Being A Girl: A Cross-Cultural Analysis

I was initially interested in how throughout history there have been archival silences where certain events have been excluded from the archives due to the powers of the time deeming them unimportant. It is mainly female history that is unrecorded and the idea of silencing women because they are less important than men really made me think if there were times in my life where I had been silenced or told I was not allowed to do something because I was a girl. This was the idea I started to work with, looking at specific moments I had been told ‘no’ and using the space and my four female dancers to finally be able to do them.

I found that there was a connection between my memories of times I had been told I could not do something and that was that the particular activity was extremely physical and not thought to be within the capabilities of a female. Examples such as particular jumps in ballet that only the men were allowed to do, up until a few years ago I was told never to do a full press up because girls cannot do them, I was never taught to play rugby because that was always a boys sport. As a group we did not have the knowledge of how to correctly achieve these physical movements so my dancers had to help each other, for example lifting someone into a jump, in …show more content…
However after trying this the work started to look gimmicky and instead of bringing awareness to the issue it seemed like we were making fun of it. I then thought about maybe making the music choice more personal to myself and my dancers, I thought this might work as we were sharing our own stories, so I tried using some of our favourite songs. However because these songs were all from popular culture they had too many connotations and had a similar effect of the rock music for making the work seem like a