"From Radical Self Love to Intersectionality via the Wheel of Consent – artist Rowan Prescott Hedley shows us their path to a theatre that is beyond binaries."
**This piece was originally written for Total Theatre under their Artists as Writers programme. Huge thanks to Total Theatre for their support and inspiration.**
I’m sat on a slightly-too-upright stacking hotel chair, a bit too warm and in a stuffy room that’s not quite large enough for the number of people in it. I’m at the Edinburgh Fringe watching a show from page one-hundred-and-something of the programme and despite the rising sensory overload, I am perhaps the most comfortable I have ever been.
In retrospect, this was a pivotal moment for me. At the time I was so unaware of the significance that I discarded all evidence of the performance or the performer. An aggressive reminder of the transience of theatre.
What I do remember is that the show was described as ‘Gender Fuck’ and in 2016 this was new language to me. Having been told to expect ‘gender performance or expression which mixes traditionally feminine and masculine elements in a way which subverts norms or roles including those of the LGBT+ community’, I was expecting another eccentric drag act, talking about how gender is a construct and we’re all actors, or it is real but it’s fluid, or… or… What I got was an experience that transcended all binaries.
The performance spoke to my working class roots and middle class education. My woman-ness as a child socially conditioned into the neurology of a woman and someone who’s not a woman at all. My ability and disability, somehow without using the context of ‘disability’ at all. It spoke of age but neither young or old, nor both, nor in-between.
This experience started me on a journey to identify emerging theatre transcending social binaries, to question why this is important, and to propose a name for the approach producing such theatre outside binaries – Radical Self. I will share this journey with you.
It is important to note that I am white, with a mono-ethnic upbringing. At the time I saw this show I was only beginning to learn what I didn’t know regarding racism, so the performance could well have centred a white experience and I wouldn’t have noticed. Since then I have been deconstructing my internalised white supremacy and bias but will not have removed it from my analysis entirely.
The show was a one-hander, prop heavy and tech light. Anecdotes, examples, and experiments all delivered searingly vividly, in a space of about 30-feet square, told the story of the performer’s journey to uncover their own complex identity and deconstructed wider societal norms in the process.
The performer was white, in their 30s-ish, non-binary or genderqueer or maybe both, used ‘they’ pronouns (at least in this context), slim-ish, short hair, and had an air of experience and compassion but not one to suffer fools.
It’s about thirty minutes into the fifty-minute show and I’m stood on the stage, by which I mean three feet in front of my chair, with three other audience members. We are all wearing a larger-than-life-size cardboard mask of the performer’s face, who is using us to illustrate the breadth and connectedness of reality – in this moment we five are all the same person, Polly, encompassing all the differences and contradictions spanning each separate life into one presence.
The performer is explaining how ‘Sliding Doors’ and parallel universes exist within everyone of us and how in that way we are all the same, we are all everything and nothing – Schrödinger’s humans.
The rest of the audience audibly grasp the point and the performer sighs with pride, as the four of us return to our seats, without our Polly masks.
In the following ten or so minutes, the performer takes questions, responding from different identities by changing a piece of costume, their voice, or their physicality. Sometimes, they don’t actually answer the question but instead ask another or state something seemingly unconnected, though relevant, to whichever identity they were in, prompting other audience members to propose their own answers.
Inside this dance of ideas and interaction it felt like the theatrical norms of performer and audience melted away. We merged together as a room full of humanity, sharing experience in different but intricately overlapping ways. There was no either, both, or in-between, we collectively and profoundly transcended social binaries.
Editor’s note: All attempts to find out who this Edinburgh Fringe 2016 performer might be have failed! If anybody reading this does know their name, please enlighten us!
I have struggled to find a word or phrase which embodies the scale of this experience. It’s possible this is a challenge not with language but with meaning. In a society immersed in binary categorisations of everything, how can we expect our current language to reflect anything else?
I propose the term ‘Radical Self’, which connects three relevant concepts: Radical Self Love, particularly as formulated by Sonya Renee Taylor in The Body is Not an Apology; The Wheel of Consent modelled by Betty Martin, and Intersectionality coined in the 1980s by Kimberlé Crenshaw.
I surmise that creative practitioners use a Radical Self approach to interweave these three frameworks and create theatre outside binaries – performances which invite individuals to come together and experience, collectively.
These events would be underpinned by accessibility strategies founded in dignity and radical consent: audience and performers could blur together as the process of giving and receiving information and emotion is shared throughout the space, and nothing would be categorised – each person would relate to what they could and learn from what they couldn’t. Ideally, this would create a theatre experience which is radically transcendental and, hopefully, decolonised.
**Please finish reading this piece here, on Total Theatre's own website.**
The article is available for free and you are already about 40% of the way through.
Thanks again to Total Theatre for their support.
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