I was a great fan of The Avengers when I was a child.
I’d never seen a woman as feisty as Emma Peel before – and it opened up my mind to what a woman could be! Here she is in her famous catsuit and knee high boots…
Wow, or what?
But at that time, I was a tomboy and did not Continue reading
How does a woman with bound feet “run away” from her family?
This is the question that has haunted me ever since I was a child when I heard the story of my great-grandmother who had bound feet.
Here is the story that has been passed down in my family, which I pieced together from different family members:
Great-grandfather was a hospital orderly in Taiping (a small town in Perak in Malaysia) when he came across a young woman with bound feet who Continue reading
It’s difficult for us in the modern world to imagine how small bound feet were. Whenever I say to people that some of the smallest bound feet were only 3 inches long, they register that that is small but it’s only when they see exactly how small 3 inches is, that the horror of it hits them.
In order to illustrate how tiny bound feet were for “Breaking Tradition”, my award-winning talk inspired by the stories in Bound Feet Blues, I went online to order a pair of baby shoes. I searched and searched for baby shoes that were 3 inches long but the smallest size that I could find came to just over 4 inches.
The photo above shows me holding those 4+ inch baby shoes during Continue reading
As part of my inquiry what it would like to walk with bound feet for my performance of Bound Feet Blues, I found this video of an elderly Chinese woman with bound feet.
I have been watching it to get a sense of her movement so that it can help me portray the walk of a woman with bound feet in my show.
The main thing that I notice is that she does not Continue reading
In Bound Feet Blues, I talk about how I used to envy men their solid, sturdy shoes. Men’s shoes give them the freedom to stride around as if they own the world. Whereas some women’s shoes – especially the more feminine, delicate ones – felt like they hobbled me and restricted my ability to move around.
In particular, I loved the look of brogues and longed to own a pair. But men’s shoes are of course huge and would never fit me. And I would feet too embarrassed to go into the men’s section of shoe shops to ask to try their shoes on.
The great thing now about our post-modern, post-feminist world is that there are brogues made for women – like this rather elegant pair…
Do you suffer – or have you ever suffered – from shoe envy too? And if so, what and who did you envy..?
“Only through pain will you find beauty,” says Snow Flower’s mother as she makes her daughter walk with her feet bound.
In my research for Bound Feet Blues, I’ve been looking into what it was like for young girls to have their feet bound. I came across the movie Snow Flower and The Secret Fan – see my blog post from earlier this week “Beaches” with Bound Feet – footbinding and female friendship – which is all about footbinding.
Here is a clip showing the sequence where one of the girls has to endure footbinding:
It is painful to watch and is a moving dramatisation of what it must have been like for little girls who had to endure this brutal process.
The one comment I would have, however, is that from my research, footbinding is a process and not just a one-off as the film suggests.
As a girl grow up, her feet keep growing so Continue reading
In the finale of the theatre piece Ten Women, the women on stage tried an experiment. What would it be like to show our ordinary, un-Photoshopped bodies in all their frailty and glory to the world?
The all female cast asked themselves that and also invited any members of the audience to join them. Some of the performers stripped naked, others left their underwear on and still others remained fully clothed. No-one in the audience joined them apart from the writer/director and producer who were sitting among us.
It was a powerful, uncomfortable and also celebratory end to the work in progress show exploring what being a real woman with a real body means in a society where “the image of a hyper-sexualised, grossly exaggerated, objectified woman’s body is used to sell pretty much anything”.
Written and directed by Bethan Dear and produced by Amy Clamp from true stories drawn from the other women in the ensemble, Ten Women is a thought provoking piece that tells … Continue reading
The Good Malaysian Woman exhibtion looks like a fascinating exhibition of Malaysian artists exploring “questions that affect women like “whose view”, “what is right or wrong”, “who judges” and “should they judge”.”
Read more at; http://www.fz.com/content/good-malaysian-women-different-perception
Bound Feet Blues explores what it means to be a woman within Chinese culture, going back to ancient times when women in China had bound feet and paralleling that with my own experience of growing up in Malaysia. It touches on gender roles, female desirability and conformity – all themes being explored by the artists in this exhibition.
The exhibition is supported by…
In the Cinderella fairy tale, when the Prince finds the glass slipper dropped by Cinderella, he travels around the kingdom trying to find the woman whose foot is the perfect fit for the shoe. Many women long to marry the Prince, including Cinderella’s ugly sisters but their feet are too big – so they resort to chopping off their toes and their heels to make their feet fit into that single perfect glass slipper.
You think this is a fairy tale.
Well, think again.
It seems that women today are having foot surgery so that their feet fit more easily into high heel shoes or sandals, according to an article on Shape magazine on Cinderella Foot Surgery.
They are asking for toe shortenings… nail re-sizing, “foot facelifts,” “toe tucks,” and foot narrowing… [and] “toebesity” surgery [liposuction on fat toes]
Having spent so much time researching the brutal Continue reading
I workshopped Bound Feet Blues at The Centre for Solo Performance with 6 other solo performers and two facilitators. What was fascinating was that after my piece ended, in addition to giving me feedback on my performance and the structure of the script, the others in the group started talking about contemporary issues of body modification, body mutilation, the outward signifiers of feminity and masculinity and the eroticization of different part of our bodies in different cultures and times.
The facilitator had to interrupt the animated discussion to bring Continue reading
Bound Feet Blues - A Life Told in Shoes 