Feminism? It’s a scream – Ontroerend Goed on Sirens

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/dec/02/feminism-ontroerend-goed-sirens-soho-theatre

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Karolien De Bleser

Alexander [Devriendt, Ontroerend Goed’s artistic director] had the idea that he wanted to make a show with women, but in the very beginning it was not much more than that. Then we came together a few months later and he said he wanted to make a show about feminism. We were not super-enthusiastic because we didn’t consider ourselves feminists – or we thought maybe feminism was a bit of a dirty word. But then we started to work on it and we read a lot of articles and books and we talked a lot about our own experiences, and that’s how the show was created.

There was this other idea from the beginning: Alexander said “I want you all to scream.” Then we came up with the metaphor of a concert. So you hear voices talking in a very rhythmical way, and that concert metaphor adds to the topics we want to discuss. We’re all dressed up like opera singers giving you a nice concert, but it’s not that nice. It’s all based on the rhythm – even the pieces of text are very rhythmical.

The show is hopefully making people more aware of the fact that things aren’t already solved. We want to make people more aware that we still have to work on feminism, that there still is no equal treatment between women and men, and it’s up to everybody – up to women, up to men – to be just a little bit more aware of that.

I see feminism now as being about equal treatment for men and women. When you see it like that then I don’t understand how people can have anything against it. If I say to people in Belgium now that I am a feminist they’re like, “Are you OK?” And I’m like, “Yeah, sure, don’t you think men and women should be equally treated?” And then they say yes, and then I say, “Well, then you’re a feminist.” That’s my new mission: to make people more aware of the fact that that’s feminism, that it’s not such a hard thing to say.

Charlotte De Bruyne

We started off talking a lot about what is feminism and why is it such a problem. And then in terms of our own experiences we felt that it was really good that Alexander was there as a man, because a lot of the things that we started talking about that we could describe as sexist encounters were things that we are used to – small things like people whistling at you on the street or making comments. We were like, “We know this is not new”, but Alexander was like, “I don’t”.

The thing that made me angry is the small stuff that we don’t even think about any more. For instance, a lot of my friends don’t want to walk on the street any more without wearing make-up. What defines us as a woman? When does society (or men) make us feel that we are beautiful women and when are we not any more? That’s the interesting thing about our show, because we do dress up and we do look beautiful, and we want to because we love it, but it’s as long as nobody says we have to and as long as it’s our own choice.

There are a lot of different responses to our show. For instance, you can feel from the UK audiences that UK society is thinking even more about feminist issues than in Belgium. For me that’s strange because I always had the feeling that in Belgium we were all very on top of everything, that we were ahead or something, which is very arrogant to think. But when we started playing the show in Belgium there were often comments, especially in the beginning, asking “Why do you still do this? Things are solved already”, which was a comment that we never got in the UK.

I still don’t really use the word feminism that much. I’m talking a lot more about the issue, but I’ve never said yet “I’m a feminist” out loud to somebody. I feel like I get more interesting conversations just by talking about the issue rather than by talking about the word.

Verona Verbakel

One out of six women gets sexually abused and two out of six get involved with violence at home. I wondered if those numbers were correct, so I started to talk about it with friends and I made a list to keep score. When I got to my 10th friend I just stopped because I got so depressed … When you start to talk about it, when you open up, there are so many stories that women tell you.

I personally don’t want to have kids, so I have a lot of discussions about that with people and one man said to me, “well, why don’t you remove your womb then?” I just got so angry, I was like … how can you even say that? It’s just those little things. You hear so many stories once you open up to women about these things, and that’s what really made me angry. It’s fun to do the show, because you know why you stand there and you scream. I have the right to scream because I’m angry about this and this and this and this, and this is just a chance that Alexander gave us to scream it all out. I love to scream.

We had a post-show talk and there was a woman who came for the second time and she brought her 15-year-old daughter, and she said “I hope that all 15-year-old girls see this.” There was also one guy who said that he thinks that the word feminism should be a more equal word to show that it’s about equality between men and women, and that feminism is a very female word. For me, that shows that if feminism is still a dirty word to use in this society then this society is still very patriarchal.

I now love the word feminism. I’ve seen sweaters in the UK that men are wearing as well saying “This is what a feminist looks like” and that’s what I love, because a feminist can be anyone. I think everyone should be a feminist.

• Lyn Gardner’s four-star Sirens review

• Sirens is at Soho theatre, London, from 2 December to 4 January

• All Work and No Plays: Blueprints for Nine Theatre Performances by Ontroerend Goed is out now from Oberon Books