Be the first to read an extract from Bound Feet Blues, the book

Writer/ Performer Yang-May Ooi shares an extract from her new book, Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes. The manuscript has just been submitted to publisher Urbane Publications and will be available in bookshops and online in early November. 

I was very pleased at the weekend to be able to put the finishing touches to the manuscript of Bound Feet Blues, the book and to dispatch it to Matthew Smith, my publisher at Urbane Publications.

As I celebrated with some bubbly with my partner, I reflected on how taking of my shoes and going barefoot transformed the stage version of Bound Feet Blues from a long form style of storytelling into a dramatic performance.

 

I write about that moment in the book so what better way to share my reflections here than with an extract…

I began to go through the scenes of Bound Feet Blues. The sexy walking in the opening moments became sexier. In the scene when I am eight, I suddenly took off half running, half skipping round the dining room – my whole body expressed the gangly movements of a little girl. As the bound foot mother, I stood with Continue reading

Learn How To Magnify Your Stage Presence to Supercharge Your Public Speaking

Are your nerves letting you down when you have to give a presentation? Is your delivery getting in the way of the othewise powerful message you want to convey to your audience?

If you want to learn the secrets of commanding a full theatre – and have fun, too, along the way – come to the storytelling and perfomance masterclass Own Your Story, Own the Room on Sat 16 May 2015 in Central London.

I’ll be sharing what I learnt from performing my solo show Bound Feet Blues to a sold-out West End theatre so you can take home with you tools to:

# dominate any stage you may be invited to speak on

# welcome and accept the gaze of your audience

# connect warmly with your audience

In Bound Feet Blues, I stand alone on stage for one hour to deliver a dramatised story, playing all the different characters and taking the audience to settings from Oxford, to ancient China and Australia and Malaysia – all without any costumes, props, scenery/ backdrops or music and performed barefoot. The success of the piece depends entirely on me. I must command the stage and hold the attention of the audience for a full 60 minutes. The showcase performance in Oct last year received 4+ Star reviews and one reviewer said of the piece, “a deeply personal and heartfelt performance… I felt the eyes of the audience follow Ooi unblinkingly until the end.”

Do you want to know how you can command the stage like this, too? The masterclass on 16 May could be for you. It will include theatre games that I have devised that will give you experiential learning – one of the best ways to capture performance mastery to magnify your stage presence.

My colleague, Beverley Glick, an award-winning speaker and well-respected journalist, is co-facilitating the masterclass and we will also be guiding participants through how to find the inspiring personal stories in their lives. You will discover how to Continue reading

Ancient Chinese pornographic painted panels showing woman with bound feet

 

This Chinese wood and glass mirror box – showing a man and woman making love: you can see her tiny bound feet (c.18th century) Photo: Courtesy Science Museum, London/Science and Society Picture Library
A detail of one of the panels is below – notice the woman’s red shoes and her disproportionately small feet.

 

 The original panel box can be seen at the Institute of Sexology exhibition in London – on till Sept 2015
See my previous blog posts about the exhibition and other bound feet artefacts you can see there.

Continue reading

The Institute of Sexology exhibition includes bound feet artefacts

We went to the The Institute of Sexology | Wellcome Collection exhibition just before Xmas. It is a fascinating history of the study of human sexuality and includes a number of artefacts from China showing women with bound feet. I blogged a few days ago about an ivory carving showing a Chinese couple making love which is on show at the exhibiton.

 

Catch it if you can before Sept 2015. Here is the blurb and also the promotional video:

” ‘The Institute of Sexology’ tells the complex and often contradictory story of the study of sex through Continue reading

Historical figurine of bound feet woman making love

This tiny ivory couple shows a Chinese man and woman making love. You can see the man on top, with his bare feet. Under him is the woman with her legs wrapped around him. You can just about see her breasts and if you look very closely, you will see her tiny bound feet.

 

ivory

 

The original carving can be seen at the Institute of Sexology exhibition at the Wellcome Foundation, which is on till Sept 2015.

