Spaces for ambiguities: playing with hair in community theatre for teenage girls

ABSTRACT

This article concerns how the normative matter of body hair is playfully encountered within a theatre practice for teenage girls. By working with Deleuzian-inspired theories, playfulness is understood as embodied doings, interwoven with the local context. The article explores how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular body hair removal. The analysis shows how playfulness is an ambiguous feature enacted together with bodies, affects and materialities. Moreover, playfulness became both a restricting and a transformative force reproducing the already known while also opening up a critical approach of playing with the violent aspects of hair removal.

KEYWORDS:

• Playfulness
• applied theatre
• body hair
• Deleuze and Guattari
• smooth and striated spaces

Introduction

This article stems from a 15-month-long ethnographic study that engages with a community theatre group of girls living in an industrial town located in Sweden. The group meets regularly one evening a week and is open to girls aged 13–25 interested in theatre as well as feminist issues. A reoccurring theme in the theatre group concerns what it is like to become a woman in this particular town; A town that many of the girls describe as being sexist and homophobic. The group discusses and stages how these everyday matters are surrounded by norms such as sexuality, femininity and the body. The first author of this paper, Elsa Szatek an applied theatre practitioner and researcher focusing on practices emerging in the intersection of art and politics, followed the theatre group as a researcher in their process of making a performance. One theme that reoccurred and stood out as charged with intensities was that of body hair and especially the norms of removing it. To explore how limiting norms surrounding body hair became a vital force in the making of the performance Szatek invited scholar Karin Gunnarsson, a former teacher, whose expertise on feminist posthumanist theories as well as on social justice education, added productive dimensions to this matter. The matter of body hair seemed to produce specific conditions for playfulness and its energetic effects drew our attention. The analysis, therefore, puts forward how playfulness occurred as part of critical discussions while producing a performance filled with both humour and severity. Thus, there is a tension displayed between joyful playfulness and hegemonic structures surrounding the female body at work in the drama room that will be further explored in this article. Along these lines, body hair is at the same time involved with oppressive norms while also creating playfulness and joy; it is within this tension that the article starts out.

The drama room in focus for this exploration is met here as a heterotopic counter-site ‘absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about’ (Foucault 1986, 24). Encountering the drama room as a heterotopia means comprehending it as a space both isolated from and interconnected with local context as to why matters such as hair and playfulness must be analysed as situated, not only in a specific drama room but also in relation with the local context. As such it is a space enabling the girls to critically explore and play with norms from the everyday, such as those surrounding body hair. The theatre practice thus generates movements in a different manner from the everyday, containing playfulness as well as aesthetics that are an important part of shaping the process leading up to the performance at the local theatre (Szatek 2020).

To explore the theatre practice with the focus on both playfulness and body hair, we employ a theoretical framework foremost inspired by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. Rather than emphasising the doing of the individual, this theoretical framework forefronts how playfulness is a collective and spatial matter enabling the participants to imagine and embody the world differently through humour, spontaneity and emotional as well as material engagements (Lester 2020). In line with youth researcher Cahill (2011) we consider playfulness as involving both pleasure and critical deconstructions of limiting norms. Given our interest in the spatiality of playfulness within the theatre practice, we put to work Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of smooth and striated spaces as well as differentiation. The smooth and the striated are not binaries, rather they co-exist in a continuous interdependent dynamic (Deleuze and Guattari 2013). With this theoretical approach, the article aims to explore how playfulness is enacted in relation to the everyday, in particular in relation to body hair in a theatre practice with teenage girls. In light of this, the article also explores the potentiality of playfulness in terms of challenging inequalities and addresses how spaces for playfulness involve matters related to both regulative and normative structures, in this case, the focus on body hair.

Background

To situate this paper, we first give a short account of the theatre practice in focus. We also outline previous research concerning body hair and especially the removal of body hair as a mundane but often silenced practice. Moreover, we give a short description of playfulness and how it is understood within applied theatre.

