Femmetasia

In 2018 I was part of forming an all-female live art collective whom I made professional work with up until 2020 when our company disbanded during the lockdown. As a company we explored our lived experiences of misogyny through endurance and task-based theatre. We also worked with duration and making work for atypical performance spaces. On this page I have documented and discussed some of the work we made together.

Teacups

We create the piece Teacups to fit the brief of a gallery installation for an exhibition called expressionmARTini, in the Hoxton Arches (2019). The consisted of all members of the company squatting against a wall inside a box on the floor which was made up of fragile tape. Whilst squatting we balanced a china teacup and saucer on our pals and when the endurance of the squat being impossible and we stopped the china would fall of our laps and smash into the box. I have inserted stills and a video of this work below.

Packed Lunch

Packed Lunch was a piece we developed for an event called Project Femme (Island Arts Studio Brixton) for International Women's Day 2020. The piece consisted of us making and eating our childhood packed-lunch sandwiches whilst blindfolded. In this piece we were exploring the transition from childhood to adulthood in young women/girls. I have included documentation of this piece below.

boiling

In May 2019 we created 24 hour durational, endurance piece called Boiling which was situated in a studio in Goldsmiths University. Our company was made up on eight women exploring the female experience through the lens of endurance.

We did this by creating 5 endurance stations in our studio the first was a body hair plucking station, then a gravel path where we calculated as a group how many contraceptive pills we took in a year – we used sugar pills to represent the pills and hid them in the path the task was to find them and line them up, then wearing extremely high heels and balancing a teacup on our heads, then the ‘milk made station’, which consisted of holding buckets on a yoke, audience members were invited to add smashed pieces of ceramic to the buckets so that they became heavier. The final station was diet books, where we would read a page then rip it out chew it up and spit it out onto scales. Then we had a rest station where 3 performers would be at any one time.

Each of the endurance stations was situated with a bell, when the performer at the station could no longer do the task, they would ring their bell and swap out with the performer who had been at the rest station longest – like a conveyor belt, this was on a continuous loop for 22.5 hours.

Due to the length of the piece for the most part it was just the 8 of us in the studio however when audience members were in the space they would often ring our bells, not knowing the purpose of the bells, if your bell was rung by an audience member you had to leave your station and move to the rest station.