These photos were taken at a rehearsal the week before the Bound Feet Blues showcase performance. They show me in various scenes from the show, and discussing the script with director Jessica Higgs.
The photos were taken by the brilliant Claudia Rocha
The iconic pose showing my left hand as a bound foot “The Golden Lotus”
Discussing the script with director Jessica Higgs
Two more photos below – Continue reading
Here’s a short video interview of me talking about the inspirations behind Bound Feet Blues and the challenges of bringing it to the stage.
It was filmed just after the Heritage Panel that I took part in, discussing the role of heritage in South East Asian Performance with Anna Nguyen of Trikhon Theatre and Elaine Foo of TrueHeart Theatre.
There’s also a short snippet of me performing a scene from the show for the audience at the Heritage Panel.
Enjoy!
We have just finalised the programme for the upcoming showcase performance on Mon and I thought I’d share it with you. Click on the image below and the programme will open up in a reading pane.
The direct link to the programme is at https://app.box.com/s/uyt1pds75o3dapi6zuam
For those of you who are coming to the show – see you there!
For those who were too late to buy tickets – we hope to bring a full production to fruition in 2015 with a 2-3 week run so stay tuned…!
I am thrilled that the brilliant Beverley Glick has agreed to chair the Q&A after the showcase performance of Bound Feet Blues on Mon 13 Oct at the Tristan Bates Theatre.
Beverley is an award-winning speaker and “story archaeologist” who works with individuals and businesses to find their authentic stories. She is the co-founder of the cult storytelling club The Story Party where I started my storytelling adventure that led me to create Bound Feet Blues.
I got to know Beverley a couple of years ago from a public speaking course we both took part in and since then, I’ve seen her working with Continue reading
Bound Feet Blues is as much about my own personal coming out story as it is about the story of great-grandmother with bound feet. Footbinding in the show is a metaphor for the binding up of who we really are, of our natural selves, in order to fit into an social construct of what a woman should be.
The story also explores how I used to be a tomboy and what that meant for me in terms of freedom vs constraint, power vs restriction, heartfelt love vs pretending to be someone I was not. For me, coming out was the ultimate act of unbinding and personal empowerment – signified by the freedom to wear whatever I choose, whether fully female or male attire or an androgynous combination of both….
This vintage photo shows two Japanese women, one in female clothing, the other in man’s clothes. I’ve not been able to Continue reading
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
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?
You will have seen my earlier blog post about the film Snow Flower and The Secret Fan and also the clip which I posted showing the footbinding scene from that movie.
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:
# They move faster than Continue reading
Bound Feet Blues - A Life Told in Shoes 