Preview: Lucy Hutson’s BOUND at Camden People’s Theatre

A lifelong project, Lucy Hutson’s BOUND weaves together performance and autobiographical film documentation. Live artist Lucy began working on this several years ago alongside film makers Clare Nolan and Benjamin Dudot and as her life has evolved, so has the performative and filming process. The December shows at Camden People’s Theatre will be the first showing of this newly developed work.

BOUND is a show about the slippery nature of identities, the ones you give yourself, the ones forced upon you and the ones that once, were strong and now you’re just clinging on… More specifically it’s a show about breasts, gender and using urinals but mostly it’s about baring all and coming clean.

Says Lucy: “The funny thing about the passing of time is hindsight. I always kind of feel like I know who I am but sometimes, I look back at my younger self and it feels like I was walking a tightrope with a blindfold on. I wonder if in the future, I’ll look back on the person saying this and feel the same?

I make theatre shows about who I am in the world I live in but I keep changing and the world keeps changing around me. What makes BOUND special is that I started making it a long time ago and have never stopped. 10 years ago, I made a film that expressed how I felt about my gender. I now have more films – I make one every time I feel that the one before doesn’t quite explain who I am anymore. I want to be heard so I’ve edited my films together

I feel stronger in my identity than ever but I don’t want to erase the past. I want to tell the story of how it feels to not fit into society’s gender categories and how long it takes to become comfortable in otherness. It’s important to me to see where I came from and how far I’ve come. Some things become simpler as other things become more complicated. I’m ageing in a world with an ever-growing vocabulary for gender identity, which makes me feel understood but seems symbiotic with a painful rift within feminism that I find suffocating. Part live show, part video instillation you will hear about how I’m learning to navigate the confusion I have about my own body.