★★★★☆ A triptych of funny, thought-provoking and often naked feminist dance-theatre

Arts House, Melbourne
June 21, 2016

It’s been a decade since Nic Green and her creative collaborator Laura Bradshaw began developing their uncompromising and unashamedly joyous examination of female identity in the 21st-century, Trilogy. Even further in the past is the seminal Dialogue on Women’s Liberation, held at New York’s Town Hall in 1971. Here, 45-years ago, four great intellects – Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, Diana Trilling and Jacqueline Ceballos, gruffly wrangled by author Norman Mailer – offered probing, eccentric and gloriously irascible perspectives on the crushing subjugation of women and the complexities of the female psyche. A lot has changed since then, and in the ten years since Green created her three-part, three-hour “womanifesto”, as she freely admits in her brief introduction to the work. A lot has changed, and yet some things have remained exactly the same.

Unlike the cast-iron intellectual rigour of that famous 1971 debate, Trilogy doesn’t try to make its point with an academic bludgeoning. Instead, its experimental combination of dance, video, spoken word, audience participation and an ample amount of nudity offers something far more accessible. It’s theatre that...