Waxing poetic
After last night’s blog on Yerma, I want to talk about a different side of that subject. To paraphase myself, I object to Yerma because its regressive framing — by men — of one woman’s situation perpetuates harmful attitudes to all women, attitudes still mistakenly considered by many to be somehow natural, or universal.
My experience of Turn, created by Nic Green for the old graving docks in Govan, shared one woman’s story with care, using our location and the lunar calendar to make connections with our own histories. At no point did it feel like we were hearing what it means to be a woman; we were listening to one person in order to reflect on ourselves.
The full moon, the lowest tide, the overgrown post-industrial landscape, preparing for its own renewal: each of these things converged in a sound performance for hand-cast bells and the voice of Colette, who was celebrating her 41st birthday. She spoke to us from beside the largest of the three dry docks, which had been used to repair and protect ship’s hulls from the late 19th century until 1987, and she told us about times in her life when she’s also felt the ‘tide’ turning. Those times when life shifts, and a new phase begins.
Like so many women, Colette’s life has been marked by loving and caring, by putting the needs of others before her own. But her performance (transmitted through sound boxes by our feet — I couldn’t see her from where I was) didn’t emphasise that nurturing; she wasn’t defining herself through those relationships. The love that she’s had for others is just one part of the person she has spent 41 years becoming. Those moments of ‘turning’ in Colette’s life were all about reclaiming bits of herself for herself — dancing, drawing, collecting water from a stream in Spain.
When Yerma goes to the river (it’s set in rural Spain), the local ‘washerwomen’ are spectacular bitches. When Colette was living out there, she was in love, living simply, helping her girlfriend recover from a long illness. She was a carer, but she was carving out a space where she could thrive too.
While I listened to her speak, I inevitably started thinking about the periods where my own life pivoted a little. Like Colette, they are all times where I realised I’d given too much of myself away, left too much of myself somewhere, in a job or a city, in a creative project or in the hands of a boy.
The turning is the moment when you decide to pull back.