A community theatre exploring and staging girls’ everyday

As the theatre group aims to place girls and their experiences and artistic expressions at the forefront, it also strives to include those girls whose access to art is limited and is open for girls with and without prior theatre experience. The girls (aged 13–25) have different cultural backgrounds from the middle-east or Scandinavia, however, most of them are born in Sweden making the majority of the participants bilingual and part of at least two cultures. The theatre group, that will be kept anonymous due to ethical reasons, has been committed to staging the lives of girls and women since 2017 making it an important cultural alternative for those identifying themselves as girls living in the town. Although working with several different projects there is a long-term commitment towards the girls who meet on a weekly basis and the participants can always choose level of engagement in the various projects. The number of girls involved thus varies but the performance project explored in this article focused on the doings of 11 girls aged 13-17. While aiming at producing high quality theatre performances, there is an equal amount of focus on the explorative process where issues from the girls’ everyday are delved into. The theatre group avoids judgements in relation to the choices the girls are faced with in their everyday such as the issue of hair removal. Rather, focus is on embodying multiple ways of managing as a girl in relation to limiting norms as well as disclosing structures producing those norms (see also Szatek 2020). As the group meets regularly on a weekly basis the drama room has become an important and inclusive space for the girls to initiate discussions while also sharing and staging sensitive matters of concern (Szatek 2020). The weekly meetings are also an important part of the devising process that leads up to the performance at the local theatre. The process is supported by an artistic team with a thorough background in the theatre-arts whose responsibility is to ensure that the process moves forward while also striving to turn the girls’ experiences into artistic expressions that can communicate with an audience (see also Szatek 2022). The artistic team is, for example, editing the manuscripts while also providing artistic direction and organising the rehearsal process. In this paper, the process is illustrated by two moments from the process of creating and staging a play based on the girls’ relations with removing (or not removing) body hair while also becoming woman in this particular town.

As the theme for the production was the female body, hair was a reoccurring subject matter both when performing improvisations and during discussions. By interweaving the individual and collective, body hair became a productive aspect for feminist interventions in the drama practice. Previous research shows that body hair has historically been a forceful aspect of constructing masculinity and femininity as opposites. Accordingly, a female body without body hair is a dominating beauty ideal among western women, with a majority of them thus removing body hair (Fahs 2011; Lesnik-Oberstein 2006; Smelik 2015; Trujillo 2021). As such, body hair removal practices are highly socially normative, consequently contributing to the silencing and invisibility of women’s body hair. Feminist scholars have stated that women’s body hair is taboo (Lesnik-Oberstein 2006; Smelik 2015). As Lesnik-Oberstein (2006, 3) emphasises, body hair is ‘Something not to be seen or mentioned; prohibited and circumscribed by rules of avoidance; surrounded by shame, disgust and censure’. Being hairy in the ‘wrong places’ can be understood to cross boundaries, such as between man/woman and human/mammals, which is risky business since it is often considered unfeminine and unattractive (Smelik 2015; Trujillo 2021). This potential risk is well known by the girls in the theatre group who, when exposing hair on their forearms, legs or armpits, have received negative comments from both their peers in school and family members. Thus, most of the girls remove said body hair, whether they like it or not, which is why this ‘hairy’ topic is something of a loaded issue. In the drama room, one way the girls engage with this issue is through improvisations.

Different takes on playfulness in applied theatre

Within the field of applied drama and theatre, playfulness and theatre are considered tightly interwoven and hard to separate (e.g. Shaughnessy 2012; Way 1998; Neelands 2016; Schechner 2012; Slade 1954). As Kitchen (2018) points out, playfulness serves a variety of functions within the field such as bridging the gap between child play and theatre arts, and, support personal development, social change and/or imagination. In this article, we will, however, pay attention to the role of playfulness when staging and exploring matters surrounded by stigmas and how these explorations feed into a performance process. According to Cahill creative play could be integrated into drama and theatre practices that aim to deconstruct norms and gender issues (Cahill 2010; 2011; Cahill, Coffey, and Smith 2016). In this article, we draw on Cahill’s work by arguing that playfulness is a reciprocal process, shaped by entanglements of past and present, humans and materiality, the everyday and the imagination. Similarly, the Deleuzian play-philosopher Lester (2020) points out how moments of playfulness start with the possibility of imagining the world differently, as in: ‘What if’. The term ‘what if?’ or the ‘magic if’, as formulated by the legendary theatre director Stanislavski, is an invitation to explore and embody the world as we know it differently. By adding the imagination or the ‘magic if’, it is possible to ‘lift us out of everyday life onto the plane of imagination’ (Stanislavski 1936, 54).

Playfulness is a responsive experience in the here-and-now, involving spontaneity, emotional engagement, and mutual trust. One researcher within the field of drama who has acknowledged this is Hallgren. In her research, Hallgren (2018) explores how a process drama-practice is marked by playfulness and high levels of involvement, where the participants can improvise and renegotiate the rules. The participants are co-creators of the evolving scenes and there is space for all involved to bring in their own experiences. As Hallgren notes, playfulness may or may not involve roles. When playing in role there is a possibility to elaborate on the knowledge (or the not knowing) of the character, which adds to creating dramatic tensions. Cahill points out how playfulness is a physical and imaginative endeavour that draws on stereotypical representation, surrealism, and the burlesque (Cahill 2010, 2011, 2015; Cahill, Coffey, and Smith 2016). Cahill’s research shows how these aspects of playfulness are important in drama when aiming for tracing and deconstructing discoursers while also challenge issues surrounded by shame. When working for social change the exaggerated elaborations could push boundaries as to how to embody and talk about certain issues, while also generating energy and amusement (Cahill 2015; Cahill and Dadvand 2022). There is little research problematising how playfulness is involved in theatre practices when exploring and challenging normative issues with teenagers. Cahill’s research has been informative, and we build on this by turning our gaze toward theatre practices that emerge in the intersection of artistic, social, and political ambitions outside formal school settings. Rather than accounting for the benefits of playfulness in applied theatre, this article strives to discuss how play and questions of normativity become entangled in drama, and what alternative spaces might be produced. By doing so, we wish to contribute to the field of applied theatre by exploring playfulness in theatre practices within a Deleuzian theorist framework that both challenges subject-object distinctions and accentuates relations and possible transformations.

