Monstrous Women

Patriarchy uses images & narratives of female monstrousness such as the Witch, Crone, Vampire, Medusa to minimise women. These monstrous female archetypes serve as moral fables to limit women's power. Tragically, we internalise those and allow them to limit who we are and who we can be in the world. Instead Good Girl, Beautiful Maiden, Nurturing Mother becomes the archetypes we celebrate.

So what do you do with your hard edges?  Do you buckle to social pressures, like always being nice? Do you have a well of frustration that you would like to release?

This workshop is a safe space to explore, articulate, give voice to and free some of the limiting ideas of monstrous femininity.

We will use multiple artistic modes to explore, physicalise and express aspects of monstrous femininity that participants discover through the process.

The workshop will be oriented towards performance and we will use:

• Theatrical scores to find the physicality of inhibitions that have kept our monstrous woman hidden.

• Short writing activities, to give voice to parts of ourselves that have been silenced.

• Bouffon Theatre to prosecute the patriarchal limits we have been living within.

To address systemic undercurrents of this kind is fiendishly hard because they survive through invisibility. For that reason, this workshop will be open only to female-identifying participants.

Get ugly!