A great write up in @spectator today on A Thing of Beauty!

Kay moves with an unaffected honesty that makes you feel she has nothing to hide or prove...
A longer piece, Fantasia, follows.. What I saw was a wittily eclectic, almost but not quite parodic homage to the classical symmetries of Petipa, the hopping and skipping of Isadora, and the deep-bend intensities of Martha Graham."

Link in next post. spectator.co.uk/article/the-ar…

Grievance culture in the arts;

The list of why someone has complaints against them (an artist) is long and quite strange at times; defending women’s rights in their own homes or in social occasions, liking a tweet by someone who has stood up for women’s rights, using the correct title of a work of art, signing a letter calling for threats to JK Rowling to stop, defending children from puberty blockers, giving feedback to an arts institution’s new (possibly controversial) policies, calling for racism to be defined through the lends of Martin Luther King’s ‘colourblind’ stance, questioning a trans-inclusive funding policy requirement for an all-women’s group who have experienced domestic violence, and even being perceived as being Jewish in an arts organisation that led to their harassment. Some artists have been silently cancelled- as one artist put it ‘I’ve been cancelled without the cancellation!’. They find the phone stops ringing, requests for meetings refused by PA’s and emails never replied to. For these artists they have done nothing, but perhaps their previous body of work or their intelligence shows that they are not ‘true believers’ and may speak up or say the unsayable and cause ‘reputational risk’.

Some thoughts on denouncements and the arts

Many of us in the arts have been subjected to bullying smear campaigns, that have seen us lose our livelihoods, many opportunities and our reputations. It has affected even our ability to continue to make our art. Often these denouncements came with petitions and open letters. Some of these campaigns have been public, a very few have been legal, but there are many more that have remained internal and covered-up in the arts.

"A bizarre phenomenon that followed from a period of plague in Europe, was the ‘dancing plagues’, with the most famous being the drawing by of 1564 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, showing a group of women dancing, but their eyes glassy and disembodied, in deeply altered states...." "As J Waller reminds us in The Lancet, these vents are well worth remembering, as “they provide an object lesson in the power of our beliefs and expectations to shape the expression of psychological distress”.

🧵on the arts

Through this movement of cancellation and attacks on individuals based on personally held views, particularly in the arts, there has been a popular discussion and comparison around ‘what would you do if you found yourself living in 1930’s Germany’.

The comparison is used normally to suggest would you be the brave individual who spoke up, who wasn’t taken in by the propaganda or who helped to hide and rescue Jewish people.

But what about those who do go along with it? What about those people in moderate positions of power who could have stopped the victimisation, the mobbing, the harassment but chose instead to facilitate the bullies?

Through my work I’ve now met quite a few of these people. I’ve seen their capitulating emails, I’ve heard how they turned thier back on friends of many, many years standing.

Off piste for a bit…

I just had an incredible time in Poland, a country I love, has huge family significance for me personally and was where I started my career as a dancer 1998-2000.

A 🧵thread story… part 1 With my family, we started in Warsaw visiting @Claudiaclare exhibition at @U_jadowski 

My son loved taking pictures of all of her incredible work.

Seeing her pieces all together were staggering in their complexity, intensity and beauty.

A must see.
u-jazdowski.pl/en/programme/e…

Ok I’m going to try and explain just how angry women are.

Many of us have had to become veritable experts in so many issues we never thought we’d have to explore.

Thread 🧵

https://twitter.com/anneliesedodds/status/1683434052194295810

I can have in-depth and expert conversations with women on the following non exhaustive list;

⁃The Equality Act 2020
⁃Single sex exceptions
⁃Case law protections
⁃Origins of the GRA
⁃Women’s toilets

A thread.

Having just reached over 1000 followers since rejoining Twitter on Friday, I wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone for following and supporting me. It’s been so heartening and strengthening. The day after a resigned from the company I founded, I lost access to everything- my email, my phone, my website, my YouTube videos even my personal documents. But I also lost my following on twitter, FB, instagram, a following I’d built up over 17 years of work and performances.

What an inspiring evening in Oxford tonight. Thanks to @OxFeministUnion
Hearing such brilliant, articulate and funny women, all experts in their fields talk about their lives work, in a supportive environment is so important right now. Thanks to @millihill @DrJessTaylor @AnnFuredi and @HiboWardere