Playfulness and difference in relational spaces

For the exploration of playfulness in theatre practice, we connect with the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari (2013). More specifically, the analysis draws on their notions of difference, as well as smooth and striated space. We turn to this framework based on the argument that it embraces how bodies, materialities, discourses and spaces, are part of the theatre practice. This theoretical approach implies working within a processual and relational ontology that encounters playfulness and hair as collective enactments that are constantly changing. This means to acknowledge how ‘relations and encounters are what co-shape us, as well as the rest of the world’ (Gunnarsson 2021b, 69). In other words, to account for both human subjects and materialities (for example bodies, affect, things and ideas) in interdependent relations where hair is playing with the girls, as well as where the girls are playing with hair. Playfulness takes place within collaborations where all players, humans as well as materialities, take part and transform.

Within this theoretical approach, we work with the notion of difference in terms of transformations and becomings (Braidotti 2013). Herein, difference does not refer to the negative definition of different: different from something, for example, as a dominant norm (Braidotti 2018, 221). On the contrary, difference is acknowledged as multiple and positive, stressing how the human subjects and materialities are constantly transforming within relations and doings. However, this means that the theatre practice and its many connections are comprehended as a space that interdependently involves difference as well as repetitions. Difference and repetitions depend on each other, which means that: ‘in that repetition lies an always-present possibility of difference giving rise to the new as-yet-unthought’ (Davies et al. 2013, 683).

To further explore how the theatre practice brings about differences and repetitions, we encounter the drama space as in constant process of becoming. A playful space is relational, meaning it is ‘not neutral but cut through by relationships that might increase or decrease opportunity for playing’ (Lester 2020, 124). In light of this, the analysis is driven by the notion of smooth and striated space. Following Deleuze and Guattari (2013), a striated space stabilises identities and doings. While being regulated by imposed rules and legislations the striated space enables the habitual and order. As such, a striated space is marked by boundaries that limit which movements can take place. A smooth space is then connected with intensities, intuition, and responsiveness, enabling a slippage between identities and categories that goes beyond the measurable and predictable. In and with the smooth space, a multitude of continuous directions could create spontaneity and unforeseen movements, as well as interconnections. The smooth space and the idea of the ‘magic if’ are here then understood as interlinked as they are interdependent in producing imaginations, the new as-yet-unthought and spontaneity which are vital for playfulness (cf. Lester 2020). It shall, however, be stressed that the smooth and striated space exist in reciprocal relations. Thus, they are always mixed up with one another while the dynamics are constantly changing.

To summarise, this theoretical approach helps us to acknowledge how relational and spatial conditions stipulate how playfulness takes place. What interests us in this article is how playfulness is enacted and what it brings to the constantly transforming theatre practice. In other words, to explore playfulness with this theoretical approach addresses how playfulness involves both movements and stabilisations in relation to what the spatial conditions offer.

Methodology: becoming entangled in relations

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted during 15 months between 2019 and 2020 by the first author, Elsa Szatek. It is part of a larger study exploring space, place and staging of teenage girls’ everyday life. Working with a processual and relational ontology, the ethnographic approach here implies to emphasise doings and ‘becomings entangled in relations’ (Springgay and Truman 2018, 204). This meant that Szatek initially visited the group on a weekly basis during four months to get to know the participants while the participants also got used to her presence. During this time no recordings or other construction of empirical material were done. Nor did Szatek plan or lead the drama workshops or rehearsals but participated in warm-ups and some improvisations, this kind of engagement continued throughout the research-process. Being a theatre practitioner it was easy to join and this participation also served as a way to establish contact with the girls.

Before undertaking the study, it was vetted by the Swedish Regional Ethical Review Board. Research ethics were then considered all through the research process. Besides the initial written informed consent given by the participating girls and leaders, informed consent was obtained verbally during the project as always-in-process, open to revision and questioning. Moreover, all names are pseudonyms and personal information is adjusted in order to ensure anonymity. In order to clarify the ethical aspects of participating in research, Elsa arranged discussions together with the group. This created space for their questions about for example who she was and why she was there. Moreover, the ambition for the researcher position was to participate with engagement and collaboration to disrupt the hierarchal and dualistic positions. Besides this, research ethics were stressed throughout the analytical work. For example, questions were raised about how not to focus on individualised acts, but rather on enactments in terms of spaces and differentiations, and how to engage with the practice both critically and creatively to acknowledge the transformations taking place, thereby avoiding reproduction of the same.

