Staging International Feminisms (Studies in International Performance)

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Staging International Feminisms Edited by

Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

Studies in International Performance

General Editors: Janelle Reinelt and Brian Singleton Culture and performance cross borders constantly, and not just the borders that define nations. In this new series, scholars of performance produce interactions between and among nations and culture as well as genres, identities and imaginations. Inter-national in the largest sense, the books collected in the Studies in International Performance series display a range of historical, theoretical and critical approaches to the panoply of performances that make up the global surround. The series embraces ‘Culture’ which is institutional as well as improvised, underground or alternate, and treats ‘Performance’ as either intercultural or transnational as well as intracultural within nations. Titles include: Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case STAGING INTERNATIONAL FEMINISMS Christopher Balme PACIFIC PERFORMANCES Theatricality and Cross-Cultural Encounter in the South Seas Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo PERFORMANCE AND COSMOPOLITICS Cross-Cultural Transactions in Australasia Judith Hamera DANCING COMMUNITIES Performance, Difference, and Connection in the Global City Joanne Tompkins UNSETTLING SPACE Contestations in Contemporary Australian Theatre

Forthcoming titles: Adrian Kear THEATRE AND EVENT

10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-09

Published in association with the International Federation of Theatre Research

You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England



Studies in International Performance Series Standing Order ISBN 1–4039–4435–0 (hardback) 1–4039–4436–9 (paperback) (outside North America only)

edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Staging International Feminisms

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identiﬁed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978-1-4039-8701-3 hardback ISBN 10: 1-4039-8701-7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case 2007 Individual chapters © the contributors 2007

List of Figures

viii

Series Editor’s Preface

x

Notes on the Contributors

xi

1 Introduction Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

Part I

1

Cartographies

7

2 Bloody Aprons: Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Warner and Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation Elin Diamond 3 Mind Yourself: On Soundwalking, Race and Gender Karen Shimakawa 4 Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms: Pollesch@Prater Katrin Sieg 5 The Queer Globe Itself Sue-Ellen Case

Part II

9 23

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Interventions

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6 Actress Stories: Binodini and Amal Allana Bishnupriya Dutt

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7 Stockholm Interventions: Feminist Activist Performance Tiina Rosenberg

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8 Women’s Writing for Performance Project: ‘Making’ a Feminist Intervention Elaine Aston

86

9 Reconstructing a Diasporic Female Self in O Kyong-Sook’s Dictee – A Speaking Woman Jung-Soon Shim

95

v



Contents

10 Giving Back to Judith: Laura Curino’s Una stanza tutta per me / A Room of My Own Roberta Gandolfi

104

11 Anticipating Globalisation: Rosamond Gilder and the International Theatre Institute Charlotte Canning

113

12 Exile and the Elusive Qualities of Time Julie Holledge 13 Cultural Memory in El Séptimo Cielo: An Inter-cultural Staging of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine Noelia Hernando-Real 14 Stretching Medea to Postmodern Sensibilities Elizabeth Sakellaridou 15 A Journey towards Sensitisation and Empowerment: Feminist Performance and Intervention Theatre in the City of Jaipur Asha Pande

121

132 140

151

16 The Demon’s Nuns: Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa (Mexico) Diana Taylor

161

Part III

169

Manifestos

17 Reflection on the Work that is Being Done within FOMMA with Respect to Women, Gender and Patriarchy, Change, New Generations and New Technologies Isabel Juárez Espinosa

171

18 MAKE SOMETHING: A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

174

19 Pakistani Muslim Theatre at Home and Abroad: A Critical Manifesto for a Feminist Homecoming Fawzia Afzal-Khan

184

20 Reflections on My Literary Performance Theatre: A Manifesto for Nigerian Women 194 Irene Isoken Salami-Agunloye



vi Contents

21 A Manifesto for an Israeli She Monster Yael Feiler

203

22 Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto Jill Dolan

212

Bibliography

223



Contents vii

1. Binodinis young (Swarpa Ghosh) and old (Selima Raza) encountering their past. Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana. 2. The Baboo’s intrusion as patron and exploiter on a young Binodini (Natasha Rastogi). Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana. 3. Catti Brandelius as Miss Universum. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler. 4. Catti Brandelius as Professoran. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler. 5. Vayu Naidu’s performance storytelling workshop, Lancaster University. Photograph courtesy of the Women’s Writing for Performance Project. 6. Split Britches workshop with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Lancaster University. Photograph courtesy of Women’s Writing for Performance Project. 7. Chorus members enact the Korean Liberation Movement patriots, executed by the Japanese Imperial Army (Theatre Group Mythos). 8. Actor Kim Min-Jung dances the Salpuri dance under Taegukgi, the national flag of Korea (Theatre Group Mythos). 9. An image of Joan of Arc superimposed on the national flag of Korea, accentuating the theme of oppression (Theatre Group Mythos). 10. Laura Curino, Una stanza tutta per me. The setting: an empty cube on wheels with just a few pieces of furniture. Photograph by Giorgio Sottile, courtesy of Fondazione del Teatro Stabile, Torino. 11. Laura Curino, Una stanza tutta per me. The actress delivering her final speech. Photograph by Giorgio Sottile, courtesy of Fondazione del Teatro Stabile,Torino. 12. Rosamond Gilder in the late 1960s, not long after the US-ITI Center hosted the 1965 annual ITI Congress in New York City. Photograph courtesy of International

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List of Figures

List of Figures ix

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Theatre Institute/Martha W. Coigney Collection, *T-Mss 2002–032. Billy Rose Theater Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Tomiko Takai performing Yokohama Noriko in the first part of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore. Tomiko Takai researching for the production of Exile in the South Australian desert. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore. Tomiko Takai performing the Traveller in the second part of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Tony Lewis. Tomiko Takai performing the final section of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore. Stage design for Act 1 of El Séptimo Cielo. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Pascual. Aitor Merino, Malena Alterio, Nathalie Seseña, Javier Gutiérrez and Manolo Caro in a scene from Act 1 of El Séptimo Cielo. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Pascual. Tamilla Koulieva as Medea and Yiannis Mavritsakis as Jason. Rehearsal photograph from the National Theatre production of Medea, directed by Stathis Livathinos (2003). Photograph courtesy of the National Theatre of Greece. MOW: family members overhear the amorous conversation of the Young Woman in the garden. Photograph courtesy of Chingari Theatre Group. MOW: Gandhari curses Krishna. Photograph courtesy of Chingari Theatre Group. Moi L’Interdite. Mouna asks the audience: ‘Why did my mother’s breasts shrivel without shedding a single drop of milk on seeing me?’ Photograph courtesy of Raj Kumar Chauhan. Intervention Theatre. Pre-performance ritual: the artists summoning a crowd in a village school by beating drums and singing folk songs. Photograph courtesy of J. P. Besnard. Intervention Theatre. Domestic violence: a young woman is beaten by her in-laws for not bringing enough dowry. Photograph courtesy of J. P. Besnard. Petrona de la Cruz Cruz (left) and Isabel Juárez Espinosa in The Demon’s Nun. San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, 2003. Photograph courtesy of Doris Difarnecio.

In 2003, the current International Federation for Theatre Research President, Janelle Reinelt, pledged the organization to expand the outlets for scholarly publication available to the membership, and to make scholarly achievement one of the main goals and activities of the Federation under her leadership. In 2004, joined by Vice-President for Research and Publications Brian Singleton, they signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan for a new book series, ‘Studies in International Performance’. Since the inauguration of the series, it has become increasingly urgent for performance scholars to expand their disciplinary horizons to include the comparative study of performances across national, cultural, social and political borders. This is necessary not only in order to avoid the homogenizing tendency to limit performance paradigms to those familiar in our home countries, but also in order to be engaged in creating new performance scholarship that takes account of and embraces the complexities of transnational cultural production, the new media, and the economic and social consequences of increasingly international forms of artistic expression. Comparative studies can value both the specifically local and the broadly conceived global forms of performance practices, histories and social formations. Comparative aesthetics can challenge the limitations of perception and current artistic knowledges. In formalizing the work of the Federation’s members through rigorous and innovative scholarship, we hope to contribute to an ever-changing project of knowledge creation.

International Federation for Theatre Research Fédération Internationale pour la Recherche Théâtrale

x



Series Editor’s Preface

Fawzia Afzal-Khan is Professor at Montclair State University, New Jersey. She is author of Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel: Genre and Ideology in the works of R. K. Narayan, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai and Salman Rushdie (1993) and A Critical Stage: the Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (2005). With Kalpana SeshadriCrooks she edited The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies (2000) and recently edited the best-selling anthology Shattering the Stereotypes: Muslim Women Speak Out (2005). She has published in NWSA Journal, The Drama Review, Social Text, Womanist Theory and Research, Wasafiri and The Journal of South Asian Studies and serves on the Advisory Board of the South Asian Review. She has held the W. E. B. Dubois Fellowship at Harvard University, a Rotary Fellowship, an American Institute of Pakistan Studies grant and a Fulbright scholarship. She is a performance artist, working in the classical vocal north Indian tradition, and founding member of the theatre collective, Faim de Siècle, with whom she recently performed at the world premiere of Five Streams at Asia Society, in Manhattan. She is also a published poet, twice awarded of finalist status at the Annual Greenburgh Poetry Festival, New York, contributor to the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Eastern Poetry, and is currently completing a memoir, Sahelian: Growing up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style. Elaine Aston is Professor of Contemporary Performance at Lancaster University, UK, where she teaches and researches feminist theatre, theory and performance, a field in which she is widely published. Her authored studies include An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (1995); Caryl Churchill ([1997] 2001); Feminist Theatre Practice (1999) and Feminist Views on the English Stage (2003). She has co-edited four volumes of plays by women and The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Women Playwrights (co-edited with Janelle Reinelt, 2000). Her most recent publication is Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory (co-edited with Gerry Harris, 2006). She currently serves as associate editor of Theatre Research International. Charlotte Canning is Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Feminist Theatres in the USA: Staging Women’s Experience (1996) and The Most American Thing in xi



Notes on the Contributors

America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance (2005). Her articles have appeared in various journals, including Theatre Journal, Theatre Survey and Theatre Research International, as well as several anthologies. She is the department’s head of graduate studies and a past president of the American Society for Theatre Research. Sue-Ellen Case is the Professor and Chair of Theater Critical Studies and Director of the Center for Performance Studies at UCLA. Her first book, Feminism and Theatre (1988), was a pioneering text in the field. She has published widely in most of the major journals in the field and served as editor or associate editor of many of them. She has edited numerous anthologies of plays and critical articles, including Performing Feminisms (1990), Split Britches: Lesbian Practice, Feminist Performance (1996) and The Divided Home/Land: Contemporary German Women Playwrights (1992). Her second book, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (1996), concerns gender and new technologies. Her most recent book, Performing Science and the Virtual (2006), traces the performative reception of science from Faust to the internet. Elin Diamond is Professor of English at Rutgers University, New York. She is the author of Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (1997) and Pinter’s Comic Play (1985), and editor of Performance and Cultural Politics (1996). Her essays on performance and feminist theory have appeared in Theatre Journal, Elh, Discourse, The Drama Review, Modern Drama, Kenyon Review, Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, Art and Cinema and Maska, and in anthologies in the US, UK, France, South Korea and India. She is currently working on a new typescript on Modernism and performance. Jill Dolan holds the Zachary T. Scott Family Chair in Drama in the Department of Theater and Dance at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Feminist Spectator as Critic (1989), Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance (1993), Geographies of Learning: Theory and Practice, Activism and Performance (2001) and Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (2005). She co-edits the ‘Triangulations: Lesbian/Gay/Queer Drama/Theatre/Performance’ series for the University of Michigan Press. Her articles on performance and gender, sexuality, social change and arts advocacy have been published in Theatre Journal, The Drama Review, Modern Drama and Theatre Topics, among many other publications. Dolan is past president of the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


xii Notes on the Contributors

(ATHE) and a past president of ATHE itself. She was executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University, New York. She now heads the Performance as Public Practice MA/MFA/PhD Program at UT, where she is also a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers. Dolan’s blog, ‘The Feminist Spectator’, can be found at www.feministspectator.blogspot.com. Bishnupriya Dutt is a scholar and practitioner, and currently Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Set up in 2001, the department looks at both visual and performance arts and is the first of its kind in India to look exclusively at theoretical and research perspectives. As one of the two members of the Faculty for Performing Arts, Bishnupriya has played an important role in designing postgraduate courses, initiating research projects and setting up a reference and research-based archive. She is currently conducting a major project for the University Grants Commission on documenting marginalised performance and women performers. Her specialisation includes modern to contemporary theatre (colonial and postcolonial perspectives), research methodology, dramatic critical literature and popular performances and the comic traditions. Her publications include The Jatra, a ‘Theatrical Form’ (forthcoming) and Feminist Performance and Critique in Contemporary Indian Dance and Theatre, co-authored with Urmimala Sarkar (forthcoming, 2008). Yael Feiler teaches at the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Stockholm, Sweden. Her main subjects are postcolonial theory and discourse theory. Feiler’s research focuses on theatre viewed within a certain ideological/political context. She has recently been exploring the relationship between feminism and nationalism as it manifests in contemporary Israeli drama, and published Nationen och hans hustru: feminism och nationalism israel med fokus pa[o] Miriam Kainys dramatik [The Nation and His Wife: Feminism and Nationalism in Israel as Seen through the Plays of Miriam Kainy] (2004). She is currently working on a project dealing with audiences’ reception of productions in Sweden and Germany of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and published Shakespeares Shylock och antisemitism [Shakespeare’s Shylock and AntiSemitism (co-edited with Willmar Sauter, 2006). Roberta Gandolfi is lecturer in theatre studies at the University of Parma, Italy. She teaches and researches twentieth-century theatre in Europe, with a focus on women and theatre directing. Her publications 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Notes on the Contributors xiii

include La prima regista: Edith Craig, fra rivoluzione della scena e cultura delle donne [The First Woman Director: Edith Craig, between Revolution of the Stage and Women’s Culture] (2003) and essays on the Italian actress Maria Melato, collected in Maria Melato: Il mito dell’attrice [Maria Melato: The Myth of the Actress] (2000). She is co-curator of ‘Spectacular Women’, a special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies 11:3 (2004). Noelia Hernando-Real teaches English and American Literature at La Salle College, Madrid, Spain. She works for a research project on Contemporary Literature in English, called ‘Re-figuring the Body: Re-inventions of Transcultural Bodies in British, North-American and Canadian Theatre and Fiction from 1980 to the Present’, at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has published in the Journal of Indo-Canadian Studies, and has articles on the work of American dramatist Susan Glaspell in Codifying the National Self: Spectators, Actors and the American Dramatic Text (ed. Barbara Ozieblo and Lola Narbona, 2006) and Interrogating America through Theatre and Performance (ed. William Demastes and Iris Smith Fisher, 2007). Julie Holledge is Professor of Drama and Director of the Flinders University Drama Centre, Australia. She began her career as an actor and director in the British alternative theatre movement in the 1970s, and moved to Australia in the early 1980s. She established a research centre for performance at Flinders, which has evolved into the Australian Performance Laboratory (APL). The current focus of the laboratory is intercultural performance and new technologies. Major publications include her groundbreaking study Innocent Flowers: Women in Edwardian Theatre (1981); her most recent work is Women’s Intercultural Performance (co-authored with Joanne Tompkins, 2000). In addition, Holledge has dramaturged and directed intercultural productions with Filipino and Japanese artists which have appeared in international arts festivals. She is past president of the Australasian Drama Studies Association and the chief investigator of AusStage, a major infrastructure research project funded by the Australian Research Council. Isabel Juárez Espinosa is co-founder of FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya or, the Empowerment of Mayan Women), the Mayan Indian women’s centre in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. FOMMA received a national award from the Mexican Institute of Research on the Family and Population (IMIFAP) in 1999. Isabel performs and writes 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


xiv Notes on the Contributors

Notes on the Contributors xv

Asha Pande is currently Head of the Department of Modern European Languages at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur. She is vice president of the Association of Indian Teachers of French. She is the founder of the Indo-French Cultural Society, Jaipur (active since 1982), and of Alliance Française, Jaipur (established 1999). She has also produced several plays and has translated Moi l’Interdite and La Cantatrice Chauve into Hindi. Tiina Rosenberg is Professor in Gender Studies and theatre scholar at Lund University, Sweden. She has written extensively on performing arts, queer theory and feminism. Her monographs include Byxbegär [Desiring Pants] (2000) and Queerfeministisk Agenda [Queer Feminist Agenda] (2002) which deal with cross-gender performance, queer theory and feminism. She has published a study of Swedish feminist theatre, Besvärliga människor: Teatersamtal med Suzanne Osten [Troublesome People: Theatre Talks with Suzanne Osten] (2004), and Könet brinner! Judith Butler’s texter i urval [Gender is Burning! A Collection of Judith Butler’s Texts] (2005), and translated Butler’s Undoing Gender into Swedish (2006). With Lena Hammergren, Karin Helander and Willmar Sauter she wrote a history of Swedish theatre, Teater i Sverige [Theatre in Sweden] (2004). Her most recent book is L-Word: Where Have All the Lesbians Gone? (2006), and she is currently working on a project on Zarah Leander as queer diva: If You Want to see a Star of Shame, Look at Zara! Elizabeth Sakellaridou is Professor of Theatre Studies in the Department of English, Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece. She has published extensively on Anglo-American theatre and on the theory and politics of performance, especially in the area of gender studies. Her most recent work is Contemporary Women’s Theatre (2006). Her current research focuses on performativity and melancholia in tragedy. Irene Salami-Agunloye is Professor at the University of Jos, Nigeria, where she is the chair of the Department of Theatre and Communication Arts, and project director of the Gender Equity Project. Among her many other offices she has been national president of the National Association of Women Academics in Nigeria (1998–2004), and is currently resource officer for gender and development in several UN organisations (UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF, UNIFEM) World Bank and ActAid in Nigeria. In 2004–5 she held a Fulbright Visiting Scholar Fellowship at 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


plays, and is the author of Cuentos y teatro tzeltales (1994). Her work appears in Spanish and bilingual versions.

xvi Notes on the Contributors

Peggy Shaw is an actor, writer and producer. She co-founded The Split Britches Theater Company with Lois Weaver (www.SplitBritches.com), and the OBIE award-winning WOW Café. She has received three OBIE awards for her work with Split Britches – for performances in Dress Suits to Hire, Belle Reprieve and Menopausal Gentleman, directed by Rebecca Taichman. She also played Billy Tipton in the American Place production of Carson Kreitzer’s The Slow Drag. Peggy recently toured with her show To My Chagrin, which she created through a Rockefeller Map Grant in collaboration with musician and sound designer Vivian Stoll, directed by Lois Weaver; and a revival of Dress Suits to Hire (a collaboration with Lois Weaver and Holly Hughes) for Split Britches’ 25th anniversary. Split Britches is also a part of Staging Human Rights, which works in prisons in Rio de Janeiro and England. Peggy has been a collaborator, writer and performer with Spiderwoman Theater and Hot Peaches Theater. Peggy won the New York Foundation for the Arts Award for Emerging Forms in 1988, 1995, 1999 and 2005; she also won the 1995 Anderson Foundation Stonewall Award for ‘excellence in making the world a better place for gays and lesbians’ and a 2003 Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre. The Foundation for Contemporary Performance recently awarded her the Theatre Performer of the Year. Michigan Press will publish a new book on Peggy, edited by Jill Dolan, which includes the scripts for her three solo shows You’re Just Like My Father, Menopausal Gentlemen and To My Chagrin. Peggy is a freelance teacher of writing and performance around the world. Jung-Soon Shim is Professor in the English Department, Soongsil University, Seoul, South Korea. She is also a theatre critic and President of the Korean Association of Women in Theatre (KAWT). She won the Best Critic of the Year Award in 2003 (Korean Association of Arts Critics) and the Yuh Suk-ki Best Theatre Critic Award in 2004 (Korean Association of Theatre Critics). She has published several books and articles on interculturalism, feminism and Korean theatre, including Globalization and Korean Theatre, Volumes 1 and 2 (2003), Sexuality and Popular Culture: A Female Gaze (2000) and Feminism and Korean Theatre (1999). Karen Shimakawa is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. Her research interests include Asian-American 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


UCLA, California. A pioneer of African feminist playwriting, Salami has five major plays in publication: Emotan, Queen Sisters, More than Dancing, Sweet Revenge and Warrior Queen.

performance, critical race theory and intercultural performance. She is the author of National Abjection: The Asian-American Body Onstage (2003) and co-editor of Orientations: Mapping Studies of the Asian Diaspora (with Kandice Chuh, 2002). Her current research project is Somatic Citizenship, a study of the embodiment of cultural identities. Katrin Sieg is Associate Professor affiliated with the BMW Center for German and European Studies and the German department at Georgetown University, USA. She is the author of Exiles, Eccentrics, Activists: Women in Contemporary German Theatre (1994) and Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (2002). Her areas of expertise are twentieth-century German theatre and performance, and feminist and queer theory. She is currently working on a book about German popular culture, gender and globalisation. Diana Taylor is Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the author of Theater of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991), which won the Best Book Award by New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997), and The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), which won the Outstanding Book Award from ATHE and the Kathleen Singer Kovaks Award from the Modern Language Association (MLA) in 2004. She has edited and co-edited seven volumes on Latin and Latino American theatre and performance including Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform; Defiant Acts: Four Plays by Diana Raznovich (a bilingual edition), Negotiating Performance in Latin/o America: Gender, Sexuality and Theatricality, The Politics of Motherhood: Activists’ Voices from Left to Right and others. Diana Taylor is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships from the following foundations: Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, Mellon and Whiting. She was also a Salzburg Seminar Presidential Fellow. She is the founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a consortium of institutions, artists, activists and scholars dedicated to the exploration of the intersections of performance and politics in the Americas. Lois Weaver is Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at Queen Mary University of London and is an independent performance artist, director and activist. She was co-founder of Spiderwoman Theatre and the WOW Theater in New York and artistic director of Gay 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Notes on the Contributors xvii

Sweatshop Theatre in London. She has been a performer, director and writer with Split Britches since 1980. Her interests include live art, solo performance, feminist and lesbian theatre, and performance and human rights. She is involved in Staging Human Rights, a People’s Palace Project initiative which uses performance practice to explore human rights in women’s prisons in Brazil and the UK. She collaborated with Leslie Hill and Helen Paris on three projects: On the Scent, an investigation of the relationship between smell and memory; Lost and Found, a human portrait of urban regeneration; and Dirty Laundry, a video performance commissioned by Franklin Furnace in New York. She was director and dramaturge for Peggy Shaw’s To My Chagrin and Holly Hughes’ Preaching to the Perverted. She was artistic director for Performing Rights, an international conference and festival on the themes of performance and human rights held in London in 2006 and is producing director for East End Collaborations, an annual platform for emerging live artists. Lois tours with her solos Faith and Dancing and What Tammy Needs to Know and is developing a new performance entitled Diary of a Domestic Terrorist.



xviii Notes on the Contributors

Staging International Feminisms: Introduction Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

Feminist Research Working Group: a brief history This anthology celebrates twelve years of collective international scholarship in the Feminist Research Working Group of the International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR). The group convenes its programmes of shared scholarship through annual conferences, internet communications and specially convened meetings. It has met in various cities, including Moscow, Sydney, Puebla (Mexico) and Stellenbosch (South Africa). Over the years the Group has sought to enable a rigorous dialogue of discovery and debate concerning women’s theatre and performance work across cultures. The Feminist Research Group was first formed in 1994 at the IFTR World Congress held in Moscow, when the theatre scholar Christine Dymokwski was approached by the Federation to inaugurate a feminist group. Deciding that the feminist nature of the project should encourage collaboration at its base, Christine invited her colleague Jacky Bratton to co-convene the first meeting, which attracted contributors from Italy, Slovakia, Sweden, the UK and US. In the 18 papers presented, feminist approaches emerged as the predominant method of enquiry, alongside discussions of emerging feminist theories, histories and contemporary performance practices. If there was a key moment in the Group’s first meeting, it was, arguably, when members were presented with Nadezˇda Lindovaská’s paper, ‘Feminism is a Dirty Word in Slovakia’.1 Faced with a presentation about a society and theatre culture that, for complex reasons, did not want to enunciate a feminist agenda, the Group felt moved to consider – or perhaps to rethink – the different national and economic relationships to notions of gender equity. This intervention destabilised the previously untested methods 1



1

of feminist scholarship that assumed a shared canon and what had been assumed as the role of feminist research. At this moment, the Group was made dramatically aware that they were meeting in Moscow – a capital of economic and ideological difference from the West. Rather than producing resistance, the direct experience of cultural difference nurtured a desire for continuing to create international feminist research connections. In 1997 Janelle Reinelt, a member of the IFTR’s Executive Committee, invited Sue-Ellen Case to serve as convenor. Sue-Ellen first convened the Group in Puebla. Scholars from around the world met in anticipation of an international and inter-ethnic feminist dialogue with each other, but in that moment, discovered the possibilities and exigencies of working with local feminist performers and activists. This discovery meant that the conference practice that assumes English as the lingua franca, or the privileged language of communication, could no longer obtain. Instead, two members of the group, Alicia Arrizón and Diana Taylor, volunteered to work as translators for local women in order to facilitate dialogue. As the room filled with local Mexican women, the Group became aware of its relative isolation within an academic environment, produced by the material privilege of subsidised conference travel. At the same time, the potential for feminist encounters beyond the conference format inspired the Group to adopt the practice of local meetings when and wherever possible. In subsequent meetings, for example, the Group interacted with performers at a feminist cultural centre in Amsterdam and with women from the theatre scene in Sydney. Beyond the original format of sharing research papers, the Group then expanded its programme to include meetings with local feminist performers and activists, sessions on current issues for women in crisis in their social and economic situations, the sharing of videos of local performances, discussions of feminist pedagogical practices and, perhaps most important, developing feminist friendships. For many women, who identify as feminist in a context hostile to feminism in their local institutions and cultures, the Group creates opportunities to be in touch with feminist colleagues and helps to sustain their own ongoing research and practice. At the heart of the Group’s research agenda were questions that centred on how, given its international membership, the Group could destabilise the presiding Anglo-American feminist critique, through explorations of different performance practices, national agendas and cultural constructs. This investment in difference called into practice 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


2 Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

feminist interrogations of ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World feminisms; studies of inter-ethnic strife, critiques of transnational processes of globalisation, research into varieties of transgender identification and minority sexual practices, and the embrace of the term ‘performativity’, as a way to look beyond the traditional parameters of performance. The research topics of individual scholars were taken up in a collective discussion that interrogated its given cultural assumptions, ultimately situating the study within a heterogeneous field of feminist cultural practices. Continuing to haunt the meetings was the attempt to engage differences in languages, both spoken and embodied. Different traditions of gendered gestural systems, scripts whose words were so culturally-specific they could not be translated, narratives with unfamiliar historical referents and locally specific sexual practices that did not fall into either heteronormative or ‘queer’ categories, all challenged the assumed category of ‘women’. These discussions invigorated both individual and collective scholarship, attracting new members and sustaining a core. By the time of the 1998 World Congress, the Group’s membership had increased significantly while its international scope had grown to include feminist theatre scholars from Egypt, Korea, Malaysia, Japan, China, Germany, Sweden, the UK, US, Italy and India. The size of the group and its energy made it one of the most vibrant Working Groups in the IFTR. A marker of its success was reflected in a special edition of Theatre Research International (1999) on feminist performance scholarship composed of articles from members of the Group, co-edited by Sue-Ellen and Jung-Soon Shim (South Korea).2 More recently, at the Helsinki Congress 2006, the entire IFTR celebrated the feminist agenda the Group represents. In her keynote address, Lois Weaver asked all the members of the Feminist Research Group to identify themselves by standing up. Then she asked everybody in the lecture hall who supported the Group’s goals to stand up. The entire hall rose to its feet.

Introducing this anthology In many ways, this anthology reflects the history of the Feminist Research Working Group and points to its dialogues, discussions and discoveries. While this is, first and foremost, a consolidation and celebration of that history and our academic scholarship, at the same time we have tried to resist the idea that our endeavours are unproblematic in terms of generating an international feminist dialogue. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Introduction 3

In problematising our labour we are also signalling key issues that require ongoing critical care and attention. First, and perhaps most problematic, is the translation of all contributions into English. We understand that this requirement and the choice of an English press to distribute the work of the Group retain traditional colonial trafficking patterns. The hidden labour of translation on the part of many authors in this volume needs somehow to be made visible and honoured. Nevertheless, we feel that a feminist appropriation of the right to publish and to disseminate is crucial to the project of imagining an international feminist dialogue. Second, while a published collection often tends to imply some kind of unifying agenda or concept, we have been resistant to the idea that the anthology should ‘collect’ papers into a seemingly homogenised ‘thesis’ on international feminism, theatre and performance. Rather, our aim has been to capture the critical endeavours, contestations and discoveries that have taken place in the Group’s discussions; to bring differently located feminisms and theatre cultures together – beside, alongside and in critical dialogue with each other, but not at the expense of each other. Having made that point, however, it ought to be noted that a certain traffic in feminist performance becomes evident in the various stagings of playwrights, performance strategies and common theoretical assumptions across contributions. The plays of Caryl Churchill, the image of Virginia Woolf, Western classical drama, legacies of feminist agitprop performances and common critical strategies illustrate an international feminist performance practice and scholarship. Yet these same shared materials and strategies reveal the continuing primacy of the UK/US feminist movements. In a volume such as this, situating that primacy alongside feminist cultures from Nigeria, India or Korea, mirrors the Group’s practice of opening up more familiar forms of Western feminism and theatre to contestation and debate. Our debate commences in Part I, ‘Cartographies’, on feminist critical navigations of the global arena. Contributions test the structures of identification for their racialising, normalising codes. They interrogate the theoretical models that pose a global consciousness, ask feminist questions of social and cultural relations, and challenge the universalising idea of globalisation. In these essays, feminist and queer theorisings of global traffic locate their arguments in a range of theatre and performative contexts – including the theatrical work of René Pollesch, Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Warner, the virtual staging of subcultural New York in commercially-based ‘Soundwalks’ – as well as queer ‘cruising’ of the globe. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Part II, ‘Interventions’, illustrates the necessity of recording the precise conditions of individual performances. Contributions to this part document some of the ways in which feminists are working in the streets, theatres and institutions of India, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Mexico, Italy, Korea, Greece and the US/UK. Individually and together, these essays reveal how feminist performance plays an activist role in resisting oppressive gender regimes. They reflect different kinds of interventionist strategies and contexts: in specific productions (Dictee/ Korea, Cloud Nine/Spain, Medea/Greece); in the efforts of individual women (Rosamund Gilder/US, Laura Curino/Italy, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa/Mexico), and in both project-based and agitprop interventions (in Jaipur, Stockholm and Lancaster). They detail solo and group performances; street and mainstream theatre – a whole range of theatre work, in short, that in some way or other offers unique and powerful strategies for imagining social change through performance. Finally, Part III, ‘Manifestos’, looks at the feminist possibilities for ‘making’ change. Written out of the experience of particular national cultures – as indeed all of the contributions to this volume are – each manifesto argues for practical, creative strategies or performance examples of theatre-making that help ‘us’ to conceive of a world where the oppression, violence and terror experienced in different places and countries – Nigeria, Israel, US, Pakistan, Mexico – might be imagined as ‘undone’. As with the ‘Interventions’ these feminist manifestos look to an ‘undoing’ that is effective beyond the theatre in bringing about social change. More particularly, while as manifestos these writings aspire to change, they also reflect experiences of having already made a difference – whether through the performance practice of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, founding members of the lesbian theatre company Split Britches, whose work has inspired and sustained feminist scholars, nationally and internationally, or the political and creative work and influence of Irene Isoken Salami-Agunloye in Nigeria, and Isabel Juárez Espinosa in Mexico. Resisting at this juncture the temptation to list the merits and achievements of all of our contributors, we would like to acknowledge that as much as the materials dealt with in all three parts offer important reflections on feminist theatre and feminist theatre research internationally, it is also the case that individual contributors are themselves important to ‘making’ a feminist difference in their academic and professional theatre cultures. While many contributors have been working for decades helping to shape and sustain a body of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Introduction 5

feminist theatre research and practice, others are engaged with bringing feminism to theatre cultures where, without their individual endeavours, there would be no feminist perspective at all. Thinking of the three parts (and our contributors) together, if there is one thing they share, it is a recognition of the necessity for feminism to be at work internationally. This runs counter to a prevalent idea of feminism, in the West at least, as having played out its role, outlived its usefulness. The feminisms as encountered in this volume have urgent stories to tell: of racialised, sexualised oppressions; and of contemporary violence, inequities, injustices, against women. Theatres of feminism ask, if not demand, that those stories are ‘written’, seen, imagined and lived differently. Finally, this volume represents more than the specific individuals and materials collected here. Not just those women writing for this publication, but all of those women who have participated in the Group throughout its existence have made this anthology possible. This volume is dedicated to their feminist generosity.

Notes 1. Subsequently published as ‘“Feminism” is an Insult in Slovakia’, Theatre Journal 47:3 (October 1995): 381–92. 2. Special edition, Theatre Research International 24:3 (1999).





Part I

Cartographies




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Bloody Aprons: Suzan-Lori Parks, Deborah Warner and Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation Elin Diamond On Wednesday, 19 March 2003, I saw Suzan-Lori Parks’ Fucking A at the Joseph Papp Public Theater, New York City. With the image of Hester Smith’s bloody apron still in mind, I hailed a taxi for Penn Station. My Lebanese cab driver had his radio on and we both grunted in disgust at the breaking news that George W. Bush, President of the United States, had ordered the bombing of Iraq in arrogant disavowal of months of mass protests around the world. The link between Parks’ play about maternal suffering and revenge, poverty and political violence in a nameless, postcolonial backwater and my feminist optic on Bush’s policy of blood and global disaster was, at the very least, complexly mimetic. Bush disguised violent aggression with patriotic cant and hid from public view the political complexities, economic costs and, as it would develop, the bloodied remains of his war’s victims. Feminist theatre at its best works against such mystifications, exposing social contradictions in order to interrupt critically and subtly the seeming inevitability of acts like the Iraq war (which Bush justified with the never substantiated claim that Iraq’s government was behind the ‘terror attacks’ on New York City and Washington on 9/11). Unlike Bush’s revenge rhetoric, the stage blood in Parks’ Red Letter Plays (Fucking A, 2000 and In the Blood, 1999) and in Deborah Warner’s production of Medea (opening in Dublin in 2000 and New York in 2002) proved to be complexly referential: it signified the irrational causality of the revenge play, but worked dialectically against type, as though the act of infanticide undertaken by women who are mothers had to be understood both as a terrible consequence of converging acts and as a component in the real business of killing – as though events on stage were detachable to other sites and times. 9



2

In this chapter, I constellate Deborah Warner’s production of Medea, which I saw in October 2002, and Parks’ Red Letter plays with other sites and times. By ‘constellate’ I echo Walter Benjamin’s notion of constellations as invented critical collages composed of non-identical similars – texts, empirical data, figures – for the purpose of producing new knowledge, illuminating new critical terrain. For Benjamin the past and the present collide in a constellation that ‘flashes up in a moment of danger’, unhinging the past from its givenness and awakening us from modernity’s dream of progress.1 To argue that postmodernists already heavily ironise such progress myths is to miss the experiential depletion that Benjamin addressed in the 1930s and that still weakens us today: the inability to break from the recent past and to re-imagine the present. In the ‘profane illuminations’ Benjamin saw in surrealist art, the impenetrable and the everyday perform a dialectical dance, becoming intimately intertwined.2 In such constellations, what seems at first to be utterly abstracted, reified or mystified breaks down into familiar objects; conversely, what looks everyday and commonplace is shown (through critical labour) to be embedded in mysterious, impenetrable abstract forces. Present/past collisions and the everyday/impenetrable will be our critical tools in exploring Parks’ plays and Warner’s production of Medea. Specifically, the impenetrable refers to the abstract forces of globalisation and the everyday, to the mundane deprivations it produces. The ‘dialectic’, in this Benjaminian context, is not the post-Hegelian construction reiterated by Hardt and Negri – the binary thinking that grounds identity in self/ other, inside/outside formulas – but rather a critical procedure that illuminates concealed interconnections and thus possibilities for resistance.3 The director Deborah Warner and playwright Suzan-Lori Parks are, as it were, self-constellating theatre workers. Warner understands the human face of abstract violence better than any director I know, and Parks loves to take a razor to the tight mesh of American canonicity, opening fictional texts and historical narratives to the rude tactics of ‘repetition and revision’.4 Warner and Parks breathe the same opaque air we all do, experiencing, but not knowing or seeing the web of effects that shape our social reality. In this chapter I want to suggest that what some of us base our scholarly work on – namely, performance by politically aware women – is itself a critical terrain, arguably the most persuasive critical terrain for thinking about, and against, the impenetrable/everyday of globalisation. But first we need to define this massive term. Marx, among others, long ago understood how modernity was uniting the world, how capitalism by its nature produces imperialism through wars of commercial expansion. But it was not until the 1960s that the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


10 Elin Diamond

term ‘globalisation’ began to refer to a shift in the scale of social interconnection across the world’s regions and continents.5 Put succinctly, contemporary globalisation refers to the integration of many local and national economies into a single global market, regulated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO; established as recently as 1995), whose rules supersede the national law of any signatory nation and are rationalised by a distinctive version of liberal political theory called neoliberalism.6 As Alison Jaggar puts it, ‘neo’ may sound ‘novel’, but in fact marks a ‘retreat from the liberal social democracy of the [post-Second World War years] back toward the nonredistributive laissez-faire liberalism of the 17th and 18th centuries, which held that the main function of government was to make the world safe and predictable for the participants in a market economy’ (Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women’, p. 195).7 The WTO, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were all established to prevent drastic fluctuations in the global market. And their method, first, last and always, is to perpetuate the myth of free trade. Mandating the end of trade barriers, neoliberalism presses governments to abandon the social welfare responsibilities they have assumed over the course of the twentieth century – allowances for housing, healthcare, education, disability and unemployment. Neoliberalism mandates instead the ‘free flow’ of capital and goods across national borders. Here we meet familiar rhetoric – globalisation means ‘objects in motion’ – used brilliantly and to the point of glibness by cultural studies intellectuals like Arjun Appadurai. Globalisation, Appadurai writes, is a world of ‘flows’ and ‘disjunctures’ (for the vectors of flow are uneven and unstable).8 Ideas, ideologies, people, goods, images, technologies and capital flow across national borders seemingly independent of ‘traditional constraints of information transfer, national regulation, industrial productivity or “real” wealth in any particular society, country or region’ (Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalisation’, p. 3). Which is why, as Sarah Kane knew so well, global capital’s site is the very temporary, very expensive hotel room, the kind ‘that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world’.9 Reserved for globalism’s legal or illegal marketeers, its virtue is its spatial anonymity: no pieces of historical clutter disrupt the delivery and transmission of instant messages or streaming video. Yet, as Saskia Sassen argues, it is just this kind of rhetoric that drastically misleads: When today’s media, policy, and economic analysts define globalisation they emphasize hypermobility, international communication, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Feminist Performance in the Age of Globalisation 11

and the neutralization of distance and place. Central to this version are the global information economy, instant communication and electronic markets – all realms within which place no longer makes a difference and where the only type of worker who matters is the highly educated professional.10 That is, ‘the dominant narrative of globalisation concerns itself with the upper circuits of global capital, not the lower ones, and with the hypermobility of capital rather than with capital that is bound to place’ (Sassen, ‘Global Cities’, p. 254). Sassen continues, ‘when we privilege global transmission over the material infrastructure that makes it possible; information over the workers who produce it, whether these be specialists or secretaries; and the new transnational corporate culture over the other jobs upon which it rests, we forget that information technologies and transnational corporations are themselves produce’ (p. 257). By focusing on production and its practices, we acknowledge that while power and hypermobility are the sexiest parts of globalisation, many of the resources necessary for global economic activities are not hypermobile but are, on the contrary, ‘deeply embedded in place’. Sassen charges us to ferret out the ‘geography behind globalisation’ – in particular, the migration of low-wage workers, often women of colour, who travel hundreds and thousands of miles to toil on the periphery of the global system as nursing auxiliaries, maids and nannies, or who, wittingly or no, are sold (‘contracted’ is the euphemism given to parents and to the women themselves) into low-wage or sexual slavery. The critique of Sassen and others is a very familiar kind of materialist criticism, particularly feminist theatre criticism which traditionally scrutinises the theatrical apparatus in order to expose the ideology of theatrical signs, particularly the signs of sexuality, gender, race and other identity positions. I will argue in this chapter that theatre, a conspicuously labour-intensive, site-specific component of a society’s cultural production, is dialectically intertwined with what contradicts it – the flows of people, goods and images generated by, and reproduced in, the global market. By these remarks I do not intend a Luddite appreciation of the authenticity of live performance. Nor am I ignoring the way theatre provides content and techniques for the global entertainment business. I am asking instead for a renovated feminist optic, based in the impenetrable yet everyday practice of instantaneous transmissions that saturate our experience from the moment we hear the birds singing and check our morning email. To say that the eye on the screen is the same eye we bring to the theatre 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


12 Elin Diamond

seems crudely to naturalise utterly disjunctured spheres, yet naturalise we do; synaptic memories of instantaneous transmission are wrapped around the same optic nerves attuned to theatrical reception. Arguably a better globalisation critique of the material practices of cultural media would look at television or radio production, media that bear signals everywhere, but are produced by unionised and agitating urban agents in a distinct somewhere. Yet I am arguing for a deeper dialectical intimacy between the relatively fixed bodies and sites of (even the most bourgeoisified) theatre and globalisation’s seamless flows. Both sides of this dialectic contain elements of the everyday/impenetrable (theatre’s real bodies within its mystified aesthetic traditions; globalisation’s real workers within a cyber-marketplace), but it is the dialectical axis of theatre and globalisation that I am pursuing here. The growing numbers of migrating women make this dialectic an imperative focus; indeed, the condition of female migrant labour is one of those rarely told globalisation stories. ‘Women’, write Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Hochschild, ‘are on the move as never before in history’.11 Over half of the world’s 120 million legal and illegal migrants are believed to be women. Driven by poverty, pulled by First World demand, millions of women, some illiterate, many educated, from the poor countries in the South or from what is known as the ‘post-communist East’, leave their own children to perform the ‘women’s work’ of the North or the First World West as nannies, maids and (sometimes) sex-workers. Since the early 1980s, migratory factory girls have worked in deplorable conditions in the maquiladora industries of the so-called free-trade border zones. Unlike these factory workers who congregate in large numbers, nannies and maids are often hidden behind closed doors in private homes. Because of the illegal nature of their work, most sex-workers are even further concealed, shut off from legal recourse, culturally displaced, kept invisible. An alarming number are trafficked by smugglers and sold, literally, into bondage. ‘In Thailand alone’, writes Kevin Bales, ‘a country of 60 million, half a million to a million women are prostitutes and one out of every 20 is enslaved’ (cited in Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Women, p. 10). Our era of globalisation counts as what Benjamin once called ‘a moment of danger’. But how can theatre approach a problem so massive? *** Warner’s Medea threw open the closed doors of the domestic interior, reminding us that Medea was, in her own right, a migratory slave … to 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



love. In the ancient myths, the sorceress Medea, descendant of the Greek sun-god Helios, murders her brother and destroys her father in order to help Jason secure the Golden Fleece. Euripides’ play adds two elements to the mythic story: it makes Medea a foreigner, a barbarian from Colchis, and it makes her an infanticide.12 Given Euripides’ subversive dramaturgy (he won only five prizes for his plays, compared to Aeschylus’ 13 and Sophocles’ 18), his loathing of war (Medea was written in 431 BCE at the beginning of the disastrous Peloponnesian Wars), and his own eventual self-exile, scholars have found justification in looking beyond the melodrama of revenge to the violent patriarchy that exploits and humiliates Medea – a patriarchy represented by Creon, the Corinthian king who banishes her, and Jason, who abandons her and their sons to marry Creon’s daughter. The sorceress Medea can hardly be thought of as defenceless against this adversity, but Euripides makes every effort to underscore her dangerous alterity in Greek culture and her felt isolation. He has her explicitly complain about the marriage marketplace where women must find strangers to marry them, and of the bondage that follows: ‘With an excess of wealth it is required for us to buy a husband and take for our bodies a master, for not to take one is even worse.’ Medea tells the Chorus: ‘You have a country. Your family home is here. You enjoy life and the company of your friends. But I am deserted, a refugee, thought nothing of by my husband – something he won in a foreign land.’13 Warner accentuated the isolation of the outsider by placing her in a set that looked like a half-built McMansion in a subdivision for upscale executives. Medea’s defiled home is a construction site: stacked slats covered in builder’s plastic lie on the margins, cinder blocks for an uncompleted foundation are strewn everywhere. More than a metaphor for the interrupted marriage of Jason and Medea, Warner’s set invokes the smooth, hard lines of twenty-first-century corporate power – the world of Creon – in all its hostility to the messy spaces of women and children. Yet women and children inhabit this site, like weeds sprouting between paving stones. On each cinder block is a well-used child’s toy, a toy boat floats in the pool. The Chorus of Corinthian women, looking like they’re on a break from Walmart, scurry over the angled clutter, speaking in thick, provincial accents – the working-class locals drawn to the spectacle of misfortune enacted by these newly established elites. Creon’s affect in this production might be described as impatience. He wants to consolidate the marriage between Jason and Creuse, to clinch the deal. Jason approaches Medea not with guilt 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


14 Elin Diamond

or remorse, but with anxiety, because she’s holding up the deal – everyone else has moved on, while she, Medea, sits ranting. In the course of the action, Medea mangles the plans of royal succession. Corporate grey, reflected in the central pool, is soon stained bloody red. The murder of the children is, in this production, made to seem inevitable. As Fiona Shaw’s haggard face reveals, if she doesn’t execute them, Creon will. Yet this is a minor modernisation. More significant is the fact that in Warner’s staging the audience is always emotionally wrong-footed. Mayhem erupts not as a conclusion to anger, but rather within the space of instinctive touch, of homely family embrace. As causality thins out, something else emerges flying under the flag of tragic fate, and that is coercion, the imposition of an abstract will, embodied in Creon, which shapes the space, even as the sorceress exacts her revenge. Despite her native powers, Medea is bereft in the Greek world. The filthy toys in the cinder blocks signal the degradation of children and affective life, even for economic elites. Besides Warner’s Medea, imported from Dublin via London, several American productions of Medea sprouted not long after 9/11 – at New York’s Classical Theater of Harlem, Milwaukee’s Chamber Theater, the Pittsburgh Public Theater. Audiences seem drawn to the notion that murderous rage may be a rational response to oppression and cultural isolation. But perhaps there is something deeper at play here: perhaps audiences are seeking to understand the link between violence and domestic intimacy in this newly configured site: the transcultural global home. When we constellate Medea with Parks’ Red Letter Plays, this theme emerges vividly. Parks claims that she was at work on Fucking A when another play leapt out of her chest. It had the same protagonist – a marginalised, poor woman of colour called Hester – and the same outcome – both Hesters are stigmatised and end up killing a beloved son. Hester of In the Blood is called La Negrita and lives in a migratory site, ‘under a bridge’ of a large metropolis, with her five children, each by a different father. In nine scenes interspersed with songs, coercive so-called helpers from the state come and go, craving Hester’s body, giving her nothing she really needs (medical care and employment). Fucking A takes place in an impoverished developing country that looks across an ocean at a Europe of wealth and advanced medical services. As Parks describes it, Fucking A is ‘an otherworldly tale involving a noble Mother, her wayward Son, and others. Their troubled beginning, their difficult end 19 scenes with song’ (Red Letter Plays, p. 113). In other words, Fucking A bears the hallmarks of a contemporary 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Brechtian fable, and despite, or perhaps because of, this respectable pedigree, Parks experiences that self-described rude interruption by a monstrous Hester, whose queenly name (Hester derives from Esther) riffs on the filthy welfare queen who, at the opening of the play, is smashing aluminium cans for remuneration, unable to read the word ‘slut’ that someone has scrawled on a bridge pylon (In the Blood, in Red Letter Plays, p. 9). Published together, Parks encourages us to read In the Blood and Fucking A as a diptych – or a triptych. Constellated in mimetic and ironic relation to Parks’ plays is another text of sexual coercion, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850). Parks’ aggressive and creative dialogue with icons of American cultural history is well known, yet the collisions sparked between and among old and new texts are especially illuminating. Reverend Dimmesdale, Hawthorne’s sweet-voiced minister who conceals his paternity of Hester’s child, makes an appearance in In the Blood as the religious huckster Reverend D, the sperm donor of Hester La Negrita’s last child. Reverend D claims he feels like a Pilgrim building his church on Plymouth rock. And Hawthorne’s herbalist necromancer, Dr Chillingworth, Hester Prynne’s first husband, splits into the peripatetic sandwich-board-wearing doctor of In the Blood and the hopelessly 12-stepped Chilli of that play, Hester La Negrita’s first sperm donor. All three Hesters are marked by the letter ‘A’. This is the only letter Hester of In the Blood can write, illiteracy being one of her many social sins. Hawthorne’s Hester is, of course, forced to wear the letter ‘A’ sewn to her breast, a symbolic brand of the adulterer that effectively ostracises her in the Puritan settlement of colonial Boston. In a nice example of what Parks calls ‘rep and rev’ (repetition and revision), the ‘A’ of Fucking A stands for ‘abortionist’, and is branded on Hester Smith’s flesh. Just as Hawthorne’s badge seems to give his Hester a second sight into the sins of her neighbours, the brand on Parks’ Hester stinks and oozes whenever abortion clients come to call, which is every night, and in numbers.14 Most important in this constellation of Hesters is the indication that Hawthorne’s Hester, as Sacvan Berkovich demonstrates, was created as an allegorical emblem of dangerous revolution. The year 1848, when the novel’s frame story opens, has been nominated by historians as the ‘Year of the Red Scare’: Chartist agitation in England and the first Paris commune were accompanied by anti-monarchical revolts in Belgium, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto reached print in 1848. Polk’s presidency, 1844–8, had epitomised Jacksonian chauvinism – ‘Mexico 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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had been defeated, the Oregon Territory appropriated (along with Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and parts of Utah), gold discovered in California, and Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin entered the union’.15 But Polk himself was defeated in 1848. New England intellectuals like Hawthorne were worried that 1848 would bring a renewal of Robespierre’s Terror. They were therefore ready to be appalled by what social commentators designated the first major symptom of the ‘red plague of European revolutions … on these shores’ – the Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 (Berkovich, ‘Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise’, p. 350). Hester Prynne, estranged … outlawed from society … had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness … . The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers … and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.16 There could be little more socially ‘amiss’ than the convention at Seneca Falls. In The Scarlet Letter sexual transgression expresses and covers over the more shocking social sin of agitating for women’s suffrage. Parks’ Hesters are also social criminals. Hester La Negrita’s crime is ignorance of the system in which she lives, and Parks gives Amiga Gringa a long monologue that both obfuscates and explains the reason she cannot fence the watch Hester has stolen: Do you know what the Dow did today, Hester? The Dow was up 12 points. And that prize fighter, the one with the pretty wife, he rang the opening bell. She wore a dress cut down to here. And the Dow shot up 43 points in the first minutes of trading, Hester. Up like a rocket. And glanced up at the faces of clocks on the walls of their offices and women around the country glanced into the faces of their children and time passed. [And when they get back] to their office where they … work the Dow has plummeted. And there’s a lot of racing around and time is brief. Phone calls are made, marriages dissolve, promises lost in the shuffle. (Parks, In the Blood, p. 26) Amiga Gringa cannot fence Hester’s stolen watch because it is keeping the wrong kind of time. It should be keeping global time – ‘numbers racing on light boards Hester, telling those that are in the know the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



value of who knows what’. Whatever ‘Miga’s grasp of global economics, Parks insists that the everyday/impenetrable flash before our eyes like those figures ‘racing on light boards’ of the world’s stock exchanges. Hester and ‘Miga’s everyday deprivations seem to increase or decrease according to a market that has never factored them in. And Reverend D, for whom suffering is an enormous turn-on, hates Hester, hates her hunger, and looks for a better televisual flock: I dont want local poor. Local poor dont look good. Gimmie foreign poor. Poverty exotica. Gimmie brown and yellow skins against a non-Western landscape, some savanna, some rain forest some rice paddy. Gimmie big sad yes with the berri-berri belly and the outstretched hands struggling to say ‘Thank You’ the only english they know, right into the camera. And put me up there with them holding them, comforting them, telling them everything’s gonna be alright, we gonna raise you up, we gonna get you on the bandwagon of our ways, put a smile in yr heart and a hamburger in yr belly, baby’ [sic]. (Parks, In the Blood, p. 73) Reverend D, like the public relations officers for the IMF, knows that the sight and, more importantly, the gratitude of the ‘foreign poor’ can disguise systemic practices that produce poverty. Indeed, in the logic of globalisation, the US and G8 countries help create the foreign poor both through unfair trade practices (you lower your barriers to trade, but we’ll keep ours up), and through the far more insidious burden of debt. Over 50 countries have debts that will never be repaid, and yet resources are constantly being diverted from health, education and sanitation towards unproductive debt servicing. In other words, debts are paid with people’s lives, the most vulnerable of whom are women and children. In Zambia, every newborn infant owes the nation’s creditors $708, more than twice the average income.17 As Jaggar notes, the ‘feminisation of poverty’, a term coined originally to describe women in the US, is now global: the UN reports that women make up 70 per cent of the world’s 1.3 billion poor (Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women’, p. 198). Indebtedness, of course, has a history. Many developing countries engaged in massive borrowing in the 1970s when interest rates were low, but when rates rose most debtor countries could not pay the interest, and in the early 1980s a world debt crisis resulted, threatening default by large debtors like Mexico and the collapse of US banks. To forestall a global economic 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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collapse the IMF and World Bank rescheduled these debts. But at the same time, they imposed new loan conditions, mandating policies of ‘structural adjustment’ – policies of economic discipline – which drew the borrowing countries into the global market, forcing them to abandon self-sustaining production, insisting instead on cash-crop agriculture which builds dependency on Northern manufactured machines and fertilisers (Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women’, pp. 201–2). In other words, structural adjustment programmes turn complex local markets into an eight-lane highway for First World manufactured products, technologies and consumer goods, and simultaneously ensure a captive supply of cheap, exploitable labour. And now we’re back to women on the move, whose remittances keep indebted economies afloat, but who enjoy the gender wrath of leaders like President Ramos of the Philippines, who would discipline migrating mothers because they’re destroying family values.18 Says Hester la Negrita, who refuses to sell her children, as Amiga Gringa suggests, to sterile whites: ‘I don’t think the world likes women much’ (Parks, In the Blood, p. 59). Oh, but it does. Hester’s prolific maternity makes her a debtor and society her creditor, keeping her perpetually in their debt. But the crude logic of that relationship is belied by the desire at work in these scenes. Ken Urban notes that in advanced capitalism money as a signifier of value has become increasingly indeterminate and suggests, citing Patrick Brantlinger, that indebtedness is foundational: ‘All modern nation states including Britain have been founded and funded on the economic basis of national debt and public credit.’19 What matters, then, Urban argues, is not debt in its dollar amounts, ‘but the affective experience of being beholden, of binding obligation’. And with this obligation comes a concomitant longing for debt-free autonomy and a deliverance made possible by ‘the gift’.20 The gift, as Jacques Derrida notes, seems like a salvation from debt’s grasp; with a gift lies the possibility of a giving or a receiving outside all cycles of exchange.21 In the violent circuits of migratory female labour, sex is frequently the payment for debts incurred. Even the great Medea has to offer Aegeus sexual service, and the promise of a son, to satisfy her debt to him for rescuing her. But Parks’ Hester confuses the sexual exchange: she simply gives. To the doctor who answers to the ‘higher-ups’, she was ‘phenomenal’; to the African-American welfare provider, whose husband demands a kinky sexual threesome, Hester has her ‘cross the line’ and momentarily abandon the class distinctions between them. In other words, Hester’s sexual pleasure defies the victimhood of her 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



marginal social identity. And for this, Parks punishes her. That is, for her refusal to abide by the debtor’s logic, Hester is given her own version of structural adjustment: she is forcibly sterilised. And the blood on her hands from the murder of her boy mingles with the blood of her own surgical wounds. Why has she killed her eldest son Jabber, one of her ‘treasures’? The answer lies in the troubling oscillation of the everyday/impenetrable. Of all theatrical signifiers, stage blood is the most obtrusively artificial. The red blobs that indicate the fake tearing or puncturing of the body’s surface and signify violent pain, extreme suffering or death are so conventional as to be distracting, even embarrassing. However, in Parks’ Red Letter Plays and Warner’s production of Medea, the punctures to the circulatory system refer not to a unitary body on stage but to the phantasm of a global female body, and so are both materially and abstractly referential. That is, Hester La Negrita’s bloody abdomen, Hester’s Smith’s bloody apron, Medea’s bloody lab coat are points of a constellation that illuminate, however briefly, the circuits of global exchange. They mark the wound that occurs when an impenetrable distant system collides with the domestic experiences of women, even women who are sorceresses. This stage blood is more than a representation of real blood; it is an emblem of the unseen networks of global migratory labour in which women and their offspring are merely functional and conveniently anonymous. When blood is spilled, when the mothers themselves slaughter their children, both the system and the suffering can be glimpsed, and in that glimpse, recognised, and in that recognition, resisted. In its unique ability to provide viscerally powerful constellations for its audiences, feminist theatre can and does perform a demystifying labour – and this despite the inflated rhetoric of transnational global flows, despite the drone of the 24/7 news cycle, despite the fact that three years after the performances I have described in this essay, the carnage of the Iraq war continues apace.

