ARTIST BIOS Mike Biskup received a Bachelor in Music from NYU and a Master's in Music Education from Montclair State University. He performed in and around NYC from 2000-2016. He now lives in Wilmington, NC and plays with Petrichor and writes music under the name michaelbiskup and Names Mai.
Karola Lüttringhaus, Ph.D. studied Art History and Philosophy at the Freie Universität Berlin before transferring to dance, earning a BFA in Modern Dance/Choreography from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Karola holds an MFA in Scenic/Exhibition Design from the Technische Universität Berlin and a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California Davis (2024). Karola ist the founder and Artistic Director of Alban Elved Dance Company and the SARUS Festival for Site-specific & Experimental Art. They create and facilitate interdisciplinary performance work and teach choreography and dance. Inspired by the Axis Syllabus©, they developed "BII – The Body’s Intrinsic Intelligence", a pedagogical philosophy and movement education framework, emphasizing individuated articular alignment parameters and the liberation of the body from injurious western concert dance training practices. Their research, “Tracing Gesture: Choreographing Meaning”, theorizes choreography as embodied philosophy, investigating the interrelations between movement and thought. They currently serve as Technical Director for Cape Fear Community College Theatre productions and previously taught BII at UC Davis and Salem College. |
ANSWERS
(in the order that they are submitted to me) COMING SOON! I have received many answers from people already... stay tuned! With "What's A Woman?" I am asking the viewer to contemplate the markers of this category and whether it is worth holding on to and why. In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her book "The Second Sex" that a woman is not born, but made.
Should we attempt, at least in our thinking mind, to expand the definitions, or embed the fairly narrow categories of "man" and "woman" within a broader array of categories, accepting a more complex view of humanity, beyond the binary. If we expand the categories of man and woman to hold more of each other's assigned characteristics, could we then not just let go of these categories all together? What do we need them for? If we acknowledge that men not only can, but naturally are, nurturing, and women in turn are assertive leaders, doesn't that render the division unnecessary? What do we gain from upholding these reductive categories? How are "female" and "woman" different from one another? We are getting all kinds of things mixed up in the discussion around what makes a woman. Let's straighten out the mess by embracing the messiness and learning to live with complexity. If someone identifies with some kind of clear category of a woman that's all good. It just seems unacceptable to sort, conform, and police all of humanity into one of two categories. Surely we can be more nuanced than that. |
ABOUT THE PIECE
The idea for this piece has been percolating for many years. All my life, really. A first concept emerged when I designed scenery and costumes for Macbeth the opera in 2013. The idea was that the split between men and women created a humanity that consisted of only two types of ideal gender manifestations: mothers and rulers. Two archetypes that have an unhealthy co-dependent relationship with one another.
Lady Macbeth has no name of her own. She represents one part of a binary: the female gender. She personifies an aspect of a person whose other half is Macbeth. In her speech in act 1 scene 5 she pleads for the removal of her feminine qualities so that she can commit murder without guilt and make a grab for power. Why would she tie having a conscience to femininity? Why does she liken it to weakness? Why do we find it believable that billions of people can be assigned into a hierarchical binary with distinct and opposite, co-dependent and mutually excluding characteristics and abilities?
Family therapist Terry Real conceptualizes "the 3 rings of partriarchy": 1) the binary: all humans are divided into two genders and each gender is assigned specific characteristics and roles 2) the dance of contempt: masculine traits are valued more highly than feminine traits which causes contempt towards the feminine (in all people) 3) the Core Collusion: all people unconsciously participate in and reinforce the system, boys learn to become emotionally hardened and incensitive, girls lose their voice and are coerced to not speak up and essentially forget what they know, which is that the system is rigged, abusive, and harmful to all who are part of it.
The idea for this piece has been percolating for many years. All my life, really. A first concept emerged when I designed scenery and costumes for Macbeth the opera in 2013. The idea was that the split between men and women created a humanity that consisted of only two types of ideal gender manifestations: mothers and rulers. Two archetypes that have an unhealthy co-dependent relationship with one another.
Lady Macbeth has no name of her own. She represents one part of a binary: the female gender. She personifies an aspect of a person whose other half is Macbeth. In her speech in act 1 scene 5 she pleads for the removal of her feminine qualities so that she can commit murder without guilt and make a grab for power. Why would she tie having a conscience to femininity? Why does she liken it to weakness? Why do we find it believable that billions of people can be assigned into a hierarchical binary with distinct and opposite, co-dependent and mutually excluding characteristics and abilities?
