Читать книгу Mouthpiece - Norah Sadava - Страница 7

by Amy Nostbakken and Norah Sadava

In 2013, we set out to collaborate on a theatre piece about female relationships. Inspired by the writing of Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Amy Gerstler, and Sylvia Plath, we wanted to create a work that would investigate the particular nature of the way women relate to one another. We hoped to explore the special closeness that we share: the intimacy of bathing together, crying together, nursing each other, all the while sensing this dark sister of competition and menace living right beside that love. The poets deftly capture the conflicts tangled up in a complicated mess of motherhood, friendship, cycles, birth, death, rebirth, releasing, menstruation, suffocation, cocks, fucking, eating, blood, food, vomit, venom, jealousy – all the forces that are extremely complex and disturbingly familiar. Inspired by these women, we wanted to examine why the darkness exists, and we wanted to make a play about it using the strengths of the female voice.

We began improvising around the subject of female relationships – physically, vocally, using the work of these poets. But day after day we kept gravitating toward stories from our own lives, our friends’ lives, our mothers’ lives, our own experiences from that very day, headlines about a ‘woman’s place in society,’ the memes, the articles, the enraging ads, the blog posts, the Beyoncé. Everyday realities had us all fired up.

Then the penny dropped. Or rather, after years and years of pressure building behind it, the penny blasted into our faces, knocking off the rose-coloured glasses. Up until that point, if asked what the play was about, we would reply: ‘It’s about female relationships,’ and in that same breath we might add ‘ … but it’s not, you know, a feminist play.’ As we explored the core of how women relate to one another, questioning how we define ourselves as women, talking about our lives in relation to our mothers’ and our mothers’ mothers’, one truth slapped us hard: we haven’t changed as much as we would like to think. The bullshit is still here. It has just been rearranged and pumped with steroids, and now there is more of it; it is everywhere, and it starts from day one in the womb. Of course the play is about feminism, of course we are scared to admit it, and of course we needed to dig deeper to find out why. Why would we deny being feminists? Why would two supposedly strong, liberated women be reluctant to admit it, to proclaim it? Why were we, women in 2014, still afraid to accept that, in order for change to occur within the society around us, we had to be the ones to change it? Us, right now, today. This idea smashed everything to pieces.

We quickly realized we had to make a play about our own questions, our own realities. From then on our writing came from a more honest place. We tried to peel down to and reveal our deepest and most shameful thoughts, the cognitive dissonance we experience constantly, the layers of internalized male gaze and patriarchal oppression that have been bred into us across many generations, the hypocrisy that we ourselves perpetuate.

This play is a document of our personal journey. We distilled three years of intense conversation into sixty minutes of theatre with some added narrative devices for the purposes of storytelling. This play is a naked, vulnerable, raw set of truths that we have been terrified to expose, and that we have been completely liberated by. The writing, creation, and performance of Mouthpiece has changed us both as artists, as activists, and as women. We are grateful the work has led the way, and we are humbled by the great guiding force of so many women before us.