Margaret Legere
Multidisciplinary performance artist Margaret Legere calls her newest piece, Quietly, “A Digital Diary. A Theatrical Film.” In fact, she tells us several times in the filmed eighteen minute piece that this is not a play. She also says that she has been told that she is not a filmmaker, but I would disagree. It looks and feels like some of the short film pieces I have seen at the Atlantic Film Festival over the years. She tells us what would happen if it were a play, or if it were a film, and how the medium of storytelling she chose would have informed the way the narrative arc took place, the performers she would have cast, the scenes from the story she would have decided to show us, versus those she might have decided to tell instead, or omit altogether.
But what about the medium that she has chosen? This hybrid of styles feels very intimate, we see a lot of Legere’s face, zoomed in, talking to us like she might if we were sitting in front of her in a Fringe venue. This lends a confessional aspect to the piece, which reflects its subtitle as a “digital diary.” The poetic nature of her language is also suggestive of a one person play, where you get the immediacy of the connection with the performer, but they have had space to carefully craft their lines in a way they couldn’t over a cup of coffee with a friend. Many of the elements are extremely filmic. At the beginning of the piece we see Legere in an expanse of snow on a body of frozen water, and there is a small building where she enters and sets up her performance space. In this wide open space, she seeks shelter somewhere smaller, confined. She allows us to use our imaginations, to picture what the feature film version or the Fringe play version of this story might be, but she also roots us right there with our narrator on the edge of a bathtub reeling from a traumatic experience.
Overall Quietly is a thoughtful mediation on how it can feel like to be a woman who lives in a man’s world, who lives every day inside the patriarchy, even when the patriarchy is quiet and just there existing. Sometimes, of course, it’s overt trauma, and sometimes it’s settling for something that is less than what we really deserve, and sometimes it’s being told “this isn’t a play,” and realizing that the rules for what constitutes a play, or what constitutes a filmmaker were both created by men. Sometimes it’s the knowledge that somewhere a man has just read my last sentence and thought to himself, “well actually…there were quite a few female filmmakers when the industry began…” *Charlie Brown Teacher Voice*
What’s beautiful and appropriate in Quietly is that it’s not a big production number, it looks so raw and ordinary in its way: a girl speaking to us, imagery of sparklers and writing on a chalk board, hearts, because films and plays are written about those extraordinary moments, and Quietly is a reflection on how misogyny in our society is so ordinary, commonplace, constant, and relentless. It’s there quietly in so much of everything that we don’t even always notice it, let alone call it out, let alone have some big visceral response to it. It’s all we know because we’ve never existed outside of the patriarchy, we’ve just learned to (mostly) live with it. And, when we have to, survive.
You can watch Quietly for free at this website. There is also the option to Donate to Margaret there to help her make more art in the future! You can also follow her on Instagram.