Family therapist Terry Real conceptualizes "the 3 rings of partriarchy": 1) the binary: all humans are divided into two genders and each gender is assigned specific characteristics and roles 2) the dance of contempt: masculine traits are valued more highly than feminine traits which causes contempt towards the feminine (in all people) 3) the Core Collusion: all people unconsciously participate in and reinforce the system, boys learn to become emotionally hardened and incensitive, girls lose their voice and are coerced to not speak up and essentially forget what they know, which is that the system is rigged, abusive, and harmful to all who are part of it.
Psychologist Carol Gilligan, Ph.D: says: "The price for women of speaking out is huge. The incentives that are offered to women for not speaking are enormous. If you don't say what you really feel and think, of you don't say what you know first hand on the basis of experience, but you learn what other people want you to say, want you to know, then you will be loved, you will be promoted, and patriarchy depends for it's continuation on make violence or the threat of male violence, to hold it's hierarchy of male privilege and power in place; and in female silence, to keep it's secrets, because the thing about women is: we live with men; so we know what can't be known if patriarchy is going to persist.
There is an injunction to keep girls from knowing what they knew..."
In the play, Macbeth he is pressured to prove his masculinity by committing murder and becoming a king. He can only be killed by a man who is not born of a woman. Does power increase when it is untouched by the feminine? To this day there is a fear of contagion from the feminine. If a man in any way appears feminine, he is ridiculed and punished. Shakespeare's Macbeth is a play about gender roles and their linkages to power, humanity, and insanity. The play features witches that are distinctly un-gendered: "you should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so." They inhabit a liminal existence that affords them magical powers of foresight precisely because they hold the complexity of viewpoints within them. They live on the fringes of society, yet they are consulted to view how things were, are, and will be. It is the witches that foretell the future of the gender struggle and the insanity that ensues from this hierarchical gender rift.
One could say that Lady Macbeth is going mad because women are incapable of holding power, or, we could conclude that the stripping away of the qualities assigned to the female gender causes insanity, war, and murder. By categorizing certain traits as undesirable or minor and associating them with female bodies creates misogyny. And it is the internalization of this that is especially insidious. Lady Macbeth suffers at her own hands but none of the rules she acts by are her own.
Shakespeare renders a hierarchically gendered world that is essentially made up of mothers and rulers. The nurturers have no power, they can only refill, bring more bodies into this world to be destroyed. They are infantilized and stripped of influence. Shakespeare's plays give voice to the feminine, to complexity and a wisdom that recognizes what we call the female, its experiences and characteristics, the yin, if you will, as rich and invaluable to being fully human. In Macbeth, Shakespeare meditates on what happens if we loose it's influence: war, murder, hierarchical social structures, hatred, contempt, self loathing, self denial, and ultimately depression and insanity.
Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are personifications of the two halves of a person.Their partitioning into two opposites, compassion and callousness, is what's causing a ripple effect through the entire land. Shakespeare also examines similar ideas in "A Midsummer Nights Dream" through struggles for power between Oberon and Titania. The conflict between supernatural powers causes suffering in the world. The inner conflict that is created by having to fit into one of two ways of being by nature of our sex, denying our complexity, ultimately causes emotional and physical disruption and potentially some form of death.
I propose
Without taking anything away from you personally, and really only adding on to who you can allow yourself to be, I invite you to question the web of associations that we have come to accept through socialization, through ridicule, punishment, and shaming. Changing the gendered system that is tied into socio- economic meshworks seems unsurmountable and so it's easier to lash out and defend what has come to feel like the natural order of things because our system's compass is calibrated to shame , to conformism, to belonging. Belonging is fundamentally registration for us. Alok Vaid-Menon asks: "Which parts of your self did you have to suppress in order to be loved?" Most likely, the more intensely you feel threatened by my question the more energy and thought you spent on creating and upholding your category. What will you lose if more categories open up?
Vaid-Menon says: "Wherever there's aggression, there's repression; some amount of emotional silencing."
