“Brave conceptually and in production, this is a great idea. Medusa needs rescuing from the notion of being a horrid monster. Knight takes up the challenge of exploring the myth further but it is with mixed results.”
Kate Stratford
Venue : Belvoir 25a
Sydney
Dates: Until 27th April
In the original myth of Medusa, she was a beautiful woman who was raped, killed and beheaded by various god. Powerless to fight against the repressive actions forced upon her, she was metaphorised into a monster with hair of a thousand snakes. This monstrous image of the Medusa exists only because it has been directly determined by the male gaze. Men have created a myth which causes women to feel inadequate and incomplete, it is a story about power. The challenge for women is to expose the fallacy of the myth. When women look Medusa in the face they understand that beauty is not deadly and that men have to be held accountable for their violent reactions to it. So it is a story very much for our time where women’s growing independence has seen a backlash in the upsurge of violence against women – both physical and political.
Aliyah Knight’s Snakeface explores these ideas but layers on more. What it means to occupy a marginalized body, the nature of creation and destruction, “icky” feelings and thoughts, rage, trauma, sexuality, racism, self-narratives and healing. Like the clay shaped and destroyed by Knight during the performance, the journey (in verse) is intentionally messy. As emotions tend to be.
The set (Keerthi Subramanyam) gives Knight a best use of intimate space to explore these ideas. The concept of “molding young women” is made visual with molding clay. Girls are to be shaped early on (in Knight’s take, the girl is 13) and once she begins to mature, she is then contained by insults, guilt and emotional manipulation. Enhanced by most effective lighting (Rachel Lee), projections (Wendy Yu) and sound (Marco Cher-Gibard), the performance moves effortlessly though time and space. Knight’s movement and dancing evokes the mythical Medusan snakes: they are internal, a core part of the woman.
Brave conceptually and in production, this is a great idea. Medusa needs rescuing from the notion of being a horrid monster. Knight takes up the challenge of exploring the myth further but it is with mixed results. Mythology provides great source material, however, in dipping into this wealth of story, closed circular narrative is not enough. The circles need to become spirals (up or down), taking the audience on a dramatic story with a resolution. In theatrical terms, is it enough just to be? A similar recent production utilized a sacrificial legend to successfully explore the dilemma of a modern young woman with clarity and closure.
The power of a myth lies in the degree to which the myth is believed. The male does not have the power to repress women if women take away the power by refusing their repressive attempts. We dismantle the myths by not believing and participating – this is how we dismantle them, voiding them of power and credibility. This is not to say the dismantling is without trauma. It is a fraught, painful experience for any woman who fronts the monster.
Photography by Abraham de Souza
Kate Stratford, Theatre Now
