John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls is a new documentary I've produced with my brother Tom to be broadcast on Radio 3 on Sunday 26 February, and then available on iPlayer.
Presenter Samira Ahmed has written her own piece about the documentary, but here's the blurb:
Perhaps you did music and movement at school. There was a
time girls across the country learnt to dance as if they were flowers.
At the start of the 20th century, Jacques-Dalcroze developed Eurythmics
to teach the rhythm
and structure of music through physical activity. But the idea had
earlier roots, including an unlikely champion of women's liberation.
Presenter Samira Ahmed has written her own piece about the documentary, but here's the blurb:
John Ruskin's Eurythmic Girls
Eurythmic dance at Queenswood School, 1920s |
John
Ruskin - now derided by feminist critics as a woman-fearing medievalist
- was at the centre of a 19th-century education movement that
challenged the conventional female role in society. Amid concerns about
the health of the British empire he looked back to the muscular figures
in medieval painting and the sculpture of the ancient Greeks, in their
loose-fitting clothes. Perhaps the Victorians needed to shed their
corsets and free their minds for learning. In Of Queens' Gardens he set
out a radical, influential model for girls' education.
Samira Ahmed argues that Ruskin was an accidental feminist. To understand
where his ideas came from, how they were enacted and what survives in
the way girls are taught today, she ventures into one of the schools set
up on Ruskinian principles, tries on the corsetry that restricted
Victorian women's lives, and gets the insight of Victorian scholars.
Contributors:
Matthew Sweet (author of Inventing the Victorians); Dr Debbie Challis
(Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL); Louise Scholz-Conway
(Angels Costumes); Dr Fern Riddell (author of A Victorian Guide to Sex);
Dr Amara Thornton (Institute of Archaeology, UCL) and Isobel Beynon, Dr
Wendy Bird, Annette Haynes, Dr Jean Horton, Diane Maclean, Aoife Morgan
Jones and Natasha Rajan at Queenswood School. Readings by Toby Hadoke.
Presenter Samira Ahmed
Producers Simon and Thomas Guerrier
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3.
Producers Simon and Thomas Guerrier
A Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3.
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