feminism
David Nice
It was only six months after rendering the total amorality of ambiguous Lulu in Pandora’s Box, based on Wedekind’s two "earth-spirit" plays, that GW Pabst and Louise Brooks moved on to Diary of a Lost Girl. It revisits many of the same themes, but through a different filter (and a very much inferior literary source).This time Brooks’s character is decidedly more sinned against than sinning, the only excuse perhaps for an uncredited piano accompaniment which is way too innocent for the subject-matter. The adolescent Thymian Henning is seduced on the night of her confirmation by the repulsive Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
In 40 years’ time, when some suit at the BBC is searching the archives for some suitable footage to illustrate women in music in the early 21st century, will he pull out an image of Miley Cyrus or Rihanna wrapped in fishnets and bondage tape? I ask because it seems as though the central question posed by this women-in-punk-themed edition of The Culture Show - namely, whether the spirit of the fearless femmes of the 1970s lives on today - must be answered not by the many successors to the punk, riot grrrl and grunge acts playing their way through underground venues all over the country, but by Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
“Somebody had to be Bikini Kill, otherwise we would have culturally starved to death.” The quote typifies the deferential The Punk Singer, a bio-doc on the driven Kathleen Hanna, the feminist front-person of the American bands Bikini Kill, Le Tigre and, most recently, The Julie Ruin.In contrast, Hanna herself was never and isn't deferential. Her vital importance to cultural and rock history is set in stone as, for the former, she initiated the Nineties feminist musical groundswell riot grrrl and, for the latter, she sprayed the words “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” (a deodorant brand) on Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Almost 45 years after the publication of The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer - now 75 years old and working on a rainforest conservation project in her native Australia, but still “full of bile” - thinks that it is time for a new analysis; a go-to feminist text as succinct and divisive as the one that she created in 1970. These days it is men that are experiencing the identity crisis, she tells Kirsty Wark; now that women are free of the restrictions created by expectation that prevented them from entering traditionally male-dominated spaces like the workplace, politics, the media and gaming it Read more ...
Naima Khan
Performed by all-female theatre company, Fluff, Sarah Sigal's take on feminism through the ages drops us in and out of three time scenarios: the Royalist household of Lady Anne in 1646, the adventures of fashion journalist Pamela in 1936, and the discourse between corporate manager Celia and her recovering addict friend Lucy in 2014. Sound familiar in both structure and content? Well, if you follow the work of Caryl Churchill, it largely is. The play's elliptical scenes and female-centric focus suggest Churchill's contemporary classic Top Girls, to which Sigal further adds an aspect not Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Feminism suddenly seems to be all the rage in London theatre. Yesterday, I reviewed Nick Payne’s Blurred Lines, and tonight I saw this show by American provocateur Gina Gionfriddo, whose Becky Shaw was at the Almeida three years ago. This current show is a light comedy, with some good bright lines, an entertainment that takes several pauses in which ideas are expounded and discussed. It’s a bit like being back in college: a mix of laughs and study.The set-up has an admirable clarity: two former college room-mates meet up again after some two decades apart. Catherine is now a hot academic who Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Access and trust are the key issues facing any documentary director, especially when the film concerned touches on questions that arouse controversy in society. It’s a long time since I've seen a work that achieved so much on those two fronts as Pussy Riot – A Punk Prayer. The HBO-Storyville documentary by double directors-producers Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin tells the brave story of the Russian conceptual art, feminist punk collective. Two of the group's members are still imprisoned in Russian penal colonies for their participation in the "punk prayer" they staged at Moscow’s Read more ...
David Nice
Now here’s a funny thing, possums. Back in 1990 when one great Australian Dame, Joan Sutherland, gave her farewell performance, another, a certain housewife superstar from the Melbourne suburb of Moonee Ponds, seemed closer to retirement age.Now La Stupenda is no more, Dame Edna is a gigastar and it’s her turn to shrill a gladdie-waving goodbye to her adoring public. She doesn’t look a day older, nary a hair out of place in that immaculate lilac coiffure. Daring to upstage her in a final speech is manager Barry Humphries, still with his hand in the till while Edna gives all for her art Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Internet porn, the sexualisation of childhood and the objectification of women are so commonplace in Western society that they go mostly unmentioned and unchallenged, even in the arts. So thank goodness for performance artist and comic Bryony Kimmings, who not only mentions and challenges these pernicious forces in so-called civilised society, but in Credible Likeable Superstar Role Model, an award-winning show first seen at Edinburgh Fringe, fashions an entertaining show around them.It was created from a very personal perspective. Kimmings recently started taking an active care role in the Read more ...
emma.simmonds
In this refreshingly rowdy, distinctly feminist film from debut writer-director Maggie Carey an inexperienced, tirelessly sensible teenage girl prepares herself for college life by taking charge of her own sexual awakening. She does so in a way that's hilariously overly administrative, with her plans taking the form of the title's tawdry, quite literal "to do list".Parks and Recreation's Aubrey Plaza is gifted the role of Brandy Klark, school valedictorian and virgin. As the film opens, the year is 1993 and Brandy's sights are set on college and little else. That changes when she's conned Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Marin Alsop may be one of America’s leading conductors, with stints as music director of the Colorado, Eugene and Richmond symphony orchestras, not to mention positions at the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia, and of course her current roles at the head of the Baltimore and São Paulo State Symphony orchestras, but apparently none of that is as important as the fact that she’s a woman.Taking up the baton as the first female conductor of the Last Night of the Proms, Alsop is once again in the spotlight for the gender-discussions that Read more ...
Caroline Crampton
Could you choose between love and knowledge? Between a life of acceptance and affection, and one of self-improvement and learning? These are the questions that Jessica Swale's new play Blue Stockings poses again and again.For the women who provided the inspiration for this play – the students of Girton College, living on the cusp of the twentieth century – this is not a hypothetical question. To choose to study at Cambridge is, for them, to choose the life of an outcast over the possibility of marriage and a family. In 1896, when the action takes place, a campaign is underway to attempt to Read more ...