Construction of empirical material has been done through formal and informal interviews that continually carried out with the girls and leaders. These interviews were conducted both in groups and individually alongside the rehearsals and drama workshops. In addition to this, Szatek engaged in the theatre work through cameras and recording devices. This engagement has produced has produced 85 h of filmed and recorded material, however, for this article 2 h of video recording is analyzed.

Being a researcher and practitioner within the field of applied theatre with an interest in post-theories, Szatek invited post-theorist scholar Karin Gunnarsson to elaborate on the theoretical ideas at work in this article. Gunnarsson’s expertise within this theoretical field as well as on social justice education opened up interesting explorations on the reciprocity of theatre practice, playfulness and normative matters from the everyday. As always, our inquiry was marked by divergent and shared biographies and commitments as well as embodied experiences of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ability. This created specific relational terrains infused with power, difference, affinity and desire as part of co-constructing the research process and the knowledge produced (cf. Fields 2016). The analytical work implied mapping enactments of playfulness as a collective and energetic matter. Both authors watched and engaged with the empirical material, not searching for major themes or patterns, but being attentive to moments of playfulness. This meant moments involving specific collaborative and spatial intensities highlighting the movements and ambiguities of the drama practice. Not in terms of defining or pinning down what play is, but to acknowledge how it became enacted within reciprocal relations. As the analysis continued, specific connections to the matter of body hair emerged. What interested us were the complexities of playing with normative and oppressive matters. The object of analysis, then, became those moments when playing with hair occurred, to then carefully consider what these moments entailed and how playfulness became enacted. This meant to consider stabilisations, as well as openings and movements of playfulness within the theatre practice.

Moments of hairy playfulness

In this section, we explore and analyse two moments from the theatre practice when playfulness is enacted together with the normative matter of body hair. The first moment delves into one explorative workshop on norms and stigmas surrounding body hair taking place six months before the premiere. The other moment takes place shortly before the premiere and problematises how the doings, sayings and improvisations of the girls are turned into artistic expressions.

Difference and repetitions unfolding when enacting playfulness

Here we analyse how body hair is playfully elaborated on as an everyday matter intertwined with structuring norms. The group is in an explorative stage of creating the manuscript and also developing characters and delving into the issue of body hair which will be part of the play. We enter the first moment at one of the workshops with the theatre group. There is an intense atmosphere as the participants in a fictional television debate argue for and against the removal of body hair. The improvisation is part of the creation of additional perspectives and content to the ongoing development of the theatre script. The 11 girls are seated on chairs with their assigned teams. They sit opposite one other, as one side acts like characters from the play that would favour hair removal and the other side acts like someone from the play who would argue against it.

April 2019: Stella sits with her legs crossed and speaks with a high nasal tone as she decisively explains that: ‘We think that women should be smooth and beautiful and almost look like children in a way’. The other girls on her team add that hair on the body is ‘ugly’ and while in character, Lina exclaims: ‘We are not monkeys!’ and Alayas’ character states: ‘We need to be fresh!’ The other team responds with arguments such as ‘hair is natural and beautiful wherever it is, whether it is on the head, under the arms or on the legs’. Hedda’s character proclaims that: ‘Women start getting hair just because of the fact that they are becoming women’. Hair is natural’, states Aminah. Linn argues that by keeping your body hair, you show your independence: ‘It shows that you are a strong independent woman … It shows that you can decide over your own body’.

At this moment, the theatre practice works through role-play by staging a fictional TV debate, thus creating improvisations around the matter of hair. When entering the set of a TV debate, a polemic engagement takes place, enacted through chairs, bodies and words that emphasise two sides of the topic. By doing this, a range of boundaries such as human/animal, fresh/dirty, natural/unnatural, independent/dependent, ugly/beautiful are activated, reproducing the normative formation of body hair as a bio-social marker very much involved in the oppression of girls and women (Smelik 2015). At work is both the knowledge of the role (c.f. Hallgren 2018) as well as the experiences from the everyday, interwoven through the ‘magic if’. When working through the ‘magic if’, the views expressed here become excessive, as the doings are set to be oppositional through the TV-debate. The characters embodied are one-dimensional and stereotypical, coming across as highly affective when responding to one other. The ‘magic if’ is here enabling the everyday experiences to become enlarged and distorting repetitions, inviting laughter and joy in to the process.