Continue reading

Watch Highlights of Bound Feet Blues -the Showcase Performance [Video]

If you missed the sellout showcase performance of Bound Feet Blues in October, you can watch a selection of highlights in this short video (under 2 mins):

The show received 4+Star reviews and we are planning a 3 week run back in London’s West End in Nov/ Dec 2015 – more details to be announced shortly.

Continue reading

Is looking Chinese really so awful?

Looking Western seems to be an ideal of beauty for some Chinese women, according to an article in the Daily Mail. They are getting cosmetic surgery on their faces to remove their Chinese features – making their eyes bigger, sharpening their noses and reshaping their faces to seem longer.  Is looking Chinese really so awful for these women that they feel they have to destroy their own faces to look more Western and therefore in their minds more beautiful?

Looking at the photos in the article, I am reminded of depictions of women in anime comics, which originated in Japan – with large saucer like eyes and heart shaped faces, mapping Western features onto Eastern female faces. The skin tones also seem to have been altered to look paler and pinker. There, too, in those comic books, Western features are idolized.

Chinese woman before and after Westernizing cosmetic surgery

Bound Feet Blues explores why women in ancient China were prepared to do violence to themselves and their daughters in the context of footbinding, which mutilated a girl’s feet beyond repair. That brutal cultural practice died out about 70 years ago. But it looks like it has returned but in another form.

The underlying message of both bound feet and this Westernizing cosmetic surgery seems to me to be that Continue reading

Bound Feet Blues – The Book!

I’ve made a start on the book version of Bound Feet Blues and I’m pleased to say I have the first 5,153 words.

The script of Bound Feet Blues is only 25 pages and runs to a one hour show. That meant that I had to edit down the stories and simplify it all in order to create a story that works as an oral story and a theatre piece. The book will tell “The Stories Behind The Story”, expanding on and deepening the stories that are in the show.

The book will be framed by the scratch night performance that I tried out at Conway Hall in March this year. This was my first attempt at presenting the piece to a live audience and was made up of 45 minutes of a rough draft of the incomplete material. The book will follow my journey as a writer and performer trying to develop the memoir that would eventually become Bound Feet Blues, the show, alongside the journey of the actual story within the show.

Why this structure?

Well, I tried for many years to write the stories of my family, my heritage and my own personal life as a conventional memoir and that did not work. Bound Feet Blues works because it is a live dramatised story performance. So I want to honour the oral storytelling out of which the show evolved by writing a book that is an UNconventional memoir and that has the feel of Continue reading

Yang-May Ooi on BBC London Live

I went in to the BBC London Live studios on 16 Oct to chat with the delightful Jo Good about my novels The Flame Tree and Mindgame and also Bound Feet Blues.

In case you missed it, here is the interview again. It runs for about 20 mins. Click on the image below and an audio player will open up.

 

Or, you can click on this link – https://app.box.com/s/n5kxj3szaric1d03r8qi

 

Continue reading

4+ Stars! Rave Reviews for Bound Feet Blues Showcase

The reviews are out for the Bound Feet Blues showcase performance on Monday night – and the show has been given 4+ Stars. As you can imagine, I am delighted!

Bound feet blues

 

The Public Reviews

The Public Reviews, UK

The theatre review online magazine The Public Reviews gave Bound Feet Blues a 4.5 star rating (out of 5 stars) and described the show as “powerful” and “beautifully performed and directed”. Read the review by Nichola Daunton:  “Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes – Tristan Bates Theatre” (14 Oct 2014).

“With a tiny three inch foot being the ideal size and the process of binding and bone breaking beginning at the age of four, Yang-May’s performance as the mother of a small child who is just beginning the process is very powerful. The fact that Yang-May performs bare foot throughout the piece is also an interesting choice and is used to good effect to highlight both her restriction and her freedom as she discovers the person she is meant to be.”

Credit: Eldarin Yeong

 

Everything Theatre

Everything Theatre, UK

This theatre review site which bills itself as the  “honest and unpretentious guide to the London theatre scene”, gave Bound Feet Blues a 4 star review (out of 5). It described the show as “Engaging, eye-opening, funny and moving” and summed it up in one word: “Excellent” Read Hanna Gilbert’s review: Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes, Tristan Bates Theatre. (16 Oct 2014)

“Ooi gives a truly fantastic performance, taking on Continue reading