PERFORMANCE poet Jenny Lindsay is behind The Dangerous Woman’s Guide To Transgressive Behaviour, an event on November 25 at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club that also features Magi Gibson, Lucy Ribchester, Mara Menzies and singer-songwriter Emma Pollock. The director of Flint & Pitch Productions, which specialise in curating spoken-word, music and theatre events across Scotland, Lindsay tells us more about the night …
What can people expect from the Dangerous Woman’s Guide to Transgressive Behaviour?
The event is an all-female bill of writers and musicians doing a live performance about an inspiring woman or group of women from history, who they feel have either been misinterpreted, misunderstood, much-maligned, forgotten, or were controversial in some way.
Folks can expect an inspiring night and a creative take on a history lecture, essentially!
The event is run by Flint & Pitch (my events organisation) and was commissioned by Previously... Scotland’s History Festival, who wanted a cabaret event as part of their great programme.
As well as yourself, who will be appearing, and what will they be doing?
I’ll be doing a spoken word/ polemic set about Sonia Brownell, the second wife of George Orwell, a woman who has been rather badly remembered by the majority of Orwell’s biographers! She played a role in literary history, yet has been shoved to the background of a heckuva lot of the projects, writers and artists she supported, and, despite never asking for the responsibility, rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way due to her attempting to fulfil George Orwell’s wishes for his legacy.
There’s also been a near-obsession with her looks, sexuality, sexual relationships by all bar a noted few who have written about her. I don’t know if we’d have got on well, but I find her absolutely fascinating, and she was the inspiration for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a character who I’ve reinterpreted for my last solo show, Ire & Salt.
The other folks on the bill are poet Magi Gibson, who will be doing a set about Stella Cartwright and other artistic muses; novelist Lucy Ribchester with a live literature set about the suffragettes; storyteller Mara Menzies, who will be sharing her work on Queen Nzinga, the warrior Queen of Angola who fought off the Portuguese slave traders; and a special set from songwriter Emma Pollock, who will be playing songs from In Search of Harperfield, alongside relating an important and insightful personal history about her mother and grandmother.
What makes for a “dangerous woman”? Is it more important than ever to be “dangerous”?
Dangerous women are those who challenge the status quo, defy gender norms and stereotypes, often at personal risk, and who refuse to be charming just for an easy life. Now, as in the past, and across cultures, who is deemed a “dangerous” woman is generally decided by those who oppose them.
I’d say it’s as important as it ever was and I don’t think it’s ever stopped being important. Feminism hasn’t achieved the fundamentals that it set out to achieve and has faced a massive backlash to every legal or cultural progress it has made and every former norm it has challenged. Some of that is quite blatantly being rolled back; cultural attitudes are shifting in some pretty worrying ways in many respects and we also have a self-admitting sexual harasser in the White House.
There’s also a sore lack of nuance and a negligible sense of history, even within the current feminist movement(s), about the achievements of the past and how and why they were won. It’s inherently political. And aye, it’s very important!
November 25, The Bongo Club, Edinburgh, 7pm, £8. Tickets: bit.ly/DangerousWomenEd
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