The theatre practice seems open and responsive, as the girls, joyfully and in character, spontaneously exchange oppositional viewpoints regarding body hair; a theme that, in their everyday life, is surrounded by stigmas. As such, it becomes it becomes foremost a smooth space that holds an ‘unlimited field of potentiality (…) beyond the control of a single author’ (Lester 2020, 85–86). Within this smooth space, playfulness is enacted collectively without considerable tensions or ruptures. The space is marked by high intensities produced together with exaggerated gestures and voices (cf. Cahill, Coffey, and Smith 2016), as the girls indulge in the joyful encounters.

It is easy to point at the space as being open and smooth because of the intensities and joy, but the space is at the same time striated; structured and disciplined. The stratification is produced within the doings of the well-known social norms, the materialities such as chairs and bodies, as well as through the instructions to perform an oppositional debate. The condition of the space makes the playing with hair a stabilising practice that reproduces normative ideas and sets aside tensions and uncertainties (cf. Smelik 2015; Trujillo 2021). As such, playfulness is, in this case, reproducing the ‘already known’ in an exaggerated way while slightly dislocating the matter of body hair. This breaks with the somewhat taken-for-granted matter of playfulness as a foremost creative force that produces new lines of thoughts. Rather, the spatial condition in the theatre practice affords playful repetitions with a double move of both continuities and discontinuities (cf. Gunnarsson 2021a). As will be further outlined next, the playful space emerges in the intersection between smoothness and stratification, which became established when preparing the scene.

Before the exercise begins, the girls are seated on chairs in two teams, opposite one other. While Tove explains the role-play she also asks what side should be pro-shaving and which side should be against. This does not seem to matter to the girls as they are eager to get started. Sarah spots a water bottle on the floor that she suggests could be used as a microphone. Tove immediately accepts the suggestion and picks up the bottle and holds it in front of her mouth while speaking. She further explains that there is even a real camera person in the room and points towards Szatek who is there as a filming researcher. As Tove explains that the girls will act in character, some of the girls immediately strike poses with crossed legs, straightened backs and clasped hands on their laps, thereby becoming fierce pro- or anti-shavers. Tove then starts and finishes the exercise by looking into the TV-researcher-camera, speaking to the imaginary TV audience with the water-bottle-microphone held close to her mouth. The water-bottle-microphone is then passed on to those who wish to have a say in the subject matter of body hair.

When beginning the role play, specific material and bodily conditions set the stage. The girls are seated in teams, opposite one other on chairs, which thus limits their movements while also accentuating the divergence. The rules of the game, explained by the leader, both inform and regulate the doings in the exercise. These are conditions that stratify the drama space, thus giving the workshop direction. As shown above, the space is simultaneously smooth, which is marked by quick responses and acceptances of the suggestions put forward. The moment can be understood as ‘an act of co-creation between bodies and things in motion with a pleasurable mood’ (Lester 2020, 29). The smoothness allows for materialities to take part in the exercise, thereby becoming co-producers in the enactment of playfulness. However, these materialities also become vital for stratifying the space as the research camera-becoming-TV-camera and the water bottle-becoming-microphone both assist in directing attention and put focus on the speaking character. These stratifications allow for new kinds of smoothness as the intensities of the joyful encounter with body hair become directed and structured. This illustrates how smoothness and stratification work in a reciprocal way and how ‘[s]mooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 552). For playfulness to emerge, this reciprocity seems vital. It makes it important to note that the stratification becomes possible in relation to the smoothness of the space. Playfulness, then, becomes enacted within the ambiguities of not knowing in which direction the exercise is headed, but creates openings for what might take place within the spatial conditions of the drama room.

After finishing the TV debate, the improvisation that came across as somewhat normative and repetitive gives rise to a debate that is related to the girls’ everyday life and the manuscript that is in the making. Tove initiates a discussion on how the matter of hair can be staged to portray the various stigmas around body-hair. Soon, however, the discussion, that is now out of character, concerns the girls’ relations with body-hair.

Sarah, along with several other girls, explains that: ‘I am doing it [removing body hair] for my own sake, so it’s not to be talked about’. Tove replies that this is an important point that should be in the play; that women shave so as not to be thought of as disgusting. Stella adds a story about a friend of hers who is ashamed to go outside unless she has shaved her bikini line, even though it is a really painful thing to do. Later in the conversation, Sarah picks up on Stella’s story of pain, exclaiming that it is her mother who nags her to ‘fix’ her eyebrows and from age 13, encouraged her to remove the hair from her legs using an epilator, which indeed can be very painful. Tove wonders: ‘Don’t you find that intimidating?’ She then shares a story about how as a teenager, she felt that her mother was ashamed of her for not shaving her legs. Some of the girls nod in recognition of the situation, while others seem astonished. Tove concludes that the pain involved in the process of removing body hair must also be part of the script: ‘It is almost like assault. We are assaulting ourselves and we are assaulting each other’.

