Smashing the patriarchy has never
seemed quite so much fun as it does in Hot Brown
Honey (Assembly Roxy),
an all-female cabaret-style show from Australia that takes on gender, sexism,
colonialism and race with a raucous glee, while giving a feminist makeover to
circus, hip-hop and burlesque.
There is an extraordinary straps sequence that
conjures the twisted moves of a woman trying to escape domestic violence; even
hula hoops are called into service to explore western tourists’ culture of
entitlement.
The women in Hot Brown Honey are all queen bees out to sting
male assumptions and privilege, question outmoded attitudes and make links
between different kinds of oppression. The struggles of Indigenous Australians
are entwined with those of women, in a show that may not win any awards for the
subtlety of its politics, but which raises the rafters with its sly, subversive
use of entertainment as a means of consciousness-raising.
The show is not alone in its interest in gender issues on the
fringe in 2016. AsJoyce
Macmillan observed at
the first
round of this year’s Fringe First awards: “Gender is always a theme,
but the mood this year is very much one of anger from women writers and
performers in a time when some people are arguing the feminist revolution is
over, but in some ways things are getting worse.”
That’s certainly apparent in Lynda
Radley’s The
Interference, an intelligent, heartfelt show written for Pepperdine
University in Malibu, which is playing at C Venues Chamber Street until 16
August. The culture of campus misogyny combines with a toxic world of online
comment when Karen is raped by a football star, Smith, and refuses to back down
despite the obstructions of the police, the timid university authorities and a
swell of public opinion arguing that his budding football career is of primary
importance. There’s much here to remind us about the Stanford
University case that
made the headlines recently.
The Interference is cleverly staged, like a football game on
which people are constantly commentating – a device that highlights how, in an
ultra-connected world, privacy is at a premium, with everybody’s actions seen
as public property. All the more so if you are a woman, because it’s still very
much a man’s world. After all, even some women posit the opinion that Karen
should have been grateful the good-looking jock Smith paid her any attention,
and say refusing to keep silent is just more evidence that she’s a slut.
For Karen, it’s almost impossible to secure real justice in a
world where trial by social media rules, and so too it proves for Leah in the
sparkily written and brilliantly performed Fabric at Underbelly. In Charlotte
Josephine’s Blush (also at Underbelly), an 18-year-old
girl’s ex-boyfriend has sent naked images of her to his friends, one of whom
has published them on the internet. There have been 30,000 clicks and rising,
and although the public sharing of private images is now against the law,
officialdom offers little redress in these circumstances
Blush, composed of intelligent, sharply
observed monologues from five characters, is scrupulously even-handed in the way it treats men and women,
but also makes clear that it’s women who are judged more harshly and
slut-shamed – shame that will need to be addressed if change is going to
happen.
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Fortunately, there are an awful lot of
shameless hussies around on the fringe, repossessing the naked female body and
making us think again about how we gaze at it. As this year’s fringe began, Moira Knox – the woman known as the Mary
Whitehouse of the fringe during the 1980s and 90s, when she campaigned against
shows that featured bad language, nudity and blasphemy – died aged 85. She
would have been apoplectic in the face of Lucy McCormick’s Triple Threat at Underbelly, an unholy,
low-down, skilled up, hilarious reworking of the story of Jesus Christ from a
female perspective.
Like RashDash’s Two Man Show at Summerhall, Triple Threat
doesn’t just remind that the history of patriarchy is long and embedded, it
also shows us we have to remake these stories and tell them differently if we
are going to change our own culture and its attitudes towards women. Two Man
Show does it by pointing up the fact that naturalistic theatre might be a tool
of the patriarchy, while Triple Threat suggests that it is in live art and
singing and dancing that liberation might lie.
In that, it has much in common with Hot Brown
Honey, and it’s the joyousness of all these shows that make them so engaging,
even to the final crowdsurfing moment in Triple Threat, where it is a woman
riding the crest of the wave. It’s also the way that they reclaim the naked
female body as something to be proud of rather than an object of shame or a sex
object to be possessed by men. In Two Man Show, the women’s nakedness has a
matter-of-fact ease, as if nudity is the most natural thing in the world and
being happy in your own body is a right.
Good stuff, but I do wonder about
the fact that all these naked female bodies on display are ones of young
perfection – not an ounce of excess flesh, and all clipped
and trimmed to conform
to what quite honestly is a male idea of female beauty – but as Nicole
Henriksen observes in her account of working as a stripper, Nicole
Henriksen is Makin It Rain (Underbelly),
there are many of daily assumptions made about the female body, and also about
women who use their bodies as part of their work. Henriksen’s show highlights
the fact that we make distinctions
between the female body exposed in a strip club and the same female body doing exactly
the same movements on a stage in Underbelly. Why is it OK in the latter context
if it’s a feminist statement, but deemed suspect in the former?
It’s these
very double-standards, and the idea that the sex worker who gets raped is less
deserving of sympathy and justice than “good girls” who dresses demurely, that
are under scrutiny in these shows, which speak up loudly about the corrosive
effects of shame. They prove that women are angry about the everyday sexism
they encounter. And if getting that message across involves flaunting the naked
female body then so be it, because – as the seminal 70s
feminist handbook of women’s health proclaimed – these are “Our Bodies,
Ourselves”.
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