Acts of Passion

Sexuality, Gender, and Performance

Nina Rapi, Maya Chowdhry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317790600
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The first volume to focus exclusively on lesbian performance work, Acts of Passion: Sexuality, Gender, and Performance draws on the experiences and expertise of a wide range of lesbian practitioners and theorists to explore the impact and influences of sexuality and gender on performance. It examines essays, dialogues, and performance texts from theater directors, performers, theorists, playwrights, and performance writers against social and cultural constructs and performance theories to produce a diverse and challenging portrait of lesbian live performance art. The book's penetrating scope covers drag queens, lesbian vampires, representations of lesbian sex, solo artists, the art of collaboration, lesbian aesthetics, and lesbian playwrights writing straight and illustrates why live performance is one of the most dynamic forums in which women can create, control, and produce their work without artistic constraint.Acts of Passion explodes binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the 'real'and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. The relationships between experience and expression, sexuality and cultural placing, context and artistic control, representation and self-representation become clearer as the book discusses:

• the manner in which women are represented as absent in the signifying system of patriarchal society
• how questions of purity, 'authenticity,'and self-definition complicate the field of representation
• the power of lesbian dance performance to make the lesbian body culturally visible
• several 'new wave'performers--creating work, getting seen, showing flesh, doing politics, and making money
• the projections, preconceptions, expectations, and general baggage attached to the performing lesbian body
• what the term 'lesbian playwright'means within contemporary culture
• 'It's Queer Up North'--a British National Arts Organization
• the arguments for and against mainstreaming lesbian performanceAnyone interested in theater and performance, cultural studies, gender issues, and the politics of 'positive representation'--whether playwright, performer, director, writer, academic, student, or theatre goer--will find Acts of Passion a powerful step in wrenching the power of representation away from the dominant culture. Defiant, saucy, sexy, and smart, the contributors appropriate their own spaces, identities, crafts, and languages, both within this book and without.

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PART ONE:
THE MONSTROUS FEMININE: LESBIAN AESTHETICS IN PROCESS

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Another Con-Text

Barbra Egervary

SUMMARY. Increasingly, performance by women questions existing binary definitions of gender and sexuality by destabilizing familiar notions of the ‘real’ and creating new production values and aesthetics in the process. This paper explores three theatre companies (Spin/Stir; Amy Roadstone Productions; ObScene Productions) and two performing artists (Helena Goldwater and Helen Paris), all U.K. based and at the cutting edge of contemporary lesbian performance, who personify these developments. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678. E-mail address: [email protected]]

The effort to ‘cite’ the performance that interests us even as it disappears is much like the effort to find the word to say what we mean. It can't be done, but the futile looking attaches us again to Hope. It's impossible to succeed, but writing's supplement traces the architecture of the ruin's Hope (endlessly to return, reconstruct, represent, remember).

Peggy Phelan:
“Reciting the Citation of Others”¹

My desire for creating a theatrical representation of a woman is neither scopophilic nor tactile per se but rather based on the pleasure of building a space, in this case a theatrical one, where ‘self-representation’ can occur.

Nina Rapi:
“Speaking in Tongues but in Whose Language? In Search of Female Aesthetics”²

Between the ruins and the building, between hope and desire, between thought and creation, lie the words which mark our endless efforts to recapture the performance which is absolute in the moment. Between the cunt and the text lies a moment of creativity in which we birth ourselves—as women, as individuals, as divine in our ability to re-vive ourselves and each other. When you perform your words, you touch the innermost part of me. This is how we look for and find each other—cunt, text, cunt. The spaces we build are of us, about us and for us. As unique as is the nature of desire to each woman, so the space which she builds; but she builds for us all. Something in me changes irrevocably when you touch me, and I return to your fingerprint, to the memory of that touch. So I return to performances that have changed me in the knowledge that my words can no more cite them than I can recapture your touch, but in the hope that by ‘tracing the architecture’ of the ruin—the memory—we can between us begin to recreate the magic of that touch.

