I got an insight into their work, and into their minds, before I’d even gotten into the auditorium. Alongside the programme (with its photo of a barbie doll shoved into a pair of boxer shorts worn by an androgynous figure) was something that looked like one of those ghastly tick-box questionnaires. Except it wasn’t. Instead, it presented a whimsical but pertinent checklist about the performers (tall/small), the show and how you could get involved to help them (cake baking or pant sewing) with future projects.

Scientists. For Science!

The play is an hour long and it’s about tomboys. Hurrah! It’s also about the challenges of growing up feeling confined by limited gender options, and the accompanying problems of underwear, of going into the “right” toilet, of working out who you are, who you want to be, and how to fall in love and be yourself. The pair use pseudo-science, white labcoats and some strange experiments alongside clownful vignettes, sad stories and bizarre situations that describe accurately, and often painfully so, the experience of  “disappointment” – how our hopes and expectations of life can fall short when we’re confronted with the brick wall of “what is expected”.

I especially loved the physicality of the two performers, their deft ownership of the space, as well as the glimmer of the personal at the edges of their characterisation. It’s funny and very, very heartfelt – I found myself watching bits of my own childhood and teenage experience onstage. The awkward, clumsy, strangeness of having a cis female body but not feeling especially feminine, and not feeling sure that was allowed, or sure of how to be “in-between”.

Everyone else had come out as these beautiful butterflies and I’d come out as a kind of butterpillar

– Tomboy Blues

The show ended with a discussion with Gendered Intelligence, who work to help improve awareness of gender issues in the public sphere, especially amongst young people. We talked about the word “queer” and what it meant, about how tomboyism might sit under the queer umbrella, and about anxieties of perhaps not feeling “queer enough” sometimes as a person happy within their body yet unhappy with the social requirements of being feminine.

Photo: Kevin Clifford

I also managed to catch up with nat and Rachel via email, to prod them a little further about their work and their ideas.

 Tell us a bit about yourselves and your work so far.
“We met four years ago at a live art performance workshop, and were immediately intrigued about each other’s work, histories and bodies. We made our first show, 27 Ways I Will Never Fuck My Mother by mashing together our two solo shows, then made a spoken word piece called Trauma Top Trumps. Tomboy Blues is our third show.”

Why did you decide to do a piece on tomboys? 
“Our work comes, foremostly, from ourselves and our experience. When we were getting to know each other we found places of similarity and difference, and the common tomboy childhood (and adulthood) was ticklish to us to explore. nat’s friends were having kids, she was looking again at childhood and was alarmed at how often it still is ‘pink for a girl and blue for a boy’ even in these supposedly broken open gender dialogue times. It was also the time of Caster Semenya and her disqualification.”

What kind of research did you do – did you find anything that surprised you?
“We talked to paediatricians, psychologists, tomboys (big ones and small ones), family, friends, mothers and fathers, and ourselves, and we looked at current consumer trends (and their attackers, like Pink Stinks). We were surprised that 50% of women identified at tomboys in childhood, and also at the amount of confusing and conflicting information about tomboys and queerness.”

There’s a bit in the show that talks about the “missing tomboys” – women who identified as tomboys when younger and now do not – why do you think that is?
“We think its a combination of wanting to conform, interest in boys/feeling like you should have an interest in boys, family pressure, high heels, bars and thongs for 7-9 year olds, and negative perceptions of any kind of femininity that isn’t ‘classic’. Plus, there isn’t really an accepted identity that is ‘Adult Tomboy’ – most often it is just ‘lesbian’, which doesn’t take into account straightness, or other kinds of gender queerness at all.”

The full title of the show is “Tomboy Blues or the Theory of Disappointment”. Do you think that being a tomboy has the potential to be a positive as well as a disappointing experience?
“Absofuckinglutely. The title is intended to be playful and provoke thought rather than suggest conclusion. The whole exploration of the piece is about that positivity in all its challenges both from within and without.”

• Tomboy Blues runs at Oval House until 19th November – click here to book.

Last week my friend Tom and I decided to exchange nerdy hobbies. I would take him to a Live Action Roleplay Game (more on that in another post) and he would take me to an airsoft game.

For those who haven’t indulged, Airsoft is a bit like paintball, except instead of getting splattered with paint you get hit with little plastic pellets (pictured) that are fired really quite fast (I spent the next week or so covered in little red welts and looked like I had lazy measles). The aim is for “realism”, so the guns used are of a similar weight and style to actual military weapons. Finally, if this were not enough excitement for one evening, you can use flares that you throw onto the ground near your opponent. These explode with bright light and a loud bang.

Obviously this is very cool, and equally obviously, it’s a rather boy-heavy activity. Looking for pictures for this post, I put “airsoft” into Google images and the only pictures of women I found were of a pretty blonde lady (titled “booth babe” sadly) at an airsoft gun show. When we arrived at the abandoned shopping centre (I told you it was cool) there were only two women – myself and my friend Kate.

The “safe room” in which we got ready started to fill up with men, most of whom seemed to know each other and started the kind of cameradarie rituals that made me start to reconsider whether this was really a good idea. I have an abiding memory from my childhood of trying to play street football or cricket with the boys who lived on my road and having balls deliberately thrown at my face until I went home, red-faced and in frustrated tears, to parachute My Little Ponies from my bedroom window, imagining my former teammates as the target of my plastic equine revenge. Thus, my brain started to fill with concerns about deliberate assault aimed at exclusion.

Once we’d got our kit and got briefed, we went into the combat area. The group was split into two teams and we spent the evening playing a series of “wargames” like Capture the Flag and similar scenarios with breaks for energy drinks, chocolate bars and hot dogs.

Over the course of the night I started to get a feel for the space and for how the games were played – there are a series of rules on safety and on recognising fellow teammates (a challenge when it’s dark and you’re wearing black). I needn’t have worried about the gender-exclusion problem. Once in the field, with facemask, guns and black camo gear on, the fact that I was a girl stopped being important – or even especially noticeable. Instead the fact that I was a “fae ninja” (not my words, but they kept me grinning for days) who could run really fast and sneak with the best of them meant that I was as challenging an opponent as the next really fast, really sneaky person.

I had an amazing time.

Heart racing, running through darkened corridors, finding cover, rolling out of the way of explosives and even taking command a couple of times.

A memorable moment was drawing out and picking off a few of the opposing team in a corridor, then hiding in a pitch black room, back pressed against the wall as their torchbeams sliced just past me.  Slowly, dreadfully slowly, they hesitantly pushed the door open and entered the space where they believed many shooters lay in wait. And I opened fire. It was a battle that I eventually lost, being horribly outnumbered – but that resulted in a handshake from the other side for giving good game.

Much credit goes to the people running First and Only Airsoft, who made absolutely no concession or acknowledgment of our gender. I felt welcomed and looked after, was given a good briefing on the kit, and felt sure and safe in using the guns. At no point was I talked down to, or treated as in any way different from anyone else who was there to have fun.

Which we did. Bucketloads.