Monday, July 4, 2011
Tonight was our final production from the Connections Festival, Beauty Manifesto by Nell Leyshon. The play was created in concert with a youth theatre ensemble who worked with the playwright for a full week discussing the pressures from mass media and peers to conform to a particular body type. The result was admittedly a surface level distopia wherein young people can "elect" to go in for surgery on their 16th birthday in order to become society's ideal of perfection. The production we saw took cues from fashion advertisements and pop culture choreographed to electronic music that reminded me very much of my take on Julius Ceasar two years ago (see below). While the work was not perhaps evocative enough to really encapsulate the gravity of the subject matter, I did feel that it provided a great opportunity for audience members to engage in a dialogue about the topic, making the event fully worthwhile (granted, there was no such talkback or follow-up activities connected to this presentation, but that is certainly where I would take it).
Here is a scene from a competing production of Beauty Manifesto:
Here is a clip of the production I directed of Julius Caesar two years ago. Tonight's production had a similar look and feel:
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