I didn't want a blog.

"I maintain that blogs are the preserve of obsessive compulsives who have opinions above their station, and feel the need to keep the world informed of the current state of their psychotic breakdown," I told My Producer Harry.

"I think anyone who has heard five minutes of the Radio Hour can detect the irony in that," he replied. So, I have a blog now.

Since Harry and I launched the Vile Arts Media Empire in January, I have become enmeshed in New Media. I think about it all day. Now that I have come off the citalapram, I have three extra hours in the day, while I sit up into the night and scratch my arms feverishly, waiting for the withdrawal to pass.You never know how addicted you are until you try to give up.

"Why don't you do one of those metaphysical monologues you inflict on me while the prerecorded interviews are on air?" suggested Harry.

"It will do you good to get it off your chest," my doctor told me. "Creativity is a great blessing."

Quite a bit of time is spent laughing hysterical about the Old Media's response to New Media.

Harry nudges me."Don't drift off into a personal language. Explain your terms." He is such an Aristotlean.

Fine. Old Media correspond to print - newspapers, those music magazines on a nostalgia trip, which I am now beginning to understand, books that come from the pound shop - as opposed to on your Kindle - anything that uses distribution networks that star a van and guys rushing into shops and hurling a bundle of paper at the floor. New Media come on a wipe-clean screen, nestles between hard-core pornography and is a mouse-click away from summoning up material that will lose you your job and haunt your sleepless hours.

Old Media are the Guardian, The List, The Skinny, The Herald. Even the Guardian website is old media, because it uses traditional methods of writing and resourcing. It's TV as well. New Media are Facebook, blogs, the Vintage Erotica Forum and that meme video involving two girls, one cup and chocolate ice-cream.

"Are you sure it is chocolate?"

It is easy to explain what the Two Media are - the blurred boundaries are par for the course these days, ever since philosophy noticed how categorisation was fundamentally a hegemonic project anyway. What is not so easy to explain is why everyone gets so excited about using New Media, and why they use it in a traditional manner.

It effectively undermines the qualities of the new, by saddling it with the past.

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.

Stripping, Kicking, Wolves and Footballers

As morally confused as I am, two subjects are bound to get my attention in the Fringe brochure: gender politics and striptease. Fortunately, Class Stage Productions are covering both this year: Dances With Wolves, a comedy about strippers (a change from the usual tragic narrative of the innocent who finds herself slowly drawn into the underworld) and On The Bench, an everyday tale of alpha male football celebrities. Faster than that time a bouncer tried to get me to pay the bill for my female host’s champagne in that Soho club, I got in contact with writer and director Kirsty Eyre.

“On the Bench is less about gender identity and more about what Premiership Football has become in England in terms of scandal, sexism, tabloids and the world of celebrity,” Eyre corrects me. “This is football, not from a player's point of view or a fan's point of view but from Joe Public's point of view.”

My mistake was easy enough to make, I plead. Teaming up a play about football – performed by a female cast – with another about strippers – opens up various questions about the gap between expectations on young people. I’m sure I read in The Daily Mail that most preteen girls want to become lap-dancers when they grow up.

“Sure, football is pimped as a man's game and a male subject,” Eyre elaborates. “But the story has not been refigured in anyway for a female cast. It is what it is. The script would work if played by male actors but would provide a different dynamic entirely. I wrote both pieces within the last 12 months without consciously deciding to explore gender identity - it was a later decision to cast On the Bench with an all female cast.”

The connection between the thrill of illicit sexuality – despite its new found social acceptability, stripping remains very much a secret past-time for performers and audience – and premiership footballers could not, however, be more relevant. Eyre is happy to point out how circumstances have conspired to support her play. She observes that “More stories are published in the press about extra-curricular misgivings than what happens on the pitch. Take the superinjuction. Take Giggsy. I could not have wished for a more contemporary backdrop provided by today's tabloids.”

Having been disappointed in my obsession by On The Bench, if not by the ideas behind the play itself, I turned to Dancing With Wolves. Although it turns up in the Theatre Section of the Fringe, it proudly claims burlesque and cabaret credentials. “It has been workshopped and devised throughout rehearsals in order to draw upon the strengths of each actor. As we have some brilliant singers amongst our cast, tongue-in-cheek comedy cabaret was a new ingredient I added to the mixing pot,” Eyre says. “I personally find burlesque a tasteful form of entertainment which can be enjoyed by both men and women. It requires charisma, comedy and an act which enables the performer to have a connection with a male and female audience.”

Last year’s Fringe did see a backlash against burlesque: certain shows were panned for lacking that charisma and taste, and many cabaret nights marginalised burlesque, only a year after it seemed to have conquered variety. The decision of theatre companies to work with its aesthetic might be its best hope of redemption. Dances With Wolves shares burlesque’s humour, setting within a more structured context. It also uses humour to move into dangerous territory.

“Dances for Wolves is set in a sleazy strip joint rather than anything classy and burlesque. I have always found the dynamic of a stripper and her audience fascinating in terms of who is playing who and which gender is in control. I have chosen striptease as a vehicle for comedy and escapism.” Yet Eyre wants to get beneath appearances. “A woman says one thing with her body and something completely different in her mind. What would happen if you could read her mind and her thoughts as she performs a striptease? How would you feel if she was actually doing her shopping list or worrying about an E-bay bid?”

And despite the comedy, Eyre retains a clear moral perspective. “I work in a male dominated environment where city boys regularly boast about ending up in the pound in the pot place down the road. I find the concept of strip joints grotesque, uncomfortable, dated and confusing.” And while the show might end democratically, through a vote on which of the four performers does “dance for the wolves”, it is clear that the comedy does not exclude a clear expression of her original vision. 

