Flesh and Blood

This isn't the first time that real-life siblings Rosana and Amy Cade have dramatised their own bodies. Five years ago they danced naked together in Nic Green's Trilogy. In this year's Sister, the pair open with a strip tease – "an experience [the audience] might not otherwise have had," they suggest. This completed, the Cades remain naked throughout as they share their own personal narratives.

Though born only 22 months apart, the sisters seemingly bring narratives from very different lives. Amy is a worker in the sex industry. Rosana is a performance artist whose work includes Walking: Holding. Amy "talks positively about her sexuality and experiences in the porn and sex industry." Rosana's narrative "is one of feeling pressured to be sexual and behave a certain way as a teenage girl." But by juxtaposing these two stories and journeys, Sister sets out to ask many huge questions about modern feminism and femininity: "What is female sexual empowerment?" Rosana notes via email, "Can it look like a Doc Marten as well as a high heel?"

Unsurprisingly, these experiences kick-started a conversation about their respective relationships with feminism and the female body. Rosana began asking Amy about the ways in which her experience in the sex industry had shaped her attitudes towards gender identity. Half a decade on, and after visits to Glasgow, London and Brighton, Sister arrives at Summerhall, and sees the pair collaborating again on a show which interrogates these ideas via the framework of their sororal relationship.

The aforementioned nudity is important in Sister, and attempts to question the way audiences look at the nude female form. "We look at our own bodies in a controlled gaze," says Rosana. "We are sexual in our own skins. We both individually use our body strength. We hug, we sit. Eventually we use it casually and functionally as we dismantle the pole."

The Cades tell me that—unsurprisingly, considering the show's title—their relationship as sisters is "a vital component" of the piece, and allows them a springboard from which to interrogate the different ways in which women relate to one another, taking ideas of authority and idolatry into consideration. Ultimately, they hope that a history of "love, respect, support and acceptance" allows them to create "open and honest dialogue about sex work and sexuality."

Though Sister does exactly what it says on the tin by discussing familial female tensions (with the help of the odd family video), its aim goes far deeper than that. It attempts to ask questions about sex education and the way sexual identity is discussed, but also to present nudity as "natural, un-astonishing, ordinary". Both Amy and Rosana "believe all ranges of bodies should be seen naked in public more often." Sister, they hope, goes a small but significant way towards presenting that alternative.