Notes 1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on a Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt, ed., Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 255. 2. Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism’, in Peter Demetz, ed., Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1986), pp. 179, 189. 3. Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 209, n. 27. 4. Suzan-Lori Parks, ‘Elements of Style’ (excerpt), in The Red Letter Plays (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001), pp. 8–10.



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5. David Held and Anthony McGrew, Globalisation and Anti-Globalisation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 1; Alison M. Jaggar, ‘Vulnerable Women and Neoliberal Globalisation: Debt Burdens Undermine Women’s Health in the Global South’, in Robin N. Fiore and Hilde Lindemann, eds, Recognition, Responsibility, and Rights (Nelson and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), p. 195. 6. Ted C. Lewellen importantly includes ‘regional adaptations and resistances’ to an otherwise similar definition of globalisation in The Anthropology of Globalisation (Westport, CT and London: Bergin & Garvey, 2002), pp. 7–8. 7. See also David Harvey’s more recent elaboration in A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 8. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Grassroots Globalisation and the Research Imagination’, Globalisation: Public Culture, guest ed. Arjun Appadurai, 12.1 (Winter 2000): 1–19, p. 5. 9. Sarah Kane, Blasted, in Complete Plays (London: Methuen, 2001), p. 3. 10. Saskia Sassen, ‘Global Cities and Survival Circuits’, in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds, Global Women: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), pp. 254–74, p. 254. 11. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, ‘Introduction’, Global Women, pp. 1–13, p. 2. 12. See Sara Warner’s fine discussion of the Medea myth in ‘Mythic Proportions: The Medea Project Theater for Incarcerated Women and the Art of Creative Survival’ (unpublished dissertation, Program in Comparative Literature, Rutgers University, 2003). 13. Euripides, Medea, in Harriet Kriegal, ed., Women in Drama, trans. Rex Warner (New York: NAL, 1975), p. 9. 14. Consider other ‘rep and rev’ parallels. The welfare lady offers Hester La Negrita sewing work, echoing Hester Prynne’s redemptive vocation as a seamstress. The welfare lady maintains her respectability by othering Hester La Negrita, as do the Puritan women in The Scarlet Letter. Hester La Negrita sees an ‘e-clipse’, an echo of the meteor in Hawthorne’s story. Most striking is the opening of In the Blood where Hester La Negrita walks through a hissing crowd carrying her newborn baby, a direct echo of Hester Prynne’s shaming walk through a gossiping crowd when she emerges from prison holding her infant daughter. Finally, both Hester La Negrita and Hester Prynne (via the novel’s narrator) refer to their children as ‘treasure[s]’, an ironic riff on the contradictory costs of birthing illegitimate children and perhaps on the biblical passage that equates salvation with ‘treasure’ (Matthew 13:44). 15. Sacvan Berkovich, ‘Hawthorne’s A-Morality of Compromise’, in Ross C. Murfin, ed., Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, (Boston, MA: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 344–58, p. 348. 16. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Bantam Classics, 1981), p. 180. 17. Jubilee 2000, ‘Who We Are’, http://www.jubilee2000uk.org/jubilee2000/ about.html. Accessed 24 July 2003.




18. See Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, ‘The Care Crisis in the Philippines: Children and Transnational Families in the New Global Economy’, in Ehrenreich and Russell Hochschild, Global Women, pp. 39–54, p. 40. 19. Brantlinger, quoted in Kenneth Urban, ‘Cruel Britannia: Nihilism, British Theater and the 1990s’ (unpublished dissertation, Rutgers University, 2006), pp. 93–4. 20. See Marcel Mauss, ‘Gift, Gift’, in Alan D. Shrift, ed., The Logic of the Gift (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 28–32. 21. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 34.



22 Elin Diamond

Mind Yourself: On Soundwalking, Race and Gender Karen Shimakawa

Be ready for the unexpected, as you do in the real world1 Soundwalk’s tag-line – ‘Audio tours for people who don’t normally take audio tours’ – sums up their objective neatly: the company aims to offer auditors/walkers the chance – literally – to step outside their normalised bodily experiences of the world. A series of audio files available as compact disks or mp3 downloads, Soundwalk’s tours of neighbourhoods in New York City, Paris and elsewhere have proved immensely popular and profitable for their creators (founders Stephan Crasneanscki and Michel Sitruk and sound designer Dug Winningham). Purchasers of the CD versions receive information on getting to the starting point, as well as on the narrator and sound/music samples; this information is available to downloaders via the website. Although both versions offer a schematic, annotated map of the route, these maps are not referred to in the course of the walks; all the walker/listener needs to do is get to the starting point and press PLAY. Beginning in 2002, Oversampling, Inc. (Soundwalk’s parent company) has released more than 15 walking tours of New York City neighbourhoods, including walks in Times Square, Chinatown and three interest-specific walks in the Bronx (‘Hip-Hop’, ‘Graffiti’ and ‘Yankees’) as well as tours of several Paris neighbourhoods (including St Germain des Prés and Palais Royal). Each audio tour uses binaural recording2 simulating ambient sounds (traffic, pedestrians, music from passing cars, etc.) that correspond to the sites specified in each tour. In contrast to more experimental projects like the conceptual sound artist Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair (a 2005 audio walk through New York’s Central Park sponsored by the Public Art Fund), Soundwalk markets itself (via its own website, Amazon.com, and other travel23



3

related retail outlets, as well as the Museum of Modern Art gift shop) explicitly appealing to tourists.3 The narrator is typically presented as a neighbourhood ‘insider’ who promises to take the walker/listener on a gritty, hipper, more ‘real’ tour of the neighbourhood, rather than the sanitised versions typically marketed to outsiders. Each lays some ‘authentic’ claim to their neighbourhood: Jazzy Jay (co-founder of Def Jam Records) leads us through the Bronx ‘Hip Hop Walk’, for example, pointing out the sites of his childhood in addition to the culturally significant landmarks (James Monroe High School, alma mater of many early graffiti and rap luminaries); Vinny Vella (Jimmy Petrille on ‘The Sopranos’) takes us to a park in Little Italy where he fed pigeons as a kid; and Johnny Solitto, novelist and former stockbroker, takes us to his old office at Goldman Sachs on the ‘Wall Street’ soundwalk. As these examples suggest, the narrators of the New York soundwalks are almost exclusively male – the two exceptions are Pearl Gluck, the narrator of the ‘Hasidic Williamsburg: Women’ soundwalk (discussed below) and Ivy (no surname provided), the alto-voiced, punky androgyne gallery owner who leads us through the Meatpacking District.4 By and large, the gender/sex of the narrator goes unremarked, and the walker/listener is structured as gender-neutral. The exceptions, however, are striking in their aggressive (if implicit, in the case of the Chinatown soundwalk) attempts to discipline the walker/listener into normatively gendered embodiments. What is the appeal of these tours? Certainly, the authentic/exotic soundtrack flourishes on each tour suggest that a heavy dose of voyeurism and fetishisation is at work here: resonating gongs, plinking pipas and thumping Asian pop music accompany you on the Chinatown walk; police sirens, bass-heavy back-beats and cars backfiring (or are those gun shots?) pepper the Bronx walks; and sitars and street beggars serenade you as you float down the Ganges in Varanasi. However, a summary dismissal of these works on the basis of fetishisation is, I think, too easy (or perhaps just incomplete) in trying to understand how they work, and it belies the more complicated content and conflicted effects of these tours; in this chapter, I shall consider the affective work these tours do in attempting to draw us into these ‘exotic’ sites and somatic spaces via specifically gendered bodily performances. To be clear: I am not suggesting that these tours do not exoticise, fetishise or objectify the (imagined) residents of these neighbourhoods – they clearly do, and are often quite explicit about such voyeuristic aims – but I want also to ask how we might think about 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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their productivity: not only how do they fail to deliver on their promises? but also what might they deliver instead? Brian Massumi’s examination of the biogram5 offers us a way of answering these questions, by refocusing the question of bodily identity in terms of asking how bodies and subjectivities are produced – constantly, dynamically, multiply/contradictorily, in motion and in space. In keeping with his project to revise notions of ‘identity’ previously conceived in terms of (static) positionalities in favour of a more dynamic, processual model, Massumi argues for a version of identity in which ‘positionality is an emergent quality of movement’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 8). This approach poses difficulties, however, since the very recognition of an identity names a seemingly static position that is fictional to the extent it purports to describe a quality or characteristic whose meaning is stable over time: likening consciousness to Zeno’s philosophical arrow, ‘the transition from bow to target is not decomposable into constituent points … . It is only after the arrow hits it[s] mark that its real trajectory may be plotted. The points or positions really appear retrospectively, working backward from the movement’s end … . A thing is when it isn’t doing’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 6; emphasis in the original). The body’s identity is never stable or permanent, he suggests, and to the extent that we link a fixed, historical category of identity to it we engage in an act of retrospection/reconstruction of a moment past. How, then, to account for identities – raced, gendered, sexed, etc. – as produced, experienced and communicated and made functional in the present? Focusing on the sense/act of propioception (a mode of sensing/moving the body self-referentially, that is, by ‘displacements of the parts of the body relative to each other’, p. 179) as a counter or partner to the more familiar mode of cognitive mapping (exo-referential orientation of the body based on the abstract grid of Euclidian space), Massumi posits the biogram as that unit by which we move ourselves, experienced as selves, through space/time.6 Experienced most spectacularly and self-consciously by so-called ‘synesthetes’ (a diagnostic label for individuals who record memories across the conventional boundaries of discrete senses), ‘[t]he biogram is a literal, graphically-diaphanous event-perception’, writes Massumi, one that, he suggests, operates on a less pathologised level for embodied subjects more generally: ‘It is what is portended when you remember seeing space in time’ (p. 188). In other words, the biogram is one of the ways we carry or move through our pasts in/with our bodies, how ‘identity’ is experienced and reproduced temporally and spatially. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Soundwalking, Race and Gender 25

In illustrating his concept, Massumi relates the case of synesthete S., whose biograms ‘came in “walks”’. He would store biograms as ‘objects’ deposited at a particular turn along a meandering walk. There they would remain as mnemonic landmarks that would come into sight as approached. Massumi continues: The walks themselves were biograms of a configurational kind. They were composed of a number of synesthetic objects stored in vicinity to one another. They had to be re-accessed in order, following the proprioceptive twists and turns of the walk … To find a memory, S. would have to enter the right geography and then move ahead proprioceptively. (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 193) Soundwalks operate in much the same way as S’s biograms. Walkers are directed along a specified route, laid out proprioceptively: we are not instructed to follow a paper map (although one is made available to the walker via the CD packaging or as a website download), but rather directed via paratactic directions such as ‘turn right at the next traffic light and walk along the blue wall’, etc. Along the way, we are told what to look at (and how to see it); we are instructed to visit particular stores and restaurants and told what to purchase/eat; and at various sites we are given contextual information (provided by the narrator and community ‘experts’) that imbue these sites with histories and meanings. In other words, having been given the ‘right geography’, walkers are presented with (what is purported to be) the narrator’s prior sense-memories – following these mnemonic landmarks, we are invited to collect and cash in the sensory deposits presumably left there for us by the narrator. Massumi does not address the specificity of the biogram; the body that moves through space in order to enact or inhabit its identity remains, for him, ‘the body’ (or occasionally ‘you’). Presumably this is in keeping with his focus on the body that precedes or evades (if only temporarily) the constraints of static (gendered or raced) identity, his interest in Zeno’s arrow perpetually caught in mid-flight, before its (identity) trajectory can be mapped. But what if the synesthete’s route is plotted along a gendered and/or raced grid? The soundwalks I discuss below proleptically attempt to envisage/produce gendered, raced bodies in motion, bodies that can become gendered and raced through motion. It is an interesting (and, I believe, well-intentioned), if impossible, project: can you learn something of the other’s experience by 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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literally walking a mile in her shoes? In this cartography I would like to examine two sets of soundwalks, both of which take the form of ‘ethnic’ tourism: the Hasidic Williamsburg (male and female) walks and the Chinatown walk. Along with the Little Italy walk and (in different and less explicitly marked ways) the Bronx Hip-Hop and Graffiti walks, these tours make ethnic ventriloquism and/or voyeurism an explicit selling point.7 It seems almost needless to argue that these tours fail to deliver on their promises of full identification/embodiment of the other’s biogram; I want to suggest, however, that by looking more closely at the means by which that promise is made, and the various reasons for their failure, we might begin to see the potential for political work that such failure makes possible.

That’s my name, that’s your name, because today we’re one Perhaps the most explicit and extensive in their insistence on the walker/listener’s adoption of the narrators’ biograms, the Hasidic Williamsburg Soundwalks offer the walker/listener the chance to be (or masquerade as) a Hasidic woman or man for an hour as she/he tours this Brooklyn neighbourhood known as a long-standing ethnic enclave first established by Hasidic Jews fleeing European persecution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Walkers are repeatedly instructed on how to be(have like) a ‘good Jewish girl’ or to ‘blend in, like a real Jew’, and we are given explicit instructions on how we may achieve this transformation.8 Unlike other Soundwalks, the Hasidic Williamsburg walks begin with instructions on what (not) to wear: ‘In order to experience our community there’s a way to dress,’ Joseph Pierkarski (the men’s narrator) begins, ‘and that is modestly.’ Pearl Gluck is more detailed in her sartorial prescriptions for women: ‘So here’s the bad news,’ she warns. ‘It’s also the good news. You’re actually gonna look like a good girl for one day. You gotta wear a long skirt, you gotta keep those elbows covered, and keep those collarbones nice and protected from the eyes of the opposite sex.’ After giving a rationale for these restrictions (‘what [the Hasidic men] should be thinking about when they’re walking their streets is their Torah, the given word of God, not you’) she then orders us to ‘get up, make sure your sleeves are long enough, your skirt is long enough, and your collar’s high enough’ before we leave the (women’s side of the) restaurant where we first ‘met’ Pearl. The biogrammatical function of clothing features prominently throughout both walks: one of the first stops on Joseph’s tour is a dry goods store where male 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



walkers are instructed to purchase a yarmulke, a transaction whose completion prompts Joseph to tell us approvingly, ‘Now you’re going to be a Jew like everybody else.’ Correlatively, Pearl walks us past Tip Top Wigs, but ‘you’re not going in there,’ she tells us, ‘since I’m not married, and you’re me, you don’t need to cover your hair.’ Having adopted the appropriate costume for this biogram, we are thereby better positioned (literally) to perform another biogrammatic task: to move/behave as a Hasidic women or man. ‘You gotta follow my rhythm,’ Pearl tells us. ‘Don’t walk around and be precious, don’t be super-friendly, and don’t walk around and be disrespectful,’ she warns, ‘just be here, in the community, like you belong. Like I belong.’ Joseph is even more detailed: ‘what I want you to do is follow me. And I also want you to listen to my footsteps as I walk. One, two, three, actually, let’s do the Yiddish [counts in Yiddish in rhythm to his footsteps].’ Later, he instructs us, ‘Of course, I don’t want you talking to any women. … Also, when you see two women walking on the street, try not to walk between them.’ Following their directions, the inference goes, will give us some glimpse into the lived, bodily experience of being a Hasidic woman or man as they might move through the streets of Williamsburg. Having (presumably) mastered our narrators’ movements, we are led to various locations in the neighbourhood, through which we are given an illustrated history of Williamsburg and of the Ba’al shem tov movement, delivered by Joseph, Pearl, various rabbis and community members. But even these more educational moments (‘let me tell you about us’) are punctuated with jarringly biogrammatic, identificatory injunctions: as we’re about to enter the first temple on the men’s route, Joseph instructs us, ‘if anybody asks, you’re Jewish. Because I’m sure at one point in someone’s life and history, in your family tree, somebody was Jewish. So, for the sake of this trip right now, you are Jewish. Are you ready?’ We are not told the stakes of failure – is it a requirement that one be Jewish to enter this part of the synagogue? – but we are praised afterwards by a (relieved?) Joseph: ‘You were great. You’ve been initiated.’ Pearl’s route does not enter the ground floor of the synagogue (where women are prohibited) but the subject of sex segregation does prompt a different sort of invitation to experience embodied Hasidic identity. As we pass the synagogue where Joseph’s walker was initiated, she tells us, ‘It’s at this point you’re going to lose your man if you’re with one. It doesn’t matter. I say find a nice Jewish boy. Listen, I’m not one for clichés, but they really please their women. It’s not a cliché – it’s the law. Every month man’s gotta please his wife, no 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


28 Karen Shimakawa

matter what. So I say, let the guy go, and keep looking [laughs].’ In a tour otherwise dominated by descriptions and explanations of Hasidic female sexuality and the centrality of the reproduction of heteronormative familial structures, Pearl invites us (as non-Hasidic women) to imagine we live their sexual lives. Elsewhere Pearl and other commentators explain the conventions of traditional courtship, expectations regarding reproduction and child-rearing, sexual practices and prohibitions; here, though, we are positioned as the partner of a Hasidic Jewish man within that culture.9 For the most part, Joseph’s movement instructions do not emphasise gender/sex differentiation; it is assumed (as is clear in his invitation into the synagogue) that the walker/listener is male and that his blocking applies (only) to men. Pearl’s instructions, as indicated above, are more overtly and explicitly about gender differentiation – and these instructions primarily come in the form of prohibitions. ‘Don’t look directly into the eyes of the men,’ she tells us. ‘Don’t make too much noise. Don’t bother the men,’ she says as we enter a bookshop. Where Joseph invites us to walk fast (having posited a brisk pace as a specifically masculine gesture) and, at one point, ‘listen to this music with me [a sprightly klezmer piece] and dance across the bridge’, Pearl’s companion is repeatedly cautioned to restrain her movements, to stay out of certain buildings (the synagogues) and to refrain from purchasing certain items (men’s clothing). The Williamsburg walks consistently ask the walker to be a Hasidic woman or Hasidic man by accessing Joseph’s and Pearl’s biograms; while there are moments in which our failure to do so is marked and we are addressed as outsiders, these tours seem to emphasise the possibility of success: we are given detailed and direct instructions on how to elicit the biograms, with the promise that the involuntary nature of biogrammatic movement will take things from there – that we will, as Joseph promises, ‘experience what it’s like to be a Hasidic Jew’. My experiences of taking the women’s walk, and listening to the men’s walk, however, were far from the biogrammatically transporting experience the narrators seem to promise: the high collars and long sleeves felt restricting (especially during the walk I took on a humid late July afternoon); the injunction to avoid eye contact made interactions with people on the street feel somewhat uncomfortable (is this person looking at me/wanting to initiate a conversation/glaring at me for transgressing or trespassing?); and the walk past the synagogues (one of which is quite beautiful and well known) made me keenly aware of the fact that the men’s walk did go through these buildings. Male walkers I queried 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



almost universally opted not to dance across the overpass ‘with Joseph’, despite the klezmer soundtrack, and many opted not to purchase or wear a yarmulke (and refrained from entering the synagogues). Both my experience and those of other walkers was generally that of feeling firmly, and in some cases staunchly, outside the Hasidic male or female biogram into which we were so insistently inserted. What then to make of these purposeful refusals/deviations from the prescripted biograms?

This is Chinatown, baby … are you scared yet? The Chinatown soundwalk was one of the first created, the one that garnered widespread media coverage, and continues to be one of their best sellers (now in its fourth revision). Following the standard ‘boilerplate’ liability waiver (read by a female performer in heavily accented English), we are invited to a restaurant at the edge of Chinatown; after a few seconds of ambient restaurant noise, we hear, ‘Hi, is this seat taken?’ and we ‘meet’ our narrator Jami Gong, who begins by assuring us of his qualifications for the job: ‘These are my streets,’ he tells us confidently. ‘These are my people. So listen to me carefully, and I will take care of you.’ As in the Williamsburg walks, there is an invitation to inhabit the narrator’s (imagined) body/identity: ‘Be one with me,’ he instructs us, and later we are told to ‘get ready to see, to smell, to touch, and to be Chinese’, as if offering a mystical transubstantiation into the exotic other’s body. This extended introduction orients the walker/listener in relation to the narrator, and to the space through which she/he is to be moved/moving. There are two appeals being made: on the one hand, the promise that we should ‘get ready to … be Chinese’, an offer of mystical transubstantiation into the exotic other’s body; on the other hand, though, we are informed that this body-snatch will be, as in the best scary movies, dangerously incomplete: ‘I will bring you into places where you are not supposed to go,’ Jami warns us, and so we are dependent on an authentic, native informant who can claim ownership over ‘my streets … my people’ to ‘take care of [us]’. This dynamic tension between being and needing the other is sustained throughout the walk, and contributes to the spectacularity of the ‘failure’ of transubstantiation as well as the opening up of new possibilities. For the most part, the walk follows the second strategy: we are plunged into a strange, dangerous and otherwise impenetrable Otherworld and our only hope of survival is Jami. There are numerous ‘edu10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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cational’ interludes throughout (voiced both by Jami, providing a history of Chinese migration to the United States, for example; as well as by priests, academics and shop proprietors, who provide historical and cultural contexts on some of the sites visited) that resemble the content of more mainstream tours; however, the most written-about (and evidently the most viscerally effective) episodes are less infotaining in the traditional sense: an early version of the tour walked us up to the screen door of a sweatshop to peer in on the women at their sewing machines and cutting tables; Jami tells us that at one time, his mother laboured here.10 Later we are instructed to walk past another building where ‘rumour has it that it was and still is an opium den … don’t even try to get inside … I warn you, they do not appreciate your attention. Remember, this is Chinatown – you don’t mess with this kind of business. Keep on walking.’ We are instructed to enter another building, but discreetly, and to look through the crack in the door of a third floor apartment where, it is promised, ‘there is an old man playing cards’. Jami tells us that ‘This is Mr Lam. He is a big boss … He used to be head of the biggest triad in Chinatown, the Ghost Shadows. Not too long ago, they retired him.’ After informing us that we are spying on a former crime boss, Jami abandons us for our descent back to the street where he tells us he’ll be waiting (‘be careful on your way back,’ he warns us), and suddenly we are left ‘alone’ to make our way back into the daylight. In these seemingly perilous encounters11 (and the peril is enhanced greatly through SFX – gunshots, women moaning in pain and/or ecstasy, hawkers aggressively selling phone cards) we are presented with a textbook stereotype of Chinatown: at turns threatening and alluring in its otherness, (over-)sexed and gendered as, if not overtly female, then penetrable (albeit at some risk). ‘This is not New York,’ a Chinese woman coos seductively in our ear, ‘This is not even America. This is Chinatown, baby … are you scared yet?’ The use of a woman’s voice, as counterpoint to Jami’s, is a tactic employed throughout the walk. Whereas Jami (speaking with the mildly inflected accent of a second-generation Chinese American) stakes an ownership claim to Chinatown, the woman whose voice we hear in the disclaimer seems to occupy a very different relationship to us, and even to Chinatown itself. Her voice surfaces periodically among the ambient sounds behind Jami: the ecstatic moans in Mr Lam’s stairwell; fragments of a Chinese folksong in the background; fevered, shallow breaths as we traverse a dark and ‘scary’ underpass. Jami may own Chinatown; this woman evidently embodies it – and that embodiment is emphatically exterior, if not altogether exotic: we are 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



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Chinatown – a world within a world within a world [repeat/fade] And yet … when I take this or other soundwalks, a curious thing happens: I go slightly numb. That is not quite it: my senses are hijacked. Everything draws in a bit: touch (the jostling of other pedestrians, ambient temperature, etc.), sight, even smell and taste – all are subordinated to what Jami (in the Chinatown example) tells me to feel, hear, smell and taste.12 The woman’s voice is – for lack of a better term – disorienting: isolated and sited (for the most part) very locally (often behind and to the side of the listener), her voice frequently startled me, as I repeatedly mistook it on the recording for an external, ‘real’ voice intruding on my tour. Other walkers report similar experiences: when I assigned these walks to my class, several students reported turning to look for someone over their shoulder, experiencing sudden or fleeting geographic vertigo – becoming aware, suddenly, that they did not know where they were (in the cartographic sense), even in neighbourhoods with which they were otherwise very familiar; several others reported nearly being struck by cars, having fallen out of sync with the beautiful, organically choreographed dance between pedestrians and cars that characterises New York City traffic. It is a process not unrelated, I think, to those Department of Transportation statistics linking cell phone usage with increased incidences of car accidents, but I would argue that it is different too: the voice of the narrator in your ear is in some sense with you in the space your body occupies – you actually need that voice to move you through that space safely, and to tell you how to occupy and apprehend that space. It is obvious, perhaps: you do what the recording tells you to do – you have, after all, purchased it for that very purpose. Yet what is most palpable for me as I take this tour, as with the Hasidic Williamsburg walk, is the way the tour fails to interpellate the walker/listener fully into that exotic/erotic sound – and landscape. If part of the promise is to enable us to ‘be Chinese’ (or, I would argue, to be a Chinese-American man as Jami is), and to attempt to put us somatically into that body/identity, the dangerous thrill of submission to Jami’s instructions (which are frequently cast as vaguely risky) puts us more firmly in our own bodies, even as it places that body’s 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


invited, under Jami’s supervision, to consume it/her. It is in part through this stark aural/aesthetic/spatial juxtaposition, in fact, that we are invited to identify bodily with Jami in terms of race and gender.

safety in the authentic native’s care. What I am suggesting is that by trying to promise both simultaneously, the soundwalk succeeds at doing neither, and instead puts the walker/listener somewhere else: we are not Jami, but nor are we allowed to be comfortably in our own skins, either. The normal/normative way in which we typically move through the world as unselfconscious agents is temporarily disrupted; that we fail to assume (what we imagine to be) Jami’s biogram seamlessly or comfortably only heightens our awareness that we are no longer seamlessly or comfortably located in our own biograms. Is there something productive to be made of this failed attempt? Judith Halberstam has argued for a consideration of failure as an ‘alternative to the violent triumphalism that victory implies … . Failure, as a practice, recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed, failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.’13 What might be made of the indeterminacy of this somewhere else body produced in/through the soundwalk? Following the neurological literature on this phenomenon, Massumi notes that ‘biograms are described as having an odd status: they are “involuntary and elicited”’ (Parables for the Virtual, p. 189; emphasis in original, footnote omitted). One chooses to move one’s body and attention in a particular direction proprioceptively; what follows, however, in terms of sense experience of that movement, is ‘peri-personal [and] autonom[ous]’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 189). One interesting consequence of this incongruity is that it leaves open the possibility for ‘mistakes’ – an error or mis-step in the act of elicitation (failing or refusing to take up the mnemonic clue, for example, means the sense-memory will not be accessed); conversely, even an accidental or unscripted encounter with the object of elicitation can evoke the sense-memory unintentionally. In other words, biograms are, on the one hand, one of the ways our bodies become sites of embedded identities and histories; and, on the other, there is some play in the joints between bodies, their emplacements, history and identity. ‘In the circus of synesthesia’, writes Massumi, ‘you never really know what act will follow. The rabbit might turn into a dove and fly away’ (Parables for the Virtual, p. 191). That this ‘be[ing] Chinese’, which Jami promises never occurs, does not entirely negate its effectiveness in presenting the walker with a new/altered biogram: discomfort (or even fear) may signal another kind of newness, an out-of-body-ness that is neither wholly me nor wholly Jami. The synthesis of Chineseness, hetero-masculinity and ownership/self-sovereignty is, in dominant 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



culture, a novel premise. And while it may not be fully realised in the course of the walk, perhaps the discomfort of having consciously to negotiate gendered, raced embodiment in the face of that failure is productive: the work of social identity-formation laid bare as differential, relational and as work. Perhaps we might see this as a potentially profound (if subtle) exercise in re-subjectification: the walker willingly commits herself to another subject’s biogram – a (failed) act of faith and fictionalisation that she nonetheless performs with/in her body. It is this submission to bodily vulnerability, I would argue, that distinguishes the ‘failures’ of the Chinatown walk from those of the Williamsburg walks and opens the walker (willingly or otherwise) to new possibilities, rather than to the biogrammatic re-trenching that results when we simply balk at Joseph’s and Pearl’s exhortations to be their narrators. ‘Reaccessing the biogram’, suggests Massumi, ‘and pulling a determinate strand of organized experience, is to reapproach the point where the materiality of the body minds itself’ (Parables for the Virtual, p. 190). To the extent that we are engaged in the project of analysing or critiquing regimes of hierarchy and oppression based on (perceived) identifications, then, perhaps a conscious engagement with our and others’ biograms holds the possibility of eliciting or (re-) producing specific pasts by their emplacements of the body. What if the Chinatown soundwalk actually (if unintentionally) pulls new or different strands of experience? What, then, might the body mind[ing] itself be, or be becoming?

Notes 1. ‘Disclaimer’, http://www.soundwalk.com/disc.php (excerpt). Accessed 12 October 2006. The full text of the disclaimer is also included as the first track of all Soundwalk audio tours. 2. Binaural recording utilises a particular arrangement of microphones in the recording process resulting in audio recordings that, when played back on stereo headphones, simulate 360-degree sound spatialisation. 3. In addition to the neighbourhood walks, Soundwalk is in partnership with various corporate sponsors to produce specialised products, such as their collaboration with Puma (‘Train Away’ running guides to New York, London, Berlin and Paris), a mobile phone download project with France Télécom, and an audio tour of the Louvre coordinated with the content (and release date) of the film version of The Da Vinci Code. The centrepieces of the company upon which these corporate projects build, however, are the neighbourhood walking tours. Rave reviews in Wired (1 September 2002), New York Times (1 September 2003) and elsewhere have fuelled this



34 Karen Shimakawa

4.

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

success and the company continues to produce new walks at a rate of several a year, while releasing updated versions of current walks. The four Paris walks, in contrast, are narrated (in sultry, dulcet tones) by four young (judging by their photographs), beautiful and very femme European actresses; and while each professes an affection for/familiarity with her respective neighbourhood, their qualifications appears to lie elsewhere: perhaps in keeping with the (stereotypical) Parisian theme, their walks are moody and reflective, laced with tales of love and (hetero-)sex, heartbreak and betrayal. Another notable exception is the ‘Varanasi: City of Light’ soundwalk, which is narrated by Robert Svoboda, US-based author and ‘expert’ on Ayurvedic medicine. Packaged as a glossy, art photographfilled hardcover book and CD, this soundwalk appears to be aimed at the armchair traveller, which might explain the choice of a similarly situated ‘outsider’ as narrator. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Massumi’s construction of the biogram is intended as a neologism deriving from the term ‘diagram’ as it is deployed in recent architectural theory: ‘Synesthetic forms … are lived diagrams based on already lived experience, revived to orient further experience. Lived and relived: biograms might be a better word for them than “diagrams”’ (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 186–7). Massumi does not appear to be referencing the term as it has been used in earlier evolutionary psychology and anthropology or, more recently, molecular biodynamics. The Varanasi, India soundwalk is similarly explicit in its appeal to racial/ethnic exoticism; that walk, however, was conceived as primarily targeting an ‘armchair’ audience rather than contemplating its use by actual travellers and as such, its invocation of an ‘other’ biogram is arguably different. In addition, the narrator for this walk, unlike those of most of the others, is already an (albeit very knowledgeable) ‘outsider’: Dr Robert Svoboda, an American expert on Ayurvedic medicine. As discussed in more detail below, the implied addressee is presumably nonHasidic, and arguably non-Jewish. To be fair, there are many other instances in each of these tours – perhaps the majority – in which the walker is not expected or imagined to attain full identification with the narrator. Some of the most interesting moments occur when the walker cannot, or will not, take up the biogrammatic deposit left for her/him. Both Pearl and Joseph address the walker in Yiddish, but Pearl soon remembers: ‘Oh wait. You don’t speak Yiddish.’ Later she tries to teach us a phrase, but gives up in exasperation: ‘Nah, not like that. You know what, scratch that.’ Similarly, Joseph gives us an extended description of the walking habits of Hasidic men and women respectively: ‘Look at the men … they’re always walking so fast, like they’re always running somewhere … But check out the women: the women, on the other hand, are a lot slower.’ It’s clear in his anthropological stance that we are being positioned as outsider-observers; in these instances he does not invite us to move like our Hasidic counterparts, only to study them from a distance. This stop was eliminated from the tour after the first edition.




11. Although I am arguing that this ‘scary’ appeal predominates throughout the tour, it is not the only characterisation of Chinatown in it: other stops on the tour include a community senior centre, a bustling, 100-year-old tea house, a Buddhist temple, a herbalist, etc. 12. Most of the soundwalks, including the Williamsburg and Chinatown walks, include stops at restaurants or delicatessens, where the narrator usually tells us what to order. 13. Judith Halberstam, ‘Notes on Failure’, unpublished manuscript.



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Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms: Pollesch@Prater Katrin Sieg

The work of the playwright and director René Pollesch (*1962) brings into view the changes in the gender order that have attended the complex process we call globalisation, and adds a distinctly European perspective to our understanding of it. In the late 1990s, European feminist scholars began to examine the combined effects of immigration and the dismantling of socialist and Western welfare states on the gender order of European societies shifting from industrial to postindustrial economies. The status of the state in countries on that continent, and in particular its function of regulating the economy, differs considerably from that in so-called free market economies. The state’s economic policies have played a key role in crafting socialist-egalitarian and capitalist-patriarchal gender and family relations (with many variations in between across the region). In addition, the state (in Western Europe) has also long subsidised public spaces for the production and dissemination of academic knowledge as well as art, in order to facilitate a self-correcting, democratic public discourse protected from commercial or political pressures. Concomitant with the adoption of neoliberal policies by the European Union, which aim to liberate the economy from state control at the national and supranational level, the relations between men and women, and between natives and immigrants, are undergoing dramatic changes, at the same time that the possibility to reflect collectively on these changes and publicly debate them in academic, journalistic and artistic venues is also radically curtailed through the privatisation of the public sphere. Pollesch’s plays address these changes in a theatrical idiom marked by the convergence of theoretical, artistic and activist languages, while also showing how the (counter-) public sphere is increasingly caught up in the economic processes it wishes to critique. 37



4

Pollesch is a noteworthy young playwright-director whose plays have been produced by the most critically acclaimed theatres in Germanspeaking countries, including the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg, the Schauspielhaus, Zurich, and the Salzburger Festspiele. He studied with Heiner Müller and John Jesurun, and later apprenticed with Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill. He enjoys a great deal of artistic control, as he directs almost all of his plays. One of the two large public television stations produced one of his teleplays, and most of his plays have been published.1 He has received many coveted awards.2 While he is open about his homosexuality, Pollesch does not participate in gay identity politics; nonetheless, his plays have become part of a broader dialogue about globalisation, labour, the arts and gender among leftist, feminist and queer intellectuals in Germany.3 Since 2001 he has run the Prater, the small, experimental stage of the Volksbühne theatre. The Volksbühne and the Prater straddle the districts of Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, formerly part of East Berlin. Since unification with West Germany in 1990 these districts have undergone a drastic transformation. In many ways, the changes in this circumscribed locale are exemplary of the massive upheaval that citizens in post-socialist societies faced in the 1990s, although the dismantling of Western European welfare states towards the end of the decade entailed similar restructurings and social upheaval. As dilapidated apartment blocks were turned into American-style ‘lofts’, luxury condominiums and hotels, and twenty-something dot.commers on aluminium scooters replaced long-term residents and shopkeepers who could no longer afford soaring rents, the Prater theatre not only bore witness to the transformations in its vicinity, but became an active participant in the dialogue about globalisation. Pollesch’s plays parade and parody the homo œconomicus at the centre of neoliberal economic theories, the subject driven purely by self-interest, whose enterprise is thought collectively to balance out in a free market for the good of all. His work investigates the paradigm shift from historic welfare-state liberalism – which rested on the division of market and domestic sphere, or the realms of ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ labour, as Marxist-feminist economists named them in the 1960s – to neoliberalism, which eliminates that division by wrapping all areas of life into the market logic that historically developed from the organisation and imperatives of industrial production. In Wohnfront [Domestic Front] (2001–2), Neustadt [New City] (2002–3) and Zeltsaga [Tent Saga] (2003–4), Pollesch asks what happens when all social relations and cultural activities – family, love, emotions, sex, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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play and artistic creativity – are measured in terms of efficiency, speed, productivity and profit. My discussion here will focus on Domestic Front, which investigates the extensive reconstruction of the urban landscape and attendant class and gender relations in the centre of the German capital. The performance is situated within a larger activistacademic milieu responding to these changes. Domestic Front offers an interesting case study of theoretical circuits not only within Europe, whose outlines and internal demographics were dramatically changing in the period preceding (and following) the European Union’s eastern expansion, but also within transnational feminist theory, and finally, between page and stage. Domestic Front reveals how German feminists, including Pollesch, began to think through the transformation of social relations under neoliberalism, but also exposes the blindspots and dead-ends of their critique. Pollesch’s more recent plays have addressed many of these shortfalls by including issues of race, postcolonialism and migration in their dramatisation of neoliberal gender regimes. Yet I find the earlier plays noteworthy precisely for the way in which they resonate with a certain German feminist mainstream whose neglect of class and ethnic differences between women risks being unable to intervene in the current construction and cementing of ethnic and gendered hierarchies in Europe.4

Sexual economies During the first season at the Prater, Pollesch created a series of plays assembled under the title Wohnfront (Domestic Front), including Sex after Mae West and Insourcing des Zuhause: Menschen in Scheisshotels [Insourcing of the Home: People in Shit Hotels, hereafter: Shit Hotels]. They cite the work of women writers (Mae West and Vicki Baum) of the early twentieth century, who successfully articulated a feminist sexual politics in a popular idiom (Sex ran on Broadway, and Grand Hotel was an international bestseller and later box-office hit).5 Through these intertexts, Pollesch links himself to a feminist tradition of dramatising and problematising sex in the city, even as he highlights the transformation of sex and desire into prime engines of capitalist interpellation, and notes the disappearance of a liberationist identity politics championed by feminist movements. In addition, the ‘domestic front’ was inhabited by fluctuating groups of local intellectuals and artists that were not part of the theatrical ensemble. This diverse array of performances took place on the multipurpose set of the designer Bert 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Globalising Neoliberalism, Travelling Feminisms 39

Neumann, which stayed in place during the entire season. The stage consisted of rows of shallow rooms, including a kitchen and a bathroom, arranged in horseshoe format around an elongated area in the middle, where spectators sat on office swivel chairs. The actors lived on this set for much of the rehearsal period and throughout the season. Shit Hotels addresses a novel and popular type of upmarket residence for modern executives in the new, chic centre of Berlin, known as Mitte. The play grapples with the puzzling fact that, on the one hand, the incorporation of the domestic sphere into a free market logic appears to cancel the heterosexual contract, and, on the other, the heterosexual contract appears to have expanded to govern relations among women. The play explores the emotional labour performed in the new living arrangements catering to the highly mobile transnational class. Its title cites an eponymous article by two feminist sociologists, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, in the socialist journal Widerspüche (2000), in which the authors examine the concept of the so-called Boardinghaus, a composite of apartment and hotel, which specialises in offering full-service, short-term homes.6 Its subtitle alludes to Vicki Baum’s popular novel Menschen im Hotel, which was made into the Oscar-winning film Grand Hotel. Kuster and Lorenz’s analysis of modern Boardinghaus living explores, in the form of a small-scale case study, changes in the spatial organisation of work, home and leisure. Their article, I argue, illustrates a particular moment in German feminist theorising, when women sought to assess the implications of the gender trouble wrought by these changes, without yet being able to judge in what ways a local phenomenon was indicative of, or deviated from, larger European or global trends. In their article Kuster and Lorenz seek to clarify whether the decline of the separation of home and work heralds a ‘dissolution of gender difference and heterosexual norms’ that feminists and queers could welcome (‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, p. 15). After all, feminists have long dreamt of an equitable division of housework and protested at essentialist ascriptions of nurturing femininity that serve to hold women responsible for the care of children, the elderly and the sick, not to mention husbands and fathers, while men are exempt. Lesbians constructed an entire politics around women’s primary investment of emotional and sexual labour in other women. Kuster and Lorenz focus on the female boarding house guest, the ‘executive, highly paid and extremely busy, who wheels her “home” in her carry-on bag’ (‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, p. 20). Her entitlement to the same pampering by attractive young women as the male guest who is still the ideal 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


