Women's Views on News |
| When women flee and ask for help Posted: 30 Sep 2016 02:28 PM PDT
Fifty women leave everything behind to board a boat in North Africa and flee across the Mediterranean. They are escaping forced marriage in their homeland, and, hoping for protection and assistance, seeking asylum in Greece. Written 2,500 years ago by the great playwright Aeschylus, The Suppliant Women is one of the world's oldest plays. At the play’s heart are fifty young women in full chorus arguing for their lives, speaking to us through the ages with startling resonance for our times. The myth of Danaus and his fifty daughters, on which the story is based, is essentially a foundation legend – or rather a re-foundation legend – of Argos, one of the foremost Mycenaean cities of the Peloponnesus. ‘The Suppliants’ does not conform to our expectations of traditional Greek tragic drama in that it has neither hero, nor downfall, nor even tragic conclusion. Instead, the play portrays unresolved conflicts of sexuality, love and emotional maturity. Aeschylus is the first of the three early Greek tragedians whose plays survive extant, the other two being Sophocles and Euripides. And Aeschylus, by expanding the number of characters in plays to allow for conflict among them, was arguably the founder of all serious Greek drama. Previously, only a single character had interacted with the Chorus. The play also pays tribute to the democratic undercurrents running through Athens in advance of the establishment of a democratic government in 461BCE, and the insistence by King Pelasgus that the people of Argos are consulted is a distinct nod in favour of democracy. Part play, part ritual, part theatrical archaeology, it offers an electric connection to the deepest and most mysterious ideas of the humanity – who are we, where do we belong and if all goes wrong – who will take us in? A co-production with the Actors Touring Company, The Suppliant Women features a chorus of young women from Edinburgh playing the title role. Re-uniting the creative team behind the acclaimed production 'The Events', The Guardian's best play of 2013, 'The Suppliant Women' uses the techniques of Ancient Greek theatre of bringing the community to participate in plays and recruits and trains citizens of Edinburgh – to create an extraordinary theatrical event. The Suppliant Women is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh from 1-15 October 2016 and then on tour to Belfast and Newcastle. For details click here.  |
| Posted: 30 Sep 2016 02:25 PM PDT
Women's Sport Week is an opportunity for everybody involved with playing, delivering, leading or working in sport to celebrate, raise awareness and increase the profile of women's sport throughout the UK. The objective of Women’s Sport Week is to celebrate and showcase women's sport at every level, from the grassroots to the elite, and highlight the incredible contribution that women make to sport. And of course the overall aim is to get more women and girls physically active and playing sport. Women in Sport will be launching Women's Sport Wednesday, a fundraising campaign to help transform sport for the benefit of every woman and girl in the UK. The first Women's Sport Wednesday will take place on 5 October 2016, during national Women's Sport Week, and will launch an campaign through which Women in Sport aims to make Wednesdays the day of the week when every playing field, pitch, pool, track and court is filled with women and girls playing sport and having fun, all in the name of charity. Participants are encouraged to organise their own Women's Sport Wednesdays fundraising activities to celebrate and encourage women's and girl's sport. From table tennis tournaments in the office to fancy dress matches on the pitch, Women's Sport Wednesdays aim to offer something for everyone to take part in. And Sport England will be using the week to continue to drive home the benefits of the hugely successful This Girl Can campaign. One of the overall aims of Women's Sport Week is to get more coverage of women's sports across different media. During the week, Sky Sports and the BBC will devote more broadcast time to celebrations of women's sport, in a bid to improve sustained and consistent media profiling of female athletes and sports teams. Click here to keep a track with what is and has been going on in the press, on TV and online during Women’s Sport Week 2016. And you can join in. Get involved in Women's Sport Week and tell everyone what you are getting up to using the hashtag #WSW16. Click here to find out what's on near you. And don't forget to share your stories with Women in Sport. And have fun!  |
| Posted: 30 Sep 2016 02:19 PM PDT
'Hidden Civil War' is a month-long programme – running from 30 September until 30 October 2016 – of events and exhibitions in different parts of Newcastle upon Tyne that expose, collate and present evidence of a Hidden Civil War in Britain today. The landscape: colossal public asset stripping and dissociation via corporate tax evasion; the tearing up of the welfare state and the commitments to each other that it was built upon; the vilification of the vulnerable, discriminatory cuts imposed on disabled people and deaths among them. A serious increase in homelessness amid the biggest housing crisis for several generations, family debt, the ongoing denial of access to land and erosion of civil liberties. Hidden Civil War is a collaborative project, commissioned by The NewBridge Project and developed in partnership with East St Arts, Hands on Film Lab, Metal, Paper Rhino, Julia Heslop, Beth Ramsay, Julie Tomlin, Vicky Ward, Aisha Zia, Mark Donne, Taryn Edmonds and Chris Erskine. Activists and artists have contributed to a series of events curated and commissioned by The NewBridge Project in Newcastle upon Tyne. Among them are: Ruth Ewan, with 'A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World', a CD jukebox which contains a – growing – collection of songs addressing a spectrum of social issues, some directly political in motive, some vaguely utopian and some chronicling specific historic events. Songs that could all be described as progressive in subject matter. The archive currently contains over 2,000 tracks, with no more than two by the same artist, which are ordered into over seventy categories such as feminism, land ownership, poverty, civil rights and ecology. Ruth Ewan lives and works in London. Her work takes many forms including performance, installation and printed matter. Her practice explores overlooked areas of political and social history, reviving these forgotten thoughts and ideas and highlighting their continued relevance today. Often celebrating activists and radical thinkers, Ewan's work encourages collaboration and participation – in the past she has worked with historians, traditional craftsmen, musicians and school children. Sisters Uncut NCL in a 2-day residence in The Newbridge Project Gallery space, and hosting Who are Sisters? A series of workshops, talks and events to bring sisters together and spread the word about the impact of austerity on vital services in our region. Women from Sisters Uncut groups around the UK will come together to show how this powerful movement is taking direct-action against cuts to domestic violence services. Presentations from our UK Sisters will be followed by a discussion. And 'WE: A Film Forum' presents a series of free screenings and discussions over one weekend, with a particular focus on the cultural impact of migration and investigating the capacity of individuals and communities to shape society. The selection of five films, with a complementary series of discussions, kicks off on 21 October with Jumana Manna‘s 'A Magical Substance Flows Into Me', a journey into the contested musical history of Palestine through the work of ethnomusicologist and German-Jewish refugee, Robert Lachmann, detailing his radio broadcasts from Jerusalem in the 1930s. On the Saturday the theme is migration, refuge and asylum, first with a film by locally-based artist Isabel Lima, followed by the internationally acclaimed 'Brûle la Mer' (Burn the Sea) by French filmmaker Nathalie Nambot and Tunisian refugee Maki Berchache, detailing the reality of migration from North Africa to Europe in the wake of the Arab Spring. The last day of WE: A Film Forum examines a historical dialogue of power and collective resistance seen in Britain today – through representations of land and the human body itself in artist films by James Holcombe, Rosalind Fowler and Hands On Film Lab’s Artist in Residence Kate Liston. For more information, tickets, or to see the whole programme, click here.  |
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