This is Benjamin

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Why I loved Nic Green’s Trilogy

January 24th, 2010 | benjamin

First of all, I was impressed by the levity of the show. I guess this was part a response to what I can avoid but call the image problem of contemporary feminism. I’m inclined to believe this is not so much to do with certain people who identify as ‘feminist’, but with the success of a subtle campaign waged by – who? – some collective subconscious mysogyny, the kind of thing that would be represented as a dark cloud in a whirlpool if depicted in a 1980s television movie for children. Anyway I don’t want to get absorbed in this question. The auditorium was filled with laughter, genuine laughter, not helpfully indulgent theatre laughter (the knowing chuckle one hears at performance of Shakespeare) but laughter that was very much the sound of tension being released.

Secondly, I was captivated by the presence of bodies. The end of the first part of the show involved approximately fifty women dancing naked. I heard people say that it was desexualising, I wouldn’t quite put it that way. I agree that it wasn’t arousing, or at least not in that particular way, because it was rousing, but I felt more that the layers of everyday pornography through which, speaking for myself, I feel conditioned to view women’s bodies was lifted away. What was it about the context that achieved this? I think it was the power of a collective of women dancing unashamedly while naked. The masculine gaze (yes, back to first year) just didn’t function in that context. It broke down and I was forced in its absence to look at woment’s bodies anew. It was beautiful.

Nic Green’s Trilogy is a show about women. That said, the other thing which was particularly resonant for me was the subtle address Green makes to the men in the audiience. The other cliche about feminist art is that it is ‘men hating’. This label is deployed as a way of circumventing any critique that a work of art might make against patriarchy and also those nasty things in your own life which are the reality of oppression, that you wish could pretend were the hallucinations of a bunch of women with an axe to grind.

I doubt that women members of the audience remember this as acutely as I do. The performance evoked the famous Town Hall meeting, where Germaine Greer and others joined a panel with Norman Mailer to debate Women’s Liberation. I say it was famous but then I can find next to nothing of detail on the internet, except this footage. Anyway, in the meeting, sections of which were played on a big screen, Mailer goes into one of his frothing fits, begins a torrent of abuse in which his hatred of women is revealed. The play then cuts to a new ensemble of dancers (ensemble, is that the word?) one of whom is a man, the only man in the play. He is dressed to resemble Mailer. And he says something like ‘The man in the video is not me. But my biggest enemy is thinking that he is not in me. That I have defeated him.’ And its true, this is a real danger for young progressive men, to look at the patriarchal archetype and think, fuck, I’m not like that, just because this person seems so plainly unlike oneself. This line was an arrow driven at the all-the-more sophisticated misogyny of young, progressive men; a welcome warning against complacency.

Finally, what was most effective in the performance was the way in which Green and her performers used silence. As my mate Andi pointed out, silence is dangerous in theatre, you have to have a lot of confidence that you’re not about to lose the audience. It was used to particular effect in one scene to utterly crush that kind of facile humour which takes the politics out of misogyny. If you can’t laugh, you take things too seriously. You shoould lighten up, submit to our laughter. Anyway. Green shows a placard held aloft by a man behind a campus rally of feminists which read ‘Iron My Shirts Bitch’. The audiences immediate response was nervous laughter. Green and the other leading performer broke the tempo of the show that had been established and settled into a deep contemplative silence. This silence was removed from the haste and shallowness of everyday chatter where someone make a joke of this nature and this allowed the kind violence and hatred underlying such a comment to emerge from the protective shell of its humour. It was quite disturbing.

Aside from this, it was superbly, expertly choreographed. I’m just not equipped to talk about that.