The Feminist Manfesto

ove over, lovely girls in frilly pink tutus: the avant-garde dance productions at this year’s Dublin Fringe Festival will reveal the naked truth about 21st-century feminism – literally.

For a while now, it really hasn’t been the done thing to call yourself a feminist.
Everyone, from pop-stars to politicians, seems to want to disassociate themselves from the big, dirty f-word.
Lady GaGa declared herself “not a feminist” because she “loves men” (feminists hate men, you see). Actress Kristen Stewart has hit back at the feminist critics who say her Twilight character is a sap (“It takes a lot of power and strength to subject yourself to someone completely”).
So much for showbiz. But even those women who are avowedly political don’t want to be seen as gender-political. In a recent interview with Hot Press, Lucinda Creighton TD, one of Fine Gael’s rising stars, said: “I think we are in a post-feminist era… I don’t know too many women in politics who would brand themselves as being feminist. I certainly don’t.”
The idea that feminism is anachronistic and more than a little naff – an embarrassing throw-back to the 1970s, in the same league as multi-coloured mullets, or a reunion of The Nolan Sisters – has serious traction. But two dance productions in this year’s Fringe Festival want to throw caution – and cool – to the wind, and reopen the debate about our attitudes to women.
It’s no accident that Nic Green’s Trilogy picks up exactly where the 1970s left off. The three-part dance production has at its centre a “performative response” to footage of arch-feminist Germaine Greer squaring up against fabled misogynist Norman Mailer at a public debate in New York in 1971.
It was when she was working with young people for a previous production that Green decided it was time to return to the explicit feminism of an earlier era.
“Some of the young girls would be particularly conscious of their bodies and relate that to what they ate – and they were only eight. I’d never encountered anything like that in young girls.
“At the same time, I was doing all this work in secondary schools and asking the kids what would they like to do in the future – and the girls, loads of them, said ‘be a footballer’s wife. I had to explain to them that’s not actually a profession, just a circumstance.”
Green bursts out laughing.
“It gave me a real bleak outlook on the future of women,” she adds. “There are a lot of young women who would rather die than call themselves a feminist because they think boys won’t like them if they have anything to say about gender politics.”
Trilogy, Green’s feminist manifesto, is a vast, complex production, nearly three hours in length, and it was one of the most talked-about shows at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe. The show also garnered a fair bit of publicity for the inclusion of a wild dance (to The Pixies’ ‘Into the White’ and ‘Broken Face’) by a group of naked female volunteers.
“It’s a big, energetic, fierce, wild ensemble dance. People expect the work to be angry and sour but we don’t want to be angry, we want to be happy. This dance is proof that we can stand up and be who we are,” enthuses Green.

PORN INDUSTRY
The full implications of presenting naked female bodies on stage will be more thoroughly explored by an Irish dance company, Fitzgerald and Stapleton, in their Fringe production, The Work, The Work.
It’s a semi-autobiographical show in which the dancers examine their attitude to work, masturbation, image and their own bodies. But the show is mostly about giving the audience “visual tools” with which they can begin to make up their own mind about these issues.
“It’s kind of constructed as a little time-frame for people to look at issues like work, industry, how you justify doing something. It gives people a space to work that out, they can read different things on our bodies, in our actions,” says Emma Fitzgerald, one half of the duo.
Áine Stapleton adds: “But there are clear messages we want to get across. There’s also a scene with masturbation, which is something we felt was important to include for this piece. For me as a woman, growing up, it wasn’t something that was encouraged. For men it’s just, ‘right so, have a wank’ but for women there’s a guilt around it.”
Fitzgerald and Stapleton usually perform naked. It’s a decision they’ve stood by in spite of meeting a good deal of scepticism and sniggering, at home and abroad, from the artistic community and from the general public. But the feedback they most consistently receive from people who have actually seen their shows is how surprisingly un-titillating the performances are.
“There were a lot of comments that dancing naked had been done before. Body dissatisfaction, people told us – ‘oh, that’s been talked about, it’s old news’,” says Fitzgerald.
“It’s women, dancing, and they’re naked. When we started working, no-one would say it was possible to do that outside of an erotic situation.
“But people are surprised. People said it to us all the time in the first year – ‘oh it’s two women dancing together naked, I expected it to be like a porn show’.
“Women’s bodies are owned by the porn industry, owned by the diet industry, owned by people who want to sell you Special K and bikinis. It’s horrible that our bodies are just seen as tools to please men or to look attractive.”
This automatic equation of women’s bodies with commodified sex – so common we barely notice it all around us – is what Fitzgerald and Stapleton, like Green, want to break down. And the fact that the ‘women = bodies for sex’ mentality has become normalised is arguably why we still deserve a good kick now and then from the feminist fringe.