Critic Cal

Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, ‘You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.’ The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, ‘Let me cross over,’ the men of Gilead asked him, ‘Are you an Ephraimite?’ If he replied, ‘No,’ they said, ‘All right, say “Shibboleth”.’ If he said, ‘Sibboleth’, because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time. ( Judges 12 :4-6, NIV) How about a story closer to home: Conservative evangelicals lay claim to the “authoritative” interpretation of scripture and, whenever a survivor of the culture wars says ‘I follow Jesus’, the men of conservative evangelicalism ask them 'Do you hate the Bible?' If that person replies, 'No,' they say, 'All right,

The top three things I look for in a theatre trip: close harmonies, tight choreography, and smashed patriarchy. If I can have all that in an hour and a half or less, so much the better. So ' Two Man Show ' by RashDash Theatre Company – a fun and poignant 75 minutes'-worth of dance- and music-driven critique of androcentrism and the inadequacy of (androcentric) language to critique it – was my ideal evening out. It also sparked a number of bloggable trains of thought... The performance opened with a brief and rapid take on the history of patriarchy. In the paleolithic period (we were told) men and women were nomadic hunter-gatherers, equal in occupation and status . If anything, the female was revered (there is evidence of goddess worship) as the apparent source of life – the suggestion being that the link between sex and childbearing was not well understood. But this all started to change in the neolithic period, when human beings  discovered agriculture  and began sett