When the discussion now concerns gender policing as well as physical and emotional labour of removing body hair, the space is marked by the same high level of involvement and emotional engagement that was present in the TV debate. Several of the girls articulate how they remove body hair because they otherwise risk being talked about by their school peers and how they have been encouraged or even forced to do so by their mothers. With the ‘magic if’ no longer present, the shared stories are firmly embedded not only in the drama space but also in everyday places such as school and home. The emerging stories related to body hair become entangled with pain, shame, and oppression. These matters come across as self-inflicted, as well as a response to the possible exposure of public shaming. But they also involve the construction of a story of shame and oppression imposed by themselves as well as by other females: friends and mothers. Perhaps it is by initially channeling and distorting points of view with the ‘magic if’ within the staged TV debate that the spatial conditions of the theatre practice now afford contesting the silence of body hair and articulate the pain and violence involved? The theatre practice and its many actors turn, in Braidotti’s words, ‘the painful experience of inexistence into relational encounters and knowledge production’ (Braidotti 1996, 313). By addressing the collective accountability surrounding body hair, the drama room is loaded by co-produced engagements and experiences, making the knowledge production a joint effort. The enactment of playfulness at this moment thus enables both a creative and critical approach to the removal of body hair, suggesting that there are possibilities of acting differently in the practices they are part of producing.

The empirical moments analysed above are not to be regarded as separate, but rather as entangled in the enactments of playfulness. The TV debate and its articulations of polemic and somewhat stereotypical arguments intermingle with the drama room, water bottle-microphone and researcher-camera-woman, as well as with the girls’ experiences in relation to school, family and friends. Herein, the aim of putting together a performance in the nearby future also affects what can be done. Within this complex relationality, playfulness is enacted as energetic moments where aspects of the past and present, humans and materiality, mundane and imagination all work together (Lester 2020; Cahill, Coffey, and Smith 2016). Moreover, these aspects are not stable but rather transformative within the specific encounters and doings that produce both differences and repetitions in the unfolding events. As such, the theatre practice creates spatial conditions that provide what and how body hair, pain, and girls become other. The question, however, remains as to whether the theatre practice affords to rupture the everyday normative matter of body hair rather than just reproduce and stabilise it. This will be further analysed and discussed in the next section.

Becoming music-body-hair-unsecurity performance

We now move on to explore how the matter of hair become a vital part of the performance that is in the making. At this moment, the premiere of the play is less than a month away and rather than being an explorative workshop the work is now a rehearsal. The artistic team has reworked the girls’ ideas and improvisations into a script that can communicate with an audience (for further discussions of the dilemmas in this work see Szatek 2022). The plot, characters as well as the manuscript is by now settled and the work is supervised by the artistic director. Some of the lines from the staged TV-debate are now part of the script although the specific TV debate is not. At today’s rehearsal, the focus is on putting together the scene, which includes exploring how to stage body hair removal for an audience.

October 2019: Loud music is playing with a voice singing in French. The girls are in pairs, entering the center of the room with the remainder of the girls watching in a half-circle behind them. One of the pairs, Sarah and Lea, performs the procedure of body hair removal. With pretend tweezers, Sarah decidedly starts plucking Lea’s eyebrows and then with fictional wax, she pulls off the hair from Lea’s upper lips, neck and legs. Continuing with Lea’s legs, Sarah uses lots of imaginary foam to also shave her legs. By twisting her body, making grimaces and loud noises, Lea expresses the pain that all of the plucking, waxing and shaving cause. As the different pairs of girls perform their scenes, those watching become engaged by laughing, while those being waxed show signs of fear as well as intense pain. ‘It hurts to watch!’ One of the girls laughingly exclaims.

For the scene to evolve, there is a multitude of collaborations. The music is one of the main actors, stratifying the space, indicating both when to begin and also setting the rhythm. Items such as razors and cloths that serve as wax strips also take part in the doings as well as imaginary foam and tweezers. At stake is playfulness, with the-all-too-familiar rituals of body hair removal, the doings and the pain involved – here exaggerated through acrobatic poses and loud cries, which inspire laughter and recognition amongst those watching. The playful space is loaded with desire and joy for a specific femininity constructed by becoming ‘smooth and fresh’. Simultaneously, the energetic playfulness intermingles with screams of pain caused by the hair removal. Joy and pain are both constructed by and constructing the spatial conditions that afford the enactment of playfulness. Rather than being opposites, joy and pain work together to produce the intensive and energetic atmosphere. Altogether, the music, speakers, razors, and bodies intermingle as the scene evolves into a dance with a certain choreography. Nothing is done at random, but the scene still involves the unexpected, as a mixture of rules and inventions interact. The scene requires stratifications in terms of calculation and discipline, as well as smoothness in terms of doubts, engagements, and joy. By working together, the space opens up for enactments of playfulness, creating joy as well as pain when rehearsing the everyday doings of removing body hair.

