photo credit  (except pants image):  Gemma Ward

ScotsGay were lucky enough to catch up with performer/writer Rachel Mars and visual artist/live artist nat tarrab, discussing the stimulus behind Tomboy Blues as well as gaining an insight to some future projects –

Although the show can appeal to anybody who has ever felt ‘other’, the focus of much of the show is gender – where did this focus come from?

The show is absolutely about otherness, and the way we create work is to start autobiographically. The focus on gender comes from a desire to playfully explore gender queerness, our experiences of it, other people’s experience of it. At the moment there seems to be a scary reprisal of rigid gender roles for young women, in pre-teen fashion, make-up and role models which we wanted to respond to (and has also prompted brilliant movements like Pink Stinks).

Harriet the Spy, Calamity Jane, Avril Lavigne – what was the criteria to gain a nametag on your set?

The names on our set are all girls and women who are doing it differently and stepping out of the box – from movie characters to pop stars, literary figures to sporting heroes and a bunch of everyday people too.

The component of the work I found most unsettling was the scenes involving the voices of science and fact, unwelcome when examining the complexity of gender and identity – did any particular studies inspire this component of the piece, and what was its intention?

The intention of the lab coated fact-wielding characters is to capture the idea of the ‘people who know’ –  they appear all the time in everyday conversations (the ‘they’ of ‘they say’) but also get internalised. It is these voices that we hear on the outside from society, and from the inside from ourselves, that can make it so hard to just be yourself. They are intended to reflect a narrow minded, unwelcome, restrictive viewpoint on life, gender and identity, in direct opposition to the reality of twenty-first century queer identity.  We hope that they are on the one hand alarming, and on the other hand ridiculous. We read a lot of sociological essays, spoke to psychologists, psychiatrists and paediatricians in order to gather information.

It’s refreshing to see an exploration of tomboyish behaviour, as I think there is a definite lack of such in contrast to projects revolving boys adopting stereotypical feminine attributes. Would you agree? And did you at any point consider including a male viewpoint?

There is definitely a lack of projects relating to female experience full stop – see the Bechdel Rule for measuring the massive lack of representation of female experience in film. It also may be of interest that we worked with a male director on big phases of the process. The fact that we are women writing the female experience does not make it inapplicable to men and their experience. In fact we have found that the particular quality of specific personal truth that we use to make theatre seems to speak to a massively wide audience of all backgrounds, genders and ages.

Alongside your reflection on tomboy behaviour, the piece also explores the ‘theory of disappointment’ – can you expand on this element of the work, and its relationship with the aforementioned ideas?

The Theory of Disappointment was the title of a paper about psychoanalysis which caught our imagination. We used it as a spark to fabricate a theory for the lab-coated characters to spout, which states that disappointment is an inevitable bi-product of human existence. Whilst it is relevant to all human beings, it also suggests that tomboys will go to on to experience chasmic disappointment, as their hopes and expectations for the future are often shaken at adolescence when society demands that you need to be one thing or another. We both definitely experienced massive disappointment at about 12 when all of a sudden everything we had held dear began to become a problem; that you lead you into problematising your female-ness and holding up masculinity as something to aspire to, when actually -in a ideal world- a mash-up of both options and neither needs to be celebrated.

Finally, are you currently developing any other projects?

We are beginning sub-soil germination on a new show about water, swimming across the channel, and getting our mums to train to be heroes. See www.marstarrab.co.uk for future developments.