Two for the Ladies

I'm sure that there is a reason behind this top twenty countdown of female performers at the Fringe. I'll even work in my introductory comments on science and religion by the end.

I'm sure. In the meantime, at number fifteen, it's Olivia Lee. She's more famous as a comedian, but having read the press release properly, I realise that she is doing a play: Touched, Like  A Virgin. It does fit in with Lee's comic TV presence (she's playing a woman who is doubting that she can 'have it all'), which tickles gender assumptions to reveal the... well, her new TV show is called Man Up, and she's trying to get 'hapless men to turn their lives around.'

Surprised that she didn't invite me onto that. I think turning a bearded, introverted critic into a man about town would make great television. Anyway, Touched was written by Zoe Lewis and plugs into that anxiety that is bothering both sexes  - isn't it time we grew up?
Thursday 15th August to Sunday 25 August 2013 (Not Saturdays)
Le Monde,16 George St, Edinburgh, EH2 2PF


Funnily enough, she's part of a programme at Le Monde, called Funny Women Pop Up. That ought to make my countdown a little easier...

The thing is, I am deliberately not chasing female performances to be included in this list. As a scientific experiment, I am just trawling my inbox, and seeing what interests me, and fits. My hypothesis is that if the female presence in the Fringe is healthy, I'll be able to complete the countdown without having to look in the Fringe guide for help.

To that end, I'm including Ménage à Trois as number fourteen. I feel lazy - it's so obvious to include and making it part of a 'women in performance' piece is so predictable. It is an NTS presentation of Claire Cunningham and Gail Sneddon's award winning autobiographical study of a life with crutches.

Okay, this is really exposing the problems of a list based on a genetic identity. Ménage à Trois could be slapped into any number of categories, including 'most likely to make a grown man cry' and 'best computer and human interaction.' Cunningham has been wowing the Fringe - and the rest of the world since she did Mobile/Evolution at DanceBase. Sneddon's tricknology effectively expands the aesthetic palette to clarify the theme of isolation that gives Ménage its bite.
Paterson’s Land at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 
9 to 25 August 2013

Even if the concept is falling apart, I'll see if I can't keep going. It's kind of dumb to expect things to have an intrinsic connection just because they are made by women. It presupposes an essentialist female identity. 

Slapping in number thirteen won't help - unlucky for me, because here is a feminist spoken word piece, directed by a woman, Sacha Kyle, about a woman, Andrea Dworkin, but written and performed by a man, Alan Bissett. 

Brave Bissett's bringing back Dworkin's dogmatic diatribes protesting perverse pornography: Dworkin's writings traced the outlines of misogyny that contained the pornographic images of the 1980s.  Dworkin was an important voice in feminist history, although she was somewhat marginalised at the end of her life, and her description of how hatred of women permeated erotic culture is bracing and, frankly, terrifying. 

BAN THIS FILTH!
Scottish Storytelling Centre
2– 11 August 

Does this belong on the list: it's about an important thinker - is her gender relevant? It's by a man - is his gender relevant?

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The Journey into Striptease: Part 1

Back when they used to let me near children, and I was a happy Latin teacher, feminism was going through a strange time. Young women, who had high aspirations for their careers, and who would frequently demonstrate how little they needed a man, would frequently launch into anti-feminist rants. Meanwhile, the English Department were teaching “feminist criticism” as part of the advanced English curriculum – trite readings of texts according to some kind of objective, pro-female stance. It became obvious that feminism was being associated with this peculiar simplification and detached from its historical roots. Not only did this ignore the diversity of the feminist traditions, disconnect it from the campaigns towards political, financial and social equality and reduce it to a predictable narrative, it associated feminism with the pointless cod-academia of contemporary education. Effectively, its teeth were being pulled.

Fortunately, LadyFest was still a dynamic movement, and a quick trip to see Brat Mobile or Le Tigre could introduce another, vibrant feminism.

Further back, when I was toiling in the declensions and conjugations of Ancient Greek, feminism was having a splendid internal battle. Easily distracted from the hard work of learning my endings, I delighted in the fierce polemics of Mary Beard and Germaine Greer. I even did my dissertation on Medea as a heroine. In the real world – or at least in the broadsheets and culture shows – Camille Paglia and Andrea Dworkin squared up to claim the legacy of the Second Wave feminists. Paglia was all about sex, excitement and bravado, frequently hanging out with drag queens, strippers and Italian macho men. Dworkin was teaming with Catherine MacKinnon and drafting laws against pornography.

In an article from that period, Kathy Acker suggested that feminism had once been about the women’s right to say yes or no. Those two answers, she worried, had evolved into two separate and competing strands.

It was exciting.

The period between had been complex. Until a few years ago, many former leftists bemoaned the political shifts of the twenty-first century, feeling almost nostalgic for the dualisms of the 1980s, when Thatcher and Apartheid were Bad and the miners and Sandanistas were good. Happily ignoring the arms-dealers and New Labour’s superb corruption of the socialist ideal, they made their compromises with the state. Going into education, arts administration or finally getting that grant for their theatre company removed their teeth. You can spot them today: they are the ones who think that Labour are better than the Conservatives. Well, I admire their faith like I admire fundamentalist Christians. I am sure it is a consolation to them.

The transition from feminism as the radical response to an obvious patriarchal society towards a media misrepresentation of lesbian man-haters (something it hasn’t been since 1974) was being completed. I woke up in 2005, roughly the time that I kicked the education habit and starting mainlining performance art, and found that burlesque and striptease were acceptable entertainment. While I remember reading in Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves that the advance of women’s rights in Greece was accompanied by more explicit representations of tits and arse in art, I wasn’t sure whether this was okay. The last time I had looked, striptease was shoved into Soho alley-ways, and was likely to involve getting threatened for your credit card by a burly bouncer. Suddenly, I could go and see women disrobe before an audience of enthusiastic women. I didn’t even have to be ironic.

Of course I decided to make cabaret part of my performance portfolio of interests.