He Builds, She Dances, They Love, They Part

Although she took the dance world by storm at the turn of the century, Isadora Duncan occupies an uncomfortable place in the dance pantheon. Less influential than Martha Graham, or even Mary Wigman, she was once the ideal of the contemporary dancer, a wild, free spirit who lived as she performed, refusing tradition. These days she is remembered as a  relic of a naive early twentieth century modernity, full of romantic ideals about the ancients, flaccid mysticism and for wearing a scarf that was ignored health and safety requirements for car journeys.

Nevertheless, she remains an inspiration. Robert Shaw discovered that Duncan had had an ill-fated romance with Edward Gordon Craig, the revolutionary set designer, and has used their letters as the basis of Teddy and Topsy. Part love story, part study of theatrical mavericks, Shaw has homed in on a great meeting of minds and desires.

“Peter Brook says that  most contemporary theatre design owes its origin to Craig’s  ideas, although they have never truly acknowledged,” Shaw begins.  “Duncan's influence on dance (she's often called "the mother of modern dance") is equally important and more widely recognised.  I was fascinated by the fact that these two outsiders, who forced their respective establishments to change, gravitated towards each other emotionally and romantically.”

Part of the problem with Duncan is that she was so determined to be a trail-blazer, much of her official writing comes across as egotistical. Fortunately, Shaw discovered a more personal revelation. “In her autobiography, she writes in a rather grand and portentous style,” he admits. “But in her letters we get an authentic voice.  You get the clear feeling that she writes exactly as she thinks and speaks, making the letters a dream for any actor to perform.  She is funny, romantic, creative, poetic, whimsical.  She describes everything going on around her very clearly and entertainingly.  It's like being present in the same room with her.”   

Even the title of the play emphasises that this is not the Duncan of official record: however, she perhaps reflects herself more closely in these unguarded missives. “Her letters reflect exactly the freedom she looked for in her dancing,” believes Shaw. “And I was especially drawn to the fact that she was quite determined to succeed on her own terms. A lot of what Isadora stood for seem very contemporary but was most unusual in her day.  For example, she was an unmarried mother of two children and she made a career without a man behind her or guiding her.” 

Perhaps her lifestyle, more than her dance style and idiosyncratic interpretations of Classical Greek religion, makes Duncan our contemporary. Even the relationship with Craig faltered for very recognisable reasons. “I think their romance was fated to fail, as so many also are today, through pressure of work,” Shaw concludes.  “Duncan was always on the road.  Craig was looking for a location for his school.  Duncan was constantly touring northern Europe.  Craig was in Italy.  In the end, it was geography that did for them - and Craig's notorious promiscuity.”

As Shaw notes, his project is very different from the many organisations around the world who seek to preserve Duncan’s choreography – a thankless task, given the lack of documentation she cultivated. And rather than a hagiography of two greats, he strives to represent a powerful love affair between two individuals who made great changes to their art-forms and came together in a passionate and intimate, if doomed, embrace.

I first appreciated Junction 25 during their astonishing examination of family ties, From Where I Am Standing. While it might not have been as blisteringly vicious as last year’s Teenage Riot—in fact, it is a rather gentle, respectful piece—it revealed a Scottish company that were taking on the lessons of the Europeans who had been visiting Tramway for the past twenty years. Devised work that came directly from the lives of the performers, confident episodes performed by accomplished actors, an atmosphere of fun and complicity between the stage and the audience: it almost seemed irrelevant that J25 are a youth theatre.

Jess Thorpe (Artistic Director)

We started Junction 25 as a response to our feeling about the need to represent the voices of young people in contemporary performance. There seemed to be a lot of theatre schools working with traditional forms but little that saw young people speaking for themselves about their own experience in their own time. Then it was  about delivering this work within a 'professional' context so that an audience might be able to view it as more than a participatory experience but also as a valid piece of art in its own right. 

We were lucky in that this feeling corresponded with Tramway's wanting to develop a group for young people that reflected its programming at the time.

At first it was a challenge for us to find ways to communicate a new style of working for young people. It wasn't about changing the ideas or making the work 'less rigorous' or 'less difficult' it was about finding the right way to have conversations about experimental art with people who had never been seen it before. It was exciting to introduce new methods as young people often think about theatre in one way - as being a character or 'acting' because it is the dominant form and most of their experience. It was hard for some of them to imagine what was interesting about 'just being themselves' but in time this has changed and the culture of the group really helps to support new members as they discover the way we work together.

The style of working has clear similarities with the work of Glas(s) Performance: in some ways is inevitable but it is important to recognize the distinction - Junction 25 is our collaboration with young people. It does not mean 'Jess and Tashi'. It means what we do together - a collective. It means young people trying out new ideas and working together to explore the world in which they experience. They need to and can speak for themselves. 

Megan (Performer)

I like how the how the show explores lots of different types of love, its not just about the typical romantic love. The devising process of the show was challenging but once we gained momentum the show came together in no time. Its such a personal show, its defiantly one of my favourites because it is all about us, our experiences. One of the challenges was trying to connect all the different stories together and make sure it was fluid, but thankfully we pulled it together, it makes me proud to be in it. 

Scott Ramage (Performer)

When the concept of the show was first announced as love I was a little unsure what to expect, although when we got started I knew straight away it wasn't just going to be about romantic love.  I was surprised as one of the first things we decided on was the name but when Nathan came out with "I Hope My Heart Goes First" quite a few people actually said "That's it".  Throughout the coming months we had a large sheet of paper spread across a wall and we all wrote ideas and feelings on it for the performance, none refused or removed.  This was then the catalyst for more activities breeding more ideas and eventually performances.  

The activities were usually either performance or question based but we still had ideas out of games that we played.  By the end we had a show.