40 Katrin Sieg

and statistical norm has moved the guest to the other side of the heterosexual contract and in a sense trans-gendered her. While her highly feminised appearance, to judge by her depiction in glossy magazines, does not suggest that conventional notions of gender have become obsolete, the scholars propose reading corporate hyper-femininity as a masquerade (recalling the psychoanalyst Joan Riviere’s diagnosis in the 1920s, when modern career women first appropriated the father’s penis by arrogating professional authority).7 Several of these Boardinghäuser have opened in Mitte. They house politicians, diplomats and business executives who value the proximity to embassies, ministries and other government buildings, as well as the urban ambience of the bustling, gentrified quarter around Hackescher Markt. The size, furnishings and equipment of the suites aim to accommodate single tenants who wish to work at home as well as occasionally socialise with colleagues. The synchronisation of the home, traditionally constructed as a refuge from waged labour, with corporate requirements, practices and rhythms, prompts Kuster and Lorenz to coin the phrase ‘insourcing of the home’. Crucial to the promise of making guests feel at home are the female employees, who are trained to model their job performance on that of a caring wife. The authors’ interviews with employees and managers reveal that the Boardinghaus management constantly monitors the degree to which personnel create cordial relations with guests and learn their personal preferences, manufacturing the illusion of committed care as part of their paid work (‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, p. 20). The workers’ subservience, attention and interest in the guests’ well-being (regardless of their gender), so Kuster and Lorenz maintain, cement the heterosexual matrix, while making previously male prerogatives available to female guests.8 Their focus on the insourced ‘sexual labour’, however, effaces the service worker, to whom the less appealing parts of dirty and monotonous domestic labor are outsourced – the figure whose subaltern class perspective had framed Baum’s novel. Recent feminist scholarship, such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book Global Woman, has brought into focus the ethnic and class divisions underlying the sexual division of labour among women – introducing analytical dimensions that are absent from Kuster and Lorenz’s study.9 The nannies, maids and sex-workers discussed by Ehrenreich and Hochschild often travel enormous distances to compensate for the ‘care deficit’ that has emerged in the affluent countries of the North. ‘Today, while still relying on Third World countries for agricultural and industrial labour, the wealthy 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



countries also seek to extract something harder to measure and quantify, something that can look like love,’ they write (Global Woman, p. 4). Sabine Hess and Ramona Lenz show that this is true for the European Union as well, and point to an internal differentiation within the EU (‘Das Comeback’, pp. 128–65). In Germany, for instance, women from Poland and Eastern Europe perform much of the domestic and care labour, often as commuters (Hess and Lenz, Geschlecht, p. 129). These scholars’ insights confirm and contextualise Kuster and Lorenz’s findings by demonstrating that the production of heterosexual relations is both regionally specific and of global scope.10 At the same time, that transnational feminist work throws into relief the impasse in Kuster and Lorenz’s neighbourhood study, for whom the corporate couple of masquerading servant-wives and transgendered executive guests proves that femininity operates entirely as simulacrum, from which all material traces of social inequality are evacuated. The very small scope of Kuster and Lorenz’s ethnography (they interviewed just two female employees of unspecified national origin) is most likely responsible for their omission of the dimensions of race and migration. Pollesch’s dramatisation of the ideas presented in Kuster and Lorenz’s article amplifies their analysis into a dystopic vision, while the reference to Baum’s novel is confined to the play’s subtitle. The scatological prefix ‘Scheiss’ to ‘hotels’ signals the degradation of life in the global city, defined as the loss of emotional authenticity, mutual responsibility and humanity. The three actresses in Shit Hotels discuss the predicament of having feelings of home, family and love produced by a complex service environment in order to enhance the creative productivity of the hotel guest, while domestic labour is outsourced to employees trained to simulate idealised family relationships. The play thus portrays the ‘insourcing of the home’ as the nightmarish totalisation of the corporate logic of maximised productivity, resulting in absolute alienation, the lack of any alternative life options and the elimination of behaviours defined as non-productive. The service workers employed in the gross hotel are called ‘cyborgs’ and ‘replicants’, whose emotional and sexual output is monitored by a supervisor called ‘blade runner’ – alluding to the famous science fiction film based on a Philip K. Dick novel.11 In turn, guests are dehumanised by being relieved of emotional responsiveness to domestic workers: their responsibility for them is a purely monetary one. Unfortunately, Pollesch’s adaptation of the article also amplifies its weaknesses. Where Kuster and Lorenz speak of the Boardinghaus’s 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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tempting identificatory offers, Pollesch blows this up into the interpellative power of the neoliberal economy, as if the economy’s hailing of the subject as executive was both irresistible and not predicated on ethno-national privilege. Resistance or alternatives to such a totalising economy can only be represented as literally a crappy choice: ‘I simply don’t get any offers of living shittily’, complains C. ‘But that’s what I want. I WANT TO LIVE THIS SHIT!’ (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 80). The class contradictions structuring relations between workers and guests are all the more shitty because their camouflage as ‘love’ cloaks them from the guests’ experience. The women portrayed in Vicki Baum’s novel, whose struggle for economic independence necessitates the kind of emotional and sexual labour performed by Pollesch’s cyborgs, would be unfamiliar with the predicament C describes. The three women on stage describe their sense of dehumanisation, but they are not portrayed as cyborgs; rather, much of their frustration results from their inability to distinguish between the performance of caring and its simulation by the service-worker replicant, and ‘real love’ from its simulation. The sci-fi terminology obscures the fact that this is not a novel predicament, but – as Baum demonstrates – one that has been typically experienced by men. Nor is it the main problem. Rather, the often illegalised conditions under which all too real emotional and sexual labour is performed render workers open to abuse and exploitation, as well as making their work invisible. Pollesch draws attention to the emotional toll that the international division of labour takes on those who profit from it economically, yet his preoccupation with the predicament of the ‘blade runner’ rather than that of the ‘cyborgs’ reveals a distinct class bias and blindness to workers’ issues that is disappointing in a (post-) socialist, feminist theatre. While Pollesch’s work is important in illuminating the affective consequences of reconstructing the ‘private’ for upwardly mobile women, and points to a new, emotionally devastating kind of homelessness that greets those who are succeeding in the globalised world, the often literal displacement from home, the emotional labour and old-fashioned exploitation of the service worker fade from view. Nor does the play recognise that not all women experience this traditionally male predicament; it is as stalled by the focus on heterosexuality as the only social matrix structuring the relations between client and worker as the article on which it draws. For this reason, it describes customer–personnel relations in terms of a paradox or contradiction: ‘there is a same-sex relation between you and the concierge, but working relations remain HETEROSEXUAL!’ (Pollesch, Domestic 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Front, p. 78). The work of Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Hess and Lenz, as well as Wichterich, Lenz/Nickel/Riegraf, Klingebiel/Randeria, and Mies demonstrates the challenges of a multi-scaled approach to the globalisation of the heterosexual matrix and the urgency of taking into account race, class and migration.12 Rather than despair over the elimination of genuine feelings, the interpellation into executive roles, the futility of resistance and the dark prospect of forgoing ‘home’ altogether (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 80), one might consider how to tackle the conditions and institutions that systematically organise the international division of emotional and sexual labour. A feminist critique and political practice would have to operate simultaneously at different scales: macro-politically, it must intervene in international financial policy, structural adjustment programmes and debt management, which have all aggravated economic differences between developed and developing nations, and contributed to the massive increase of migration, with an increasing proportion of women. Moreover, it must transform immigration law, which has contributed to the illegalisation and exploitation of domestic workers in particular. At the national scale, feminists ought to hold the state responsible for making the care for children, the elderly and the handicapped available and affordable, as well as regulate domestic employment. Finally, at the micro-political scale of gender role behaviour, a feminist politics would question the tendency to teach boys – and increasingly girls – that they are exempt from domestic labour, as well as from emotional and sexual responsibility for others more generally. In its splicing of a myopically local study with a global mass cultural text, Shit Hotels makes very large claims about the alienation experienced by those whom neoliberalism positions as a transnational elite. If feminism aims to articulate shared interests between the winners and losers of globalisation, the neglect of the corresponding alienation of the ‘cyborgs’ to whom dirty and monotonous labour is outsourced undermines that objective. Moreover, the antagonism of human guests and cyborg service workers masks the fact that for many women today being ‘modern’ entails straddling the two. That omission in Shit Hotels, I suggest, correlates with a certain myopia in some mainstream German feminism, which unquestioningly adopts the neoliberal discourse of flexibility, mobility and creativity – now revalued as an advantage women derive from their historic training in bearing the ‘double burden’ – in order to position women competitively as the model subjects of the neoliberal economy.13 It is no coincidence that this research has emerged in relation to postsocialist 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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gender systems, as Central and Eastern European women are much less likely and able to outsource domestic labour; instead, they compensate for failing state support with their own unpaid domestic labour. Postsocialist women’s orientation towards combining work and motherhood, and the flexibility they have learned to realise that goal, are now seen to enhance their competitiveness in a globalised economy.14 While a number of scholars concur that many post-socialist women have enjoyed an unprecedented degree of social mobility, many are also critical of the fact that modernisation comes at the price of imposing a heavy and unjust toll on women.15

Knowledge economies Watching a Pollesch production is a little like witnessing a theory seminar whose participants are on ‘speed’. Pollesch splices political theory and mass culture into dialogues without action. Nothing much happens on stage, although the atmosphere is hectic. Monologues and dialogues circle around theoretical concepts and terminology shared not just by the young, largely student audiences flocking to the Prater, but also by the activist groups that inhabited the Domestic Front along with Pollesch’s theatrical ensemble, as ‘roommates’ of sorts. In contrast to the reading and discussion groups consorting with the actors, however, the plays do not clarify or explore the meaning of the theoretical texts, nor are they parodied. Pollesch mines laboriously constructed arguments (such as Kuster and Lorenz’s article) for quotable slogans and catchphrases, which are repeated and varied rather than developed into theses. The fast pace with which actors deliver their lines impedes comprehension; at best spectators remember some of the key terms. When characters realise that the meta-characterological statements they speak concern them, they demonstrate the process of absorbing and applying theory; in Sex after Mae West, for instance, Inga says: ‘Some desire bolsters my exploitation and I’m just lucky that it’s no heterosexual desire. Wait a sec. OH GOD! But it is, I’m a fucking HETEROSEXUAL!’ (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 131). As knowledge and self-knowledge are placed in the same economy that is thematised, the individual must continually rearticulate her position vis-à-vis the discourse that speaks it; the capitalised words and phrases do not just signal abrupt increases in volume – which might signal the strain of that cognitive labour and the agony of realising one’s interpellation – but also slight decreases in tempo, faintly echoing the stillness of reflection. Hence Pollesch’s style operates as a metaphor for the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



accelerating and expanding regime of neoliberal efficiency that enfolds not only the ‘private’ realm, but also the public, autonomous realms of art and knowledge. The piercing screams punctuating the delivery – not all of which are scripted – signal the agony of not being able to stop to think. The relative immobility of bodies on stage, which are inundated with mass cultural signs at high volume, evoke the stillness of the reader, on which the interruption of busy ideological reproduction is predicated. On his stage, theory is denied the critical distance and elevated status of meta-discourse, but neither does Pollesch seem to share the optimism of Naomi Klein, who notes that contemporary artists’ embeddedness in corporate environments has merely heightened their ability to block any discourse. At irregular intervals, the dialogue is interrupted by so-called ‘clips’. During these moments, actors jump up, walk around or talk to each other while very loud music blares out from speakers. These ‘clips’ provide performers with opportunities to stretch, drink water, wipe off their sweat or do a quick workout to make their bodies fit for the next segment. During these moments the strain of acting becomes visible, thereby linking the actors to the service workers referenced in the dialogue, who tap parts of their subjectivity to add value to the emotional experiences they provide. By foregrounding acting as work, the theatre also throws into relief the spectators’ release from social responsibility, which in turn increases their own efficiency. This defamiliarisation technique foregrounds the heterosexual matrix structuring relations between the female worker and mixed consumer-audience in the interest of increased productivity; the wheeled office chairs on which spectators are seated in Domestic Front underscore that the consumption of emotion and release from the labour of thinking make them fit for another day at the office. The interruptions in the dramatic flow highlight acting as labour and flag the convergence of art and the market, which liberalism postulated as distinct. Pollesch’s theatre thus exhibits and reflects on its own conditions of production as part of the social changes it seeks to analyse. As art is folded into the market logic, working conditions prevailing mainly in the cultural sector spread throughout the economy, while public spaces shielded against commercial and political pressures vanish. Whereas political consultants in Britain, the US and Germany applaud the growing complexity, meaningfulness and flexibility of work in post-industrial ‘creative economies’,16 the work of cultural scholars points to overwork, low pay, self-exploitation, lack of security and benefits, the accelerating pace of production, the shift from 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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cooperation to competition and the ubiquitous erosion of security or solidarity as the hallmarks of the increasingly deregulated, informal sector in which designers, musicians, graphic artists, architects, journalists, researchers and many others work, conditions that are effaced by the enthusiastic vision of ubiquitous ‘creativity’.17 What kind of art and knowledge can be produced under these conditions, and what are the political consequences of the attendant transformation of civil society? In the Enlightenment, the theatre and the university were given the task of producing critical citizens able to emancipate themselves from the yokes of superstition and authoritarian rule, shielded against commercial and political pressures. Certainly, these institutions did not live up to the ideal of the public sphere as Jürgen Habermas theorised it; both the exclusion of certain matters as ‘private’, and of certain identities from civic debate, have been rigorously criticised.18 Yet I would link Pollesch’s facilitation of a collective space for reflection and debate at the Prater to those who seek to modify the concept of the democratic public sphere, rather than discard it altogether. By turning itself into a hub in networks of activists, theorists and artists, the Prater models the very public sphere whose vanishing is the subject of Domestic Front. Notwithstanding the critical pessimism that marks the plays, I want to note the optimism of democratic will and method that drives the social and work relations in that space. The working group that constituted itself as one of the ‘roommates’ of Pollesch’s ensemble inhabiting the Domestic Front called itself NewCenterAddition.19 Its The Wrong Life Show20 consisted of a series of discussions that aimed to connect the personal, the professional and the political; a reading group working through Hardt and Negri’s Empire; and video nights, slide shows and karaoke shows.21 NewCenterAddition had grown out of a supra-regional network of urban activists, which in 1997–8 organised actions protesting at the transformation of public, urban space into privatised, increasingly policed consumption and service zones, from which unwanted populations and individuals are systematically excluded.22 The Wrong Life Show sought to come to terms with the shifting role of artists and other hip urbanites from social outsiders to model citizens of the neoliberal ‘creative economy’, and the cooption of self-determined, alternative and politically critical practices located in the social margins. Reflecting on the show, participants noted that it reproduced the very conditions the actors had thematised and criticised: the blurring of work and life, the pleasure and satisfaction derived from it, and 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



minimal pay. NewCenterAddition used the stage as a forum where the pressing of culture into social service, the ‘culturalisation’ of social conflicts that are no longer solved politically, could be discussed. ‘But perhaps performative repetitions such as this will bring about change,’ they concluded (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 128). In conclusion, Pollesch’s work stakes out a critical space at the margins of the cultural sector, which is currently undergoing far-reaching transformations. Domestic Front brings into view changes resulting from the folding of the domestic sphere into corporate rhythms and objectives. These changes are examined from the point of view of European women who gain economically but experience unsettling, alienating consequences from their integration into the global economy. By illuminating the sexual and emotional life of the homo œconomicus at the centre of the neoliberal worldview, Pollesch’s plays make an original contribution to feminist theatre’s engagement with globalisation. Read alongside feminist theorising in Europe and North America, however, they also reveal very particular blind-spots in German feminism, which until recently neglected the widening class differences between women, and the ethnicisation of the European workforce as a consequence of migration. The plays’ thematic focus on the consequences of the ‘insourcing of the home’ is amplified by the dramatic form, which highlights what could be called the ‘insourcing’ of the creative and critical imagination. Pollesch’s signature style signals the painful synchronisation of playing and thinking with the demands of the post-industrial economy, in which the arts model the ascendant notion of eminently innovative, flexible, deregulated, self-exploitive labour. Yet the project of making emotions, eroticism, contemplation and critical reflection more ‘efficient’ constitutes a severe and dangerous refashioning of civil society and the public sphere, which Habermas and others postulated as key to self-correcting, participatory, democratic politics. Pollesch’s thematic focus on the very private matters that Habermas excluded from consideration emphasises the need to rethink the philosopher’s notion of the ‘public’ in order to retain its critical purchase in the face of neoliberal restructuring. Aside from the thematic and formal dimensions I have outlined, Pollesch’s democratising impulse also informs his theatre’s institutional structure, which actively resists the social relations marked by isolation and competition that prevail in the gradually de-subsidised, privatised, creative economy. By sheltering a whole array of activist, academic and artistic interlocutors, and fostering the very argumentative, collaborative discourse that the plays show to be 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Notes 1. René Pollesch, Wohnfront 200/2001 (Berlin: Alexander Verlag, 2002). wwwslums (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2003), Zeltsaga: René Pollesch’s Theater 2003/2004 (Berlin: Synwolt, 2004). 2. In 2001 he was awarded the Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis for www-slums, and in 2002 was named Best Dramatist by the magazine Theater heute. In 2006 he received both the Mühlheimer Dramatikerpreis for Capucetto Rosso and the Audience Award at the Mühlheim Festival. Domestic Front was selected to participate in the Theatertreffen 2002, an annual theatre festival to which the ten best productions of the season are invited. 3. For instance, several scenes of www-slums were excerpted and anthologised in Forge Reproductive Accounts: Heterosexuality, Work & Home by a feminist collective of critical urbanists/social geographers; the written analyses of that collective were in turn incorporated in Pollesch’s play Gross Hotel in Berlin later that year. 4. Sabine Hess and Ramona Lenz, ‘Das Comeback der Dienstmädchen: Zwei ethnographische Fallstudien in Deutschland und Zypern über die neuen Arbeitgeberinnen im Privathaushalt’, in S. Hess and R. Lenz, eds, Geschlecht und Globalisierung: Ein kulturwissenschaftlicher Streifzug durch transnationale Räume, (Königstein: Ulrike Helmer, 2001), p. 137. 5. Mae West, Three Plays by Mae West, ed. Lillian Schlissel (New York: Routledge, 1997); Vicki Baum, Menschen im Hotel (Berlin: Ullstein, 1929), translated as Grand Hotel (New York: Doubleday, 1931). 6. Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, ‘Insourcing des Zuhause’, Widersprüche 20:78 (2000): 13–26. 7. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, International Journal of PsychoAnalysis 10 (1929): 303–13. 8. While the authors profess to dislike the ‘international colonial style’ in which these Boardinghäuser are furnished, they are attracted to the possibility of escaping the constant, draining negotiations around housework, professional pressures, needs and duties that characterise the daily life of many heterosexual feminists living with male partners. 9. Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, eds, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003). 10. This allows the ‘First World to take on a role like that of the old-fashioned male in the family – pampered, entitled, unable to cook, clean, or find his socks, while constructing the migrant, who now shoulders the labour of love, not as wife but as secret mistress, whose work remains invisible and unacknowledged (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, Global Woman, pp. 11–12). 11. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (New York: Del Rey, [1968], 1996).



increasingly impossible, Pollesch turns the Prater into an arena for staging the current, acute contradiction between capitalism and democracy, without ceding the latter as a lost cause.

12. Christa Wichterich, The Globalized Woman: Reports from a Future of Inequality, trans. Patrick Camiller (London, New York: Zed Books, 2000); Ilse Lenz, Hildegard Maria Nickel and Birgit Riegraf, eds, Geschlecht, Arbeit, Zukunft (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2000); Ruth Klingebiel and Shalini Randeria, eds, Globalisierung aus Frauensicht: Bilanzen und Visionen (Bonn: Dietz, 1998); Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labor (New York: Zed Books, 1999). 13. I call this work ‘mainstream’, since it aligns itself with the dominant position articulated by the ‘transitology paradigm’ in the social sciences, which teleologically posits liberal democracy as the outcome of socio-political developments following authoritarian forms of rule. (The term was originally applied to Latin American and Southern European states in the 1970s and 1980s.) Transitologists thus assume (rather than argue) that ‘market capitalism and democratic rights have been expanded for all postsocialist societies’, Jacqui True, ‘Gendering Post-Socialist Transitions’, in Marchand and Runyan, eds, Gender and Global Restructuring, Sightings, Sites and Resistances (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 74–93, p. 77. 14. See Hildegard Maria Nickel and Eva Kolinsky, eds, Reinventing Gender: Women in East Germany since Unification (New York: Frank Cass, 2003); Susan Gal, ‘Feminism and Civil Society’, in J. W. Scott, C. Kaplan and D. Keates, eds, Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics (New York: Routledge, 1997). 15. Nickel’s work must be seen in the context of the many feminist studies of post-socialist women in the early 1990s that portrayed them as victims of transformation processes. Against that tendency, scholars like Julie Beck and Jacqui True insist on a differentiating view of processes that have engendered ‘both new forms of exploitation and empowerment to women in Central and Eastern Europe’ (True, ‘Gendering Post-Socialist Transitions’, p. 76). Even among the most avid post-socialist proponents of the free market system in Eastern Europe, there is a greater sense of alarm over ‘signs that capitalism is having a negative effect on the employment opportunities of many women at the lower end of the skill and education ladder’, widening income gaps between men and women, and the ‘growth of prostitution and sex tourism since the Velvet Revolution’ (Julie Beck, ‘(Re)negotiating Selfhood and Citizenship in the Post-communist Czech Republic: Five Women Activists Speak about Transition and Feminism’, in Marchand and Runyan, Gender and Global Restructuring, pp. 176–93, p. 189). 16. Joseph B. Pine and James H. Gilmore, eds, The Experience Economy: Work is Theatre and Every Business a Stage (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1999); Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class and How it’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); John Howkins, The Creative Economy: How People make Money From Ideas (London: Allen Lane, 2001); Adrienne Goehler, Verflüssigungen: Wege und Umwege vom Sozialstaat zur Kulturgesellschaft (Frankfurt: Campus, 2006). 17. Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds, Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2002); Angela McRobbie, ‘From Holloway to



50 Katrin Sieg

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

Hollywood: Happiness at Work in the New Cultural Economy’, in du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds, Cultural Economy, pp. 97–114. Georg Yudice, ‘The Privatization of Culture’, Social Text 59:2 (2000): 17–34. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T. Burger and F. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1972] 1989). For newer critical approaches to Habermas, see especially Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Neue Mitte [New Centre] was a catchphrase often used by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder for the reorientation of social democratic parties away from their historical commitment to the interests of labour. Schröder invoked an entrepreneurial subject required by the neoliberal economy in order to legitimate the dismantling of the welfare state as collective safetynet and mechanism of secondary distribution. The term also refers to the redeveloped district Mitte. The group explains its name as follows: ‘Utterly enmeshed in these [neoliberal] practices, we cannot discern an outside. That’s why we’re choosing to add on: tacking tawdry sheds onto the interior walls of cool lofts. Air out Beautiful Homes by drilling holes in their walls’ (Pollesch, Domestic Front, p. 107). The show’s title alludes to Adorno’s aphorism that a ‘wrong life cannot be lived rightly’. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (New York: NLB, 1974) p. 19. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). See the special issue on Fragmente städtischen Alltags of the journal Widersprüche 78 (December 2000), the study Stadt als Beute by the collective SpaceLab (Klaus Ronneberger, Stephan Lanz and Walther Jahn), which Pollesch adapted for the stage; and Pauline Boudry, Brigitta Kuster and Renate Lorenz, eds, Reproduktionskonten fälschen! Heterosexualität Arbeit & Zuause (Berlin: b books, 1999).




5 Sue-Ellen Case

The concept of globalisation is most often understood as a genderless, sexless phenomenon, signifying the processes of nation-states and transnational flows of capital as if they were purely self-referential dynamics. In spite of interventions into the critique by feminists and queers to personalise differences among those most affected by globalisation, the major discourses continue to inscribe the global and even the local as if abstracted, universalised categories. In fact, these authors take great pains not to ‘descend’ to particulars, even when they insist that they are interested only in the materialist effects. Take Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s influential work Empire, for example.1 They write of ‘populations’, ‘subjectivities’ and ‘ethnic groups’, in their socalled ‘Biopolitics’ (Empire, pp. 31–7). Significantly, though, they treat ‘capital’ as if it were an active subject, as in ‘capital does relate to and rely on its noncapitalist environment, but it does not necessarily internalize that environment’ (Empire, p. 225). It is difficult, at least for this author, to imagine how capital could internalise anything. Nonetheless, economic processes, unmarked by gender and sexuality, are the dominant subject posed within their critique. Other familiar ‘big names’ in the field, such as Fredric Jameson, move considerations of identity and difference into the misty regions of heady abstractions that operate as subjects: ‘As you begin to watch Identity turn into Difference and Difference back into Identity, you grasp both as an inseparable Opposition. … At that point, you have approached the identity of non-identity.’2 Surely, the scene Jameson paints of a clash of philosophical Titans melting into one another registers some anxiety of specificity, but, beyond that, it is difficult to parse just what happened to differences in this collapse. More, David Harvey offers a seemingly activist role for ‘-isms’ in his notion of ‘militant particularisms’.3 As for 52



The Queer Globe Itself

the local, it too appears as an active abstract term. The influential author Arif Dirlik defines it in this way: ‘The local as I use it here has meaning only inasmuch as it is a product of the conjuncture of structures located in the same temporality but with different spatialities.’4 We might hope that in one of those spatialities we would find something like a lesbian bar, but it is unclear whether or not the local actually signifies any populus. From a feminist perspective, Carla Freeman argues that in these discourses the global operates as a masculinised concept. 5 Even though these authors seem to write critiques of the global, the agency and power they lend to it masculinise its role, if not their very discourse. Moreover, Freeman insists, since these accounts do not consider the role of gender in the global sphere, their seeming nongendered space is, as usual, a masculinist space; for the unmarked has traditionally been construed as masculinist (‘Local:Global’, p. 1010). Freeman locates accounts of gendering processes within ethnographies, rather than within critiques of globalisation. Ethnographic accounts have recorded and understood gendered hierarchies as part of a specifically local scene (‘Local:Global’, p. 1011). This practice of situating gender within the local, argues Freeman, reinscribes the equivalencies among global/ masculine and local/feminine (p. 1012). Finally, Freeman observes that in the macro-scenarios of global and local, the local is often construed as a rape victim of global capitalist domination. She argues that a feminist reconception of the global would understand local practices not merely as the effects of the global, or as a contradiction to it, but as constitutive of it (p. 1013). This means that gender would be a constituent of the global, rather than one part of its ‘other’. The feminist shift to the discourse would install people as subjects, marked by differences of gender and class in contrast to the active ‘-isms’ and economic processes of global critiques. Apart from ethnographies, sexual practices and gender codes have been constituted as autonomous, discrete objects of study, carefully sorted out from global discourses and belonging only to critiques dedicated solely to them; thus queer and feminist writings are perceived to deal exclusively with sexuality and gender, respectively. In Queer Globalizations, Miranda Joseph notes how kinship and community have been constructed as part of the so-called ‘natural’ and thus ‘extraeconomic’ realm.6 If capital is perceived as an active agent of power that refers only to its own economic processes, sexual practices must belong to an order that is entirely self-reflexive. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


The Queer Globe Itself 53

As my students in feminist classes often ask, ‘How did this happen?’ By way of an answer, Joseph offers a cursory consideration of the division of the economic from the embodied in the work of Karl Marx as a kind of ‘origin’ of influence for Leftist critiques. Joseph turns to Marx’s use of the term ‘value’ (as in ‘use value’ and ‘surplus value’) as establishing referents of economic value that are abstracted from embodied practices. These so-called ‘values’, which actually define conditions of labour and consumption, serve only to refer to economic conditions, extracted from the values associated with embodied practices such as gender or heteronormativity (Joseph, ‘Discourse of Global/Localization’, p. 86). Moreover, she argues, Marx’s notion of capital, like that of ‘value’, ‘depends on an abstract equivalence across cultures’. She concludes that ‘this abstraction is what makes capitalism seem mobile and dynamic’ (pp. 86–7). Ironically, Leftist abstractions of monetary operations and their values as culture/gender/body-free collude with those very operations and assumptions of global capital. Here is the actual battle of the Titans: one form of economics wrestles with another, abstracted from embodied processes. So where, one might ask, does Marx situate the embodied practices of the subject? Unfortunately, for those outside the heteronormative order, he relegates all personal/social/kinship values to the family unit, for better or for worse. The family unit bears the weight of embodied production and kinship hierarchy. As Joseph notes, the family unit also serves as a compensatory site. It constitutes the private, personal realm imagined as supplemental to capitalist and market exploitation (‘Discourse of Global/Localization’, p. 88). The family is installed as the great keeper of the gender divide and hierarchy, the exclusive propertyowner of the bedroom, and the single refuge from the arena of state and global economics. Here, Left and the Right also seem to agree. The title of the volume in which Joseph’s article appears, Queer Globalizations, reveals that any study that imagines large economic and state processes that would be marked by the social and particularly a social outside of the heteronormative zone must constitute a separate, autonomous critique of the local. So first, what queer studies can bring to studies of globalisation is an understanding of the direct relation between economic forces and the social. Sexual practices and preferences can be seen to co-constitute not only local, but also global transactions. In other words, like feminist critiques, queer interventions can help to dissolve the autonomous sense of capital and economics upon which both critiques of the global and globalisation depend, infusing embodied practices in the root of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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these operations. Second, and most important, queer subjects can displace the self-referential discourse of the economic with an agent who is neither necessarily a resident of the local nor a normative citizen. Queer discourses can insist that there is a labouring/consuming subject within the global arena that is not defined by the family or kinship hierarchies. And the queer subject can be treated as a denizen of both the local and global arenas. In this way, queer studies of globalisation can alter the paradigm of the critique at its base.

The voyage out A vast liner labours its way into the harbour. In many ports of the world this is a familiar sight. While the ship contaminates international waters with its waste, it also brings welcome tourist dollars to port regions. Street performers rush to the dockside, along with those who bring ‘local’ foods and crafts in the hope of earning tourist dollars. When the passengers begin to disembark for their short visit to a ‘foreign land’, the locals are shocked to see homosexual couples coming down the gangplank: men are holding hands with other men; women have their arms around each other. Performers who practise sexualised versions of local traditions on the docks, such as the hula, stop in their tracks, afraid that the gay men will respond to the male dancers and the lesbians to the female. Food vendors flee from imagined contamination. This scene could have happened anytime from the early 1990s to today, in many ports, but let’s set it in the Cayman Islands, a British territory, where the islanders were, in fact, so offended by displays of same-sex affection that in December 1998 the local authorities denied docking privileges to an American gay cruise ship insisting that ‘gay vacationers could not be counted on to “uphold standards of appropriate behaviour”’.7 The public and national space, it seems, are imagined as heteronormative. Gay and lesbian tourism creates a ‘visible and mobile homosexuality’ in the world, challenging local behaviours (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 102). Some queer theorists argue that creating a queer space is always a form of tourism, particularly in fleeing repressive societies at ‘home’. From their perspective, the search for a safe habitat in which to express affection and desire in public, combined with a disposable income, launched a ‘golden age’ of queer tourism in the 1990s. Today, ‘an estimated 5–25 million gays and lesbians … spend more than $10–17 billion on travel products each year’ (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 105). The visibility of these tourists definitely challenges local prohibitions and seduces local 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



market economies. A myriad of gay and lesbian travel organisations and publications now flourish, publishing descriptions of welcoming sites as well as homophobic ones for queer tourists. It is important to note that only certain queers are part of this venture, however. A marketing survey published in 2001 claims that 88 per cent of gay travellers are college-educated, most are white and many live in urban centres. Moreover, 94 per cent of gay and lesbian travellers are, in fact, gay; only 6 per cent are lesbians (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 114). However, critiques of queer travel perceive it as launching a form of globalism that reconstructs the imperial sense of travel, with its nostalgia for illicit, exotic encounters. In this way, queer travellers practise ‘the use of the exotic to transgress’ (Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 104). Joseph Boone, in ‘The Homoerotics of Orientalism’, traces this practice in the biographies and literatures of noted gay authors from André Gide to Roland Barthes.8 The sex trade for boys in the Mediterranean and in Asian countries such as Thailand has financed new clubs and scenes, bringing a relaxation of local laws. Bangkok now houses numerous clubs, many featuring transgender or drag acts as entertainment, featuring katoeys, or ladyboys. Beach towns such a Phuket host many gay guesthouses and clubs. The majority of those who perform in these clubs and serve as sex-workers are young boys from poor homes, who have found economic success in plying their trade with gay tourists. The critique within feminism of the sex trade and the sexual use of poor women in the Third and Fourth Worlds has apparently not permeated the consciousness of these gay male travellers. So while queer tourists may bring a new, global visibility to alternative sexualities, they also exploit local conditions for a booming Orientalist sex trade that preys on poverty. Queer women tourists have also financed numerous forays into the global. Their preferred method of travel, however, is less the occupation of cities and resorts than lesbian cruises. The earliest and most successful of these grew out of the feminist recording label Olivia Records, now known as Olivia Cruises. These are the lesbian specials, although not necessarily marketed that way by the cruises themselves. One needn’t read the secret codes of the subculture to discover these are primarily lesbian cruises. Lesbian travel agencies advertise them as such. One lesbian travel agency, Flamingo Travel, notes: Olivia, serving the lesbian community since 1973, has worked to empower women through travel. It’s different to say the list as lesbian cruise travelers really feel free every minute of every day 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Resources travel agency posts that ‘Olivia Gay Travel is up and coming and is one of the hottest gay and lesbian travel agencies in the world. Catering to the lesbian community, most if not all of Olivia’s staff and customers are gay and lesbian’.10 These cruise ships feature musicians of feminist/lesbian note, travelling to Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Netherlands, the Greek islands, etc. The Netherlands may seem to stand out here as a different sort of port-of-call, but Amsterdam has long been recognised as a lesbian-friendly city, with several ‘hot spots’ to enjoy. Along with Amsterdam, the cruises advertise ‘the buzzing social scene’ of Key West, Florida – another known queer resort – as part of the ‘Caribbean Escape with Melissa Etheridge’.11 Etheridge, long a favourite in certain lesbian circles, provides what some describe as a ‘dreamy cruise’, as she croons across the Caribbean. As this suggests, these cruises are more about romance on the far seas than sex in the port cities, while still offering short visits to various bars in the ‘buzzing social scene’. Prices for these cruises range from US$1,400 to $6,000. The Etheridge tour for 2006 sold out. This success indicates a flourishing class of lesbians who can afford such travel and leisure. To be fair, not all of these cruises are focused on romance: at least two evince an interest in ‘nature’, one sailing to the Galapagos Islands, the other to Antarctica. While these cruises indicate a different sort of traveller and a different interest in the global, they also chart frightening incursions into fragile ecologies. By the way, should heterosexual feminists feel left out of the portrait of global travellers, Ms. Magazine will be hosting its third all-women feminist cruise in 2007. On this cruise, speakers such as the activist Dolores Huerta, the actress Tyne Dailey and the president of the National Association for Women will (presumably) deliver feminist politics, while cruising the seas. In fact, our Women Studies programme at UCLA sent out e-flyers for this cruise. While the ship cuts through the Caribbean, stopping at familiar ports, it also hosts such events as a ‘meeting with Mexican feminists’ and, more difficult to comprehend, a ‘feminist land excursion to the Guatemalan Mayan Ruins’. While at sea, feminists can enjoy feminist gambling at the ship’s casino and feminist facials at the spa. And all this for as little as 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


from the outside world. Olivia, like many other gay travel cruise companies, charters entire ships and resorts and they continually craft new vacation packages and unique experiences for the gay travel industry.9

$1,849 or as much as $5,800. The class of these feminists is fairly easy to deduce from these prices.12 However, the sight of independent women together, descending the gangplank, may have a liberating effect on those who find themselves in constrained social circumstances. At the same time, that capitalist independence might also produce a kind of cookie-cutter globalism in its image of feminist and queer women. One could imagine, too, that the sight of these upper-middle-class women on vacation might not inspire the working women in the ports, with their few vegetables and fruits. Money does speak, in all these ways, with the growth of queer travel. Eng-Beng Lim, in his article ‘Glocalqueering in New Asia’, describes the effect of ‘pink dollar politics’ in Singapore – a nation-state long known for the persecution of homosexuals.13 Recognising the economic benefits of luring queer tourists, Singapore reversed its policies to host ‘Asia’s [queer] Mardi Gras’ in 2003. A form of the Pride Parade, the event attracted tourists from many countries, including Germany, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong and the US, along with more than 4,500 local participants. This enormous ‘coming-out party’ eased restrictions on public displays of queer affections, including dancing. ‘Pink dollar tourism’, then, motivated the nation-state to lift its prohibitions. Beyond state-instituted changes in legislation of non-normative sexual behaviour, the global visibility of queers has inspired the formation of more indigenous political organisations such as the Asian Lesbian Network, organised by the Thai group Anjaree in 1990; the first Indonesian Lesbian and Gay Congress in 1993; the Progressive Organisation of Gays in the Philippines in 1992, and the group Occur in Japan.14

Dubbing the queer voice Adopting the globalised queer voice has become a strategy of resistance. In several countries, people have found it useful to ‘dub’ the queer voice in order to mimic its association with transgender identification and same-sex desire. Some have found that mimicking these non-normative practices can offer protection within oppressive normative hierarchies; others have found a way to articulate their own set of identifications through this globalised paradigm. For example, Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, who suffer not only indentured servitude but also sexual exploitation, adopt a sexual identity called ‘tomboyism’ to discourage the men for whom they work from making sexual advances 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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and compromising their integrity (Freeman, Local:Global, p. 1016). They find that convincing these men that they are, in fact, masculinised women, interested only in other women, can successfully prevent their sexualisation. They appear less seductive and less available in their ‘tomboy’ role. Some queer theorists posit this kind of strategy as a glocalised use of ‘lesbian’ in contrast to a ‘global lesbian’. In other words, local women appropriate the global signifier ‘lesbian’ as a standpoint from which to resist oppressive practices: less a site of identification than a foil to traditional assumptions governing women’s sexuality.15 These ‘glocal’ adoptions of queer identities contrast sharply with the manner in which more official, seemingly feminist organisations in the international realm have eschewed any nominative association with lesbians. One need only recall what transpired at the UNsponsored Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. As Katie King documents, a coalition of women’s organisations from South Africa, Indonesia, the Netherlands, the US and Mexico drafted a document on sexual orientation and women’s rights.16 At the eleventh hour of drafting the Platform for Action of the World Conference, the term ‘sexual orientation’ and its attendant issues were struck from the document (King, ‘There Are No Lesbians Here’, p. 34). King points out how this process is tied to the human rights project of creating a ‘new global citizen’, or, more specifically, the new global woman as citizen who signifies stable, normative identifications and social realities across cultural and national differences (p. 37). In so far as sexual orientation issues threaten the success of women’s application for global citizenship, they are often considered dispensable. I have been asked by feminist representatives of three countries where I have delivered public addresses not to mention the term ‘lesbian’, lest it impede the success of their feminist agenda there. So, ironically, while lesbian issues have been silenced in international feminist platforms, the voice or identity has been ‘dubbed’ by other, local women as a strategy of resistance. I have borrowed the term ‘dubbing’ from Tom Boellstorff’s notion of ‘dubbing culture’.17 Boellstorff coined the term to describe several local practices he discovered in his research on gay Indonesians. For example, he relates the case of ‘Darta’, a Muslim man living in East Java, who adopted two English words to describe his sexual identity, first, ‘lesbi’ and then ‘gay’ as in dapat gay juga (‘I Knew it Was Me’, pp. 21–2). These words had travelled via gay literature and gay tourist contacts to his country and helped him to articulate his own practices and desires which had no name in his Javanese Muslim culture. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Boellstorff records that 95 per cent of his informants from Java, Bali and Sulawesi cite the mass media as a source for understanding themselves as lesbi or gay (p. 33). Boellstorff also notes the widespread use of the term ‘tomboi’ in Indonesia as signifying various forms of transgender identification (p. 31). Surprisingly, the term ‘tomboy’ has been adopted across cultures as a strategy of resistance and self-definition. Not only have Hong Kong domestic workers and Javanese Muslim men ‘dubbed’ the term, but Taiwanese butch lesbians have adopted it to signify their social identity. Apparently, in the 1960s, gay men in Taipei began referring to women who wore ties and trousers and sported short haircuts as T boys. By the 1980s, the women themselves were using the term, hanging out in what came to be known as ‘T bars’. Antonia Chao reports that more than 30 such bars have opened in Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsung since the 1980s.18 These are globalised environments, specialising in karaoke and global music videos, so the identity of ‘T’ could be perceived as a purely global phenomenon. Yet, notes Chao, while these women seem to participate fully in a global commodity culture, their T identification plays on traditional Confucian gender codes of the masculine, including Chinese beliefs in sexual potency, etc. So, while their nomenclature and social space are globalised, their codes of transgender identification are derived from the local Chinese traditions. The process of ‘dubbing culture’ describes how globalised queer identities can be used to ‘animate a sexual self felt to be fully modern and authentic, yet a disjuncture from the local’ (Boellstorff, ‘I Knew it Was Me’, p. 22). As a dubbed soundtrack is shaped by images originating elsewhere, so a ‘dubbed’ identity is something one cannot originate, but only receive. The ‘dubbed’ identity mimics the original in order to disrupt the naturalised cultural referents that are determined by the traditional. Thus, the term is neither strictly globalised, nor strictly localised, but oscillates between the two, in offering, through the global, a local identity. Boellstorf argues that beyond this dubbing, queer identities are positioned in a similarly oscillating manner within global critiques. They are perceived as either autochthonous bearers of ‘traditional identities masked by Westerns terms, or as traitors to tradition, partaking in global gay imperialism’ (‘I Knew it Was Me’, p. 27). ‘Dubbing’ negotiates between the practice of globalised assimilation and local tradition. What Boellstorff has termed ‘dubbing’ others have called ‘glocalisation’: or ‘the localization and indigenization of globally mobile understandings of sexuality’ (Berry, Martin and Yue, Mobile 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Electrifying global sex In their introduction to Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue periodise the global transmission of queer sexualities, citing Time magazine’s assertion in 2001 that ‘the Internet had done to Asia’s gay and lesbian communities what Stonewall enabled in the West …’ (p. 2). The new millennium, it seems, ushered in an electronic network of sexual and political contacts for queers. High-speed technology and the ‘ephemerality of the commodity’ for a network of what these authors perceive as ‘mobile and transient cultures’ (p. 2). As the Web provided online possibilities for assignations and even actual sex around the globe, it also created opportunities to share strategies for political organisation. Websites and chatrooms enabled a new meshing of the public and private – the twilight zone where queer identities and practices form. At the same time, new forms of surveillance have been put in place to monitor and punish these contacts. As usual, sexual practices prompt censorship and moral outrage. Globalising sex also globalises morality. The case of Josephine Chuen-juei Ho, a prominent academician in Taiwan, chair of the English Department at the National Central University and president of the Cultural Studies Association, illustrates how both radical intervention and surveillance can meet on the Web. In June 2003, 14 Taiwanese conservative NGOs filed charges against Ho for two bestiality hyperlinks located on the zoophilia webpage in her Sexuality Studies databank. Ho has been researching sexuality and supporting freedom for marginalised sexual minorities for ten years. She has published 17 books in the area of sexuality studies and feminism. These groups, which had been hounding her for the duration, used the website as an issue to insist that Ho be dismissed from her teaching post. The conservative coalition included a censorship group, Christian groups and a parents’ group. Ho described the hyperlinks in this way: In my case, the hyperlink in question is situated at the bottom of our ‘animal love’ webpage, one among more than 50 webpages on sexuality studies that we are building, preceded by a collection of essays on zoophilia, literary pieces on zoophilia, topical news about cases of bestiality. The hyperlink, when clicked, would reveal 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Cultures, p. 7). Thus, the queer subject is both local and global, assimilated and resistant.

a warning message that says, ‘The following are photos of alternative bestiality sexual acts. Those who may feel offended should refrain from entering.’ The hyperlink itself leads to a string of a dozen or so zoophilia photos that I found on one of the bestiality sites in the US. This collection was chosen mainly because it illustrates not only the various types of animals involved but also the cliché scenarios portrayed. BTW, I have never used the databank in my teaching; it was merely a research reserve for like-minded researchers.19 The study and representation of queer sexual practices, it seems, must be omitted in favour of the normative. Even research implies unhealthy participation, and the global sharing of research pollutes the new, emerging global citizenry. Ho’s response to the censoring of her website clearly articulates the issues: Imposing a law on cyberspace that decrees that ‘the mere provision of hyperlinks’ to the so-called obscenity sites is criminal is simply absurd. For hyperlinks are not direct avenues to fantasyland, but moments of choice-making. A person has to initiate the click to effect his decision to enter. That is something totally different from the passive situation in which you are handed a flyer of obscene images on the street corner. [3] If providing a hyperlink to difficult knowledge is a crime, then search engines from Yahoo to Google would all have to be shut down for they all can lead us to numerous unspeakable terrains. (‘The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript’) The charge inspired a response by local scholars and activists and a transnational internet petition of over 1,000 signatures from 35 countries and areas, including formal letters from the AAUP, the Hong Kong Association of Sex Education and others. Ultimately, two investigative hearings were held concerning the structure and content of Ho’s sexuality databank. Apparently, the Taiwanese legal system considers all explicit sex-related information to be obscenities and not scholarly. In the trial, the prosecution could not distinguish between a hyperlink and a holding in a databank, claiming that Ho had violated the criminal code in making graphic and obscene materials easily available. The court proceedings became a site for activist education – a 50 footlong petition with signatures was unfurled outside the courtroom, the building and plaza were jammed with protestors, etc. Ho was found not guilty, but the case focuses internet issues around the internet 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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representation of alternative sexualities, rights and processes of access, new definitions of the public space, and local, juridical holds on global databanks. Ho’s case challenges the location of the moral choice. She argues that morality is not located in the databank of knowledge, but in the decision of the user. Moreover, she illustrates how search engines of online materials are successfully opening doors to knowledge and contacts across cultures and national laws in a way that is impossible to censor. Sexual practices reveal how the global space is one of extreme anxiety in terms of censorship or security. As the private becomes the public in sexual politics and liaisons, codes of the normative seem even more difficult to presume and enforce. In response to such acts of surveillance and censure, the Taiwanese filmmaker Shu Lea Cheang produced a digital sci-fi porn film, I.K.U.: A Japanese Cyber-porn Adventure, to provide what she deemed a feminist intervention into the mainstream production and reception of digital images considered to constitute a moral outrage. Her film satirises corporate-linked digital-cyber-porn, with porn stars portrayed as mobile flows of the transnational corporation Genom.20 The fictional corporation sends collected sexual pleasure signals directly to the brain of consumers, without any ‘physical friction’. I.K.U. orgasm decoder chips, in different colours for different sexualities, provide access to the Genom server. Thus, Cheang’s film sidesteps all issues of identity and even sexual practice, as the process uploads entirely into the digital realm. Katrien Jacobs claims a ‘queerscape’ for Cheang’s work, which projects a mythologised site, animated in many cases, and projected into the future.21 The digital realm, then, challenges the notion of the sexual as embodied. The global sexual subject may be formed in the future as a collection of digital effects. The few strategies offered above may begin to suggest ways in which queer studies can intervene in normative global critiques and discourses. They prompt the visibility of untested normative assumptions that are built into the global and local, suggesting ways to imagine a more nuanced and varied global subject. Queers studies can intervene in the bipolar opposition of the global and the local, offering an oscillating position from which to perceive economic and social effects.

Notes 1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000).




2. Fredric Jameson, ‘Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue’, in Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, eds, The Cultures of Globalization (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 54–77, p. 76. 3. Quoted in Matthew Hyland, ‘In Place of a Conclusion’, in Jameson and Miyoshi, eds, The Cultures of Globalization, pp. 378–9. 4. Arif Dirlik, ‘The Global in the Local’, in Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, eds, Global/Local (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 21–45, p. 39. 5. Carla Freeman, ‘Is Local:Global as Feminine:Masculine? Rethinking the Gender of Globalization’, Signs, 26:4 (Summer, 2001): 1007–37. 6. Miranda Joseph, ‘The Discourse of Global/Localization’, in Arnaldo CruzMalavé and Martin F. Manalansan, eds, Queer Globalizations (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 71–99. 7. Jasbir Kaur Puar, ‘Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism. Travel, and Globalization’, GLQ, 8:1–2 (2002): 101–37, p. 101. 8. Joseph Boone, ‘Vacations Cruises; or The Homoerotics of Oprientalism’, PMLA, 110, (1995): 89–110. 9. Flamingo Travel Group, http://www.flamingo-travel.com, accessed 29 September 2006. 10. Gay Resources Online, http://www.gay-resources-online.com. Accessed 29 September 2006. 11. Olivia Cruises, http://www.olivia.com/cruises. Accessed 29 September 2006. 12. Ms. Magazine Cruise, http://www.msmagazinecruise.com. Accessed 29 September 2006. 13. Eng-Beng Lim, ‘Glocalqueering in New Asia: The Politics of Performing Gay in Singapore’, Theatre Journal, 57:3 (2005): 383–405. 14. See Dennis Altman, ‘Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities’, Social Text, 14:3 (Fall 1996): 77–94, p. 79. 15. See Chris Berry, Fran Martin and Audrey Yue, eds, ‘Introduction’, Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 1–18, p. 8. 16. Katie King, ‘“There Are No Lesbians Here”: Lesbianisms, Feminisms, and Global Gay Formation’, in Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan, eds, Queer Globalizations, pp. 33–45. 17. Tom Boellstorff, ‘I Knew it Was Me: Mass Media, “Globalization”, and Lesbian and Gay Indonesians’, in Berry, Martin and Yue, eds, Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, pp. 21–51. 18. Antonia Chao, ‘Drink, Stories, Penis and Breasts: Lesbian Tomboys in Taiwan from the 1960s to the 1990’, Journal of Homosexuality, 40:3/4 (2001): 185–209, p. 186. 19. The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript, http://chronicle.com/colloquylive/ 2003/10/controversial. 20. I.K.U.-com, http://www.i-k-u.com. 21. Katrien Jacobs, ‘Queer Voyeurism and the Pussy-Matrix in Shu Lean Cheang’s Japanese Pornography’, in Berry, Martin and Yue, eds, Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, pp. 202–1, p. 211.



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Part II

Interventions





Actress Stories: Binodini and Amal Allana Bishnupriya Dutt

In Calcutta, the actress made her entrance on the stage 50 years before she did in any other presidency in colonial India. For the last 30 years, a by-product of the colonialist imagination has been the popular performance genre the ‘actress story’, performed in numerous versions in Calcutta and in the jatra (repertory theatre), which tours the surrounding countryside of Bengal. The ‘actress stories’ present a moralistic and didactic treatment of the actresses who appeared on the Calcutta stage in the nineteenth century. The performances actually serve to sanctify both the moral role of the actress and that of the nineteenth-century colonial theatre model which grew up under the aegis of an intelligentsia trained in the English colonial system. The genre, which once performed the roles of several actresses, finally came to focus on the central actress figure of the nineteenth century: Binodini Dasi (1863–1941). Though not the first actress on the colonial stage, she belonged to the first generation of actresses1 and in that sense became the first female star and a cult figure in Indian theatre. Binodini Dasi joined the public theatre in 1873 when she was eleven years old, one year after they started recruiting actresses. She was very soon recognised as one of its most accomplished performers. She became a sensation in the title roles in a run of plays written and produced by Girish Chandra Ghosh (1844–1913). Ghosh, dramatist, director, actor and manager, was one of the most influential theatre figures of his time, almost single-handedly setting up the Calcutta Public Theatre.2 In Binodini’s ‘story’ he plays a patriarchal role: as a benefactor and father figure at the centre of her life in the theatre. Despite her success, at the height of her fame, Binodini quit the stage in 1887. Like many of her female colleagues, for most of her life she depended on patrons or protectors alongside her profession as an 67



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actress. In 1883, a young Marwari businessman, smitten by Binodini, offered to build a theatre for the company if she became his mistress. Binodini agreed, partly in response to the pressure of her colleagues and partly because of her commitment to a theatre of her own. In recognition of her decision, the new theatre was to be called ‘B’. However, when the time came her colleagues registered it as the ‘Star Theatre’ since it was felt that naming a theatre after a ‘fallen woman’ would not be good for business. Binodini’s writings were published from 1885 onwards and continued to be published until 1925.3 Her ‘story’ as it is played on the stage, however, while it has appeared in many different versions – including the jatra performance Nati Binodini, which, first performed in 1973, has more than 5,000 performances to its credit – is reduced to one kind of overarching narrative of ‘saintly sinner’. Despite claiming to speak in Binodini’s own voice and to use her autobiographical writings as their main point of reference, her ‘actress story’ is presented as her rejection of the theatre on moral grounds. This is not the story of a consummate actress, but of a woman who is a martyr to the stage. If she assumes a ‘genteel’ or ‘lady-like’ persona, it is not because of her skill and exceptional acting talent, but because of her apologetic and confessional voice and her final penance and atonement, which lead to spiritual redemption. The moral message for the actress is to leave her acting career and do penance for her life in the theatre. The ‘story’ thus constructs a pattern between the admonitory and the exemplary: Bindoini remains at the centre of the discourse as an idealised model, at the same time as she displaces other actress stories. Actual acting achievements by Bindoini, or by any of her contemporaries, are deliberately erased or trivialised.

