Movement, by nature, alters.

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It is incalculable, immersive, and turbulent. It transforms space into fluid geometries of the possible

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This newly created terrain is both tangible and intangible - but above all it is disruptive. It is the unoccupied cavity between the polarized world view of dualistic thinking. When combined with affective speech, it has the ability to challenge and restructure traditional discourses, and liberate methods of resistance. It is a world which deconstructs in order to create anew.

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Where in this world can we locate the feminine?

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How do we begin to situate the mercurial? Perhaps through the act of definition. It is tempting, here, to fall into the same trap as so many before us - to define woman by her sexual difference. Woman-as-Other, Woman-as-Inessential, Woman-as-Surplus. A negative theology of woman.

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Our goal as Fishbowl Collective is to instead situate woman within the lacuna produced by her negation, in order to facilitate her ability to create.

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Negation as productive action.

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We must let the female body become monstrous. We must displace her outside of expected narratives. We must subvert the molasses assertion of an essential female identity by manifesting the performativity of gender within a staged act(ion). What happens when we liberate the female voice from gendered expectations and place her firmly within a world of spontaneity and unpredictable live action?

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We intend to make these vital, living, breathing, ever-changing discourses unapologetically visible and vocal on the stage in order to secure a creatively charged, collectively shared space for young, gendered voices. We believe this can be achieved by a theatre that is inherently theatrical: physical, dynamic, interactive, and full of risk. These voices belong on the stage where they can be actively engaged with.

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Gender is something our generation has been taking up, destabilizing, subverting, and persistently challenging. However, there is a lack of young women celebrating what it is to be a young woman within performatively charged spaces.

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We situate our work within the larger project of challenging the dominant narrative tradition as a political strategy to destabilise hegemonic discourses of gendered expression and power.

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We reject popular contemporary theatricalized representations of femininity.

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We reject these as members of our generation.

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We are young. We refuse to hide behind words such as amateur, emerging, or developing because of the adverse and diminutive connotations associated with ‘youth’ and ‘young work’. We are strong advocates for creating spaces and opportunities that empower young people to create highly-developed work that defies the confinements of the category ‘young theatre’.

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Our work grapples with the experience of identifying and living as a young embodied female subject in the so-called “post-feminist” era, using the vocabulary of our creation - dance, physical theatre, and clown.

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We are interested in centering an unobscured female voice who unapologetically claims space. Conventional narratives of embodiment and of being essentially more ‘natural’ render women invisible through their hypervisibility, and do not let women occupy space within the patriarchally constructed world of disembodied rationalism.

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We need to subvert this hypervisibility.

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Our work manifests the experience of being female through a mixture of bouffon and clown traditions, defying capitalist discourses of beauty, utility, and divinity continuously associated with women.

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By rejecting essentialist schemas we find ourselves face-to-face with an empty but charged, radical, and inherently resistant space. Emptied of an essence, woman becomes defined by the violence done to her, (de)formed by that which negates her. The state of femininity becomes liquid(ated).

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We commit to locating the feminine in the unnatural, the absurd, the logos, the erotic, the repulsive, the profane, the rational, the paradoxical, the malleable, the performative, the obscene, the sublime, the technological, the spatial, the unformed, the solid, the excessive, the grotesque, the plastic, the fragmentary, the surplus, the cerebral, the political, the vulnerable, the sub-Derridean pastiche -

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We believe it is still subversive for young female bodies to defiantly reclaim and occupy a shared, performative space while knowingly being watched.

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We are wary of solipsistic feminism.

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Theatre allows for a "a call to action" which by its very nature surpasses a conception of freedom that is self-sovereign, or a system of power which only recognizes and legitimizes certain action as action, certain identities as identities.

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Clown and physical theatre are the perfect media through which to embody this negotiation. Clown demands a responsive audience, it creates dialogue, it plays, it mocks, it denaturalizes. Its very nature is to destabilize. To radicalize. To engage.

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