Content for this page was contributed by Caroline Waters, Dance Nation undergraduate dramaturg.
Consistent with Barron’s writing process, Dance Nation “came out of an application.” The 10 pages originally written developed into a full-length script, chock-full of personal details, one of which is Barron’s relationship with self-esteem as a teen: “I felt bad about myself all the time when I was 13. But I would have these moments [....] where I just felt like I ruled the world. [....] And sometimes I feel like it was the most powerful I’ve ever felt in my entire life.” She situates the reclamation of “pussy” within her young characters’ nascent empowerment: “When they’re whispering “pussy,” it feels a little bit prickly for people who don’t like that word, I hope that by the end of the play, when they’re doing the chant, and it’s so clearly rooted in a source of internal power [....] that the word kind of transforms into something mythic.”
Regena Thomashauer, or “Mama Gena,” centered herself in the movement to reclaim the word “pussy” with her book: Pussy, A Reclamation. Mama Gena’s central argument revolves around her religious view of the vagina, which she associates with the Divine Feminine. She blames patriarchal institutions for removing the pussy from its divine history and imbuing it with patriarchal meaning (think Trump explaining his sexual assaults using the word “pussy”). By reclaiming the word, Mama Gena hopes to recharge it with the divine, life-giving, redoubtable feminine power it used to be ascribed (Mama Gena references some old agricultural society whose women beckoned wheat to grow to reach their pussies). The reclamation of this inner power on a wide scale is her first step to taking down the patriarchy, “Until a woman knows her own majesty there would be no communicating with men to get them to understand who we are.”