‘How [not] to act’ What were Binodini’s achievements on the stage which are trivialised and generalised through the ‘proxy’ actress who performs her story? Binodini Dasi was the first actress who could command a pivotal role in the middle-class colonial theatre. Generally, actresses were taken on without having any influence over the theatres in which they played. By contrast, Binodini emerged as a powerful woman determined to negotiate her own professional identity. She began a long and protracted struggle for space and identity – socially, culturally and professionally. Her audience appeal empowered her to insist on top billing and she fought for the right to a theatre in her own name. She could 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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even prompt and persuade Ghosh to write roles and scripts especially for her. Finally, as an actress, she had sufficient social standing to be able to write and publish her autobiography and to acquire a literary identity within the colonial system – an outstanding achievement, given that theatre was considered inferior to literature in middle-class intellectual circles. However, the ‘actress story’ distorts all of this as it ‘casts’ her in the fallen/redemptive model, a narrative of salvation identified with a popular religious movement known as bhakti.4 Fictionalised accounts of Bondini’s life become entangled within the contradiction of both adopting a ‘colonial’ theatrical model as Indian and constructing an indigenous religious sect to aid in forming a nationalist identity. The dominant cultural model of colonial theatre was so restricted in its scope that its Victorian grandeur inevitably degenerated into mere excess. The local, city-based theatre in Calcutta never had enough theatre houses, large enough audiences or indeed sufficient performances to be able to replicate the model of the ‘popular’ English theatre. In such a reduced context, the only commercial vitality of the colonial stage came from its exploitation of actresses. Alluring female performers were crucial to the success of the theatre. The role of the actress consisted of an ambiguous construction of her sexuality. Constant shifts around and the departure from the autobiographical texts have created serious problems in the readings of the materials and jatra on Binodini. Her voice as an actress has been drowned out in favour of a constructed literary voice. Thomas Postlewait states in ‘Autobiography and Theatre History’ that the ‘problem of presenting oneself in a narrative is also complicated by literary techniques of characterization’.5 The other roles – or, as Postlewait terms it, the ‘personae’ – that subdue the author’s own voice are that of the character and the narrator. When, in her autobiography, Binodini calls herself ‘wretched from birth’ or refers to herself as ‘lacking the identity of the patriarch that society recognized as the only identity’, or that ‘residential locality and single status were reason enough for the actress concerned to be identified as a prostitute’ (My Story and My Life as an Actress, p. 12), she is undoubtedly describing her entire generation of actresses. She merely uses the ‘wretched birth’ story as an entry point to contrast her achievements and success in the role traditionally assigned to her. She shapes her own story in the way that Postlewait describes as the familiar autobiographical trajectory: a ‘pattern of narrative development from childhood though journey to crisis, conversion and confession’ (‘Autobiography and Theatre History’, p. 257). Yet the theatrical texts 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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created from her autobiography deliberately distort her success story in an attempt to make her role perform a public apology. By prolonging her ‘miserable’ retirement and creating a redemption and salvation process out of her autobiographical materials, they destroy her main contribution to the role of the nineteenth-century actress. The voice of Binodini in these performances is actually the moralistic, didactic, hegemonic voice of the patriarch who would admonish her on ‘how [not] to act’.

Amal Allana and a contemporary Binodini story In spite of a long tradition of replicating the iconic image of Binodini as a repentant figure, a new version of her story has now been taken up by one of the leading woman directors of India, who works exclusively in Delhi and in Hindi. Amal Allana is perhaps the most influential and most popular woman director working outside of commercial theatre in India today. Though Allana does not make any claim to feminism, she is an important figure in feminist research, and her plays offer strong, albeit apolitical representations of cross-dressing and body politics. Like Binodini before her, Allana lays claim to an important and powerful role in the theatre: she is, for instance, the chair of the National School of Drama, a highly influential institutional training and theatre centre which has significantly retained its name as the National School of Drama. Among Allana’s recent successes is a stage version of Gabriel Garcia Marques’s Erendira and her Grandmother, performed not only in Delhi, but in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Allana’s decision to work on the Binodini text represents a radical break with the ‘actress story’ as performed in urban Calcutta and rural Bengal. Allana frees the ‘story’ from this legacy and the overemphasis and over-dependence on historicisation and the literary-textual. Instead, she is looking to leave this colonial burden behind and move the story into a new, alternative performance. Allana’s treatment of Binodini is a lengthy, painstaking and time-consuming workshop process, which engaged the director for over a year and a half (she started work in 2004 and the final performance was staged in November 2006). Allana made a conscious choice about starting her ‘actress project’ with an intense period of critical, historical and sociological research, involving actresses, translators and visiting scholars. Significant in this workshop process is the way that Allana deals only with writing by Binodini. Working from a recent English translation of the text, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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however, Allana has had to deal with the literary emphasis in the translated text and its non-engagement with the theatre. After the first read-through, the actresses she was working with came up with the crucial questions and episodes which they wanted to workshop. The actresses also began translating parts of the text for themselves to work on and to discuss. Stylistically, Allana aims to break with the illusion of realism by using a grotesque carnivalism and combining both folk and urban styles. Departing in content and style then from the colonial legacy of the ‘story’ as played in the Calcutta and Bengal traditions is a radical break with tradition, though may bring its problems. To be able to communicate the storyline to a Delhi audience, for example, who may not be familiar with the Calcutta actress, Allana may need to oversimplify the ‘story’ in a way that risks some of the more radical critical treatment for which she strives. That said, dramaturgically Allana has split the actress persona into three voices: the literary, the narrative and the voice of the actress. The canonical male voice is silenced, left out. The contemporary actresses are given the task (power) of creating a new Binodini performance text. The autobiographical text is read aloud in Hindi, English and Bengali. With five actresses playing Binodini (ranging in age from 18 to 60), the apologetic, confessional voice which supposedly dominates the

Figure 1: Binodinis young (Swarpa Ghosh) and old (Selima Raza) encountering their past. Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana.




autobiographical text is diffused through the collective performance process of the actresses. Theirs are multiple voices seeking identities – identities where sexuality and sensuality are not constrained. This is no longer a male-authored, melodramatic text aimed at commercial success. The actresses that ‘make up’ Binodini are unrepentant and openly sexual, on their own terms. The central theme of this new performance of Binodini is the underlying violence and abuse the actress suffered in a colonial and maledominated society. The benefactor baboos,6 whom Binodini is meant to regard with awe and even a glimmer of respect and affection, are now revealed as possessive, ruthless and sexually exploitative. The lifestyle of the colonial middle classes is exposed as lascivious, decadent, greedy and self-indulgent. Suffering from a loss of identity in an oppressive colonial society, the men in Binodini’s life are portrayed as using her as an outlet for their own pent-up anger and violence. One actor plays all the baboos and businessmen who keep Binodini as their mistress and exploit her in one way or another. In one scene, when Binodini is in pain and seeking solace from her artistic benefactor, Girish Chandra Ghosh, Allana portrays Ghosh as a sexual aggressor instead of a kindly benefactor or father figure. This new interpretation, coupled with Ghosh’s refusal to name the theatre after Binodini when she had given her talent (and ‘body’) to build it, positions the actress as a pawn in a patriarchal game of power politics. Binodini’s acting method was the result of two kinds of style and/or influence: the training she had with her mentor Ghosh, and the influences of the ‘great’ European actresses, such as Ellen Terry and Sarah Bernhardt. This mix of the local and the European was typical of colonialist theatre and acting. Images of English actresses were everywhere in the local penny press, and while alien to Indian culture in their representation of the body as petite and sexualised, this was nevertheless imported on to the colonial stage and into ‘idealised’ notions of the image of the actress. In her workshops, Allana goes back time and again to Binodini’s concentration on her acting method and her determination to succeed as the greatest actress of her age. She focuses on three acting styles: Ghosh’s training, the English system and Binodini’s own method of working on character. With Ghosh, Allana illustrates how Binodini was taught the nuances of Victorian melodramatic styles through gestures, postures and attitudes. He teaches her the importance of realism in acting and characterisation. He also tells her about important English actresses and anecdotes from their lives. He tells her how an English 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Figure 2: The baboo’s intrusion as patron and exploiter on a young Binodini (Natasha Rastogi). Photograph courtesy of Nissar Allana.

actress would attempt to imitate the nightingale’s voice. Yet Allana introduces a critical slant by having two of her young actresses skirt the stage imitating a nightingale, hands wide open like a bird, parodying the system, while a third runs up to Ghosh with the text of Hamlet in her hand, asking about Ellen Terry’s portrayal of Ophelia, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



her basic techniques of playing madness on stage and her own memories of her mother going mad at her brother’s untimely death. While seeming to accept Ghosh’s method as the best of the age, when left to her own devices Binodini works out her own style and method. In her autobiography she explains how she would memorise her lines, characterise her role and work out various alternatives for herself. She uses the mirror extensively to find the new self, innovate and control the overemphasis of the prevalent acting style on gesture, posture and attitude (Binodini, Amar Katha, p. 30). Allana’s actresses improvise movements before a wall-to-wall mirror, a method of selfreflection that enables Binodini to decide for herself what acting advice to accept or reject. In what is staged in Allana’s performance as the final confrontation between the actress and her mentor, it is the patriarch who has to placate the actress by offering her the role of the godlike Chaitanya. Chaitanya was a cult figure from the medieval period, who became a revered figure in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial Bengal. The religio-ideological discourse of Bhakti which grew up around Chaitanya was connected to new issues of nationalism and national identity through the political project of Vivekananda and Ramkrishna. It was a new nationalist discourse for the Bengali middle class which grew up around Ramkrishna’s power to evoke the free cultural space of the Middle Ages and a pre-colonial tradition. Traditionally, this role is seen as Bindonini’s final realisation of her sins, followed by her penance and exit from the theatre. To Allana the new ideals of self-realisation were to be embodied through the body of the actress as a public act of her final success and not her repentance. Fusing the man-boy and the feminine, the Chaitanya/Ramkrishna icon stood for a new nationalist self-belief, in opposition to a ‘macho’ colonialist discourse. Allana’s Ghosh looks to Binodini in the role of Chaitanya, not as cathartic penitent, but as a skilled performer: one capable of bringing together the masculine and the feminine. The radicalism of this moment is marked by the way in which this represents a break from the tradition in which the female goddesses of mythology were and are still acted out by male actors. Yet when the mythological culture reaches its height of nationalist identification the protagonist had to be replaced by the ‘actress’. *** To conclude: Allana’s new version of the Binodini story questions the theatrical legacy of the ‘actress story’. Her version, through its years of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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process and its final production (November 2006), is multifaceted, dealing with theatrical, feminist, colonialist and nationalist issues. It is the first time that Binodini’s story may really be heard and it has the capacity to challenge the colonial tradition of theatre; to interrogate this from within a strong feminist, post-colonial theoretical framework.

Notes 1. The first recorded public performance in ‘modern theatre history’ is of a Bengali play held at a private residence on 7 December 1872. On 16 August 1873, in a performance of Michael Modhusudan Dutt’s Shermistha (1859), women first played the female parts. 2. Son of a bank clerk, Girish was regarded as a misfit in the colonial system, particularly its formal educational structure. His major contribution to the Bengali theatre repertoire deals with his philosophical exploration of the Bhakti performance texts, the philosophical monotheistic religion of Ramkrishna and his outright historical-nationalistic plays. 3. Binodini wrote two autobiographical texts: My Story and My Life as an Actress (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998) and Amar Katha [My Words] (Kolkata: Subarna Rekha, 2004). 4. Bhakti are popular religious traditions outside the canonical religion and were important for mobilising the Bengali middle classes into an integrated nationalist consciousness and commitment to a nationalist cause in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 5. Thomas Postlewait, ‘Autobiography and Theatre History’, in Thomas Postlewait and Bruce McConachie, eds, Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000), p. 255. 6. Baboo is a derogatory term used for the colonial middle-class gentleman. It connotes the feminine and suggests compliance with the colonial government.




Stockholm Interventions: Feminist Activist Performance Tiina Rosenberg

Sweden has experienced a veritable explosion of feminist performances in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Although feminist actions, theatre, shows and performance have an established tradition, the current decade has seen an upsurge of feminist events that adopt a performance approach. Feminist cultural festivals are regular and frequent; feminist performance, dance and theatre manage to attract audiences beyond their immediate feminist constituencies. This popularisation of feminist performing arts is, I argue, related to the lively feminist activism in Sweden. Here, I aim to present some examples of different kinds of contemporary feminist performance work by artists and activists who were born in the 1970s, and some later still, in the 1980s. In other words, they were not involved in the feminist activism and debates of the 1970s and 1980s. I limit my examples to the capital, Stockholm, but wish to stress that feminist activism, performance and events are occurring elsewhere in Sweden. In terms of thematics and activism, feminist theatre and performance in Sweden have lines of continuity: direct action, mixing styles and genres in performance-inspired events, but also utilising the more text-based traditions of theatre as and when required. What is unequivocal, however, is that it is performance that drives the contemporary feminist arts scene as events mix a feminist message with spoken word poetry, queer theatre, music, dance, circus and elements of popular culture, with impromptu pranks and tricks thrown in. When I talk of performance, I mean that hard-to-define live act that is a form of performing art but not necessarily linked to the skills or traditions of the stage. In this sense, performance is effective for fast, improvised and spectacular appearances, and is rooted in the early modernist events – the 1960s happenings and other multidisciplinary 76



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art-forms. Performance, then, is a ‘tumbling place’ for encounters between political activism, autobiography, mass culture, ritual body art and the commonplace. Particular characteristics are the use of multiple voices and the lack of hierarchical components. Performance aims at simultaneity; a concurrent effect that the audience is free to structure and evaluate for itself.

Group interventions Feminists in Sweden and internationally have used spectacular and dramatic means to demonstrate how women are objectified by dominant cultural and social representational systems. The early street demonstrations and direct actions triggered the body-centred critique of gender and sexual representations that came to dominate feminist theatre, theory and practice in the 1980s.1 For example, feminist action groups organised counter-performances in connection with the Miss World contest and other beauty pageants. The ‘No More Miss America’ demonstration in August 1968 heralded the popular image of feminists as bra-burners. Recently in Sweden there has been a return to this kind of feminist demonstration, as illustrated by the activities of the Swedish feminist activist group, Unfucked Pussy. Unfucked Pussy are Joanna Rytel and Fia-Stina Sandlund whose Gubbslem (‘Slimey Old Men’) action protested against the Miss Sweden contest in 2001. When Unfucked Pussy attacked the Miss Sweden pageant with their ‘Slimy Old Men’ banner, they did it with humour and fun to challenge the acceptability of women’s objectification and in an interventionist, spectacular way that made it far more effective than any kind of television debate. The tactic of combating repression with pranks and wry humour has a strong feminist tradition. The Guerrilla Girls, who are veterans of feminist cultural resistance on the contemporary art scene, for example, still describe themselves as ‘fighting discrimination with facts, humour and fake fur’, while the activist group Absurd Response to an Absurd War proclaims that the way to maintain today’s anti-war message is through ‘humour, theatre, music, flamboyance, irony, FUN’. Unfucked Pussy work very much in this tradition of fun and feminist intervention.

The feminist solo artist: Miss Universum One prominent Swedish feminist performance artist is Catti Brandelius, alias Miss Universum. She has developed her own performance style 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Figure 3: Catti Brandelius as Miss Universum. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler.

incorporating songs with Swedish lyrics conveying urgent political messages against sexism and capitalism. Her alias, Miss Universum, is the ironic title of a feminist version of a beauty queen who has set herself above the beauty pageant and conferred the title on herself. She does as she pleases: sings and dances, writes poetry and delivers speeches. Miss Universum lives by her own rules, and she is angry. Miss Universum also makes music videos set in her apartment, in the supermarket, at a party or with her pram strolling among the concrete apartment blocks. When Miss Universum speaks out, the working-class suburb is the centre of the world, the centre of her universe. Her style is based on the provocatively commonplace. She carries bags of baby’s nappies, grocery bags full of cheap food, as she wanders around the neighbourhood singing ‘This was not what Ellen Key had in mind’. (Ellen Key is one of Sweden’s most famous feminists from the early 1900s, best known for her ideas on the social mother, an essentialist view of femininity and motherhood.) Miss Universum confronts the feminist utopias with crass, everyday realities, which primarily comprise a lack of sleep, money, sex and intellectual stimulation. Despite her criticism, Miss Universum is neither cynical nor pessimistic. Things will improve for women, her message proclaims, if only they have the strength to keep on fighting. Therefore, Catti Brandelius occa10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Figure 4: Catti Brandelius as Professoran. Photograph courtesy of Camilla Agdler.


sionally exchanges Miss Universum for Professoran (The Professoress), her most recent alter-ego, a character who holds lectures on women’s history and tours all over Sweden. Professoran is a modern-day popular educationalist, brandishing the motto: ‘No one can understand everything, but everyone can understand something’. Catti Brandelius guides the audience to her female role models, women who had to fight for their rights and were forced to develop their own survival strategies. In the role of Professoran, Catti Brandelius advises her audience: ‘Find role models!’ By appearing as Miss Universum and Professoran, Catti Brandelius wants to instil hope and a fighting spirit in her audience. And her audience responds by cheering and giving her standing ovations.

The pink rebellion: moderation sucks! The cocky attitude and the pink are typical of Grynet (a Swedish appellation similar to Tiny). Like Miss Universum she wears a tiara, as do W and Courtney Love, and has a predilection for pink chainsaws. Grynet, alias Elin Ek, is a loud-mouthed, over-the-top character, who encourages rebellion. Her main target is adult men in positions of power. With her tiara, her glittery girl’s clothes and big, black-framed glasses Grynet addresses young girls with a broad, clear and direct feminist message: ‘Hey, you are the way you are, so don’t take any shit!’ Grynet is a power princess, a contemporary Pippi Longstocking, who gets her strength from feminism. In the 1970s the women’s movement tried to redefine the Witch. She symbolised women’s right to speak, make a noise, demand attention and challenge conventionality, while being good ‘inside’. This amalgamation of witch and power princess is represented by characters such as Grynet, a plucky little thing in her pink skirt. Princess Don’t-Take-Any-Shit is not trying to be cute, and even less to be a darling or a sweetheart. She conquers her tiara and sings ‘I don’t give a shit’ (about school or parents). Another pink intervention was the Queer Cab project in the summer of 2005. A pink car with plastic flower garlands and blue fairy lights round the rear window took customers anywhere in Stockholm free of charge, on one condition: that they revealed all their prejudices about lesbians and gays. The idea was humorous – a glamorously decorated, Barbie-pink limo toured various music festivals in Sweden throughout the summer, offering a free ride to young people. All they had to do in return was to have their ideas about queers tested during the ride, through a range of activities including hetero bingo and a game of prejudice trivial pursuit. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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In terms of concept and execution the Queer Cab project is again a lot of fun, but it also has a very serious purpose. Queer Cab was part of the REFLEX project launched by the Living History Forum, whose intention was to raise awareness among young people about their values. The Living History Forum is an organisation for knowledge and culture based in Stockholm, commissioned by the government to promote democracy, tolerance and human rights, with the Holocaust as a starting-point. The idea of a specially equipped taxi was borrowed from New York, where a half-crazy lay preacher offered visitors to Manhattan free rides in his Jesus Cab, on the condition that they listened to his sermons. In the Swedish version, customers were taken care of by the performance artists Lina Kurttila and Jens Jonsson, wearing nifty caps and checked braces. The purpose was not to deliver ready-made truths, but to take preconceived notions and turn them upside-down. The ultimate goal was that passengers, when they got out of the cab, would be more aware of their own attitudes. Only then is it possible to influence these attitudes. There was also a hope that those who had been for a ride in the Queer Cab would have the courage to protest the next time they heard someone shout ‘fucking faggot’. Apart from combating homophobia, the cab ride also challenged the heterosexual norm.

KUNQ and the Lion Kings Queer Cab is an exponent of a genre of popular education activism that uses performance to fight discrimination. In a similar fashion KUNQ, a performance project, seeks to inspire queer youth to dare to demand attention, to feel valuable and to show others that they have something important to say. In this way, they hope to counter exclusion and homophobia. The KUNQ project was launched in 2001, as a youth programme against racism, xenophobia, homophobia and discrimination. KUNQ performs, for instance, at the annual Stockholm Pride Festival. Its summer 2005 production, An Army of Lovers, was a dramatisation of Queer Nation’s famous queer manifesto of 1990. Young people, who were infants when Queer Nation distributed its now legendary flyers with the slogan ‘queers bash back’, dramatised the manifesto which is still highly relevant today. The manifesto is a long homily in defence of the right to be queer, teeming with anger and disappointment over the American authorities’ unwillingness to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic and hate crime against queers. But the text is also full of hope and admonitions to stick together. The young lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals who make up KUNQ were 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



raised in the queer feminist tradition. In addition to their politicosexual activism, they emphasise gender-related activism for the greater acceptance of gender variations and against homo-/bi-/trans-phobic violence. The performance artist Lina Kurttila, who sat in the Queer Cab and performed the prejudice tests, is also a member of the drag king group Lion Kings, based in Stockholm. The Lion Kings examine gender roles and their boundaries with shows and excursions into reality. The drag king culture is popular in Stockholm. Its feminist status has been the subject of a theoretical and political debate that largely resembles the international discussions of drag. The question has been about whether drag in general, and drag kings in particular, can be regarded as subversive and feminist. Certain forms of drag challenge the connection between masculinity and maleness, while others – for instance, those engaging in male mimicry, as the gender theorist Judith Halberstam argues – maintain that there is a natural link between the two.2 This term, according to Halberstam, denotes drag kings who articulate and reproduce male masculinity, without questioning the connection between men and masculinity. She describes drag kings as women who perform in men’s clothing and parody masculinity to reveal its theatrical nature (Female Masculinity, p. 266). The Lion Kings have existed in various constellations since 2002. The group focuses on a critique of heteronormative gender prejudice and explorations of masculinity in general and female masculinity in particular. The Lion Kings are also active when it comes to organising workshops and their activities are based on a conscious strategy. They do not engage in male mimicry but in sabotaging the gender orders. In the Lion Kings’ shows the masks of masculinity and femininity are enhanced.

The autobiographical body performance The strong autobiographical element, and the way in which it relates to the body, links the younger Swedish feminists to the preceding feminist tradition. One of the most successful performances in the autobiographical genre has been Lo Kauppi’s Bergsprängardottern som exploderade [The Rock-Blaster’s Daughter who Exploded] (2004), in which she delivers a raw, powerful and candid account of her life and class origins, giving her audience both a social reportage and the energy to keep going. Her life-story was not just a private anecdote but also a fierce political critique against cutbacks and poor health services. She 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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was fuelled by her own fury and her perpetual questions. Lo Kauppi points out that nobody at drama school understood what she meant by political theatre. ‘I felt so lost – what if I had chosen the wrong profession. And now it has all fallen into place. I was able to do political theatre after all,’ she says.3 In the programme Lo Kauppi sums up how much she has cost society: two million Swedish kronor. And how much less she would have cost, one seventh of this, if she had been given the appropriate treatment when she started having problems around the age of 14. Lo Kauppi tried to resolve her inner chaos in her teens by dieting. Her eating disorder took place in a working-class environment in a family of addicts, where, she says, they used to fight about who was the sickest. This was followed by years of drug abuse and other social problems. ‘I’m incredibly grateful that I grew up in Olof Palme’s Sweden. It doesn’t matter what the Conservatives say, I would never have survived in a more competitive society,’ she says, thanking Sweden’s social democratic society for her life.4 Another example of autobiographical body performance is the actress Lotti Törnros’s work Mitt liv som tjock [My Life as a Fatty] (2005). Her performance is about obesity and is a tribute to the body of size. In the small basement premises of Teater Scenario, Stockholm the audience was brought into close contact with the small, overweight child, all of the bullying and the loneliness, while Törnros also managed to convey what it was like to have a rotund body that many find attractive, despite the prevailing social norms. Acting out scenes from her life, she took the risk of appearing naked in front of the audience, with protruding belly and wobbly thighs. In an interview, Törnros says that she no longer dreams of being someone she isn’t, namely, another, slimmer woman, or that her 100 kg are a temporary mistake. ‘Every puffed-up fat cell of my body is a protest movement!’ she proclaims.5 By the entrance to her performance, Törnros placed a large set of scales and the audience was requested to weigh in and note down their weight in a book before the show started. Many people refused, at least when it came to recording their weight. Others, whose body weight was ‘normal’, explained in a note that at least 2 kg were attributable to their clothing. ‘If women had devoted as much energy to women’s lib as we do to dieting or dressing, we would have been in power by now,’ says the pioneer of Swedish feminist theatre, Suzanne Osten.6 The classical empowerment genre is still vibrant in contemporary feminist performing arts, and it goes hand-in-hand with the autobiographical theme, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



giving the audience both enlightenment and reassurance. Since the early 1990s, however, there has been a strong ‘feel-bad trend’ in young Swedish feminist art, literature, drama and performance, focusing largely on eating disorders, self-mutilation and mental illness. The feeling of being inadequate is familiar to many women, and Mitt liv som tjock was specifically about this painful sense of insufficiency and exclusion. The physical exposure to the audience is a feminist strategy to challenge the onlooker’s gaze at the female body and to make an audience aware of how their own gaze may be implicit in ‘ideal’ body image-making.

Still angry after all these years Performance has been, and remains, a means of politicising and portraying the anger and frustration felt by many feminists. Feminist and queer insights are based on the awareness that something is wrong in the world. Feminist cultural theorist Sara Ahmed demonstrates how the emotional road to feminism goes via range of feelings such as pain and anger, where anger is a reaction to the fact that pain is wrong. Ahmed analyses the anger that feeds the feminist and queer activist, while the angry person needs to move on and present this anger to the world. Thus, these feelings do not stop at being angry and in pain, but are transformed into new feminist and queer power. The fuzzy boundaries between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ feelings in turn lead to new cultural formations, including feminist and queer perspectives, without the participants in these cultures perceiving themselves to be victims. On the contrary, anger and pain are politicised and transformed into decisive action.7 The truly innovative aspect of feminist performance has been, and still is, the position of subject from which a feminist is able to speak and make statements. There is no uniform way of creating feminist actions, interventions or performances. Every expression must be seen as part of a greater cultural and political context where the terrain is constantly changing. There is a fundamental solidarity among young feminist practitioners with the feminist generation that went before them, at the same time as realising that it is necessary for each generation to find new artistic roads. As long as the basic problems of sexual equality and equality in general remain, feminists will continue to help themselves to all and any means possible to protest and fight back. Performance is one exciting and multifaceted way in which feminist artists and activists in Sweden are demanding a more equal future. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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1. Elaine Aston, Feminist Theatre Practice: A Handbook (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5. 2. Male mimicry is a term coined by Judith Halberstam to denote when drag kings articulate and reproduce male masculinity without questioning the link between men and masculinity. Diane Torr’s Drag King Workshop, where women can experience being a man for a day, is one example. See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 250–3. 3. Betty Skawonius, ‘Pa[o] korsta[o]g mot den sjuka va[o]rden: Lo Kauppis självbiografiska succépjäs ga[o]r ut pa[o] turné’, Dagens Nyheter, 18 August 2004. 4. Ibid. 5. Karin Thunberg, ‘Tjockisen som fick nog’, Sunday interview, Svenska Dagbladet, 23 January 2005. 6. Quoted in Tiina Rosenberg, Besvärliga människor: Teatersamtal med Suzanne Osten (Stockholm: Atlas, 2004), p. 263. 7. See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 174; Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 15–48.



Notes

Women’s Writing for Performance Project: ‘Making’ a Feminist Intervention Elaine Aston

‘To bring women to writing’ was an attractive, if flawed feminist manifesto adopted by Hélène Cixous in an earlier phase of feminist thinking and activity in the 1970s.1 In a more contemporary moment, specifically for the years 2003–6, I have been the principal investigator on a Women’s Writing for Performance Project, funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and based at my home institution, Lancaster University, where my co-investigator is theatre colleague Gerry Harris. Together, we have been focusing on process and practice with the aim of understanding how and in what ways a number of established women artists, many of whom have been foundational to women’s theatre and performance practice and politics in the UK and elsewhere, engage resistantly with gender in their performance work. Seeking to avoid the earlier essentialist pitfalls of an écriture féminine, the project has refused a monolithic view of ‘women’, ‘writing’ and performance. ‘Women’ was adopted as a ‘to-be-contested’ or contingent category, as Butler and Spivak (among others) advise. ‘Writing’ was argued for in the most expansive and inclusive sense of any means of making creative work to be performed, and the project included a diverse range of performance genres (such as storytelling, radio drama, live art, performance art, performance poetry, stand-up comedy, playwriting and site-specific performance). Research into women’s practice was carried out through a regularly convened programme of theatre- and performance-based events with artists – workshops, demonstrations, performances, talks and symposia. Artists taking part in the project included Gilly Adams, Geddy Aniksdal, Bobby Baker, Marissa Carnesky, Sarah Daniels, Jenny Eclair, Anna Furse, Leslie Hill, Jackie Kay, Vayu Naidu, Helen Paris, Rebecca Prichard, SuAndi, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver.2 All of these practitioners engage 86



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in different kinds of gender-related interventions, though in radically different ways. It would be fair, however, to summarise that what these artists have in common is the way in which their personal, political and performance lives motivate them to make work in the interests of imagining the world differently: artists whose theatre and performance practices open up critical and dialectical relations on and with those social and cultural systems that constitute and constrain ‘norms’ of gender, race, class and sexuality. To quote Weaver: ‘If you can imagine it, you can make it. If you can make it, then you can change it.’3 While other contributions in Part II, ‘Interventions’, have tended to focus on the work of an individual artist or a particular production, this chapter reflects on the activities of this project, the networking, workshops and interventionist ‘writing’ strategies, and the ways in which these might be instructive for thinking and performing feminism internationally. One of feminism’s serious losses in the UK has been the breakdown of the networks that evolved out of the second-wave feminist movement and the connections that feminism made across different disciplines within the academy. As Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg observe in the Global Feminist Politics anthology, ‘feminism lost addresses right and left’.4 In respect of feminists working on and performing in theatre, the ‘addresses’ that were known to be womenfriendly, whether theatre, community or campus ‘homes’, were ‘lost’ to the ‘centralisation of feminism’ which, while positive in some ways, ‘has been at the expense of what bell hooks (1984) identified as sites of radical possibility’.5 In the study and practice of theatre, those ‘sites of radical possibility’ were realised through the energies and endeavours of feminist individuals who introduced women’s theatre and performance courses into to the main(stream) theatre syllabus; organised and hosted workshops, residences, conferences and performances that enabled women from academic theatre and performance cultures to meet. Conversations between those engaged in professional practice and those in the business of researching theatre were crucial to women connecting up in the ‘margins’ and coming to feminist understandings of the marginality of women in theatres past and present.6 The backlash disconnections to feminism, felt also, for example, in the way that young women are no longer attracted to studying theatre courses that focus on women’s performance work in the way that they were in the 1980s or even early 1990s, indeed are reluctant to identify with feminism at all,7 coupled with the squeeze on institutional funding (meaning reduced access to funds to pay artists for workshops, residences or performances in the academy), has left feminist interests 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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in theatre and performance dis-located and isolated. If feminism has been making connections in recent years, it has largely been through theory rather than practice. The ‘traffic in theory’, while important and essential to philosophical and critical feminist thinking of ‘gender matters’, as this collection illustrates, has nevertheless tended to ‘globalise’ practice: has translated the critical ‘doing’ of theatre back into philosophical writings. Just as British feminism has tended to maintain some kind of presence in the academy rather than in activism, so in the context of women’s theatre and performance in the UK, the emphasis has been on the philosophical, or the theoretical, rather than the practical encounters. When we bid for the Women’s Writing for Performance Project we had all of these concerns in mind and part of our desire was to make some reconnections to women’s practice and to feminism: to put women engaged in professional practice and in the academy back in touch with one another. We wanted the project to be a ‘site of radical possibility’; a means of enabling women to be in touch with each other creatively and politically, generating activities that might link up with other ‘sites’ or might, quite simply, enable women to find others, even just one other, with whom to dialogue, discuss and create. We were not thinking about some kind of ‘old girls’ feminist ‘reunion’ but were more concerned with the possibilities of cross-generational connections to artists and scholars that might be especially helpful to those emergent as practitioners or scholars. To be clear, however, we were not presenting, arguing or headlining the project in terms of feminism. Each artist came to share strategies for ‘writing’ resistantly based on her own work, rather than, say, working on a particular feminist issue.8 In brief, there was no invitation to identify with one feminism that the project was seeking to promote, or with the very different feminisms of the artists, but rather, through process and practice, to identify (with) the practicalities and political possibilities of resistant ‘making’. As the researchers on the project, Gerry Harris and I engaged primarily with the strategies for ‘making’ and reflected on processes in a way that prioritised practice over theory. To be more specific, it shifted our reflections away from the dominant paradigm of encountering practice through theory and towards an idea of what we came to term for ourselves as ‘embodied knowledge’: ways of thinking, of reflecting, that came out of our being in the moment of process and practice. To be in the ‘emotional juice’, the ‘human core’ of the meaning-making creative process (to borrow from Naidu’s diasporic storytelling practice), is to be in something that is associative, lateral rather than linear; 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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surprising, shocking – a whole lot ‘messier’ than a ‘theoretical core’ of meaning. This is not to discount or to do away with the latter, but rather to sense the possibilities that might arise or follow from the experiences of resistant, creative doing which might enable us to come to know what we know differently.9 While enabling women to ‘make’ connections with each other was fundamental to the project, it also answered a very basic need: the ‘space’ for creativity. This we realised early on: both generally through the way in which at project events we never had enough places for all the women who wanted to come (or to come back), and further and more specifically at the Performing Words workshop. Performing Words, which Aniksdal and Adams have jointly delivered in the UK and internationally, in the Philippines, Singapore and Australia, is designed to make a space for women’s creativity; to answer a need for women to step out of other lives, work or performance commitments to explore creativity collaboratively and collectively. The hunger for ‘space’ in which to make work is arguably fundamental to all practitioners, whatever their interests, whatever their practice. However, making a space for women’s creativity comes back to the idea of ‘space’ as a ‘site of radical possibility’: that making space for women’s work and women to work creatively together is an opportunity that in the current moment of ‘centralised’ feminism, is hard to find. Overall, the most important ‘space’ that the project was able to offer was the workshop. Workshops were organised over a period of up to five days and were free to participants (which made a financial difference to women as to whether they might be able to attend or not). The workshops functioned as a shared doing and learning environment. The emphasis was on engaging directly and experientially with the practice, rather than attempting to theorise and to intellectualise in ways that would interfere with the ‘doing’. Moreover, the workshops did not function as ‘master’ classes for an artist to demonstrate her ‘writing’ accomplishments to those less skilled or experienced than herself. Rather the artists, or artists in partnerships (Hill and Paris as Curious; Shaw and Weaver from Split Britches; Sarah Daniels and Sally Avens who work together in radio as writer and producer), shared the processes of her/their own work with the aim of facilitating the creativity of all others. Most remarkable in some instances were those like Daniels, Baker and Carnesky who were more than willing to admit to their ‘failures’ in making work, so that others might learn from this. It has become widely accepted in the ‘doing’ of women’s theatre and performance that the classical and canonical ‘writing’ practices of the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



stage are those that write women out. This accounts for the need and desire of the project practitioners to imagine and to make identities, histories and sexualities that write ‘women’ otherwise. Techniques and strategies for ‘writing’ otherwise are, as the project taught us, many and varied. On the other hand, they are not infinite. Much processing comes back to key theatre exercises (in trust, status, significant objects, or role play, for example), yet exercises that are put to very different, resistantly creative uses. Status games for Daniels, for instance, were introduced as a tool for becoming status-aware in writing characters for radio drama, whereas Prichard played power and status games to illustrate how these take on particular resonances and meanings in her women’s prison work. Often what motivates how a particular game is played or an exercise is applied is the desire to resist social and cultural ‘scripts’ that cast by type or ‘norms’. So, for example, Shaw and Weaver devise exercises and tasks that involve resistant appropriations of heteronormative texts, cultures, images or identities to give creative expression to lesbian representation and desire. ‘Woman’ as a universalising type is a source of much deconstructive play from Eclair’s monstering of the feminine in her in-yer-face style of stand-up comedy to Baker’s revisualising of the domestic she had us experience through show-making strategies based on the (food)stuffs of daily life. The body, an object of much theoretical enquiry, often figured in the workshops as both making ‘tool’ and as a ‘site of radical possibility’. The reproductive body, and the advances in biotechnology that have made it into a ‘spectacular body’, for instance, motivate Furse’s highly physical exercises and explorations of the body through which participants are encouraged to ‘see’ their own bodies from the inside out. Just as the body is a ‘tool’ for making and creating, so too is language, and practitioners generally shared a ‘relish’ for language. This was the case for those artists for whom words are a primary form of expression in their work – as they are in the verbal wit and dexterity of Eclair’s stand-up, in Naidu’s storytelling or in the creative and dramatic output of writers such as Kay, Daniels and Prichard. However, taking pleasure in words was also important to those practitioners for whom words are integral to other ‘languages’, such as the visual, the corporeal or the locational. Also characteristic of much of the project’s engagement with process was the need to insert the personal into the political: the desire to ‘write’ personal experiences (‘local’) into larger political questions (‘global’). In their workshop, Hill and Paris (Curious) encouraged 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Figure 5: Vayu Naidu’s performance storytelling workshop, Lancaster University. Photograph courtesy of the Women’s Writing for Performance Project.

lateral and associative links between family stories and public events (exercises drew on maternal stories, paternal stories and world events that took place within a familial chronology, but all of them getting creatively ‘messed up’ and mixed together). Getting participants to work from an object of personal significance, Carnesky facilitated the transformation of private stories into burlesque, variety, fairground or magic shows. Giving creative expression to ‘unofficial’ stories or histories was also seminal to Naidu’s workshopping of cross-cultural storytelling practices, or SuAndi’s invitation to participants to ‘write’ their own cultural histories and heritages, rather than those that are imposed on us. Several of the artists, SuAndi included, have extensive experience of working with disadvantaged communities for whom creativity has simply not been an option. Daniels, Prichard, Shaw and Weaver, for example, all shared their experiences of working with prison communities where the opportunity to make, can make a real difference to damaged lives. Making a difference to women’s lives has always been seminal to feminism, though more recently feminism has explored ways 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Figure 6: Split Britches workshop with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, Lancaster University. Photograph courtesy of Women’s Writing for Performance Project.

of making a difference at the level of the local and of the global: of acknowledging and enabling local differences at the same time as connecting across national boarders. In the interests of thinking feminism transnationally, feminist and post-colonialist theorist Sara Ahmed proposes a model of ‘strange encounters’: encounters that are ‘strange’ when participants do not assume to know, or not know the other, but work to ‘get closer to others’.10 By way of conclusion, I would like to propose some reflections on the Women’s Writing for Performance Project that in a process and practice workshop model illustrate ways of doing this. I stated at the outset that the workshops were above all concerned with doing. Perhaps more important than this was the way in which the workshop environment was not just about doing, but about doing for each other. Many of the exercises and activities set in the workshop, for example, required that participants ‘create’ meaning through processes in which each participant is dependent on others. ‘Authorship’ is complex as ideas start with one person, in one place, get transformed by another and come back as something else. As anyone who has ever 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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participated in a theatre workshop will know, ‘making’ requires careful negotiation of each other’s ideas; requires listening to, learning from, labouring for and with each other, or being an audience for each other’s work. Particular to the project workshops, however, was that the listening, learning and labouring were undertaken in the interests (to borrow from Weaver) of imagining, making and changing. ‘Making change’ means that participants are engaged both generally at a skills level of ‘making’ and specifically with ideas of ‘writing’ otherwise. ‘Doing’ together in ways that are with and for each other and are focused on resistant strategies of imagining and ‘making’ ourselves otherwise is a way of labouring in the interests of our own creativity and the creativity of others. All of this is ‘hard labour’ because it often entails having to shift out of the comfort zone of the knowable, the familiar in order to come to know (others) differently. In coming together in one of the artist’s workshops this was not about starting out as a ‘community’, but suggested the possibility of a community in the making. The local, regional and national networking arising out of the project evidences a community in the making, as artists, would-be artists and academics have a means to be in touch with others, even just one other. It was never our intention that Lancaster should be a ‘home’ for this ‘community’, but rather that it should function as a facilitator for ‘sites of radical [performance] possibility’ wherever the ‘making’ connections get taken up or take ‘root’. It is in such ways that I would argue the project is making a national difference to ‘women’s writing for performance’, and for making feminism ‘work’ more progressively and imaginatively in the academy than in many of its current centralised forms of knowledge production.

Notes 1. H. Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), pp. 245–64, p. 245. 2. For further details of the project visit go to http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/ theatre/womenwriting/pages/background.htm. 3. Quoted in the Spit Britches workshop, Lancaster University, 12–15 January 2006. 4. Debbie Epstein and Deborah Lynn Steinberg, ‘No Fixed Abode: Feminism in the 1990s’, in Suki Ali, Kelly Coate and Wnagui Wa Goro, eds, Global Feminist Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 126–32, p. 127. 5. Ibid., p. 129. 6. See my ‘Background – Feminism and Theatre Studies’, in An Introduction to Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1–11.




7. For further discussion of this point, see Leslie Hill and Helen Paris, ‘Curious Feminists’, in Elaine Aston and Gerry Harris, eds, Feminist Futures? Theatre, Performance, Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 56–70, p. 57. 8. The project website gives details of each workshop alongside brief artist profiles that identify the work and gender-related concerns of a particular artist. 9. In working on an idea of ‘embodied knowledge’ Harris and I have been drawn to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching, Feeling (London: Duke University Press, 2003). In a discussion of affect, pedgagogy and performativity Sedgwick argues for the need to think beyond the versions of what we already know, or what we have already learned to look for. Rather than a critical anti-essentialist preoccupation with getting ‘beyond gender’ Sedgwick is interested in looking to the non-dualistic possibilities of ‘beside’ – ‘of having a number of elements … lie alongside one another’ (p. 6). The idea of embodied knowledge is one that Harris and I take up in Performance Practice and Process: Contemporary [Women] Practitioners (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 10. Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 17.



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Reconstructing a Diasporic Female Self in O Kyong-Sook’s Dictee – A Speaking Woman Jung-Soon Shim

A young Korean teenage girl walks onto a silent stage, carrying a small suitcase. The silence is broken by a voice that says in Korean, ‘She had come from afar.’ This is the opening scene of the stage production A Speaking Woman (Seoul, 2001), adapted and directed by the Korean woman director O Kyong-Sook. It is adapted from the autobiographical text Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, a Korean-American writer. This particular scene enacts the very first sentence of Dictee: ‘Open paragraph. It was the first day period. She had come from afar.’1 In A Speaking Woman, the motif of journey/diaspora is emphasised even before the performance begins: when the audience arrives at the theatre, they are instructed to wait in the lobby, and then are led into the stage space. They are invited to sit on the stage, which is extended by three walkways installed over the auditorium. A huge Korean national flag hangs on one of the walls, with a set of Korean bean paste earthen jars stage front, reminding the audience of things Korean. In the middle of the performance, the audience is instructed to take the walkway to the opposite side of the stage in order to change viewing positions. Thus this particular version of Dictee required, as it were, that the audience perform their own brief journey across the stage. This, and the performance style generally of A Speaking Woman, caused some consternation and bemusement among the audience – mostly young women in their twenties. Because the performance had no conventional sense of plot or character, but rather sought to engage its audience in a sensorial way through image, sound and light, in viewing terms, this made it an unfamiliar experience. This has been the case with a majority of O Kyong-Sook’s productions, which include Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1993) and Ingeborg Bachmann’s 95



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Malina (2000). O has also adapted Western classics such as Timeless Lear (1992), where she experimented with a female Lear, and Iphegenia (1997). In all these works O’s constant and consistent pursuit of women-related themes and non-realistic style of productions clearly connect her to a contemporary Western women’s theatre tradition. O’s adaptation of Dictee can best be understood, therefore, as a significant addition to her global-Korean female hybrid oeuvre, especially as Theresa Cha is a Korean-American woman writer. This chapter examines how O Kyong-Sook reconstructs Cha’s search for a diasporic female self in A Speaking Woman in terms of mise-enscène; how O interprets Cha’s search for identity from the Korean point of view of Han and embodies it in a performance text; and how the Korean audience responded to her performance. To contextualise the discussion, it is briefly necessary to introduce the original text of Dictee.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s diaspora in Dictee Dictee is Theresa Cha’s multicultural, postcolonial autobiographical/ biographical writing, consisting of images, calligraphy, historical documents, certain Chinese characters, empty spaces, and so on. The motif of diaspora runs through this collage of fragmentary texts and images, reflecting Cha’s own family diaspora: Cha’s parents were exiled to Manchuria under Japanese colonial rule (1919–45) and then, after living in Korea (Seoul and Pusan), emigrated to Hawaii when she was ten years old. Unlike some emigrants who were never to go back to Korea, Cha returned several times. Her visits in the 1980s coincided with significant but unfortunate episodes of Korean history. Dictee is her memoir of what she witnessed and in her diasporic identity in the US as a Korean-American woman. Dictee is attracting considerable critical attention in both the US and Korea. Looked at from a range of approaches which include the poststructural and the post-colonial, the focus on the politics of the inbetween-ness of Theresa Cha’s Korean-American identity by Elaine Kim is one that is useful to bring to this interventionist discussion. Kim explains that Cha reveals two ways in which she searched for her Korean-American identity: one was ‘to trace the history of Korea, the nation, to her race, to her ancestry’;2 the other was by learning to speak and write English and French, the languages of the superior ‘Other’. Thus for Cha, connecting back to the history of Korea’s nation-state is integral to her own search for identity. Kim also argues that by re-inscribing the historical figures such as Yu Guan Soon, a 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Korean woman martyr under Japanese colonial rule, Dictee directly challenges the Western racist notion of the Asian and Asian-American woman as a male-identified, passive and self-sacrificing Madame Butterfly (Kim and Alarcon, Writing Self, p. 22). Yim Jin-Hee, a Korean woman scholar, interprets Dictee as focusing on Cha’s search for diasporic identity by going through the historical memories of the Korean nation. At the centre of modern Korean history, Cha finds the shame of Korea’s colonisation, and the confiscation of her mother tongue by Japanese colonial rule.3 This shame constitutes the core of the sense of Han for most Korean people, and provides the emotional backdrop for Dictee. Han is the collective unconscious of the Korean people, consisting of unfulfilled desire, anxiety, resentment and anger. This national ethos or emotional complex has been formed over Korea’s 5,000-year history, resulting from traumatised national memories of repeated aggressions and dominations by powerful outside forces.4

O Kyong-Sook’s encounter with Dictee O Kyong-Sook, trained in the US in theatre direction, founder of the theatre group Mythos (1985), and adaptor, translator and director of a number of experimental theatre works (see earlier), is one of the most high-profile and prolific women directors on the contemporary Korean theatre scene. She introduced Dictee and Theresa Cha to a Korean theatre audience from a potentially post-colonial Korean feminist point of view. I say potentially because it is more accurate to talk about the feminist implications of O’s theatre work than it is to argue for this as explicitly feminist. This is because she is working in a Korean theatre system that, unlike the Korean’s women’s movement which has made significant advances in the past ten years, still does not publicly or explicitly acknowledge feminism.5 O explains that one reason why she became interested in Dictee was her identification with the speaking subject in the text as an individual woman artist. O shares many of her cultural memories with Cha, since she and Cha belong to the same generation and have both witnessed the tumultuous phases of modern Korean history, ranging from the military oppression in the 1960s to democratisation in the 1980s. More than anything else, O Kyong-Sook sympathises with Cha in her struggle to learn and speak English and French: O herself remembers vividly how painful it was to take a French language examination in English during her first year at college in the US. She also strongly shares Cha’s 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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concern for minority issues, such as re-inscribing women’s histories in her work, including those of Cha’s own mother, Huo Hyung Soon, the Korean woman patriot Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc and St Theresa of Lisieux.6 O Kyong-Sook first staged her adaptation of Dictee under the same title in 1998 in an experimental theatre style with a primary focus on the difficulties of acquiring a new language. Then the performance went to the International Women Playwrights Conference (Greece, 2000), where it was well received by an international audience. Later, on the internet, O came to read a review of this performance written by Margareta Skantze in which she argues ‘Dictee shows the initiation process of a modern young Korean woman. It is a Grail legend with a female protagonist.’7 This interpretation arguably had an impact on O’s perception of her work (though I state this speculatively as O has not been entirely explicit about this). However, significantly, when the performance was staged again in 2001, there was as a shift in focus to the historical memories of Korea and the national ethos of Han implicit in the new title, A Speaking Woman. O explains that by 2001 she felt that the act of speaking about history was more crucial than addressing the literal meaning of the word ‘dictee’: her previous productions suggested a woman who learned foreign language(s) by being dictated to, thereby learning to enter the symbolic order of the others.8 Through this change, O capitalised on her own and Cha’s desire to speak: ‘It murmurs inside … Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say’ (Cha, Dictee, p. 3).

The sense of Han and A Speaking Woman A Speaking Woman basically follows the same structure as Dictee. It consists of a prologue and nine episodic sections, which are named after the nine Greek Muses: Clio, Calliope, Urania, Melpomene, Erato, Elitere, Thalia, Terpsichore and Polymnia. Although the titles allude to Greek sources, each section deals with a specific Korean historical phase, such as Japanese colonialism in Korea, the Korean liberation movements, Korean feminism, the Korean War and Korean immigration to the US, as well as Cha’s personal history and that of her parents. In order to reconstruct a performance text based on Dictee, O KyungSook selected six characters from the original: Theresa Cha herself, Cha’s mother Huo Hyung-Soon, St Theresa of Lisieux, Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc and Cha’s father. O considers A Speaking Woman an appropriation rather than an adaptation since it physicalises textual frag10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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ments from Dictee (interview, 2005). Lines from the text were assigned to the production’s five performers (four female and one male). Each performer played multiple characters in different episodic scenes; and collectively they created the chorus. A Speaking Woman proceeds in a kaleidoscope of seemingly dissociated images projected onto the stage. For example, in the Clio/History section, episodic scenes are arranged in such a way as to create a collage of images about the Korean independence movement under Japanese colonial rule. This section pays special attention to Yu Guan Soon, the patriot who was tortured to death at the age of 16 for leading and participating in the 1 March 1919 independence movement. This inserts Yu Guan Soon into Korean history in the way that she deserves. At the beginning of this section, a photograph of Yu Guan Soon is projected, followed by the appearance of the Yu Guan Soon character. In a presentational style, Yu recites the lines about herself from Dictee; foregrounds the association between herself and Joan of Arc as ‘[s]he calls the name Jeanne d’Arc three times’ (Dictee, p. 28); and spells out the significance of her martyrdom, which is not inscribed in men’s history: Guan Soon is arrested as a leader of the revolution, with punishment deserving of such a rank. She is stabbed in the chest, and

Figure 7: Chorus members enact the Korean liberation movement patriots, executed by the Japanese Imperial Army (Theatre Group Mythos).




