Author diaries

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22 October 2003 Entry: "Manila"

Women Playwrights International conference 2003 here I come!
I have just heard that I’ve received the funding from Arts Council England, NE to attend this conference, which is happening in Manila in the Phillipines in November.
I have three weeks to buy tickets, book accommodation and sort out family life so that I can attend with a clear conscience.
My play A Life In Shadows is being presented under the Gender and Sexuality heading. I get ten minutes to introduce it, 20 minutes to present some scenes and then the conference of women delegates from around the world discuss it for 30 minutes. How’s that for being in the spotlight ?
This play was originally commissioned by University of Northumbria for Year Two Drama students, and I had to take two texts: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and create a theatre piece from that stimulus.

In my research I realised how the two female heroines of both books mirrored their authors in life and habits, ie
Jane Eyre = Charlotte Bronte and and Antoinette = Jean Rhys
They seemed to me to represent two alternative approaches to the same personal obstacles : how does an independent and imaginative woman create in a world antithetical to both those things ?
Lecturers Sharon Paterson and Fiona MacPherson, and the students from the department, worked with me in a collaborative process, exploring themes of women’s creativity and independence, and how their suppression - racial, economic and patriarchal - can lead to ‘madness’ or to being labeled as such.
The play was created to be perfomed in and around Belsay Hall as a site specific piece. We were very lucky to have Canadian Designer Caroline Mercier who came up with the most wonderful costumes that echoed the themes - dresses that had elements of the restraining straightjacket about them, or bits of text written on them.
I’m not sure what delegates will make of it, but it will have resonances for many parts of the Asian and non-European world in its themes of British Colonialism and the conflicts and misunderstandings arising from different cultures.
Maybe the next time I blog it will be from the Phillipines ?