Byre World Insights – ‘Queer Tales: Reenacting Women’s Lives’
This initiative – recently held as part of the School of Modern Languages programme of Byre World – showed how acting, performance and collaborative creation can become powerful tools to reflect on diversity, gender and the life-experiences of women and queer communities. Opening spaces, where voices that have often become marginalised, can be heard, acknowledged and celebrated.
With these words, the Colombian Ambassador to the UK, H.E. Ambassador Nancy Benítez, inaugurated the last event and performance night of “Reenacting Women’s Lives: Queer Acting, Art, and Creation in St Andrews”, on the 21st of April at The Byre Theatre. The evening was the culmination of weeks of hard work by the organisers, acting tutors, and workshop participants in the lead-up to the event. What looked like a lot of both challenges and fun, also came with an important message: Be proud, be loud!
The concluding event titled ‘Queer Tales: Reenacting Women’s Lives’ featured a variety of performance pieces, including dance choreography, live singing, poetry readings by students who authored these, as well as film footage and photographs of the overall experience. All of these stemmed from a larger workshop titled “Reenacting Women’s Lives: Queer Acting, Art and Creation in St Andrews”, co-led by Dr Karol Valderrama-Burgos (Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies), Ciara Rooney (School President 25-26) and Emily Hadfield (Spanish Convener 25-26). The Byre World event was followed by a Q&A session where the audience had the opportunity to listen to the impact of the experience in the lives of the participants. For anyone, who is interested in seeing more reflections on the workshops and the event, there will be a WordPress site launch towards the end of the summer, comprising the works!
However varied the performances were, they all had one thing in common: using art to find a personal and vulnerable connection with oneself and to share this with others. Thank you so much to all participants, sponsors, and organisers who made this moment of connection through art and self-expression possible and to hopefully many more little moments like this in all of our everyday lives!