100 Jung-Soon Shim

Then, the scene blends into a tableau in which the Korean independence movement patriots are executed by the Japanese Imperial Army. In the Calliope/Epic Poetry section, the character of Cha’s mother sings the song ‘Bong-Sun Flower’. For Korean people this song is symbolic of a colonised Korea: ‘Standing in a shadow, Bong-Sun flower, your form is destitute’ (Cha, Dictee, p. 46). She continues to narrate the lines about the confiscation of the Korean language under Japanese colonialism: ‘The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak [it] in the dark’ (Dictee, p. 46). Hence, it is through a female character that the episodic scenes in this section provoke memories and shameful feelings of Han in the audience. Then the performer playing Cha’s mother transforms herself into a chorus member, bows to the Korean national flag (Taegukki), and dances the Salpuri (the Korean traditional dance), while citing lines from the Bible about Jesus Christ. Salpuri means the purging of Han, and hence provides a means for Korean people in times of difficulty to sublimate the Han complex. Christianity provided a source of spiritual strength for many Korean Christians, who fought for the national independence movement against Japanese colonial rule. It is not surprising, therefore, that the performer merges the Salpuri with Christianity as the source of historical hope for the nation. The Melpomene/Tragedy section centres on Korea’s modern historical tragedy: the partition of the nation’s territory into South and North in 1945. A chorus member transforms into Cha herself and delivers the lines: Here at my return in eighteen years, the war is not ended. We fight the same war … We are severed in two by an abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently named the severance, Civil War. Cold War. (Cha, Dictee, p. 81) At this point, the chorus members become demonstrators under the military oppression in the 1980s, and sing a well-known demonstration song, which for the Korean people has come to symbolise the ‘fight for democracy’. Consequently, this is a moment that arouses a strong emotional reaction in the audience. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


subjected to questioning to which she reveals no names. … Child revolutionary child patriot woman soldier deliverer of nation. (Cha, Dictee, p. 37)



Figure 8: The actor Kim Min-Jung dances the Salpuri under Taegukgi (the national flag of Korea) (Theatre Group Mythos).


The Erato/Love Poetry section reveals a Speaking Woman character holding a video camera and shooting three women chorus members as they appear on the stage, while simultaneously their video-taped images are projected on to an oversized Korean national flag. The motif of women’s martyrdom is sublimated as the character of St Theresa narrates the lines about ‘the wedding of Sister Theresa of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face’ and her martyrdom (Cha, Dictee, p. 101). The wedding episode shifts to Cha’s parents’ marriage. On to the walkway Cha’s mother and father enter as characters in traditional Korean wedding dress, thus placing Cha’s mother and St Theresa on the same walkway level. Visually, this presents the two women and their histories of oppression as equal. A new Speaking Woman character narrates, focusing on the unequal relationship in Cha’s parents’ marriage: ‘He is the man. She is the wife. It is a given … Stands the distance between the husband and wife the distance of heaven and hell’ (Cha, Dictee, p. 102). This episodic scene is followed by the projection onto the huge Korean national flag of an image of Joan of Arc excerpted from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s film The Passion of Joan of Arc. This image is soon overlaid by images of Nazi troops. While this series of images, evocative of women’s oppression, is shown on the stage, high-intensity lighting illuminates the gestures of suffering and wailing in high-pitched voices performed by the women in the chorus. For the audience, bombarded with such stunning intensity by images, sounds, lights and movements, this moment constitutes the emotional climax of the performance. In the 1998 production of Dictee the Korean audience, unfamiliar with a non-linear, associative, image-based style of performance, without conventional dialogue and naturalistic acting, were confused and disoriented. Han Sang-Chul, an influential theatre critic, reported: ‘although the play was very ambitious, it lacked audience appeal’.9 However, in 2001, with the national ethos of Han more clearly accentuated, the audience was more responsive to A Speaking Woman (even while, as I stated earlier, it provoked some consternation). As the theatre critic Lee Jong-Do wrote: ‘Attractive and difficult at the same time, the performance liberated and revealed to the audience the languages and gestures inhibited within our consciousness.’10 In my view, the significance of A Speaking Woman lies in the way that O KyongSook has re-inscribed the issue of Korean-American diasporic female identity through the specific Korean perspective of Han. Through her episodic, image-based performance O has enacted the hope and desire that she shares with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: ‘To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion’ (Cha, Dictee, p. 30). 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


102 Jung-Soon Shim

Figure 9: An image of Joan of Arc superimposed on the national flag of Korea, accentuating the theme of oppression (Theatre Group Mythos).

Notes 1. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), p. 1. 2. Elaine H. Kim and Norma Alarcon, eds, Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1994), p. 19. 3. Jin-Hee Yim, ‘The Self/Language/Nation in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee’, Journal of American Studies, 28:1 (Summer 1996): 205–27. 4. For further discussion of Han, see Jung-Soon Shim, ‘The Shaman and the Epic Theatre: the Nature of Han in the Korean Theatre’, New Theatre Quarterly, XX (August 2004): 216–24. 5. For example, the Korean Culture and Arts Foundation does not support theatre work if identified as ‘feminist’ or ‘women’s theatre’, because this kind of labelling suggests a ‘minority’ interest. 6. Explained in interview with Jung-Soon Shim, 20 February 2002. 7. http://www.galatea.nu/skantze/myths.html. Accessed 8 September 2006. 8. O Kyong-Sook, interview with Jung-Soon Shim, 15 June 2005. 9. Sang-Chul Han, ‘Theatre Focus’, Korean Theatre Review (August 1998): 67–8, p. 67. 10. Lee Jong-Do, ‘Theatre Review’, Kaeksuk (September 2001): 362–3.




Giving Back to Judith: Laura Curino’s Una stanza tutta per me/A Room of My Own Roberta Gandolfi

Virginia Woolf is a feminist icon whose work has been taken up in mainstream, mass culture. The Italian actress and dramatist Laura Curino, one of the founders of Laboratorio Teatro Settimo (1974–2002),1 has added a solo performance to the cultural industry that is Woolf: Una stanza tutta per me/A Room of My Own (Turin, February 2005; national tour of central and northern Italy). Curino’s performance neither seeks to bolster Woolf’s iconic status in mainstream terms, nor sits in an experimental performance tradition, like the versions of Orlando by Sally Potter and Bob Wilson, for example.2 Her purpose is more ethical and political, drawing on the personal and on feminism, while formally being indebted to the practice of narrative theatre (teatro narrazione). Narrative theatre is a popular performance practice peculiar to contemporary Italian theatre and Curino is one of its leading exponents. In essence, it mostly involves solo performers as storytellers who entertain their audiences through an oral and corporeal enactment of collective memories and civic histories. The performers devise their own text and use narration to bridge the personal and the political; the individual and the collective, the local and the global. This informs both performance and process: the dramaturgy and workshop processes are collaborative and draw on the experiences and issues which emerge from the communities with which the artist works.3 Curino works with many different communities: amateur and professional performers, teachers and students, all-female groups of different kinds (feminist centres, lesbian groups or associations for women concerned with particular social issues, such as domestic violence). Her storytelling workshops create an interventionist opportunity for selfempowerment through discovering and exploring the ‘narratable self’.4 104



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Curino turns to Woolf to resource a feminist pedagogy and a poetics of the senses.5 In Woolf, Curino finds an exhortation to agency, to realisation and to creativity that is rooted in a vibrant, ethical feeling of gender-based cultural responsibility. A Room of One’s Own is a text that she finds as relevant to women today as it was in 1928, and she often shares it with her workshop participants: If we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. As for her coming without that preparation, without that effort on your part, without that determination that when she is born again she will find it possible to live and write her poetry, that we cannot expect, for that would be impossible.6 In her adaptation of the essay for the stage, Curino engages with Woolf’s criticism of women’s cultural and social marginality through her ‘character’ performance as Judith, Shakespeare’s sister: the woman who could not be, was not allowed to be, an artist. As Woolf writes, ‘who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?’ (Woolf, A Room, p. 44). Liliana Rampello argues that Woolf’s invention of Judith is in part a practical strategy for overcoming the difficulties of dramatising essayistic writing, based on facts rather than the imagination; on argument not narrative. This also makes it, Rampello states, a fusion of the masculine and the feminine: the (masculine) essay with the narrative movement ‘of a feminine mind’; thought that flows in search of itself.7 Creating a ‘hidden’, ‘other’ character like Judith is theatrically important to Curino. She views this kind of character work as seminal to the possibilities of making a feminist intervention: as a device to revisit and revision cultural history.8 Like the original text, Una stanza tutta per me is organised into six ‘chapters’, but ‘there are no words by Woolf, there is her preparation of the work, her wandering about, in a literal and metaphorical sense, her searching for the right images, the right characters’.9 Dramaturgically Curino selects, paraphrases and interpolates. She cuts many of the references to an English literary heritage (they would be unfamiliar to 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Curino’s Una stanza tutta per me 105

the Italian audience), while verbal and visual ‘texts’ are added in the interests of politicising a feminist past (from Woolf’s time) or addressing a contemporary feminist global politics. For example, Woolf’s ironic response to masculinist writing hostile to women fuels and transforms into Curino’s denunciation of the xenophobic anxiety against immigrant communities in the West: If you tell me: ‘immigrants are all down-and-outs’ I can believe it. … But, twisted with anger, you tell me: ‘immigrants come here and steal our jobs!’ That’s ridiculous: Prof. von X, you really wanted to work in a tannery, up to your elbows in dye, but an immigrant stole your job and you had to work as a university professor instead! Oh, please! But I understand even before that there’s something else, from your tone of voice: you’re snarling. (Curino, Una stanza, p. 100) Mirroring the disembodied writing voice that is Woolf’s in A Room of One’s Own10 and departing from her usual identification with a biographical self,11 Curino’s performance persona is, curiously, neither

Figure 10: Laura Curino, Una stanza tutta per me. The setting: an empty cube on wheels with just a few pieces of furniture. Photograph by Giorgio Sottile. Courtesy of Fondazione del Teatro Stabile, Torino.



106 Roberta Gandolfi

Laura Curino nor Virginia Woolf. Rather, Curino aims for a multiple subjectivity, one that resonates in Woolf’s words: ‘Here then was I (call me Mary Benton, Mary Senton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance)’ (Woolf, A Room, p. 4). Her narrator is a female subject whose costume of multi-layered fabric – reminiscent of Edwardian times – enables identities that are both male and female. Switching first-and third-person narrations, historicising the ‘telling’, Curino’s persona plays actress, witness (to the telling), friend (to Woolf), Woolf herself, and so forth. Overall, Una stanza tutta per me resists Woolf as the mournful icon, but rather aims to be upbeat and positive. In terms of the playing space for Una stanza tutta per me, this is literally a room (designed by Roberto Tarasco, who worked with Curino at Teatro Settimo). More specifically, Curino moves into and around the structure of a room: an empty cube on wheels with just a few pieces of furniture: an armchair, two lamps, a desk, a radio. Net curtains trimmed with lace are drawn or pulled back by the narrator, to become transparent partitions or screens for the projection of slides and short movies. Importantly, there are books everywhere, and these are used to quote passages and fragments of narratives, or as ‘bricks’ to build a small platform. Woolf’s room has been interpreted in many different, even contrasting ways by feminist scholars. Showalter’s 1970s classic A Literature of their Own12 read it as a secluded, separate place, symbolic of a move by the female modernist artist towards interiority; as elective space for female creativity. Today, Italian philosophical feminism privileges another kind of approach. Rampello, for example, proposes a connection between room and window in Woolf’s fiction. To give a specific example, the fictional I of A Room of One’s Own in chapter 6 is busy observing life on the street from her window. Hence this more current view argues for a room–window–eyes–view as a looking outwards, onto the world.13 Curino’s setting chimes with this. Her room is evocative of the studio of the New Woman at the beginning of the twentieth century, at the same time as being reminiscent of the Hogarth Press warehouse, where Woolf loved to write and often worked at packing and sending out books. On stage, the room is not separated from the outer world, since its walls are transparent; they are more often open than closed, and ‘reality’ or ‘facts’ enter and open up the space through slides and projections. Borders are permeable, not fixed; like the narrating subject they change and are moveable, mobile, in flux. As the narrator, addressing the audience, explains, the room is both physical space and the ‘space’ of the mind: ‘il tuo pensiero saldo 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



è la tua stanza’ (your room is your own solid thought) (Curino, Una stanza, p. 118). Recreating the ‘characters’ (cued by Woolf’s text) that the narrator meets on her imaginary journey – like the Beadle who forbids women to walk on the grass, the angry author of the book dealing with women’s inferiority, Aphra Behn and other iconic women writers (Curino, Una stanza, pp. 97, 100, 111) – Curino entertains her audience. These are lighter moments achieved through single, precise gestures and movements, with minimal adjustments to costume and subtle voice changes. Such moments mix the elegant ironic register of Woolf with the efficacious theatrical irony of Curino. By contrast, only one characterisation relies on a tragic register: Judith. Here it would be more appropriate to express this in terms of metamorphosis, since the narrative I goes far beyond a brief sketching of other identities, to a transformation into another. This occurs after the only moment of darkness in the performance, as the music of Ravel’s Bolero starts up and as Judith’s verbal and physical ‘dance’ begins. Standing at the front of the proscenium, outside the room, speaking in a voice that challenges the audience, Judith tells her own story, while her feet, never still, beat the rhythm (one step forward, one step back). This is the only moment in which Curino shifts out of the epic discourse of narrator to ‘become’ her character. The effect that this moment has on the audience is palpable: I saw the play twice and especially the second time, in Turin, when the audience was mainly female, I could feel their reaction. Judith is not a victim. Her story, told on stage in the first person, gives her a body and a voice. Borrowing the terms of Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance, the present-tenseness of Judith on stage realises in time and space, for a fleeting but concrete moment, the utopian, what-if dimension of both Woolf’s text and Curino’s adaptation.14 Curino’s embodiment of Judith is political and works as a utopian performative: it is an ‘intense moment of electrifying presence’, a ‘wish-oriented moment’, which calls for a different story, a different destiny for women, a different idea of humankind, and helps the audience ‘capture fleeting intimations of a better world’.15 Although this is her one appearance in character, Judith is recalled at the end of the play through Curino’s oration (a passionate speech made on a small platform of books), which serves as a feminist political reminder of past and future oppressions: Now we must be thankful and give back. Give back to Judith that which is hers. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Judith gave us that which she never wrote, the school she never attended, the job she never found … Judith lives on in baby girls slaughtered at birth, married in their cradles, raped, conceived through violence; in those who do not attend school, in those who have to walk for two hours to get to school, in teachers in deprived communities, in women who cannot walk freely in the streets, in all those who are constrained, retained, traded, exchanged or forced into arranged marriages. Judith lives in all young people’s minds, whether male or female, to whom the way is blocked by injustice and prejudice. (Curino, Una stanza, p. 121) This manifesto-style oration mobilises Woolf in the interests of a contemporary feminism concerned with global change. Judith is the reminder, the symbol, of oppressions past, present and future, as well as the demand that education, opportunities and rights be given to all; the demand for an ethics of gender-based cultural and social responsibility. While mainly speaking about/to women in her audience address, Curino is nevertheless concerned with ‘all young people’s minds, whether male or female’. She views the up-and-coming generations as the new Judiths of our time: where new communities of social and cultural deprivation may emerge. This has a particular resonance and meaning in Italian society, heavily afflicted as it is by male gerontocracy which affects all spheres of public life, from business to education; from the industry of information to public administration.16 Her concern with ‘young people’s minds’ is also reflected in her collaborations with young women practitioners: Claudia Sorace as director, Michela Marelli as co-dramatist, Eleonora Diana and Giulietta Vacis as visual media artists. Like second-wave feminist theatre-making, Curino’s theatre is collaborative, at the same time as being particularly attentive to the involvement of younger women, which also balances out the way that her performances often attract audiences of women from older generations, the middle-aged and the elderly. ‘Narrative theatre is an act of rescue, which loads its own shadows on a raft and into a present, shaky and transitory but alive, where it is still possible to listen, to see, to persuade and to support each other’ (Guccini, La bottega, p. 18). On her ‘raft’ Curino ‘floats’ Judith as a metaphor of thwarted creativity. Like Woolf, she argues that the oppression of (women’s) creativity is a ‘crime’ and demands that we ‘give back to Judith that which is hers’.Working and workshopping 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case





Figure 11: Laura Curino, Una stanza tutta per me. The actress delivering her final speech. Photograph by Giorgio Sottile. Courtesy of Fondazione del Teatro Stabile,Torino.



Notes 1. The group was known for its epic and narrative poetic; their ensemble plays adapted literary and dramatic materials for the stage, from Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1985) to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1991). Characteristic of the group was their use of biography and daily life in their collaborative, creative processes. 2. Orlando by Sally Potter, film, 1992 (co-production GB-RUSS-FR-OL); Orlando by Bob Wilson, play, 1993 (produced by Théatre Odeon, France). 3. See Gerardo Guccini’s updated and valuable analysis of narrative theatre, La bottega dei narratori (Roma: Dino Audino, 2005), pp. 5–43. 4. A feminist concept of the ‘narratable self’ is central to Italian philosophical discourse and is one that explores the relation between subjectivity and narration. See Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (London: Routledge, 2000 [1997]). 5. See Guccini, La bottega, pp. 75–9. 6. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Penguin Books, [1929] 1993), pp. 102–3. 7. Liliana Rampello, Il canto del mondo reale. Virginia Woolf. La vita nella scrittura (Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2005), pp. 144, 152. 8. This procedure informs much of her dramaturgical work. In Elementi di struttura del sentimento (1985), an ensemble production based on Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, an all-female cast played the parts of six characters, the servants of the houses, while Goethe’s characters were never seen by the audience. In Olivetti – Camillo: alle radici di un sogno (1996), Curino’s successful, multiple-character solo performance dealing with the true story of a progressive industrial family, the male protagonist was evoked by the characters of his mother and his wife: both women became co-protagonists. 9. Interview with Laura Curino, in Curino, Una stanza tutta per me (Turin: ed. Teatro Stabile, 2005), p. 13. All translations are mine. 10. See Rampello, Il canto del mondo reale, p. 145. 11. Laura Curino, Passion, in Lizbeth Goodman (selection), Mythic Women Real Women: Plays and Performances Pieces by Women (London: Faber and Faber, 2000). 12. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 13. Liliana Rampello, in discussion with the author. I am grateful to Rampello and to Curino for their fruitful exchange of ideas with me. 14. Curino’s subtitle, Or, If Shakespeare Had Had a Sister, intentionally heightens the utopian register of Woolf’s essay. 15. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance. Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2005), pp. 2, 6, 30.



with different communities she invites them all to ‘to act in Judith’s name’. Hers is a feminism which is welcoming and inclusive; her performance is political in intent as, along with Dolan and others, she shares the aim of ‘finding hope at the theatre’.17



16. The problem is periodically analysed and denounced by sociological studies and debated in public discourse. See A. Cavallo, A. De Lillo and C. Buzzi, Giovani del nuovo secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002) and the essays on gerontocracy which appear in the social studies journal, Reset, 94 (2006). 17. This is the subtitle for Dolan’s study, Utopia in Performance.


Anticipating Globalisation: Rosamond Gilder and the International Theatre Institute Charlotte Canning

If anyone in the mid-twentieth-century United States came to believe that ‘theatre is one of the most effective vehicles for the dissemination of the principles of international understanding, international cooperation and world peace’, they did so because of Rosamond Gilder.1

Figure 12: Rosamond Gilder in 1967, not long after the US-ITI Center hosted the 1965 annual ITI Congress in New York City. Photograph courtesy of International Theater Institute/Martha W. Coigney Collection, *T-Mss 2002–032. Billy Rose Theater Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. 113



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Best known now for her 1931 landmark history of women in theatre Enter the Actress, Gilder was committed to the cause of internationalism and theatre. Her argument for that cause was made to the US National Commission for the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) because theatre was not initially included in the ‘cultural’ part of UNESCO’s title. UNESCO had been founded in 1946 to address concerns not covered by the state-to-state, political focus of the United Nations (UN), and its primary charge was to build a worldwide culture of peace. The constitution read: ‘That since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed.’2 Each interested country set up a national commission to study how they would participate. Gilder, whose extensive cultural contacts made her privy to the commission’s inner workings, was appalled that there were no provisions for theatre. The theatre panel of the US National Commission that Gilder lobbied for successfully would be instrumental in establishing the US centre of the International Theatre Institute (ITI). While Gilder by no means worked alone, it is her voice that spoke most consistently and determinedly for theatre’s presence. She was no recent convert to the idea that theatre functions best as an international art. Her 24-year involvement with Theater Arts, the only US magazine until the 1950s to treat theatre as a serious artistic and cultural matter, signalled her professional commitment to orienting the US theatre toward internationalism. Editor Edith Isaacs, whom Gilder first assisted then succeeded, initially espoused this view. Gilder reflected in 1975, ‘Theater Arts under Edith Isaacs’ inspiration saw the American theatre not as a limited commercial undertaking but as a magic window opening on the world at large’.3 Isaacs may not have foreseen an international institution devoted to connecting world theatres, but Gilder firmly believed that ITI would be Isaac’s ‘magic window’ for all theatres. Gilder’s full assertion to the US Commission – ‘It seems to me important that the theatre should be here – for the theatre is one of the most effective vehicles for the dissemination of the principles of international understanding, international cooperation and world peace with which UNESCO is so deeply concerned’ (Report to the National Commission for UNESCO) – was one she held to unwaveringly. In the years around ITI’s formal establishment in 1948, Gilder toured the US tirelessly to argue for theatre’s central role in achieving world peace. Typically, her efforts are viewed in the context of theatre, especially in its post-war US expansion. I would like to propose, however, an alter10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


114 Charlotte Cunning

native lens, a contiguous rather than contradictory one, through which to understand Gilder’s work. I would like to read her work on behalf of ITI during its early years in the context of women’s internationalism since the end of the nineteenth century. While Gilder as an individual had an ambivalent relationship to feminism, as an historical figure her mission and experiences were very much shaped by feminism.4 Women were key players in the creation of internationalism, particularly through organisations that promoted suffrage and peace. From the International Council of Women founded in 1888 to the myriad organisations that emerged after the Second World War, women questioned how identity and solidarity might be fostered despite the powerful boundaries of national borders. Studied in this context, Gilder’s work becomes less an isolated case of a woman committed to her field, and more an example of how women reached beyond the limitations of the geopolitical state to enact worldwide transformation. The years when Gilder was working as Isaacs’ assistant editor at Theater Arts were, according to the historian Leila J. Rupp, ‘the high tide of internationalism’.5 Women had been working together for decades by the time the First World War ended, but two simultaneous developments created a fertile environment for the growth of feminist internationalism. The first was the widely felt horror at the war’s carnage. This kind of sentiment had made the League of Nations seem inevitable. Additionally, in Europe and North America nationalism stagnated for many reasons; chief among them the rise of international socialism, the conflation of nationalism with totalitarianism or fascism, and the 1930s’economic problems. Activists found the interwar years ripe for international efforts. Notions of universalism shaped interwar internationalism. As Rupp points out: ‘The international bonds of womanhood rested on the assumption that all women shared certain characteristics and thus naturally would flock together in women’s organizations’ (Worlds of Women, p. 83). Certainly, many feminists supposed absolute and biological differences between women and men and encouraged the idea that women’s shared gender oppression trumped difference. As the editors of Feminism and Internationalism point out, however: ‘These claims of universalism on behalf of an international feminist solidarity have been shown, in fact, to rest on an unreflective equation of the … parochial experience of certain dominant versions of feminism in Western Europe and North America as the paradigmatic form of feminism per se.’6 Women’s international positions tended to 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Gilder and the International Theatre Institute 115

duplicate their national positions, but this did not necessarily diminish women’s collective influence or the importance of internationalism for individual women. Given these differences and complicated power dynamics, it is not surprising that there was no unified platform undergirding this work. Interests were diverse – suffrage, imperialism, peace, social change, education, philanthropy and labour – and the diversity indicated the range of women’s investments. Much had to be negotiated, from ideology to the logistics of translation. Women’s personal (letters and diaries) and public (minutes and newsletters) records document how much time and energy were spent figuring out how to work together. International work for women was less a politics of state, and more a politics of affect. Rupp observes that internationalism was ‘a new – a twentieth-century – phenomenon and a spirit rather than a formal ideology … Words such as “spirit”, “feeling” and “force” cropped up again and again, suggesting the almost mystical quality of internationalism as an imagined community’ (Worlds of Women, p. 108). It is this aspect of women’s experience and organising, more than any other, that I think creates a productive context for analysing Rosamond Gilder’s ITI work. The idea that the importance of international work came from inner feelings as opposed to external action is a productive frame for understanding theatre’s internationalism. Gilder’s claim that ‘theater is one of the most effective vehicles for the dissemination of the principles of international understanding, international cooperation and world peace’ is not that theatre itself will bring about these ends. Instead, it is that theatre will make these things possible. Affect is about disposition, it concerns how one has been acted upon. Theatre promises to create affect purposely and dependably, not from the unpredictable vagaries of circumstances, but from the studied product of rehearsal and repetition. ITI may not be a direct descendant of interwar women’s organisations, but like the League of Nations and the UN, it owes a debt to the women who believed, in Rupp’s words, they ‘could – and ought to – come together across national borders and work to make the world a better place, and that agreement is what bound them together’ (Worlds of Women, p. 129). Making the world a better place was the primary item on Gilder’s agenda. Gilder promoted ITI in venues as diverse as IBM’s Think magazine, radio speeches and academic organisations like the American Educational Theatre Association (AETA). What was paramount was reaching those potentially interested. And she was successful. One 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



spectator wrote: ‘I was one of the playwrights who listened to you talk yesterday afternoon on what the theatre can do to further international understanding. I just want to tell you that I found your ideas very provocative.’7 The idea that the playwright took away ‘what the theatre can do to further international understanding’ was one of Gilder’s key points. She focused repeatedly on the concept of ‘understanding’. In 1946 the publicist Sam Swerdloff wrote and Gilder revised a brief speech for her to deliver at a press conference. ‘The stage speaks an international language,’ she explained to her audience. ‘Great artists need no interpreters. By exchanging the productions of other nations with ours, we would create an international understanding and appreciation of the talents and customs of all countries.’8 Like others involved in post-war internationalism, Gilder believed that the two world wars had come out of the fears and prejudices born from ignorance and inexperience. If the world was more closely knit through shared knowledge, then world wars would be impossible. She explained in the Department of State Bulletin, ‘the artists of the world speak a common language’, and this shared language made theatre ideal for fostering and supporting understanding.9 When Gilder asked the members of AETA for ‘your help and advice’ on ideas for the US ITI centre for example, she reminded them that it was not simply about promoting theatre, it was about ‘the “UNESCO idea”, an idea which is more important than anything else today – understanding among peoples’.10 This form of understanding, given that it was, for her, always coupled with theatre, was more than simple familiarity. It was about affect and assumed that the understanding wrought from theatre was deeper and more profound. Gilder’s sense of ‘understanding’ was commensurate with what Rupp located in women’s internationalism. She argues that these feminists practised ‘“prefigurative politics” – acting out the conviction that, through putting into practice desirable ways of living, a group can, in fact, help to transform the old order’ (Worlds of Women, p. 226). Gilder was arguing that theatre could ‘act[ ] out’ the very transformation the world so desperately needed. The performance of what the world could be, or how it might get there, was what theatre could model – a persuasive, embodied practice. Gilder was convinced that theatre was unique as a form of knowledge-creation and that fostering international understanding was a mission well suited to theatre’s ubiquitous world presence. While she may have been arguing for the special role theatre might play in internationalism, Gilder was mindful of her own position. She 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



did not jettison her own nationalism in championing the international. As early as a 1945 radio address she argued: ‘Once a United Nations educational and cultural organization has been established, how will the American theater see to it that it is properly represented?’11 This call for the place of ‘American theater’ in the international scene echoed changes in women’s international practices. Helen Laville notes of the post-war world: ‘American women’s new approach to internationalism was based less on partnership and communication with their counterparts in other countries, and more upon taking a position in the developing Cold War.’12 The US lacked a national theatre or a committed source of government funding, a fact that greatly frustrated Gilder and many of her colleagues. Not stated was the idea that if the theatre provided an essential service to the nation, it could then argue its entitlement to government support. Laville sees the feminist strategy similarly: ‘In referring to their increasing desire and right for greater participation in government-sponsored international relations, American women’s organisations spoke not of their international loyalties and identity, but of their participation and inclusion in national politics and citizenship’ (Cold War Women, p. 31). Gilder qualified her position with the sense that the US deserved the chance to guide the changing world. She challenged the readers of the New York Times: ‘The American theatre is faced with a challenge. Will it take its place in the concert of world theatres?’13 Implicit in her challenge was the threat that failure to do so would result in another taking leadership. Her article in the Institute of International Education News Bulletin was much more explicit. It is reported that the USSR spent some one hundred and fifty million dollars in France alone on cultural propaganda in 1950–1951. Wherever international artistic gatherings (that it could control!) were planned, the Soviet Union was on the spot with exhibitions, artists, films, and performers. On these occasions the United States was usually conspicuous by its absence or so feebly represented that the results were worse than nil.14 This anxiety – the Soviet Union’s greater success in the field of cultural understanding would mean that the US would lose the fight for world dominance – seemingly contradicts her arguments for greater understanding. But Gilder was making her arguments in the context of some of the worst years of the Cold War for American artists. The House 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Committee on Un-American Activities was subpoenaing performing artists and asking them about their affiliations with the Communist Party – the price of clearing your own name was to name others as members. Those who did not comply were blacklisted and could no longer find employment. Their applications for passports were denied and their ability to participate in the international sphere curtailed. Gilder, whose own FBI file documents over ten years of surveillance, was not unaware of the fine line she walked arguing for internationalism at a time when some equated it with communism. Her solution was to position theatre nationally, so that it was possible for its international activities to work towards ‘mutual understanding and good will among nations’, as she told readers of the Department of State Bulletin (‘First Congress’, p. 488). Maurice Kurtz, the young American playwright and UNESCO employee whom Secretary-General Julian Huxley had charged with organising the new theatre organisation, patronised Gilder’s efforts: ‘Two women came from the United States: playwright Lillian Hellman and Rosamond Gilder, a keen drama critic and editor-in-chief of Theatre Arts Monthly, a protagonist for over thirty years of the best in Dramatic Art. Typically, Rosamond entered my office and asked: “Can I help address envelopes?”’15 The discontinuity of Kurtz’s appraisal is jarring. While he acknowledges her prominence as a critic and editor, he dismisses her ITI contributions. Gilder may not have seen herself in the context of international feminist organising, but her experiences demonstrate the role gender played in her international work. Her call for theatre’s inclusion in ‘the dissemination of the principles of international understanding, international cooperation and world peace’ was couched in gender-neutral terms. But she was enacting the gendered ‘prefigurative politics’ Rupp identified in women’s interwar international work. Gilder’s participation modelled the kinds of leadership women might provide, even in the depths of the Cold War. Her work on ITI’s behalf itself is an example of the power of affect to bring something into being. She may have argued that theatre could bring about the understanding needed to create a new world, but she was already performing the new and better world that she promised would be found on international stages.

Notes 1. Report to the National Commission for UNESCO, ms (nd) 1. International Theater Institute, Martha W. Coigney Collection, *T-Mss 2003–032. Billy Rose Theater Collection, The New York Library for the Performing Arts (NYPLPA for all subsequent citations).




2. UNESCO Constitution http://portal.unesco.org/en/ev.php-URL_ID=6206& URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. Accessed 10 June 2005. 3. Rosamond Gilder, ‘Theater Arts Books’, Theater Library Association Broadside (February 1975), np. 4. When asked about the connections she felt with the women she championed in Enter the Actress: The First Women in the Theater (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1931), Gilder replied, ‘I came into my life and career after the vote had been won and because of this I didn’t have to think about being a militant suffragette whether I would have been or not’. Quoted in Caroline Jane Dodge, ‘Rosamond Gilder and the Theater’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1974), p. 17. 5. Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 34. 6. Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy and Angela Woollacott, eds, ‘Why Feminisms and Internationalism?’, in Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. 1. 7. Edward J. Gilmore, letter to Rosamond Gilder, 12 February 1949, NYPLPA. 8. Rosamond Gilder and Sam Swerdloff, press conference speech, NYPLPA, 4 April 1946. 9. Rosamond Gilder, ‘First Congress of the International Theater Institute’, Department of State Bulletin 19:485 (17 October 1948): 488. 10. Rosamond Gilder, address on ‘The American Theater Scene’ panel, American Educational Theater Association conference, NYPLPA, 30 December 1948. 11. Elizabeth Parkhill Jordan, transcript of Gilder radio interview in Pittsburgh, ‘News of the New’, NYPLPA, December 1945. 12. Helen Laville, Cold War Women: The International Activities of American Women’s Organisations (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2002), p. 9. 13. Rosamond Gilder, ‘Drama Goes Global’, New York Times (17 August 1947): 57. 14. Rosamond Gilder, ‘The Arts as Ambassadors’, Institute of International Education News Bulletin 28.7 (April 1953): 4. 15. Maurice Kurtz, ‘Creating the ITI’, International Theatre Institute 1948–1983 (Paris: International Theatre Institute, 1983), p. 10.




Exile and the Elusive Qualities of Time Julie Holledge

… Be merciful, say ‘death’: For exile hath more terror in his look, Much more than death: do not say ‘banishment’. (Romeo and Juliet III.iii.12) Time is frozen when the elements contained in an intercultural performance are subjected to classification; if a taxonomic analysis of the cultural signifiers is to be successful, the creative process must be momentarily suspended. Yet it is the living creative process that fuels the fascination of all intercultural inquiry, whether it is the negotiations between artists from different cultures, or the cross-cultural interactions between performers and audiences. These encounters are like interactive cells in an organism, forever merging and splitting, changing the unfamiliar into the familiar, and the familiar into the strange. This intervention attempts to catch the living process of intercultural performance by privileging time; it focuses on the richness of temporal aesthetics across all performance dimensions: subjective, representational, gendered, philosophical, technological and historical. The subject of this temporal study is Exile, a global feminist performance that premiered at the Sydney Spring Festival 2000, played at the Shanghai International Arts Festival 2000, and performed in Adelaide in 2004.1 The work was made by two women artists with over 30 years’ experience in the performing arts: the Australian/English visual artist Mary Moore, and the Japanese butoh dancer Tomiko Takai.2 I begin this account with a narration of historical time. Exile is part of the recent wave of collaborations between Japanese and Australian performing artists. The driving force behind these cultural exchanges for over 20 years has been the independent Japanese woman producer 121



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Michiko Aoki. She collaborated with Mary Moore to create Masterkey, an Australian/Japanese co-production commissioned by the 1998 Adelaide Festival, and based on a thriller involving single women in post-war Tokyo. The cast of Masterkey, mostly Australian and Japanese women performers over the age of 60, included not only Michiko Aoki, but also Tomiko Takai, who played the role of the outcast Noriko. It was Moore and Takai’s shared fascination with this character that brought them together to make Exile. Takai was born into a Japanese middle-class family in the 1930s and Moore into an English working-class family in the 1940s; both rejected the dominant gender constructions of their cultures. The character of Noriko is a painter-turned-shouter, bag lady and thief, who has committed symbolic suicide by breaking all social ties. Takai and Moore were frightened and attracted by this degree of social negation, and decided to make a work that explored shifting female subjectivities. Three spaces provided the creative impetus for Exile: railway stations in Tokyo, the South Australian desert and a feminist virtual world or matrix. As the work evolved, different perceptions of time were attached to each of these spaces: subjective, durational and cyclical.

Yokohama Station and subjective time In Japan, Moore and Takai researched the lives of female vagrants and outcasts in the railway stations and subways of Tokyo. One old woman in particular became their inspiration for Takai’s character in the first part of Exile: they called her Yokohama Noriko. To understand the psychology of women who live in these station tunnels, they consulted Robert Desjarlais’s phenomenological study of homeless people living in a shelter in Boston. He suggested that the refuge residents were prevented from turning their daily experiences into coherent narratives because of the immediacy of their bodily sensations. Their lives consisted of ‘acts of struggling along’ in a perpetual present, which resulted in ‘an episodic orientation towards time, with each incidence taking precedence over any larger temporal context’.3 Moore created a performing space to encapsulate this temporal fragmentation, using a gauze box with internal screens and six video projectors that could produce multiple vanishing points and disorient the spatial sense of the audience. In the opening sequence of Exile, she used computer-enhanced abstracted images of trains to criss-cross Takai’s performing body as she enacted a series of ‘incidents’: waking, begging, washing, watching (Figure 13). There was no narrative coher10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Exile and the Elusive Qualities of Time 123

Figure 13: Tomiko Takai performing Yokohama Noriko in the first part of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore.

ence to these actions, just a series of isolated habitual moments accompanied by a composition of station sounds and frenetic trains. To create a suspended moment of time, Takai requested that the trains 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case

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Deserts and durational time Moore and Takai embarked on a second stage of their creative journey in the South Australian desert. In Japan, their inspiration had come from a real woman in Yokohama station, but in Australia they drove into a geologically ancient landscape, bringing with them their preconceived literary and theatrical ideas about wilderness, exile and banishment. Moore’s references were the 40 days and nights of the Temptation of Christ, and Shakespeare’s exiles, particularly Romeo, and Edgar and Kent in King Lear. Takai’s major theatrical referent was the eighteenthcentury bunraku puppet play Chushingura (Treasury of Loyal Retainers) by Izumo Takeda. This national myth is the subject of countless plays and films and concerns the fate of the 47 ronin, or leaderless samurai, who choose to live in exile for a year while planning to avenge their master’s death. The literal translation of ronin is ‘wave man’: a metaphor for the life of a samurai cut adrift from the social ties of a feudal society by the death of his master. Moore and Takai drove into the desert with their literary and theatrical preconceptions, but what they saw reflected other cultural referents. Moore was looking for the continent’s dead heart, rather than the ‘red heart’ that is the New Age ‘place of spiritual plentitude’.4 As Kay Schaffer argues, this dead heart is a colonial imaginary of ‘melancholy, despair, madness, and/or death’;5 it reaches its clearest literary expression in The Drover’s Wife, a short story by Henry Lawson about a woman left alone with her children in the bush. This landscape traps women and leaves them suspended outside the narrative time of a male world: ‘There is nothing to see … because of the everlasting, maddening sameness of the stunted trees – the monotony which makes a man long to break away and travel as far as trains can go, and sail as far as ships can sail – and further’.6 Moore saw death in the ‘maddening sameness’ of the bush, but Takai saw life. In the saltpans and desolate rocky outcrops, she found tiny insects, roots of barely living plants, a minute wild flower (Figure 14). Ankoku butoh respects the sanctity of life; in the words of Hijikata, the founder of butoh and Takai’s teacher, ‘if we, humans, learn to see things from the perspective of an animal, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


freeze while she performed a sequence later referred to by the production team as ‘Little Buddha’. This contemplative moment in an otherwise materialist view of vagrancy signalled the beginning of a parallel temporal aesthetic within Exile.



an insect, or even an inanimate object, the road trodden everyday is alive’.7 This detached contemplation of animate and inanimate matter has a long history in Japanese performance aesthetics:8 the

Figure 14: Tomiko Takai researching for the production of Exile in the South Australian desert. Photograph courtesy of Mary Moore.


fifteenth-century actor Zeami proposed a theory of mimesis that enters a deep identification with the represented object: ‘the dualism of man and nature is gone; man and a natural object are the same in their ultimate essence’ (Ueda, ‘Zeami’, p. 74). As a contemporary form, butoh draws on the intellectual heritage of Zen Buddhist aesthetics, but the differences between Moore and Takai’s perceptions of the desert should not be characterised as an East/West philosophical divide. Takai’s concentration on the inner essence of matter also fits within a Western aesthetic tradition, most notably in the concept of intuition as theorised by Henri Bergson.9 Moore and Takai synthesised their perceptions of the desert into the second part of Exile. To create the suspended time that Moore associated with the ‘dead heart’ of the continent, she designed a world out of the barren rock and increased the density of this concentrated matter by creating the sensation that the rock was descending like a solid, slow-motion waterfall. Takai’s body emerged, by a trick of the eye, as a living form from this hard surface. After a slow entry as a pilgrim or traveller, she began a dance of metamorphosis representing the movement of durational time through living matter. She started with an image of a young woman indulging in a detached contemplation of

Figure 15: Tomiko Takai performing the Traveller in the second part of Exile. Photograph courtesy of Tony Lewis.



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The matrix and cyclical time In the last section of the performance, the concept of exile was expressed as the moment of death in the cyclical time of human existence. Moore, though ten years younger than Takai, found in Takai’s 70-year-old body an idealised image of her own mother, who had died 20 years earlier. Moore wanted to create a virtual matrix for this maternal imago: ‘I use the word matrix because it is derived from “mater”, meaning both mother and womb … but paradoxically, the body it contains resonates with memories of my mother’. Moore constructed her matrix out of projections of fine lines, arcs and grids of moving white light that played on the gauzes, the walls of the theatre and even on the bodies of the audience (Figure 16). This visual world inspired Takai to create a dance reversing the passage of time, rather than represent the dying maternal body. She described her experience of dancing within the matrix as that of a child held in her mother’s (Moore’s) gaze. She danced cocooned in a transparent shell that dropped away to reveal an image of new life suspended in refracted light. Despite Takai’s decision to perform a choreography of reincarnation and her extraordinary powers of transformation, the physical reality of her 70-year-old body situated her dance in the Zen tradition of transcending the moment of death through the act of creation, which traditionally in both China and Japan consists of a ‘parting with life’ verse.10 Takai had witnessed her teacher, Hijikata, dance with his hands as he died; she incorporated these exquisite hand gestures into Exile, which she recognised would probably be her last major choreographic work: ‘How do I dance? I cannot choose “how” anymore. The choice never comes. All that is visible in the light I have left are the worn-out soles of my feet.’

Audiences and time The Exile temporal experiment did not stop in the rehearsal room; it moved onto the stage and into the auditorium because the timing of Takai’s performance was entirely dependent on the audience. Her choreographic method fixes a sequential pattern of movements, but 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


nature, and then transformed into birds, lizards and mammals; the focus of her choreography was not the imitation of these creatures, but the indeterminacy of the performing body as it flowed through these evolutionary forms (Figure 15).

Figure 16: Tomiko Takai performing the final section of Exile. Photograph by Mary Moore.

still allows for temporal improvisation. She describes her relationship with an audience as existing in a ‘united space’ in which ‘one breathes out, and the other breathes in’. According to these breathing patterns, she stretches, suspends and accelerates performance time; in Exile the real-time duration of her dance fluctuated by as much as 20 minutes. Takai’s temporal composition of Exile was predicated on the butoh practice of reflecting the inner essence of the represented object. According to Hijikata, ‘a body is a stage where a mind communicates with the universe’.11 This maxim echoes the teachings of Zeami: by finding the inner truth of an object, the performer touches ‘some great primal force that flows through life and death’ (Ueda, ‘Zeami’, p. 77). The Japanese aesthetic of detached perception, riken no ken, connects the audience to this primal force through its cultivated appreciation of the artistry of the performer. Zeami identified nine levels of aesthetic perception; at the highest level the audience experiences a feeling of no-mind, or the mind beyond the ordinary mind, ‘mushin no kan’.12 Takai created a journey in each section of Exile to this place of meditation where subjective time could be suspended. The temporal structure 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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of the choreography functioned like a spiral: winding down to this contemplative moment and then reversing out again. At the centre of the spiral, in the meditative sequences, the Australian audiences were restless. They were experiencing sensory deprivation rather than contemplating an exquisitely held moment with aesthetic detachment. Traditionally, riken no ken is considered an acquired taste; despite their familiarity with the global flows of international performance, the audiences in Adelaide and Sydney were antipathetic to this aesthetic convention. Their response suggested that they were interpreting Exile as a unified narrative in a classical European three-act temporal structure with a beginning, a middle, some inexplicable longueurs and an end. Neither Takai nor Moore intended that Exile should be read in this way. Moore had aimed at creating a feminist anti-narrative by designing three spatial locations in which the performing body was literally bypassed by social worlds: in the railway station, invisible travellers traversed the space on commuting trains; in the desert, narrative was elsewhere, and the traveller was contained in an unyielding infinity of descending rock; and in the virtual matrix, ghost figures appeared in the refracted light, moving through and beyond the physical body of Takai. None of these figures stopped or interacted to create stories. By trapping the performing body, Moore gave immobility a negative connotation, which contrasted with Takai’s use of stillness as a positive signifier of satori, or enlightenment. Takai felt ‘the breath’ of her Australian audiences and subtly began to alter the temporal structure of her choreography. The moments of meditative reflection were adjusted and the juxtapositions of contrasting rhythms intensified; the performances slowly increased in speed. Takai entered a dialogue with her audience, adapting to their expectations, while simultaneously inviting them to explore an unfamiliar temporal aesthetic. This dialogue changed once again in the performances in China, where historical time rather than temporal aesthetics determined the interaction between Takai and her audience. In 2000, Takai became the first Japanese artist to be invited to perform at the Shanghai International Arts Festival. The historical legacy of anti-Japanese sentiment is particularly strong in Shanghai because of the massacre in the neighbouring city of Nanjing: 300,000 non-combatants died in the six weeks from December 1937 to February 1938, 20,000 women were raped and murdered, and thousands more were abducted from the region as ‘comfort women’. The Japanese government has never formally apologised for these war crimes. When the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



director of the Shanghai Festival first booked Exile, she had enquired whether it would be possible to re-rehearse the production with a Chinese performer. For the Shanghai audiences, a Japanese performer of Takai’s generation was as unfamiliar on stage as the Ankoku butoh dance form itself. The sold-out performances and the local reviews indicated that Exile was the success of the Festival. The audiences were absorbed by the novelty of the choreography and the electronic mise-en-scène, while maintaining a constant connection with their own temporal realities by answering their ubiquitous mobile phones. The most profound moment of audience interaction occurred at the end of the performances when Takai responded to the applause with her habitual bow. As she slowly sank to her knees and completed a full kowtow, there was a hush in the auditorium; it was impossible not to interpret this silence as an audience, transfixed by memory of historical time, accepting a formal apology from a 70-year-old Japanese artist. Takai was only a child at the time of the Nanjing massacre and Moore was born at the end of the Second World War, but their production of Exile inadvertently brought together artists and audiences in an aesthetic dialogue that acknowledged history and its legacies. By crossing their own barriers of language and artistic discipline they had created a work based on a shared, but vastly different, experience of self-imposed exile from the heterosexual mainstreams of their cultures. Their production proved to be a successful feminist intervention within the global arts market, and represented a rare example of an intercultural collaborative work between two older women artists. Yet the deepest strata of their cultural interactions, while reflected in the visible signifiers of Exile, existed in the invisible realms of perception and sensibility. This study has explored the living but invisible elements in a feminist intercultural performance by focusing on time, ‘the most enigmatic, the most paradoxical, elusive, and “unreal” of any form of material existence’ (Grosz, The Nick of Time, p. 4). Perhaps by adopting Takai’s practice of listening to the breath of the ‘other’, and learning to breathe together in time, a different order of cultural understanding can emerge on our stages, in our auditoria, and beyond.

Notes 1. The Studio, Sydney Opera House, 4 and 5 August; Shanghai Lyceum Theatre, 13–15 November; Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre, October.



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2. As dramaturge, I attended rehearsals and all performances. All the quotations from Moore and Takai come from my interviews and programme notes. 3. Robert Desjarlais, ‘Struggling Along’, in Michael Jackson, ed. Things As They Are: New Directions in Phenomenological Anthropology (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 88. 4. Andrew Lattas, ‘Aborigines and Contemporary Australian Nationalism: Primordiality and the Cultural Politics of Otherness’, Social Analysis 27 (1990): 50–69. 5. Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forms of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 127. 6. Henry Lawson, Best Stories, ed. C. Mann (Sydney: A&R Classics, 1973), p. 6. 7. Jean Viala and Nourit Masson-Sekine, Butoh – Shades of Darkness (Tokyo: Shufunotomo Co. 1988), p. 60. 8. Ueda Makoto, ‘Zeami on Art: A Chapter for the History of Japanese Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20:1 (Autumn): 73–9. 9. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1920). For an excellent discussion on Bergson’s writings on intuition, see Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2004). 10. Steve Odin, Artistic Detachment in Japan and the West: Psychic Distance in Comparative Aesthetics (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), p. 149. 11. Takai repeated this quote from Hijikata’s teachings in an interview with the author. 12. Yusa Michiko, ‘Riken no Ken: Zeami’s Theory of Acting and Theatrical Appreciation’, Monumenta Nipponica: Studies in Japanese Culture 42:3 (Autumn 1987): 331–45.




