Woman is

My company’s inspiration for this project was provided by the poem “woman is” by Kadish Morris. This poem captures the experience of what it is to be a woman by displaying the conflicting expectations placed on women and the impact of those unrealistic standards. It inspired us to talk about our own experiences of womanhood and our struggles growing up which we aimed to reflect in our performance.

After reading “woman is”, we wrote our own poems to get an understanding of our own experiences and definitions of womanhood. When we did this, my immediate reaction was to write a perfect definition of womanhood. I found myself questioning what it means to be a woman. Is it persevering through adversity like my mother has shown me, is it kind and gentle like her mother or is it something entirely different? My first vision was of a woman who had risen above the ideal, she was tall, poised beautiful and strong all at once. She was ambitious, successful in her career and yet nurturing and family-orientated. She was hardworking and thoughtful but she knew how to enjoy herself to the fullest too. Her intelligence was both logical and emotional, balanced in just the right way. She was perfect. But she was not real. Even when directly asked about my own experience, I couldn’t shake the expectations of others and my lifetime pursuit of perfection. Being a woman is not what I thought it would be, I was told I had the world at my feet but instead, I found it on my shoulders.

So, I decided to write about the realisation. The realisation that I had been asking myself the wrong question. The realisation that being a woman is desperately climbing an unending ladder that you don’t even remember wanting to go up in the first place. The realisation that as a woman, no matter how far up you get, a man will always be ahead, making sure the ladder keeps getting higher.

Her concrete face smiling as she was crafted

She stands above

Being watched

Being judged

Her stone spine holding her high

She is poised

She is tall

But never as tall as he

He was created from clay

From earth

He is the ground

She is lucky enough to stand on

Then she blinks

yet the world grows dimmer

She blinks

And in a second she sees

The girls below of flesh and bone

Climbing up the rungs

desperate to join her

to fit the mold he made for her

She knew they would never reach

No matter how hard they tried

And even if they did

It was because he let them

We each read out our poems and discussed our different perspectives which sparked a lot of passion in us, we found ourselves sharing our experiences and frustrations that come with being female and relating to each other’s emotions.

When deciding the message of our piece we originally wanted our audience to take accountability for how they view and treat women in their own lives by showing them our perspective of womanhood. However, this felt reductionist, and we went down the route of addressing what being a woman means to our company and us as individuals so our performance would create a larger impact on a wider range of people. I wanted our audience to have a visceral reaction to our performance so that we could get them to empathise with our experiences. One way in which we decided to do this is by using contrast to shock and make our audience empathise with us, I loved the idea of incorporating the innocence of girlhood in our performance and depicting it alongside the struggles of womanhood to mimic the experiences we had growing up.

We had many ideas for this, such as re-enacting our own experiences of what it was like for us to grow up, as well as incorporating some verbatim quotes from our lives and our poems to get our views on womanhood across to our audience. Using pink stage lights during scenes reminiscent of childhood to embody rose-tinted glasses and wearing pink clothing were considered early on in our discussions. Often pink is associated with feminine qualities and thus represents weakness to many girls who go on to reject the colour for its symbolism, I felt that by wearing and embracing pink in our piece we are reclaiming our definitions of what it means to be a woman.

Another way in which we originally wanted to incorporate the theme of girlhood in our piece was by using toys, we wanted to record a voice-over of us playing for our opening scene in which we would act like dolls using stiff movements and potentially incorporating overly large props. However, this felt obscure and unnecessary, so instead we thought to enact children playing with toys, spreading them around the stage during the opening scene. Then during our performance, we could hold onto the toys throughout and drop them during reenactments of our experiences to represent how childhood innocence is taken away from us when we are forced to grow up and exposed to the real world. To wrap this up, we considered placing a cardboard box on the stage so that at the end of our performance we could put away all the childhood items we brought out and tape up the box to symbolise packing up our childhood.

One thing we considered early on was that there are both positive and negative aspects of being female and how we wanted to intertwine them in our piece. We spoke about how we could use the concept of women going to the bathroom together to display this, despite bathrooms being considered an odd place for women to visit together, they act as an escape from men and outside judgement and are spaces in which women can be themselves and let their guards down without being criticised. So we decided to centre our performance around a bathroom to tie our experiences together.

