Rolling In The Pink

A research project on the emotion of female anger and the collective body.

Spring 2023, Berlin.

Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media within the NEUSTART KULTUR programme.  

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Rolling in the Pink was a research project conceptualizing female anger as a dramaturgical question. Developing the master's thesis The Dramaturgy of the Dead Female Body | Femicide Is Not Poetic (HfMT Hamburg), it approached anger as a moral emotion—a sign that someone cares for things to be fair—and asked whether it could become a dramaturgical entrance into the themes of gender and discrimination.​ At its core was a set of questions about the stereotypes certain emotions carry in relation to gender: How is anger embodied? Is it really as static and one-dimensional—in voice, in body, in form—as it is so often expected to be? Does anger have a gender? Do emotions have gender at all, or only the genders we assign to their expression?​ At stake was a single premise: that the way anger is allowed to appear is a matter of performativity and that what is performed can be performed otherwise. From this, the project imagined a collective body: not a single character but a composite figure that might hold many femininities and forms of female experience at once, and carry anger as something shared rather than private — a fictional figure to be approached through an aesthetic collage of various performing forms: documentary theatre as testimony, lecture-performance as argument, stand-up comedy as release, and the chorus of Greek ancient drama as collective, depersonalized voice. The questions were informed by the works of Silvia Federici, Judith Butler, and LASTESIS performance collective.