Juggling Metaphors and the Actresses’ Franchise League

As part of the initial development for this blog we held a seminar inviting a range of researchers to offer a brief reflection on Activist Performance. Several contributors offered performative pieces which symbolically represented some of the gestures they were exploring. The relationship between written and spoken language, movement and visual images will, we hope, become an ongoing theme in the blog, so we will try to include a mixture of media to reflect this. The short recording by Naomi Paxton and accompanying cartoon image by Paul Gent is our first attempt to do this. In her piece Naomi prompts thought about the relationship between protest and entertainment, using the metaphor of juggling to represent ways in which she is exploring the work of actresses who belonged to the suffragette Actresses’ Franchise League.