Women & Power: Why here? Why now? Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Research &am
Women & Power: Why here? Why now? Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of Research & Higher Education at the Globe introduces our forthcoming Women & Power Festival that takes place 13-18 May. The Women and Power Festival is designed to ask questions about women and leadership in all sorts of areas, so we’re interested in the arts and culture, we’re interested in politics and society, we’re interested in education and academic studies.Obviously, in the last couple of years conversations have exploded about the role of women in society and whether or not women have access to power and how much access to power we have. So it’s this relationship between women and power specifically that this festival is really interested in.We’re having this conversation now because of the precarious relationship between structures of power and women. So we see in some parts of the world women not having gained power at all. We see in some parts of the world women’s power being taken away from them as we speak. I think there’s a lot of fear out there about women having power but actually what women want is equal access to power and I think it’s these kind of conversations that we need to have here.It’s important at Shakespeare’s Globe because we are interested in particular in what theatre and art-making can do in particular to those conversations. So we’re going to have some platform events where we invite female directors to come in and talk to people about what it means to direct theatre in the twenty first century as women, as women of colour.We also want to have a panel event which discusses politics and activism and who these women are who are sort of on the front lines of society at the moment. Then we’re going to have the one day symposium which just examines women and leadership really quite intensively. So we’re going to be looking at the relationship between women and leadership and culture and art and politics and education specifically as well. What the imbalances are between the different genders.The kind of impact that we are hoping this women and power festival will have is getting people to talk, getting people to think about these questions about the role of women in society very critically instead of just skimming the surface of social media and picking a side. It’s really looking at the grey areas what it means to be a woman today when we are faced with all of these struggles and imbalances. It’s really about getting people to talk and ask more questions, maybe even put on more events, but we just need to keep talking about it.Art and theatre is about creativity and I suppose they’ve been domains that have been male dominated. I suppose that women have had to elbow their way in to important positions, taking over theatres, deciding content, curating museums. It’s all those kinds of things. Those have been in the domains of men and I feel like the potential particularly for theatre is basically exploding a conversation that women are determining. What kinds of performances are we going to see, whose story are we going to tell, are we always going to tell the same old stories that have been dominating society for hundreds of years. I think when women come into the scene, they start to provide alternative narratives and ideas that actually propel more creativity, and that’s really exciting. You can hear Farah alongside playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury, actor Clare Perkins, fight director Yarit Dor and Globe artistic director Michelle Terry talking about women and equality in theatre in our podcast, Such Stuff. Tune into Episode 2, Season 4: International Women’s Day. Full transcript available. -- source link
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