Jake Mace
We’re celebrating the opening of Prague Fringe by shining a light on a number of shows headed to the festival this week. Becka McFadden from Beautiful Confusion Collective is the performer of autobiographical piece Black Dress. The show is described as a euphoric exploration of nonbinary femme identity told through story, dance and 12 black dresses from Becka’s own wardrobe. We caught up with Becka for a pixelated pint to dive into the show.
You can catch Black Dress as part of Prague Fringe from the 29th-31st May at various times at Divadlo Inspirace. Tickets are available through the Prague Fringe Box Office.
Jake: Hi Becka! You describe your show Black Dress as a “euphoric exploration of nonbinary femme identity told through story, dance and 12 black dresses.” Tell us more about the concept and what inspired it.
Becka: Black Dress is about the dissonance between who you know yourself to be and how you are perceived. I had been thinking about my relationship to gender and sexuality since childhood and always felt that something was different about me, but — to paraphrase an adrienne maree brown quote we have in the show — “I didn’t have the language for that.” Around 2018, I felt a greater sense of urgency to find that language and it was also a moment where there was more visibility of people with expansive relationships to gender in the cultural space. That’s how I came across the term nonbinary femme, initially in an essay by American poet Joanna C. Valente, and I thought ok, this is closer to my experience than anything I have encountered before.
The idea to make a show about this came later and emerged quite organically — I started playing with black dresses, which I have always loved and had a lot of, dancing in them and telling stories about them — at a workshop in June of 2020, took a rail of them on a residency later that summer where I showed an early work in progress and the piece evolved from there. I suppose the conetp, early on, was that two things can be true at once — I can have these dresses and enjoy them AND I can not feel like a woman. Those things are not mutually exclusive. So that is my experience and then, as is the case whenever I make a solo show, I want to place that experience in dialogue with others, so that the solo can become choral, and that is achieved here by weaving in quotes from queer theorists, artists and social media influencers. That kind of research was going on alongside the performance-making — lots of reading, gathering and collaging.
Jake: How did you come to develop the piece, and who have been your co-collaborators? Tell us a bit about the process of creating Black Dress.
Becka: Black Dress was one of the most relaxed and pleasant creation processes I have ever had. We were fortunate to find support and co-production partners at each stage of the process: Venuše ve Švehlovce, SE.S.TA Centre for Choreographic Development, the University of Worcester and the Plum Yard in Malovice all supported this project. After the initial explorations I did in the summer of 2020, I knew I wanted to work on this piece with my friend and collaborator, Worcester-based artist Daniel Somerville. Daniel played an important role in helping to shape the dramaturgy of the piece and clarifying the movement vocabulary.
The content of the show also emerged in part from our many talks over the years about performance, queer identities and queer theory. I also worked with Prague-based Ukrainian multimedia artist Mariia Reshetova, who created video art for the performance — when we perform in theatres, the production includes an exhibition with the video art, books and objects that were part of the creation process. Later on in the process we worked with Filip Obermajer on lighting and technical design, Eva Ullrichová on the Czech translation of the show and Markéta Pščolková as assistant director. We also have an excellent team on production.
In developing the piece, there were two very important guiding principles — one was to say everything I thought (in an elegantly distilled format, of course) and hold nothing back and the other was to prioritise pleasure, a strategy inspired by Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown, which, in short, makes the case that it is possible to do challenging, difficult and necessary things without relinquishing pleasure and wellbeing.
Jake: What are you hoping the audience might take away from the experience, if anything?
Becka: That you can’t always tell who someone is by looking at them, so it’s great when we can let go of assumptions. And also that it’s good to feel and prioritise pleasure, even when doing challenging things.
Jake: Tell us about how the show has ended up being performed at Prague Fringe, and what you’re most excited for about the festival.
Becka: I performed at Prague Fringe for the first time in 2005 in my first professional production, so this is the twentieth anniversary of that, which is kind of hard to believe. I am based in Prague and wanted to perform in the festival to connect with new audiences here as well as those travelling here for Prague Fringe.
Jake: Given the themes of Binge Fringe, if your show was a beverage of any kind (alcoholic, non-alcoholic – be as creative as you like!), what would it be and why?
Becka: An espresso tonic — it can sound perplexing at first, but once you’ve tried it, you’re going to want another one.
A reminder, you can catch Black Dress as part of Prague Fringe from the 29th-31st May at various times at Divadlo Inspirace. Tickets are available through the Prague Fringe Box Office.
Elisabeth Flett
Freddie Haberfellner
