A Woman Becomes a Wolf When She Learns How to Scream, The George Tavern
- HIDEOUS Magazine
- 18 hours ago
- 5 min read
Words by Beth Jones
The George is lit the colour of a bruise and I am standing on the rails running alongside the bar; others stand on benches at the back. People sit around a cleared circle in front of the stage. It’s the kind of crowd that makes me wonder about the threads between everyone, gluey with some frequency I can’t quite touch.
The show is A Woman Becomes a Wolf When She Learns How to Scream. Celebrating its two-year anniversary this coming February, A Woman Becomes a Wolf is a communion of poetry, performance, music, dance- a semi-improvised chorus walking the line between curation and instinct. The night unfolds without clear beginning or end, a deliberate looseness into which performances pour, thick with shadow and soundscape. Early on, it’s mostly women taking the stage, their work textured with intimacy and strangeness, men begin to filter in later, adding an unexpected balance. Each person offers just one piece.
The audience watch, closely. The act of attention is part of the work.
Everyone who performs at these nights has spent the past few weeks getting to know one another- building trust, working against the transactional model of many London shows. Everyone who performs at these nights has spent the past few weeks getting to know one another- building trust, working against the transactional model of many shows. Scarlett Woolfe, the creator of these nights, puts together workshops in the run-up with her collaborator Alexander Gallimore, holding close the importance of people feeling part of a wider community when they perform. Feeling that they know the people around them, that they are working from within a collective, the bounds of which provide both limitations (performers rarely can use many props or installations to frame their work, the space is small, and the turnaround is quick, each person performs just one piece) and openings for something untried. A poet is suddenly accompanied by looping drones on the violin, a mime artist finds themselves surrounded by people weaving and contorting around them, the middle of an old folksong is broken by the singer producing a saxophone and playing increasingly manic arpeggiated licks. The organisers often do not know what to expect either.
Scarlett tells me she was reading Anaïs Nin’s A Woman Speaks during the event’s conception. Nin, who was writing in the mid-70s about the creative impulse, the feminine voice and its liberation from creative silence, is all about the flood:
Allow for the rise in temperature and all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess.
A Woman Becomes a Wolf follows this injunction. It is an overspill. Many of the performers have never performed before; much of the work is improvised, surreal, the collective stepping in and engaging as and when it feels right to. It is all about trying something new, allowing for the rise in temperature.
***
A harpist breathes into a microphone.
A woman hanging clothes along a line, recalling a hot day where she sheds layer after layer, recalling the cactus she’s eaten, that space between longing and suffocation.
“That shadow turning the corner is me, chasing you. I want to do something more extreme than just love you.”
A poet is standing on the stage, “we all exit blinking-”
A poet stands in the circle-
“Enter the mother. Who isn’t your mother. Who looks like your mother. Who breathes like your mother… Enter the best friend, who isn’t your best friend, who has her face, her neck but not her body… sipping fake champagne, who the mother who isn’t your mother is feeding cake.”
People in animal heads on top of the piano. A voice alternating between Polish and English over the PA
“Yesterday I had one of my afternoon visions, resting on the sofa. Like it does most days, the daylight came through the window in an easy way, like somebody had forced it through the glass… Jesteś delikatny, podnosisz koce i kołdry, w czystym pokoju nie ma potworów w kątach- tak właśnie powiedziałeś”
A performer is speaking. He says there is something that feels ridiculous about putting yourself out there at thirty-two. An older woman in the audience heckles, “what about me?” and he laughs and replies, “well, it’s not about you, it’s about me.” and then “I’m making my famous scallops- they’re divine… I’m working in the kitchen, remember? I’m fighting with a PRESSURE COOKER.” We are all laughing.
A woman singing at the piano - it's never over it's never over it’s never over it’s never over, I’m sitting where I'm supposed to sit I'm sitting where I'm supposed to sit I'm sitting where I'm supposed to-
***
Scarlett sees these nights as part of a wider analogue return. It’s true, there is something old-fashioned about the night. It feels more like going to a play than a gig at The George, and it makes me reflect on how little is often asked of us as an audience. It makes me think of something a friend said recently about how audiences in Northern Europe are so attentive at gigs, so watching & listening, that he found it almost unsettling to perform in front of. That made him consider the fast-food approach to gigs we take in London. We all too often starve ourselves of active attention, of waylaying the urge for a cigarette right now, of realising that you are there to properly take in what is being said. Not so here: here, you are aware that you are part of what’s happening. There are things required of you. There is an interval. It is a Sunday. “Not all events have to be about drinking Red Stripes and getting fucked up,” Scarlett told me. “It’s about asking, can we listen in a different way?”
A Woman Becomes a Wolf was initially born out of Scarlett’s frustration with the silence women are forced into, with the ways abusive dynamics denature us, forming rubber between the feet and the ground keeping us empty of the buzz and the hum. “It started as an homage to my grandmothers,” she said, women who had “lost their voice and instinct” to abuse. The show’s name tangles with that loss, and with its remediation, a reclamation of instinct, untaming. The rejection of a kind of aestheticism that too often becomes a stranglehold on performance. And Scarlett is also adamant that the events are not just for women, that we go a lot further when we go there together, reading the masculine and feminine within everyone. Trying to locate the animal in the room. Somebody is speaking, a new centre of gravity forms.
When I leave, the street is slick with night. The pub glows behind me, a small light on Commercial Road. I think more than anything else, these nights seem to me to tap into our hunger for being known, for walking into a room on a Sunday evening and feeling caught up in those invisible strings, for catching familiar eyes across a room, for seeing someone perform and knowing exactly where they are coming from. Having had half that conversation with them the night before. You can see a room shed its skin, frequencies shift. You find yourself wanting to wink. A stranger gives me their drink to hold.
Performers: Arcadia Molinas, Angelika May, Devi Chatterjee, Olia Poliakova, Bianca Pina, Luke Hornsby-Smith, AILSA, Alexander Gallimore, Miranda Gray-Aragoneses, Annie Wicca, Agostina + Ravn (Mike TV), Anaïs Serres, Maddalena Iodice, Melody Triumph, Olive Dickson, Rose From The Dead, Mataio and Ula, Daniel Phillip Davies, Lillith Freeman, Carys Maloney, Coco Angelo and Scarlett Woolfe.
Organisers: Scarlett Woolfe & Alexander Gallimore
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