Celebrating a pivotal period of influential output from women theatre makers and playwrights.
This timely exhibition at London Performance Studios highlights an influential period of 20th century theatre history. From the end of the 1960s until the early 1990s, radical performance made by women including playwrights, directors, feminist collectives and experimental companies, gained significant profile but has often been neglected, their history and archives overlooked. Radical Rediscovery: Feminist Theatre in Britain 1969-1992 will share artefacts from key theatre makers, installations will be created and pivotal performances revisited. The exhibition is curated by London Performance Studios Associate Artist Dr Susan Croft, whose ongoing archive project Unfinished Histories is dedicated to preserving and celebrating the history of Alternative Theatre in Britain from the 1960s to the early 90s.
Radical Rediscovery: Feminist Theatre in Britain 1969-1992 explores far reaching social changes that impacted the arts and set the stage for an explosion of female voices. Focusing on the richly visual and interdisciplinary work of artist and performance maker Geraldine Pilgrim and artist, writer and performer Natasha Morgan in the 1970s and 80s, this exhibition also looks at the larger history of women’s devised performance during this time and at the struggles of women directors and playwrights to gain acceptance and move towards equality.
From the groundbreaking and outspoken feminist work of writer and film-maker Jane Arden in the1960s to the challenging and uncompromising output of Sadista Sisters and Cunning Stunts, this exhibition contextualises their work within the growing emergence of feminist performance that grew from Arden’s Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven, through the first Women’s Theatre Festival in Britain in 1973, to gradually build real and increasingly intersectional change within theatre.
Exhibition events also include a Radical Rediscovery Symposium on Saturday 30 November.
In addition to the exhibition, Montez Press launch Radical Rediscoveries, a new publication with an introduction by Dr Susan Croft, making available key rare and unpublished scripts from the period including Ophelia by Melissa Murray (1979) - a lesbian reworking of Hamlet, Go West, Young Woman! by Pam Gems (1974) a feminist exploration of the mythologies of the wild west and The Wind of Change by Winsome Pinnock (1987) a Windrush play on the experience of a Jamaican nurse in 1960s Britain. Vagina Rex & The Gas Oven by Jane Arden (1969), Minutes by Hesitate and Demonstrate (1978) and Room by Natasha Morgan (1981) are also included. Radical Rediscoveries will launch at the exhibition symposium.
Dr Susan Croft’s Associate Artist residency at London Performance Studios includes Fifty Years Of The Fight For Inclusion (FYFFI) – a three-year project initiated to mark the fifty-year anniversaries of three key moments in the history of theatre including the first Women’s Theatre Festival in Britain in 1973 and work that followed in 1974, the first Gay Theatre Festival in Britain in 1975 and the publication of Naseem Khan’s ground-breaking report The Arts Britain Ignores, by the Commission for Racial Equality in 1976.
To find out more please visit https://www.londonperformancestudios.com/unfinished-histories
London Performance Studios, Penarth Centre, Penarth Street, London SE15 1TR
Opening Hours: Monday–Friday 9am–5pm.
Further Information: Radical Rediscovery: Feminist Theatre in Britain 1969-1992