‘Filthy/ Gorgeous’ by Bec Richmond and Emily Binks 2020

Filthy / Gorgeous is a clowning piece produced by myself and theatre making partner, Emily Binks. The piece was created for our third year Independent Project and Research module at York St John University. The piece explores the inequality of women within comedy, as well as manipulating the sexualisation of women and using the male gaze as a power tool rather than subversion.

Our main inspiration came from artists The Two Wrongies. They taught us to take ownership of our female bodies on stage and to be agents of the male gaze when being looked at.

The theatre genre of clowning was completely alien to myself before this module. However, this unfamiliarity was one of the main reasons I decided to take on the challenge of clowning for my Independent Project. Due to the majority of my performance experience being in dance and movement, the notion of using my body as a form of communication was something I knew I was capable of, but was very interested in seeing how this skill could be developed and altered for different theatrical purposes. For clowning, I learnt mostly from artists Peter Shub and Jacques Locoq‘s clowning techniques. Shub taught me how to build and sustain a relationship with the audience during a performance, rather than being separate and disengaged from who is watching me, something I often did as a dancer.

The process of creating Filthy/Gorgeous was long, tiring but incredible. I found it was nearly impossible to whole heatedly give clowning your all for longer than a few hours. We rehearsed from 7am most days as we found the peacefullness and stillness the university had was useful in helping us channel our own fresh energy. This energy was always needed for play and creativity.

The joy of making and performing this type of work solidified our desire to create a theatre company based on tackling political issues, not necessarily head-on, with comedy and honesty. Both Emily and I recognise that we have different pathways we wish to take with our careers, however, we are both in agreement that to make and perform work of our own is something neither of us want to stop doing once we leave university. Hence the beginning of our theatre company: Filthy/Gorgeous.

Dissertation

Richmond, R. (2020) ‘Living in the moment: An analysis of how Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow State can be achieved throughout the holistic experience of dance for people living with dementia.’ York St John University.

My dissertation was broadly written on the effects of dance and movement for people living with dementia, with a more specific focus on Csikszenthihalyi’s ‘Flow Theory’ and dance as a holistic experience. My dissertation argues how this ‘Flow State’ can be reached using the Moving Minds Project as a reference point.

I decided to write about this matter for my dissertation, as by this point in my degree I knew where I wanted this experience to take me. I knew I wanted to further my studies in social arts and I knew it would be invaluable for my degree to have experience in research and critical analysis for this subject, as well as practice based learning in which I have achieved through my contributions to Moving Minds.

I found the research process for my dissertation really interesting and the many theorists and artists that I came across such as Dr Richard Coaten and Pia Kontos, were inspiring to read about. Coaten believes that dance is for everyone and his ideas surrounding dance being “vitally important for people with diminishing cognitive powers” (Coaten, 2013:2) was an idea that helped drive my dissertation. I am not a scientist but from my own experience and from my own research I believed him and I wanted to write something that would to add to his argument that dance is vitally important. Kontos provided me with a vast amount of research and analysis surrounding the arts and dementia, which really helped to give my argument breadth as well as depth.

In terms of actually writing the dissertation, I initially worried. I do consider myself a visual learner and I thought that writing 4000 words critically and academically would eat me up. However, the process of articulating my research and personal reflections into an academic argument was enjoyable and rewarding, as it allowed my own ideas and values about dance and dementia to be reflected upon amongst names like Coaten and Kontos.

Bibliography:

• Coaten, R & Newman-Bluestein, D. (2013) ‘Embodiment and dementia- Dance/movement Psychotherapists respond.’ Sage Journals. 12:6: 677-681