The discrepancy which prevails between the volume and diversity of women's performance being produced and the critical writing which seeks to represent it is such that one can only begin by touching on as many areas of inquiry as possible, in the hope that threads will be picked up by others and woven into ropes of critical attention. In looking at some of the work produced by women which has most recently captivated me, I discover an abundance of interest which these words can only begin to explore. At every level of inquiry, there are examples of women's performance which lead us into uncharted territories; from questions of programming and producing to discussions regarding form, content and aesthetics, to documentation and modes and means of theorizing women's performance. Here, then, is a beginning—the bricks from the ruin which become the foundation of ever new spaces in which to represent ourselves.

FRAMING THE FEMALE

Feminist critical analysis has revealed the manner in which women are represented in the signifying system of a patriarchal society as absent. Within a signifying system which conflates the lack of a penis with the lack of that which the phallus signifies (in relation to power, choice, determinism, activity, agency), which represents the female as lack, as absence, comes a displacement of the female subject from the symbolic order. ‘Woman,’ on stage as in society, becomes an indeterminate force which accrues meaning and significance only by warrant of not being male; by opposition to that gender which does bear meaning within the order of the Father.

The theatrical frame is a forum where every sign, be it visual, spatial, temporal or linguistic, is assumed by the spectator to bear meaning. The spectator willfully searches for meaning in order to construct a narrative which renders the seen and heard a coherent whole; one which reflects and facilitates reflection upon, the stuff of her own life. As Elin Diamond, in her essay on Caryl Churchill's theatre, writes:

The theatre wants us all to believe—or at least accept—its representations, and in doing so we ratify the power that authorises them.³

By placing the female body as metonym⁴ center-stage, occupying the signifying space of the stage, women working in theatre challenge the notion of female absence and confound the processes of objectification by the spectator by extreme self-objectification. Increasingly, performance by women questions existing binary definitions of gender and sexuality which reflects on the ‘real’ in such a way that our perception of it is destabilized and questions arise as to the validity of discursive paradigms which place the female in the context of a binary opposition which marks it as lack, as absence, as ultimately inferior. By placing the self as woman at the intersections between definitions, the performer brings into question the currency of the definitions themselves, introducing an element of doubt which effects a dislocation from given categorizations. Thus the woman as performer finally occupies a nebulous, indefinable space which sets her outside the terms of discourse so completely that she cannot in any tangible way be ‘consumed’ by the spectator, but generates instead her own representational paradigms.

SPIN/STIR WOMEN'S PHYSICAL THEATRE COLLECTIVE: FEMININE MORPHOLOGY AS FEMINIST AESTHETIC

Spin/Stir is structured in the eighties feminist theatre tradition of women's collectives; drawing on a predominantly feminist audience, its work emphasizes the exploration of a ‘feminist aesthetic’ The collective was established in early 1992 by Joelle Taylor and Vanessa Lee as a partnership which invites other members to join on a temporary basis. The members of the collective have a background in theatre and performance poetry, and are trained in rape crisis counselling. Their commitment is to a theatre which “focuses on the bitter edge of sexual politics and the experience of ‘woman.’ ”⁵ The collective has produced two plays to date—Naming and Whorror Stories—both written and co-directed by Joelle Taylor and premiered at the Oval House Theatre.

Naming was the culmination of a six-month research period into feminist theatre process as relevant to an exploration of issues surrounding child sexual abuse. The piece demonstrates Taylor's exposition of female experiences of abuse and the resultant selfalienation through the use of the fractured languages of text and body. Short, episodic scenes, wild gesture and parodic characterization, the use of sound generated by movement, poetic and fragmented speech, voice-over and television footage all make up what Taylor describes as “feminine morphology as feminist aesthetic.” Her characters are those of the self-lacerating child, the confused and controlling mother of the abused child, the abusive lover, the suicidal survivor. Her approach to the issues surrounding child sexual abuse—which she wants people to view as political issues—is to write “something that tells the truth, however dirty and nasty it is, about survival.”⁶

Whorror Stories approaches the ‘monstrous feminine’ through the techniques of contemporary horror, feminist deconstruction and physical theatre. The four central characters in the piece are spiders, emblematic of the culturally endorsed fear of female sexuality; the Tarantula on stilts, the Black Widow, the Wolf Spider and the House Spider. Each spider is symbolic of a socio-cultural stereotype of “Woman.” The spiders live in the basement of a house, weaving a web which is narrative and structure of the piece.