Cultural Memory in El Séptimo Cielo: An Intercultural Staging of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine Noelia Hernando-Real

Given its production credentials one might have expected El Séptimo Cielo (2002), the Spanish version of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine (1979), to be a huge success.1 Ángeles González-Sinde, the translator and scriptwriter, has been very much in the public eye since she won a Goya, the most prestigious Spanish film award; José Pascual, the director, is much acclaimed for his outstanding productions of David Mamet, Bertolt Brecht and Stephen Berkoff, among others. The cast included many famous theatre, film and television actors; the play was promoted by the venue as Caryl Churchill’s ‘most brilliant play’,2 and Churchill herself approved of the translation.3 However, as José Pascual boasts, ‘the night that someone did not leave the auditorium was very rare’.4 Indeed, by the time I went to see El Séptimo Cielo it was playing to a virtually empty house. Pascual argued that this was due to the play’s sexual explicitness.5 I feel this is an unlikely explanation, however, given that the play was advertised as ‘Sátira sobre la búsqueda de la identidad sexual, catálogo de comportamientos sexuales, incluso, búsqueda de uno mismo a través del sexo’ [A satire about the search for sexual identity, a catalogue for sexual behaviour, and even a search for one’s self through sex] (‘La sexualidad’, p. 2; my translation). In this chapter I will argue that the main reason for the poor audience attendance was that El Séptimo Cielo, in both its translation and staging, constituted a direct attack on Spanish cultural memory. While González-Sinde and Pascual both respected Churchill’s devices which dislocate place and time, and her practice of cross-dressing, which is pivotal to her criticism of patriarchy and colonialism, certain changes to the setting, characters’ names and dialogue turned this production into a play about Spain, not England. 132



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El Séptimo Cielo intervenes in Spanish cultural memory and the legacy of Franco’s 36-year dictatorship (1939–75), which had such a detrimental effect on gender and sexual politics, just in the way that Churchill dramatises the deleterious consequences of Victorian values for British society in the more liberal climate of the 1970s. Beyond gender and sexual politics, González-Sinde’s translation also tackles the ways in which history, fascism and religion have played a part in shaping Spanish cultural memory. El Séptimo Cielo is not a comic celebration of (sexual) freedoms that Spanish people have ‘won’ in a contemporary moment, but is a reflection on and criticism of a reactionary past: one built on patriarchy and fascism that still militates against us – especially in the case of Spanish women and ethnic and sexual ‘others’. In this respect Spain is still a long way behind other Western countries in achieving a more liberal outlook – socially, sexually and politically. Had this play been produced in a small, independent theatre, it would probably have been a success. Joanne Tompkins argues that ‘the place of performance inevitably affects the execution and interpretation of the productions therein’.6 Contrary to Susan Bassnett’s recommendation that ‘the expectations of the target audience and the constraints imposed by the target theatrical system’ should be key considerations in translating for the theatre,7 El Séptimo Cielo worked against these very expectations. First, it was advertised as a play about changing roles and stereotypes in England. Thus, spectators expected to see a show about England, rather than about Spain. Second, the Teatro Auditorio Ciudad de Alcobendas is not the sort of venue for the liberal audiences that Churchill’s plays usually attract. It is a state-run theatre which works on a high-priced subscription basis. Tickets go on sale only when productions prove financially difficult to cover from subscriptions. The shows usually produced are classical music concerts, operas and ballet. Typically, a subscription-holder is well-off in his or her fifties with right-wing sympathies – the target, in fact, of El Séptimo Cielo. Instead of opening in a Victorian British colony in Africa as Cloud Nine does, El Séptimo Cielo is set in Cuba in 1897. Significantly, the African setting could have been retained, since Spain controlled the Protectorate of Morocco between 1912 and 1956. However, unlike an African setting, the Cuba setting opens old wounds in Spanish cultural memory. The play begins in a white colonial house on a coffee plantation, with an enormous Spanish flag dominating the stage. This translocated setting suggests the last ‘glorious’ epoch of the decaying Spanish Empire. Indeed, the loss of Cuba in 1898 constituted the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Cultural Memory in El Séptimo Cielo 133

end of the Spanish Empire, and it is still a disgraceful burden in the cultural memory of the Spanish Right. While Spanish settlers had been putting down Cuban revolts, echoed in El Séptimo Cielo through the slaves’ revolt close to the end of Act 1, the final loss of Cuba, together with the Philippines and Puerto Rico to the United States, meant not only the loss of territories, but, more importantly, the loss of dignity. In keeping with the reminiscence of the loss of the Empire that the Cuban setting evokes, Clive’s line in Cloud Nine ‘Elsewhere in the Empire the sun is rising’8 is translated as ‘The sun never sets on our Empire’. This statement, popularised during the reign of Philip II in the sixteenth century, was the proud Spanish motto for centuries, right up to the time when Cuba was lost, when it became meaningless. Importantly, the 1898 Cuban setting implies another central element of the Spanish cultural memory: the ‘1898 Generation’. This philosophical movement promoted the idea that, no matter what the cost, Spain had to renew itself in order to become an empire again, and it was this kind of thinking, coupled with patriarchal and fascist ideologies, that was the ideological basis of Franco’s dictatorship. Moreover the translations of the characters’ original names also appeal to Spanish cultural memory. The family name in El Séptimo

Figure 17: Stage design for Act 1 of El Séptimo Cielo. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Pascual.



134 Noelia Hernando-Real

Cielo is Churruca, an uncommon Spanish surname but one with important historical and cultural links. Cosme Churruca is a Spanish ‘naval hero of total moral rectitude’,9 famous for his Atlas of the Antilles and his death in the Battle of Trafalgar. Interestingly, Franco chose this name for the heroic family he depicted in his 1941 novelcum-film script Raza (Race), written under the pseudonym Jaime de Andrade.10 The Churruca family in Raza ‘carr[ies] the essence of all that is valuable in the Spanish “race”’ (Preston, Franco, p. 418). The film version appeared in 1942 and viewing was made compulsory in schools. Raza was re-released in 1950 and curiously in 2002 was released again on DVD. I would argue that it is highly likely that many of the spectators of El Séptimo Cielo had seen Franco’s film more than once. This Churruca family stands for Franco’s idyllic patriarchal, patriotic and extremely Catholic family. Women are obedient and happy wives whose duty it is to raise children to grow up as docile, religious and patriotic as they themselves are. Franco counted on a Spain populated by families like this to save the fatherland from liberalism, freemasonry, socialism and communism: to make Spain ‘One, Great, Free’. Franco’s Spain did not allow for dissidents – feminists, homosexuals, communists or people of different races. In El Séptimo Cielo Churruca Sr clearly embodies Franco. Just in case the audience did not know Raza and could not make the connection between Churrucas and Franco, the father’s forename is Paco, the abbreviation of Francisco, Franco’s first name and the way anti-fascist Spaniards refer to the dictator today. The size of the actor in this role also helped to make a comparison between his character and Franco. Javier Gutiérrez was shorter than any other actor, and Franco too was very short, which caused him ‘various minor humiliations’ in his youth (Preston, Franco, p. 9). Thus, these verbal and visual references to ‘the Caudillo by the grace of Lord’ begin to explain why audiences walked out of the production. For a right-wing audience, the farcical figure of Paco Churruca is hard to stomach. Far from being a hero, Paco admits that he has continual erections and he even performs cunnilingus on stage. Deceived by all, Paco is not aware of what is really going on in his house, and while he struggles to defend his idea of the family, every member, including himself, is a black sheep. Paco’s repression of the Cubans’ rebellion echoes Franco’s belligerent racism. Joshua, played by a white man painted black, is used by Churchill to explore racial stereotypes. El Séptimo Cielo uses the same device, but again to make a connection between Franco and Paco. In Raza Franco included a character named Simón to exemplify Churruca’s 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Figure 18: Aitor Merino, Malena Alterio, Nathalie Seseña, Javier Gutiérrez and Manolo Caro in a scene from Act 1 of El Séptimo Cielo. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Pascual.

kind-heartedness. This Simón is a poor fisherman whom Churruca saves from starvation, and who says of Churruca, ‘I owe everything to him’; ‘He has always been so kind to me’ (Andrade, Raza, p. 22; my translation). In contrast to the friendly relationship between Churruca and Simón in Raza, Paco Churruca in El Séptimo Cielo enslaves and exploits Simón, as well as massacring his peers. Before Franco came to power, Spanish women enjoyed some civil liberties. They were enfranchised in 1931 and feminist associations formed to advance women’s rights were very common. Under Franco, however, all of this disappeared. Since, under his dictatorship, Spanish women were to serve as submissive, dutiful bearers of the race, the names of the female characters in El Séptimo Cielo correspond to the virgin mothers celebrated in the country: Betty is Immaculada (Immaculate), Maud is Ascensión (Ascension) and Ellen is Consuelo (Consolation). Immaculada is dressed all in white, symbolising her supposed purity. As in the original version, she is also played by a man, overacting the role of the dutiful wife to highlight that she is what her husband wants her to be. Indeed, Immaculate’s Day was celebrated as Mother’s Day in Spain. Thus, an Immaculate in pursuit of a sexual relation with Diego Fortuna (Harry Bagley in Cloud Nine) and recounting 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



her sexual pleasure (masturbation) to the audience, contravenes conservative attitudes towards women. Note also that Immaculate ‘fails’ in her traditional role of mother, in so far as her two children are a gay and a lesbian, and not heterosexual. Immaculate’s children enjoy homosexual relations and their idea of family and duties subverts Paco’s wishes. Ascensión also relates to another big Spanish festivity, Ascension Day. Ascensión’s elevation into patriarchal heaven is ironised by her confinement to a wheelchair. Although unable to walk, let alone fly heavenward, Ascensión continues to defend Paco’s patriarchal ideas, forcing other women to submit to his rules. Finally, Consuelo is the ironic name given to the lesbian maid who has to repress her love for Immaculada, and who, submitting to Paco’s patriarchal rules, marries the gay Diego Fortuna. Paco finds homosexuality ‘the most revolting perversion’ (Churchill, Cloud Nine, p. 26) in the same way that Franco repressed homosexuality in Spain. The assassination of the gay poet Federico García Lorca at the hands of fascist forces in 1936 is anchored in the Spanish memory as an extreme act of state homophobia. Paco’s son and daughter deviate from his patriarchal model too, and their names are also connected to Franco. Victoria becomes Isabel, namesake of Churruca’s daughter in Raza. Franco probably chose this name in homage to Queen Isabella, who began shaping the Spanish Empire in the fifteenth century by colonising America and expelling the Arabs and Jews from Spain. Far from being the obedient daughter and loving mother that Isabel represents in Franco’s work, in El Séptimo Cielo Isabel is the character who experiments the most with sexual practices. In Act 2, Isabel leaves her husband to live with her lesbian lover and her brother, establishing a new model of family deviating from patriarchy and religion. Paco’s son is called José María. Interestingly, this common Spanish name is a compound of two names, one male, the other female. José María is both Joseph and Mary. In the play, he is a gay man played by a woman. Politically provocative, José María is also the name of the rightist former prime minister, Mr Aznar. The suggestion that Aznar is Franco’s son surfaces easily. Therefore, it is logical to conclude that those spectators affiliated with Aznar’s party, still ruling in 2002, would not find this joke at the prime minister’s expense very funny. However, though still on the right, under Aznar’s mandate, the De Facto Couple Act was passed, allowing homosexuals to be considered legal couples for the first time in Spain. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



In keeping with the change in the location in the first act of El Séptimo Cielo, Churchill’s London bcomes Madrid. Though the use of slang expressions and some updated songs provide the sense of present time, the aesthetics of the set and costumes locates the action in the 1980s, a polemical decade in recent Spanish cultural memory. Celebrating Franco’s death and the birth of democracy, an atmosphere of new-won freedom spread throughout the country, particularly the capital. Liberties were reintroduced: political parties were legalised; free speech and the rights to assembly and association were restored. As Pedro Almodovar masterfully depict in films such as Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980) and Labyrinth of Passion (1982), Madrid at this time was known for its frenzied and cathartic movida madrileña, as the more liberal-minded citizens experimented with their new (post-Franco) freedoms, especially in respect of sex and drugs. At a time when HIV/AIDS and the long-term effects of recreational drugs were unknown, the characters in El Séptimo Cielo are lesbians, gays and bisexuals who talk openly about their various sexual experiences. Javier (Martin in Cloud Nine) describes putting cocaine on his penis to have longer erections, and Ruben, José María’s lover, is a pimp who wears the typical druggie outfit: tight jeans, white T-shirt and a leather zipped jacket. In conclusion, the Spanish adaptation of Cloud Nine was a brave revisionist, but not a commercial, success. By changing the set, characters’ names and some lines, El Séptimo Cielo successfully interrogates Spanish cultural memory, especially Franco’s role in submitting the nation to patriarchy. El Séptimo Cielo makes the audience confront the fact that Spain is anything but ‘One, Great and Free’, urging a revisionist analysis of its social and cultural heritage. After that ephemeral burst of freedom in the 1980s, Spain still needs to look further and harder at matters of sexual choice and ethnicities. While there may have been some advances in contemporary Spain, the empty houses for El Séptimo Cielo suggest that the ghost of Franco continues to haunt Spain’s cultural memory; and is still to be laid to rest in the interests of a more progressive future.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to the Spanish Ministry of Education, Research Project HUM2004-00515, for providing the financial support for writing this chapter. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case




1. I saw El Séptimo Cielo at the Teatro Auditorio Ciudad de Alcobendas, on 23 November 2002. The production played for one night only at different venues – though only to a select few willing to stage the performance, and this did not include any of the theatres in Madrid. 2. ‘“El Séptimo Cielo”, la obra más brillante de la británica Caryl Churchill. La sexualidad y sus estereotipos’, La Escena. Programación trimestral del Teatro Auditorio Ciudad de Alcobendas (Season Programme of the Teatro Auditorio Ciudad de Alcobendas) 21:2. 3. Private conversation with Daniel Pascual, producer of El Séptimo Cielo, 6 September 2006. 4. Round-table, ‘Diversidad dramatúrgica en la obra de Caryl Churchill’, Madrid: Teatro Pradillo, 15 February 2005. 5. Ibid. 6. Joanne Tompkins, ‘Space and the Geographies of Theatre: Introduction’, Modern Drama XLVI (4) (2003): 537–41, p. 537. 7. Susan Bassnett, ‘Still Trapped in the Labyrinth: Further Reflections on Translation and Theatre’, in Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, eds, Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation (Clevedon, Philadelphia, Toronto, Sidney and Johannesburg: Multilingual Matters, 1998), pp. 90–108, p. 93. 8. Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (London: Samuel French, 1979), p. 4. 9. Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: Fontana, 1993), p. 5. 10. Jaime de Andrade (pseud. Francisco Franco), Raza. Anecdotario para el guión de una película (Madrid: Ediciones Numancia, 1942).



Notes

Stretching Medea to Postmodern Sensibilities Elizabeth Sakellaridou

The Epidaurus summer festival of 2003 was shaken by the highly controversial, postmodern production of Medea, directed by Stathis Livathinos. 1 Its reverberations reached even the British press. 2 Obviously, such scandals, occurring every two or three years, rescue popular festivals from the pitfalls of stultified performances by posing anew questions of ideological and aesthetic reorientation and testing the measure of the audience’s receptivity to yet further iconoclasm of theatrical conventions. Such were the goals of Stathis Livathinos, a young Greek director trained in Russia, who was in charge of the experimental stage of the National Theatre of Greece from 2001 to 2007. Livathinos consciously chose Medea for a postmodern cultural experiment. In contemporary Greece where gender relations in and out of marriage are governed by a complete sense of independence and self-interest; where the global economy and media technology have produced a new and hateful class of local yuppies and media icon dummies; where, on the other hand, a steady inflow of economic and political refugees has created a rising tide of xenophobia and resentment, Livathinos visualised a triple axis on which to base his reading of Medea. As he explained in an interview, today it would be simplistic to restrict the reading of this much produced and debated play to its traditional perception as the tragedy of a betrayed woman, who, seeking revenge, resorts to infanticide.3 Through a multiple dislocation of emphasis Livathinos deepened the male/female antagonism inherent in the play, widened the gap between indigenous and foreign culture (Greek and barbarian) and strengthened the tension of class difference by imbuing those in power with the glittering assets of contemporary transnational capital. 140



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Stretching Medea to Postmodern Sensibilities 141

Figure 19: Tamilla Koulieva as Medea and Yiannis Mavritsakis as Jason. Rehearsal photo from the National Theatre production of Medea, directed by Stathis Livathinos (2003). Photograph courtesy of the National Theatre of Greece.


In the director’s own words Jason’s plight is as important as Medea’s4 – obviously so since in the logic of late capitalism and the contemporary politics of power he legitimately negotiates in order to improve his socio-political status and secure a dominant position for himself and his two sons. Jason’s eloquent discourse on the socio-economic advantages for himself and his ‘family’ (as a deposed prince with male heirs by a foreign wife), springing from a new marital link to the royal family of Corinth, is more than plausible in the current rhetoric of corporate business; it is a real triumph of capitalist ‘wisdom’, as Medea herself ironically admits when, in a short-lived change of tactics, she pretends to accept the benefits of his material offer. At the same time Medea’s own post-feminist portrayal is built primarily on the image of the ‘Other’, the xenos, as conceived in contemporary cultural studies. Thus, Medea becomes the tragedy of the doubly oppressed female ‘xenos [alien]’ in the hegemonic and xenophobic European state of Greece, which is making rapid strides in the direction of a global capitalist ethic and economy, a major part of which is the full exploitation of foreign women’s labour (including sexual services). What is more, the misery and helplessness of the degraded gendered immigrant is pitted against the power position of a new, affluent, indigenous social class, whose insolent self-importance combines material success with the affected style of media celebrity icons. In other words, Livathinos’s reading takes a clear political line, which launches a multiple critique of hegemonic structures on various levels – those of gender, culture, class and ethnicity. The fact that the production gave rise to unprecedented hostility and ridicule among the audience and critics alike obliges us to return to Euripides’ text in order to re-examine its hidden dynamics before we embark on a discussion of the modern Greek translation by Stratis Paschalis and Livathinos’s staging of it. What emerges is that Medea’s ethnic and cultural displacement is introduced by the writer at the very beginning of the play and is subsequently kept to the fore through to the end. Euripides seems to show a surprising sensitivity to the ‘alien’ in society – not only the foreigner but any individual, who, by virtue of difference, is set apart from the social norm. In her first monologue addressed to the Chorus, Medea becomes the spokesperson of this major issue of the play.5 At this point and later, when Medea speaks bitterly about the solitariness of and the disdain for the wise or superior individual (Medea, p. 26), she may well be voicing Euripides’ own bitterness at his fellow citizens’ resentment of his intellectual excellence and aloofness.6 Although one trend of feminist criticism still 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


142 Elizabeth Sakellaridou

seems to insist on the view of the masculine construction of a female persona in Medea, as in other tragic female figures, I would align myself with those feminists who allow for a greater complexity in characterisation in Greek tragedy and who extend and legitimise the performativity of gender for both men and women.7 I would thus cast in a positive light the aforementioned cases, where Medea acquires a generic position for humankind without betraying her gender position. Apart from the traits of the fugitive, the exiled and the wise individual, which feature so prominently in Medea’s personality, one should note the undisguised critique of Greece that she embodies: this country’s hostility to foreigners – Jason being the major bearer of such a callous attitude. Siding with her, the Chorus expands with regret on this national disgrace (Euripides, Medea, p. 30). Strangely enough, Athens is craftily exempted from this open indictment of the shameful and dishonourable behaviour of the Greeks. The play takes pains to portray Athens as the ideal city, whose mythical king, Aegeus, is the prototype of generosity and hospitality to an asylum-seeker. Certainly, it is this recourse to myth that tempers the oxymoron of historical untruth concerning the actually declining state of affairs in Athens in Euripides’ own time, while rendering his view of his native town unsettlingly ambiguous.8 Equally ambiguous is the writer’s attitude to the two protagonists. Despite his being commonly portrayed as a misogynist, in this play of poignant gender struggle and hostility Euripides does not seem to take sides; on the contrary, he shows a deep insight into the politics of gender and creates balanced arguments to debate, which heighten the complexity of the situation.9 To Jason’s savage indictment of the female sex the Chorus retorts with disgust on the decline of the male sex and the wish that the women would show their real merit in social and political matters (Euripides, Medea, p. 29). Besides, quite scandalously, the female transgressor not only remains unpunished, but leaves the scene of the murder in triumph. As Rabinowitz argues, such incongruities in the plot (further complicated by the baffling – in terms of gender politics – ambiguity of the last Chorus) have recently made Euripides ‘seem modern and a kindred spirit’.10 I would add that, more specifically, they reflect his scepticism about the condemnation of a woman, for whom he has made such a strong case, by comparison to the lame rhetoric he gives his nonheroic male protagonist, Jason.11 In fact, in Medea Euripides has created a strongly dialectical play on various levels: of gender, by juxtaposing male to female right; of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



culture, by setting up the ‘barbaric’ Colchis against ‘civilised’ Greece; of civic rights, by showing us the privileges of the citizen against the unprivileged status of the immigrant and the refugee; and lastly, of power hierarchies, by drawing a line between the oppressors and the oppressed. In the light of a historicist/materialist perspective the introduction to a recent anthology of four plays by Euripides, entitled Women on the Edge (1999), stresses the materially grounded psychological portrayal of Medea and emphatically concludes that her criminal act is not due to ‘innate evil’ (Blondell et al., Women on the Edge, p. 82). In other words, the text of Medea in itself provides all the primary material of the ethical, political and psychological behaviour of gender, inspired by Euripides’ real experience as a gendered Athenian citizen; a rich paradigm on which Livathinos could legitimately base his own reading of the play along the lines of gender antagonism, culture difference and power struggle. The linguistic digressions of the modern Greek translation from the original text, which could be of some ideological consequence, were very few and consisted in the strengthening, on one occasion, of the struggle between the sexes, in wielding cultural antagonisms on a second, and on a third, in underlining the ineptitude of a lazy and docile Athenian society to conceive the depth and magnitude of the tragic. Much more prominent than his interference with the semantics of the written text was Livathinos’s treatment of the spoken language. In that respect, his interventions – introduced to create a heightened sense of foreignness – were frequent and conspicuous. The director cast Tamila Koulieva, a young and attractive actress from Georgia (a contemporary state formerly part of the USSR, which corresponds to the mythic Colchis), to play Medea, and he directed her to emphasise her foreign accent, and even at points to revert to her native Georgian language in the place of modern Greek. Koulieva was chosen to bring her exotic, culturally marked female body strongly into the performance and she acted this out quite emphatically. As expected, the doubling of the xenikon (the ancient Greek term for ‘foreign’) in the text and the performance was interpreted by the audience as an insult to the ‘Greekness’ of the play and it was used to attack the production. Several reviews protested about the sacrilege committed against Euripides’ poetic diction, a sacred Greek text, and one critic in particular made the sweeping assumption that ‘Euripides may have written the tragedy of an alien Medea but surely in order for the Greek language to be spoken by a Greek actor’.12 Yet another went to great lengths to prove even Medea’s own ‘Greekness’ by excavating an 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



obscure version of the myth that links her to a Greek origin, against the prevailing belief (Polenakis, ‘Terror of Emptiness’, pp. 22–3).13 A raging hysteria of possessive and defensive nationhood would shun any possibility of heteroglossia for a foreign woman like Medea, not even as a slip of the tongue, due to nostalgia for her homeland and lost family ties or to her disturbed state of bitterest betrayal.14 Linguistic ‘barbarism’, of course, was not so alien a trope for the tragic poets, if only we remember the cries of the followers of Dionysus, common in both comedy and tragedy. However, it is equally true that such deviations from orthodox Greek did make theorists like Aristotle, who advocated linguistic purity, uncomfortable.15 The contemporary Greek audience’s insistence on the sovereignty of the Greek language and the attempt to give Medea a Greek identity must be linked, of course, to the current, often unvoiced resentment of every middle-class Greek citizen at the indispensable presence of a foreign worker and subordinate in almost every Greek household, commerce (including the traffic in foreign women) and various outdoor unskilled manual work. In terms of gender difference, the image of the degraded foreign woman as a domestic cleaner or nursing auxiliary to the senile or disabled, or as a marketable sex commodity has become a strong negative stereotype in contemporary Greece. Koulieva’s alluring but also deeply afflicted and humiliated Medea was a reminder in sight and sound of the halfdesired/half-hated, gendered, intruding ‘Other’ at their own, Greek, hearth and of their related social or psychological insecurities. It was this undesirable topicality, dexterously handled by Livathinos, that pierced the contemporary Athenian audience straight to the heart, reminding them of their own social and gender troubles, which they would certainly prefer not to air in public. Like the ancient Athenians, who punished the early dramatic poet Phrynichus for rekindling in his infamous tragedy The Fall of Miletus a painful national disaster, today’s Athenians considered Livathinos unforgivable for playing with their gendered xenophobia at a time when such fundamental issues as national identity, the recognition of minority community rights and the suppression of a newly emerged sex trade in Greece were at stake. By bending Medea’s tragic destiny to the humble needs of a contemporary woman refugee for survival and legal protection (no higher than the pursuit of documentation and a work permit),16 Livathinos removed the situation from the grandiose and oblivious distancing of myth – the safety valve that from the time of Aeschylus onwards was known as the unfailing trope for expressing transgression and offence without risking the audience’s personal involvement. As Nicole Loraux 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



succinctly observes, ‘because the city did not like to remember its defeats a ban on memory had been solemnly proclaimed’ (The Mourning Voice, p. 42).17 Livathinos’s return to topicality imbued his production with the appropriate political correctness but his ill-received provocation proved once again how wise and necessary are the conventions of the tragic genre that render its political criticism remote, and thus harmless and acceptable to the viewing public. In a sense, Livathinos’s modern recontextualisation follows the ancient writer’s penchant for rubbing salt in civic wounds and vexing his audience by offering double readings to his dramas and crossing the boundaries of tragic conventions. Yet, the objections to Livathinos’s approach to the Euripidean text were not only ideological. Those were perhaps the loudest as they reflected contemporary Greeks’ anxiety about the preservation of ‘nationhood’ and cultural superiority (in accordance with their gender position) against the threats of heterogeneity and a multicultural identity. Equally substantial and often more subtle and interesting for theatre theorists and practitioners were the views that pointed to Livathinos’s openings to the ethics and aesthetics of postmodernism.18 On this level the basic displacement of the production was that of set and costume (aided by the choice of music), which created the chic environment of a contemporary, nouveau riche wedding party around a sparkling swimming pool downstage and a raised dais at the back, on which were placed a jazz orchestra and a white grand piano. To this we must add the significant double transformation of the Chorus: on one level the introduction of male members to an all-female ensemble (as explicitly required in the Euripidean text), and on a second level the shift of the Chorus’s function from sympathetic onlookers to worldly party revellers, altogether indifferent to the tragedy of the protagonists. As suggested earlier, in their capacity as male escorts to Jason this male Chorus might be expected to redress Jason’s non-heroic presence in the play. In fact, their placid, banal behaviour emphasised their lord’s lame argument before a rhetorically and corporeally well-armoured Medea. On the other hand, as guests to the royal party all the members of the two Choruses were dressed in dazzling white – the men in white suits and the women in long bridal gowns, including the two protagonists and the children. Thus, the dominant monochrome visual impression blurred the boundaries of class, gender and ethnicity, whose tensions constitute the core of the textual semantics of Euripides’ play. Additionally, it placed Medea visually in a more positive light as it took away – through the strong symbolism of white and her dress aligning 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



with the female Chorus – her a priori identification with the threatening image of the sorceress-cum-murderess that traditionally circumscribes her stage representation.19 The postmodern veneer of high-class, affected bonhomie blunted the edginess, the conflict, the uncouthness of the tragic discourse by engulfing everything in its unaestheticised, accommodating tolerance and calculated mirth. In a passage slightly divergent from the original, as I mentioned earlier, Livathinos passes his ironic critique on post-capitalist society for its inability to encounter and comprehend the tragic: How could Athens know of all this A town that has been living far from trouble And has known no despair But only reason, measure, harmony Reflection and wisdom?20 The critics sensed the deflation of the tragic working in both word and image, but failed to see Livathinos’s self-conscious use of the postmodern ethic and aesthetic in a reversed form that aimed precisely at pointing to the problematic position of tragedy in a pedestrian culture, whose very existence lies in the trivialisation of the tragic experience, its complete erasure before a heightened and celebrated lightness and banality of being. As Terry Eagleton observes succinctly: Tragedy is an unfashionable subject these days, which is one good reason for writing about it. … There is an ontological depth and high seriousness in the genre which grates on the postmodern sensibility, with its unbearable lightness of being.21 Long before Eagleton, Heiner Müller had had the character/actor playing Hamlet in his play Hamletmachine announce with regret that ‘[his] drama doesn’t happen any more’, only to add a few lines later, and in an unmistakably dismissive tone, that ‘the street belongs to pedestrians’.22 In a similar vein, Howard Barker, who alone among contemporary British playwrights engages in theory and practice with the possibility of a new tragic form, asserts that ‘tragedy resists the trivialisation of existence’23 and declares ‘its absolute independence of the street’.24 By showing the postmodern milieu (vividly enacted by the re-cast two-gender Chorus of revelling yuppies) as being unable to absorb and respond to the complex tragicality of the Medea/Jason conflict played out before them, Livathinos’s production relegated the notion of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



tragedy from the world of the mythic protagonists to the condition of contemporary society, whose ethical placidity dismisses any chance of a lofty dramatic sensibility. It thus held up to the audience its own mirror of an impotent state of deprived vision and impoverished insight by unearthing their own repressed anxieties and fantasies, marked by their national, class and gender specificity. At the same time, by placing Medea in an ambiguous, dialectical position between ancient myth and contemporary reality, and making an equally double use of the spatiotemporal setting – real and mythical – and of the actress’s multiply marked body as Medea, the production reconfigured the tragic complexity of gender relations, juxtaposing it to our postmodern delusory mediation of reality, a self-willed blindness or hollowness of perception. In other words, Livathinos’s double experiment reconfirmed through a deconstructive meta-theatrical method the view of many modern theorists and theatre practitioners about the unaccommodating relationship of postmodernism (both as discourse and as cultural ethic and aesthetic) with the highest of all theatre forms: tragedy. As my discussion of this recent modern Greek production of Medea has demonstrated, the tragic condition of the gendered human regrettably can only be represented today in the mode of inversion: as the denial or the absence of the tragic.

Notes 1. Ironic, contemptuous and vitriolic titles such as ‘Party by the Pool’, ‘Medea –Cartoon’, ‘Medea without a Parachute’, ‘Medea with a Pool and White Piano’, ‘How Medea Splashes in the Pool’, ‘The Disappointment’, ‘Puzzlement and Disappointment at the National’s Medea’, ‘Theatrical Waterloo in Epidaurus’, The Treacherous Poison of Originality’ and ‘Fuckpilaff with Medea Sauce’ indicate the extent of the critics’ negative reaction and open hostility. The English translation of all the titles of the Greek reviews here and elsewhere is mine. 2. See John O’Mahony’s favourable report ‘Gods and Rockers’, Guardian, 20 September 2003. 3. See Vasilis Aggelikopoulos, ‘Medea or the Trial of Symbiosis’, Kαθηµερινη´ , 20 June 2003. 4. Ibid. In order to bring Jason’s male point of view more into focus Livathinos developed two major stage strategies: he changed the all-female Chorus into a mixed-gender one and he presented the action of the play as the unfolding of Jason’s memory. 5. Euripides, Medea and Other Plays, trans. and with an introduction by Philip Vellacott (London: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 24. 6. Livathinos reminds us of Euripides’ legendary isolation and, though little is known about his life, the rumour about the Athenian poet’s aloofness, com-




7.

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

bined with his later abandonment of his native city for a self-imposed exile in the Macedonian court, are open to legitimate speculation. See, for instance, the subtle reasoning of R. Blondell et al., eds, Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 60–4. One of the reviews shrewdly wonders which Athens Euripides had in mind when making this utopian eulogy. See Leandros Polenakis, ‘The Terror of Emptiness and the Four Paradoxes of Medea’, Aυγη´ (17 August 2003): 22–3, p. 23. Interestingly, even Froma Zeitlin is eager to retract her earlier indictment of the Greek tragic poets for misogyny and calls our attention to the existence of ‘important, even unsuspected, affinities … between masculine and feminine characters’. Zeitlin, Playing the Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 7–8, 14. N. S. Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides and the Traffic in Women (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 13. On this issue there is a vivid debate among feminist critics. See M. Williamson, ‘A Woman’s Place in Euripides’ Medea’, in Anton Powell, ed., Euripides, Women and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 16–31, 25–6; Zeitlin, Playing the Other, pp. 347–8; E. A. McDermott, Euripides’ Medea: The Incarnation of Disorder (University Park, PA and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), p. 1. Thymeli, ‘Ion and Medea by the National Theatre’, Pιζοσπα´ στης (10 September 2003): 24. This conflicts vividly with Livathinos’s assertion that Georgian is Medea’s native tongue and that in Georgia there are girls who bear the name of Medea. See Chrysa Dotsiou, ‘Nothing is Painless in the Theatre’ (interview with Stathis Livathinos), Aπο´ ϕαση (13 August 2003). See Chrysa Dotsiou, ibid. Livathinos explains: ‘Medea reaches the extremes, she goes beyond her bounds. When people reach their limits they speak in their [native] tongue. That’s all.’ The anonymous reviewer of Imerisia backs Livathinos concerning the use of the Georgian language at points of crises ‘because the alien, the immigrant will weep and pray in his [sic] own language’. See Anon., ‘The Temptations of Stathis Livathinos in Medea’, Hµερη´ σια (6 September 2003). See N. Loraux’s comments in The Mourning Voice: An Essay on Greek Tragedy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 40–1. This converges with the critical view expressed by McDermott that Euripides in his text identifies Medea with ‘Everywoman’ (Euripides’ Medea, p. 7). Loraux devotes the whole of chapter 4 to analysing the ways in which tragedy ‘mocks the obligation to forget and the ban on memory’ (The Mourning Voice, p. 42). Younger critics especially – mostly women – were strongly drawn to Livathinos’s innovative staging and praised his audacity in breaking the tradition, even if they found fault with the acting and other aspects of the production. One of the reviews rightly observed that Medea dressed ‘as a bride among brides is hardly distinguishable from the chorus of women’. M. Kaltaki, ‘How Medea Splashes in the Pool’, Kο´ σµος του Eπενδυτη´ (14 August 2003): 11.




20. My translation, based on the performance text as published in the programme, p. 108. 21. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p. ix. 22. Here it is most relevant to remember Müller’s personal treatment of the Euripidean Medea, which he famously reduced to Medeamaterial in his own dramatic oeuvre, thus affirming the aporia of our contemporary debris of a culture to retrieve the lost parameters of tragedy. Heiner Müller, Hamletmachine and Other Texts for the Stage, ed. and trans. Carl Weber (New York: PAJ Publications, 1984), p. 56. 23. Howard Barker, ‘49 Asides for a Tragic Theatre’, in Arguments for a Theatre. (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, third edition, 1997), pp. 17–19, p. 18. 24. Howard Barker, Death, the One and the Art of Theatre (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3.




A Journey towards Sensitisation and Empowerment: Feminist Performance and Intervention Theatre in the City of Jaipur Asha Pande In this fast-moving world of globalisation, the drive towards uniformity of culture means that those who lag behind have no place and become marginalised. In developing countries women constitute a major component of this marginalised population. In Rajasthan, still a backward state of India, it is the women who really suffer. Look at the crimes listed against them – rape, sexual assault, sexual harassment, cruelty by husband, kidnapping or abduction. Out of ten crimes listed in the state, nine concern violations of the female body.1 How safe is a woman in a state where every eight hours one rape is committed, where every three hours a woman is subjected to domestic violence and assault, and every day one woman is killed for her dowry?2 The statistics expose a stark reality: the national average of cases pertaining to atrocities against women is 13.8 per cent per lac3 of population, of which Rajasthan accounts for the highest – 23.5 per cent – with a 15 per cent increase in 2002 alone (Sharma, ‘Dying Everyday’, p. 4). The Women’s Counselling & Security Centre, Jaipur, and similar NGOs are trying to help by providing victims with women counsellors who can listen patiently and sympathetically to their stories of violence which know no bounds: ‘Utensils, sticks, even iron rods, shoes and blades have been used in some beatings. Sometimes a woman is burnt with cigarette butts or even a hot iron is put on her body parts.’4 In socially deprived sections of the population a girl can expect to suffer and be exploited from birth. Even biotechnology works against rather than for women in the form of foeticide. The front page of a local newspaper recently featured a shocking picture of a female foetus floating in a lake in Udaipur, while news reports exposed the discovery of dozens of female foetuses found in a well behind the clinic of a 151



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quack in Punjab. All of this serves to confirm the misuse of technology for sex determination and the abortion of the female foetus as a wellestablished racket in India. This imbalance in gender ratio is of serious concern because over the next 20 years India will have 12–15 per cent more men than women. This trend will have a negative effect on the social fabric of society: an increased level of anti-social behaviour and violence as gender is a well-established correlative of crime, especially violent crime.5 Such a gender imbalance will give rise to an increase in violence of all kinds – physical, mental and forms of public humiliation, all of which are common in this part of the world and used to punish women.

The Mahabharata of Women Humiliation in the form of honour killing was the inspiration for the play The Mahabharata of Women (MOW). The Mahabharata, an epic tale of the God Krishna, is an intrinsic part of Indian life with Krishna being worshipped in every Hindu home. Even in villages today, children are sung to sleep with lullabies based on Krishna’s childhood pranks. The Mahabharata is perhaps best known for Bhagavad Gita, the philosophical discourse that Lord Krishna gave to the great warrior Arjuna, when he refused to face the uncles and cousins that he loved as adversaries in battle. What is less well known is that the Mahabharata is considered by Hindus as the beginning of Kaliyuga, or the Modern Age: a period when all the rules were broken and women were victimised. For example, the female character of Draupadi is ill-treated and publicly humiliated by Duryodhan, her husband’s cousin and rival to the throne. Duryodhan tries to strip her in the royal court in front of sages, relatives and her five husbands (Pandavas) who had lost her in a wager. Even the fact that she happened to be in the middle of her menstrual cycle did not stop him from dragging Draupadi by her hair to the court. Only the divine intervention of Krishna saved her. It was her desire to be revenged and her pledge to wash her hair with the blood of Duryodhan that unleashed the war of Mahabharata. The Mahabharata of Women was staged on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2003.6 Jaipur celebrated this day by organising public events by various associations to honour women of their caste excelling in different fields, organising rallies for women’s rights or hosting social celebrations. However, we decided to do something different and to stage MOW. The play essentially draws upon strong women characters from the Mahabharata epic and weaves them into a 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Feminist Performance and Intervention Theatre in Jaipur 153


family legend with ordinary mortals. The legend: two brothers mistakenly believe that they have overheard their sister talking to her lover in the garden, when, in fact, she is talking to the plants! To tease

Figure 20 MOW: Family members overhear the amorous conversation of the Young Woman in the garden. Photograph courtesy of Chingari Theatre Group.


her brothers, the sister lets them believe that she is guilty, telling them that they will never be able to catch her lover; he has jumped over the wall. She laughs, mocking their helplessness and anger, which infuriates them further. Convinced that she has lost her virginity, they tie her to a tree, build a pyre around her and burn her alive to save the honour of the family: ‘And my virginity flew away with the odour of my rejected flesh, murdered in the middle of vanity and barbarity.’7 Like the victimised women of Mahabharata her helplessness translates into a curse. Breathing her last, enraged by the injustice done to her and with fire in her eyes, she says: ‘You will pay for this crime through the ill fortune of your sons! I will follow you everywhere, across oceans and seas’ (MOW, p. 16). In the play, three nameless characters from the contemporary world are present. Their identity is established only through their relationship: Mother, Son (changing roles but always unhappy) and Sister. Mother believes in the curse of her ancestor the Young Woman, burnt alive 200 years ago. She believes that the Young Woman still haunts the villagers and instigates the misfortunes of all male descendants. In this re-appropriation of the Mahabharata, the linearity of the script gets lost in time travel, suggested through the senility of Mother and reinforced by the Krishna lullabies that are used as a refrain. The play makes use of two important aspects of Indian society: the importance of the Mahabharata to daily lives and the strong belief in the power of the curse of a wronged woman. Through story-telling, the Mother passes with ease from one space (time zone) to another. She makes contact with all the women in the classical Mahabharata, reliving the woes of Amba, Ambika, Ambalika, Satyavati, Draupadi, Kunti and Gandhari. What is striking is that all these women characters do not appear as hapless victims but surface as strong women who take revenge either by taking rebirth as a hermaphrodite (as in the case of Amba), or through the curse, as Gandhari does. These women are forthright in asking pertinent, uncomfortable questions of those who perpetrated the crimes against them and those who stood by silently watching their humiliation (MOW, pp. 107–8). Sister, who is far more sceptical, refuses to be caught in the web of curses and ill-fortune. It is the gender perspective of the play, the world seen through the eyes of the women characters, that makes MOW unique. Even in the most trying of circumstances the women do not give up, but emerge as strong, positive characters who know exactly what they want, rather than come across as moaning martyrs. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Figure 21: MOW: Gandhari curses Krishna. Photograph courtesy of Chingari Theatre Group.

Moi, l’Interdite A second play, Moi, l’Interdite, performed on 30 January 2004, and based on a French novel by the Mauritian author Ananda Devi, translated by Asha Pande,8 examined the victimisation of women by focusing on the physical and mental torture of a young girl, Mouna. Abused not only by society but also her family, Moi, l’Interdite focuses on Mouna’s ability to cope. To reach a wider audience, the play was performed in Hindi as Mein Nirvasit (MN), and dealt with several gender issues important to Asian societies, such as the preference for a male child, the idea that girls are a burden to be dispensed with as quickly as possible through marriage, and the notion that deformity is a curse, a bad omen, a disgrace and the cause of all misfortunes for the family and the village. The play was staged at the Krishnayan theatre, which has a seating capacity of 200. Four black walls, no curtain and a semicircular performance area on the same level as the audience, who were seated on the floor in front and on three levels of steps at the back, made the performance space appropriately informal and intimate. Lighting and sound effects of storm, wind and sea were used to suggest an island setting. Anjana Sharma, an amateur artist, created the one-woman solo, playing the heart-rending story of the hare-lipped girl Mouna (which in Mauritian also means female monkey). Rejected at birth by her mother due to her hideous (‘cursed’) looks, her life is one long ordeal. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Figure 22: Moi L’Interdite. Mouna asks the audience: ‘Why did my mother’s breasts shrivel without shedding a single drop of milk on seeing me?’ Photograph by Raj Kumar Chauhan.

When the play opens, Mouna squats on haunches in a corner, objects scattered around her, and her face covered by a veil, as she tells the audience that she intends to offer them a crown of thorns. Lifting the veil she advances towards audience saying: Now the time has come to show my face. … They say I am born with the sign of devil and turn away their eyes or start pronouncing words of exorcism. … I am born hare-lipped. In villages it is not called a deformity but a curse. But I am not a curse. You will realise it following my story. I am here to ask you. Tell me where did the milk of my mother’s breasts go?9 The audience is shocked by the unveiling as well as the question which is directed at those sitting close by, and put to them over and over again. They are gripped by the awfulness of Mouna’s story, but also her unwillingness to see herself as helpless, in spite of the cold-blooded contemplation of her parents to kill her, by poisoning, drowning or simply starving her to death (all of which are narrated in the background). Mouna narrates her story to the audience and is helped in the telling by a larger-than-life puppet that by turn appears as a paralysed grand10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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mother, a nurse, a prince she loves or a child in her lap. Mouna has few friends: Liza, the nurse she meets in the asylum, and her paralysed grandmother. Compelled to live in animal-like conditions, escaping into a fantasy world, Mouna imagines herself metamorphosed into a dog walking on four legs, hair growing on her body. Later she meets a vagabond whom she calls prince and who sees her inner beauty and makes love to her. This transforms her into a princess dancing ecstatically to a desert folk song. But when he too leaves her without a word, she decides to kill her daughter, a product of this relationship, because she does not want her child to be a part of this quasi-demonic world full of hatred and despising. The twist in the play comes in the last scene when she feels as light as air, grows wings and flies, wondering if she will become a fairy. At which point she asks, ‘Was my journey until now an illusion?’ From a feminist point of view it was important that, on the one hand, the play has sensitised the public to the abuse by seeing the world through the eyes of a young girl tortured for a defect of nature over which she has no control. They watch as no one tries to see beyond her external ugliness to discover the inner beauty of her sensitive heart yearning for love and attention. On the other hand, the fact that she does not give up but copes with her misfortune and ultimately is able to liberate herself reveals her strength and potential. The two performances of MN and the one performance of MOW played to packed audiences. For both plays the audiences came from social elites, and the majority of spectators were women. Both plays had a profound impact on the audience and how they saw women as fighters and survivors in the most difficult of circumstances. However, the elite, while an important part of society as leaders and opinionmakers, is tiny compared to the vast majority of those marginalised women who make up the poorer strata of society. To reach more of these women and to encourage a sense of resistant, self-empowerment requires a different kind of theatre – Intervention Theatre.

Intervention Theatre Intervention Theatre works along the lines of Boal’s ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’ and encourages the participation of women on stage, working on local issues pertinent to them and to Indian society, such as dowry death, the abuse of girls, child marriage, alcoholism and domestic violence. Intervention Theatre has the potential to help victimised women, but it is a tough task for the shy women of shanty towns to get up on stage. Students from universities like Pankaj Sharma 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Figure 23: Intervention Theatre. Pre-performance ritual: the artists gathering a crowd in a village school by beating drums and singing folk songs. Photograph courtesy of J. P. Besnard.

liaise between the group and the residents. Over a period of months, female volunteers work hard to gain the women’s confidence through regular visits, convincing them of the benefits of such activities and helping them in various ways by counselling them on their personal problems. Still, very few come forward as the stigma attached to women from respectable families acting on stage remains a stumbling block. Very few agree to perform. My involvement as an interventionist with Jan Kala Sahitya Manch Sanstha (JKSMS), whose chief functionary is Kamal Kishor and Caravan Theatre Association, run by Jean Pierre Besnard and Béatrice Forêt from Toulouse, began through a French connection and workshop in 1997. After a decade of dedicated interventionist work it is possible to see many results: to help girl artists, like Seema Singhival10 from a shanty town, to have access to education and to develop as an actress in her free time; to see more girls being sent to school; and to see off illegal distillers and sellers of country liquor in order to reduce the incidence of domestic violence. With this growing awareness and media publicity, the government came under pressure to give priority to issues 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Figure 24: Intervention Theatre. Domestic violence: a young woman is beaten by her in- laws for not bringing enough dowry. Photograph courtesy of J. P. Besnard.

being addressed by Interventionist Theatre. As a result 20 schools were opened by JKSMS with community participation. Later, the government adopted all of them. Eight months’ regular theatre performance on safe motherhood in 20 villages resulted in a remarkable increase of hospitalised deliveries and a decrease in infant and maternal mortality. While there is no regular source of income for these groups, they do get financial support from individuals and organisations, including UNDP, UNFPA, UNICEF and CARE, for projects and campaigns on specific issues.11 I got involved in theatre as an activist for two main reasons: because I had acted in plays as a student and on account of my own journey from the Bharat of the ‘poor’ (less privileged) to ‘India’ of the ‘rich’ (more privileged). As the ninth born and fourth girl in a lower-middleclass family in a small town, I was already sensitised to many of the problems that we face today. The snide remarks made by our more affluent neighbours on my birth, as told to me by my mother, made me resolve early on to prove myself and to be of some use in empowering marginalised women. As an academician and theatre activist, my 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



association with JKSMS and caravan theatre provided me with a platform to sensitise the young participants, including university students coming from insulated, comfortable backgrounds, to confront the stark realities of our society. My hope is that this experience will, at some point in their successful, affluent lives, pull them back to the Bharat of the less privileged, and instil in them a similar wish to help contribute to the making of a just and equitable society.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

‘Crime in Rajasthan – 2001’, Government Report, Table 10, p. 51. Ritu Sharma, ‘Dying Everyday’, Rajasthan Patrika, Jaipur (17 August 2003): 4. 1 lac = 100,000. Dogra B, ‘It’s High Time Violence against Women is Checked’, Hindustan Times, Delhi (4 October 2003). Neelam Raaj, ‘A Growing Club of Male Singletons, India and China Face the Maximum Threat’, Times of India, New Delhi (3 September 2006): 7. Produced by Asha Pande, founder and director of the Indo-French Cultural Society, written and directed by Kichenassamy Madavane. Kichenassamy Madavane, Le Mahabharata des Femmes (Pondicherry: Samhita Publications, 1998), p. 16. The novel on which the play is based has recently been published in Hindi as Mein Nirvasit by Sanghi Prakashan, Jaipur. The play version is forthcoming. Ananda Devi, Moi, l’Interdite (Paris: Editions Dapper, 2000), p. 9. Seema Singhavi used to be a rag-picker. Along with Shaista Khan, another Muslim girl and rag-picker, Seema studied at a school started by JKSMS in their shanty town. The girls got involved in theatre in 1997 and since 2003 have earned a living teaching and training others in the theatre of the oppressed. To find out more or make contact with these theatre activities, go to www.jksms.org, www.caravane-theatre.com, www.planete-clowne.com or email [email protected].



