An in conversation with director Emily Adams, discussing beauty standard BS and trend cycles ahead of the upcoming premiere of She’s F***ing Tired at the Camden Fringe on Tuesday 6th August 2024, 6:00pm at The Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton.
Jodie: She’s F***ing Tired grapples with the absurdity of beauty standards and relentless rigmarole of trend cycles, how did you come to decision to navigate the beauty standard BS within multi-disciplinary performance art?
Emily: I always had the idea to project the social media content as I wanted the audience to experience it with the dancers. The screen essentially becomes a third performer, dictating what the two live performers do. I felt this creates more impact than two performers scrolling on their phones and engages the audience in trends that they’ve probably seen before. The audience becomes, not just an observer of the performance, but a consumer of the content, allowing them to take the performers journey, and perhaps, their own. The performance involves a lot of acting out trends, but contemporary dance is used to express when they’re tired of the BS and expel all the chaos. This style of dance can be about your own way of moving, so contemporary helps portray their individual and connected journeys with their bodies.
Jodie: What methods of creation and exploration are called upon within She’s F***ing Tired; from where did you source ingredients for your recipe for a weighted, yet humorous, social commentary?
Emily: I devised an initial idea of an exaggerated performance where the performers are increasingly inundated with trends. All the trend content came from TikTok, and essentially became a script for the performers to follow, replicating how we, in our own lives, see content on our feeds and are sometimes persuaded to buy or do something. To emphasise the overwhelming amount of content on social media and the impact it can have, the performers try to follow every video they see. What begins as a fun makeover and following dance trends becomes a chaotic struggle to constantly keep up with the ever-changing trends.
On the other hand, social media videos also provided the body positive messages that we use in the performance, which shows how social media can be nourishing when we follow content with good affirmations around beauty and our bodies. Through prompts and direction, the performers brought a lot of their own movement into their performance, which shows their individual ways of releasing from societal pressures and relearning who they are when they’re not worrying about society’s standards.
Reading books and articles, watching films, and attending exhibitions on women and beauty standards, has shown me how prevalent these ideals have always been across many forms of media. Today, social media continues to perpetuate these damaging and unrealistic beauty standards. My own learning and understanding have shaped the direction the performance takes and the message I want to share.
Jodie: What is it that you hope audiences take away from She’s F***ing Tired?
I hope audiences will understand that they can enjoy following trends but to be mindful of when it’s going too far, and when our own self-worth and how we see how selves become affected. I want the audience to have fun and relate to the show, but I want to encourage them to think. I hope they begin to question the content they’re scrolling and the people they’re following and ask themselves; is this making me happy or am I feeling less than the person I’m watching? We can get sucked into the blackhole of scrolling and spend hours consuming content, so we need to be mindful of what we’re consuming.
With the rise of TikTok trends and overconsumption in the fashion and beauty industries, it feels important to keep this conversation going. It’s getting harder and harder to be ourselves and enjoy who we are naturally. We compare ourselves and chase ideals that are not natural to us and every one of us feels the pressure of these standards. Society continues to tell us there are things wrong with us and then sells us procedures, clothes, and tools to ‘fix’ us. I ask; what if the only thing we need to fix is how we see ourselves?
I feel this performance is an important reminder to embrace who we are without all the BS. The materials on us are far less important than the person we are inside and the knowledge that we have.
I believe to be ourselves, is to be beautiful.
And I hope the audience will believe that too.
She’s F***ing Tired is showing at the Camden Fringe on Tuesday 6th August 2024, 6:00pm. For more information or to book tickets head to Camden Fringe.