TRANSIT
VI
Women's International
Theatre Festival and Meeting
Theatre - Women - On the Periphery
Odin Teatret, Holstebro, Denmark
6-16 August 2009
As an actress my first thought on
periphery concerns the relationship between my centre - the heart
of the action in my torso - and the detailed precision of the
extremities - my hands, feet and eyes - that tell the anecdote and
make the action believable. As an actress my main concern is the
power concentrated in my centre. So I am confused. Why chose to
work on the periphery? Why is being on the periphery so important
to many of us women theatre practitioners?
We chose to work on the periphery, both
geographically (in places distant from the main cities, in
countries at the extremity of the world, in neighbourhoods at the
edge of the towns) and as genre (theatre that confines with film,
music, nature, visual art, writing…). The choice of the periphery
comes as a consequence of where we place our performances, why we
make theatre and with whom, as a need to emigrate and travel.
When the Magdalena Project lost its
physical centre - the office in Cardiff and its revenue funding -
the activities mushroomed in events all over the world and the
network maintained its connection internationally through the
website and The Open Page journal. The Magdalena Project became a
tangled bond of peripheries, and each of these peripheries was at
the centre of our professional and personal lives.
In a global world, in which it is
becoming more and more difficult to remain enclosed within the
boundaries of a national and traditional culture, where is the
centre and what is the periphery? Each periphery exists only in
relation to its centre as each centre to its periphery. Women in
theatre are our centre, like the poor in opposition to rich, mad in
opposition to normal, black or yellow or red in opposition to
white, young or old people in opposition to middle-aged could be.
We make the periphery our centre because we do not accept the world
as it is, with its injustice and segregation, its mainstream
thinking and order. We make work on the periphery because we are
not satisfied with the theatre we know from before. We chose
periphery as the place where small essential human values are
cherished.
Women working in theatre are
definitively on the periphery of those deciding for the world, but
although we know our influence is nearly inexistent we still feel
the enormous responsibility of sharing our knowledge which unites
body and mind, torso and hands, feelings and actions to promote a
different way of perceiving and thinking.
Remembering how the Magdalena Project
acquired more life and dynamism after losing its physical centre, I
understand that the actress's principle I should refer to when
thinking of periphery is another: going out of balance and
transforming weight into energy. Abandoning the centre is a way of
taking a risk, of accepting the challenge, of needing to move away
from an inert centre that no longer feeds us and gives a false
feeling of security. Being on the periphery is to explore unknown
places with the necessity of making something
happen.
The heart of the action, our centre,
becomes our profession, and how we manifest it, our periphery. The
6th Transit Festival will gather examples of 'peripheral'
manifestations inviting performances and women who are
geographically and artistically placed at the borders. The
programme includes workshops, site specific events, performances,
lectures, master-classes and work demonstrations.
Julia Varley
Video
