Gender Divide (2010) was a show that looked at gender politics and the impact these ideas have on the lives of young people in contemporary society. Gender Divide was first performed at Tramway in Glasgow in June 2010.
Through the process Junction 25 looked at notions of identity, labelling and language associated with this. They asked questions about what society tells us ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ should look like, play with, think, say, do and how they should act. They recreated stereotypical behaviours, swapped clothes, changed the shapes of their bodies, danced, listened to songs, looked at how the different genders were portrayed in magazines, literature and films. They researched celebrity and a wee bit of feminist literature. They spoke about the woman and men in their lives who they admire, they told their own story, their own experiences as a young ‘male’ or ‘female’
The concept for the staging of Gender Divide came from the idea that as people we are so often separated by our gender and wanting to put that at the centre of the audience’s minds. At the beginning of the performance the audience were asked to make the choice to enter by either a door labeled ‘Female’ or ‘Male’. The people who identified as female sat together on a seating bank and watch and the audience who identified as male sat on the other side with a curtain in between that acted as a back wall, so effectively they were each in their own black box studio space but they could hear what was happening on the other side of the curtain. Sometimes the performers communicated to each other, the young men were performing to the men and the young women to the female audience except that half way through one of the young women revealed that he should in fact be on the other side of the curtain and swapped. At the end of the first 20 mins the curtains opened and the rest of the performance was played out together.