Relationship therapist Esther Perel says: " when you begin to change these roles...how do you not, as a woman, say "you know I've been in my masculine all day" What does that mean? Am I in my masculine here, I've been working the whole day.(Perel herself), I'm not in anything. I'm in my working mode. Why am I in my masculine? Because I had to take authority,because I have responsibility, because I have agency? Because I'm commanding the room? Is that masculine? Or s that just competent, professional...! Part of this is: when is it important to have a gendered conversation and when is it actualy not useful to have a genedered conversation."
Perel stresses the importance of not conflating gender with everything else. We are stuck in gendered thinking. Everything is gendered and on top of that it is hierarchical.
This has always felt extremely wrong to me, and ever since I was a child I felt the need to defend myself from the accusation of fitting into a category. Into a hierarchy. It never felt natural because it isn't. It is completely delusional. The gendered hierarchy has become unbearable to me. This gendered way of thinking is tainting and distorting everything we experience.
The gender binary simultaneously creates an unhealthy rift and a codependent interdependence between the two binary categories, leading to estrangement, confusion, hatred, oppression, and idolization. It creates a world of mothers and rulers. The picture is sadly skewed and entirely built on illusions that in order to be upheld have to be denied and enforced violently.
To try to give "women" more rights and respect, we expand the attributes of women and the things they are allowed to wear, say, and do, but expanding the categories essentially does away with them. They are not helpful. We are starting the whole thing from the wrong end. Women are also strong, women are also leaders,...but they are more nurturing than men. But men can also be nurturing. This is circular thinking that makes no sense. People are empathetic, caring, nurturing, assertive, creative people.
Lilla Watson famously wrote: " If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together". We don't need men to help women gain equal rights. We need people of all genders, classes, and backgrounds to realize that our liberation is mutual and inter-affective. The patriarchal system harms men profoundly. It supports and upholds an oppressive, hierarchical way of thinking and it spills over into all other aspects of life, socio-economic, environmental, personal, educational, and so on.
Gendering happens from before birth. We speak to our children differently, touch them more or less often, challenge them unevenly, based on gender. We are designing this self fulfilling prophesy.
Pause to consider my question "What's A Woman" or a man....or what do you think about gendered thinking and social structures....and write your answer into the "Audience Responses" on the right.
Carol Gilligan and Terry Real: https://youtu.be/wn4QiDpaWOE?si=vrRAXO6qHxZqyrmQ
Alok Vaid-Menon
Esther Perel, The Masculinity Paradox Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5sDXJoRbcI
Lilla Watson
These were the words of Lilla Watson, an indigenous activist from Australia, at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi.
https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589526c006
Alok Vaid-Menon
has many valubale and insightful things to say about gender and the need to consider trauma, colonialization, oppression and lack of self respect. Vaid-Menon said" Which parts of yourself did you have to suppress in order to be loved?" The I was beaten, I deserved it, or, I turned out alright mentality is a pathetic attempts at rationalizing and defending the violence done to us. Gender violence lies at the heart of the violence of gender and at the core of violence against women and gender non-conforming people.The pathologization of gender expression is a sign for the deep misunderstanding of human psychology and the violence and abuse that we normalize and idolize as supposedly strengthening in our society.
If you feel threatened by fluid or unconventional gender expression consider if you censoring yourself and the hurt and effort that it took to do that might be the source of envy towards another that expresses themselves freely. Why should other people be free when I have invested so much into fitting myself into the required and accepted category?! How dare you just do what you want?! "Vaid-Menon says: "when they have to contend with us they are reactivated in this childhood resentment that says: What do you mean we don't ever have to grow up in this way!? And instead of being able to say 'it hurts to see you because I have to reconsider all the lies I was told by my family and my culture, that I had to leave creativity, abandon wonder, suppress the parts of me that were most idiosyncratic. It is so much easier to dismiss you as foolish and naive. when you realize that you actually feel so much grace and mercy for these people because you're like *' Oh! You're just having a reaction to yourself."
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qKYHAA61Usw
Bell Hooks says: rather than giving up the stereotype they create a special category for that person...rather than saying my categories … were too narrow…” she continues: “...I think people are hungry for provocative voices that go to the heart of the matter. Because people want answers to things that they are in crisis about…. People are really hungry for truth.”
Ultimately, this piece invites audiences to question the social web that enforces gendered hierarchies and to imagine more complex ways of being human. Rather than expanding the categories of “man” and “woman,” it proposes loosening their hold altogether—embracing ambiguity, multiplicity, and the possibility that liberation is collective. As Indigenous activist Lilla Watson famously observed, true change emerges when we recognize that our freedom is bound together.