However, within this playful moment, the evolving story of women mimicking the removal of body hair from already hairless bodies is reproduced (Lesnik-Oberstein 2006). The dancing bodies are perfectly smooth and shaved – playing with the norms that are securely fulfilled. In other words, they are simultaneously embodying and critiquing the norms. This is done while both navigating the risks of disrupting the silence around body hair and playfully making it visible and open to discussion (ibid).

As the scene starts to settle, lines from the script are added to physical movement and the scenes are rehearsed over again, with the same loud music.

The girls, some with scripts in their hands, enter the scene. Their different voices intermingle with the loud music as they read the lines, raising their voices to be heard: ‘You just want to be smooth and fresh’. The idea that the older girls shave the younger girls is established. The razors and wax-stripes join to assist together with the music and screaming of pain. Sandra, the artistic director, continuously steps in to offer feedback and encouragement.

The scene is gone through several times, rehearsing the timing and movements as well as trying out various ways to perform it. The drama space is moulded with concentration, as the participants struggle to get the scene exactly right. This makes the spatial conditions increasingly striated in terms of regulating the doings. The manifold of collective doings such as the music, concentration, manuscript and instructions, fixates the atmosphere around what is good and bad. Within this stratification a progress becomes possible that encourages and enlarges the expressions of hair removal, thereby making them more performative in an artistic sense and thus pushing the boundaries on how to express pain.

The striated space in this example is related ‘to a more distant vision’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 573), as the gaze and doings of the director now play a large part in the stratification that regulates the movements in the drama room. As such, the doings are less influenced by the participants’ affects and ideas as the stratified space is ‘defined by the requirements of long-distance vision’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2013, 574). As Deleuze and Guattari (2013) note, the movement between different spaces, such as between a smooth playful and a striated working space, is never easy. Within theatre practices aiming to produce a performance, this movement is, however, necessary. The stratified working space serves to create a tighter aesthetic expression that in turn can re-create new kinds of smooth artistic spaces.

As the rehearsal continues, a sense of insecurity and confusion emerge concerning what to do and why. Despite the stratification, or perhaps because of it, the space becomes ‘slippery’ and produces confusion regarding the content and process. The girls have several comments and questions about what is happening, which the artistic director Sandra tries to clarify. This becomes specifically addressed when one of the girls raises a question regarding her line: Would she prefer to be hairless or to endure the critique from others who think of her as ‘disgusting’ if she displays body hair.

‘You want to be hairless because that’s when you’re not “disgusting” in this scene, then it does not have to be that way in your whole life. Do you understand what I mean? We do not agree that it is so’. Sandra continues in a facetious manner: ‘Soon Bianca [a character in the play] will enter the scene like this (mimicking the movements of the character, she puts her hands behind her head and exposes her armpits): “I do not shave at all and I stopped doing that a long time ago”, (pulling imaginary hair under her armpits as if it were quite long). We work with, so to speak, different ideas about shaving off hair’. Sofia, another of the leaders explains: ‘We portray, we can say, those girls who do not have, currently in this scene, a feminist analysis on hair removal’.

In this moment the space is marked by a sense of confusion that the artistic director Sandra works hard to handle. Some of the girls are getting lost in the playfulness as it here in the scene implies to accentuate the dominating norms of body hair as disgusting, norms that they had discussed as problematic and oppressive. As Sofia says, they are taking the role of someone who is not aware of the ‘feminist analysis’. Sandra explains that in the theatre production, they want to be hairless. At the same time, she jokes that one of the characters in the play would stop shaving. To have armpit hair is articulated as funny and ridiculous, and not possible to exist in relation to the town, school, norms and desires. The enactment of playfulness here provides limited capacity to disrupt the powerful social norm about body hair. Feelings of shame, insecurity and joy are mixed together, producing tensions in terms of how to critically address the norms that are simultaneously reproduced.

The drama space comes across as too smooth, thus slippery at times, as the matter of hair becomes continuously reordered in multiple and contradictory ways. The slipperiness becomes co-produced in relation with confusion, hair, and norms as different ideas and initiatives does not connect with each other, creating insecurities and frustration. This slipperiness also emerges as norms that surround the female body are simultaneously being reproduced, played with and critically examined. Hence, both reproducing and transforming gendered and sexualised doings and norms (Gunnarsson 2021a). These simultaneous movements become difficult to handle and produce both engagement in the dancing scene as well as several questions and misunderstandings. Accordingly, body hair becomes a forceful affective playmate, where hair is playing with the girls in terms of creating insecurity that also includes differentiations. Then, the possibilities for playfulness to challenge inequalities are difficult to predict, rather play becomes a relational interruption with unexpected effects. Without control, playfulness implies to slow down and become responsive to the movements in order to navigate where it is heading.

