Girlspeak in Six Voices: A performed reading

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Hilevaara, Katja. 2024. 'Girlspeak in Six Voices: A performed reading'. In: Words and Worlds: Languages and Ecologies Symposium. Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom 22 March 2024. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

For Words and Worlds symposium, I presented a multi-voice reading (myself, five other women + a birdsong recording) of sections of a chapter in which I stage an interspecies (bird-human) conversation between Bleuel , Daughter, Echo , Finchgirl , Fringilla , Mother and Swift , a charm of winged female creatures perched on a tall pine branch above a raging forest fire. For the chapter, the conversation is composed of fragments blending speculative fiction, quotes and birdsong; mimicking adolescent girls’ prattle, and foregrounding this ‘girlspeak’ as a radical strategy to harness alternative approaches to the patriarchal system’s impasse that is failing to act in the face of the current ecological crisis. I ask in the chapter - inspired by an archaeological discovery of a skeleton of a young girl found with a chaffinch fledgling’s skull in her mouth - what if the Finchgirl was able to speak in ‘Finch’, able to communicate with birds in their own language? What if the young chaffinch was tasked to teach humans how to live alongside birds and other more-than-humans? What could we learn listening to the Girl with a Finch in her mouth? Might the words of the Finchgirl and other adolescent girls offer us the language required to act now?

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Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)

Additional Information:

Performed by:
Echo - Abigail Conway
Daughter - Eva Hilevaara Shilland
Finchgirl - Nomakhwezi Becker
Fringilla/SFX - Katja Hilevaara
Mother - Rachael Newberry
Swift - Abby Sinnott