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5th November 2008, 7.30p.m. (full details below)

Hosted by Stella Duffy

Devoted and Disgruntled is an opportunity to meet up with artists, arts professionals, and audiences. The next three D&Ds will have a different theme and guest host. November’s D&D will be hosted by Stella Duffy, an Associate Artist of Improbable. As always the response to this theme, and the conversations we have, will be decided by you at the start of the evening.

Do gender and sexuality still matter – and if they do, what do we do with them?

Dear All
I am a woman. I am gay/queer/lesbian – and far happier with any of those terms as adjectives, than as necessarily-limiting nouns. I write, perform, direct, make theatre and other work. None of those things solely define me, nor would I want them to, yet as artists, what we do comes from ourselves, our own lives, those we meet, and the worlds – real and imagined – we inhabit. We make work by and of ourselves. How important then, are gender and sexuality to what we do?
In twenty-five years making work I have seen our women’s and gay/queer theatre companies virtually disappear. This doesn’t matter if all the issues we once thought so vital have been taken up by newer artists less concerned with drawing lines and/or with speaking from and for the ghetto. It doesn’t matter if the issues of gender and sexuality – so prevalent, for example, in the classics – are investigated in current work. Nor does it matter if we now truly do have a level playing field from which to make our work.
And yet … I still hear more women than men decrying childcare provision in our work/places. We still have many more men directors than women, and a glance at any listings magazine will show men writers in (at best) a 2:1 ratio to women. Gay men may be in the public eye in unprecedented numbers, but where is the work by young women about their sexuality? Why is it now deemed empowering for women to get their kit off in the rise of modern burlesque – and if those women are still subject to the male gaze, whose empowerment is it anyway? (And are there any straight men empowering themselves by getting naked too?)
Maybe it is all sorted. Maybe there are no women thinking there’s still a glass ceiling, no queer people believing they rarely see themselves represented on our stages, no heterosexual men hemmed in by a society forcing them into a patriarchy they would rather reject, no straight people pushed into playing boy/girl games they hoped stopped in the 1950’s …
Or maybe we can have an Open Space about it, ask if we have arrived at a stage where gender and sexuality are truly fluid, or truly irrelevant – or both. And anyway, as was mooted at the very first D&D, didn’t we all come into theatre in the first place because we thought it was sexy, because we were seventeen-year-olds hoping to get laid? (While we changed the world, obviously.)
Stella Duffy, October 2008

DETAILS:
The evening runs using Open Space technology which gives anyone the chance to propose a starting point for discussion, then take part in one of these conversations, flit between them all, or head to the bar.
To get into Shunt for free, let them know on the door that you’re there for D&D. No need to book, just turn up on the night.
Shunt is on Joiner Street, a little alley inside London Bridge tube station. Find a map at:http://www.shunt.co.uk/map.php
For further information or to discuss access requirements get in touch with Lucy at lucy@improbable.co.uk or at the office on 0207 240 4556.
Hope to see you there.
www.improbable.co.uk