Women rewriting stories

This seminar is part of Women Raising the Curtain, a programme of educational and cultural events comprising seminars, film screenings, dance, literature, talks, and other activities featuring Paula Rego. Throughout her career, Paula Rego has been fascinated by storytelling. In this exhibition we can see engravings by Rego from her series Nursery Rhymes (1989), in which she delved into the oddness and cruelty of traditional British children’s songs. With this as a backdrop, Women Rewriting Stories offers up an analysis of women’s role in books for children and young adults, and how these have evolved over time, until today.

Program

6.30 p.m. Are Classic Stories Feminist? Ángela Vallvey Arévalo
The speaker will cast her eye over classical children’s tales, which have always fascinated her because she feels they have served as both guidance and protection for women in the darkest times, when being a women put one’s life seriously at risk.

She will take a look at some of these stories and explain how she decided to write an “updated version” of some classic children’s tales, which she entitled “Classic Feminist Tales.” Based on the fact that, evidently, many contemporary analysts consider these classic tales to be the product of an out of-date, hetero-patriarchal society, her position is quite the opposite: they are classics precisely because they are very modern, because they will last, and will always provide valuable lessons to their readers.

7.00 p.m. Little Red Riding Hood: the seeds of the forest. Beatriz Giménez de Ory
Stories are like seeds from which forests grow. Forests represent life, which grows ahead of us, mysteriously and with no defined paths. We must enter the woods, inexorably, leaving behind our familiar home, which has become too small for us. Some forests are set on fire by the swirl of a red cloak; some swallow up the dancing children who follow a wicked piper; there are tree-trunks that smell of chocolate…

When night falls, all forests turn into troubled seas. Some children make a path out of crumbs of love that they stole from their home; but it is pointless: we have to get lost in the woods and leave childhood behind. Over the centuries, women writers have thrown out warnings for young children (today, and always), in the form of stories about the dangers and beauty of life.

7.30 p.m. Round table
With the collaboration of the Embassy of Portugal in Spain.