Women, Walking and Performance

By Dr Eleanor Rycroft, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre, School of Arts

Dr Eleanor Rycroft tells us about her project which explored attitudes to women walking, from the Renaissance period to the present day. The workshops piloted during the project aimed to collect women’s contemporary experiences of walking, especially by night. The project recently received an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account award and is yet another example of how arts and humanities research can address societal challenges.  

‘Women, Walking and Performance’ was an Impact Acceleration project which explores gender and pedestrianism using theatre methodologies. The project was based on my historical research into walking and performance, particularly my insight that a fundamental shift occurs during the early modern period (c.1500-1700), at which point discourses of walking begin to exclude certain groups and individuals from the activity. The importance of this argument concerns the ongoing reverberation of these exclusions, especially how inequalities of class, race and gender of walking in the past continue to inform the unequal distribution of the health and social benefits of walking today. Given that walking is a free and effective form of both transport and exercise – theoretically accessible to all able-bodied individuals – it is important to discover the historical roots of attitudes which mean that not all individuals feel free to walk.

 

This seems most particularly to be the case with women: the growing social and sexual control of women during the Renaissance continues to impact women walkers today. The tragic deaths of Sarah Everard, Zara Aleena, Sabina Nessa and Ashling Murphy are just the most recent in a long line of women who have been murdered whilst going onfoot. 

Alongside Co-Investigator, Dr. Jess McCormack, we hope to explore these gender inequalities through a verbatim play as an element of a larger research bid. This play will tell the walking stories of women, to be staged or read in educational settings and beyond. The IAA funding enabled us to pilot a workshop format for collecting these stories. Facilitated by Breathing Fire theatre company, we used playback theatre techniques to test the practical and ethical scope for collating the experiences of walking women. Playback theatre encourages people to share their life stories which are then ‘played back’ to them via theatrical means. These workshops provided a safe space for the women to speak back against the prohibitions placed upon their movement through the world. By using playback theatre we honoured and affirmed women’s experiences of walking, as well as identified and investigated the barriers which preclude women from walking feely today. 


“The IAA funding has provided an invaluable means to collect women’s stories together, with the aim of helping to spread this message”


The first workshop was produced as part of International Women’s Day in March 2023. Many of the stories which emerged concerned walking at night, and what was most telling from the IWD workshop was the common set of experiences that solo women walkers shared. Women spoke of insisting their daughters get taxis, forking out for taxis themselves, walking with keys between their fingers, adjusting their routes around men on the street, re-tracing known journeys, searching for exits and escape routes, as well as a number of other modifications they made to their behaviour simply to get from A to B.  

Women spoke of feeling ‘on edge’ when walking at night, and spoke of feeling angry about the sexual attacks that women (primarily) suffer. They spoke of changing their gait: “I have a night walk” said one. Many women do, and given that victims have been shown to be selected on the basis of how they walk, this is not a frivolous idea (Book et al 2013, Gunns et al 2002). The reality of (primarily) mens’ attacks on women excludes half the population from a whole realm of sensory and physical experience. As one participant lyrically put it, “As a girl on a moonlit night with fireflies, I loved walking with my mother and sister and seeing Jupiter.” As a woman she felt unable to enjoy such freedom. Another said, “I like the idea of walking in the dark in theory. If there were no men on the planet.” Another added, I feel that we are owed much more safety at night.” 

Our research suggests that one way to tackle this societal issue is through education. One participant spoke about how angry she got with men walking behind her at night, saying that they “should KNOW not to do that.” But do boys and men know not to do that? And how can that message and knowledge be effectively communicated if not? The IAA funding has provided an invaluable means to collect women’s stories together, with the aim of helping to spread this message. My co-researchers and I believe that a verbatim play weaving together women’s common experiences across time will show the extent to which they have had to alter their behaviours because of the threat that some men pose to walking womenand will encourage both knowledge transmission and discussion about how boys and men can help other genders in their quest to feel safe when they walk.  

Dr Eleanor Rycroft is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and is involved in the Early Modern Studies Research Group, which consists of scholars from the Arts, Humanities and Modern Languages, active in the Renaissance and early modern periods. To find out more about Eleanor’s research, please email e.rycroft@bristol.ac.uk 

Performing Shakespeare at Sea – The Hamlet Voyage

By Dr Laurence Publicover, Senior Lecturer in English, School of Humanities

Dr Laurence Publicover discusses his contribution to a new play, The Hamlet Voyage, performed at the Bristol Harbour Festival in 2022. The project received an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account Award and underlines the positive social influence arts and humanities research can effect.

The Hamlet Voyage performed aboard The Matthew in Bristol. Image Credit: Edward Felton

In January 2021, I held a video conference call with a Bristol-based American theatre director named Ben Prusiner. For some years, it turned out, both of us had been intrigued by the enigmatic evidence surrounding a specific performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: one supposed to have taken place aboard an East India Company (EIC) ship off the coast of Sierra Leone in 1607.