We started by improvising a scene in which a group of friends are getting ready to go out clubbing and then we transitioned to a scene aimed at sharing Gwen’s experience, we thought about how we could mimic the tension of the story by standing close to her and incorporating shocking shifts in character between being a playful girl and being an angry father, we liked the quick change in demeanour to stun our audience into feeling the fear we were attempting to get across. After trying this with the structure we had in mind, we realised we liked where it was going and decided to write up an outline so we could begin practically working on the piece in full rather than just talking about individual scenes and how they might fit together.

Our outline

Improvisation

After we formed a rough plan for our performance we practised using improv as a tool, as improv gets ideas flowing we found it helpful in getting our performance on its feet. In practice, our company improvised a scene using nothing but the words “ham”, “balloon” and “horror”, which helped us see the value of improv as a tool for exploring the different choices we make in order to tell stories. At first, we felt that this scene was somewhat overdramatic and unnatural so we changed our vocabulary to be less direct and tried out different character choices and after a few more tries we saw the scene become more realistic and uniform in tone.

This was helpful when we began putting our performance on its feet. Although we had an idea of what we wanted to create for our opening scene, the scene felt awkward and unrealistic. Through improvisation, we increased our pace and found this helped the scene feel more natural because the slower we were, the more rigid the scene was. Improv also helped us find the tone of the scene which led us to make better decisions about our dialogue and reduce the awkwardness that we had in the beginning.

However...

There comes a point in the midst of devising when everyone suddenly decides they hate it, and this was that moment for us. After we got our outline on its feet, we realised it wasn’t working, so what did we do? We pushed aside everything we had done so far and tried something new.

We began to experiment with lighting and create a scene where we used only the torches on our phones as a light source, we played around with moving it around our bodies which we found helped us to highlight different insecurities and body parts we were referring to. For example, at one point we had Sam standing in the middle of us whilst she spoke about how she had been complimented on her personality whilst we moved our torches to her body, this created a great contrast and emphasised the discomfort caused by catcalling. When we performed I also gestured to her body, coming close and pretending to grab her whilst she recoiled, this was great at displaying the unwanted advances women receive and I believe this was a relatable moment for our audience.

We also thought about using different angles to display different levels of threat, in some scenes, we angled our lights down on people to give them a softer look whilst in others we shone our lights from multiple levels to indicate threat overwhelming the character such as when being catcalled. We liked the idea of the lights being used to display and view women, so we devised a scene in which my character is being followed by men and I talk about how uncomfortable this is. I really liked this scene as I think it really accurately reflects how women are made to feel unsafe even in public spaces.

Another way we explored the usage of light was to use them as a representation of ‘eyes’ and create a scene in which a woman is being followed by torches which turn away when she looks back. We kept the structure of this scene largely the same in our final performance, however, we ended up using more space than we had originally mapped out as during rehearsals we found it felt too rehearsed and unnatural to keep the scene confined. I was also given direction to be quicker in my movements and to almost challenge the others to turn around in time so I wouldn’t catch them following me, this was helpful in speeding up our pace which allowed our performance to flow more naturally and further helped convey my character’s anxiety at that moment.

Growing up

We also spoke about the different ways women are viewed through their lives and how things that were once considered innocent become uncomfortable over time as women become more sexualised as they grow up. To portray this in our performance, we came up with a scene that captured the childish innocence of being watched and contrasted it with a scene where a woman is objectified. We improvised a scene of a little girl talking about her first day of school whilst her mother photographs her and compliments her, this cuts to the girl now working at Tesco and how she is objectified and preyed upon by an older man. I felt this created a wonderful depiction of how women are perceived as they grow up and the judgement they face from all angles. The quick cut from a girl on her first day of school to a girl working at a supermarket was comedic but shifted to an uncomfortable situation upon the appearance of an older man. This shift seemed to shock our audience, their laughter quickly faded and it was clear that the comedic moment had been undercut almost immediately as intended.

