This Ain't No Pussy Show | Kate Harman
Had an amazing time witnessing Kate Harman’s This Ain’t No Pussy Show on its closing night. A very unique offering that cements their reputation as one of the most innovative Queensland companies that are working in the dance theatre and contemporary dance space.
Over the space of an hour we explore tropes of toxic masculinity, are presented with provocations on positive masculinity, look at the tangle of ethical motherhood, push it up against the dark heart of a lifetime wrestling with misogyny, and dance around themes of friendship, aging, empowerment, growth, and discovery. A meaty morsel, to be sure.
Images supplied.
Toby is a teenager. He was a young teenager when they started making this show, and Kate was a fresh mum. They are both a couple more years along in their respective journeys now. The show looks at the challenges of being a boy transitioning into a man in this complex contemporary Australian society. It also looks at the challenges of being a mother of a boy in that same society, the conflicts that arise as a woman who has experienced some decades of being on the wrong end of sexism, the joy and love of men and boys, the fear that arises as those self-same boys go out into world and have to make something of themselves. Have to survive in the first instance. And hopefully, maybe, possibly, thrive.
Toby moves beautifully. Kate does too, but it’s more unexpected from a teen boy, and one in baggy teeshirt and unbrushed hair. The moves are the right moves for his body, and this is something I am starting to understand is a signature of this company, having seen several of their shows and several of their supported shows, I’m starting to get a feel for their teaching & sharing style. How they let people wind out the thread and fit the story to the length of their own bodies.
One scene that lingers is the one where Kate is dancing wildly, circle pit style, and she doesn’t give a fuck and she doesn’t even care if he doesn’t know any better because after a lifetime of impositions it’s the same old shit, it’s men making presumptions and men taking your space and men touching your body and men touching your psyche and you can’t ever really get that out of your body, not for anything.
And a young man might not know any better, and how could he really, he’s just spent a decade trying to read meaning into subtle cues, learning the unspoken language that is this clusterfuck of gendered nonsense that makes fools of us all, he’s just starting to figure it out, but he better watch what it looks like when a woman reaches the edge and be careful, because sometimes she doesn’t come back down. She doesn’t come back in.
The lasting message…. the patriarchy is of no use to anyone, truly.
I am deeply touched by the themes, this is a play that draws heavily on the zeitgeist. What are artists but conduits? This is one of those deeply moving pieces that is at once both deeply personal and specific to the performers and yet universal. My eavesdropping afterwards draws many commentators who each saw something of their own journeys reflected, their own families, childhoods, parenting challenges. Their brothers, their first boyfriends, their mothers. I feel lucky to see it on the last night of their season, and likely the last time this show is presented. Others will take up the mantle and this theme will surely be explored again and again, from other angles, perspectives. But this particular edification was a wonderful dichotomy of simple and complex, choreographed and raw, storytelling and autobiographical, didactic yet questioning, performed and presented from the heart.