Thus, playing with normative matters might propose a different way to encounter the pain and violence that it causes. Within collaborations, the moment affords differentiations and as such enacts a ‘transmutation of a negative relation into an affirmative mode’ (Braidotti 2018, 222).

The insecurity emerging in relation with slippery spaces could also be connected to the fact that the space shifts between the playful and the disciplined in relation to the aesthetic expression. These collective conditions possibly contribute to many of the impulses to act thus coming from the artistic leader, rather than from the girls who struggle with navigating through the many directions in which the scene works. The slippery space that is produced is here undermining the co-creation, spontaneity and ‘magic if’ hallmarking playfulness (c.f. Lester 2020; Hallgren 2018). This seems to create tensions between the ideas at work and the doings in the room, which are also part of the slipperiness. The question then arises as to who can afford to play with power relations and injustices while creating subversions that unsettle normalising patterns.

Conclusion: enactments of playfulness with hairy norms

In this article, we have explored how playfulness is enacted in relation to normative matters in the everyday, in particular removal of body hair in a theatre practice with teenage girls. Moreover, the aim was to explore the possibilities and limitations of playfulness in terms of challenging inequalities. By putting Delueze and Guattari’s ideas to work, playfulness is understood as a collaborative intensity, emerging in spaces created by the intersection of smoothness and stratification. This also acknowledges the differentiations taking place within the encounters and the shifting spaces.

What became apparent in the analysis was that playfulness is an ambiguous feature enacted in various ways. Together with bodies, affects and materialities, playfulness became a limiting force that reproduces the already known and at the same time became an opening energy, moulded with creativity. In other words, the analysis unfolds how both stabilisations and transformations simultaneously emerge within the enactment of playfulness. Hence, from the analysis, it is difficult to say whether or not inequalities were challenged. What we argue, however, is that the theatre practice addressed some difficult and sensitive issues of equality in productive ways. In line with Cahill (Cahill 2010; 2011; Cahill, Coffey, and Smith 2016; Cahill and Dadvand 2022) we find that playfulness enabled a pushing of boundaries as well as deconstruction of hegemonic narratives. Moreover, what also became enacted during the theatre practice were multiple manifestations of normative logics that disrupted the silence around body hair and thus transformed it into a vital playmate.

One ambition with the article was to explore the complexity of playing with normative matters in an applied theatre practice with teenage girls. As such, it became an exploration into how both human subjects and materialities participated and became other through the ‘magic if’, where exaggerated gestures and movements became an integral part. What emerged was the production as well as the reproduction of norms when playing with the familiar pains and rituals of body hair removal. At stake is a collective knowledge production that involves both creative and critical thinking that potentially allows the girls, as well as social norms and the matter of hair, to differentiate. However, turning these playful explorations towards stratified artistic expressions is, as shown, a rather slippery business. This, we argue, raises concerns regarding the somewhat taken for granted connection between playfulness and performance (e.g. Way 1998; Shaughnessy 2012; Schechner 2012). Although playfulness is a vital force within applied theatre practices it is not always without complications.

To conclude this article, we want to stress that playfulness is never something simple, and it requires a multitude of collaborations. These accounts raise a vital but difficult question about ‘how to arrange collaborations that impel movement towards equality’ (Gunnarsson 2021b, 77). It is easy to point at the importance of retaining the viability of the critical analysis throughout the process, for the sake of producing playfulness and thus avoiding mechanical gestures. To do this when coming close to the premiere of a performance is quite another thing. Then the drama room becomes increasingly stratified thus restricting movements and, spontaneity which are both connected with playfulness (Lester 2020). However, we would like to point out that when workshopping and staging normative issues from the everyday playfulness, the ‘magic if’ and critical thinking are co-dependent. This is why it becomes important for applied theatre practitioners to pay attention to how smoothness and stratification structure the drama room and what enactments are enabled.

Of interest for further discussion are the ethics and potentialities of playing with mundane and normative matters where pain, as well as oppression, are involved. Being a heterotopic space, such matters are bound to enter the drama room. To some extent, the heterotopic-drama space allows for a disordering of and a play with power structures of the everyday (c.f. Szatek 2020). In these spaces, there is always a possibility to become other by rupturing hegemonic structures that produce different spatialities of rhythms and movement. As playfulness is vital within most applied theatre practices, stories that enter the drama room will be elaborated on through humour, the ‘magic if’ and exaggerations, while also involving the objects at hand. The drama space could offer momentary disruptions created through present conditions – not so much changing those conditions but rather enlarging them while playfully working together with them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).