To address the change in attitudes to girls as they grow up we came up with a list of phrases that we’ve heard been said to children, teens and adults to see how they differ and if we could use it in our piece. So after the Tesco scene, we cut to a teenager who talks about how her mother bought her face wash and criticises her, this was an interesting scene to create as I felt it really got across how girls grow up with their appearance being a main determiner of their worth. This moment reminded us of the poem Ella wrote when we first read “Woman is” which made us decide to have Ella read the poem she wrote aloud to our audience directly. To visualise the pressure put on women to look a certain way, when working on this scene we stood around Ella holding different makeup products and had her frantically try to put them on whilst she read out her poem.

When talking about the words used to describe women when they’re older compared to when they’re younger, we noticed how many of them were quite similar such as “smile for me” and “pretty girl”. However, in the context of being an adult these words and phrases became uncomfortable and infantilising yet violating at the same time, to capture the discomfort of these phrases, we incorporated them at the end of the “walking at night” scene whilst depicting my character being closed in on by the ‘eyes’ and having these things yelled at her.

This process of putting aside our previous work and looking at creating something fresh was very helpful in getting our ideas flowing and preventing us from getting stuck. Because we had focused on telling each of our stories and just glued them together to try and make it linear, we had made it feel unnatural and thus it wasn’t making the impact we wanted. So by deciding to put aside what we had previously created and focus on fragments that conveyed our experiences in a creative way, we stopped our performance from feeling like a series of monologues and converted it into a cohesive performance.

At this point, we started reincorporating more of our original outline to match the new fragmented style we had created by looking at our original experiences and stripping them down to their bare bones. By reducing this detail we were able to break up our performance more which gave it a better pace. We were also given feedback that holding toys during the piece wasn’t clear and subsequently distracted from our message so we went down a different route of incorporating the theme of growing up.

I created a voiceover compilation of a group of girls of varying ages answering the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” which inspired us to think about what we wanted to do when we were growing up and comparatively what we wanted now. We decided to open our performance by asking that same question to ourselves and then getting straight into the scene in which the little girl gets ready for school to set up the idea of growing up in our audience’s minds from the get-go.

What do you want to be when you grow up?

As our piece was so heavy, we were in need of some positive moments to balance out our performance and form a bittersweet ending. We toyed around with potentially including a projection of images of us when we were young at the end of our performance and coming full circle, ending with us saying what we wanted to grow up to be when we were children. To create a more positive ending we practised having my character be ‘saved’ by another girl when on the bus, we tried using synchronised dialogue to get across female solidarity, however, this sounded messy so instead we made it a moment between two people.

After the bus scene, we went on to add more to Gwen's story as it still felt partially unfinished and we were looking for ways to end on a more positive note, deciding to add in a small exchange to show her character was accepted was a simple yet effective way to wrap up her story. We felt that although this rounded out our performance more, it still didn’t balance out the heaviness to the extent we wanted, so we decided to go back to how women’s bathrooms feel like a safe space by collectively writing a poem about escaping to the bathroom. This worked really well for our piece as I feel it quite nicely showed that despite the difficulties that women face, they are able to create little pockets of safety and positivity.

Again to reiterate the beauty of women’s friendships, we took a photo of us at the end of our performance, in our first practice, we all immediately huddled around the phone to look at the photo and talk about it. We found this was a really sweet and “girly” moment and ended up incorporating this into our ending, just before we played the voice-over to give it an even more raw feel.

Balancing our piece

Touching up our performance

When cleaning up our performance, we received feedback that we needed to separate our stories more and lean into the episodic structure, so we added a collective deep breath between scenes and used up more of the stage space. Spreading our scenes out a bit more was really helpful in separating our moments but it also aided in getting our message across as it made our performance bigger which helped us emphasise the importance of our issue. We were also told to exaggerate our movements more, as we had been rehearsing in a rather small area, our performance reflected that and thus it wouldn't have been as impactful if we had performed it the way we had been rehearsing. To remedy this, we sharpened and quickened our movements to better our physicality and heighten the intensity of our performance, this was successful as it made our performance bigger and more engaging for our audience which helped them empathise with our characters and understand our message.

