From Xtra: Ca: http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Belgiums_first_transsexual_performs_at_Club_PuSh-13016.aspx
Erin Flegg
Friday, January 11, 2013
Vanessa Van Durme, Belgian writer and performer, has a knack for picking the right word. After all, she’s had some practice. Van Durme became Belgium’s first transsexual before the vocabulary for the transition existed.
“It wasn’t that simple then,” she says over the phone from Belgium. “It was a big, big struggle because you couldn’t even pronounce the word, because it didn’t exist at that time.”
Now, at the age of 64, she has told her story in three different languages all over the world.
Van Durme will perform her one-woman show, Look Mummy, I’m Dancing, at this year’s PuSh International Performing Arts Festival in Vancouver.
The performance is a 90-minute monologue that tells the story of a young boy who was happiest when dressed in his mother’s clothes, wearing red lipstick and dancing.
The show is simply staged, just Van Durme in a pink slip, a table and two dolls, one male and one female. She transitions between her two parents’ voices and her own child’s voice. In a way, she says, the show is a tribute to her parents.
“They’re lovely people. I had lovely parents, working class people. I thought, what was it for them, having a child like me in the ’60s? It wasn’t a simple thing. They were full of understanding.”
She has performed the show 250 times so far, all over the world, including four times in Canada already. That’s at least 100 times more than she at first anticipated.
Continue reading at: http://www.xtra.ca/public/Vancouver/Belgiums_first_transsexual_performs_at_Club_PuSh-13016.aspx
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