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‘The Demon’s Nuns’: Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa (Mexico) Diana Taylor

Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa, who founded FOMMA, the Mayan Indian women’s centre in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, have transformed their personal experiences of gender violence and humiliation into an astonishing model of success, both personally and for their communities. They are the first indigenous women playwrights in the Mexico, and the first to publish their work in both Spanish and bilingual versions. Isabel Juárez Espinosa is the

Figure 25: Petrona de la Cruz Cruz (left) and Isabel Juárez Espinosa in The Demon’s Nun. San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, 2003. Photograph courtesy of Doris Difarnecio. 161



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author of Cuentos y teatro tzeltales (1994), and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz published her play Una mujer desesperada in Spanish and English (1991, 2003). Cruz Cruz was the first indigenous artist to win the prestigious Rosario Castellanos prize in 1992 for that same play. FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya or, the Empowerment of Mayan Women), received a national award from the Mexican Institute of Research on the Family and Population (IMIFAP) in 1999. They are, no doubt, also among the first native women playwrights to have inspired a fair amount of scholarship.1 Cruz Cruz, a Tzotzil speaker from Zinacantán, and Juárez, a Tzeltal speaker from Ahuacatenango, have known each other since 1988, when they began working together in the Sna Jtz’ibajom (Writers’ Workshop), a Mayan theatre collective in San Cristóbal. How they started to participate in that group, why they finally left it, and how they founded their own theatre and cultural collective (another first), are lessons not only in their strength and tenacity, but also about the harsh gender and race realities of Mexico, particularly within native communities. Both Cruz Cruz and Juárez came from small communities near San Cristóbal in which native girls cannot expect an education. Routinely, girls as young as 11 or 12 are married and at times sold or given to men who have raped them. It is a question of honour, according to their families, who consider that marrying the child to the rapist restores the family’s reputation. Men can have four or five such wives at the same time. Both women shared a history of violence and social marginalisation. Petrona was kidnapped and raped when she was 17 and raised the son who was born of that violence. Isabel’s husband was murdered while she was pregnant (the topic of FOMMA’s 2005 play Soledad y Esperanza) and she too was forced to raise her child as a single mother. Both women were ostracised by their communities and both went to San Cristóbal to work as domestic servants. There they learned Spanish and received eight or nine years’ education. Isabel Juárez was the first to join a Mayan theatre group, Sna, which at the time worked mostly with oral traditions, compiling stories from the surrounding indigenous communities and staging them, using puppets. Juárez worked as a puppeteer, but when the group started using actors instead of puppets, they needed more women. Petrona and a few others were invited to join the group.2 After four or five years of working with Sna, they left in 1992 – Isabel in June, Petrona in December. One was forced to leave after becoming pregnant by one of the male actors; the other was pushed out after winning the important Premio Chiapas, a prize granted by the state government for best artist.3 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


162 Diana Taylor

The women had transgressed communal boundaries that prohibited women from exposing themselves in public, as physical, sexual beings and as speaking, thinking subjects. Petrona notes: ‘Every community has its culture, but in indigenous communities it was universally accepted that women should not act – it’s like selling your body. It’s a sin. So we faced a huge amount of negative criticism from our families and communities.’4 Yet, as Cynthia Steele notes, it was the women’s ‘ambiguous status as single mothers from fractured primary families that made it possible for them to become actors and playwrights’ (‘A Woman Fell into the River’, p. 251). They had already been marginalised. And it was this same ambiguous status that made the men of Sna critical of their independence and jealous of their success. After a few attempts at organising a woman’s performance group, Cruz Cruz and Juárez founded FOMMA in 1994, a collective that focuses on native women and children in Chiapas. With support from local government agencies and literacy programmes, they struggled to find a small house in which to work. In addition to theatre performances in Spanish and their native languages, they offered workshops: reading and writing in their native languages, cooking, sewing, accounting and, of course, dramatic writing. As Juárez puts it, one thing led to another: ‘we saw that many women came with babies and small children, saying, “Well, I do want to learn, but I don’t have anybody to take care of my child.” So we opted for starting a day-care centre for the children while the women attend the workshops. That’s how La FOMMA started to grow’ (Erdman, ‘Gendering Chiapas’, p. 164). They eventually bought a larger building with rooms for workshops and a large, outdoor patio for performances. Since they started FOMMA, the women have worked together with a shifting population of 6–8 other members who come and go depending on family and financial circumstances. Most of them consider themselves to be writers and actors, several have published their work, and together they have developed a dozen new performances and continue to tour throughout the Americas. With help from the Hemispheric Institute and the Ford Foundation, they are currently converting their house into a cultural centre which will incorporate a large covered performance area, a gallery and better workshop spaces. Since 1999, FOMMA has worked closely with the Colombian theatre director Doris Difarnecio, who has helped them develop five works: Creci Solo Con El Amor De Mi Madre (2001), La Voz y La Fuerza De La Mujer (2002), La bruja monja (2003), Soledad y Esperanza (2005) and Viva La Vida (2006). 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


The Demon’s Nuns 163

How did this come about? How did these women achieve what for many would be not only impossible, but unimaginable? Petrona and Isabel love telling their stories. Their entire work, in fact, centres on telling stories – theirs, those offered by the women who come to work with them, those offered by other native women from various communities. Often, they are the same story. As Isabel Juárez Espinosa’s manifesto included here makes clear, native women have often been told that their ‘traditions’ and ‘culture’ support the abusive practices they endure at the hands of men, who treat them more as servants than as fellow human beings. If women aspire to equality, they are beaten back. Mothers raise their daughters to wait on their sons. FOMMA works to disentangle positive cultural values and traditional practices (linguistic, culinary, dress) from the annihilating structures of gender inequality and violence which have taken root in their name. FOMMA uses theatre to change their world(s). An all-female group, FOMMA writes the works they present, basing their stories on personal experiences or things that happen in their communities: rape (Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, Una mujer desesperada, 1993, migration (Isabel Isabel Juárez Espinosa, La migracion, 1996), women’s rights (La voz y fuerza de la mujer, collective creation, 2002), religion (La bruja monja, Cruz and Juárez, 2003), and so forth. Sometimes a group of five or six women perform; sometimes it’s Petrona and Isabel who play all the parts. They paint on moustaches to play men’s roles, don rustic costumes to signal age, gender and social status, and use simple props or humorous masks to get their points across. FOMMA’s work mixes and matches styles and genres, often without really being conscious of what they’re pulling from. Don’t mention Brecht or Grotowski, but there’s something very interesting going on in this theatre. Soap operas provide the delicious tear-jerkers that keep audiences coming; the masks and roleplaying give many works a humorous edge, producing the distancing necessary to recognise the dramas as all too real. It’s a poor theatre, but one rich in humour, critique and affirmation. The Demon’s Nun [La bruja monja] (2003), for example, offers a very humorous view of very serious issues in Chiapas – violence against women, alcoholism, limited educational opportunities for women and the role of religion in native communities.5 Domitila, the principal character, is married to Elias, a drunkard and lecher. According to him, he and his wife have never had sex. We overhear her praying that she might feel love for her husband, but her emotional energy seems directed at the santitos, the small statues of saints, she keeps in her modest home. Her erotic longings fixate on the angel in her dreams: 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


164 Diana Taylor

‘He touched my ears, my shoulders, my stomach. … He made me feel ticklish all over my body. … He has big eyes … (She talks as if in love) and a soft face … a tender mouth that made me want to kiss him, Father!’6 Elias first turns in despair to the Catholic Church, but that offers him no comfort. Like many others in native communities throughout Mexico and Latin America, he finds a more receptive home with the Evangelicals, who promise him ‘love’ and persuade him to give up drinking. While there are several reasons why a reformed Elias decides to leave Domitila – her sexual unavailability and her unkempt appearance – he also criticises her Catholicism: ‘Why is it that you spend all your time talking to these saints as if they were your children … the neighbours are spreading the word that you’re a witch.’ Father Benjamin, who teaches Domitila to read using the Bible as text, grants her refuge in the convent. There, however, he tries to rape her and then warns her against telling anyone. Domitila is back on the street. The rest we know only by hearsay, offered by two hilarious masked characters that make their appearance towards the end of the play. They, we learn, are Domitila’s sons. They tell us what has become of her. Domitila has become an alcoholic, married a bar-keeper and borne twins. In the end, she has fulfilled the role of wife and mother that had been assigned to her all along, but her life and her aspirations have been shattered in the process. She has been betrayed not only by her husband, but also by the Catholic Church. She has nowhere to turn to. The alcoholism and family – announced almost in the same breadth – are an afterthought, the postscript to a life gone wrong. While their audiences laugh at the characters and enjoy the acting, masks and exaggerated gestures, and the constant cross-dressing and role-switching by the two women who play priest, drunkard, Domitila and sons, the plays points to a dearth of options for native women. This story, like all the ones that FOMMA stages, speaks to the tensions that many experience in the native communities. There are few options for the poor: Domitila cannot turn to the legal system; the priests betray her; she has no money or way to earn a living. While life is hard for almost all native peoples in Mexico, women have an especially difficult time. Although some Mayan groups have staged acts of resistance, including the armed wing of the Zapatistas, women continue to experience double marginalisation both within the Zapatista movement and in their own communities.7 So how can native women perform these stories without alienating their audiences? Feminism is a bad word and a dangerous concept, though Petrona and Isabel call themselves feminists when it serves their interests. But they clarify that 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



they are not against men (a critique often levelled at feminists) but are against men acting in a macho and bullying fashion. They are feminists because they believe in and fight for the equality of women. Because anti-Church and clerical comments also incur disapproval in their communities, they are careful to stress that it’s not religion that’s bad – all religions have value, they affirm, a statement that is probably equally inflammatory in a community pulled apart by Catholics, Evangelists and even converts to Islam. But bad things happen within religious systems, their plays make clear, as they do everywhere else. FOMMA has successfully negotiated conflicting forces by using humour, exploiting popular genres and telling stories drawn from their own communities. Their audiences can enjoy what they see on stage even as they recognise that these are ‘real’ stories, told by the women who have lived through the experiences. Mayan women and children who make up the majority of the audiences see themselves and their stories reflected artistically, often for the first time. But as Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa say, even men often enjoy the performances and the representations of themselves, humorously distanced through the cross-dressing.8 The flagrantly theatrical masquerading offers them a safe distance from which to view and even enjoy the critique. Aside from the personal pain and hardship that initially drove them out of their communities, Petrona and Isabel talk of how Mayan women watch them perform in amazement and admiration. ‘Little by little they’ve come to understand that theatre is not about betraying their culture, it is culture, that it’s healthy. Now communities greet us with admiration – how were you able to do what you did? Get up on stage? Tell your stories? Now women come to the workshops. They too stop feeling ashamed (sentir vergüenza), and see their work as something positive.’9 Perhaps more than the play, or the message that Isabel Juárez refers to in her reflection, the power of FOMMA lies in the act of these native women standing there, performing, addressing their audiences. As all can see, they have done the undoable: they speak their minds and call the shots.

Notes 1. See, for example, interviews, essays and plays by or about FOMMA in Roberta Uno with Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, eds, The Color of Theater: Race, Culture, and Contemporary Performance (London and New York: Continuum, 2002); Tamara Underiner, Contemporary Theatre in Mayan Mexico: Death-Defying Acts. Negotiating Performance in Latin/o-America (Austin, TX: University of Texas



166 Diana Taylor

2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

Press, 2004); Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas, eds, Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality & Theatricality in Latin/o America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994); Diana Taylor and Roselyn Constantino, eds, Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). See too the web-cuaderno (multi-media resource of plays, photos, interviews, etc.) on the Hemispheric Institute website: Holy Terrors, http://www. hemisphericinstitute.org/cuaderno/holyterrorsweb/FOMMA/index.html. See Harley Erdman’s ‘Gendering Chiapas: Petrona de la Cruz and Isabel J. F. Juárez Espinosa of La FOMMA (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya/Strength of the Mayan Woman)’, in Uno with San Pablo Burns, The Color of Theater. For a fuller description of this period, see Steele, ‘A Woman Fell into the River’, in Taylor and Villegas, eds, Negotiating Performance, pp. 239–56. Interview with Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juarez Espinosa, by Diana Taylor, San Cristóbal de las Casas, August, 2004. See clips of this performance on the Hemispheric Institute website, http://www.hemisphericinstitute.org/eng/seminar/usa/text/moreevents.html. All translation from this play are by Margaret Carson. The English version of this play, and a shorter version of this chapter, will appear in Diana Taylor and Sarah J. Townsend, eds, Stages of Conflict: A Reader of Latin American Theatre and Performance (Michigan: Michigan University Press, forthcoming). See Teresa Marrero, ‘Eso sí pasa aquí: Indigenous Women Performing Revolutions in Mayan Chiapas’, in Taylor and Constantino, eds, Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform, pp. 311–30; and Coatlicue Theatre’s play, Caracol: Heart of the Earth – Flower of Hope, which focuses on Mayan women within the Zapatista movement. See video clips of the performance on the Hemispheric Institute’s website: http://hemisphericinstitute.org/eng/seminar/ brazil2005/performances.html. Interview with Diana Taylor, October 2004. Ibid.








Part III

Manifestos





Reflection on the Work that is Being Done within FOMMA with Respect to Women, Gender and Patriarchy, Change, New Generations and New Technologies Isabel Juárez Espinosa

As an indigenous woman, actress, playwright, mother and coordinator of an organisation, the workload is four-fold. You have to tie up your skirt band and get on with it. It’s not easy. Criticisms rain down on us – most of them negative, few of them positive. For someone who wants to get ahead, these criticisms actually give strength, energy and courage to stop complaining and move forward. On the contrary – it’s about positively analysing how one wants to participate with children, women, men, young and old, to bring together the trajectories of each life, each family, each community. In my work as an actress in this organisation, theatre is the primary tool to empowerment, to overcome shyness, fear and suffering. So many indigenous or non-indigenous women who participate in these workshops dedicated to gender and self-esteem are able to overcome their own obstacles and create awareness in men, parents and children by participating in talks, body movement workshops and games. The games focus on who prepares the food, who cleans the house, who does the dishes, who washes the clothes, and other things. It’s fun. Men always say, ‘I wasn’t born for this, I feel useless.’ The satisfaction is that women have achieved recognition and have defended their rights without resorting to violence, to be more themselves than acting like men, without taking on the role of the violent, abusive macho. It means talking with their children, spouses, fathers and the family. These conversations about gender concern both boys and girls regarding the same rights to an education, household chores, sharing the same toys. A male can get himself a glass of water when he’s thirsty whether he’s a child or an adult. 171



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Another thing dealt with in the workshops: it’s not necessary for a girl or woman to stay at home or be forced to serve her brother, husband or any man, far less so when they are abused with insults or physical violence. Otherwise women wouldn’t have the right to rest, or visit their friends or even be ill. Many sick women get up to make tortillas, serve meals to men, their children and look after them when the men are perfectly capable of preparing a meal and taking care of the kids. Another example: bringing children into this world isn’t about making them work from childhood, or hitting them or putting them in charge of their younger brothers and sisters when they themselves need looking after. Nor is it about separating males from females starting with toys and food as if males should get better and more food because they work harder. It’s about giving them the same whether it’s dressing them or educating them. They both have the right to an education, to go to school, to receive the same kind of support from their parents, and if they don’t have a father, from the mother, the grandparents and the aunts. And when a woman and man get together or marry, it isn’t because one’s looking for servant. It’s to take care of each other, helping each other, becoming like one person, both caring for the children, bathing them, cleaning the house when the other is sick, cooking for them or at least getting a glass of water for the wife or partner when she feels unwell, getting her to a doctor or clinic before she gets worse – this is the life of a couple. It’s not only men who need to rest, but women too. Some women and men have understood this and have become aware. Redefining domestic work and work in the fields has improved their lives as families and as parents. It’s slow progress. It’s not easy for women or men to get it straight away. They take their time to analyse it. They want to defend what their great-grandparents taught them about what constitutes women’s work and men’s work. Also, they are concerned about what the neighbours, or even their own brothers, will say if they see the man doing household chores. Little by little they are thinking about how they want their family to live. They’re not going to live with their neighbours or brothers, so they can ignore what others say, since happiness is found in one’s own family, with the people who share your daily life. The theatre productions that are offered in the communities are very well received, and there’s admiration when the role of the bad man or macho is enacted by women. This also disturbs some men who later get in touch with us to ask if we also give talks on how to improve 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


172 Isabel Juárez Espinosa

family life. They want to change their ways, to stop being an alcoholic, stop abusing their family. The answer that we give them is that it depends on the place and the distance. If they are close to FOMMA, they can come with their wives any day and we form groups of 6–20 people. If it’s a long way off and there is no way for them to come to us, two of us head out twice a week, and we invite them to organise themselves as a group even if it’s just one family. At first they don’t like to talk; they’re scared, the men as much as the women. Some men answer more or participate in the warm-up exercises to release the tension. When they feel more relaxed, they start to talk. They share their fears and sorrows, they cry and help each other. It’s good when they understand that it’s not the same as what our grandparents taught us about how to behave as men, and that women were always to be submissive and obey what men say and that he should be ruler of everything, the boss, that he should order her around as if she were his property. Now, life, time, the entire outlook and new technology are different. For this reason the plays’ messages serve to analyse the situation and help us to live individually or with our family; it’s never against men. And women don’t want to be better than men. What women want is to live in harmony with their husbands. Besides, plays are fun and people get the message. Translated from the Spanish by Angela Rose Marino-Segura



The Work that is Being Done within FOMMA 173

MAKE SOMETHING: A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

The tasks • • • • • • • • • • •

Begin Make a pact Make something Locate desire Beg, borrow and steal Embrace accident Have faith in humour Rely on your body Imagine context Make believe Make it public

The conversation Task: Write a manifesto for performing global feminisms Peggy: What is a manifesto? Lois: A public display of policy and aims. Peggy: Our policy is to ask questions and talk about things. Lois: We make public displays of policies by making public displays of ourselves. We perform a feminism of desire. We begin locally by talking personally and then travel to find a global conversation. This document is an attempt to make public a policy of process and creative inspiration that has helped us meet the challenges of making performance that makes change and to encourage others to give it a try. Peggy: Do we reflect? Entertain? Fit into 4,000 words a lifetime’s worth of politics and performance? Can I rant? Can I say how arrogant it seems? 174



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How didactic? Because it is not a search but a statement that makes your ideas seem permanent, correct … Lois: … and obvious, which makes them more accessible. Peggy: But it fixes them, claims them. It seems that men are always claiming things making them theirs. Ideas. Land. Countries. Claiming and reclaiming. It is an ancient fight, but you still have to deal with the newly dead. And once you’ve killed someone’s family or claimed somebody’s land it starts a never-ending cycle of violence and vengeance. Vengeance is not a pretty word. Lois: I think vengeance is a pretty word but a terrible incentive. Peggy: What can you do with that kind of contradiction? Task: Begin Peggy: Start from zero every day. Fill your worry hole with whatever is at hand, even the simple, stupid things like owning a car in Manhattan and moving it to the other side of the street on a Monday, Tuesday, Thursday or Friday. Lois: I wake up in the morning and think about how I am in the world. What world am I in? What country? What language? What kind of coffee will be served? Or is it tea? What will be my access to the news? What part of it will I believe? What control will I have over the hours of my day? Will I eat well? Will I remember to be grateful that I can eat at all? Will I fear for my life? Will I remember that sometime during my day I will be reminded that as a woman I am somehow secondary? Will my mind stay true? Will my heart heave? Will my fingers behave? Will my dreams come true? Will my cell phone ring? Will my cellmate remember my name? Will she return what is mine or covet the rest? Will I forget the blows of my childhood? Will I have a reprieve from the part I play in the re-enactment of that? Will my mother remember me or will she forget ever having let me go? Will the grass grow? Will it ever be Easter or Christmas or Ramadan or Diwali? Will it be necessary to celebrate these days in order to remember that life passes in a rhythm that we no longer have to acknowledge because life is digital? The counting is done for us. There is no longer a little before or a little after 8. It is specific. It is 7:56. Will I be content in not having to ask? Will I ask? Will I finish and will I step forward without one moment of hesitation? Peggy: And then? Task: Make a pact Lois: Wake up and find a collaborator. She might be lying in the bed next to you. She might be a character that fell from your hands as you 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


A Manifesto for Making Performance about Making Change 175

drifted to sleep. She may no longer be a she. She may have always been a he. She might conduct an orchestra in a small town in Taiwan. She might have cheated an already bankrupt government out of enough money to pay for a facelift. She might have put the drugs in her pocket by mistake or maybe she was hungry or desperate or bored at her job as a social worker in the middle of Minnesota. She might be your own worn-out voice. But she is there, at your table, down the street, on the radio, in the horror, at the office. Peggy: Walk up to her. Slowly. Don’t assume too much or too little. Just ask a question. Always start with a question. Lois: It can be personal, professional, intimate, political, mundane, profound, local or global. Peggy: Look around you for the question. How do you feel? What time is it? What does it mean to perform? What is the light falling onto? What did you have for breakfast? Do you dye your hair? Have you ever received a speeding ticket? Do you dream? If you had a million dollars, what is the first thing you would do? Or if you had $10 million? What is family to you? Do you love passionately or practically? Lois: Any question. She’ll try to answer with the first thing that comes into her mind, on impulse right or wrong, true or false. Trust impulse. It is the thing you do or say without really thinking. It starts and finishes in the place between thought and action, between the inhale and the exhale. It is your origin and your original thought. Don’t second-guess it. Peggy: Don’t try to make her up. See what she has to say. Find out what’s in the room. Don’t try to make the room fit into your idea of what it should be. Lois: This is the beginning of your collaboration. Allow anything to happen once you walk into the room. Peggy: I never trust a room where everyone has on the same T-shirt like they are all trying to fit into a neat pattern of what they are expected to say. It’s like expecting prisoners to talk about how they want to be free or lesbians to talk about how all they want are the rights to get married and have children. Lois: Embrace the unknown. Don’t expect everyone to turn up. There might have been a fight last night and a lockdown this morning. She might have had to work overtime. Her father might have objected to the sexual content of her homework. The medication might have sent someone else in her place. She might just be too shy. And don’t forget the effect of the guards on her ability to tell the truth or the effect of a stranger on her willingness to disclose. But remind her that she doesn’t have to tell a story. She doesn’t even have to tell the truth. She can lie. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


176 Lois Weaver with Peggy Shaw

Peggy: Someone asked me, ‘What is your favourite music?’ And I said, ‘Snoop Doggy Dog’. I have never, to my knowledge, ever heard a Snoop Doggy Dog song. It was just the first thing that came into my head. Lois: She can dress her life in the costumes of her imagination and you will believe it. It will be true. You will translate, transpose the pronouns, understand a foreign language in her inability to meet your eye, see the true story grow behind the comfort of the lie, read the reasons why her hand covers her mouth when answering the phone. You will admit the darkness of her skin or accept her whiteness, understand it as you might understand the incessant snow, the flattening winters and hollowing sameness. Peggy: Don’t think, ‘This is not big enough to be heard’ or ‘This isn’t the full story’. Don’t try to go global or be universal. The world is in the detail. But don’t be afraid of telling stories. They are a way of answering questions or singing songs. Try singing songs in between stories. But don’t worry about plot or middle, beginning and end. Lois: The action is in the relation of people, places and things. It takes place in the of, the to, the from, the in between. That is where the action is. No need to change a law, start a war, report an earthquake, recount the full story of your rape, admit your crime. You can sit with a teacup, forage the remains of a fire, remember a departure, regret a kiss, describe a loss. Peggy: There must be a place of loss. It is the place where the other sock goes, or the contact lens, or the parking space, or the memory of something that you knew a moment ago. If everything is digital, there must exist a digital place of loss. If I could find it and name it, I’d name it after a singer-songwriter I met in New Zealand, Rapai. You could call Rapai and ask her where she is and then go there to find what you have lost. Your heart, your wallet, your glow. She would give it back. Lois: Now make a contract. It doesn’t matter what it says, just some kind of promise to show up tomorrow and keep going. Write it down in any language, two or three languages if you need to. Make it stick by making it silly. State that you will always tell a joke or learn to tap dance or braid her hair. The good thing about contracts is that you have something concrete to change, something to break besides her heart. Task: Make something Peggy: Are you talking about a play or a movie? Will I see myself on TV? Will it make me famous or get me out of jail? 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Lois: No, I am just talking about the act of making. Like making a cake, making a dress, making a mess, making house, making art, making love, making it all go away, making the men stop, making the mind open, making money the thing you make in order to make the things you need and the things you need to make, making something from scratch, making something from scraps, recycling for the sheer pleasure of seeing something become something else. Peggy: Making love stops time, but how do you make time? Lois: Time is raw material. It is one of your ingredients. It may not always be yours. It may belong to your sons or daughters or to the corporation who took over your village or the small business you inherited from your mother, or it may be all you have. You may be doing time for a crime, or left behind with nothing but time on your hands. Peggy: When I was in college I made baby booties, and rum cakes and hot cross buns in order to make drawings and paintings and photos. Lois: Start with time. Steal it if you have to and use it to collect your ingredients: • • • • • • • • •

some facts, a lie, a feeling, a gesture, an object, an uncovered memory, an incomplete story, a song, a dance.

Mix them together and make something the way you would make dinner, a cake, a mess or a dress. Peggy: To make is when there is something there that wasn’t there before. It fills space, it occupies a page, it is thoughts projected onto the air, it is making a space in a prison where women can project dreams on bare walls and no one can take them down or graffiti over them. It is renting an 8–24 foot space so that girls of all ages can write bad poems and dress up in all the wrong clothes. It is laughing until the tears come and the stories about sex touch the reason why for these last 20 years she has never wanted to be touched. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case




Peggy: Once I realised that my main desire was to make shows and to create new things, I realised what a burden it must be to want to be successful in the mainstream – like wanting to have a show on Broadway or a painting in a fancy gallery. At one time I thought I just wanted to do anything I had to in order to make queers and women visible. Now that there are women’s archives, and queer history and other people telling stories, I have to locate different desires. Lois: Ask yourself, what do I want? What have I always wanted to do? Wanted to be? Look for the desires that feed your dreams. If dreams have been broken or if they have been taken from you in a night-raid that mistook you for an insurgent or a soldier or a plaything, then look in the storeroom of need. ‘I need shoes’ can lead to the making of a story about a walk between war and peace. But if need, like desire, is too painful and reminds you of times you had or never had or if it overpowers you because you are hungry or your hormones are shifting or if you ask yourself, ‘How can you have the desire to make something when the world seems bent on destroying it’, then rely on will. Just do something. Write something down. Make a list of ingredients. Then mix, tear, fold that list into something else. And when the time is right, ask yourself and your collaborator. ‘What would I do if I was free, if I was a millionaire, if I had all I needed to make the things I wanted to make?’ Peggy: My father always said he didn’t trust millionaires because there aren’t enough hours in the week to make that much. He worked by the hour. He also said that if you have a crease in your pants and a haircut, you can get any job. Lois: This is not minimum wage. It is your biggest, richest, most powerful, most daring fantasy. Peggy: When I was in upstate New York making a performance with women who were survivors of domestic abuse, they requested that I stop using the word fantasy. To them, fantasy meant meeting men’s sexual demands. They asked if I could use the word imagination. Lois: If you live the nightmare of men’s violent sexual fantasy, then you might have to cultivate and reclaim. Take your imagination shopping. Let fantasy be the dressing-up box, the walk-in closet of your life desires. Go on. Dress up as movie star, a talk-show princess, a rock goddess or rock climber, a prime minister or the pope. Then imagine how you would move, what you would say, what story you would tell, what letters you would write, what dance you would do. Peggy: And if your mind goes blank and you can’t think of anything? 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Task: Locate desire


Lois: There’s plenty to choose from. Most of us are bombarded with images of Hollywood celebrities and sports heroes, we know the movements and idiosyncrasies of world politicians, we hear music made in cyberspace and recycled in adverts and super malls, we have seen stories unfold then retold on wide screen and in high definition. We have every cooking, fashion and decorating tip at our repetitively stressed fingertips. Steal from the richness of popular culture. Take it, use it, twist and subvert it, then return it upside-down. Peggy: The things I use to make work have changed over time. I find I am not so interested in popular culture anymore. I have much more confidence in the unknown, in my queer, female self, in my illogical logic. I don’t have to refer to mass culture so much anymore to make sense of anything. Lois: But it is there if you need it, alongside great art, literature and philosophy. And beneath the media billboards and on basement floors of the libraries and museums lie the traditions, myths, superstitions and wives’ tales that whisper in our ears and hold us up or drive us down. Turn around and look them in the eye. Ask them to help. Task: Embrace accident Lois: Pay attention to the things that get in your way, items that fall onto the sidewalk as you walk to work, old ideas you uncover when you are cooking the noodles, phrases or faces that will not leave your mind alone. Don’t disregard the ‘I didn’t mean to say that’, the fight before breakfast, the music that tormented your mother about how things were before the occupation, the fur coat you almost threw out but couldn’t because it reminded you of the glamour she left behind. Look the accident in the face. If only two of you show up while the other 13 are waiting for their meds, turn the chorus into a duet. Task: Have faith in humour Peggy: So many times I have heard white straight theatre critics at a performance created by women or people of colour say, ‘I don’t know what everyone was laughing at’ or ‘The performance was full of “in jokes”’. They didn’t get the jokes because they don’t recognise us. They don’t have to study us the way we study them. They don’t have to laugh so they don’t cry. We see ourselves and we laugh and we don’t always know why and when we laugh, we don’t feel so alone. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Task: Beg, borrow and steal

Lois: Use humour. Tell a joke, even a dirty joke. Find funny people and imitate them. Copy their rhythm and gestures and change their words to yours. Peggy: I tried to be funny when I was working with Bloolips, a gay men’s theatre company from London. I found that the only way for me to be funny, or to be the clown, was to totally make myself vulnerable. Some things just aren’t funny. But if you cut to the pain you might find a funny bone. And that kind of humour can pull you up short. It can heal you. It can make friends with your enemies. Task: Rely on your body Lois: The only thing to remember, the best piece of advice, your best friend and, when all else fails, the best starting place of all is your body. The body remembers and will reveal its own set of details. The mind is the keeper of the voices that say, ‘This is not art, this is not important, this is women’s work.’ But the body holds a fuller knowledge, a global memory, a connection to all you have seen and wanted to forget and to all you have forgotten. Let the body speak. Let the gesture tell your fortune. Move if you can’t think and record the feeling of the movement, the memory of the muscle, the insight of your bones. Task: Imagine context Peggy: Start with your worst assumptions about yourself. I am a racist, sexist. I am homophobic, classist. It may feel hurtful and hateful and, of course, it may contradict everything you are trying to say. But you need to see and feel the source of the wrong you are trying to right. Be the enemy. It will create an atmosphere that allows for mistakes and change rather than the politically correct assumptions that disable our creativity. Lois: And go on, call yourself a feminist. If a work allows those involved and those who witness and those who come across it to imagine they can be all that they desire, if a work makes you think ‘I could do that’, if it is not just about, for or with women but takes the presence and power of woman as a given, then it is feminist. Peggy: I remember – or maybe I dreamt – that there was a movement, a very short one indeed and not all that successful, in the 1970s where all feminists decided they should call themselves lesbians. Calling yourself something isn’t a pigeonhole, it is a context. Calling yourself a liar can make you suspect, but it can also give you freedom. And if what we do is ‘women’s theatre’ why not call the last 2,000 years of 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



theatrical history ‘men’s theatre’? When I was in the gay cabaret group Hot Peaches, we charged heterosexual people $10 for admission to a show, and queers $5. Do you know that the straight people paid the $10? It never occurred to them that simply saying they were queer would save them money. Lois: But don’t try to make work about things you know very little about. If you want to talk about homelessness, work with homeless people or make work about the risks of choosing to be an artist in the current economic climate. Don’t pretend to know the pain of oppression or even the pain of having the same address as the oppressor. Peggy: Look, listen and ask questions about the big subjects that surround you: breast cancer, Islamophobia, gender dysphoria. Then focus on the details: a woman’s desire to go topless, a Muslim lesbian’s fascination with the burkah, the use of the masculine pronoun in Brazilian Portuguese. Lois: Start with the local. Mention the war or make something about hope or try to relieve the disaster with your humble making, but start with the personal. Make a work about war by considering the conflict between you and your collaborator. Think about mud before you try to stop the flood. And if you are talking about mud, ask yourself ‘what I really want to talk about is …’ and don’t worry if your thoughts turn to the colour red. Follow red. Peggy: It is like walking quickly down a stream, not having time to plan out your journey, just alighting quickly on the next available rock. Lois: It is a local walk that feeds global thinking about injustice, social responsibility, human rights and all the other words we use for doing the right thing. Task: Make believe Lois: If you can’t say what you believe in, think about what you rely on. Peggy: I rely on mistakes. The point is to do the best you can every day, stop worrying about getting it right. Give up. Just give up. That’s when there is room for infiltration and divine grace. Once you realise you want to be an artist, not a successful artist, but an artist, what do you have to lose? Lois: I believe in alignment. When you can sit in the one minute of time that is truly yours, just sit in it, things line up and come your way and you can see them coming and sometimes you can ask them to stay for lunch or ask them to sunbathe with you in the prison yard. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



Peggy: I believe everyone is an artist. I believe you learn from everything and everybody. You take up space, you have a shadow, light falls on you, you make a sound, time passes, you die. You watch others die. You watch others live. Watch where you are going. Look into the light and the shadows. Question everything. Write it all down every day. Every single detail of your life is important. Lois: I believe in the imagination. If you can imagine something different, it might start to change. It is like molecules in motion. One molecule wakes up, puts on a costume, does a dance and the other molecules have to stand up, move over, pay attention or maybe even join the dance. If we can imagine something, we can make it; if we can make something, we can make it change. Task: Make it public Don’t stop. Keep going. This is the only chance you have. You have to finish this now. Set a date and perform, show, try. Do it before you don’t.




Pakistani Muslim Theatre at Home and Abroad: A Critical Manifesto for a Feminist Homecoming Fawzia Afzal-Khan

Through my involvement as both actor/performer and scholar/ academic with Pakistani alternative theatre groups since the late 1980s, and with Compagnie Faim de Siècle, a fringe theatre collective based in New York City and Paris, since the late 1990s, I have arrived at a set of questions and possible answers, however incomplete, which have led me to conceptualise a Manifesto for Pakistani/Multinational/Muslim Feminist Performance. Such a manifesto locates itself in the interstitial space between the ‘home’ locale of Pakistan and Pakistani theatre workers, and the translocation of this ‘home’ ‘abroad’, typified by Compagnie Faim de Siècle. The Compagnie’s artistic director, Ibrahim Quraishi, and I, a founding member and performer, are both of Pakistani origin.1 What counts as ‘feminist’ performance in terms of politics and aesthetics in local and transnational contexts is different and complex enough to confound our understanding of women’s relationship to Islam, and yet both locales create feminist possibilities for a manifesto for social change.

The ‘feminist’ label in Pakistan The identification of theatre works as feminist is complex. Since the advent of Islamisation, government policies in the 1980s, enforced by the military dictator General Zia-ul-Haque, have denied many rights to the majority of Pakistani women.2 However, Madeeha Gauhar, founder and artistic director of the Ajoka Theatre Troupe of Lahore since the mid-1980s, has flatly rejected the label ‘feminist’ for her theatre work,3 despite the fact that most if not all the plays in Ajoka’s repertoire revolve around the theme of women’s rights. In contrast, a Karachibased group, formed around the same time as Ajoka by Sheema Kirmani 184



19

(a dancer in the Odissi tradition of southern Indian classical dance), started life as a women’s rights group dedicated to improving the daily lives of poor women in Sindh province. The group called itself, appropriately enough, Tehrik-i-Niswan [The Women’s Movement]. Prominent among the plays in its repertoire is Aurat [Woman], an adaptation of an Indian play on women’s rights. In this instance, a woman director and a theatre group are more ostensibly at ease with the label ‘feminist’, yet Tehrik-i-Niswan does not use this term openly in defining or categorising its work in the cultural arena. A more radical group in the Punjab called Lok Rehas (not as active in recent years), with ties to various leftist groups and individuals aligned with farmers’ rights and labour rights organisations such as the Kisan Mazdoor Party [Farmers and Labourers Party], has rejected the idea of its work as ‘feminist intervention’ if understood only in terms of women’s rights. Rather, as its main female theorist and worker, Huma Safdar, told me in an interview in the mid-1990s, the work of Lok Rehas aimed to uncover and highlight the class-based nature of oppression plaguing both men and women of the lower socio-economic strata in Pakistan. Indeed, Safdar, among others, often complained of Ajoka, despite Madeeha’s distancing from the label ‘feminist’, as starting ‘a new trend in the Pakistani Women’s Movement … to be anti-men’.4 Does the term feminist mean ‘anti-male’? That is the association most commonly made, even by women active through their theatre work in the fight against women’s rights abuses in Pakistan. Thus, the label is often eschewed by theatre activists, even when working to raise audience awareness and to mobilise communities to press for an end to the oppression and abuse of women at the level of government policy. One primary issue which problematises male-specific crimes against women involves crimes of ‘honour’ against women, such as the tribal custom of karo-kari in which a female suspected of adultery or fornication may be killed by her own brothers, father or other male relatives. Staging these issues may seem to invoke an ‘anti-male’ politics. Instances of mutilation or gang rape as punishment for women’s so-called moral failures have often been translated into ‘proper’ theatre, through the work of groups like Ajoka, or have formed the basis for Forum Theatre exercises in the style of Boal.5 The issue has become central to even the national government. President Musharraf’s government has recently ordered the release of women prisoners from Pakistani jails, who have been imprisoned for years on charges of fornication and adultery. In reality, these women are the victims of rape which they could not prove because of the discriminatory Hudood Ordinances of Shariah 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Pakistani Muslim Theatre 185

(Islamic) law. Musharraf’s ruling is due in no small measure to the efforts of theatre activists, working tirelessly alongside other civil society groups of the Pakistan Women’s Movement. Yet, alternative theatre in Pakistan has found itself in the untenable position of taking a stand against the anti-women Islamisation policies of successive governments since 1979 and, at the same time, appearing not to endorse a position that could be construed as anti-Islamic and anti-male. Indeed, this is the dilemma faced by the Women’s Rights Movement as a whole and it has divided its adherents between those who wish to endorse a vision of ‘true Islam’ in which women have all the rights that men do, and ‘secularists’, who insist that Islam must be kept out of the affairs of state and government. On the whole, given the gross human and women’s rights violations passed into law by successive regimes since Zia-ul-Haque, theatre workers and other artists in general have tended to favour the latter view and not been afraid to voice their secular sentiments and their critique of religion through their work. However, this critique of religion occurs within the broader framework of a critique of the age-old feudal system prevalent in Pakistan, in which the landowners and other vested interests of the elite ruling class are in cahoots with the religious establishment to retain power. Hence, there is a disavowal of ‘feminism’ as understood to be only about women’s rights in favour of a more class-based analysis.

Traditional and experimental forms We need to make our problems visible and our message to our audiences and policy-makers unambiguous through realist theatre based on our indigenous traditions. We have no need of the extreme absurdism and meaninglessness of much theatre that passes for ‘cutting-edge’ fringe or avant-garde in the West today – including your Mr Ibrahim’s [Quraishi] type!6 Because of the urgency of the political situation in Pakistan, the form most amenable to dramatising urgent social concerns is naturalist realism, whether this is performed on the proscenium stage or in the round, interspersed with song and dance in the South Asian tradition. Being quite literally a ‘poor theatre’, there are few, if any, ‘special effects’ (lighting or staging techniques, for example). Indeed, since much of Pakistani alternative theatre is meant to be performed in front of poor audiences in villages or inner-city slums, it is done cheaply, with far less technical apparatus than we might expect of ‘fringe’ 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


186 Fawzia Afzal-Khan

groups in the West. Experimental forms do not attract many theatremakers in Pakistani alternative theatre, beyond the notion of nonproscenium theatre and audience alienation derived from Brecht. Even Brechtian alienation is never fully practised since audience expectation tends towards the cathartic experience found in theatre and film. The deconstructive impulse behind most modernist and postmodernist ‘avant-garde’ performance work in the West does not interest theatre directors in Pakistan since the political, social and economic realities in the latter are so different. This embrace of naturalist realism in Pakistani productions concerned solely with the local reception is frustrated by the international success enjoyed by more postmodern productions. Ibrahim Quraishi, whose diasporic work in New York and London was selected by the Japan Foundation to represent Pakistan in 2004–5, was invited, along with directors from other major South Asian countries, to create a production for peace. Quraishi’s international visibility frustrated local theatre workers such as Madeeha Gauhar, who raised these kinds of questions: What makes him Pakistani? Or a representative of the Muslim world? Or a feminist? How is his work and vision seen as representative of these identitarian constructs? These questions were asked by those who considered themselves to be more ‘authentic’ purveyors of the traditions and histories suggested by these terms, by virtue of simply living in the space designated ‘Muslim Pakistan’ or by the category ‘Woman’, irrespective of the way in which someone like Madeeha is in fact highly critical of identitarian constructs such as nation, religion and gender. Part of what is at issue here is that, despite having been born in Pakistan and raised by Pakistani parents, Quraishi has spent most of his life in the West: first in Europe and then the US. He is a product of a Western cultural and educational milieu and his work reflects this. His influences are Robert Wilson, Peter Sellars and Arianne Mnouchkine, not Agha Hashr, Rafi Peer or the theatrical traditions of the Parsi Theatre from which much of contemporary Pakistani ‘commercial’ and even alternative theatre is derived. And being a man, despite, or perhaps even because of, being an openly gay one, his authenticity vis-à-vis being a ‘true’ feminist and ‘Muslim’ is equally suspect. His work has much to commend it in terms of its innovative experimental quality, which enables a political engagement with many of the issues regarding Islam’s relation to women. Along with others, Quraishi offers South Asian Islam’s affinities with Sufism as redemptive 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



and enabling of women’s centrality to Muslim thought. Many Pakistani alternative theatre groups, particularly Ajoka, also set Sufi poetry to music in their plays, most often performed in traditional qawwali form with male singers. Sometimes, the poetry of a seventeenth-century Indian Sufi/mystic, Bulleh Shah, is even sung by female performers like myself7 to suggest the egalitarian and truly spiritual and catholic side of Islam, which was open to influences from Hinduism, Buddhism and other regional faiths. Indeed, the Muslim Mughal Emperor Akbar, who ruled India during the late sixteenth century, came up with his own version of Islam, Din-i-Ilahi [The Divine Path], based on a mixture of Islamic and Hindu beliefs and practices (which was later declared heretical by the Islamic orthodoxy). So one could argue that these new, experimental forms that stage Sufi poetry can claim antecedents in the history of pre-partition Pakistan.

Postmodern feminist production It is this history of eclecticism and tolerance of South Asian Islam, combined with the influence of the patriarchal, class-ridden aspects of this cultural milieu on Islam leading to the paradox of Islamic openmindedness on the one hand, and the oppression of women on the other, that Quraishi sought to convey through a performance piece developed by the Compagnie over the past few years. It began its journey as a meditation through movement (Kathak, Indian classical dance form with Muslim roots) and voice (northern Indian classical), performed as a work-in-progress early in 2004 in Tokyo at the Japan Foundation’s ‘peace initiative’ designed, through theatre, to bring the five modern nation-states of the region together. Its most recent incarnation is a three-part spectacle,8 in which the story of Anarkali is the opening sequence. This is performed through movement and voice utilising three female performers of Indian/Pakistani background (kathak dancer Parul Shah, Bharatnatyam dancer Rajika Puri and myself, north Indian vocal classical singer Fawzia Afzal-Khan). The third part is a Sufi meditation based on the work of the twelfth-century Arab mystic Ibn ‘Arabi. Here, part of the sonic landscape is a female voice whispering/singing words from his well-known text (sung and spoken in both the original Arabic and in English translation),9 in which the male pronouns indicating the Divine have been changed to the female. Narrative, as well as the traditional musical and dance forms being used to convey that narrative in Part/Vision 1, are subsumed or superseded by an abstract deployment of voice and movement where the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



traditional structures and histories are hinted at only to be discarded, cut up, criss-crossed with other sonic and visual ‘clutter’ via videographic installation and an abstract soundtrack, bringing together sights and sounds of the natural and post-industrial ‘techno’-world beloved of a postmodernist sensibility attuned to concepts of bricolage, ‘happenings’ and ‘installation art.’ Part/Vision 3 is entitled ‘Through the Forest with Ibn ‘Arabi’, and here the space is a forest of plastic trees (designed by the Swiss stage designer Xavier Xool, who used plastic to create the entire space of our ‘installation’, including our costumes), dimly lit with a fog machine creating an even hazier or ‘mistic-al’ feel: strange, whispery and clangy sounds emanating at intervals from within the trees (a sampling of sounds put together by DJ Spooky, a ubiquitous and renowned figure of the music underground scene in Manhattan and worldwide). These sounds are interspersed with whispered incantations of Ibn ‘Arabi’s text: ‘None sees her other than S/he … Her veil is but a part of her Oneness … None veils other than S/he … Her Prophet is S/he, and her Sending is S/he, and her Word is S/he.’ I walked around the space of the forest uttering these words, illuminated only partly by a halogen halo around my face; at times, I sat down in various corners and sang a verse or two from the Sufi mystical tradition of Indo-Pakistan, accompanied by drumming on a Turkish-style drum played in the PersoTurkish mystical tradition of drumming by a French drummer named Nikolas LeFevre. Sandwiched between Visions 1 and 2 is a longish piece based on the epic battle between Krishna and Arjuna, the divine and the mortal, as recounted in a foundational text of Hinduism, the Mahabharata. Here, then, as I see it, is the heart of the performance. The erotic energy unleashed by the dance of war and death performed between Lord Krishna, the male divine, and Prince Arjuna, the male mortal who casts aside his (feminine?) questions and reservations against going to war with his brothers and cousins at the urgings of Krishna, becomes both a space of pacifist feminist intervention, as well as a space which, in casting aside the feminine, becomes a site of unbridled male sensuality and power symbolised by the gleamingly intertwined bodies of Krishna and Arjuna.

Towards a critical manifesto for Islamic feminist theatre To reiterate my evolving set of questions and observations, then: what counts as feminist theatrical praxis? How can we arrive at a critical manifesto for Islamic feminist theatre given the difference in 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



discursive conditions of the relation between women and Islam in the context of Pakistan and its Western diaspora? Should Quraishi’s work qualify as a critical component of such a manifesto because of his familial heritage and ethnic background despite, or possibly even because of, his eclectic upbringing which makes him ideologically incapable of a monocultural identity? Is this not part of the heritage of a tolerant Islam as taught by the Sufis of the Arab and the Indic worlds? Can his challenge to female victimhood inscribed in patriarchal Indo-Muslim history (Anarkali’s dance of imprisonment ends with a hint of rupture and escape) be seen as a feminist intervention and part of a manifesto for social change for Muslim women? Can his transformational vision, in which the words of Ibn ‘Arabi, a renowned male mystic of Islam, are spoken by a female voice and form, be regarded as an intervention into the space of public discourse regarding the centrality of the feminine in Islam? Or can the exclusion and defeat of the feminine in the exciting homoerotic universe of the Mahabharata episode in this production/installation be seen as enabling an Islamic feminist manifesto? How should one account for the problematic of audience-reception, given the fact that this piece was performed for a primarily Western, non-Muslim audience in New York, post-9/11? Thinking about this piece through the lens of Pakistan-based theatre practitioners and audiences, one might be tempted to ask how relevant the rehashing of the Anarkali story is to the contemporary moment and the anti-women laws that Pakistani women have to combat on a daily basis. How does a legend of the court of a Mughal emperor become a metonym for the Islamic oppression of women? What does a vague reference to some lines from the twelfth-century Arab mystic Ibn ’Arabi’s work, recited in a setting meant to evoke the urban decay of post-industrial Europe (as designed by Xavier Xool originally for an installation in a museum in France), have to do with the South Asian context of Islamic Sufi thought? What are the half-naked bodies of Arjuna and Krishna (the latter played/danced by a Puerto Rican gay male dancer from the Bronx!), thrashing about to deafening drum rolls in stiff, Japanese-looking plastic costumes, lit up by blue and white lights respectively, meant to evoke about Islam and women? And why am I appearing in a blue plastic, allrevealing, space-age costume which makes me look like a weird pastiche of Barbarella? And why aren’t you letting me sing properly? Why is there an overlapping, screeching soundscape? Clearly, this literal-minded imagining of the reactions that one might expect from Pakistani theatre workers as well as audiences is 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



based on my reading of the favoured place of traditional realistic conventions in this location. Never mind the fact that a display of female bodies in transparent plastic is not likely to be seen as a feminist stand, but rather as an exploitation and brazen display of the female body wearing the mask of theatrical innovation. A homoerotic spectacle involving almost nude male bodies would prove similarly problematic in a society where homosexuality is practised but never acknowledged, and indeed is viewed as a sin according to common understanding of Islam. Yet, paradoxically, the great Sufi masters and poets throughout the subcontinent as well as in Iran are well known for their glorification of male homosexual love, in which the figure of the beloved as a boy also becomes a symbol of the divine. Perhaps, after all, Five Streams, if performed in Pakistan, might receive a different reception from the one that I have imagined? Ultimately, the question becomes one of deconstructive versus reconstructive praxis. The continental drift (pun intended) of Quraishi’s conceptual universe (borne out also in the fact that the company’s technical team consists of French and French-Swiss men) definitely owes a debt to French deconstruction, including the work of French feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray.10 It is a deconstructive impulse that drives much of my own theoretical work on issues of Muslim women and performance. So it was not surprising when I was recently asked, after a performance and talk I gave (‘Bold and Beautiful: Speaking out as a Pakistani/American/Muslim/WoMan’), why my stress was on deconstructing anti-feminist Islamist tendencies while ignoring the potential and need for reconstructive thought and action in the Islamic world. My tentative answer illuminates, I hope, the basic premise on which my Manifesto for an Islamic feminist theatre praxis rests: that location determines action. The deconstructive privilege is what we must exercise to debunk accepted truths pertaining to both the centre and the margin as these are understood and defined within the Imperium, which is where Quraishi and I make our interventions. The space of our ‘Other’, however – in this case our ‘original’ home, Pakistan – is its own Self. A self, to be sure, which is affected by the world beyond its margins, particularly as it is shaped and reflected back to itself through the cultural and political discourses of the powerful West. At the same time, it is an internally-riven self, caught between competing conceptual frameworks of religion, nationalism, ethnicity and gender. In this location, the deconstructive impulse is most certainly useful; but perhaps the reconstructive is more so at the moment. From the examples and descriptions of ‘alternative’ theatre 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



work in Pakistan which I have shared with you, along with the thoughts of the major players on the alternative theatre scene there, one thing seems clear. While energy is given through performances to debunk antiwoman myths perpetuated by society (e.g. that female sexuality is a sin and deserving of punishment), in order to challenge the anti-woman laws being passed in the name of Islam, it is also clear that the figure of Woman needs rehabilitating as an entity in her own ‘write’, but in ways in which she is not seen as ‘anti-male’ and ‘anti-religious’. Walking a tightrope between tradition and (post)modernity, she first needs to be written into His/tory before Her/story can be used to dismantle, or at least challenge, the binaries of gender in Islam and in the troubled history of the nation-state. Recourse to the binary model of gender in order to rehabilitate that half of the binary which has been systematically positioned as inferior, becomes, in this instance, also an important space from which to challenge an/other binary: that of an authentic ‘Islamic’ Pakistan versus a Hindu India whose pre-Pakistan cultural influences must be eradicated to preserve and enhance the ‘authentic’ Islamic nature of post-partition Pakistan. Reconstructing the female-as-performer, looked at askance in Muslim Pakistan (Islam being interpreted as against the public exhibition of the female body), then becomes a way to re-establish severed linkages with Indian counterparts across the border/binary of the nationstate, where female performers are not an anomaly. (Re-)inserting the female body within the idiom of a pan-Indian authenticity of performance traditions rooted in the Sufi version of Islam, this feminist intervention ‘at home’ in Pakistan, becomes a powerful exercise in reconstructive deconstruction (or deconstructive reconstruction), not so radically different, after all, from its incarnation ‘abroad’. Ultimately, any critical manifesto worth its name must account for these inter- and intracultural/national/religious and gender connections and differences, but must be careful not to radicalise difference to an extreme ‘otherness’. We are all in this together, standpoint theory notwithstanding. Nevertheless, it is the voice of a Muslim feminist from across the span of centuries, whose performance ought to be observed and privileged as we fashion our manifesto for Islamic feminist theatre and cultural praxis in the twenty-first century. This is the voice of Scheherezade of the fabled Arabian Nights, whose performative feminism I have written about elsewhere: Hers is the voice/story we must listen to now, hers the performance we should watch attentively … a voice and a persona that is cloaked neither in a hijab of the mind … nor superficially revealed in the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



scantily-clad bodies that inhabit the Western harem … Scheherezade’s is, above all then, the voice of a woman … whose fight for life is not personal but collective, the voice of a woman who wants to see justice, not murder, meted out to other oppressed women like herself, a woman not afraid to voice her dissent with the powerful when that power becomes abusive and unjust.11 Islamic feminist theatre, taking its cue from Scheherezade, whether performed in the centres of power such as the US and Europe, or within the Muslim societies which occupy the space of the West’s agonistic ‘Other’, must help us perform our solidarities and resistances within and without the Imperium, across space and time, against all abuses of power. From Scheherezade we must learn the art of performing our identities fluidly, challenging the simplifications of nation, religion, gender. It is the performance of identitarian complexity that saves her life, as it will surely save ours.

