As a company, we have always acknowledged body image to be a very broad topic, covering a number of issues, affecting a variety of people of different genders, ages and ethnicities, and as being influenced by a variety of outside factors; such as social media, magazines and peer pressure.
As part of our ethnographic research, we wanted to work with a younger generation of people to find out what issues they were facing in their lives, whether or not body image was as much of an issue for those young people as it was for ourselves when we were younger, and to discover what pressures they faced in comparison to those that we experienced. We hoped that this would give us a greater understanding of the landscape in which our work would be situated, and to allow us to acknowledge the number of pressures that can contribute to stress around a person’s sense of self, body image included.
To achieve this, we began a four week series of workshops with a youth theatre from York Theatre Royal, with young people aged from 10-14. We saw this as a great opportunity to facilitate sessions that all parties would enjoy, and would also allow us to explore the issues surrounding not only body image, but the pressures faced by the young people.
In our first session, we used different arts and crafts material to allow the young people to create ‘role on the wall’ characters. This activity consisted of drawing an outline of a person on a large roll of paper. This activity encouraged a platform that allowed conversations surrounding the pressures that the young people faced to surface, as they wrote down what pressures they themselves or their peers experienced, such as school pressures, social media or pressure from parents and friends; how they felt in regards to these issues, and some common stereotypes they felt surrounded them. Things that frequently reoccurred were themes surrounding gender expectations, a pressure for girls to be feminine and like pink, and boys to be masculine; the pressure of exceeding in school to impress parents and teachers, and also the pressure to be in a relationship. This in particular surprised us a company, as in regards to the age of the youth theatre members, 10-14, it shocked us that the pressure to be in a relationship was so great so early on.
The use of different materials allowed the young people to not only be creative in their presentation, but also allowed those individuals that were not as vocal as others to find other mediums to communicate with the group. This was visible through young people choosing to cut things out of magazines, such as headlines that spoke to them, or pictures of celebrities. Drawing allowed them to experiment with the identity of the role on the wall, for example adding makeup, which proved to be a big pressure for the girls of the group in particular. Pressure to wear makeup at a young age, and post pictures on to social media with makeup on.
Encouraging the group members to feed back to each other what was on their role on the wall allowed us to hear these pressures being vocalised. It was refreshing for us a company to hear that the majority of the young people were very vocal in rejecting these pressures, and although they acknowledged that pressure was around them and they could see it effecting their peers, they could situate themselves away from the pressure and be who they wanted to be. Working with the young people to locate where these pressures were originating from also proved to be interesting to us and to them, as both school and social media appeared to feature very heavily, . The expectation on young people to excel in academia appeared to be very prominent, and this focus on academia seemed to overrun other aspects of school, as thing such as smoking on site and wearing heavy makeup seemed to often be overlooked if the students were still doing the work that was expected of them. The pressure to have an active online presence in the world of social media was perhaps less surprising to us, as we ourselves as a company are all personally present on social media and have seen first-hand, and experienced the pressures that can exist online. However, it was worrying to hear that young people as young as ten are witnessing the same things as we are online.
The ‘role on the wall’ exercise allowed us to start conversations surrounding body image, which has been one of our aims for our work since day one; to encourage people to talk about something which can be viewed as quite a taboo, hard to talk about topic. Gaining a wider understanding of the pressures that young people face allowed us to cast our minds back to when we were younger, and how the things that we experienced at that age have influenced us today. The idea of growing up, and of progressing through life and life’s pressures is evident in our work, and links back to the title of our piece ‘I don’t think you’re ready’. What are you not ready for? Is it you’re not ready to wear makeup, to embrace your body, to become a woman? These questions are always in our mind and allow us to interrogate our work, and our own feelings in relation to the work, allowing it to be an honest exploration of body image and societal pressures to us, and will hopefully relate to others too.