Bell Hooks
Speaking Freely: Bell Hooks interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bmnwehlpA
There is an injunction to keep girls from knowing what they knew..."
In the play, Macbeth he is pressured to prove his masculinity by committing murder and becoming a king. He can only be killed by a man who is not born of a woman. Does power increase when it is untouched by the feminine? To this day there is a fear of contagion from the feminine. If a man in any way appears feminine, he is ridiculed and punished. Shakespeare's Macbeth is a play about gender roles and their linkages to power, humanity, and insanity. The play features witches that are distinctly un-gendered: "you should be women, and yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so." They inhabit a liminal existence that affords them magical powers of foresight precisely because they hold the complexity of viewpoints within them. They live on the fringes of society, yet they are consulted to view how things were, are, and will be. It is the witches that foretell the future of the gender struggle and the insanity that ensues from this hierarchical gender rift.
One could say that Lady Macbeth is going mad because women are incapable of holding power, or, we could conclude that the stripping away of the qualities assigned to the female gender causes insanity, war, and murder. By categorizing certain traits as undesirable or minor and associating them with female bodies creates misogyny. And it is the internalization of this that is especially insidious. Lady Macbeth suffers at her own hands but none of the rules she acts by are her own.
Shakespeare renders a hierarchically gendered world that is essentially made up of mothers and rulers. The nurturers have no power, they can only refill, bring more bodies into this world to be destroyed. They are infantilized and stripped of influence. Shakespeare's plays give voice to the feminine, to complexity and a wisdom that recognizes what we call the female, its experiences and characteristics, the yin, if you will, as rich and invaluable to being fully human. In Macbeth, Shakespeare meditates on what happens if we loose it's influence: war, murder, hierarchical social structures, hatred, contempt, self loathing, self denial, and ultimately depression and insanity.
Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are personifications of the two halves of a person.Their partitioning into two opposites, compassion and callousness, is what's causing a ripple effect through the entire land. Shakespeare also examines similar ideas in "A Midsummer Nights Dream" through struggles for power between Oberon and Titania. The conflict between supernatural powers causes suffering in the world. The inner conflict that is created by having to fit into one of two ways of being by nature of our sex, denying our complexity, ultimately causes emotional and physical disruption and potentially some form of death.
I propose
- to let go of binary thinking
- to let go of hierarchical thinking
- to view people as human beings
- to stop assigning abilities and characteristics, such as compassion, nurturing, strength, resilience, empathy, beauty, aggression, etc to one gender or another
- to stop gendering clothing, colors, textures, fabrics, toys,...
- to stop muddling the waters by conflating feminine or masculine with male or female sex. Being a man does not make you anything but human, actually. Stop putting people in boxes that don't fit.
- identify however you want, but open up your heart to the other categories that exist, that the binary denies
- accept complexity
- accept uncertainty
- accept that life is messy and unpredictable, it's ok
- to consider the binary as a regime that extends beyond the human experience and causes tremendous harm, has caused tremendous harm. You can see that if you look a bit closer.
Without taking anything away from you personally, and really only adding on to who you can allow yourself to be, I invite you to question the web of associations that we have come to accept through socialization, through ridicule, punishment, and shaming. Changing the gendered system that is tied into socio- economic meshworks seems unsurmountable and so it's easier to lash out and defend what has come to feel like the natural order of things because our system's compass is calibrated to shame , to conformism, to belonging. Belonging is fundamentally registration for us. Alok Vaid-Menon asks: "Which parts of your self did you have to suppress in order to be loved?" Most likely, the more intensely you feel threatened by my question the more energy and thought you spent on creating and upholding your category. What will you lose if more categories open up?
Vaid-Menon says: "Wherever there's aggression, there's repression; some amount of emotional silencing."
Relationship therapist Esther Perel says: " when you begin to change these roles...how do you not, as a woman, say "you know I've been in my masculine all day" What does that mean? Am I in my masculine here, I've been working the whole day.(Perel herself), I'm not in anything. I'm in my working mode. Why am I in my masculine? Because I had to take authority,because I have responsibility, because I have agency? Because I'm commanding the room? Is that masculine? Or s that just competent, professional...! Part of this is: when is it important to have a gendered conversation and when is it actualy not useful to have a genedered conversation."