Notes 1. There are, however, many other playwrights and performers of Pakistani heritage writing and performing in the US and Europe, focusing on feminist issues, but they are not within the scope of this manifesto. 2. For more on this point, see Barri, Dhee Rani, Jhalli Kithay Jaavey and Eik Thi Nani, in Afzal-Khan, A Critical Stage: The Role of Secular Alternative Theatre in Pakistan (Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2005), pp. 53–63. 3. Explained when I interviewed Gauhar during the early stages of my project on Pakistani Alternative Theatre, see Afzal-Khan, A Critical Stage, p. 48. 4. Huma Safdar, quoted in Afzal-Khan, A Critical Stage, p. 65. 5. Since 2000, under the leadership of the Interactive Resource Centre headed by Mohammed Waseem, almost 100 Theatre of the Oppressed groups have formed all over the country. 6. Madeeha Gauhar, interview with Fawzia Afzal-Khan, December 2004. 7. See my description of Barri, in A Critical Stage, pp. 54–8. 8. This was performed after a two-week residency in October 2005 at MassMoca and in January 2006 at the Asia Society, both museum settings, although the scale and ‘feel’ of each space was very different. 9. Ibn ‘Arabi, ‘Whoso Knoweth Himself …’, From the Treatise On Being [Risale-t-ul-Wujudiyya] (Abingdon: Beshara Publications, 1988), p. 4. 10. I elaborated this point in my introduction to the programme notes for the premiere of Five Streams at MassMoca in October 2005. 11. Fawzia Afzal-Khan,’Where Are The Muslim Feminist Voices?’, TDR: The Drama Review (Spring 2002): T173, 5–11, p. 9.




Reflections on My Literary Performance Theatre: A Manifesto for Nigerian Women Irene Isoken Salami-Agunloye

The Nigerian feminist dramatist must engage in a radical, often innovative, literary journey Irrespective of Nigerian women’s significant creativity in oral literature, and the obvious elevation of their status ushered in by the feminist movement, male writers continue to dominate the literary scene. Although colonialism has heavily influenced Nigerian literature, it cannot be denied that patriarchy has played a major role in shaping Nigerian literary theatre. Unlike the genre of prose, literary drama is relatively young in Nigeria and the Nigerian woman as a dramatic subject has a brief history too. Consequently, in choosing to write and not be written about, the Nigerian feminist dramatist is engaged in a radical, often innovative, literary journey because she seeks to project her ideas to the readers of her text from a feminist perspective. The ideology that men are naturally superior to women permeates the writings of Nigerian male dramatists. These authors characterise society as strictly patriarchal and excessively masculinist. Their plays are excessively misogynistic; their ideological aim is to perpetuate and legitimise their patriarchal ideology.1 In most of their literary construct, Africa too is feminised. This concept is evident in works from Sengor to Wole Soyinka; in fact, it pervades the tradition of colonial literature. The relationship between men and women is one of possession. He is the active subject citizen, while she is the passive object – nation. She symbolises his honour and glory or his degradation as a citizen. Sometime he is the questing hero, while Africa is a woman in distress. The female dramatist seeks to redress this through dramatic texts that dismantle the gender codes inscribed in the male tradition. In an 194



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attempt to situate myself within the male-dominated literary space, I have resolved to rewrite the negative stereotypical portrayal of women in texts written by men. In doing so I am constructing new identities for the female characters or heroines whom I use as my mouthpiece to buttress my feminist viewpoint and engage in a criticism of the social order. It is in this light that I will share my experiences as a playwright within Nigerian theatre. I offer my work, and my reflective journey through my work in Nigerian performance theatre, as a feminist manifesto for social and political change.

Women must be seen as ‘history-worthy’ I have had to ask myself several questions about women’s marginalisation in African societies, especially in Nigerian society. Most people I have interacted with always responded thus: ‘Irene, this is the way things have been, this is the way they are and this is the way it will always be, so you have to learn to accept it and live with it.’ Although such remarks often baffle me, they have also contributed to my resolve to voice my contempt for the various discriminatory practices against women, thereby becoming an agent of change. Writing for the theatre became the most appropriate avenue to realise my dream. Before I started writing, I had worked very closely with my father while he was carrying out research in preparation for his ground-breaking book on the history of the ancient kingdom of Benin. Realising that the most successful kings of the Benin kingdom ascended the throne, achieved great success and regained their throne through the intervention of women, I proposed that he include a chapter on each of these women (Emotan, Idia, Iden, etc.). He rejected my proposal and appeal, implying that women are not ‘history-worthy’. With this realisation a strong urge welled up in me to foreground women in history by rewriting history using dramatic texts. In many of my plays I problematise a lot of the discriminatory practices and gender issues. I offer the titles and brief descriptions of my plays in order to illustrate my project, and my manifesto, as a woman playwright in Nigeria.

More than Dancing Women must not be distracted from pursuing political positions Realising that dance is a feminised practice in African society, my play More Than Dancing attempts to deconstruct this practice. I stage how the practice of women dancing is used by men as a manipulative tool, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


A Manifesto for Nigerian Women 195

a diversionary and subversive strategy aimed at distracting women from pursuing political positions. In the play, I reveal how women have been given the right to vote, but can only vote for men. Then, they are given some rice as a concession for their vote and they dance happily. I disavow this tokenism and these concessions, which men grant women. Such patronising gestures negate the notion of personal striving and meritorious attainment. The climax of the play is realised in the emergence of a female president for the country. One of the challenges facing African women is the lack of unity and unquestionable loyalty to husbands, which men often exploit to their advantage in the political arena. In their strife to wrest political power from men, I used the concept of collective action, collective heroism and a strong bond among the women. In spite of intimidation from men and husbands, the women vote together for a woman candidate. The idea of revolt needs to be used in the service of feminist change Protest Theatre or Theatre of Revolt has become popular in Nigeria as an avenue to express the struggles and aspirations of the oppressed masses. I see the idea of revolt as a radical aspect of theatre which can be used in the service of feminist change. In most of my plays I have used elements of the theatre of revolt as a weapon to ‘dismantle the master’s house’, seen in the women’s move to overthrow men politically. In African societies, there is the stereotypical belief that women are predictable, incapable of making and successfully executing plans because of their inability to keep a secret. More than Dancing displays women’s competence in successfully strategising and executing plans to acquire political power with elements of surprise, thereby overthrowing the male political model and enthroning a viable female paradigm of political engagement. Most literary works by men in Africa objectify women while subjectifying men. In an attempt to de-objectify women in my literary work and demystify male dominance in politics, I made a woman the president and a man the vice president in More than Dancing. Marriage must be redefined along the lines of equality In marital settings the men have the sole right to all property. More than Dancing confronts this issue by empowering a woman to resist this male claim to community marital properties. The lead female charac10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


196 Irene Isoken Salami-Agunloye

ter, Nona, is a university professor whose husband feels threatened by her presidential candidacy. He asks her to choose between her political career and her marriage. He fears that his power in the home will be eroded if she becomes president. As she bares her heart to her friend Ameze she says, I do not want my marriage to collapse on account of my political career. Professional or political achievement is nothing compared to my home. I would rather stay married than become the president. Who would respect you when you are a president without a man by your side?2 Here, she echoes society’s belief that women are not socially acceptable if they are not under the ‘protection’ of a man. Like other authors, I represent Nigerian marriage as structured around men’s authority over women. I further problematise here a marital mode that demands that women set aside their careers or ambition so that they do not constitute any threat to their husband.

Sweet Revenge This dilemma is also vividly portrayed in my play Sweet Revenge where my character Aisosa has to resign as a consultant gynaecologist because her husband wants to travel abroad to study. He ends up marrying another woman there and so manipulates two women from two different backgrounds: Eurocentric and Afrocentric. On his return, he looks for excuses to drive Aisosa out of his home, verbally abusing her and finding fault with everything she does. In the play, I corroborate the humiliation that women experience when they are not financially empowered. Surprisingly, sisterhood and collaboration, rather than resentment, are forged between the two women. Discrediting the notion that a woman’s success is dependent on her husband, or any other man, the lead female character, in spite of all the challenges confronting her, becomes successful in her career without the help of anyone or anything but her own competence. In both Sweet Revenge and More than Dancing I redefine marriage along the lines of equality. In More than Dancing, Nona is confident enough to tell her husband: ‘I am sorry you have no choice, it is too late. If yours [your political career] could find shelter in this home then mine will be well accommodated here’ (More than Dancing, p. 77). When her husband threatens to expel her from the matrimonial home 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case




Queen Sisters We must construct alternative forms of subjectivity In Africa the voices of women are silent; women are seen and not heard. This trope of silence pervades the literary works of many male writers in the theatre. In Queen Sisters this began with the central character Ubi’s father’s demand that she marries the king and his refusal to listen to her protest against the tradition of forced marriage into polygamous relations. Denouncing the traditional concept of marriage as a privilege to practise polygamy, Ubi refuses to be married to a man who is a stranger to her and whom she does not love. She refuses to be a party to this ‘charade’ masterminded by her father and the palace chiefs. Ubi openly confronts her domineering father, who insists she must marry the king against her will. Omoze, Ubi’s mother, believe that every woman is created for marriage, and marriage to the king is the best thing that could happen to any woman. Ubi refuses to be swayed by her mother’s pleas and persuasive words, refusing to be enslaved and silenced. Ubi’s decision finally to marry the king is not a sign of submission, but an opportunity for her to carry out her revolt. Ubi’s entry into the harem results in a series of changes. The women no longer take turns sleeping in the king’s bedchamber. Ubi, who says she is in the harem on a mission, refuses to share her husband with any other woman. Her mission is to embark on a radical dismantling of the patriarchal social structures in Bini tradition. Portraying Ubi as a subject of feminist and ethnic aspiration, I attempt to construct an alternative form of subjectivity. Ubi is infuriated by the way the other wives idle their time away and she restricts their access to the king, expecting that this will motivate them to re-examine their lives and conditions in the harem. Women must be allowed to make choices about childbearing While Ubi actively resists patriarchy, the other wives passively submit to it. For the queens in the harem, motherhood is so ingrained in their psyche that they see no alternative. For them motherhood is central to their identity. However, Ubi subverts this tradition that has enslaved and entrapped her co-queens by refusing to become pregnant. Her refusal of the role of motherhood can only be under10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


so she can ‘have your desired freedom to do all you want’, she replies, ‘Move where? I am moving nowhere. This is my home as well. We have both invested in it’.

stood within the context of sexual politics. For Ubi, every woman should be allowed to make a choice about childbearing. Her decision not to have a child is even interpreted as infertility by the other wives. For example, in a celebration of motherhood, Tirosa (the wife of another king in the play) says, with reference to Ubi’s refusal to bear children, ‘If urine is not easy to pass, why do chicken not urinate? She must be barren.’3 Ubi’s pretence of infertility is a form of resistance to male domination. She is conscious of the fact that motherhood can interfere with her proposed mission to the harem. She refuses to find fulfilment in the traditional mode of ideal womanhood. Her ability to instigate and control harem politics is commendable. She does not stop at the harem as her influence soon spreads into the city. She looks down on certain traditions, assaults chiefs, creating problems felt to be above her status. The complacency of women in a polygamous set-up and the acceptance of their gender role within it are the focus of the play. All Ubi wants in marriage is equality. Omoze, still enslaved by tradition with very little hope of ever being redeemed, says that Ubi is a dreamer and asks her to accept the tradition as their mothers have done. However, Ubi, who is optimistic about the power of anyone who is determined for change, says that everything is subject to change, no matter how deeply entrenched or how long such a practice has been taking place. Ubi remains undaunted in her quest to become an agent of change in the palace and harem. Women must resist woman-to-woman oppression Although feminist critics often remain silent about women oppressing their fellow women, the fact remains that in many African societies, women act as oppressive agents especially as co-wives, mothers-in-law, older women, stepmothers, etc. This is often the outcome of institutionalised, hierarchical female spaces that make women victims and collaborators in patriarchal violence.4 This is why proponents of African feminism ask that woman-to-woman oppression be taken into consideration in defining African feminism or womanism. In The Queen Sisters the wives gang up against Ubi. The other wives, who see nothing wrong with their status as one of many wives to the king, challenge Ubi and frustrate her efforts. However, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



many writers, including myself, are intervening by rewriting this aspect with the intention of fostering a stronger bond among women. The strength of Queen Sisters lies in my refusal to glorify Ubi’s inability to raise the consciousness of the other women so that they too can be part of the struggle. What I am saying here is that challenging the status quo must be through collective struggle. We must give voices to women In most African literary texts, the trope of silence is often reinforced with the motif of patience and submission, as wives are taught to exhibit patience in their matrimonial homes. Patience has become a recurring trope in modern African literature, especially in the works written by women. This motif is being seen by women writers as enslaving and has often silenced African women, especially in their matrimonial home. They are taught to be voiceless, without agency or freedom, in this patriarchal system. Women have been socialised to accept the fact that patience is the only ‘remedy’ for a lasting marriage. Ubi subverts this by her radical behaviour in the harem and palace, where she expresses her disapproval for the older women who have decided to accept their lot in life without offering any resistance.

Emotan We must question traditional institutions – the ancestral gods and the silencing of women in their matrimonial homes In Emotan, my play about a historical figure and foremost Bini heroine, Emotan, I closely examine various gender issues from a feminist perspective. For instance, I highlight women’s potential resistance in a scene in which women are made to take the traditional oath of allegiance in front of the ancestral shrine, promising to be faithful and loyal to their husbands. In my play, the ancestral gods are accused of discrimination because husbands are not made to take the same oath. I draw attention to the use of ancestral spirits to subjugate and silence women in their matrimonial homes. In Bini tradition when a woman marries, her first night is spent at her husband’s family home where she is brought before the ancestral spirits, represented by some objects. Here she is made to take an oath of loyalty and faithfulness to her husband, as Adesuwa says here: 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case




To which Imade replies: And what did our husbands swear to? Shouldn’t they be loyal and faithful to us too? Are the ancestral spirits discriminatory? Are they meant to protect only the interest of men? (Emotan, p. 59) Here I question the traditional institution. Emotan refuses to be a wife to the king on the grounds of traditional principles. Women must not allow men to control and dictate their destinies In this play I present Emotan as a symbol of social justice devoid of self-interest. She challenges the irregularities that, if not checked, can mar the destiny of the entire kingdom. The work also displays a woman’s selfless leadership in contrast to contemporary Nigerian leadership, in which ‘godfathers’ install their lackies and remain behind the scenes to manipulate events and demand their pound of flesh. In the case of Emotan, she raised an army to help wrest power from a corrupt usurper and enthroned the rightful heir, after which she took her bow and left the scene. In Bini tradition, men were believed to be in control of their wives’ destinies. It is customary for wives to praise their husband by reminding him that he is the owner or controller of their lives and their destinies. By this action the women are assenting to the patriarchal system embedded in society. As the controller or owner of women’s destinies, these men dictate what women should do or not do. Emotan also advises women that in pursuit of their feminist visions they should do so through compromise, negotiation and partnership rather than through pressure and force. In analysing the trope of silence in African literature, some African feminist scholars have drawn attention to the different usages of silence in literary texts. In this context, silence is seen from two perspectives: choosing to be silent and being silenced. While the former connotes the choice, the latter implies imposition. When one chooses not to speak one exercises agency; the refusal to speak becomes an act of resistance that signifies an unwillingness to participate. In Emotan, 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


I ye I made, did you not swear to the ancestral spirit when you got married, to be faithful and loyal to your husband, saying that failure to do this could result to disaster for you or your children?5


Warrior Queen We need to write women as good warriors In Warrior Queen I present another strong female character in the person of Idia, a historical figure, who confronts Portuguese traders. She shows concern for her nation and her people, accusing the Portuguese of employing a double standard by supplying arms, yet asking them not to wage war against their enemies. Depicting women as good warriors, Idia is displayed as a woman of valour who singlehandedly wages war against an enemy nation when the men were reluctant to go to war. This brief discussion of my progress, my journey, through a literary performance theatre is my way of voicing a manifesto for Nigerian women. As a pioneer whose works are influencing the literary directions of some emerging writers, there is still an urgent need for more voices and a critical mass to follow me, come with me, on this journey. We must be relentless in continuing our journey.

Notes 1. For further discussion, see Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1994). 2. Irene Salami, More than Dancing (Jos, Nigeria: Saniez, 2003), p. 83. 3. Irene Salami, Queen Sisters (Jos, Nigeria: Saniez, 2002), p. 41. 4. For a discussion, see Obioma Nnaemeka, The Politics of Mothering (New York: Routledge, 1997). 5. Irene Salami, Emotan (A Benin Heroine) (Jos, Nigeria: Malink, 2001), p. 59.



Emotan’s silence and unwillingness to participate is used as a tool of resistance against injustice (Emotan, p. 20).

A Manifesto for an Israeli She Monster Yael Feiler

In every generation each individual must consider himself as though he personally had gone forth from Egypt. As it is said: ‘And you shall tell your child on that day saying: This is on account of what the Lord did for me when I came forth from Egypt’, for not only our forefathers did the Holy One, Blessed be He, redeem, but He also redeemed us with them, as it is said: ‘And He took us forth from there to bring us to the land which He had promised to our forefathers.’ (Passover Haggadah Shalom of Safed) And it was Passover again. Jewish Easter. Of course I was going to observe. I bought matzah, the unleavened bread ‘we’ of tradition eat during the eight days of the holiday in remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt. In memory of our brothers, those Hebrew slaves who, having just heard the news that today is D-day, today we will escape, were in such a hurry that they – or rather, their wives – could not wait for the bread to rise. The bread remained flat and hard, and to this very day matzah is baked without yeast. In remembrance I drag out my Haggadah, the book that is read aloud during the ritual meal, and I prepare all those small symbolic dishes – charoses, a sweet, heavenly mix of groundnuts and apples with the consistency of mortar, because our brothers slaved as builders under Pharaoh; and moror, a bitter blend of horseradish to remind us of our brothers’ bitter life under the yoke; the bitter which is blended with the sweet; the sweet taste of freedom with the bitter memories of servitude. And I brought down small bowls and filled them with the salted water into which we dip the matzah, the fresh parsley and lettuce leaves; everything taken with a sprinkling of salt, to remember 203



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the tears our brothers cried, suffering under the cruel oppression of the Pharaoh. Yes. I am going to celebrate the heroic transition from ‘slavery to freedom, from sorrow to joy, from mourning to festivity, from darkness to a great light, and from servitude to redemption’ (Passover Haggadah Shalom of Safed). Together with friends, I shall eat and remember and sing and tell stories about the Exodus from Egypt. Jewish tradition views the Exodus as a kind of national constitution: ‘Today you have become the people of the Lord, your God’ (Deuteronomy 27:9). Participation in Passover’s ritual meal and the retelling of this ‘birth of a nation’ can therefore be viewed as a symbolic action. In articulating the ‘we’ from a position in the present we resuscitate a several thousand-year-old collective past which is considered to be the foundation of ‘our’ future. The Seder can be described as a regularly occurring discursive activity designed to sustain the national discourse. It nurtures the idea of a collective national identity, visualises it and offers the opportunity to practise one’s part in it. I participate in this ritual every year. This is how we create the idea of a community, of a nation: you and I – we – speak about it, describe it, define its boundaries and the differences that set it apart from the rest. Posit a ‘we’ and a ‘them’. Those who are included and those who are outside: Conflicts. National Conflicts. War. Death. Most national discourses have a long history. Every new articulation corresponds to an earlier version of the same discourse. These long-lived, tenacious discourses take on the guise of the ‘real’ or ‘natural’ precisely because we lack experience of a time when they did not exist. The state of Israel, with all its complexity, is a tangible consequence of the Jewish national discourse. And I, possessing knowledge of this discourse, realise that I am also such a consequence. Born and raised in Israel, I am counted among the Israelis. The national subject. A soldier. A soldier of the discourse. At the same time, I am a deserter, living on foreign soil. Yet all the while, I contribute to the preservation of the national discourse. I celebrate Passover! I am a carrier, a carrier of the Jewish national discourse. This brings me to a point of personal, political crisis: a desire to know if I can break loose. If I can see an alternative, feminist way out of the national discourse that is the state of Israel. As a feminist theatre scholar I see theatre as an arena in which it might be possible to visualise and practise a resistance to the idea of nation in the interests of social change. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


204 Yael Feiler

A Manifesto for an Israeli She Monster 205

Following the culinary theme of my introduction, I see national discourse as providing pre-baked subject positions – indeed, I am tempted, given my feelings about all of this, to suggest ‘half-baked’. The individual is expected to ‘man’ these positions. But what happens if she refuses to ‘man’ them? I say she refuses because she is a gender identity which is sufficient in herself to challenge the Israeli national identity, which is masculine. Within the European context, throughout the decades before the state of Israel, Jews were considered as others. Along with other colonised others, they were also regarded as ‘feminine’: weak, passive, unreliable and hence inferior. National liberation, seen as the solution for oppressed Jews, however, resulted in the nationstate of Israel, the construction of a national identity, and the New Jew. The New Jew is constituted as an opposite to the Diaspora Jew, which explains why the masculine character of the Israeli national identity is so conspicuous. The thoroughly masculine character of the national identity has been causing identity problems for Israeli women, past and present: ‘To be Israeli she must conform to the male emotional norm, based on the concept of virile strength. And yet this norm does not apply to her. She is expected to be feminine, even though the more stereotypically feminine she is, the less Israeli she then becomes.’1 Some images, which are constituents of the Israeli national discourse and its perception of women, can be traced back to biblical prophecies. One example is the feminisation of the land, which associates the feminine with an object, rather than a human subject. Furthermore, reading the prophets, one realises that the feminine character of the land is often combined with negative, sexualised stereotypes of women. Furious prophets accuse the land of being sexually unfaithful to God and describe it as a whore: ‘See how the faithful city has become a harlot! She once was full of justice’ (Isaiah 1:21). Comforting prophecies relate to the land/city as a beautiful bride waiting for her bridegroom: ‘For the Lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married. For as a young man marrieth a virgin, so shall thy sons marry thee: and as the bridegroom rejoiceth over the bride, so shall thy God rejoice over thee’ (Isaiah 21:4–5). The description of the land in feminine terms can also be discerned in more recent discourses. Jewish immigration to the land of Israel, at that time called Palestine, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was often described as an act of marriage between the pioneers and the land. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


To oppose national identity

To be tolerated by the Israeli nation a woman should accept being an object. She should accept her role as a symbolic bride, faithful and loyal, be subservient to the national agenda and participate in the construction and the reproduction of the national home. Furthermore, she is expected to support men, who are the representatives of the national identity, through good times and bad. But I want to ask and to imagine what might – would – happen if, in the Israeli context, ‘woman’ refuses to be this objectified other in the interests of the nation?

Theories of discourse and change First, I need to rehearse certain theoretical points that appear to be ‘obstacles’ standing in the way of my desire for a feminist alternative to nation. Mats Börjesson, for example, posits that everything existing outside our normative classifications must also be beyond our comprehension and that it is therefore impossible to express the ‘inexpressible’.2 Moreover, Foucault’s rigid mono-logical theory of discourse allows for only one discourse to rule a particular period in history. Foucault calls this a ‘regime’: ‘[e]ach society has its regime of truth, its general politics of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true’.3 Theorists within the field of discourse analysis have, though, different standpoints on the scope of discourse and the ability of humans to affect its structure and content. I would argue that according to a modified theory of discourse, more then one reigning norm/discourse can coexist in our cultural epoch. Standpoints represented by Norman Fairclough, a representative of critical discourse analysis, enable the active role and responsibility which he ascribes to the human subject; he believes in ‘the capacity of human beings to change what human beings have created’.4 Discourse, according to Fairclough, is therefore not only reproduced by the subject, but is also being constantly renewed and changed by her/him. Viewed in this way, critical discourse analysis, can openly declare its political goals; can show ‘a commitment to the emancipation of the people who are oppressed’ (Fairclough, Language and Power, p. 4). I welcome this as an enticing and stimulating thought, one that allows me to conceive of tracing several parallel discourses. With all respect to monotheism, in truth I feel it is polytheism that offers unexpected openings. Here I might find a way to enable the articulation and practice of that which is forbidden in a dominant discourse. When I read Zygmunt Bauman’s The Individualized Society and his argument against individualised identity which poses a threat to the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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idea of community, I find that for the Israeli context I want to argue the opposite.5 If every manifestation of an independent identity that is not in harmony with an idea of ‘community’ constitutes a threat to the nation, then might the individual be the key to change? Since the national community is an imagined ‘community’, and since its present modus operandi is chiefly conservative in character, there is every need not to preserve that ‘community’ but to bring about an alternative. What I propose is to imagine an individual, a female individual, who can bring down, destroy, the community as nation. As theatre gives us the public space and power to imagine our world differently, it is through theatre that I imagine an Israeli She Monster: a feminist individual who breaks loose from the nation in the interests of a new ‘community’ not founded on the empire of all things masculine.

Monsters in the making: Miriam Kainy’s female protagonists In my imagining, I take inspiration from the work of the feminist Israeli playwright Miriam Kainy. Each of Kainy’s plays offers a female protagonist who in some way represents a challenge to the nation.6 My aim here is to take each challenge as Kainy stages it to build into a feminist manifesto that argues for a re-evaluation of (masculine) Israeli nationhood. Working through Kainy I want to think each of these resistances not in isolation from each other, but somehow to imagine the possibility of playing all of these together. What I desire is a drama where the female protagonist is a composite of all of Kainy’s strategies of resistance as I identify them here – a veritable slush bucket full of all possible forbidden traits.

Refuse to choose between the binary oppositions that are imposed on you! In Kainy’s Hashiva [The Return] (1973; revised version 1975), the character Alona is caught between two male protagonists, an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian. Each of the male characters is a representative of the two nations. Alona, on the other hand, is an ‘object’ of conflict; a woman apparently without national ‘belonging’. The metaphorical use of the triangular love affair – Alona is first with the Palestinian, but then cheats on him, taking the Israeli for her lover – emphasises the fundamental polarisation between her gender and her national identity. Being ‘unfaithful’ means that her ‘official’ Israeli identity loses its 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



meaning – she switches ‘sides’. One can read her position as an example of how Israeli women are deprived of a subject position and excluded from the nation, and, on the other hand, in this ‘no man’s land’ they might operate from a position that allows them to be disloyal to the nation.

Choose life! In a later play, Bavta (1987), Kainy works through an historical setting to explore a feminist subject position and nation. Set in the Bar Kochba uprising against Rome during the second century AD, Bavta is depicted as a powerful woman in a male-dominated military society. Choosing a female hero for this historical context is in itself an intervention – a way of telling herstory, women’s history. Bavta fights to be a part of the nation, but in a different, ‘home-made’ version – one that values life, the human, above a set of national values. Finding herself constantly in collision with a discourse of nation that has less regard for the human is Kainy’s way of signalling the desire for an alternative to nationalism. Life, Bavata teaches, is the most important thing and if the play registers conflict and discontentment with national values, it does so with a view to signalling the need for an urgent re-evaluation of nation.

Turn your back on the nuclear family! Joseffa is a physician, single, living and working outside the national borders, and Kainy’s central protagonist in Sof Onat Hachalomot [The End of the Dream Season] (1991). An old house in Jerusalem belonging to Joseffa’s grandmother represents the nation: its history, the roots through which the nation is reproduced. It stands in opposition to ‘foreign’ feminism.7 The End of the Dream Season dramatises a conflict in which Joseffa is forced to choose between her profession and a feminist way of life, and the house. Ultimately, Joseffa chooses the house, which in one way is a victory for the nation. However, this house is also infected, transformed, in other ways by her feminist choices: the matrilineage of house ownership, or the fact that Joseffa becomes a single mother. The nation is also reconfigured through ethnicity as Joseffa’s family come from the so-called Oriental part of the Israeli population. Depicting a national conflict represented by non-European Jews makes the national alternative more nuanced and the ‘house’ of the nation less secure. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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Performed in 1996, Kainy’s Bianca politicises an idea of the nation through the figure of the foreigner. Bianca is a rootless foreigner – a woman who denies the need for roots; who sees them as dangerous to escaping, or being able to get away quickly from, trouble and threat. This rootlessness connects her to the image of the ‘Wandering Jew’; renders Bianca a representative character of the Diaspora Jew who is excluded from Israeli national identity. What is particularly interesting is the way that Kainy takes a woman’s body to represent this diasporic identity, thereby emphasising the alienation of the feminine within the national context. Bianca embodies two polar opposites: a feminine gender identity and an Israeli national identity. It is impossible to reconcile, to repair, these two opposites. This irreparable gap is why the character eventually chooses to leave the national scene: the play ends with Bianca’s decision to leave Israel and continue her life abroad. Since this means choosing between war/death and life – life in Israel is depicted as a never-ending war and commemorations – like Bavata before her, Bianca choooses life. The very exclusion of Bianca from the national context, both within the play and by the almost total silence of the press, can be interpreted as silencing the voice of Israeli women. Yet the way that Bianca chooses life over a national agenda suggests a more subversive development since her contradictory choice opens up to an unknown hybrid. Bianca’s hybridisation of a traditional ‘Jewish mother’, making choices for the sake of the future of her son, and at the same time her furious rejection of the sacrifice for the sake of the nation, raises questions about a local Israeli feminism, and embodies the possibility of Jewish life outside the state of Israel. While this is still forbidden in the Israeli context, it augers well for the future.

Making the Israeli She Monster Kainy’s feminist theatre is inspirational, even though none of her female protagonists is an outright ‘winner’. What they have in common, though, is their refusal to choose between opposites – opposites which are foundational to an Israeli national discourse, which must be observed by everyone, and from which everyone must choose. Refusing opposites can be problematic, however. As they still correspond to the centre, a refusal of such a binarism can achieve the opposite of the desired effect, can end up strengthening rather than 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


Be a rootless foreigner!

deconstructing the dichotomy. Perhaps, also, as much as Kainy’s critical feminist endeavours around nationalism are welcome, they are held back by the traditional dramaturgy that ‘contains’ them. Critical reactions suggest that the realist tradition in which she writes may have diluted the radicalism of her individual women. The conservative reception of her work tends to ‘read’ her theatre back into the dominant discourse and ignores the alternative, feminist interpretations as I have presented them in this manifesto.8 What I desire, what I imagine, is a female individual at the centre of a drama that is more openly oppositional to the established national order. A female character whose actions are wholly antagonistic to her Israeli environment; a woman who fully exploits the middle ground, the ‘no man’s land’ of opposites, in the interests of a theatre that can effect social change. Such a drama might, indeed would, come under attack from the social order it opposes, though such a reaction might in turn fuel progressive debate and change. Israel urgently needs a theatre for social change in which the She Monster embodies alternative discourses to that of the dominant discourse of nation. Here is what I imagine: the play in which the Israeli She Monster is the protagonist who is unfaithful to the He Soldier who is fighting for his country. She is unfaithful to him with a Palestinian woman who, like herself, is not interested in the battle for territorial supremacy. She deceives him twice: by turning to the national enemy; and by refusing her own reproductive, heterosexual, ‘nationed’ body. She interrogates the masculine; she rejects her otherness. As a She Monster, ‘we’ will know her by her unfaithfulness to the nation; by her choice of life over nation (death); by her questioning of history; by her willingness always to move on.

Notes 1. Lesley Hazelton, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myths (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 110. 2. From Mats Börjesson’s presentation of his book Diskurser och konstruktioner: en sorts metodbok (Lund: Studentlitteratur, 2003), during ‘Identitet, Roll, Karaktär’ [Identity, Role, Character], a course given at the Dramatiska Institutet, University College of Film, Radio, Television and Theatre, Stockholm, 29 October 2004. 3. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings 1972–1977 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), p. 131. 4. Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London: Longman, [1989] 2001), p. 3. 5. See Zygmunt Bauman, Det individualiserade samhället (Göteborg: Daidalos, [2001] 2002).



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6. Miriam Kainy’s plays are not published, but are collected at the Israel Documentation Centre for the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv University: Hashiva (Hebrew) [The Return], 1973 and 1975; Bavta (Hebrew) [Bavta], 1987; Sof Onat Hachalomot (Hebrew) [End of the Dream Season], 1991; and Bianca (Hebrew) [Bianca], 1996. 7. In an Israeli context feminism has often been regarded as an irrelevant, foreign, imported ideology. 8. This kind of reception issue was rehearsed by the Israeli theatre scholar Anat Gesser Edelsburg in ‘Attitude Change and Social-Political Theatre: A Methodology to Evaluate and Measure the Impact of Social-Political Plays on Spectators’. Paper presented at Performance and Possibility: Theatre for Social Change in the 21st Century, Liverpool Hope University, 2005. Edelsburg makes the point that ‘[t]here might be coalitional or oppositional contents in … plays, but if they do not correspond with the social experiences of the audiences, the encounter between stage and auditorium fails’.




Feminist Performance and Utopia: A Manifesto Jill Dolan

[W]e ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present. … [T]he pervading feeling [is] that there simply are no alternatives, that our times have witnessed the exhaustion not only of Utopias, but of any new departures as well. … Doubt has replaced hopefulness – and men [sic] act out a defeatism that is labelled realistic. The decline of utopia and hope is in fact one of the defining features of social life today. (Port Huron Statement, Students for a Democratic Society, 15 June 1962) For me, both personally and politically, feminist performance’s ability to point us towards a better world remains an intractable principle of faith. As a lesbian feminist now in her middle age, I still need to believe that it is possible to change the world. I need to see, to write about and to teach performance with the hope that transformation is possible. How could I face my work otherwise? What would move me to attend performance, if not the hope that I’ll find, among a group of strangers and intimates, some tangible if fleeting moment of genuine community feeling that might model for me how the world would be better if these experiences were sustained in other realms of social life? What else would persuade me that it’s worthwhile to put my body and soul in the sightlines of performers who need to see me listening to their stories, to know that I’m witnessing their vulnerabilities and their wish-laden prophecies? For me, feminist performance continues to hold potential for transformation because it’s always been a laboratory of critique and possibility. From the agitprop performances that delivered the didactic 212



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rhetoric of 1970s feminism, to the melding of gender politics and dramaturgy of feminist playwrighting in the 1980s, to the avant-garde practices of feminist solo and ensemble performance in the 1990s, to the diversity of work now produced under feminist performance’s banner in the 2000s, our work in theory and practice has continued to hone a critique. The nomenclature remains important. We need to mark the different contributions artists and critics offer to utopian visions under the rubric of explicitly feminist performance, so that all three terms – feminism, performance, utopia – might be reinvigorated as rallying calls for the twenty-first century. As the queer activist Amber Hollibaugh says, ‘What we want is to create a new world . … Why not commit to changing the world totally?’1 In my work on utopia in performance, I’ve been inspired by twentiethcentury Marxist philosophers like Ernst Bloch and Herbert Marcuse, who believed that art provides a stage for the experiment we conduct in living.2 I’ve also been inspired by the Jewish theologian Martin Buber, who sees utopian possibility in ‘fantasy pictures’ that infiltrate the real as a ‘wish’ for the future of human community, and by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who suggests that we see the present through the lens of ‘radical amazement’ to help propel us to a better future.3 Both believe that art helps us imagine new worlds. In my book Utopia in Performance (2005), I discuss solo performances by Peggy Shaw, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin and Ann Carlson; multicharacter solo performances by Anna Deavere Smith, Lily Tomlin and Danny Hoch; full-scale productions directed by Mary Zimmerman, Deborah Warner and Moisés Kaufman; and an evening-length, multiracial and multi-ethnic slam poetry event created for Broadway, all of which bear the trademarks of feminist performance. They address gender as a constituent issue, not only in their content, but in their forms of address; they mark identity as a formation that gives or denies people voice; they link perspectives derived not just from gender, but from sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and other identity-markers that overlap and intersect to make us similar to and different from one another; and they gesture towards a community that arcs over identity politics into a more capacious, even humanist, political coalition. These performances, in all their radical liveness, give me hope, poised as they are in that ineffable moment between living and dying, presence and absence, fear and consequence in which the present vibrates with anticipation for the future. I commit my teaching, writing and activism to proliferating and preserving performance moments of such exquisite possibility, of collective belonging to a vital, active, vocal public sphere. 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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I encourage my students to write manifestos that spell out their beliefs as citizen/artist/scholars, because the manifesto remains, for me, one of the best forms for delivering values and articles of faith with unalloyed passion and ideological idealism.4 My own manifesto is an exhortation to stave off the easy cynicism of contemporary politics and public life, and to continue to develop feminist performance as an avenue toward fluid, ever-changing, never fixed, but constantly available utopias, better worlds that remain ‘no place’ (the literal meaning of ‘utopia’). I imagine the ‘we’ in this manifesto as people who practice feminism however their national and local political circumstances allow, and who believe, as I do, that performance inspires us to social change.

A Manifesto 1. For feminist performance to change the world, we must write about it, teach it, and circulate it as an idea, a commodity, and a practice of faith and belief When American feminist performance scholars began writing about the lesbian and feminist performances at the WOW Café in the early 1980s, few people outside of the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City had heard of the venue or its now notorious performers. SueEllen Case, Kate Davy, Alisa Solomon and I, among other American feminist performance scholars and critics who began publishing in the early 1980s, wrote in newspapers, academic journals, anthologies and books to popularise and publicise this innovative work beyond the confines of its original local audiences.5 While WOW began as a social haven and theatre primarily populated by white lesbians, it flourished over the years as a provocative entertainment venue for straight spectators as well as gay men and genderqueers, and for people of colour as well as the white community. Inviting Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver, Holly Hughes, Deb Margolin, Lisa Kron and many other performers to attend the Women and Theatre Programme’s annual conferences helped academics and critics across the US see their work. Because feminist academics invited WOW’s performers for guest residencies at our colleges and universities, we introduced many generations of students to other ways of producing their art and of dreaming themselves as artists as well as citizens and scholars. Through the academy–community synergy that is one of the hallmarks of American feminism, this work circulated beyond its immediate subculture. Academics and critics writing about feminist 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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performance flourished alongside the performers, making complementary claims for how we might widen our understandings of gender and its meanings, of sexuality and its pleasures. Those of us who work in academic institutions need to maintain and continually strengthen our ties with feminist performance artists, playwrights and directors, since the mainstream theatre community restricts their resources for developing, circulating and producing their work. We need to use the comparative power of our positions and the relatively flush budgets we sometimes command to enable feminist theatre artists to continue their experiments with performance forms and contents and the ideological and political meanings they generate. Those of us who write about this work should publish not only in academic venues, but in trade publications, local newspapers, the internet and blogs, spreading widely the word that feminism and performance united provide a powerful, pleasurable force for social change. 2. For feminist performance to change the world, we must not be afraid to proselytise, or to preach to the converted, about its utopian possibilities Proselytising has long been a dirty word in politics, and claiming feminist performance ‘preaches to the converted’ has been an easy critical route to its dismissal. We must ignore these derogations and persuade people that feminist performance brings a better world ever closer, and remains, in a cynical age, the best vehicle for sustaining hope and faith in social change. As committed spectators, artists and scholars, we must serve on our local arts councils; ingratiate ourselves with granting organisations, so that we can become evaluators for their arts applicants; serve on peer review committees; and generally insinuate ourselves into positions from which we can advocate for feminist performance that would otherwise be overlooked or dismissed as ‘too political’. We must argue for the value of performance that addresses social justice, and write and speak out to counter the charge that ‘preaching to the converted’ makes feminist performance insular and irrelevant. We must dispel the myth that ‘the converted’ don’t need forums for their concerns or, as Holly Hughes has said, that ‘the converted’ don’t need to have their faith occasionally reassured by what they see at the theatre. We must speak about feminist performance with passion and conviction; we must move people by explaining the faith feminist performance brings us in the possibility for a better future. We must describe what it feels like to experience the potential for transforma10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



tion during those magical moments in the theatre. We must encourage people to buy tickets to local feminist performances and find underwriters to support the attendance of those who can’t otherwise afford to come. We must actively convert people to feminist causes, however we define them, and educate people away from stereotypes about who feminists are, what feminists do and what feminism means. 3. For feminist performance to change the world, we must be spectators and artists, scholars and citizens at once, creating performance that hazards a glimpse of utopia One of feminist performance’s lasting contributions is its refusal to submit to the conventional hierarchies of theatre production and reception. The WOW Café and other feminist incubators remain radical because they define artistic roles fluidly, encouraging spectators to become artists; scholars to participate in the making of art; and artists to speak with historical, critical and theoretical insights about their work, all under the rubric of active, participatory citizenship. Artists once viewed scholars with suspicion; I recall too many conference panels at which artists looked ill-at-ease, certain that their creativity and their ideas were being exploited by academics who wanted to make careers by ‘explaining’ their performances. But over the last decade or so, I believe such mistrust has turned closer to mutual appreciation, as we all understand how much we help each other achieve common social and theatrical goals. The theory/practice bogey that hounds so much American theatre discourse has begun to fade in feminist performance, defanged by the understanding that we need each other to advance a cause in which we have the luxury of believing together. The public record now documents our collaborations: feminist scholars have edited, introduced and published play collections by feminist and queer performers.6 The pages of academic journals are sprinkled with interviews feminist scholars conduct with feminist artists, who speak with insight and elegance about their work and its social and political context. Likewise, the performance workshops that artists present during their guest residencies on university and college campuses are often filled with students and teachers and community members who want to learn how to make their own art, or who want to understand how feminist performance is generated from the inside out. I’ve taken performance workshops with Shaw, Weaver, Margolin and Hughes, and Carmelita Tropicana (Alina Troyano) and Marga Gomez. Each time, my students, my colleagues, my friends and I were encouraged to see the 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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artistry in our own critical perspectives, to meld our analytical skills with our talents for telling stories and creating images and narratives. We embodied moments of impersonation and fantasy, feeling the emotions of the moment as a conduit to thoughtful reflection. These workshops freed us to see ourselves as artists as well as critics and historians, scholars as well as spectators, and to draw from the marrow of creativity and invention. They moved us closer to community with each other and with our guest artists, even if just for an afternoon or a morning, letting us reveal parts of ourselves that might otherwise have remained cloaked. They helped us reassess the boundaries between public and private, the personal and the political, and joined us in a conversation based in theory and practice, all grounded in the politics of the now and of the future, practising the ‘what if’ as a hopeful extension or reimagining of the ‘as is’.7 4. For feminist performance to change the world, we must find resources with which to create, produce, write about and publish the work In the US, the Fund for Women Artists is a useful source of advocacy and resources, as well as for establishing tours to theatres and academic campuses. The National Performance Network brings socially-conscious work into communities by cost-sharing with local non-profit organisations. Private organisations like Creative Capital and the Doris Duke Foundation pick up the slack left by the federal abandonment of arts funding.8 Many universities and colleges have funds for guest artists and speakers, all of which can be productively plundered to bring in feminist theatre people for lecture/demo gigs or longer residencies. To trumpet their importance, we must suggest that feminist plays be part of the season at our local repertory and community theatres, as well as in our college and university syllabuses. We must call attention to the work, educating people who make decisions about where and how to spend resources. We too often bemoan the state of funding without proposing specific plans for how it might be ameliorated. The creativity we bring to our artistry and criticism should also be brought to resource generation and distribution. 5. For feminist performance to change the world, we must instil utopian longings in new generations of students and artists At the university where I teach, since students mostly train as ‘method’ actors preparing to work in conventional production processes and 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



hierarchies, they are stunned and thrilled to be taught other ways of thinking of themselves as citizen/artist/scholars. Our feminist faculty, committed to performance as a public practice, encourages performers to create their own material, rather than waiting for casting calls at which they’ll be slotted into roles according to their looks or their ‘type’.9 We are stealth teachers, insinuating alternatives into the otherwise standard BA acting major or MFA curricula. Many women graduate students produce solo performances from their personal narratives. Often, these pieces become the centre of their creative lives, projects to which they return after forays into professional theatre, film and television, where agents and casting directors ask them to lose weight, cap their teeth or undergo plastic surgery to correct their physical imperfections. Rather than waiting to become another cog in the commodity wheel of commercial culture, these students commit themselves to their art as a public practice that speaks from the heart about the possibility of belief in self and others. We must challenge students to claim their agency by creating their own work and forming companies with which to reimagine their relationship to performance and what it might mean to the social world. 6. For feminist performance to change the world, we must monitor and comment on the progress of culture – including film and television, magazines and newspapers, as well as theatre and performance – from a feminist perspective Feminism is a practice of social critique and renewal. In addition to the wealth of meaning, feeling and vision fostered in feminist performance, feminist criticism is a powerful method for remarking the excesses and inadequacies of mainstream culture and for demanding change. Even though dominant culture tries to neutralise it as a political movement, feminism hasn’t lost its power as social critique. New publications in the US, like Bust, Bitch, Curve and others, including many on-line sites, provide trenchant critiques of popular culture from an aggressively feminist perspective.10 We must read these publications and visit these sites, encourage our students and other interlocutors to look at them, and use them as examples of a thriving subculture of feminist commentary. I write a bi-monthly blog called ‘The Feminist Spectator’, finding it a vital outlet for writing that would otherwise be only private.11 As a ‘blogger’, I don’t have to seek an editor’s approval to publish my thoughts, nor must I water down the vehemence of my feminist critique. I write as much or as little as I want and I invite comments from 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case


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readers. We must also write letters to editors to press a feminist perspective into the forefront of public debate about cultural and political representation.12 We must be gadflies on the livestock of mainstream commentary, always present, always buzzing, impossible not to hear and acknowledge. 7. For feminist performance to change the world, we need to be loyal audiences, attending performances, subscribing to theatres that regularly present feminist work, spreading word of mouth, and encouraging friends, students and strangers to develop the habit of spectatorship Performance is perhaps symbolic and fleeting, but I believe that the practice of spectating and performing establishes a lasting habit of participation in public life. By attending feminist performance we demonstrate our willingness to gather in community, to listen together to people’s stories, ideas, polemics, and often to discuss, afterwards, their meanings and implications. We accrue great affective value from being in the presence of others, experiencing narratives and images and emotions simultaneously, even if our responses and interpretations differed widely. In those moments of performance, we hear and feel each other react. We are addressed together by actors gesturing through the overhanging cloud of their own mortality in a shared, irreplaceable instant of time, unmediated by the temporal manipulations of technology. Our presence matters to a larger collective sense of belonging – as the anthropologist Victor Turner suggested in his notion of communitas – to something both of ourselves and larger than ourselves.13 In those moments of performance, I reaffirm my precarious faith in something once called ‘fellowship’ (or ‘sisterhood’) and feel a resurgence of personal hope for the possibility of a better future. 8. For feminist performance to change the world, we must continue to dream that it can change for the better, that utopia, as a tangible force for wishful thinking – not in a naïve, idealist sense but in a fiercely pragmatic political fashion – can fuel our passion to imagine the world as it might be, rather than acquiescing to the world as it is When did we allow ourselves to stop dreaming of utopia? When did we relent and stop calling ourselves feminist scholars, performers, artists, activists? When did the radical possibilities of the practices of feminism, joined to the practices of performance, stop predicting a powerful, critical, polemical experience? It’s not important to pinpoint 10.1057/9780230287693 - Staging International Feminisms, Edited by Elaine Aston and Sue-Ellen Case



this decline; it’s much more important to reverse course, to wield our feminism as a forceful portent of worlds to come, to see feminism and performance as meaningful utopian practices, ones we urgently need to restore our faith, to shore our resolve, to inspire us imaginatively and ideologically toward new ways of being in the world together.

Notes 1. Amber Hollibaugh, in Feminism: Controversies, Challenges, Actions, a film by Rebecca Haimowitz, The Scholar & the Feminist Online 3.3/4.1, http://www. barnard.edu/sfonline.sfxxx/film.htm. 2. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005). Bloch’s ‘anticipatory illumination’ suggests that ‘theatre [is a] rehearsal for the example … a laboratory of the right theory-praxis in the form of a play … [which] might provide the experimental experience for the serious case’. Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 227. Marcuse says, ‘Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world’. Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 33. 3. See Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, [1949], 1958); and Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951). See also José Estaban Muñoz, ‘Queers, Punks, and the Utopian Performative’, in D. Soyini Madison and Judith Hamera, eds, The SAGE Handbook of Performance Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2006), pp. 9–20, for more on utopia in performance. 4. On the ‘citizen/artist/scholar’, see Carol Becker, ‘The Artist as Intellectual’, in Gigi Bradford, Michael Gary and Glenn Wallach, eds, The Politics of Culture (New York: The New Press, 2000), pp. 236–46. For the quintessential feminist manifesto, see Valerie Solanas, S.C.U.M. Manifesto, http://www. womynkind.org/scum.htm. 5. See for only several examples of early feminist performance criticism Kate Davy, ‘Constructing the Spectator: Reception, Context, and Address in Lesbian Performance’, Performing Arts Journal 10.2 (1986): 43–52; Sue-Ellen Case, ‘From Split Subject to Split Britches’, in Enoch Brater, ed., Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Sue-Ellen Case, Feminism and Theatre (New York: Methuen, 1988); Alisa Solomon, ‘The WOW Café’, The Drama Review 29.1 (Spring 1985): 92–10; Jill Dolan, ‘The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Performance and Pornography’, Theatre Journal 39.2 (May 1987): 156–74; Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, [1988] 1991). 6. See, for example, Sue-Ellen Case, ed., Split Britches: Lesbian Practice/Feminist Performance (London: Routledge, 1996); Lynda Hart, ed., Of All the Nerve:



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7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

Deb Margolin Solo (London: Cassell, 1999); and Jill Dolan and Jaclyn Pryor, eds, You Wanna Piece of Me? Peggy Shaw’s Magnificent Masculinity (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, forthcoming). For insightful work on the ‘as is’, see Maurya Wickstrom, ‘Wonder in the Heart of Empire: Deborah Warner’s Medea and The Angel Project’, Modern Drama 47.2 (Summer 2004): 177–99. The summer 2004 Modern Drama is a special issue on ‘utopian performatives’. See The Fund for Women Artists at http://www.womenarts.org/; the National Performance Network at http://www.npnweb.org/; the Creative Capital Foundation at http://www.creative-capital.org/; and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation at http://www.ddcf.org/. ‘Performance as public practice’ is a term coined by the MA/PhD programme in the Theatre and Dance Department at the University of Texas at Austin. The programme explores the widest possible parameters of performance in its relationship to historical and contemporary global culture and local communities, applying the skills of performance theory and practice to expand the civic and academic dialogue prompted by citizen/artist/scholars. See http://www.finearts.utexas.edu/tad/degree_programs/theatre_history_criticism/phd_theatre_history_criticism/index.cfm. See http://www.bitchmagazine.com/; http://www.bust.com/; and http:// www.curvemag.com/. See Jill Dolan, ‘The Feminist Spectator’, www.feministspectator.blogspot.com. See Jill Dolan, ‘Gender and Advertising’, American Theatre 23.7 (September 2006): 6. On communitas, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); and From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982).







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