CAN BABY JANE CAN CAN? 1987 –1989
CAN BABY JANE CAN CAN? explores the development of a friendship during wartime. Borrowing familiar images from the past, (the pre-war public park, the old-fashioned nursery, Britain I the 1940’s), the piece comments on the changing character of the relationship between two women and the roles they play within it – the innocence of childhood friendship gives way to the more testing friendship of adolescence and finally resolves into the more mature friendship of adulthood.
Through the associative use of costume, props and movement, the work presents multi-leveled metaphors, taking the audience on a journey, which considers not only the nature of friendship, but also the changing lives of women in 20th century Britain and the roles they have to play.
A journey through the imagined path of our mother’s generation. The young girls of World War II, the daughters of the British Army, the boarding schools, the orphanages, the land girls, the secret agents, the housewives with their ration books, the endless tin cans, the identification with ‘keeping your pecker up”, the need to keep soldiering on.
CAN BABY JANE CAN CAN? was funded by the Arts Council Of England, and featured in the Spring Loaded Festival at The Place theatre, London. The piece toured extensively throughout the UK, as well as tours to Holland, Vienna and Germany 1987 – 89, with support from the British Council.
PRESS:
“Yolande Snaith and Kathy Crick stomped about in sensible shoes and good tweed suits; two manly British ladies enrolled, it seemed, as war time secret agents, whose grapplings with suitcases and cans of food became transformed into an absurd battlefield”
Nadine Meisner, The Sunday Times.
“Their phrasings and patterns build up to become dramatically evocative as well a intellectually stimulating. Yolande Snaith’s work sparkles with intelligence, invention and a great warmth of spirit.”
Lesley-Anne Sayers, Dance Theatre Journal
“By far the most interesting examination of female behavior (and the most interesting choreography) in the festival has been Yolande Snaith’s Can Baby Jane Can Can. …Snaith makes the ordinary (tin cans, chairs, clothes) seem extraordinary. She and Kathy Crick are funny, moving, powerful performers.”
Jann Parry, The Observer