In the video below, writer/ performer Yang-May Ooi tells the story of her great-grandmother that inspired her to write Bound Feet Blues.
Yang-May writes:
The show was only one hour long so I made certain artistic choices in portraying my great-grandmother in the theatre performance. Her story is incomplete in the show because I wanted the audience to stay with the moment of transformation rather than seeing how her story ends.
The book of Bound Feet Blues takes great-grandma’s story and extends and deepens it at the more leisurely pace that a long read can offer. So for those of you who Continue reading →
Author Yang-May Ooi talks about how she was able to write the book, Bound Feet Blues – all 420 pages of it! – in 28 days.
This groundbreaking family and personal memoir was a lifetime in the making. The stories span several generations, going back to the young boy who was kidnapped by bandits and the young woman with bound feet who ran away from an unhappy marriage. Yang-May interweaves these ancestral tales with her own personal story as she learns what it takes to become her own woman.
In this video, she gives us a flavour of the book and shares her creative process in bringing these stories to life.
Bound Feet Blues was just an idea in the mind of writer/ performer Yang-May Ooi when she signed up for a workshop at The Centre for Solo Performance in January 2014. With the guidance of facilitators Luke Dixon and Sean Bruno and the feedback of the others workshop participants, Yang-May completed the script of Bound Feet Blues in 12 weeks. She performed a work-in-progress version of the piece at the Centre’s Going Solo scratch night in March 2014 at Conway Hall.
At the performance was one of the producers of the South East Asian (SEA) Arts Festival, Annie Kwan, who invited Yang-May to perform the completed show at that year’s festival in October. The showcase was performed at the Tristan Bates Theatre to a sold out audience and 4+ star reviews. Now, within 2 years of first starting the script, Yang-May and the Bound Feet Blues creative team have brought the show to full production, opening at Tristan Bates Theatre for a 3 week run on 24 November 2015.
The Centre for Solo Performance
Based in central London at historic Conway Hall, THE CENTRE FOR SOLO PERFORMANCE works with THE CONWAY COLLECTIVE in providing a specialist series of unique performance workshops, events and opportunities catering to writers, actors and performance artists interested in creating, developing, sharing solo performance work.
Luke Dixon is a performance maker, writer, teacher and academic, internationally known for his innovative productions of Shakespeare, his site-specific performances, his teaching of actors and his research into performance. www.lukedixon.co.ukSean Bruno has a wide range of experience in making, both solo and collaborative, performance work in various contemporary and traditional styles; including dance, spoken word, multimedia and site specific. www.seanbruno.co.uk
Their book Creating Solo Performance is now available as well. It is an innovative toolbox of exercises and challenges focused on providing you – the performer – with engaging and inspiring ways to explore and develop your idea both on the page and in the performance space. Creating Solo Performance by Sean Bruno and Luke Dixon £18.99
You can watch highlights from that first scratch night performance at Conway Hall below:
Yang-May Ooi, writer/ performer of Bound Feet Blues talks about the inspiration behind her extra-ordinary solo story performance and the memoir accompanying the theatre piece.
Earlier this year, photographer Paul Cox came over to take a series of photos of me for a photography project focusing on storytellers. He was travelling around the South East of England taking pictures of storytellers in their natural habitat – or rather the places where they got their inspiration. Among the storytellers he had collected were those who specialised in folk tales, myths and legends and local places. I was his only subject whose work is around personal narrative with an East Asian twist.
It was fascinating to watch him work, using a medium format camera and film – yes, film! It was one of those old fashioned looking cameras that you look down at. He also used a light meter. It all felt very charming and old fashioned!
Here is another of the shots below… These pics show me in my garden where Continue reading →
My solo show Bound Feet Blues asks the question: how do we as individuals, and as women, live authentic lives true to ourselves within a dominant culture that seeks to control our bodies and our spirit? Foot binding in ancient China broke a woman’s body physically – but also broke her spirit over the course of the many years it would take to create the perfect tiny foot. What dominant cultural traditions in our modern era play a similar controlling role in who and what we can be?
I’ve just received the proofs of the e-book of my second novel, Mindgame, the first and only lesbian Malaysian thriller. It is soon to be re-issued by Monsoon Books and I am now reading through the proofs – all 450+ pages of the book – to check it before publication. On re-reading the book, I see that this same theme that I explore in Bound Feet Blues also 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 →
This is the question that I am thinking about at the moment during the development of my performance for Bound Feet Blues. How would having bound feet have affected the way you would walk? How would it have affected your outlook on life, going through the process of the brutal procedure over a number of years and then having to live the rest of your life crippled in this way?
That film has been a useful resource in depicting the way that women with bound feet would have walked.
The movie seems quite careful and meticulous about depicting bound feet – after all the whole premise of the story is founded on the women having bound feet. They show what bound feet would have looked like in their little socks and slippers. In long shots, we can see the tiny feet under the women’s gowns (I’d love to know what special effects they used to make the women’s feet seem so small). It looks like in the performances as well, care was taken to depict how women would have moved with bound feet.
I watched those sequences carefully where the bound feet protagonists Snow Flower and her friend Lily are in movement and here are my impressions:
Luke Dixon is a performance maker, writer, teacher and academic, internationally known for his innovative productions of Shakespeare, his site-specific performances, his teaching of actors and his research into performance. 
Bound Feet Blues - A Life Told in Shoes 