Shipboard theatricals

If this performance did take place—and its reality continues to be the subject of debate—then it is not only the first recorded performance of Shakespeare outside Europe; it is the first recorded performance, anywhere, of Hamlet. (Shakespeare’s tragedy was written and first performed around 1600, and versions of it were published in 1603 and then 1604-5, but there are no surviving records of specific performances before 1607.) To make things even more intriguing, the voyage on which this performance may or may not have taken place involved the first English ship to reach mainland India—a region that the EIC, at this point a fledging enterprise, would later rule.

All this interests me not only because I work on Shakespeare, but also because, in recent years, I have become interested in what people read, write, and perform on board ships; in fact, before Ben and I made contact, I had alluded to the episode off the coast of Sierra Leone in the introduction to a volume of essays on this topic.

The Hamlet Voyage

Ben didn’t simply want to talk to a fellow Shakespeare enthusiast; he wanted my help in developing a play about the possible performance of Hamlet. With staggering energy and imagination, he then realised this vision over the following eighteen months, commissioning a script from the British-Nigerian playwright Rex Obano (who had written previously on Africa and early modern England, and who had also, before becoming a playwright, been an actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company) and involving a team of academics and creative practitioners with expertise relating to the story. With the help of Jiamiao Chen, who worked as a research assistant, my role in the project was to locate and help interpret primary and secondary literature concerning the third voyage of the East India Company—and in addition, to help Rex and Ben think about shipboard theatricals and about the texts of Hamlet with which the English sailors might have been working.

We trialled the first draft of Rex’s script at the University of Bristol’s Department of Theatre over the summer of 2021, working with student volunteers, and then ran a second series of workshops that autumn at the Trinity Centre in Easton, where Ben invited members of Bristol’s West African and South Asian communities to watch rehearsals and ask questions. With support from several funding bodies, including Arts Council England, the University of Bristol’s Participatory Research Fund and its Impact Acceleration Fund, and the Fenton Arts Trust, The Hamlet Voyage—as the play was titled—went into rehearsal in London in the early summer of 2022. I travelled to London to speak to the cast about the historical background of the play and about why (and how) people might have performed Shakespeare during a long voyage; in addition, I helped the actors playing English sailors to rehearse the scenes from Shakespeare that Rex had incorporated into his play.

The Bristol Harbour Festival

The Hamlet Voyage premiered at the 2022 Bristol Harbour Festival on board the Matthew, the replica of the ship on which John Cabot sailed from Bristol to Newfoundland in 1497; it then transferred to London for a run at the Bridewell Theatre. On the morning of the first performance, Rex and I spoke about the play on BBC Radio Bristol, and the interviewer asked the question that I’ve been asked countless times since: Did this performance of Hamlet really happen? I direct anyone wishing for a response to that question to the piece I wrote for the project’s website.

The Hamlet Voyage performed at the Bristol Harbour Festival, 2022. Image Credit: Edward Felton

The Hamlet Voyage performed aboard The Matthew in Bristol. Image Credit: Edward Felton

Education Outreach

That website was also the basis for an education programme that reached around 200 students across four Bristol schools in 2022. Across four sessions, students were asked to think about the possible performance of Hamlet in a number of different ways: for example, through West African forms of storytelling and through English modes of record-keeping (specifically, diary-writing).

Future Projects

Working on this project has influenced my work in a number of ways. I now have a better sense of what is involved in turning research into a creative output, and I’ve been inspired to keep reading and thinking about the early voyages of the EIC: I’m now writing an essay on those journeys for a volume of essays to be produced by Migration Mobilities Bristol, a Strategic Research Institute at the University of Bristol. I’m also working with Rosie Hunt from Bristol’s School of Education to develop a series of Shakespeare-related materials linked to the project and aimed at A-Level and GCSE students.

The Hamlet Voyage performed at the Bridewell Theatre, London. Image Credit: Dan Fearon

The Hamlet Voyage performed at the Bridewell Theatre, London. Image Credit: Dan Fearon

Even if it never happened—and I keep changing my mind over whether it did or didn’t—this performance of Hamlet off the coast of Sierra Leone is a wonderful story to think with, posing questions concerning the social dynamics of shipboard spaces; the place of Shakespeare in histories of globalization and imperialism; and the role of theatre in diplomatic and cultural exchange. Among all the video calls I held during the pandemic, the one with Ben in January 2021 was by some distance the most consequential.

Dr Laurence Publicover is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English with research interests in Shakespeare and other English Renaissance dramatists and in the relationship between humans and oceans. To find out more about Laurence’s research and The Hamlet Voyage, please email l.publicover@bristol.ac.uk