We also received some more feedback on the poem scene, at this point we had decided that the visual representation of Ella frantically putting on makeup was not necessary as the poem conveyed what we wanted and the addition of extra props was somewhat messy. We were told that without the makeup the scene was missing some exaggeration so we added a moment where we all reached out and grabbed Ella’s hair to display it to the audience. This moment reminded me of how women are often judged for owning their beauty and being confident in themselves instead of following the expectation for women to act as though they don't care/or know if they're beautiful whilst still following beauty standards.

I also received feedback that during the bus scene by internalising my emotions, I was not showing them to the audience effectively and so instead I aimed to have more of an angry disposition during this moment so that I could better express my emotional state to the audience and subsequently relate to them more.

Final thoughts

Overall our performances went well, after the fact we were told by girls in the audience that it was really relatable for them so I’m glad that our piece made the impact we were looking for. In some moments, I definitely feel I could have gone bigger with my physicality and facial expressions to convey emotions and changes of character, especially during the bus scene I could have better expressed the rawness of the moment and how it made me feel very exposed and trapped. We were told after the show that our performance really showed that we work well as a theatre company and I think this is because we all had a really clear message we were conveying throughout our rehearsals and our performance. The topic we had centered our performance around was very hard hitting for all of us as women and so being vulnerable and opening up with each other was something we did quite early on and I think this is what helped our piece feel so real and relatable for our audience.

Overall evaluation

This term has definitely taught me a lot about myself and how I cope with change. Before starting, I was really nervous coming into a group of people who already knew each other and were familiar with the environment as I’ve never really pushed myself in that way before. But since then, I’ve found that my fears actually vanished quite quickly and that working with new people isn’t something to be worried about, it is something to embrace. I didn’t feel ready for the big change that is Drama school as I thought I wouldn't adapt to the different environment so quickly, however, doing level 4 and working on this project has shown me just how adaptable I really am and has made me more stoic when facing certain challenges.

As this course requires a lot of creative independence and self-discipline, I have found some aspects of the course quite overwhelming. Learning how to multitask and focus on multiple things at once has definitely been a challenge, especially when it comes to written tasks or memorisation tasks because my ADHD partially limits me in that way. The course has also been very physically demanding, not only do I regularly have joint pain but I also sprained my ankle at the beginning of the course and so at times have found it difficult to keep up with physical tasks, however, although difficult to adjust to, it has been possible and it has proven my ability to push myself physically.

The switch of environment may not have been easy, but it is certainly rewarding, despite how difficult it has been for me to adjust to some things.

The quick pace has been helpful, I’ve loved the fast environment as it encourages me to think on my feet and be prepared to be caught off guard, especially as my previous training has been very different. Coming from a very theory-based environment focused on grades instead of individual progress, meant that I was excited to focus on the practical elements that I haven't had as much experience with, with its constant “let us get up and try this new thing” energy, this course has done wonders for my motivation and has really encouraged me to be more open to new ideas and trying new techniques.

Coming into this term with fresh eyes has also been really beneficial to me, being able to move on from my past experiences is something that has been very helpful in my training as I’ve been better able to focus on getting the most out of this year. I also hadn’t seen previous Level 4 group’s work so I haven’t felt the pressure to exceed the past year’s performances and only have my former projects as a target to beat.

I do still need to work on my confidence in my own ideas, as although I don’t lack ideas, I often get in my head about their quality and end up, not standing up for my own ideas and letting other people lead. in group discussions, sometimes I find myself sitting back and letting other peoples ideas come before my own, because of this anxiety around suggesting a bad idea. So far, this course has helped me realise that I actually need to emphasise my ideas more and fight for them to be considered, instead of just letting everyone else get their way, I think that this is definitely something that I can and will work on so that my contributions can become more impactful only to my performances, but for my audience too.

This course, help me learn to take pride in my leadership skills. being around, such amazing voices and opinions makes it easy for me to forget the importance of sharing my own unique ideas. With improved leadership skills, I will be better able to project my own strengths in a group to create dynamic performances. I’ve already begun to take charge more and follow through because being here, has made me realise the opportunities I was missing because I let my self-criticism get in the way. I better understand why I need to take those steps to be more confident in my ideas and to really push them an advocate for them so that they are done justice because I know that pushing away the side of me that does half that drive and does want to take charge and ownership only stopped me from growing as an actor.