Would you get naked in front of a hundred people? Ten Women did

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”.

TEN WOMEN smaller

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

Come and see my TEDx style talk inspired by Bound Feet Blues – Breaking Tradition: How to Live Unbound

I will be giving a TEDx style talk inspired by my research for my solo show Bound Feet Blues at the Inspiring Speakers Gala on Wed 9th July. The talk is called Breaking Tradition: How to Live Unbound and looks at the life lessons that I learnt from exploring the story of my great gandmother who had bound feet.

Yang-May Ooi talking about bound feet – her left hand stands in for a crippled bound foot

If you enjoyed the work in progress performance of Bound Feet Blues on 26 March, my talk will look behind the show at my personal crisis that led me to find out the story of my family heritage. I also talk about the life lessons that I was able to draw from the courage and spirit I saw in my great grandmother who was able to transcend the brutal limitation imposed on her by her cultural tradition.

If you haven’t managed to see the show but would like to get a flavour of what is in store when the full length performance of Bound Feet Blues is showcased later this year, Breaking Tradition will give you a feel for what lies ahead. Someone who saw me do a snippet of the talk said: “I feel as if I’ve just seen a feature film in 4 minutes!”

The Inspiring Speakers Programme - Gala Finale July 9th 2014

I’ll be giving this talk as part of … Continue reading

Writing for Performance is wildly different from Novel Writing – here’s why

Over on my main blog StoryGuru.co.uk, I’ve just written about the differences between writing for performance and writing novels. As a novelist, I had a steep learning curve working on the script for Bound Feet Blues and found lots to love about this fresh genre of story performance, and also lots that has been a challenge in terms of creating the text.

In contrast to 180,000+ for each of my novels, I have had to…. Continue reading

Bound Feet Blues showreel is now online – watch highlights of this “riveting” solo show

I’m delighted to share with you the showreel of Bound Feet Blues from the work in progress performance back in March.

Enjoy!

You can see what the audience said about the show at the  Audience Reviews page

The video was filmed and edited by the very talented Claudia Rocha and her team

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Bound Feet Blues: Performance Photos – China Doll – walking to the ball

This moment is from the opening sequence of Bound Feet Blues. My friends and I are walking to a ball in Oxford in 1983…via Flickr http://flic.kr/p/nrsexh 

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My story performance Bound Feet Blues is a way in to talking about contemporary feminist issues

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

My vision for Bound Feet Blues is as a pure form of storytelling

I have added a page to my blog giving the background to the development of Bound Feet Blues.

Bound Feet

My vision for the piece is as a pure form of storytelling with no costumes or props and minimal lighting and music or sound effects. As a child, I loved listening to the stories my mother and Continue reading

Solo Performance: Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes (work in progress)

In Chinese tradition, women with tiny bound feet were desirable as wives and lovers, their delicate feet seen as objects of both status and sexual fetish. In her first full length storytelling piece Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes, Chinese-Malaysian story performer Yang-May Ooi explores themes of female desirability, identity and empowerment in this personal story told through the shoes in her life.

The image of Chinese women with bound feet has haunted me since I was a child. I think of these women who have been crippled for life ever since they were 4 years old, unable to walk, with broken stumps for feet beneath the delicately embroidered silk shoes. Just so they can appear to have little, dainty feet and seem to be elegant and graceful – and therefore desirable and marriageable.

Small Feet

I’ve always had small, delicate feet. My shoe size is 3.5 and it’s a real problem trying to Continue reading

Follow my Mood Board for Bound Feet Blues on Pinterest

Images can help the creative process. Artists, writers and other creatives use Mood Boards to help them in their work.  Discover how Author and Story Performer Yang-May Ooi has been using Pinterest to collect pictures in a Mood Board for her current project, Bound Feet Blues.

For Bound Feet Blues, I’ve found it helpful to collect images of bound feet and the Chinese cheong sahm (long dress) as well as other images – no matter how tangently – that relate to the various themes I’m exploring:

# Chinese Continue reading