The Between Her Legs Theatre

With Myriam Legault Lamontagne

Myriam Legault Lamontagne and I built this piece from the ground up, quite literally, starting with a single image that would not leave us alone: a giant hoop skirt, vast enough to hide an entire puppet theatre within its frame. We designed and hand-constructed the skirt ourselves, engineering its structure so that layers of fabric could conceal a working stage beneath, the audience never quite sure, at first, where the real performance was happening.

I performed the piece on six-foot stilts, standing as narrator, towering over every audience I faced. An opening cut into the skirt became the puppet stage itself, so that the show seemed to emerge from somewhere beneath my own body — mobile feminist puppet theatre, in the most literal sense, born between my legs. Drawing on fairy tales and fables, Myriam and I reworked these old, familiar stories until they could hold something new: patriarchy confronted directly, women's rights and bodily autonomy woven into narratives that generations had absorbed without question, all while keeping humour, spectacle, and joy stubbornly at the centre of the work. We never wanted this to feel like a lecture. We wanted laughter, surprise, delight, even as the stories cut close to something serious.

Performing this piece asked a great deal of my body. Standing on stilts inside a hand-built skirt, often on uneven ground, outdoors, at the mercy of wind and weather, meant that stamina and constant physical improvisation became inseparable from the performance itself. Every show demanded a kind of vigilance most audiences never saw, balance negotiated moment to moment beneath yards of fabric and height.

We carried this work to Bread and Puppet Theater in Glover, Vermont, returning there across several seasons between 1999 and 2002, to various public locations throughout Montréal, and to the Festival International des Arts de la Marionnette à Saguenay in 2001. Audiences ranged from children encountering puppetry for the first time to seasoned theatre-goers who recognized exactly what we were doing to the stories they thought they already knew. Across all of it, I remained struck by how willingly audiences of every age let themselves be drawn into something so strange, so overtly feminist, so visibly built by hand — proof, I think, that joy and provocation have always been able to share the same stage.