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Pronouns and video games

Wed 10 Feb 2016 In: Community View at Wayback View at NDHA

From their first introduction to the Legacy Project in 2014, encouraged by friend Joni to audition for an acting position, Iana Grace is back again, this time as writer of The Pronoun Game.   Not one to shy away from creative diversity, Iana says although they are an actor, first and foremost, they strongly believe every actor also has to be a writer and a director at some point. Speaking of their beginnings as a writer, Iana says; “I used to do a lot of creative writing at school that was really teen-angsty and after awhile I realised it was just straight up bad so I gave it a break. I always enjoyed devising my own scripts in high school but didn't really do it seriously until university.” Admitting they have a bit of a love-hate relationship with writing, Iana says The Pronoun Game is a little weird, “It's meta. It's about gender identity. “I wrote it within a week - just before the Legacy deadline and just after coming out as agender to a few people,” they say. “So gender roles and identity were on my mind. “It's not my coming out story at all, although it's very me in that I've crammed in references to basically everything I like; the name "The Pronoun Game" is a reference to a YouTube channel I really like, the lead character is "Gemini" like I am, and the whole idea behind the play is vaguely based off a video game called "The Stanley Parable" which is another fave.” The story of a messy teenager who is very much forced to confront the gender ideals put in place by society, represented by objects around their room, Iana says “It sounds really deep, but it's a lot of fun and very visual. Again - I put a video game premise on stage and slapped a gender identity message on it, so it's weird.” “It sounds really lame but I hope it can educate some people, or at least open some eyes as to how even the objects we are given can convey so much gender confusion or expectation. Of course there's the underlying pronoun battle going on that I hope can be brought to people's attention. I want to shake people and yell "there's more than two genders!" or "singular 'they' is a thing!" but I hope I'm a lot more subtle in this approach. And it's fun!” “I think representation is so, so important in the LGBT+ community and giving people the space to share their stories is so important. I'm just pumped when any minority group gets the chance to have good, accurate representation - I basically scream when I see Afakasi people and voices - and there's such a great mixture of groups represented in this year's project so I really hope everyone who watches can find just a bit of themselves somewhere.” The Legacy Project is in it’s third year running and Iana says this year the audience can expect so many fantastic stories about love - but no love stories. “Instead we have wonderful, personal, character driven stories of different people crossing paths, finding themselves, but not in any cliched ways.” they say. “You've got relationships, friendships, self-love, all with different tones that work well together. There's just a bunch of wonderful people in the project this year and there's a lot of love gone into it!”     - 10th February 2016

Credit: GayNZ.com

First published: Wednesday, 10th February 2016 - 1:44pm

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