The threads of the web are stories of women's lives: the Child Star, trapped in a large, gilded bird cage, relating her story of child pornography; the victim of psychotherapy and psychic invasion; the woman returning to her father's house after his death and starving herself to become weightless enough to walk the web from her bed without alerting the spiders and escape; the child brought up for fourteen years as a dog who kills the members of her family, dresses in her mother's skin and lures men to an unsuspecting death. These are the nightmare characters of the ‘monstrous feminine,’ survivors of abuse who become executors of their abusers. The only male character is that of a serial-killer who imprisons pregnant women until they give birth, walls them up and sews the babies into dolls-killed in turn by the women he has walled up,

Harrowing and nightmarish, Naming and Whorror Stories present a theatre which does not shy away from some of the most difficult stories women have to tell, the fact and effect of abuse. These are not plays which look to communicate to a mainstream audience the experiences of women who have suffered abuse, but a means of validating women's worst experiences to themselves.

AMY ROADSTONE PRODUCTIONS: WRITING SEXUALITY INTO AN ACCESSIBLE SYSTEM

Amy Roadstone is the context in which writer Jyll Bradley has produced her work in its various forms, from her plays (On the Playing Fields of Her Rejection, Institute of Contemporary Arts and Drill Hall, and Irene Is Tied Up (With Concert Arrangements) ICA— Institute for Contemporary Art) to poetry readings (Breast Pocket, ICA). Bradley describes the aims of Amy Roadstone as providing challenging, complex roles for women in theatre, inventing new written and visual languages for a women's theatre that innovates and entertains, exploring some indigenous theatre traditions (such as music hall, vaudeville and the ‘pleasure garden’) in order to do this. She looks to “create a theatre of female sexuality, not a theatre about female sexuality,”⁷ “to work with humor, naughtiness to create a women's theatre which is as celebratory in its ‘difficulty’ as in its ‘accessibility’ to a wide audience.”

In the context of Amy Roadstone, Bradley is able to oversee the production of her work by appointing her own female creative team for each production, allowing for a shared vision of the work but also to “ultimately have control over my own work and its representation.” She considers one of the pitfalls of a collective theatre to be that the identity of individuals as artists and creators is subsumed to the collective, and endeavors to counteract this tendency by promoting individual artists within each production.

On the Playing Fields of Her Rejection places a female sexual agenda within the context of the tradition of absurdist theatre. It follows the initiation of four women into lesbian sex and sexuality, showing them as apprentice ‘gardeners’ to the object of their desire: Lady Jane. The character of Lady Jane is attended by her four sub-personalities, Jane Eyre, Jane Austen, Jane Seymour and Jane, Jane, Tall as a crane.

The play is “an evolving, theatrical pleasure garden, rather than a piece ‘about’ pleasure gardens.” It is Bradley's approach to asserting the “power and diversity of sexuality in general and women's sexuality in particular by writing sexuality rather than writing about issues of sexuality, such as adultery, homosexuality, etc. This is done in my belief that the production of text, both in its writing, reading and performing constitutes an act of proposition or seduction in itself and herein lies the power to effect.”

Beyond theatre production, Amy Roadstone seeks to “inspire intellectual debate around female sexuality, its representation, and female humor.” Incorporating as it does, the promotion of Bradley's writing in mainstream publication and lending its name to her own site-specific work, Amy Roadstone is evolving into a broad-ranging, multi-faceted production company, which is able to promote and produce work across the spectrum of site, art-form and audience.

With a view to “putting women's work into an accessible system where it may be debated,” Bradley places her work in ‘mainstream’ contexts; she promotes her work in off-West End theatres, through larger publishing houses, and seeks funding not only from established...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introductions
• Part One: The Monstrous Feminine: Lesbian Aesthetics in Process
• Part Two: The Lesbian Body in Performance
• Part Three: From Margin to Center: Subversion or Assimilation?
• Part Four: Writing the Self in Performance: Femmes and Butches, Drag Queens and Kings, Vampires and Clowns
• Index