The project is centring around western society’s unarticulated relationship with the women’s breast, through research about the female breast in literature, art, politics, history, popular culture and through transcriptions of interviews with women who have had cosmetic and medical based breast surgery.
Created by Song Circus in collaboration with composer Laura Bowler (Manchester, prof. Composition at Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Royal Northern College of Music), author Lavinia Murray (poet, BBC play writer), artist collective Brave New World (UK) represented by award-winning scenographer and performance artist Kate Lane (scenographer & costume designer) and Valentina Ceschi (actor, director, performance artist, co-director Dancing Brick), Pål Asle Pettersen (electronics), and researcher Birgitta Haga Gripsrud (Stavanger, UiS / Stavanger University Hospital, postdoctoral with breast as her specialisation).
The development project has received funding from Art Council UK and Arts Council Norway. Premiere November 2019
THE CHICKEN MASTECTOMY SONG
Two hens leave the Finger-Licky Chicky Shop they’re heavily bandaged round their chests
CHORUS:
are your bodies oven ready
are they
are they
are your bodies oven ready head gone so we can better see your breasts pushed up
and legs all spread
VERSE
We’ve had double mastectomies
chuck chuck chucky
they took what they wanted
chuck chuck chucky
our chicken breasts, our chicken breasts they’ve left the rest
isn’t that kind of them?
instead of being hung by our feet and fastened to the slaughter line our stretched throats slit
our blood bled out
bodies chucked into the boiling vat that sears our skin
and draws our ruffled feathers out (with some of us not dead by then) oh there’s been such suffering
for breast meat
well, instead of that,
we’ve had double mastectomies
they sliced off our chicken breasts
they took a scalpel to our succulence
but we walk free
god bless the double mastectomy
god bless the butcher that butchered me we’re bandaged and alive
the breast meat gone
but life’s been kind
we’re lucky fucks
we’ve had double mastectomies