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honour-shame

I feel so much more comfortable being me.

Dance City audience member

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Honour/Shame

2017 saw the start of a new research and development project that used dance, poetry and visual arts to create a performance authored by many women; unpicking attitudes and behaviours surrounding shame and honour in relation to women’s bodies and sexuality, weaving together common threads across different cultures.

The project, co-ordinated by choreographer Alys North, ran workshops with four diverse women’s groups across the North East, which invited creative expression via participative arts processes, drawn from the artistic team’s backgrounds in dance, poetry, painting and installation art. The work was shaped by a collaboration between four dancers and the original artists who ran the creative sessions with the women’s groups, working alongside our Assistant Director Polly Turner. From this an original combined-arts work-in-progress performance was shared with participants, industry professionals and a youth audience at Dance City, Newcastle in October 2017.

Audience responses to the performance helped us to gain critical feedback to inform the project’s refinement and shape our intended plans for a public tour in 2019 beyond the research and development period.

The project will work towards creating an outcome that will:

  • Create a platform where the women we work with can define how they believe their bodies and sexuality should be treated and respected;
  • Raise awareness of how we all participate in judging women’s bodies and sexuality through exploring how attitudes of shame and honour manifest themselves;
  • Create a space for reflection about how we can empower, support and respect women better, bringing attention to women’s common experience across cultural differences.

Contact us for more information or to make a booking inquiry about using the resources that came out of this project.

To discover how our vast array of poetry and visual arts materials could be used as the basis of an educational workshop please visit our shop.

You can also find out about our Education Workshops here.