What does it feel like to be a slag? This installation explores the terrain of slaggyness, engaging with feelings of shame, sex, desire and joy through poetry presented at scale.
Being Slaggy is a performance-poetry installation that does three things: experiments with what it means to 'perform' poetry; explores the vernacular of working-class south London; and represents the experience of 'being slaggy'.
The piece transforms space by presenting poems at scale in written physical and projected forms, along with a voice recording of a longer prose peice and visual scenographic interventions. By using the scenographic techniques of theatre, and theatre's unique ability to enliven space through objects and voice, this installation surrounds the audience in the vernacular and sounds of south London, offering an autobiographical reflection on working-class experiences of objectified cis-womanhood.
Being Slaggy complicates the notion of 'slaggyness', both presenting it as an abjection but also playing with the ways that sexuality offers avenues for pleasure (even when those are bound up with sexisms). It also plays with icons and objects from late twentieth and early twenty-first century culture - by, for example, sampling the famous Jackie magazine and offering the audience a take-home poetry collection focused on a character of Jackie as a south-east London everywoman, coming of age in the early millennium. It is fun and funny, moving, and attempts to shift our relationship to poems in performance.
This show takes place in CPT's basement space which is still wheelchair accessible via lift.
"The seed commission has made me feel supported, not just as an artist but also a woman of colour whose story needs to be heard."
CPT Commissioned Artist