Perel stresses the importance of not conflating gender with everything else. We are stuck in gendered thinking. Everything is gendered and on top of that it is hierarchical.
This has always felt extremely wrong to me, and ever since I was a child I felt the need to defend myself from the accusation of fitting into a category. Into a hierarchy. It never felt natural because it isn't. It is completely delusional. The gendered hierarchy has become unbearable to me. This gendered way of thinking is tainting and distorting everything we experience.
The gender binary simultaneously creates an unhealthy rift and a codependent interdependence between the two binary categories, leading to estrangement, confusion, hatred, oppression, and idolization. It creates a world of mothers and rulers. The picture is sadly skewed and entirely built on illusions that in order to be upheld have to be denied and enforced violently.
To try to give "women" more rights and respect, we expand the attributes of women and the things they are allowed to wear, say, and do, but expanding the categories essentially does away with them. They are not helpful. We are starting the whole thing from the wrong end. Women are also strong, women are also leaders,...but they are more nurturing than men. But men can also be nurturing. This is circular thinking that makes no sense. People are empathetic, caring, nurturing, assertive, creative people.
Lilla Watson famously wrote: " If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together". We don't need men to help women gain equal rights. We need people of all genders, classes, and backgrounds to realize that our liberation is mutual and inter-affective. The patriarchal system harms men profoundly. It supports and upholds an oppressive, hierarchical way of thinking and it spills over into all other aspects of life, socio-economic, environmental, personal, educational, and so on.
Gendering happens from before birth. We speak to our children differently, touch them more or less often, challenge them unevenly, based on gender. We are designing this self fulfilling prophesy.
Pause to consider my question "What's A Woman" or a man....or what do you think about gendered thinking and social structures....and write your answer into the "Audience Responses" on the right.
Carol Gilligan and Terry Real: https://youtu.be/wn4QiDpaWOE?si=vrRAXO6qHxZqyrmQ
Alok Vaid-Menon
Esther Perel, The Masculinity Paradox Q&A: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5sDXJoRbcI
Lilla Watson
These were the words of Lilla Watson, an indigenous activist from Australia, at the 1985 United Nations Decade for Women Conference in Nairobi.
https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589526c006
Alok Vaid-Menon
has many valubale and insightful things to say about gender and the need to consider trauma, colonialization, oppression and lack of self respect. Vaid-Menon said" Which parts of yourself did you have to suppress in order to be loved?" The I was beaten, I deserved it, or, I turned out alright mentality is a pathetic attempts at rationalizing and defending the violence done to us. Gender violence lies at the heart of the violence of gender and at the core of violence against women and gender non-conforming people.The pathologization of gender expression is a sign for the deep misunderstanding of human psychology and the violence and abuse that we normalize and idolize as supposedly strengthening in our society.
If you feel threatened by fluid or unconventional gender expression consider if you censoring yourself and the hurt and effort that it took to do that might be the source of envy towards another that expresses themselves freely. Why should other people be free when I have invested so much into fitting myself into the required and accepted category?! How dare you just do what you want?! "Vaid-Menon says: "when they have to contend with us they are reactivated in this childhood resentment that says: What do you mean we don't ever have to grow up in this way!? And instead of being able to say 'it hurts to see you because I have to reconsider all the lies I was told by my family and my culture, that I had to leave creativity, abandon wonder, suppress the parts of me that were most idiosyncratic. It is so much easier to dismiss you as foolish and naive. when you realize that you actually feel so much grace and mercy for these people because you're like *' Oh! You're just having a reaction to yourself."
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qKYHAA61Usw
Bell Hooks says: rather than giving up the stereotype they create a special category for that person...rather than saying my categories … were too narrow…” she continues: “...I think people are hungry for provocative voices that go to the heart of the matter. Because people want answers to things that they are in crisis about…. People are really hungry for truth.”
Ultimately, this piece invites audiences to question the social web that enforces gendered hierarchies and to imagine more complex ways of being human. Rather than expanding the categories of “man” and “woman,” it proposes loosening their hold altogether—embracing ambiguity, multiplicity, and the possibility that liberation is collective. As Indigenous activist Lilla Watson famously observed, true change emerges when we recognize that our freedom is bound together.
Bell Hooks
Speaking Freely: Bell Hooks interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2bmnwehlpA
Photo of Karola Luettringhaus by John Turner
