In the box section after the soldiers have taken the boxes and we are left with the jackets, Simon wanted for us form a circle and begin to waltz with our empty jackets or with the ghosts of the men we once had. I think it's a beautiful idea and everyone else agrees. I think it pulls at the heartstrings a bit because these women have just received their husbands belongings and are grieving. Death is a hard thing to come to terms with and can take years to finish mourning. We have something that still has their smell and proof that they wore them, their jackets. They're roughly the size of our men and it's almost like they're there if we tried hard enough to picture them. In the 20s, waltzing was something couples would do or something you would do on a date and that's where the idea of waltzing in this section came from. We're all waltzing with these empty jackets then after we've done a full circle we come to a gradual stop and just hold the jackets, look up at Catherine who is still waltzing, drop the jackets and leave. We watch Catherine and are upset because her husband is alive and ours have died. We feel jealous and cheated but that is the point where it hits us that's they're not coming back.
To help us grasp the basics of waltzing, we had a teacher from the dance department come in for an hour and teach us how to waltz. I present you with a video that covers what we learnt:
Everyone worked this out in their own time and some of us understood it quicker than others. We started off by doing it in our own spaces then we moved into the circle formation that we would be doing it in the performance. Ah, that was painful. As we had all been doing it at our own paces some of us went straight into it and carried on swiftly whilst others stopped and started again. So we all started bumping into each other and got confused when we so much as looked at each other's feet. It was easier to understand if you had some background in dancing though because I do ballet and there are similar foot movements but I still got confused if I thought too much about what I was doing. This section will come together in it';s own time if we practise a little bit in our own time.
Talk about the relevance of this and how many women had the belongings of their deceased men sent back to them. Do some research on what would have been inside, what the boxes looked like, how the women coped after, etc.
This box section is the part we do after the soldiers die and it contains other sections I have mentioned on my blog. The boxes contained belongings of our men who were no more and it was routine to send these boxes back to soldier's family. In this box would be their jacket and other items that could be recovered that they held dear to them. Soldiers would keep a box of their belongings when they were on the front and if this box was still in a reasonable condition, it would be sent back or belongings and the jacket would be moved into a new box and sent home.
This is how the box section (just the boxes) goes like this:
Hesitantly open the box
Slowly pick up the jacket inside (this will be at the top) and just hold it, smell it, embrace it. You can smell him on this so you treasure this item.
Put the jacket on yourself or on your shoulders
If you have another item such as a ring or a necklace, look at this and put it on.
You find a pile of letters that were sent to him. You look through them hoping that one might be addressed to you, an unsent letter. You can't find anything yet so you look through them quicker and get frustrated then you finally find an envelope addressed to you. Put all the letters down and open your envelope.
We do the letter section where we have our own lines we chose from real letters soldiers wrote. We start this off by one person saying "Dear Vivian" then we all say our names. We close this similarly by saying "love from Jacob" and we all said our men's names.
The men came back on and took off our boxes, we were left with the jackets and the waltz section begins.
When all the men started going off to the war, the women had to start going to work in order to support themselves and their families. This was an unusual role in society for women to do as society was quite patriachal in those days so the men were the ones who went out to work and the women were to stay at home, cook, clean and look after the children.
The Suffragettes movement had started fighting for the women's rights to vote in the late 19th century so for the women fighting for this, it was a chance to prove what women were capable of.
We devised a section separate from our box section and it begun with short movement pieces dedicated to showing the work women would undertake such as manual labour and office work such as newspaper printing and call centres. We used a part of Liyah and Brit's duet where they had physicalised the work women did at home and at their jobs and how it affected them.
