The Separation of Ugly is a 25 minute performance that I created in my third year of university in the module titled Independent Practice and Research (iPaR). Taking inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling, the performance consists of physical theatre and episodic imagery based on the themes of isolation, loneliness and social displacement.
This was a six-month project that used ethnographic and academic research to create. My initial thought process was to ask the question of ‘why do we teach children nursery rhymes and fairy tales that have a sinister background to them?’. If their origins are so dark, why do we then put them into a more childlike setting and change the meanings to lure children into a false sense of security. The story that children are told is one of a little duckling that is bullied by his peers and is looking to fit in and then one day discovers that he is a beautiful swan and finds his family. Whereas in Andersen’s the duckling attempts suicide and endures a lot more suffering than explained in the fairy tale of today.
I took a workshop into a primary school in the local area to explore some of the themes that I had picked out from the story. The aim was to get an understanding of how the children would respond to an image stimulus based on the themes but without any prompts, all coming from them, so that I could know what their understanding was and what it was that mattered most to them. From the information that I gathered; I was able to identify that children notice a scene of bullying and know who they should turn to from this.
I knew that I also wanted to explore what the meaning of the word ‘ugly’ meant. What does it mean to you and what does it mean to me? By creating an online anonymous survey, I could ask people to give examples of when they have felt ugly and isolated. From this I explored how I could turn this into a series of images and movements.
The performance itself focuses on certain plot point that I wanted to show, rather than retelling the entire story as I did not want to recreate something that already exists. It is a performance that is aimed at an older audience but comes from the response of children.
