyone being aware of what consent is, was too serious to play funny when there society has still not figured out a solution. The fact that what happened to Frankie has happened to so many women, is too concerning for us to make this funny in the performance. Therefore, we decided to do this scene differently, in juxtaposition with the light-hearted approach of the other scenes, we thought it was far more powerful to change the emotional tone and atmosphere of this possible scene.

 -Personification of the female body and functions i.e. orgasms created humour. When Frankie and I personified our vagina, we liked the thought of our vagina having its own voice and how it reacts in certain situations. However, when exploring these voices, we realised that we did not know the scientific terms of our vagina parts, the only one we really knew was the clitoris! Frankie and I were shocked at ourselves, we are doing a performance about vaginas and we do not know the correct terms for the parts! We are both feminists and 22 and 24 years old, how did we know this! This progressed into a discussion how we were not taught this in school, Frankie said she could recall one lesson where they labelled a vagina in science, but they were not given the correct terms, they were told they could slang. From the lack of our own education and schools in the UK, this prompted us to not only research the correct scientific terms of the vagina, but to think of ways in which we could make this performative.

 From this exercise, it had learnt us to begin the research of vagina terms and plan our next rehearsal of how we could make this performative, in order to teach our audience what we had learnt. Next week, vagina mapping time!

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Presenting our vagina timelines in 2 minutes!

[bleedoutheatre-blog]

Week 1 (13)

Happy start to rehearsal process!

To get us started, Franks and I decided to individually draw out a timeline of our vagina lives. I know what you’re thinking, periods, virginity and sex. Although this was of course included in our vagina timelines, there’s more than that. These timeline including vagina injuries, STI scares, childhood sexual thoughts, alcohol pouring (that was Frankie!), you name it! We each presented the timelines to each other, and we found the more personal and ‘non-obvious’ stories were far more interesting, as they were not predictable. For example, Frankie’s friend once decided it was a good idea to pour gin inside her vagina! I know! The stories and experiences that were personal rather than 'the expected’ where far more interesting to listen to. 

From this, we created one big timeline and picked out interesting moments. However, we found that we needed to include the 'predictable' moments of our vagina’s, for example, starting with our periods. These moments are intrinsic to our 'vagina’s’ history, and is part of having a vagina. 

Melissa, (our tutor) had instructed us earlier on in the week to show her 2 minutes of performance for our next meeting. Therefore, we decided to take this further by using a stop watch to present our timeline in exactly 2 minutes! This kept the pace fast and we found it worked for our hand-drawn timeline. As we had only 2 minutes, we rushed over the ‘predictable’ moments, just to state they happened, and focused our attention on the more interesting stories. We mention child masturbation and friends shaving off our pubic hairs to make it personal to Frankie and I.  

Please see the video of the history of our vagina’s in two minutes!!

Frankie and I also talked about how we could use intertextuality of previous feminist performance to denote the feminist context. Carolee Schneeman performed Interior Scroll, in 1975, she pulled a scroll out of her vagina to share her experiences of being a female performance artist. Frankie and I thought to introduce the timeline, I could pull it out of her pants to reference this performance.